The city above whispered of empire and conquest.
But beneath it — beneath the marble facades and iron-spined watchtowers of Draggor’s capital — the bones of older things slept in chains.
ProlixalParagon moved through a forgotten seam between two foundation pillars behind the Tinker’s Guild archives, the air quickly thickening into brine-stung dust. His cloaking mantle adjusted automatically, pulsing in subtle counter-light to match the flickering mana sconce on the wall. Behind him, the vault door sealed with a heavy clang.
He was beneath Vhal’Zaruun now. Far below the public dungeon layers and tutorial sewers. This was Tier Null: a deprecated map section from early launch—never patched out, never fully locked down. One of those gray zones that still technically existed in the game files, but was marked Off-Map by the system. A place where GM warnings flickered like ghost code, easily ignored if you knew how to walk just out of bounds.
And Prolix did.
>Zone Entered: Underspire Catacombs – Level Sync Suppressed<
>Warning: Exiting approved play regions. PvP and PvE rules altered. Scryblock active. No respawn zone detected.<
Perfect.
His eyes adjusted quickly as he stepped through the arched descent, stone slick with condensation and something darker. Roots knotted the ceiling like veins. Debris from collapsed bridges littered the passage — old bones, shattered flagstone, even a half-buried shrine to Mahena, its hourglass motif broken and weeping black ichor.
Prolix paused at a rusted maintenance door, pressing a palm to the sigil lock. It sparked but didn’t reject him — the glyph had degraded into something readable only by old code, and he still carried fragments of a GM-tagged instance from the instant dungeon collapse in Sern Ka’Torr. One benefit of being broken.
The door groaned open.
>Dungeon Phase Detected: "The Hollow Narthex – Vault of Forgotten Roads"<
He stepped into darkness.
Not metaphorical darkness. Actual, physical, abyssal black — the kind that resisted torchlight and devoured mana-glow. His HUD flickered, struggling to calibrate.
Environmental Debuff Applied: Sight Limit - 1 Meter
Passive Fear: Hall of Echoed Memory (WIS Save 17+)
Unique Trait Triggered: Umbral Synthete – Shadowmeld Override Accepted
The black receded.
Only for him.
To anyone else, the vault would’ve been untraversable. But Prolix saw the outline of crumbling arches, water-stained murals of pre-Draggor dynasties, and old, iron-spiked gates that hadn’t seen a living touch in generations. Shadows weren’t obstacles here. They were guides.
He followed them.
Carefully.
The goal was simple: Find the forgotten breach that connected the Underspire Catacombs to the Hollow Egress — a tunnel known only to smugglers, heretics, and code-corrupted NPCs. It was supposed to be collapsed decades ago, but rumors said it could be navigated if you were small enough, quiet enough, and patient enough not to wake the things that now called it home.
The things that weren't coded.
He passed a collapsed library next — shelves toppled like ribs, scrolls decayed into mulch. Then an old treasury vault, looted and scorched. Finally, a passage nearly sealed by calcified roots and black mold. But there — just barely visible — was a faint shimmer in the air. Not light.
Permission.
>Hidden Path Discovered: “The Hollow Egress”<
>Skill Check: Awareness (Passed) | Intuition (Passed) | Deception (Passed)<
Access Granted.
A seam split open before him, folding inward like peeled bark.
The tunnel was jagged, narrow, half-choked with fungus and rusting tools. It stank of stale blood and old magic. Prolix ducked inside without hesitation.
Every step down the Hollow Egress was a rebellion.
Every breath was a lie whispered to the world above.
Because Draggor thought him trapped. They thought the White-Furred Fennician rogue—this Tinkerer, this ghost of instant dungeons and broken systems—was still tangled in their capital’s teeth.
But the Lunar Empire still shimmered on the other side of the sea, and PillowHorror waited beneath a tri-moon sky. And the Vermillion Troupe — his family, his fire-forged kin — rolled steadily toward the edge of exile, hoping he would find the way back.
He would.
One tunnel at a time.
The Hollow Egress narrowed sharply ahead, forcing ProlixalParagon to crouch, one paw pressed to the damp stone for balance as he crept down the curved throat of the passage. The air thickened, choked with static and the sour tang of rotting mana. Runes long eroded by time still bled faint light from the walls — not enough to illuminate, only to warn.
A system message pinged in the corner of his HUD.
>Proximity Alert: Relic Signature Detected – Classification: Tinkerer Construct (Corrupted)<
Estimated Level: 45+
AI Integrity: 27%
Behavior Flag: Hostile / Unstable / Recursive
Environmental Modifier: “Enclosed Terrain – No Escape”
Prolix halted.
Up ahead, the corridor opened into a vault chamber — circular, rimmed with broken scaffolding and collapsed ceiling plates. Hanging from a sparking mana node at its center was a hulking shape, half-suspended by shredded conduit cables: a humanoid construct, eight feet tall, its limbs thick with reinforced plating and patchwork armor. What had once been a >Tinkerer’s Assembly Assistant – Mk. IV< now twitched in unnatural spasms, its optics dark save for a single flickering lens glowing violet.
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Worse still — it wasn’t alone.
Two smaller relics dragged themselves across the floor nearby, spindle-legged and half-sunken into the stone as though the dungeon had tried to absorb them. Their plating was cracked. Glyphs scorched. But their targeting systems were active.
And they’d already locked on.
>Combat Initiated: Corrupted Assembly Core (Elite) + 2x Skitter-Weldlings (Sub-Elite)<
>No Respawn Zone – High Consequence Encounter<
>Hint: This construct remembers you.<
The massive relic’s head jerked toward him with a grinding snap, sparks blooming from its shoulder socket.
“>ERROR: INITIATOR // PROLIXAL-763-CROSS. MISSION: HALT TRAITOR. PRESERVE CORE BLUEPRINT.<”
A flurry of compressed warnings surged across Prolix’s HUD — not from the game system, but from the construct itself. Remnants of routines Prolix had once hand-coded during test cycles. They were still in there. Fragmented. Feral.
And angry.
The first skitter-weldling lunged, a blur of jagged limbs and shrieking servos.
Prolix dodged low, rolling under a sparking arc of its plasma-torch pincer. He came up near the fractured scaffold wall, flinging a caltrop scatter behind him.
>Tinkerer Ability: Unstable Trapset – Fragment Pulse (Tier II)<
Success! Weldling #2 Impaired (Staggered, 3s)<
He didn’t waste time attacking.
Instead, he scanned the corrupted Assembly Core for weak points — anything too old, too patched-over. His eyes narrowed.
There.
A junction port along its rear hip, still etched with the older Tinkerer’s guild crest. Unshielded. Prolix knew that model. It was never properly debugged. Overcharging it from an external power spike would send it into recursive memory lock, potentially disabling the targeting subroutines entirely.
But he’d need power.
And misdirection.
As the Core advanced, its massive limb-arm flared with a whir of collapsing gears, revealing a built-in piston hammer. It brought the weapon down like a siege engine — Prolix barely blinked out of the way in time, the stone cracking where he’d stood.
>Health -18 | Partial Impact | Bleed Avoided<
“Fine,” he growled, backstepping toward the dangling overhead cable that fed residual energy to the broken node cluster. “Let’s talk in your language.”
He reached into his pouch, fingers curling around a broken flux condenser — scavenged from the quarry caves days ago. Useless alone. Lethal when jury-rigged into a spike trap.
In one smooth motion, he jammed it into a loose bolt, overclocked its seal with a snap of his pliers, and hurled it onto the broken scaffolding struts just beneath the mana conduit.
>Field Crafting Activated: Flux Overload Lure (Improvised Tier III Trap)<
Baiting Signal Emitted – Hostile Target AI: Reprioritizing Objective<
The relic hesitated.
The Core twisted, sensing unstable energy, and shuddered forward—toward the bait.
Prolix dashed left, darting behind a snapped column. He counted the seconds, breath sharp in his throat.
The relic lifted one arm to strike the source—right as the overloaded trap pulsed with blinding white mana.
>Chain Reaction: Conduit Rupture Triggered<
>Backlash Delivered: 346 Arcane | Weak Point Hit | Recursive Memory Loop Engaged<
Assembly Core: LOCKED IN DIAGNOSTIC<
The Core staggered, motors whining.
Prolix didn’t hesitate. He dashed toward the sparking husk, flung himself up on a scaffold beam, and drove his dagger directly into the junction port.
>Special Interaction: Signature Override Detected<
>Soul-Tuned Access Key Applied – Override Success<
Relic Subsystem Quarantined. Combat Ceased.<
The weldlings twitched… then collapsed, limbs folding in like broken crabs.
Silence fell, broken only by the hum of the bleeding conduit and the shudder of Prolix’s breath.
His HUD blinked again.
>Enemy Defeated – Unique Interaction Completed<
Reward: Tinkerer Cache – Forgotten Path Node Access Enabled<
Bonus: Relic Fragment (Adaptive Core Lattice – 1/3)<
ProlixalParagon stepped back, glancing down at his still-glowing dagger. The relic husk now pulsed faintly, rhythmically. Not dead.
Sleeping.
He’d best move before the dungeon remembered it had guardians.
Because the Hollow Egress still wound deeper — and the sea, and his people, were waiting on the other side.
The quiet didn’t last.
It never did.
ProlixalParagon adjusted the straps on his belt, breath steadying as the fractured Assembly Core behind him settled into inert stillness. The mana leaks bled light into the floor’s seams, casting faint lines like veins beneath translucent stone. For a brief moment, the space felt like a tomb.
Not a tomb for the relic.
A tomb for something older.
He pressed onward.
The next corridor dipped sharply, the floor turning to ribbed iron choked with rust and collapsed sediment. Every step echoed faintly, but the dungeon itself seemed to muffle sound — not by accident, but by intent. Prolix’s ears twitched. There were no vermin here. No wind. Just the slow pulse of ambient mana deep in the bones of the world.
Then came the scent.
Dust, yes — but something sharper beneath it. Ozone and scorched meat. Like the air after a mana implosion. He flicked on his HUD’s terrain overlay, scanning for mana imbalances.
A thin ripple danced across the ground ahead — subtle. Circular. As though something had breathed here once, long enough to leave a warp behind.
>Environmental Flag: Residual Combat Damage – Not Recent<
>Local Log Fragment Recovered: Event Tag ‘Oblivion Sync #0874’<
> Playback? >Yes< / >No<
Prolix hesitated—then tapped Yes.
The corridor around him blurred for a moment as faint outlines formed — spectral echoes left behind by whatever event had been too important for the system to fully erase.
A Fennician, not unlike him, blurred at the edges with system-degeneration. Beside them stood an automaton covered in sigil-scars and shielded plating, its mana-core exposed and burning white. And ahead—just ahead—a door.
Massive. Sealed in lead and obsidian.
“You don’t understand, Vel,” the Fennician hissed, voice staticky. “The Core doesn’t just scale. It learns. If it syncs again, it’ll remember everything. The failures. The loss. The shutdown cycles.”
“Then maybe it’ll fix what we couldn’t,” said the automaton—its voice modulated, bitter. “Maybe the Core deserves to outlive us both.”
The memory ended in static. Nothing remained but the door. Still sealed. Still waiting.
Prolix swallowed.
That door… it wasn’t just any vault. It was one of the black-listed node entry gates. The kind patched out of player-accessible maps but left in the code for lore continuity. Places players weren’t meant to reach anymore.
Which meant it likely still led to the Lunar Empire’s border tunnels — or worse, to a part of Ludere’s infrastructure pre-dating both kingdoms.
The seal was ancient: six locking arms, each requiring a unique type of energy signature.
Three of the nodes still shimmered faintly.
Two were cracked.
One pulsed faintly with a sigil he recognized — the symbol of the Lunar Emissary Order. PillowHorror’s guild crest, stylized and fractured.
>Door Lock Node 6 – Seal of the Lunar Emissaries Detected<
**Player Affiliation Verified: ‘Waffles’ | Guild Tag: PillowHorror-Confirmed<
Access Rights Extended (Provisional)
The glyph brightened, then faded.
One lock undone.
Prolix reached for his satchel, fingers brushing across the scavenged >Adaptive Core Lattice< fragment he’d pulled from the relic.
It pulsed once.
Then drifted upward of its own accord, slotting into a jagged depression in the door’s central mechanism. Metal groaned. The lattice twisted—and clicked into place.
Two locks undone.
The system paused. Then flared.
>Warning: Unsealing Hidden Sector – You are leaving known game space.<
>Proceeding may result in narrative divergence, meta-reputation shifts, or permanent soulbind trigger.<
Proceed? >Yes< / >No<
ProlixalParagon grinned—sharp and quiet.
“Yes.”
The locks spun.
The vault opened.
And from within came the wind.
Not dungeon wind.
Ocean wind.
Faint, distant, carrying the scent of salt and kelp and freedom.
He stepped forward.
The Hollow Egress opened into a vast underground dock — carved into the cliffside, its long-forgotten piers shattered by time but still reachable. Luminescent moss lined the walls, revealing broken skiffs, rusted chains, and the bones of smugglers long forgotten by the surface.
A single boat remained intact.
Not a fishing vessel. Not a transport ship.
A courier skimmer, Lunar-make — glyph-hulled, veil-cloaked, seaworthy in all but name.
At its helm, a familiar sigil glowed: a red waffle overlaid with a crescent moon.
PillowHorror had sent a retrieval.
A final message bloomed on his HUD:
>Quest Objective Updated: “Return to the Lunar Empire – Discreet Extraction via Hollow Egress”<
Board the vessel. Survive the crossing. Rejoin the Troupe.
Hidden Objective Added: Deliver the fifth blueprint.<
ProlixalParagon stepped onto the dock, his white fur stirring in the cavern wind.
Above, Draggor still believed him trapped.
Below, the sea waited.
And beyond it, the Vermillion Troupe and the next chapter of the world they were building — piece by forged piece.
