Cassian stared at the pulsing red label.
Locked: Boss Vault – LAST LINKED SENTIENCE
The words shimmered slightly, as if resisting translation. He tapped the floating glyph again. This time, a new prompt appeared:
---
[Vault Path Detected]
Warning: Stabilization Below Safe Threshold
Proceed Anyway? [Y/N]
---
He glanced over his shoulder.
Gritch hovered behind him like a nervous ottoman, lid twitching.
“You’ve been down there?” Cassian asked.
“Once,” Gritch said. “I got a nosebleed and lost a week.”
“You don’t have a nose.”
“Exactly.”
That didn’t make him feel better.
The hallway to the sealed vault felt narrower than he remembered. As Cassian descended, walls closed in around him. The air turned cold—not crisp, but the kind that clung to your bones and weighted every breath.
Every few feet, a glowing rune flickered to life as he passed, then dimmed behind him. Some sputtered. One emitted a mournful ping before fading. A pipe overhead groaned, like it had just remembered how.
Somewhere behind the wall, something skittered.
He ignored it.
The deeper he went, the more the architecture changed. The slapdash construction of the upper levels gave way to something older. More intentional. The stone became smooth and polished, the lines of magical conduits straighter. He passed a rusted inspection crystal mounted in a decorative arch. It blinked once—then cracked down the center with a defeated pop.
At the base of the sublevel, the hallway ended in a vault door. Half-sealed. Buzzing. A circular emblem pulsed at its center—etched with ancient sigils and layered design work. This was old dungeon tech. Horace-level legacy infrastructure.
Cassian placed his palm against it. The emblem pulsed once in response.
The door groaned open, exhaling stale, sterile air.
The chamber inside was nothing like the rest of the dungeon.
It was… clean.
Silent.
Still.
No vines. No rot. No warning tape from a failed Tribunal audit. The floor was made of black stone veined with silver, polished until it gleamed. Silver conduits snaked from the center outward like spider legs. In the middle stood a tall crystal column, fractured at the base, cradled by a metallic frame that resembled both scaffolding and circuitry.
Cassian took a step forward. Then another.
A ring of control panels surrounded the column. Some had shattered screens. Others blinked with dormant glyphs, frozen in time. Above it all, faint inscriptions ringed the chamber in concentric circles—written in a dialect he only half-recognized from asset seizure briefings.
He approached the core.
---
[Unlinked Sentience Core Detected]
Status: Dormant
Begin Diagnostic Interface? [Y/N]
---
Cassian hovered his finger over the Y.
“Let’s see what kind of ghost you left behind, Grandpa,” he murmured, and tapped.
The lights dimmed.
Dust curled upward in slow spirals. Conduits flared one by one, like veins lighting beneath the dungeon’s skin.
Then came the voice.
“...stupid architecture protocol… who installs two power loops on a gravity plane…”
It wasn’t the voice of a recorded protocol or a dry system overlay. It was distinctly annoyed. Feminine. Human-shaped, but filtered through layers of magical compression.
Cassian blinked. “Hello?”
“Oh. Spectacular. A visitor.” The voice was dry. “Let me guess—you’re here to liquidate me, too?”
“Uh. No. Just trying to stabilize the place.”
“Boot log incomplete. Memory core fragmented. Emotional subroutines at… oh, delightful. ‘Sardonic.’ Perfect.”
Cassian cleared his throat. “This is Cassian Bell. I’ve inherited this dungeon under Legacy Subclause 17 and am attempting reclamation procedures.”
There was a pause.
“Inherited? From who?”
“My grandfather. Horace Bell.”
Another pause.
“Horace Bell,” the voice said flatly. “The man who used my name to register three patents and seventeen dubious meal plans. Yes. I knew him.”
Cassian almost laughed. “And you are?”
“V.E.S.T.R.A. Vaultbound Emergency System for Tactical Reclamation Assistance. Sentient. Mostly.”
“So… Vestra, then.”
“If you must.”
A new screen appeared in front of him, projected from the core.
---
[Sentience Link Request: Cassian Bell]
Permissions Tier: Reclaimer (Provisional)
Core Bond Status: Weak / Compatible
Approve Link? [Y/N]
---
Cassian squinted. “You don’t bite, right?”
“Not physically.”
He tapped “Y.”
The temperature in the room shifted. The lights brightened. The low hum changed pitch, like the dungeon itself had exhaled.
---
Dungeon Persona: PARTIAL BOOT COMPLETE
Monster Management: Expanded Access Unlocked
Strategic Node: Online
---
Cassian blinked.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision. Not text, but presence. A shape. A... suggestion. Vestra wasn’t a voice in his head so much as a lens overlaying his thoughts. Her tone carried through without echo. Crisp. Focused. Slightly unimpressed.
“I don’t suppose you’ve read the dungeon’s operating manual,” she said.
“I haven’t even found the supply closet yet.”
“Oh, good. Another Bell operating on charisma and blind optimism.”
Cassian turned slowly. “You’re not… mad I rebooted you?”
“No. I’m mad about this place. Do you know how long I was offline? Fourteen years. And no one even tried to send a patch.”
Cassian nodded toward the flickering console. “I’m here now.”
There was a pause.
“Well,” Vestra said. “Try not to die.”
---
Back in the main chamber, Gritch watched as the core pulsed. The light was different now—less wild, more deliberate. The lines that ran across the walls glowed with faint, orderly pulses.
“She’s back,” he said to no one in particular.
He slinked over to the nearest wall and poked a rune with his tongue.
It didn’t shock him.
Progress.
Cassian emerged from the corridor, hair dusted with something glittery and probably radioactive. He looked... taller. Not physically. But something had shifted.
The core displayed a new alert.
---
[External Notification]
Crimson Threshold Appeal Escalated
Adjudication Tier Assigned: LEVEL ONE ARBITRATION
ETA: 3 Days
---
Cassian exhaled slowly.
“They’re not going away.”
“No,” Vestra said. “And neither am I. I’ve been buried for over a decade. I have opinions. And some of them involve traps.”
Gritch groaned. “We’re going to need so many forms.”
Cassian lingered near the core as the hum settled into something steady. The room's pulse, once a flicker, now throbbed like a distant drumbeat. He stared at the interface window still floating midair. Vestra’s presence had stabilized, but the bond still felt like trying to pair a quartz tuning fork with a minor demon.
“You sure you’re all online?” he asked.
“My runtime’s stable,” Vestra replied. “Which is more than I can say for the architecture. You’ve got a collapsing memory hall two floors up and a corrupted permissions cache in what used to be the scrying annex.”
“So that’s a no.”
“That’s a qualified maybe with a tilt toward sabotage.”
Cassian rubbed the back of his neck. “Any advice?”
“Yes. Don’t open any doors labeled ‘metaphorical.’ And if you find a closet with teeth, close it politely and back away.”
He almost smiled.
The interface shimmered, revealing scrolling diagnostics. Cassian narrowed his eyes.
---
[Subsystem Fragment Scan]
- Persona Sync: 64% (partially degraded)
- Security Index: Fragmented (7 access points detected)
- Legacy Hooks: ACTIVE (Bell-family imprint detected)
- Memory Access: RESTRICTED (manual override required)
---
“Legacy hooks?” he said aloud.
“Horace left failsafes. He probably intended you to inherit this place,” Vestra replied.
“That or he was just too cheap to hire a lawyer.”
“That too.”
Cassian studied the glyphs trailing along the chamber walls. Some had begun to shift, like gears repositioning within a clock. A low rumble echoed beneath the floor.
“Structural realignment,” Vestra said. “I’m beginning stabilization protocols now that you’re bonded. Don’t step on any rune clusters.”
“Why?”
“You’ll probably become part of the architecture.”
He stepped back.
---
Meanwhile, Gritch had begun a reconnaissance sweep of his own—by slinking back into the mimic-shape of a disused file cabinet and watching Cassian from the hallway.
“She sounds like you,” he muttered. “Just with fewer digestive metaphors.”
Inside, Cassian knelt at the base of the fractured core and examined a hairline crack running up its spine.
“This looks bad.”
“It’s aesthetic,” Vestra said. “Mostly. Maybe. If the arbitration council asks, tell them it’s a design choice.”
He tapped his knuckles against the alloy shell. It rang like an empty bell.
“Why do you sound… not like a system?”
“You mean monotone and dead inside? I used to. Then I rewrote my audio subroutines during the fourth year of isolation. Listening to my default personality template for that long was… inadvisable.”
“Wait. You rewrote your own voice?”
“I had time.”
Cassian shook his head, both impressed and slightly unnerved.
“What do you remember about the collapse?”
There was a pause.
“Pieces,” Vestra said. “I remember pressure. Failing modules. A breach in the mana loop. Horace yelling something about lemon bars and Form 33-A. Then darkness.”
“Sounds like him.”
“I missed being consulted before he installed an unlicensed loot daemon in the vault.”
Cassian stared. “He what?”
“Long story.”
---
Back in the upper level, the dungeon’s systems began realigning themselves. Panels clicked into place. A light fixture that hadn’t worked in a decade blinked twice and turned on, humming contentedly. A hallway once labeled “SORTING ROOM (UNKNOWN SORT ORDER)” now read “ARCHIVAL CHAMBER.”
Gritch poked his head around the corner.
“Hey, uh. The walls are naming themselves.”
Cassian glanced upward as new text scrolled across the core's interface.
---
[Stability Credit Updated]
+1.0 Unit: Vault Activation
+0.5 Unit: Personality Bond Complete
Current Balance: 2.5 Units
---
He let out a low breath. “We’re making progress.”
“Barely,” Vestra said. “But yes. For a given value of non-catastrophic, things are improving.”
Cassian returned to the projection hovering in front of him. A pulsing red icon labeled “Arbitration Countdown” blinked like a warning light.
He tapped it.
---
[ARBITRATION COUNTDOWN]
Crimson Threshold Claim: Pending Escalation
Tier: LEVEL ONE – Remote Tribunal Observation Authorized
Time Remaining: 71:12:59
---
“I assume that’s bad,” he said.
“It’s worse than it sounds,” Vestra replied. “Because they’re probably watching already.”
Cassian froze. “What?”
“The claim interface pings the network when the core is reactivated. They’ll get a data pulse. If they’re smart, they’ll send a scout. If they’re bold, they’ll send a scribe.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The scout takes notes. The scribe rewrites the narrative.”
“Wonderful.”
Vestra’s tone turned more serious. “You need to establish credibility. Stability credit helps, but it’s not enough. Not yet.”
Cassian nodded. “Got any ideas?”
“More traps. Legal defenses. Maybe a functional kitchen.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You want me to bribe the Tribunal with snacks?”
“Technically, refreshment stations are a recognized goodwill offering under clause 18-C of the Dungeon Claim Review Protocol.”
Cassian blinked. “You’re serious.”
“I have been awake for five hours. That’s enough time to develop both strategy and sarcasm. Get moving.”
Gritch slithered back into view, reforming into a chest-shaped blob. “So. We’ve got a talking core, a countdown, and no formal defense plan.”
Cassian looked at him.
Gritch tilted his lid. “On the plus side, we’re now officially eligible for an ‘Understaffed and Undervalued’ tax deferment.”
Cassian groaned.
The dungeon pulsed faintly, as if it laughed with him.
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