Floor two was hotter. Darker. The factory layout gave way to something more organic - corridors that twisted and narrowed, ceiling heights that varied unpredictably, rooms that felt less like manufacturing spaces and more like the internal chambers of some vast metal organism. The crystallized mana growth was denser here, the amber deposits clustering along walls and ceilings in formations that pulsed in slow, coordinated rhythms. A heartbeat. The dungeon's heartbeat.

  Jace's [Mana Sense] was working overtime. The ambient density on floor two was significantly higher than floor one, and the creature signatures were heavier - slower pulses, deeper resonance, more stored energy. Level 6 to 8. The clerk hadn't been exaggerating.

  "Contact," he said, raising his fist. "Two signatures. Large. Stationary. Next chamber."

  Elara consulted her compiled notes. "This deep, this heavy - Forge Wraiths or Pressure Constructs. Forge Wraiths are shadow-aspected, inhabit defunct machinery, attack through the metal itself. Pressure Constructs are physical - animated boiler components, steam-based attacks, high durability."

  "Which is worse?"

  "Forge Wraiths if we don't have shadow-disruption capability. Pressure Constructs if Torrin can't resist the urge to hit them and feeds their kinetic absorption."

  "I won't hit them," Torrin said. Then, after a beat: "Hard."

  They entered the chamber.

  It had been a boiler room - three massive cylindrical vessels lined the far wall, each one five meters tall, their riveted steel surfaces warped and swollen with mana-crystal growth. Pipes ran from the boilers in every direction, crossing the ceiling and walls in a web of corroded metal that groaned and ticked with thermal stress.

  Two Pressure Constructs stood between the boilers like sentries. They were humanoid - barely. Each one was assembled from boiler components: a barrel-shaped torso of riveted steel, limbs fashioned from pipe segments and valve housings, a head that was nothing more than a pressure gauge cluster mounted on a thick neck-joint. Steam leaked from every joint and seam in continuous plumes, and the ambient temperature within ten meters of them was intense enough to make Jace's eyes water.

  Level 7. Both of them. He could feel it through [Mana Sense] - the density of their cores, the compression of stored energy inside those barrel-chests, the potential force coiled in every joint. These were two tiers of creature density above what they'd fought on floor one.

  "Elara. The clerk said they absorb kinetic energy and release it as steam detonations. Explain."

  "Impact absorption through mana-reactive plating," she said, her voice dropping into the rapid analytical cadence she used under pressure. "Physical strikes charge their internal reservoir. When the reservoir reaches critical mass, they vent - steam explosion, area effect, probably two to three meter radius. Hitting them makes them *more* dangerous."

  "So we don't hit them."

  "We hit them *carefully*. The absorption is surface-level - the plating converts kinetic energy to thermal energy on impact. But precision strikes to joints and seams bypass the plating entirely. The energy has nowhere to go because it's entering through gaps in the conversion matrix. You need surgical hits, not power hits."

  Torrin's jaw tightened. Surgical hits were Jace's strength. Torrin's strength was *strength*. Asking him not to use it was like asking a river not to flow.

  "Torrin." Jace looked at him directly. "You're the wall, not the hammer. Draw one. Hold it. Let it push against you and burn SP keeping your stance. Don't punch the body. If you have to hit, elbows and knees to the joints. Short. Controlled. Understood?"

  "Understood." The word came out tight but steady. Disciplined.

  "I'll take the other one. Mara - these things vent steam. If either of us gets caught in a detonation, that's burn damage, potentially serious. Be ready."

  "I'm ready." Mara's hands were already loose at her sides, her mana reaching outward in the gentle exploratory tendrils of active [Triage Sense]. She didn't need to close her eyes anymore for the basic detection - three weeks of daily practice with Sister Vael had pushed the skill from barely-functional to reliable at short range. The eyes-closed channeling was still needed for sustained healing, but the diagnostic component was becoming second nature. "I can feel their cores. The heat signatures are... intense. Torrin, if one grabs you, the contact burn alone will-"

  "I know. I'll hold."

  "Elara," Jace said, "disruption runes. You said you had two?"

  "Designed to interrupt mana-flow in enchanted objects. I theorized they'd work on constructs, but-"

  "Untested."

  "Field validation pending."

  "We're validating. If I call for a disruption rune, you throw it and we find out together." He shifted his grip on the Subway Fang. "On my mark."

  The Pressure Constructs hadn't noticed them yet - or if they had, they hadn't classified them as threats. The creatures stood in a patrol idle, steam cycling through their joints in rhythmic pulses, pressure gauges twitching in their skull-clusters.

  Jace threw a loose bolt from the floor. It clanged off the nearest Construct's torso. Both creatures turned. Their gauge-faces swiveled toward the sound, and then toward the four figures in the doorway, and something shifted in their posture - an immediate, mechanical recognition of intruders. Steam pressure built audibly. Joints locked into combat configuration.

  "Mark."

  Torrin advanced on the left Construct. He moved differently now than he had at the start of the year - still heavy, still deliberate, but with a *purpose* to his slowness that hadn't been there before. He wasn't failing to be fast. He was choosing to be immovable. His feet found their positions with the precision of a mason laying stones, each step calculated to maximize his ground contact and minimize his center of gravity's exposure.

  The left Construct charged him. Pipe-arm raised for an overhead slam.

  Torrin set [Immovable Stance] and caught the blow on his crossed forearms. Metal screamed against mana-hardened wrappings. The impact drove him two centimeters into the concrete - his boots actually *denting* the floor - but he didn't move backward. Didn't buckle. The force distributed through his frame and into the earth, and the Construct's gauge-face twitched as if confused by an equation that wasn't resolving correctly.

  The Construct swung again. Torrin blocked. Again. Blocked. Each impact was a thunderclap that echoed off the boiler room walls, and each time Torrin absorbed it without yielding ground, without retaliating, without feeding the creature's kinetic reservoir. He was a wall. The Construct was throwing itself against a wall, and the wall wasn't breaking.

  Jace engaged the right Construct.

  It was faster than the Slag Drones - faster than anything he'd fought in the Subway. The pipe-arm came in hard, a lateral sweep aimed at his ribs. He dropped under it with [Footwork: Evasion], the SP cost biting into his reserves, and came up on the Construct's inside flank where the barrel-torso met the left leg-joint.

  The seam was there - visible to [Analysis] as a structural gap in the mana-reactive plating, a three-centimeter line where the riveted panels didn't quite overlap. Precision target. Surgical hit.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He drove the Subway Fang into the seam.

  The blade bit - but not deep. The Common-tier weapon was reaching its limits against Level 7 construction. The enchantment buzzed against the Construct's mana-dense frame, the AGI-alignment maintaining his speed but providing no armor penetration against a target this far above the weapon's designed efficacy. He felt the resistance through the hilt - the sensation of pushing against something that his gear wasn't built to handle.

  *Need more force. Need a better angle. Need-*

  The Construct's free arm swung back at him. He dodged - barely - the pipe-fist passing close enough to his face that he felt the heat of it singe his eyebrows. The creature was learning his pattern. Two more dodges and it would anticipate his evasion angles.

  *Adapt.*

  The memory surfaced with crystalline clarity: three days ago, Corvin's shop, a veteran [Saber Dancer] named Ketla testing a repaired blade in the alley. She'd demonstrated a technique - a binding strike, MYS-infused, that channeled mana through the blade at the point of impact to *lock* a joint in place for a fraction of a second. A Finesse DPS technique designed for exactly this situation: when the blade couldn't cut deep enough, you stopped cutting and started *disrupting*.

  Jace reached for [Skill Mimicry].

  The activation felt like opening a door in his mind - a door that led to someone else's muscle memory, someone else's understanding of how a body and a blade and mana could work together. Ketla's technique flooded into him: the angle of the wrist, the timing of the mana-pulse, the way the energy had to leave the blade's edge at the exact moment of contact to propagate into the target's joint mechanism.

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  [SYSTEM]

  [Skill Mimicry] Active

  Replicating: [Binding Strike] - Finesse DPS Technique

  Source Proficiency: Journeyman (est.)

  Mimicry Proficiency: 40% - Apprentice equivalent

  Duration: 22 seconds

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  Twenty-two seconds. The countdown began the instant the technique settled into his body like a borrowed skin.

  Jace pivoted inside the Construct's guard, [Footwork: Evasion] burning SP to buy the angle, and drove the Subway Fang into the same seam he'd struck before - but this time, the mana surged. It left his core, flowed down his arm, entered the blade, and *detonated* at the contact point in a pulse of disruptive energy that wasn't his own.

  The effect was imperfect. Ketla's version would have locked the joint completely - a clean two-second freeze. Jace's forty-percent copy managed a stutter. The Construct's left leg seized for less than a second, its mana-flow interrupted by foreign energy it couldn't process. The creature lurched. Its balance broke.

  One second was enough.

  "Torrin! Right side, leg joint, NOW!"

  Torrin didn't hesitate. He broke from his Construct - *letting it hit him* in the process, taking a glancing blow across the shoulder that spun him half around but didn't drop him - and closed on Jace's target in three strides. His elbow came down on the exposed leg joint with the controlled precision of a chisel stroke, targeting the already-disrupted seam where Jace's mimicked [Binding Strike] had cracked the mana-flow matrix.

  The joint *shattered*. The Construct's leg buckled. It went down on one side, steam shrieking from every seam, its pressure gauge skull-cluster spinning wildly.

  Jace felt [Skill Mimicry] expire - the borrowed technique draining away like water through cupped fingers. Fourteen seconds had remained on the clock but the execution cost had been brutal; his MP had plunged, the mana expenditure of maintaining a foreign technique through [Wayfaring II]'s multiplier consuming nearly a third of his pool in a single use.

  The Construct was down but not dead. Its remaining arm swept the ground in wide arcs, and the steam venting from its broken leg was intensifying - pressure building toward a detonation.

  "It's going to blow," Elara called. "Pull back!"

  "Elara - disruption rune! On the body!"

  She threw. The inscribed strip hit the Construct's barrel-torso and activated - blue-white light flaring along the rune-work as the disruption pattern propagated into the creature's mana-reactive plating. The effect was immediate and violent: the Construct convulsed as its internal mana-flow stuttered, the building pressure *destabilizing* rather than releasing. Instead of a controlled steam detonation, the energy dissipated in erratic jets - steam venting from random seams, pressure dropping, the creature's animation faltering.

  "It works!" Elara's voice carried the sharp delight of validated theory. "The disruption interrupts the absorption-release cycle. It can't build to detonation while the rune is active - maybe ten seconds of suppression."

  "Torrin - finish it. Joints only."

  Torrin went to work with the grim efficiency of a demolition crew. Elbow strikes to the remaining leg joints. A knee-drop onto the arm assembly. Each hit targeted a seam, a gap, a structural weakness - not power shots, but *architecture* shots, dismantling the Construct piece by piece while the disruption rune kept its pressure system offline.

  The Construct died in stages. First the legs. Then the arms. Then the torso, cracking open as its core lost containment and the mana inside bled away in a hissing, amber fog.

  The second Construct was already closing on them - drawn by the noise and the dying signature of its partner. Its pressure levels were elevated; the combat sounds had charged it even without direct kinetic input.

  "Elara - second disruption rune?"

  "One left. Making it count." She waited. The Construct charged. At four meters, she threw - not at the center mass this time but at the leg joint, low and precise. The rune hit, stuck, and activated. The Construct's right leg seized mid-stride. It stumbled, momentum carrying it forward and down, and Torrin was there to meet it with both forearms braced in [Immovable Stance]. The Construct crashed into him like a freight car hitting a wall. Torrin slid backward half a meter - the first time the stance had given ground - but he held.

  Jace came in from the flank. No [Skill Mimicry] this time - the cooldown was still running. Just the Subway Fang and his own skills. [Footwork: Evasion], a sidestep to the exposed joint, and a series of rapid thrusts into the disrupted seam - four, five, six strikes, each one driving the blade deeper into the gap the disruption rune had created. Not elegant. Not powerful. But *persistent*, each thrust widening the damage, exploiting the structural failure the way water exploits a crack in stone.

  The Construct's core ruptured. Steam blasted from the opening - Jace threw himself backward, the heat washing over his arms, and Mara was already channeling. He felt her mana reach him before the pain fully registered - warm, golden, threading through the superficial burns on his forearms with the careful precision of someone who could feel the damage without looking at it.

  "Surface burns," she said, her eyes half-closed, her hands extended toward him from five meters away. The [Triage Sense] gave her the diagnosis. The healing channeling followed automatically - a current of restoration that smoothed the angry redness and took the fire out of the flesh. "Nothing deep. Hold still for three seconds."

  He held still. The burns faded to a faint pink irritation and then nothing.

  "Torrin?" Mara's focus shifted. Her mana reached further, finding the [Brawler]'s signature, mapping his injuries with practiced ease. "Shoulder contusion from the hit you took. Minor burn damage on your forearms from the close grapple. Nothing structural. I can heal the burns now and the contusion will need pressure and rest."

  "Heal the burns. I'll carry the bruise."

  She did. Torrin rolled his shoulder when she was done, testing the range of motion. Winced. Didn't complain.

  Silence in the boiler room. The two Pressure Constructs lay in pieces, steam still leaking from their remains in diminishing wisps. The heat was oppressive but the threat was gone.

  "Disruption runes work on constructs," Elara said, writing furiously in her notebook. Her cheeks were flushed - not from the heat, but from the particular exhilaration of experimental confirmation. "The mana-flow interruption is even more effective than I projected. The absorption-release cycle is entirely dependent on continuous internal circulation. Disrupt the circulation and the construct loses both its primary offensive capability *and* its structural reinforcement. They become-"

  "Breakable," Torrin finished.

  "Dramatically so."

  "How many disruption runes can you make?" Jace asked.

  "With current materials? Eight more, given two days of inscription time. If I can source higher-grade binding ink - Corvin might have contacts - I could improve the duration by thirty to forty percent."

  "Do it. After we get out of here." He checked his resources. MP was low - [Mana Sense] maintenance plus the [Skill Mimicry] expenditure had carved deep into his pool. SP was at roughly half from the evasion work. HP was full thanks to Mara. "Everyone top off. Water. Rations if you need them. Floor three is the boss."

  They rested for ten minutes. Ate. Drank. Mara moved between them, her [Triage Sense] running in the background - a passive scan that she'd started doing unconsciously, her mana reaching out to touch her teammates' signatures the way a hand reaches out to touch a wall in a dark room. Checking. Confirming. Present.

  When they were ready, Jace led them down.