“They don’t have spares?” I asked.

  “From the big deal they made when one of the teams brought one in yesterday, they don’t seem to get them often. You’ll need to be assessed before they will let you go into the delve. How about I take you down for that, and you can discuss it with one of the assessors there what it would take for you to get your hands on one?” Paul said.

  From Paul's description as we walked, the top floor of the site was predominantly office space, which had been converted into homes for Delvers and the leadership of the town. Some had been given to visiting dignitaries and representatives of other settlements, which is what Paul fell into. The middle of the building was where the town’s leadership had their offices and meeting rooms, with the entrance foyer being their throne room. Something which was largely a leftover from when they were ruled by a despotic slaver. One side of the site was given over to storage for the town, where they did the majority of their trading. The other had the entrance to the delve, and where they had located all of the services related to it.

  “Oh, good. It’s not busy,” Paul commented as we walked into the large open chamber. There were men pushing trolleys laden with ingots of metal I didn’t recognise, baskets of random electronics, and one with what looked like several rifles. We were led past a series of workbenches where several people were sorting through a pile of items, while a group of exhausted-looking men watched on with eager anticipation.

  “That team must have just come up from the delve and is having their inventory assessed,” Paul said. “The evaluators sort and assess the haul, split it in two and then offer the team a fair price for their half.”

  “Do they take it?” Darksider asked.

  “Usually. They might be able to get a better deal trading it themselves, but it’s not guaranteed and takes more effort…”

  “We want to take that for our own use!” one of the watching delvers said when a weapon was placed in the town's pile. The person who had just placed it nodded and then moved the weapon to another table. Contested items, was my guess.

  “You can challenge the split, and then it becomes a negotiation,” Paul informed us, as he shepherded us towards a wiry-looking fellow who was succeeding in overseeing the sorting without hovering.

  “Calab.” Paul greeted the man.

  “Mr Paul, I hope you are not here to argue for a reassessment. We have a month minimum from when the healers give you the go-ahead to train again,” he said politely while his eyes never left the operation that was happening.

  “Ha.” Paul laughed, with just enough of a tinge. I suspected this wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation about that. “No, I have a group of visitors from Landing who would like to discuss Delving. I’ve explained the rules, but they have a few questions about an item on the town’s list.”

  “Oh?” he turned to look at us for the first time. “Which item?”

  “I’m after a teleporter core,” I said.

  “Ahh, yes… That’s on the urgent requirements list. We need two immediately to repair the connection between here and the 5th floor, and then we need to stockpile spares in case those break. It’s rare for us to see one a week… I’m sorry, as much as we need new Delvers helping us out, I'm not sure if I can justify promising to let you keep it if you find one, even if you let us take the rest of your haul in return.”

  “What if we helped get the teleport to floor five open and got you a spare?” Darksider asked.

  “Well…if you were to dig out four of them,” he looked up at the ceiling and scratched his chin in thought. “I suppose I could justify you keeping one…” he admitted. His focus returned to give us a steely look. “But they really are rare… We’ve never seen one above the fifth floor, and right now the teleporters are both broken. The only way down is the long way.”

  “Hi, Paul. I hope you are not thinking that bringing a new team will let you skip the training requirements.” The smartly dressed woman said from behind a desk in the office Paul had led us to.

  “Diane,” he greeted her. “No, these five need assessment so they can delve.”

  “Has Paul explained the rules?” she asked, then continued after seeing us nod. “Excellent. The delve is dangerous, so to ensure we are not risking lives, saving people with no right being there, the first delve is done under the supervision of one of our deep divers. The people who have made it down to the deeper floors and returned safely.” She organised her papers and pulled one off a pile. “Luckily, we had a cancellation, so I have a team who are just sitting around waiting for enough people. With you joining them, it brings their numbers up to eight, which will meet the minimum numbers needed to safely delve, which means you can do the assessment now, or if you need more preparation time, I might be able to fit you in, in…” she looks down at her diary… “A week.” she looked up at us, with that unmistakable take it or leave it look.

  “Now sounds good,” Peachy said, her tone calm but alert, I see what you are doing here. I don’t like it, but it suits me right now to not rock the boat.

  Paul left us as Diane escorted us into a room with three people in it, two in the middle of a friendly spar, while the third was using their HUD to surf the internet.

  “We now have enough members for your delve assessment run. If the eight of you will share pleasantries, I will retrieve your assessor.”

  All three were kitted out in similar garb to what the Delvers outside had been wearing.

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  “Hi,” Peachy said cheerfully.

  “Yo!” the one who had been surfing said. “You five all look dope! Cool gear!”

  “Hi, I’m Ant, this is Chango, and that’s Beatnik.” One of the other two said. “You look like the Wardens, you must have been grinding faction rep like crazy.”

  “So much for being the first ones to find this dungeon,” Chango said.

  “Still amongst the first. Head start is a head start,” Ant told his friend.

  “Been here long?” I asked.

  “I washed up near the port town, just south of here,” Beatnik said. “On day one.”

  “We rushed to join him when he told us what he had found. We’ve been grinding faction with them to get permission to delve ever since.” Ant said with a grin.

  “Yep, we’ve had to prove our combat prowess just to get this far, and they have had us waiting until there is enough of us for a Delve for the last thirty minutes… I was about to give up.” Chango said. “How long have you been in town?”

  “About twenty minutes,” G said.

  “Closer to thirty,” Jacobs said.

  “What? How did you pass the combat assessment so quickly?”

  “They had someone vouch for them,” Diane said as she returned with a stocky old man with a scar over his eye. “This is Clark. He is your assessor; if he tells you to do something, do it. He is allowed to fail you if he doesn’t like the colour of your shirt, so don’t piss him off.” She then said something quietly to him, which vaguely sounded along the lines of, ‘Do it properly, don’t forget you still owe me.’ She then left.

  The man watched her go, and then, the moment the door closed, visibly relaxed. “Ok, kids, let's go. The sooner we are done, the sooner I can go back to my beer.”

  “This will be a relatively light run. Most of the top floors will already be stripped, so we will probably need to push down to at least the third before we will find anything worth fighting,” Clark said as he led us towards a flight of stairs descending into the ground. At the top of the stairs, there was a table with a large crystal ball set into it. The man standing behind it nodded to Clark.

  “Entrance assessment. Stop people from trying to smuggle loot out. You place your hand on the ball, and it will measure the size of your inventory. On exit, you empty it out, and they measure it again. They should match.” Clark said. Putting several potions onto the table, and then putting his hand on the crystal. “Take out any consumables you might use, so they don’t count against you at reassessment.”

  The three had a few potions each and were quickly processed.

  The man behind the counter gave us an unamused look when we said we didn’t have any.

  “Delvers should be prepared,” he said, and opened a cabinet behind him. “A gold each.”

  “Two each?” I asked my friends, they nodded, and I put ten gold coins down. The guy's eyes went wide, and he shot a look at Clark before shrugging and putting ten potions down on the desk and taking the gold.

  “They are only two silver from the town. Most will only buy one from here in an emergency. The price is the ‘you should have been prepared' price, you are the first I know of who brought more than one of them,” Clark said.

  “Quentin only buys them from here…” the man said.

  “Yeah, but he is superstitious,” Clark told him.

  The noise of the city and the bustling of the people in the building became noticeable in its absence. For several steps, the only sounds were our own breathing and the clang of a foot hitting the metal of the stairs. When we emerged into the first chamber, this had been replaced with a very faint and distant clunking sound. The metal walls and floor made me think ‘generic factory complex’. There was debris and other indications that something had been fought here.

  “Welcome to the first floor. Typically, here we’ll just find clunkers. Weak machines and rat-like monsters. Some of the weaker teams will farm them for the meat and metals. Most wait until the way down has been found and then take the shortest route to it. Today it’s just around the corner. Last week, it was on the far side of the site, a good few thousand strides.”

  “It moves around a lot?” G asked.

  “Every day it’s somewhere else. I remember someone claiming they had figured out the system… and then complained that every time he figured it out, the system changed.”

  The second floor had a grungier feel. Fans slowly spinning in vents gave a faint flow of air. Fluorescent lights, flickering slightly, giving off industrial chic vibes. The path we took led us into a large open chamber, with huge forges hammering at blocks of red glowing metal. Smelters poured steel into large moulds. There were several leather apron-clad men using the machines to hammer and forge a variety of tools and weapons.

  “This is the Forge,” Clark said, “Usually on the second floor, sometimes on the third. The Blacksmiths' guild has the permanent rights to this chamber. There is a reward for reporting its location, but it’s usually taken before I get out of bed.”

  “Any other Chambers like this one?” Darksider asked, curiously, as we moved into one of the side tunnels.

  “Claimed by the guilds? Not really. There are rewards given if you can find any of the autocrafters. Machines which will build you things if you give it the resources it asks for, but you won’t see them above the 5th. It’s also usually better value to gather up the resources it asks for and then submit the crafted items yourself. They usually only make a few at most before shutting down. There are what we call the treasure rooms.” He turned to point at one chamber. “That one most likely had bundles of cloth.” One wall had hexagonal pipes on it. “Usually, you just strip them of everything you can before moving on. So, no rewards for reporting, chances are it would be stripped before you got back anyway.”

  “So this is the third floor, and where the danger starts to really show itself. You’ll get roaming packs of creatures, so you need to keep your wits about you. If they get your trail, you can find yourself being attacked on both sides. There are also trap rooms.” He pointed at a door that was wedged open, and a chalk symbol had been drawn on the door jamb. A circle with a cross through it. “Circle means trap, the cross means a trapsmith has disarmed it or deactivated it in some fashion. In this case, it looks like they just triggered all of the room and then stopped it from resetting by wedging the doors open.” Inside, I could see metal spikes sticking out of the ground and others coming from the ceiling. Being impaled struck me as being not a nice way to die.

  Our route seemed kind of circling, more meandering than the direct route we had taken on the first two floors.

  “I think we went past this room…” Darksider said.

  “Yeah…” Clark admitted. “Half the teams took today off or just hit minimal quotas. This floor is only half explored, and I was hoping to see you all fight before I took you down to the fourth. Supposed to be a pack of cyber-mastiffs roaming this hall…”

  There was a howl from the corridor behind us.

  “Ahh, there they are.”