The three ran through the hallways of the third level until they reached a small atrium. It was about fifty paces wide, and hexagonal, with a hallway stretching out off every face of the structure. A metal column stood at the center, and occasionally, cracks along its sides pulsed with blue.

  Two automaton corpses laid up against the column’s side, having been destroyed by scavengers a few days ago, and a ring of water ran around the atrium about a third of the way across.

  At first, Jace had opposed camping here. Too many hallways intersecting meant more people could come from all directions and attack them at once, and there would be too many hallways to guard, but the chances of scavengers coming from all six directions was slim. This way, they had plenty of routes to escape along.

  It wasn’t cool down here, like he had been expecting, and there was no need for a fire. He pulled off his cloak and bunched it up under his head for a pillow. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but now that he was laying down, his body didn’t want to get up, and the day’s exhaustion caught up with him.

  Not to mention that he’d not really slept properly the night before, either.

  Kinfild kept the first watch while he and Lessa slept. About two thirds of the way through the night, Kinfild woke Jace up, and Jace watched their surroundings until morning.

  Alone, with nothing else to do but watch, he practiced fuelling his Whistling Blade with hyperspace Aes. It took intense concentration, and he could barely cycle Aes while doing it—certainly not maintain a strict, combat-focussed pattern. Moreover, with the willpower it took, he could only hold it for a few seconds before it sputtered out, returning the blade just to its regular stored-up plasma Aes.

  He desperately needed a card for it. It’d make the technique so much faster and combat effective.

  Finally, when Kinfild and Lessa woke up, they ate a small breakfast of dungeon rations. They split it into enough rations for two months (earth months), and though they wouldn’t be feasting, it’d be enough sustenance to keep them going.

  After eating, they continued on into the depths.

  Over the next three days, they located crust-lifts and descended levels. There was no point lingering in the levels that the scavengers had already cleared out. Moving as quickly as possible was of utmost priority, but even on the higher levels, they encountered minor difficulties that slowed them.

  For one, a few more guardian automatons. They looked the same as the first, and were all about [Level 30], except for one which was [Level 36] and chased them for a few minutes, before they toppled a statue on it and trapped it.

  The strategy for destroying automatons was almost always the same: Kinfild and Lessa would distract it, allowing Jace to go for the kill. With an enhanced slash, he cut through the plating of the creatures’ legs and brought them low, then speared their vulnerable chests and caused catastrophic failures.

  The vast majority had a shield aspect, like the first, but one had an ice aspect, and its core weapon generated a beam of frosty air that froze everything it touched. It’d caught Kinfild across the shoulder with its beam, and they had to recover a stim-shot from a dimly-lit and poorly explored hallway to help his body recover from acute frostbite.

  But, aside from that, no problems!

  On the sixth level, there were almost no lanterns. The scavengers had only just begun exploring, and it was perfect. Lessa lit the way with her flaming tail, though it guttered much dimmer than usual. No doubt a result of the intense spiritual pressure and weight of the cavern, but she kept a firm face, and Kinfild supplemented it with his own light from his staff.

  But, disappointingly, no obvious treasure.

  “How do we know where the tombs are?” Jace asked. In the Maehn dungeon, the loot had been inside tombs, and though there hadn’t been much there, it had only been the first level.

  “Where there are more guardian automatons,” Kinfild replied.

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  But Jace didn’t need tricks like that. He simply changed the target of his Questforger card and focussed on the idea of technique cards.

  However, the sheet read: [Subquest unavailable: no nearby unsocketed technique cards. Assess socketed cards?]

  Jace declined with a push of intent, then explained exactly what it said to Kinfild and Lessa.

  “You’d think there’d be something good on the sixth level,” Lessa grumbled.

  “You’d think,” Jace agreed.

  “It simply means there are none in the nearby vicinity,” said Kinfild. “But we must keep delving.”

  “There will be something good eventually, right?” Jace asked. “The deeper we go?”

  “Of course,” Kinfild said. “The deeper you travel, the more important the buried Luminians were, and the greater their burial goods will be.”

  “We also need to find a crust-lift to move ourselves horizontally,” Lessa pointed out. “Or latitudinally. Wait…longitudinally?”

  “I suppose both?” Jace shrugged. “We need to get above the dungeon-core, which probably means we need to head both a little ways. Any idea where the core would be, Kinfild? Aside from, well, on the fifteenth level.”

  “My suspicion is that we’ll find it in an area of geographic significance. Like the equator or the ecliptic. But that is still a very large ring.”

  “So he doesn’t know.” Jace stopped walking and scratched the back of his head. “My Questforger card doesn’t have enough range to track the core, either. Unless, miraculously, it’s within ten kilom—miles of us.”

  “Kilomiles?” Lessa nudged him teasingly.

  “You knew what I meant…” Jace crossed his arms. “The only solution is to enhance the card’s range, and for that…well, how difficult would it be to enhance the card’s runes?” He looked directly at Lessa.

  “I could enhance it about five times,” she said. “As it stands now. And then we’d have to reforge the card altogether, which I might be able to do if I had the right resources and setup.”

  Jace nodded slowly, but he understood little. “Reforging? I’m gonna need that one explained. And…what resources would we need specifically?”

  Kinfild held out his hand and manifested his Hollow Dragon’s Bite card. The plastic-y sheet hovered over his palm. He snapped it out of the air with his fingers and held it out to Jace. Gingerly, Jace took the card and held it up.

  It shimmered in the light. At first, he thought it was a by-product of the shifting fire-light, but that couldn’t be. It had an iridescent, faintly-purple shimmer to it. Every few seconds, a wave of power ran over the card, making his fingers tingle. His hand shook. “This card has been reforged?”

  “Precisely,” Kinfild said.

  “It allows more complex functions,” Lessa explained, “but it also bakes in all lower-tier advancement runes into the card’s substance. They’re a part of the plastic, a part of the card itself now, and it can control them much more efficiently.”

  “And it allows card-smiths to add new runes on top,” said Kinfild. “Usually, when you don’t have a card-smith travelling with you, you use credits to buy the services of a smith, which can be expensive and time-consuming. But we’re lucky to have Lessa with us.”

  At that, Lessa beamed, then said, “We’d need an emulsifying liquid. And…something almost like quenching oil, though it has a specific name, but…in essence, you get it from melting down old technique cards. Old, weaker ones. You take their power. Reforging almost always improves the grade of a card, too.”

  “So,” Jace said, “is it actually possible to enhance the range of the Questforger card enough to…to scan the whole planet?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Lessa shut her eyes, but stared at him intently and intensely until golden dust appeared on the backs of her eyelids and wafted out onto her eyelashes. She blinked it away and said, “I see two clear paths for enhancing the card. One makes it more precise and focuses the senses directly, and the other expands the range and allows the user to…effectively enhance the range of their spiritual senses as well.”

  Jace rubbed his chin. For a moment, the idea of precise focus on a target sounded appealing, but he had to think of the long term. Being able to sense things farther away was just a better trade, not to mention more necessary right now.

  “Let’s aim for that one, then,” he said.

  “Given a week, I can get it about five enhancements,” Lessa said. “But it’ll use up about half of our soldering wire, and you’ll get about a thousand miles of range. At some point, it starts increasing in larger amounts.”

  But nowhere near the circumference of the earth. Jace did the calculations in his mind, and even though his conversions between imperial and metric weren’t perfect, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. This planet had to have about the same gravitational pull as earth, so about the same size.

  “So reforging the card is absolutely necessary,” he said.

  He was about to pivot to a different idea, but he stopped his thoughts and dragged them back to the first conundrum. “When we find useless cards in the tombs, we can just keep them.” Jace grinned. “Then, use them as reforging material when we have enough.”

  “You’d need about fifty spare cards, but yes,” Kinfild said.

  “And we’ll only find fifty spare cards the deeper we go,” Jace replied. “So, onto the next crust-lift.”

  That felt much better now. Moving through with a way forward, with the path illuminated to him.

  And with an idea of how to get to the center of the dungeon.