One second, Edge was standing in the jailbirds’ storeroom, desperately trying to break through the walls. The next, he was falling.

  Or perhaps he was floating, flying, swimming, or sinking—he couldn’t really tell. At the moment, he didn’t seem to have a body, which left him with no way of determining relative motion or tracking the passage of time. A chaotic blend of sensations assailed him as his essence was flung across the void, traversing those spaces between spaces that permeated the physical world like cracks in a sidewalk.

  He had just enough time to realize that he’d experienced something like this before—when his consciousness had been cast across the stars before arriving on Ord—when everything stopped moving and nothingness rose to embrace him.

  When Edge woke up, he was lying on the ground with solid stone pressing against his spine. He opened his eyes, and impenetrable darkness met his gaze.

  For a bewildering moment, he couldn’t remember where he was or what had happened, then it all came flooding back. Stepping into the Claws’ trap, then being hit by some manner of powerful magic—the likes of which he had never seen before. That answers my second question, but it doesn’t help with the first.

  He was relieved to still be alive and worried about his friends. He called out to the others, but only the warped echoes of his own voice reached his ears.

  The stone beneath him was warmer than his body, and the air was musty and damp. Edge briefly wondered if his mind had transmitted to another planet entirely. But when he thought to check in with his core, he learned that he was still in his puppet body after all, and the magic of Ord was flowing all around him.

  I should have bought some magelights from Bee before leaving for the dungeon. Thank the gods I have another way to illuminate my surroundings.

  He sat up, reached out with one hand, then conjured his iceblade, using its arctic glow to reveal his environment. When the crystalline sword emerged from his palm, Edge saw that he was lying inside a cavern. It was perhaps twice the size of the storeroom he’d been standing in when the teleportation ritual caught him and spirited him away to… Wherever the fuck this is.

  The floor was formed from a slick black stone that reflected the light of his iceblade, casting the enclosure in a wintery azure hue. The walls and ceiling were a different material—a creamy brown mineral he wasn’t familiar with.

  Most unusual of all, every inch of the brown rock was covered with a dense carpet of mushrooms. They came in a vast array of colors and forms. Some were bone white and smaller than his pinky. Others were bigger than his body, with brightly colored caps that were so wide he couldn’t have wrapped his arms around them.

  He was familiar with a wide variety of underground terrain from watching Prison World for decades before coming to Ord, but Edge had never seen anything like this before. It must be an undiscovered biome. “What happened to us?” he muttered, searching for clues but finding none. “Where the hell am I?”

  He rose to his feet—worry for his friends mingling with the relief that whatever was going on, Ella’s ritual hadn’t killed him outright. That was when his Guide detached from his chest, bobbing in his peripheral vision to let him know he had an important update waiting from the System.

  Hoping it would shed some light on his latest ordeal, Edge willed his Guide to flatten into a screen, opened his messages, and started to read.

  Pioneer’s Quest: Escape the Deep-Gill Grottos

  Congratulations, or perhaps condolences would be more appropriate under the circumstances. After stepping into an appallingly crude teleportation trap, you have managed to reach a place where none of your kind have set foot before.

  The good news is that the amateur who created the ritual circle fucked up the rune designating its destination. Otherwise, you would have found yourself enjoying the view from 20,000 feet above the surface before skydiving without a parachute.

  The bad news is that instead of up, you were sent in the opposite direction. The teleportation ritual had a failsafe to keep you from rematerializing inside solid matter, so you wound up in a nearby cavern.

  As a member of the first crew to enter this biome, you are eligible to receive a pioneer’s quest. Normally, completing it would involve reaching the most dangerous, inaccessible corner of the region. But since you’re already standing at the lowest point of the grottos, I suppose that I’ll have to raise the bar a little higher.

  Your reward for escaping the Deep-Gill Grottos will be: I always offer a powerful trait for completing quests like these, but since this subplot promises to be especially entertaining, I’ll throw in a little bonus to keep you motivated.

  The chamber I have designated as “the exit” is located close to the people you were trying to save before embarking on this unscheduled detour. If you can reach them fast enough, they might even be alive when you get there, which should incentivize you to work fast if nothing else.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Oh, and I usually let the people who discover a new biome name it. But since you wound up here by accident, I’m taking the liberty this time around.

  Edge was still processing the dynamics of his situation, but he raised an eyebrow at the last line before the quest’s reward. That was the longest description I’ve ever read, and was that a pun?

  It seemed that whatever was going on with the System was still getting worse. His quest and trait messages had become increasingly erratic after the anomaly, displaying a familiar tone that was radically different from the clinical neutrality the AI generally presented. Now the System was referring to itself in the first person and seemed to be developing a sense of humor too. At least it’s including some helpful information in these rants—not to mention that modified reward.

  While Edge found the changes to the System to be both intensely fascinating and profoundly unsettling in equal measures, he didn’t have time to worry about them now. He needed to find his way out of this subterranean biome before the Crimson Claws reached Trapper and the other survivors from the expedition.

  Any way that he sliced it, the clock was ticking.

  At least Lilly, Mel, and Sasha should still be alive, based on that bit about a failsafe. While it was possible they were trapped in a cavity with no exit or something equally awful, he had a hunch that the System had tweaked their destinations just a little, in order to keep things interesting.

  Now that he understood what was happening, he knew what he needed to do, and there wasn’t a moment to spare. Edge’s next step was simple enough. The chamber only had one exit, so he turned toward it and started walking. He came to a stop a few seconds later, staring at the endless collage of fungi covering the walls.

  He didn’t like the look of the mushrooms surrounding the crack leading out of the cavern. Some of them seemed harmless enough, but others looked downright sinister. He conjured a Warlord’s Mantle to supplement his light source and add an extra layer of defense, enjoying the boost to his attributes the aura provided.

  He nearly jumped out of his skin a few seconds later when one of the big mushrooms turned to face him. Edge put an end to that nonsense by touching the creepy fucker with his rune-covered iceblade, freezing it solid within a handful of heartbeats. He continued moving when nothing else reacted to his presence.

  The next chamber he entered was considerably larger, helping him breathe a bit easier despite the severity of his situation. The walls opened and the ceiling rose to about a hundred feet—plenty of room to fight when danger inevitably reared its ugly head.

  However, it wasn’t all good news. The floor was banded with black and brown rock. He wasn’t sure why the shrooms grew on one mineral and not the other, although he supposed it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that instead of staring across an endless expanse of mushrooms, he was now smack in the middle of them.

  The unusual layout transformed the biome into a double maze. One labyrinth was formed from the walls of the cavern, and the second by prolific fungal growth. Luckily, some of the shrooms were bioluminescent, which made it easier to get a sense of the scope of this place.

  While time was of the essence, Edge stopped and cast his senses into his environment. If he was going to traverse this warren without something horrible happening to him along the way, he needed to have a better understanding of what he was dealing with. There was a lot that he wanted to know, but he was already certain of one thing. If the System is happy that we’re trapped in here, exploring the Deep-Gill Grottos is going to be dangerous as hell.

  He deactivated his aura, Concealed his presence, and went perfectly still. Then he began sifting through the information provided by each of his senses in turn, hoping to uncover clues as to what he’d gotten himself into.

  Edge began with his ears. At first, the grotto seemed totally silent, but that turned out not to be the case. When he slowed his breathing and concentrated, tiny sounds emanated from all around him as the biome’s residents began to stir. He could hear endless dripping as water collected on the roof of the enclosure before falling to the stone below. It formed a musical pattern that was occasionally interrupted when something moved beneath the plummeting drops—subtly altering their rhythm before it passed by.

  Every now and then, he caught the scrabble of claws against stone, along with a fibrous creaking he couldn’t readily identify. There are beasts down here, but that’s not all. Something else is moving across the cavern, using the forest of mushrooms as cover.

  When he sampled the air, he was pleased to learn that while the grotto smelled moldy and dank, there wasn’t a hint of monstrous stench—the filth that Edge had become intimately familiar with during his survival vacation in the Savage Garden.

  When he concentrated on his skin, he could feel just the hint of a breeze stirring the air, which meant that somewhere far from here, the biome connected to the world above. Of course, the richest feedback came from his eyes. Before he moved onto examining the cavern’s contents, he peered at the magicytes filling the air—the living magic that was unique to Ord.

  The shimmering weave that was all colors and none flowed across the floor—thicker than he had ever seen it before. Magicytes swirled and billowed around the endless sea of stalks, providing boundless energy to any creature with a core burning inside its body. This is definitely a high-threat biome. There will be stage-two creatures in abundance, and probably some stage threes too.

  While he was done inspecting the glittering motes, Edge switched on Penetrate Foliage. Unfortunately, the sensory-enhancing skill didn’t let him see through the mushrooms, but the thermal vision component was still useful. Most of the growth was the same temperature as the walls, glowing red within his vision. But there were pockets of yellow scattered throughout the cavern. Whatever they are, the heat is either coming from a warm-blooded beast or another core-wielding creature.

  Eventually, he decided that while some of the mushrooms looked poisonous, none of them seemed to be overtly threatening. However, after running into a patch of spike-shooting shrooms back in the dungeon, he wasn’t taking that for granted.

  Edge advanced with his polearm in hand after extending the weapon’s shaft to its maximum length. Every time he encountered a new species of fungus, he gave it a tap, then waited a few seconds before moving on.

  Eventually, his diligence was rewarded. The next time his naginata touched a sprawling man-sized mushroom, it reached out and launched an attack.