Kinfild steered the skiff down to a landing platform on the side of the dungeon entrance complex. It sprouted out the side of a girder, and a set of wires supported it.

  Jace watched from inside an empty cargo crate.

  They’d needed a way to get him into the dungeon without scavenger armour and a disguise, and this was what they’d settled on. His back contorted, and the box pressed up against the back of his neck or restricted his shoulders, but he just barely fit, and had a slight gap where the hand-holds were to see through.

  Scavenger guards approached the landing pad, inspected the skiff, then asked, “What do you have in the crates?”

  Jace held his breath, just in case there was another mage around to sense him, willing Kinfild to give the explanation they’d come up with.

  “Ration packs,” Kinfild said. “We can bring them down to the entrance if you’d lend us a repeller-cart, but they’re a little too heavy to lift on our own.”

  Lessa, leaning against the skiff’s railing with her helmet on and poncho hiding her tail, only nodded in agreement.

  “Take one, and be quick,” said the guard. “We’ll need this landing pad empty in five minutes.”

  It only took them one. Kinfild and Lessa gathered a cart from the edge of the landing pad and hauled it over, then, with Jace rocking side to side to help them, shifted the two crates onto the repeller-cart.

  He could barely see the inside of the structure as they hovered him down toward the entrance. They entered a hallway with dim, incandescent lighting and patchwork steel walls. Hordes of scavengers ran in all directions, and few paid any mind to Jace and the repeller-cart. Still, he held his breath.

  Every so often, maybe one in a hundred scavengers, there was a Wielder. They were [Level 30], or close to it—sometimes a little lower or a little higher. Seemed to be the average.

  “Kinfild,” Jace whispered, “how far could the level thirties get into the dungeon?”

  Kinfild kept his gaze forward and barely flinched as he towed the cart down the hall. “If what you heard about the dungeon is true, and it does hold an ancient Luminian weapon, then it’s a powerful dungeon. I doubt they would’ve have made it past the fifth level.”

  “So…we’re in trouble, then,” Jace whispered.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “How? I’m only thirty, and you’re…”

  “Thirty-one, though I’m verging on thirty-two.” Kinfild stayed quiet for a moment. “I am average, Jace, and though the Wielders of the Crimson Table learned to siphon their Aes directly into their life essence, it tends to stunt our advancement. Not to mention, I am still getting old, much like Stenol. But with age comes experience. I have more technique cards, skill, and stronger senses than many of these young upstarts.”

  “That’s still not going to get us very deep,” Jace said. But as soon as he spoke, he winced. That’s why he was here.

  He’d almost reached the stage Kinfild had taken years to get to in a matter of months. He was a worldjumper; this was his job. Fast advancement, summoned to destroy the Enemy…or at least, save the galaxy from whatever might be happening.

  “What is it about me that lets me harvest Aes faster?” Jace asked. “How did I reach this point so quickly?”

  “A multitude of reasons,” Kinfild muttered. “For one, the Split chooses the most ideal candidates. Those with the greatest devotion, loyalty, and drive.”

  Jace narrowed his eyes. Those didn’t exactly describe him. He’d felt more lost than anything. “I…I dunno—”

  “The desire for purpose is still drive, Jace,” Lessa said.

  “I suppose.”

  “But aside from that, the Split allowed you to set your class (having been new to this world and without a life here to inform the class it gave you), and your high soul-inclination toward the class allowed you to pick it up quickly,” Kinfild continued. “And, atop it all, you’ve had four months of direct, hard work.”

  Jace tried to scratch the back of his head, but his hand bumped up against the inside of the box. He winced. “But there are others who could do that.”

  “There are. There are also many Wielders who are born into lower families in the outer reaches, who need to work two jobs to feed their families, and who don’t have time to hunt darklings and can’t afford elixirs.”

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  Jace swallowed. “I…suppose. Then what about the extremely powerful mages from the inner-core sects?”

  “That’s where you see the true prodigies, much like yourself. Be thankful you haven’t encountered one yet.”

  “Neikir,” Jace said. “What about him? He’d have all the opportunities possible.”

  Kinfild snorted. “Middle-sects and guilds like the Brakamen don’t understand one important factor: struggle. A Wielder must find the perfect balance between personal struggle, drive, and luck and circumstance. But without struggle, there can be no drive to do the extreme. Neikir may have had all the elixirs possible, not to mention access to fancy Aes cycling techniques, but he’s never struggled once in his life.”

  Jace was about to respond, but Lessa tapped the top of the box. “We’re almost there. Keep quiet, now.”

  They pulled the repeller-cart through an archway. The floor of the hallway blended with bare, smooth concrete, and the hallway fanned out into a massive cylindrical hall. Floodlights beamed down on the floor, and tubes and clumps of wires criss-crossed over the sky. Puffs of steam chuffed out of machinery, before funnelling toward a central beacon.

  At the very center of the hall was an enormous device—a stack of wires and tubes in the general shape of an hourglass, nearly two storeys tall, which all the other tubes and wires fed into.

  He didn’t know precisely what it was, and for a second, he contemplated using a technique card to examine it. He had socketed his new card, and it was ready to use—perhaps it could tell him a little more about what the device at the center of the hall did.

  He activated and snatched the card out of the air. [Technique Card: Questforger (Legendary) (Curse) (Compatible Class: Hyperspace Hunter) (Compatible Aspects: Hyperspace)]

  It was legendary. With a combination of the high quality materials stolen from the scavengers and the perfect carvings Lessa had made, the card was very powerful. And, as Kinfild had explained, it was technically a Curse card, in that it interacted with the world around it and manipulated the Split around a different object. It marked the object as a target, cursing it.

  Jace wondered precisely how he could enhance the card and what other kinds of Curses he could place, but that would also require him to put attribute shards into Potency. With how many he’d already distributed, he’d need a title or something else like the Path-boost to help him catch up his Potency.

  But that was a problem for later. The card functioned relatively simply: [Technique description: Once every thirty (30) minutes, seeks out a desired target within ten (10) miles and creates a subquest. Forges a guiding needle for five (5) minutes. Technique range scales with Resistance.]

  Lessa had to add a scale to the range, as the format of the card dictated, and since they’d been making the card from scratch, it hadn’t been difficult at all to adjust the attribute required to Resistance.

  He concentrated on his target—the device at the center of the chamber. The technique activated, lighting up the box with a quest sheet: [Subquest available: Find one (1) previously unpossessed mythic quality shield-aspect technique card. Reward: None]

  He hadn’t actually wanted to find the card, but now that he saw it, his eyes widened. There was a mythic card within that device, and it was shield-aspect.

  He wanted desperately to ask Kinfild what the device was, but before he could even open his mouth and whisper something, a pulse of energy rolled up from the earth itself—from the dungeon below.

  At first, it only applied a steadily growing pressure to his channels and core, but the pipes and tubes in the ground began glowing. Runes lit up along their rubber housings, and streaks of gaseous Aes flowed past their plastic-y windows. It was raw, aspectless, and gold. When it flowed into the machine at the center of the hall, columns of steam chugged out the machine’s vents, and it began rattling, threatening to topple off its support struts.

  Then it steadied, and everything went quiet. The nearby scavengers covered their eyes, and a beacon of orange Aes blasted out the machine’s center, up through a hole in the roof, and into the sky. It was advanced shield-aspect Aes, for the anti-hyperspace torpedo net. Shimmering hexagon patterns lingered in the air, forming a column around the beam of raw Aes. It let out a shriek that created goosebumps all over Jace’s arms and made his stomach churn.

  He swallowed, then deactivated his tracking card. The dungeon itself was fuelling the blockade around the planet.

  The beam lasted for about thirty seconds before fading away, and the scavengers went back to their business. Kinfild and Lessa walked faster, then, when they reached the machine at the center of the hall, stopped the cart.

  The plan had been to take the cart into the dungeon entrance, but when they’d come up with the plan, they hadn’t known what the entrance looked like.

  The enormous dungeon-powered shield generator stood on a set of struts, looming over a pit in the earth. It descended deeper than Jace could see from his meagre viewport, but there had to be hundreds of ladders descending down into the ground, and cargo cranes lowered crates into the depths with jerky movements. Hard enough to jostle the contents around and injure the human cargo, no matter how much Jace’s Vital rating had improved.

  “We’ll take that crate from here,” called a crane operator, holding up his hand. “You guards can go back to your post.”

  Guards? Jace had stolen the armour of scavenger guards, and none of the workers here were wearing armour.

  As soon as the crane operator finished speaking, a golden glow formed in the air in front of Jace, forming a warning: [Advanced Luminian tomb ahead. Recommended party level rating: Thirty-five (35).]

  “Go away!” Jace hissed, passing his hand through the sheet in the tight space. It didn’t budge.

  “Is that crate glowing?” a different worker asked.

  “What’s in there?” the crane operator called.

  Lessa stammered, her voice modulator making it sound even choppier than normal. Kinfild opened his mouth, probably about to conjure some other excuse, but it wouldn’t work.

  They were close to the entrance. It was time to make a run for it.

  Jace pressed his hands up against the container’s lid, and, without waiting for a signal from Kinfild or Lessa, he sprang upright. “Run!” he shouted, then jumped out the crate and sprinted toward the nearest ladder.