Jace widened his stance and reached out to the side. He nearly dropped his blade, but his grip just barely held. Air rushed past his face, and the ceiling retreated. The blazing blue lines in the floor shone brighter.

  “I think I hit the right button!” Jace called. He had to raise his voice over the rushing electric whir and grinding steel. Wind swirled in his ears.

  When Lessa shouted back, “Some warning would have been nice!” he barely heard her. She reached out to the side just the same, trying to keep her balance.

  Kinfild planted his staff down, holding his balance. “I, for one, could tell he was about to press the button!”

  “How would you have known?” Jace called. “I barely even knew what I was doing!”

  “Just a hunch!”

  Jace rolled his eyes, but they had more important things to worry about. They were descending at a rapid rate, and already, they were probably deeper than the deepest tunnel miners had dug back on earth. (Though, the more he thought about that, the less it seemed difficult to surpass.)

  The walls of the chamber rushed past. For the most part, they were smooth metal—Luminian steel—but every so often, they passed a grate that gave him a view of the stone outside. It was a pale beige stone at this depth, with the occasional vein of a granite-like pink.

  A pressure pushed down on his shoulders, both from the strength of the crust-lift, and from something else. At first, he couldn’t pinpoint it, until he realized that for them to descend so quickly without the floor leaving their feet, something had to keep them attached.

  In the tube, artificial gravity had doubled, holding him tight to the descending platform.

  “Kinfild,” Jace asked on a curious impulse, “how does gravity work?”

  “What?”

  “Well, back home, no one knew, but since you guys can manipulate it, I thought—”

  “We don’t know, either!” Kinfild said. “But gravity-aspect Wielders can sense it, much like a field, like the Split but of a different make, and less arcane. They can manipulate it, but they don’t understand the fundamentals of why it works.”

  Gravity-aspect. Jace nodded. He didn’t exactly know what that entailed, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to meet one. Seemed rather dangerous. But then again, maybe they’d be kind.

  “You…don’t know?”

  “There are many mysteries to the galaxy, Jace, and we may never uncover them all. But I am no scientist, nor are you.”

  A moment later, the platform stopped descending. It came to a halt with a lurch, and Jace fell to his knees. His hands smacked the steel floor below, but the enhanced gravity faded a moment later, and he rose to his feet again.

  A doorway stood off to one side of the chamber, leading into the second level of the dungeon. Jace grinned. “Let’s get moving, then.”

  They stepped off the platform and emerged in a hallway much like the interior of the structure at the top of the crust-lift. Here, however, the veins and tubes along the walls glowed orange instead of blue. A different aspect of Aes? “This is Aes, right?” Jace asked, tapping the tube.

  “Highly refined shield-Aes is my guess,” Kinfild answered. “As the crust-lift descends, the Aes that powers it refines into advanced shield-aspects and takes on the distinct orange hue of the anti-hyperspace shield.”

  Jace swallowed. “Does everything here run on a shield-aspect, then? Weapons, crust-lifts…that sounds counter-intuitive.”

  “You saw how effective the shield-beam was,” said Lessa.

  “A shield repels,” Kinfild said. “And thus, it can be used to propel a platform downward. But, while this dungeon seems to focus on shield-Aes, it can use other aspects. It was able to manipulate gravity.”

  They followed the hallway to its end, taking a similar route to the top of the facility, then emerged on a walkway, where they traversed out into yet another massive cavern—almost identical to the one at the top of the lift, except darker. Less light seeped in from wall lanterns, and the stone itself just seemed to absorb more light.

  “Second level, huh,” Jace said halfway across the walkway. He placed his hands on his hips and glanced around. “So, next course of action? I suppose we need to find another Aes lift?”

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  “Unless you want to wander aimlessly in a set of tunnels the scavengers already explored,” Kinfild replied.

  Jace activated the Questforger card and let the bright blue sheet flash into existence ahead of him. Again, it said, [Subquest available: Find abandoned Luminian Aes-Lift. Reward: None].

  “Let’s get moving,” he said, then set off toward the hallways on the other side.

  They descended through the second level of the dungeon much like the first. Jace practiced sensing traps, with Kinfild and Lessa close behind, and he used the questforger card to locate the next crust-lift. They walked through the hallways and took stairways down wherever they could.

  Here, there were some routes that the scavengers hadn’t lit up, though there was no obvious benefit to travelling those ways, and not to mention a whole slew of un-triggered traps. Jace was getting better at picking them out already—from ten paces away, he could sense a trap now. Fifteen paces if it hadn’t yet been triggered.

  So they stayed in the light. Much safer, and much faster.

  He had no gauge of time, but it had to be getting close to evening. Though Jace’s legs didn’t feel tired, there was a dull ache building in his ankles, and the others had to be getting tired too.

  When they reached the third level, they’d stop and rest. He promised himself that.

  Scavenger patrols were fewer here, but whenever Jace and Kinfild sensed them, they stayed clear. No sense creating problems when they didn’t have to.

  They passed the machine corpse of another automaton. Plasma blast holes dotted its armour, scorching it, and dark ash tumbled out the joints between its limbs. A few dead non-Wielder scavengers laid in a ring around it, but whichever companions had survived had taken the rifles and supplies with them.

  Still, it must have taken a good number of scavengers to bring the automaton down.

  After a few hours, they arrived at another crust-lift. Aside from the frequency of automaton corpses, it didn’t seem too different. Trapezoidal hallways, scavenger lanterns, the odd statue at junctions.

  But painfully empty.

  As they approached the crust-lift, they stayed on-guard and wound down around the walkways of the cavern. Everything about it looked much like the first, except once more, it delved deeper into the ground.

  No automatons attacked as they approached, however two of the destroyed machines lay prone on the walkway across from the stone outer wall to the inner chamber.

  When they reached the inner sanctum of the lift, they took the crust-lift down to the third level. Jace pressed the same central button on a remarkably similar control panel, gravity doubled, and the floor shot downward.

  As they descended, Jace asked, “Why bother with the crust-lifts at all? I mean, if the Luminians wanted their tombs secure, just bury them entirely.”

  “What good would a tomb be if no one could bask in your glory?” Kinfild asked. “No, the tombs were designed to allow other Luminians in to view the dead of generations past. You see, they were mortal, and though they lived slightly longer than men, they were intensely jealous of the elves’ immortality. Hence their penchant for megastructures and galactic monuments. They sought to preserve their legacy.”

  “I guess the key word is other Luminians,” Jace said. “Not other humans. Or men.”

  “Precisely,” said Kinfild. “The moment the scavengers stepped inside, they triggered the defenses.”

  The crust-lift came to a halt and the tug of gravity lessened once more. They stepped out and navigated through the device’s hallways, until they reached another walkway that stretched across the enormous hall surrounding the lift’s base. But on the other side stood a troop of scavengers. There had to be about fifteen footmen, and one [Level 31] Wielder. Two pulled repeller-carts with crates atop them, but the rest tugged rifles off their shoulders.

  Not good.

  There was barely time to think, but as soon as the muzzles flashed, Jace was in the middle of conjuring a card and snapping it up out of the air. He crushed the hyperdash in his grip and shot off through the air. In a flash, he passed through a bolt of plasma and launched along the walkway, then appeared in the midst of the scavengers.

  They leapt away in shock. One wobbled on the edge of the walkway, and Jace helped the man off with a light push. The rest turned on him, trying to get better aim or slice with their bayonets, but on such a narrow walkway, Jace had the advantage. He stayed low and kept in the middle of the group.

  With wide, sweeping swings of the Whistling Blade, he pushed back swaths of scavengers and knocked others off the walkway until only the Wielder was left.

  The man drove a fist into the walkway and ripped up a chunk of Luminian steel. The entire bridge creaked and groaned, threatening to collapse. If he didn’t take this Wielder down quickly, the man would get them all killed.

  The Wielder stomped hard, then punched, and with his movement, thrust the sheet of metal forward. Jace sliced through it twice. Once to split the sheet down the middle and protect himself, and twice to cleave off a small corner.

  He caught the corner before it fell off the edge of the walkway, then held it up and used the Wanderer’s Expulsion.

  The Wielder wasn’t ready. Still reeling from the initial onslaught, the shard of steel zipping forward faster than light skewered a hole right through his chest, and he fell dead in a near instant.

  Jace shook off the Whistling Blade, then held up his hand and flexed his fingers. “Good…good to know it’s getting easier.”

  Or he was getting better at this. Either way, facing someone around his same level was almost…inconsequential.

  He glanced back at Kinfild and Lessa, who still stood nearly fifty paces away, then shouted, “I think it’s about time we rested for the day!”