The trip back to the house was slow—but thankfully, not long. Kai had woken up with what he described as "a migraine made of knives," but the group heal had stabilized everyone enough to move. Together, they trudged out of the tunnel and through the eucalyptus trees that surrounded their property, silent but alive.

After stepping out from the trees, the first thing they noticed was that something was off about the yard. They all came to an awkward stop, scanning the area and trying to figure out what had changed—until Lily pointed it out.

"The excavator's missing."

"Yeah, that's it," Zane said, frowning. "I guess Dave came back to pick it up. I only hired it for two days."

"I wonder what he thought about all the defences," Tarni added, glancing around. "Also, how did he even get it started? Last time I tried to use it, the battery was dead flat."

"Well, looks like he managed," Kai said with a shrug. "Maybe he brought a spare battery or jump-started it."

"Doesn't really matter," Zane said, already heading for the house. "Let's keep going. I'm ready to stop and relax."

Back at the house, the first order of business was food. While a hot meal was being prepared, cold showers were taken. Everyone wore their armour into the shower, only taking it off after they had got most of the blood and grime out of it, and to Zane and Kai's great relief, Tarni waited for the real shower this time.

Once everyone was cleaned up and the smell of cooking filled the air, they gathered around the table. Bell was still drying her hair with a towel when Kai sat forward and broke the silence.

"Mum and I think we worked out why we were both freezing our arses off in that dungeon," he said, rubbing the back of his head. "We reckon it was a cold debuff from having low Constitution. So, yeah—never want to feel like that again."

He opened his stat screen and allocated his points: Constitution: 12 → 15

Bell nodded, tossing the towel over her shoulder. "Same. That cold was nasty."

They talked it over, and she decided on a slightly different spread—two points into Constitution to resist the cold better, and one into Strength to help with the bow. Constitution: 13 → 15 Strength: 13 → 14

Lily, ever the planner, stuck to her original goal.

"I'm still going for balanced stats. I want everything to hit 15," she said, tapping the air in front of her. Dexterity: 14 → 15 Wisdom: 12 → 14

Tarni, still dripping from the shower, was taking his time. He stared at his stat screen so long that everyone started heckling him.

"Just pick something, mate!" Zane called, holding a half-eaten sausage roll.

"I am picking! This is strategy!" Tarni protested. But eventually, he caved. "Fine—two to Strength, one to Dexterity. Getting my weapon into that boss's back was harder than I expected. I'll need to hit harder next time." Strength: 16 → 18 Dexterity: 24 → 25

Zane didn't hesitate. He'd made up his mind during the fight with the spider.

"I'm going for more Strength. I almost didn't get the spear far enough into the boss, and I want more staying power." Strength: 16 → 18 Constitution: 20 → 21

Once the last stat point was spent and the screens disappeared, the real celebration began.

They feasted.

Piles of food were demolished in record time as their bodies burned through nutrients for healing and levelling. For the first time in what felt like a small forever, nothing was hunting them. Just warmth, food, and the comfort of knowing they'd survived another dungeon floor—together.

Everything else could wait.

After all the cooked food was gone, some of them were still peckish. They moved to the lounge room with packets of salted chips.

Lily found her pad and pen. "I'm keeping a record of the dungeon floors and what happened on each." And with that, she looked at Kai and her Mum. "So did anything happen after we left you?"

Bell put a hand over her face just as Kai burst out laughing. "Yeah, something happened. You'll never guess what Mum did to one of those musk ox things."

He launched into the story of how Bell had completely obliterated a full-grown musk ox into a fine mist. There was laughter and smiles all around—until he got to the part where they saw the damage the others were taking and couldn't help, because the debuff had gotten worse with the setting sun. The fear they felt. The powerlessness. Kai's voice cracked as he spoke about standing by the fire, helpless, knowing the others were in pain and danger.

There were hugs and more tears as they comforted each other.

Then it was Zane, Tarni, and Lily's turn to tell their story.

Finding the mine. Deciding to leave it. Then, hearing the thunderclap that turned out to be Bell's fully charged arrow annihilating a poor ox.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Then came the world's largest bear chasing them for no good reason back to the mine.

Kai and Bell winced when Zane described taking the bear's charge head-on.

Tarni took over when it came to fighting the boss spider, jumping up and reenacting his moves as he single-handedly saved the day.

Everyone laughed. Zane clapped Tarni on the shoulder and, in a serious voice, thanked him for jumping in front of the spider's bite.

After all the stories were told, they all voted—unanimously—to cram the Bag of Holding with everything they could possibly need for any environment.

The conversation moved on to the next floor—and the rewards.

Lily flipped open her notebook and carefully copied down the latest System message.

Guild & Quest System

(People in authority may give quests to adventurers registered to a Guild; Rewards will be managed by the System)

Kai leaned forward, eyes wide with excitement. He hadn't been conscious when the message had first popped up.

"That'll be awesome—getting rewards for doing quests! We'll definitely want to unlock that before the System finishes initialising."

Zane blinked, momentarily caught off guard. He'd almost forgotten why they were rushing through the dungeon floors. But Kai's words snapped his focus back into place.

"Yeah… we need to clear as many floors as we can before time runs out," Zane said, his tone serious now. "If dungeons and monsters appear all over the world at once… each thing we unlock could save hundreds of thousands of lives on the first day alone. Never mind the days, weeks, months—or even years—after that."

Tarni nodded slowly.

"Yeah. Everything we've unlocked so far will be a massive boon for everyone."

Bell glanced toward Lily. "Can you read out everything we've unlocked so far?"

Lily, already flipping pages, nodded. "Give me a sec."

After a moment of reviewing her notes, she read aloud:

"There were two major passive increases:

Item Drop Rate will increase

Skill Proficiency will now increase through use

Then we unlocked the Party System, the Map System, and later the Safe Zone.

From the dungeon itself, we've completed two floors, which gave us:

Bags of Holding added to the Loot Drop Table

Job Classes, including Crafting Skill Sets, were added to the Skill Tree.

And if we complete the next floor in time...

Guild & Quest System."

There was a thoughtful silence as they all digested the list.

Finally, Tarni broke it.

"You think we should go back tonight? Try to finish the third floor quickly?"

"Mate, we have no idea how hard it'll be," Zane said.

"Yeah," Kai added. "There seems to be a theme on each floor related to the unlock. So there might be multiple quests on the next one."

"Besides," Lily added, "not everyone's back at full HP yet."

"I say we hit the sack and get up real early. Head out before dawn," Zane suggested.

Everyone agreed to that plan with nods and muttered affirmations.

Then Zane leaned forward with a grin.

"Alright—who wants to do show and tell?"

Kai hesitated. He almost shared his new title—but decided against it. They didn't need to know that he'd freaked out so badly the System had given him a title for it.

No one else volunteered anything new, so in the end, it was just Zane.

"My appraisal skill levelled up. It gives me more detail now, and I can scan more objects and creatures at once." He paused for effect. "But the big one… is my new shield."

With a dramatic flair, Zane reached behind the sofa and pulled it out, holding it up proudly.

There were no gasps or oohs—everyone had already seen it, after all. He'd walked in with it strapped to his arm.

But when he read out the actual stats, there was plenty of owwwing and ahhhing.

Medium Frost Shield of the Tundra

+30 to Armour when equipped

40% chance to inflict Medium Frost status on enemies

"That's a beast of a shield," Tarni muttered, clearly impressed.

"I wonder what the 40% frost status actually does to bad guys?" Lily asked.

That sparked a debate—slowing effects, freezing limbs, stamina drain? They bounced ideas around, finally deciding the only way to know for sure was to test it out in the next fight.

Bell yawned first, stretching with a contented sigh.

"I'm off to bed," she said, then gave Zane a smile—and a wink—before heading down the hallway.

Zane saw the wink. He looked down at his shield, still on his arm from his little show and tell… then back at the hallway leading to the master bedroom. Then back at the shield.

With a grin, he yanked it off and sprinted after her, the shield barely starting to fall towards the carpet before he disappeared.

Tarni just shook his head. "I forget how much our stats have improved—until I see something like that."

Kai and Lily both laughed as they stood, also heading to their own beds for an early night

Sergeant Barry Smith was having a late night.

After Dave had dropped him off in town, Barry had promised to keep him in the loop about their little trip out to the Riders' property— "Mate, that place is a bloody hellscape," Dave had muttered before driving off, still pale around the edges.

Now, well past midnight, Barry was in his office, nursing his third cup of terrible instant coffee and staring at his laptop like it owed him money.

The footage from his body cam had looked fine when he checked the file size. But when he'd tried to play it back earlier? Corrupted. Glitched. Audio skipping, video freezing. The file kept crashing every time it reached the edge of the treeline.

He'd gone digging through department-approved recovery software and even pulled out a dusty hard drive adapter kit he'd last used during the bushfire arson investigations.

After hours of cursing, patching fragments, and re-encoding frames like he was some amateur tech nerd on YouTube, he finally had something usable.

The preview flickered across his screen in what looked like dull infrared and distorted sound—but it was enough.

There it was. Rows of sharpened wooden stakes lining narrow trenches. Crude barricades made from stacked corrugated metal and salvaged plywood. A rusted drum full of gravel and what looked like bones. And beyond it all, barely visible through the grey wash of the half-recovered video file:

That thing. The cube.

It stood out like a smudge of ink in the middle of the scrubland—matte black, silent, wrong. He couldn't say why, but just watching it made his stomach twist.

No people were visible in the footage—Zane, his crew, whoever was out there—they'd vanished long before Barry and Dave had arrived. But the sheer scale of the defences... it was too much for one bloke and his mates with a few machetes.

This was deliberate. Organised. And bloody weird.

Barry scrubbed through the video one more time, made a few notes in the incident report, and attached the cleaned-up footage to the case file.

He paused before hitting save, glancing again at the screen.

Even if the footage wasn't perfect, it was enough. Enough to convince his superiors that something was going on out there—something dangerous. Barricades. Fortifications. An unknown structure hidden on private property.

It was enough for a warrant. Enough for a tactical team. Hell, maybe even enough to bring in someone from the AFP.

He leaned back in his chair with a sigh, exhaling slowly through his nose.

"Zane Rider, what illegal shit are you doing?"

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