They stepped out into the forest.
Not a forest like any Caleb had known. No trails. No birdsong. Just a warped, alien wilderness of twisting roots and towering trees that looked older than memory. The air was thick, not humid, but… alive. As if Breathing. Watching.
Dina said it first.
"All this still doesn't feel real."
It didn't. The trees were too tall. The trunks too smooth. And the light that filtered through the canopy shifted constantly, like clouds were moving even though the sky itself was still.
They moved cautiously, each step muffled by layers of moss and strange, spongy foliage. The forest had a way of swallowing sound, making their movements feel distant, unreal. Caleb's boots left no tracks. The soil wasn't soil. It felt too soft, too pliable, like flesh pretending to be earth.
Caleb raised his hand. "Don't spread. Stay close to each other."
They obeyed.
And then they saw it.
Not at once. Piece by piece.
A crude wooden fence, half-rotten and covered in moss. Smoke trails, faint and oily, drifting above the trees. Shapes moving between the trunks—small, hunched, inhuman.
Caleb ducked, motioning the others down. They crawled to the edge of a small rise and looked down into the valley below.
A village.
But not like any they had seen.
It looked like someone had built it out of garbage. Tents made from stitched leather, bones used as scaffolding, weapons like sharpened scrap. And things moved through it—creatures, green-skinned and wiry, with cruel eyes and oversized ears.
"What the hell…" Soren whispered.
"They're short," Dina murmured.
Caleb counted. "Forty, maybe fifty of them."
They watched for a while longer, unmoving. The creatures—goblins, though none of them knew that word yet—moved with purpose. Some carried tools. Others argued or fought over scraps. It was chaotic, crude, but not mindless. There was structure buried beneath the savagery.
"Are they the 'Hostiles'?"
Marek's voice was cold. "Doesn't matter. We've got nothing. No weapons. No armor. No food."
"True," Caleb said. "All we have is time."
Ellen looked pale. "You think they're… intelligent?"
"They built that, didn't they?" Dina said.
A silence. Heavy. Uneasy.
Then the interface pulsed again.
FLOOR FIVE OBJECTIVE
ENEMY TYPE: INVADER GROUP
SURVIVAL REQUIRED: FOUR OF SIX
REWARD: THREE EXTRA STAT POINTS
That wasn't the important part.
Caleb tapped the ground. "Focus. Around fifty enemies. Rough estimate. They're half our size. Probably half as strong as a normal adult."
"We don't know that," Marek said.
"No," Caleb agreed. "We don't. But we'll find out."
"How?" Ellen asked.
He stood. "We hunt."
They all looked at him.
He gestured down toward the woods.
"One of them. Isolated. We observe. We ambush. We learn. That's how we survive this floor."
"Won't they notice and try to fight back?" Dina asked.
Caleb didn't blink. "Then we learn faster."
No one argued. The strategy was brutal, but clear. No more puzzles. No riddles. No diplomacy.
Predators. Prey. That was the new shape of the game.
The others rose slowly. Soren's jaw was tight. Dina kept swallowing, like she was fighting nausea. Ellen's hands shook. Marek stared at the ground, his face blank. No one wanted to say it, but it was there now. In the air. Written in their expressions.
For the first time since the Tower began, they would have to kill something that thought.
They retreated from the ridge. Carefully. One slow step at a time, until the village was hidden behind a screen of crooked trees and woven vines. Caleb led them deeper into the woods, far enough that the smell of smoke faded, but not so far they would lose sight of their objective.
They needed distance. Time to think. To plan.
To feel the weight of what came next.
Caleb stopped in a clearing overgrown with roots and knotted grass. The silence here was heavier, like the forest itself was listening. The others gathered around him in a loose circle, eyes scanning the trees, ears straining for sounds that weren't their own.
"We wait here," Caleb said. "We observe shifts. Watch how they move. Track their routine. Eventually one of them will wander off."
"And then?" Soren asked.
"Then we make our move."
Ellen sat down slowly on a thick root, hugging her knees. Her eyes didn't look afraid anymore. Just tired.
"Do you think they… have families?" she asked.
The question settled over them like a weight. Soren rubbed his face with both hands. Dina turned away, studying the treeline as if it held answers. Marek's fingers curled into fists, then relaxed, then curled again.
Caleb watched them process it. The slow realization of what they were planning. What they were becoming.
"Does it matter?" he asked quietly.
"It should," Ellen whispered.
"Should," Caleb repeated. "But the Tower doesn't care what should matter. It cares what we do."
He looked at each of them in turn. Saw the fractures forming. The pieces of themselves they were losing, floor by floor, choice by choice.
"We can stay human and die, or we can become whatever keeps us alive." His voice was steady, matter-of-fact. "The Tower's teaching us there's no middle ground."
It wasn't just strategy anymore. It wasn't about numbers, or advantage, or experience points. The Tower had changed the rules again. And this time, survival didn't just mean being smart or strong.
It meant being something less than human. Or maybe something more than human - something that could do what humans couldn't, bear what humans shouldn't, become what humans feared to become.
Caleb turned his head and listened to the forest. Somewhere out there, something snarled. Not loud. Not near. But real.
He lowered his voice. "Be ready. We move when the time is right."
Just blood.