There was no screaming. No panicked shouts.

  A lesser party would have broken formation, terrified by the sheer impossibility of the sight. But this was an S-Class squad. Panic was a luxury they had discarded years ago.

  When the thick, dark blood of the High Orcs began to crawl up the stone walls, defying gravity, the party simply stopped.

  Michael and Uncle moved seamlessly, locking their massive shields together to form an impenetrable wall of steel down the corridor. Their breathing remained perfectly steady. Meijin didn't say a word; he simply ceased to exist, fading into the darkest corner of the ceiling to secure the perimeter. Sarah tapped her staff, shifting its glow from a warm gold to a harsh, diagnostic white.

  Mosin held up a single, black-gloved fist. Halt.

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  "Status," Mosin ordered, his voice dropping to a clinical whisper. He didn't look at the blood; he looked at the layout of the hall.

  "Gravity isn't inverted," Mythy answered.

  The thirteen-year-old mage stepped closer to the wall, his eyes tracking the creeping blood. The profound boredom that had weighed him down on the previous floors was completely gone. In its place was a razor-sharp, almost predatory fascination. He extended a pale finger, letting a drop of the upward-falling blood hover just an inch from his skin without touching it.

  "It's not a physical anomaly," Mythy continued, his voice steady and analytical. "It's a localized mana vacuum. The dungeon isn't just pulling the blood up. It's forcefully extracting the residual mana from the monster corpses."

  Mosin’s eyes narrowed. "Dungeons don't actively feed on Class-C trash. They recycle it slowly."

  "Normally, yes," Mythy smirked, a dangerous, thrilled glint in his eyes. He crushed the drop of blood into dust with a spark of his own mana. "But this one is starving. Whatever is waiting for us down there... it’s hungry. And it just hijacked the dungeon's core logic to feed itself."

  High Lone Wolf or visualizing the S-Class party, drop a comment or hit me up in the DMs. Let’s build this dark fantasy IP together.