All eyes were on her. She was looking out into the void with a look of both awe and fear on her face. "This is the Armory of Living Weapons."

"Rosalina took me here once when I was training, and it was one of the Royal Knights' best-kept secrets," she said.

"Living weapons?" Elwen said it again, watching a spear spin through the air like a drill in the distance. "You mean those things are really alive?"

Lylia said, "Not alive like we are," as she moved closer to the edge of their island but stayed away from it.

"They're made up. Weapons that were made to work on their own."

"The plan was to make friends, protectors, and training partners. The goal was to create weapons that could engage in combat alongside their users, rather than merely serving as tools.

Greg thought about what that meant. Making life out of metal and magic and giving weapons their own wills and purposes. It was both fascinating and very scary at the same time. "So they're not hostile?"

"That's the serious part." Lylia turned back to the group, and her face was serious. "Most of them are doing well, like, yeah... you can say peaceful."

"As long as we don't bother them, they won't pay us any attention, but some are very touchy. They can get angry rapidly, and when they do, they lose all control."

"Rosalina told me that even she had trouble with some of the more unstable ones."

A distant explosion of light lit up the void, as if on cue. Greg heard metal hitting metal, and then he heard what sounded like a scream. It was high-pitched and metallic, not quite human, but it had the same emotional weight of pain and anger.

"What was that...?" Hilda asked in a quiet voice.

"Two weapons are fighting," Lylia said. "Sometimes it happens."

"They fight or get territorial with each other. It usually burns itself out after a while, but what if we get caught in the middle of it?"

Greg looked at each member of his team and said, "Okay, new rule."

"Nobody goes off on their own! We stay together, move slowly, and do not touch any of the weapons we see! Got it?"

Everyone nodded, but Hilda looked like she wanted to argue that she could barely stand, let alone walk away. Greg made a mental note to watch her closely.

The silver marks were getting worse. They were spreading down her arms and up her neck in complicated patterns that looked almost like wires.

Elwen looked around the space and said, "Now we just need to find Hammy. Do you have any ideas on how to do that here?"

A familiar chirping sound echoed across the void, as if it were answering her question. Greg's head turned quickly toward the sound, and there, about fifty feet away on another floating island, he saw a small, clear shape bouncing around with excitement.

He pointed and said, "Speak of the slime! There's Hammy!"

There was slime there, and it wasn't by itself. It was going after something. No, someone.

A person was walking away from them and toward what looked like a giant building floating in the distance. Greg could see what looked like walls and towers in the void, but it was difficult to make out clearly. Everything was floating in the nothingness like a castle made of shadows and starlight.

The person was tall and moved with a smooth grace that made it look like they had been trained to fight. They wore armor that looked like it absorbed light instead of reflecting it, and they had a long cloak that billowed behind them even though there was no wind. Greg couldn't see the person's face, but the way they stood and moved made him think they were doing it deliberately, like they knew exactly where they were going.

"Is that..." Lylia squinted to see better. "It has to be!"

"There wouldn't be anyone else here! That's Veldway."

The name hung in the air between them. After all the searching, the dead ends, the traps, and the fights, they had really found him. Or rather, Hammy had found him, and they had followed the slime into this strange pocket dimension.

"How do we get over there?" Greg asked, looking at the space between their island and Hammy's island.

There was a space that looked like it was six or seven feet wide. They can jump, but it's dangerous. There were also dozens of other islands making a path to the floating structure, with similar gaps between each one.

Lylia said, "There might be bridges," as she walked around the edge of their island.

"When Rosalina brought me here, there were stone paths that would show up when you needed them. She said that the dimension reacts to what you want, it will show you how to cross if you need to."

"That sounds very unreliable," Elwen said under her breath, but she helped Lylia look around the edges of their island.

Greg was going to help them when he saw something strange. The silver veins in the stone under their feet were getting brighter and pulsing in a way that felt like a heartbeat. And they were all heading toward the same place on the edge of the island, the same place where Hammy and the figure had gone.

Greg said, "I think I found our bridge," and walked over to it.

The stone started to move as he got closer. A path made of the same dark material began to stretch out, reaching toward the next island like a tongue unfurling. The silver veins ran along its length, giving off just enough light to see by.

"Okay, that's both useful and scary," Hilda said, finally getting up with Elwen's help. "How did you know it would do that?"

"I didn't," Greg said. "But somehow, this place is linked to weapons and making things."

"It might have known what I am. A blacksmith."

"Or maybe it actually wants to follow Hammy," Lylia said as she stepped onto the bridge.

As solid as regular stone, it held up under her weight. "Come on. We're already losing track of them."

They walked across the bridge in a line, with Greg in the front and Hilda in the back, with Elwen's help. There were no railings on the bridge, and it was so narrow that only one person could fit on it.

Greg tried very hard not to think about what would happen if someone fell because the void stretched on forever on both sides. The bridge behind them started to pull back as they reached the second island.

Like water sucked up by a sponge, it flowed back into the stone. A new bridge began to form in front of them almost right away, pointing toward the next island in the chain.

Elwen said, "It's showing us the way like it wants us to keep going."

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