As soon as Jace began sprinting, Kinfild and Lessa did too. Lessa ripped off her helmet immediately and gulped in the air, and Kinfild cast aside his baggy poncho, revealing his staff. He pulled it off his back and swatted a worker who ran toward them with a heavy shovel.

  “Jace, duck!” Lessa yelled.

  Just before he reached a ladder down into the pit, he dropped flat on his stomach, and a blast of magenta plasma seared overhead. It smashed into a support strut of the shield generator, and while it didn’t do any major damage, it showered him in sparks.

  For a moment, he flinched, half expecting his body to respond like it had when he’d first arrived here—disintegrating and burning.

  But the sparks merely pattered against his skin, and though they melted holes in his shirt, it barely felt warm on his skin.

  Vitality and Resistance doing their job. He grinned, then jumped back to his feet. A scavenger guard, a regular [Level 9] soldier, jabbed at him with his rifle’s bayonet, but Jace gripped the rifle’s barrel and pushed it away then kicked the guard into the pit.

  Lessa fired two shots back into the hall, aiming at armed scavengers near the edge, but Jace shouted, “Come on! Go down!”

  He took the lead, gripping the edges of the ladder and sliding down into the cavern. He’d gotten much better at that lately, having practiced enough in the past four months, descending ladders quickly while running from local authorities. It didn’t seem like an important skill, but when your life depended on it, and when the people of this galaxy used so many ladders…

  Lessa followed close behind, and Kinfild took up the rear, waving his staff and conjuring a plume of flame at its tip to dispel an incoming plasma blast.

  Jace descended down the pit, perhaps falling a hundred feet before the ladder ended. He slowed himself and leapt out of the way, letting Lessa land, and in turn she dove out of the way for Kinfild.

  As soon as they landed, Jace drew his Whistling Blade. They’d landed on a floor of enormous, van-sized stone bricks. It was a plaza of sorts, with circular walls and eight different tunnels. They reached out in all directions, evenly spaced.

  But there were also guards. A party of scavengers stood in the center, armed with plasma rifles and Aes-shielded sabers. Lessa blasted one of them, and Kinfild struck another with a pulse of flame.

  The other three took aim, but Jace closed the distance with a hyperdash and cut through two of them. The last swung his shielded saber, knocking Jace’s blade aside, then slashed back the other direction, but Jace ducked, then rammed his shoulder into the scavenger’s gut and sent him staggering back. As the scavenger fell, he slashed with the Whistling Blade, cutting the man in half.

  Panting, Jace turned back to face Kinfild and Lessa. “We can’t just keep fighting them! Sooner than later, their Wielders are going to turn up!”

  “Which way?” Lessa asked.

  “I sense Wielders from behind,” Kinfild said, pointing to half the hallways on his side of the room.

  “We’ll pick one on the other side and run, then!” Jace called. “We can find our way when we’re not immediately in danger.”

  He sprinted across the room to the hallway straight ahead. It had an angular archway with brass statues flanking it on either side. They wore robes and wielded staffs, and Jace half expected their patchwork panels to shift when he passed, moving to attack him. But so close to the entrance, the scavengers had hopefully dealt with the biggest threats already—unless anything else had come up from below.

  But, unlike the dungeon on Maehn, there were no black veins or tarry vines hanging from the ceiling. No distant, chittering kobolds.

  Jace kept running. The hallway was smaller, and it had a roof that slightly narrowed from the bottom, giving the hallway a trapezoidal shape. After a half minute, he slowed, letting Kinfild and Lessa catch up, then continued down the hall.

  They had no lights of their own, but the scavengers set up rudimentary lamps all around the hallway. The shone pale yellow with some sort of filament, and needed no wire. It wasn’t bright, and there were still deep shadows near the edge of the hall, but it was better than trying to make their way with no light.

  When the hallway branched, Kinfild sensed a Wielder to the left, so instead they ran to the right. He’d seemed pretty certain the Wielder was only [Level 30], but Jace still didn’t need to fight one when he had the chance not to. It’d just waste time.

  Finally, after nearly ten minutes of sprinting, they stopped in an open chamber. There weren’t even the echoes of scavengers’ footsteps, and Kinfild said he couldn’t sense any nearby Wielders.

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  Jace leaned against the wall, panting, and asked, “You don’t happen to know where to go, do you?”

  “No idea,” said Lessa. She pulled her rifle’s bolt back, then slotted in a few more loose plasma shells to keep it topped up. Then, she began pulling off the scavenger armour. It’d be heavy and warm, and they’d already blown their cover. “You want to carry this around? You know, work on pushing your true stats to match the attributes?”

  “My bag’s already full,” Jace said. “And I don’t think we’ll find it very useful anymore. It’s not special, and the scavengers already know who we are.”

  Kinfild also began taking off his armour. “I did not have a chance to find a map of the dungeon, but our priority should be delving deeper. You need to hit the tenth level within a month, so that’s what we must do.”

  “A map would be helpful,” Jace said.

  “Where we’re heading, I find it unlikely they have explored yet,” Kinfild said. “The chances of a map helping us are slim. We need to find a stairway and descend.”

  “Why would it get stronger the deeper we go?” Jace asked. Sure, that was just what instinct told him, but when he thought of it for a moment, he couldn’t explain it. This was supposed to be a tomb.

  “The tomb has natural defences to prevent people like us from entering,” Kinfild said. “Armed traps, which we should avoid easily enough once we work on your senses, but more concerningly, tomb guardians. They use power from the dungeon’s central control core, which we should find on the fifteenth level. The closer you get to the core, the more power it exerts.”

  “Like the kobold queen-core?” Lessa asked.

  “Similar, but the control core cannot move,” Kinfild explained. “I do not know where it will be, but I can say for certain that the closer you get to it, the stronger the defences—for that is where the true treasure of the tomb is.”

  “The Halcyon Spear?” Jace asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why would they put a weapon in a tomb?”

  Kinfild tilted his head. “Your people…don’t bury their dead with the weapons they used in life?”

  Jace scrunched his lips. “Not recently, no.”

  “It was common practice for the Luminians, and for many other modern cultures as well,” Kinfild said.

  “Are we…above the control core right now, then?” Jace asked. “That round room we entered into seemed pretty central.” But the scavengers had locked off the entire planet, and this clearly wasn’t the only outpost they’d set up.

  “Considering they found a tap of Aes, they likely set up above a crust-lift. But the entire structure extends all throughout the crust and mantle of this planet.”

  “The dungeon on Maehn didn’t go nearly as deep,” Jace said.

  “Oh, yes it did,” Kinfild said. “We only explored the uppermost level. To descend to a deeper level, you would need to find a crust-lift. In the dungeon on Maehn, they’d likely lost their power long ago, but in a dungeon with a functional control-core, we won’t have that issue.”

  Jace nodded. “So…it’s like a big elevator?”

  “Elevator?” Lessa asked. “Like, thing that goes up and down? Sure, a crust-lift is like that. Sometimes, on the big city-worlds, they have crust lifts that go all the way through the planet. Never seen one, ‘course, but I will one day. You…you don’t suppose there was one on Kinath-Aertes?”

  “Kinath-Aertes is hardly the most populous world in the Starrealm, Lessa,” Kinfild said. “But no, there wasn’t one.”

  “My point,” Kinfild said, “is that the crust-lift does not necessarily mean we’re over the center of the dungeon. The spear could be a half-world away from us.”

  “Neikir said the center of the dungeon,” Jace commented. “He didn’t mean the center of the world, right? If there are fifteen levels.”

  “He…just said center?” asked Kinfild.

  “He just said center,” Jace confirmed.

  “Perhaps he meant that you should meet him above the central chamber?” Lessa suggested. “This dungeon doesn’t go all the way to Ifskar’s core, does it?”

  “The Luminians were somewhat practical,” Kinfild said. “They didn’t go any deeper than the mantle, because even their most powerful lords didn’t see the point in trying to build a tomb in the planet’s core.”

  “Well…that’s good for us, then, I suppose?” Jace said. “So we need to find our way above this core, which could be anywhere across the planet’s surface. We won’t make it on foot.”

  “No, but the crust-lifts also move horizontally,” Kinfild said. “If we find one, we can travel to different sections of the dungeon.”

  “I can help with that, then. With the tracking card, we shouldn’t need a map to find this crust-lift.” Jace held his hand out, but then pulled it back right away. “Or…uh, after fifteen minutes, when it’s off cooldown. I’d rather not burn the reset card right now.”

  They set off at a brisk walk, keeping moving. Eventually, the scavengers might catch up, but at least if they kept moving, they could expand their lead, or at least have less risk of being caught.

  Kinfild led, tapping the ground with his staff. The scavengers had disabled or triggered most of the traps so high up already, but there were a few that Kinfild instructed them to avoid. A set of blunt metal rods launched from holes in the wall, fast enough to crush a human skull, or invisible gas seeped up from the floor, which they sprinted to avoid.

  When they reached a stairwell, they descended. Like the hallways, the stairwells had angular walls with rudimentary lanterns set up in them. A party of scavengers climbed up the stairs, lugging a crate-laden repeller-cart behind them, but Jace Kinfild and Lessa ducked into an alcove to let them pass before continuing on.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Jace paused. They were still on the first level, of course, but it felt deeper here. There were less lanterns to light the way, for one.

  “Alright,” he said. “It’s been fifteen minutes, I hope. Or close enough. I should be able to get the tracking technique working.”