Scintillating and tightly controlled, mana wormed through his flesh.

  Kaius was focused and driven — finding a window of quiet between patrols where they could duck into a side room and he could reinscribe was difficult. He couldn’t waste this opportunity.

  His last Stormlash was all he would need. Since their flight from the redoubt he had shifted his loadout to favour the spell. They were devastatingly effective against the mechanical automata with their metal bodies. The fact that he was so familiar with the spell and it was by far his fastest spell to reinscribe was only another benefit.

  They had been at it for hours, racing through halls, avoiding as much battle as they could, and taking every opportunity to keep themselves recovered and topped up as they spent their stock of potions like water. It was frustrating — he was by far the limiting factor of their pace.

  The others only had to contend with recovering their resource pools. He was not so lucky. Every stop and moment of rest, he had to put them at risk as he drew his focus inward to squeeze in as many inscriptions as he could.

  At the very least, he was almost certain that Kenva’s hypothesis was correct. For all that the automata threw themselves at them with beautiful displays of coordination, they were not actively tracking them through the facility. The sensors were sharp, and when one group spotted them, they all reacted — but they had a greater beast and a ranger with a Heroic class on their side. Kenva and Porkchop’s senses were sharp enough to hear the rattle of the scrambling automata long before they themselves were detected.

  Still, they couldn’t avoid every fight. Worker drones had fallen like waves before their advance, and their intermittent run-ins with Centurions had proven the largest drain of their resources by far. The giant automata were vicious and heavily armoured, with attacks that could easily injure both him and Porkchop. But in all honesty, at this point the only significant advantage the automata had was manpower.

  Now that they had discovered where the Centurions’ cores were, they weren’t so bad to take down. Sure, they took their licks doing so, but they had strength and firepower on their side. Plus, every battle became easier than the last. Much like the worker drones, the Centurions’ fighting style was rote. The automata were flexible and reacted dynamically, but they always used the most technically appropriate movement with no thought to guile or subtlety. It made them viciously susceptible to feints.

  That weakness proved their undoing as he and his team punched deeper and deeper into the facility, even with Centurions becoming a larger part of the forces in the deeper layers of the Imperial ruin. Such a change had barely slowed them.

  They were so close to the so-called mainframe he could almost taste it — literally. Starting four floors ago, the mana in the air had grown denser and more dominated by arcane affinity. It was like an electric crackle on the skin, and a metallic tang hung on his tongue.

  Here, at the lowest level of the ruin, they didn’t even need to search for directions to the central core. They could simply follow the sharply rising mana gradient.

  It wouldn’t be long now. Their expedition was almost at its end. Their fights had brought them skill levels and power in spades. While Rapid Adaption and Brotherhood of Ichor and Animus stubbornly hung at their thresholds, the rest of his skills had seen pleasing growth, as had his class levels. Even with the skyrocketing experience requirements, fighting so many silver automata above their level had its benefits. He was close — only a few levels away from evolving his next class skill.

  Kaius longed to review his status and see the changes before him, but he had more important things to focus on. His inscriptions.

  Reviewing his progress could wait until the core of this place was destroyed.

  Tying off the final knot of the Stormlash inscription he was working on, Kaius jolted as he felt someone shake his knee. Ianmus was crouched down in front of him— an impressive feat, considering they had crammed themselves into a utility closet at the back of some sort of meeting room.

  The mage must have been watching the flow of his mana and had waited until he finished an inscription to get his attention.

  “A patrol just passed a few minutes ago. It’s our best bet to get through the final stretch without running into more.”

  Their moment had come, and Kaius felt anticipation clench in his belly.

  It heightened the visceral excitement prickling across his skin. The core of this facility would be heavily defended — he knew it deep in his gut. Regardless of how oddly aimless the automata were acting, he just couldn’t see anything else being the case.

  Such a thing was bound to be a good fight.

  He sprang into action, smoothly drawing his blade as he got to his feet.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Let’s go. I hope the ruin has something more in store for us. The Centurions are starting to get a little samey,” Porkchop said, hungry aggression bleeding through his words as they spilled out of the closet — their impromptu rest spot.

  Kenva chuckled. “Of that I have no doubt. A place as important as this core would definitely be the most fortified. The only question is if whatever degradation has affected the automata has damaged its defences as well.”

  Kaius only nodded as they ran out of the room and down the hall. As soon as they were in the main thoroughfare, mana billowed around them with palpable pressure. It wasn’t quite blinding — not with his Truesight — but the sheer intensity of it almost ruined his ability to make out fine details in the mana currents, and made his mortal vision seem washed out and pallid in comparison.

  Every sense Kaius had was focused, ready for an army of Centurions to spill around the corner at any moment.

  Every experience he’d ever had told him that things never went simply for them. Not in their lives.

  There was always another beast, more terrible and horrific than the last — a practically universal law that all Delvers lived by. If you didn’t expect it, you died when something caught you flat-footed.

  It meant their lack of opposition set Kaius’s heart pounding as they tore through the halls with raw arcane streaming over them in an almost physical wave. It was like he had run a marathon without any stats — a pounding of his heart that wouldn’t quiet.

  Where were the guards? The patrols? There should have been something — a far-off clank, or a telltale wheeze of fluid-filled cylinders as a Centurion stepped into their hall.

  Yet the passageway was silent, other than their heavy breathing, the hum of the lights above, and the far-off sounds of Imperial artifice in other parts of the ruin.

  It might have been simple paranoia. He knew, logically, that for every time things had taken a turn for the worse, there had been several dozen others where everything went fine. Yet he would not be the one who let complacency take hold.

  So he ran, and he watched — alert to the presence of threats.

  But there were none. None at all.

  Corner by corner, the mana built as they drew closer to the mainframe. Till finally, all at once, they spilled around a bend and passed through four closely stacked arches — each an open portcullis of adamant defence.

  Exactly like where he had seen other steel barricades fall in the ruin.

  The very sight of them eased the tension in his heart. That was the trap. They would fall and seal them in.

  Yet despite that thought, he pushed on — because their prize was in sight.

  The mainframe.

  Occupied thoughts or not, Kaius gasped. It was a gargantuan thing, dominating the centre of an immense dome.

  The middle of the floor had been punched out into a pool of purest azure fluid, filled with the virulent purple light of pure arcane. Whatever the liquid was, it was barely suppressing the worst of the mana. It shone so bright to his eyes — so saturated with arcane power he could barely look at it.

  The source of the energy was clear.

  Blocky spires of stacked crystalline wafers, each prism nearly as wide as he was tall. He could just barely see the tops of them nearly five strides beneath the water’s surface. They stretched down out of sight into the deep.

  It was the mana core — it had to be. What else could possibly fill the very air with such immensity of energy?

  Hells, he was surprised it hadn’t outright grown mana condensate, like the life-attuned fragment Ianmus had gotten during their boggart extermination so long ago.

  Yet their approach would be difficult. With the reactor all but exposed to the open air, arcane energy burned. Every stride heightened the tension. Soon it would grow from uncomfortable to actively hazardous — a danger to Ianmus and Kenva. They lacked any arcane resistance. Porkchop at least benefited from a fraction of Rapid Adaption, and his own natural vitality. Unfortunately, his Greater Spell Resistance was specialised towards manipulated spells — not raw mana affinities.

  “Stop!” Kaius called, sliding to a halt.

  They needed to find some way of destroying the mana core without getting too close.

  Worse, they had to find a way to do it without causing an explosive destabilisation that would shatter artifice and runic formations. The damn thing looked like it held enough energy to turn them all into paste.

  They needed a plan.

  The reports they’d read said that others had simply damaged the physical structure. Those historic expeditions must not have been to a ruin as active as this, or their mana cores had been lesser things. Not one had mentioned how visibly energetic the damn thing was.

  “Any ideas?” Ianmus panted, an uncomfortable grimace on his face under the intensity of the mana around him.

  “Why don’t we just smash it?” Porkchop asked.

  “Because that would be a good way to turn us all into mush. It’s too much energy. We know too little about how it works.”

  “What do we do then? Break it and make a run for it?” Kenva asked.

  “Too risky,” Kaius said with a wince. “Let me get a look at it up close myself.”

  Kenva gave him an incredulous look. “And you think my plan’s risky? What, are you going to take a dip in that water?”

  Kaius grinned. “I’m not that stupid — I just want to get a better look at what we’re aiming for, I’ll be fine with that much. I have arcane resistance now. Better me than any of the rest of you.”

  Besides, every other report said that people were able to safely damage the mana generators of other ruins to deactivate them. Even if this one was more powerful, there had to be a way to do the same. He just needed a moment to find it.

  “And if you can’t?” Porkchop asked.

  “Then I set off a Starfall right above it from around the corner, and we sprint for our damn lives.”

  Kenva sighed, shaking her head. “When it all goes horribly wrong, remember that I said it was a bad idea.”

  He simply laughed and felt the burn of arcane intensify on his skin as he took a step closer to the still-beating heart of the Imperial ruin.

  juicy.

  Come check out patreon if you want to read ahead!

  https://discord.gg/NjsqGKHHaY