Life could take strange turns.
A few months ago, Milo was just a young man entering adulthood, with the simple ambition of leveling up for a better life, like everyone else...
Now, as he observed the walls of the tunnel they had built, he couldn't help but laugh in disbelief.
'Here I am,' he thought, 'under millions of giant monsters, hiding from a creature that could supposedly eliminate us all.'
"It's crazy that we're here, isn't it?" he commented aloud.
Nessa looked up from her work, while Kai and Arnaud temporarily stopped coordinating the tunnel's expansion.
"If someone had told me a month ago that we'd be building a secret tunnel around the city..." Arnaud left the sentence hanging, shaking his head.
"Or that we'd be involved in humanity's most important mission," Nessa added, "simply because we wanted to level up and get a rabbit."
The soft flutter of a swift interrupted their conversation. The small summon glided through the flow of cores they were absorbing from the expansion, bringing a note with it.
Milo read it aloud: Elio had begun the level 10 challenge. But it was the second part of the message that caught his attention... They wanted them to check the captured deposit again, specifically of the challenge he had been watching.
He looked at the monotonous construction work before him and then at the long tunnel leading to the deposit.
The decision was easy.
"I'll go," he offered, already starting to move. "Anything is better than repeating this work every day."
While running through the tunnel toward the crystal of the challenge they had already overcome, Milo couldn't help but smile. Maybe he wasn't the strongest or bravest, but he was here, being part of something much bigger than himself.
The sound of his footsteps echoed in the tunnel, accompanying his thoughts about how much his life had changed since deciding he wanted to be more than just another citizen.
♢♢♢♢
It was strange how one could get used to living down here, without sunlight.
Inside the small tunnel, his steps echoed differently.
The crystal chamber appeared before him, familiar and strange at once. The victory message that previously adorned the crystalline surface had disappeared, as if the crystal itself had entered a deep sleep.
Milo stopped in front of it, observing his own distorted reflection in the polished surface. His hand rose almost by instinct, slowly approaching the crystal.
In the tunnel's dimness, the moment seemed charged with special meaning, as if he were about to awaken something ancient and powerful.
At least until Milo extended his hand to touch it.
When his fingers touched the crystalline surface, a new message appeared, shining with surprising clarity in the tunnel's darkness:
"Welcome to the daily challenge of the wind deposit in the wind ring. Challenge status: available. You will face a level 10 Locus. Maximum party size: 5. Do you wish to enter?"
Milo withdrew his hand as if the crystal burned.
Level 10 Locus weren't something he wanted to encounter alone, especially with his limited mana from working today and just a level 5 elephant as a summon. The stories about their power were enough to make anyone think twice.
His return run was faster than the trip there, the discovery's adrenaline pushing him to use more of his potential speed.
Taron was the first trusted person he found in the tunnel.
"The crystal!" exclaimed Milo, catching his breath despite his improved resistance. "There's a new supposed daily challenge!"
The news spread quickly.
Soon, Zara and the others were gathered, discussing the implications of this discovery. This could be a partial solution to the problem of revealing themselves through absorption.
"Not everyone can abandon construction," Taron pointed out, always practical. "The tunnel must keep expanding."
"A high-level team of 5 could try it," Zara suggested, her mind already calculating possibilities. "If the challenge resets daily as the name suggests..."
"The cores," Mei murmured. "We could obtain them more discreetly than absorbing directly from the surface."
The discussion continued, the implications of Milo's discovery expanding like ripples in a pond. What had started as a simple reconnaissance task could transform into the solution to several of their problems.