For a few more hours, Jace led the way through the hallways of the dungeon. He held his Whistling Blade out in front of him, in case anything attacked, but kept his attention keen for any glimmers of danger. He paid attention to the little ring of a soul, concentrating on where the potential dangers came from.

  He illuminated most of the traps in his senses, almost like how he imaged a bat’s echolocation would be, but without being able to perceive the true shape of his surroundings. At least, not yet.

  It took such direct concentration that he could barely keep track of his cards on cooldown. Sometimes, he even forgot to reactivate the Questforger card when it was available, and they drifted off-course ever so slightly.

  When the needle of Aes was pointing ninety degrees to their current trajectory, they turned left, and now, it was straight ahead. Whenever they found a stairway, they descended.

  “Are you looking for people as well?” Kinfild asked when the needle of Aes floated directly ahead, instead of angling downward.

  “Looking for…people?” Jace tilted his head.

  “Trying to sense scavengers.”

  “Uh…no,” Jace replied. “I can do that?” Stupid question. Of course he could. They were alive, they had Aes.

  So far, they’d been avoiding scavenger parties with Kinfild’s guidance, but they were lucky that most teams were heading to the surface to deliver their goods to the facility above, and weren’t looking for him.

  But it wouldn’t last. Soon, more would be coming down, and they had to find that crust-lift before then.

  So Jace expanded his senses hunting for even a twinge of that dangerous feeling. The feeling he got when he knew something was wrong, but just couldn’t explain it. Two cycles of using his tracking card later, he finally picked up on one—between the sense of danger that signalled traps.

  This sense was coming from the right, down a branching hallway. He whispered, “Kinfild, there’s something coming from that direction,” and pointed the same way.

  “Very good,” Kinfild said. “How close?”

  “Uh…yeah, I’ve got no clue.” Jace swallowed. “Couldn’t say.”

  “It will come in time,” Kinfild said. “Remember this feeling. They are about three-hundred yards away. Plenty of room to evade them.

  Ahead was a stairway, and they descended, following a trail of scavengers’ lanterns. Here, there were more lanterns, placed closer together, and the hallway was brighter. Kinfild deactivated the ball of flame at the tip of his staff.

  After a few more paces, the Questforger card came off cooldown, and Jace activated it. Now, the needle pointed directly ahead. “It should…should be directly down this hallway,” he said. “If I’ve locked onto the right thing.”

  “You must’ve,” Lessa said. “The ground is humming. We’re getting close to something.”

  Jace knelt down and pressed his knuckles against the floor. Indeed, it was vibrating, almost like the deck of a starship. The ceiling was higher than before, and metal bulkheads lined the walls, matching the trapezoidal shape of the hallway. If this didn’t lead to some kind of fancy elevator, Jace didn’t know what would.

  By the time he felt the scavengers’ presences behind him, he, Kinfild, and Lessa had ventured down the hall far enough to be out of sight, and the scavengers didn’t follow. After a few more steps, a set of traps lit up Jace’s senses, but they’d already triggered.

  And he didn’t need special senses to tell that the scavenger who’d been impaled on spikes from the floor was the victim of a trap. The man had died probably days ago, and they navigated carefully around his body.

  “I suppose we should be thankful they triggered the traps for us,” said Jace. Still, he drew his Whistling Blade.

  Something felt wrong up ahead, now, but he couldn’t pinpoint it like the other traps. It felt like it was coming from all over the edges of the hallway. No choice but to tuck his head and walk straight into danger, then, but kept his eyes out for mosses and any other creatures clinging to the walls.

  Nothing.

  A pale blue light seeped down the hallway, and a deep whir interspersed with thrumming machinery came from ahead. The hallway ended. It deposited them on a ledge with a thin, angular railing that overlooked a vast chamber.

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  The chamber was cylindrical, and the walls were bare stone—the material of the crust itself. Almost like someone had carved a soda-can-shaped hole in the earth. The only light came from a machine at the center. A set of vertical glass tubes filled with glowing blue liquid, wires, and concentric, rune-covered rings. They spun in a circle, nothing suspending them, and unleashed a spiritual pressure that made Jace’s stomach churn. Kinfild didn’t flinch, and Lessa put on a brave face, but the pressure couldn’t have been comfortable to someone who was only officially [Level 5].

  Spars of metal anchored the device’s body to the walls, and a long metal tube ran to the bottom of the cylinder, where it penetrated deep into the stone below.

  “And there it is,” Kinfild said. “The crust-lift.”

  Jace ran to the edge of the ledge and leaned on the railing. “How do we get over?” He didn’t want to put too much weight on it, lest the old metal collapse under his weight, but he still peered out as far as he could into the cavern. The machine, aside from its rings, wasn’t free-floating. Giant spars of steel reached across from the edges of the cavern to support the main body of the crust-lift, which they could climb across if they had to.

  But they still had to get down.

  “I’ve got no idea,” Lessa provided. “In case…you were wondering.”

  They followed the ledge around the side of the cavern, taking it as far as it would go, until they reached a stone stairway that wound down around the edge of the cavern. The scavengers who’d passed through before them had left a trail of lanterns lighting the edge, and as Jace’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized they weren’t just elements of machinery, but a vast network of marked out pathways.

  It was difficult to tell scale in such a massive cavern, but he was starting to realize how much larger such a device was, and how deep they’d have to go.

  “I hope the ventilation is good,” he muttered. “Or we’re going to have problems.”

  “We shouldn’t have to worry about air in the depths,” Kinfild provided. “To my understanding, the Luminians’ modified their bodies in a such a way that atmosphere slowed their decomposition, and so it became an imperative to mimic a standard atmospheric composition in the depths.”

  “How?” Lessa asked.

  “A combination of porous stones and runic structures,” Kinfild said. “We may eventually see one, but I doubt up here.”

  “Let’s just find ourselves a way into the machine,” Jace said. He took the lead again, practicing his senses.

  “Hey, hey, having air to breathe is important!” Lessa exclaimed.

  “I’m not complaining,” Jace replied. “But these scavengers made a mess of the place, and they didn’t just mark out a single route.”

  They’d lit every differing path, whether it was a stairway up or a flight down, or just a straight ledge, with a slew of lanterns.

  Jace, Kinfild, and Lessa descended until they reached the same level as the crust-lift’s main body. By now, they’d circled almost a quarter way around the entire cavern, and if they went any lower, they’d reach a main support strut. But the struts had to be a last resort. Hard to climb, and they didn’t connect with any human-compatible openings.

  But, as they rounded the edge of the last quarter, a thin walkway came into view on the other side of the cavern. No railings, simple perforated steel, but it reached from one side to the other and pierced into the side of the crust-lift’s main body.

  Jace pointed at it. “There. Now we just need to—”

  He cut himself off halfway through his sentence and blinked. A new sense erupted to his left, and he couldn’t explain it. It was similar to the sense of danger, foreboding and warning of a trap, but it approached much faster than they were moving.

  Kinfild’s eyes widened, and he shouted, “Get back!”

  Jace and Lessa both stumbled back along the pathway. Lessa pulled her rifle off her shoulder and flicked the safety off.

  The wall exploded right where Jace had been standing. Shards of stone blasted out into the cavern, and a cloud of dust wafted out across the walkway. “A trap?” Jace asked. “Why couldn’t I sense it the same?”

  “Because it’s not a trap,” Kinfild said. He backed away from the cloud of dust as well, tapping his staff on the ground and swapping in a different technique card to replace his low-tier light-making card.

  Two halos of blue light lit up in the cloud of dust, then a network of glowing cerulean lines and runic patterns. The dust settled, revealing a metal man twice Jace’s height. He wanted to call it a kyborg, but it didn’t chug any smoke and it didn’t chitter. It whirred, more like an electric motor.

  It had a broad, disc-shaped head with a line of light running around it and two glowing eyes. There was no discernable neck; smooth panels of coppery metal ran down from the disc and formed a mantle at its neck, which flowed down in a set of plates, as if it was wearing a robe.

  It carried no weapons, but in the center of its chest was a metal sphere, almost like an eye, but its pupil yawned and created an entirely hollow center in the creature’s body.

  “Grave guardian,” Kinfild said. “Natural dungeon defences.”

  [Level 35 Shield-aspect Guardian Automaton] read the tag above its head, when Jace looked up that high.

  That would explain the blue mana.

  “We need to get around it,” Jace said. “Can we destroy it?”

  “These are ancient Luminian machines,” Kinfild said. “But it should be possible, no matter how skilled their makers were.”

  “Is it a kyborg?” Lessa asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Jace whispered back. “It’s something else.”

  The machine whirred and shrugged its broad shoulders, shaking off a cloud of dust. Then it took a lumbering step forward and made a fighting pose with its hands.

  The cavity at the center of its chest sparked with electricity, and Aes glimmered around the aperture.

  It was preparing to attack.