a sharp word issued from the S-ranker - somehow not from his body but from the miasma directly - and they no longer worried about anything. I was confused. I had just lost all connection to everything on that level. There was an enormous hole in my influence that perfectly fit the bounds of that floor. I quickly shunted my influence through a makeshift portal between floors to recapture my control and worked to re-establish a tiny bit of connection on that floor. When I could see into the room, I still couldn’t quite understand what I was seeing. The entire floor was empty. No fortifications,
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