Chapter 84 – Into the Green

  Alex left the rest of his people arrayed across the steps. They fanned out to either side of the entrance, gas masks on, weapons up, eyes on the darkened opening. It was a sensible precaution. If this place was going to keep spitting out nightmares, leaving some people behind to ensure the rest of the city was safe, or at least warned, wasn’t optional.

  “Hold here until we’re back,” Alex told them. “If we aren’t back by sundown—”

  “We’ll put together the biggest rescue party we can and come in after you,” a woman in a tattered Boston PD uniform finished, her voice grim but steady.

  “That wasn’t what I was going to order, you know,” Alex said.

  “But you know damned well that’s what we’ll do if you don’t show up, so you’d best be back by dark, eh?”

  Alex looked like he wanted to argue with her but thought better of it. Instead, he nodded once, then turned to us. “Masks down if we call ‘spores.’ Otherwise keep them around your necks for quick access.”

  We crossed the threshold into the building as a unit. I went first, then Alex, Marion, and Dara. Ruiz and the five others followed close on their heels, two fanning out to cover each flank. Our footsteps echoed loudly in the building’s hush.

  Inside, the world was slate grey and covered in shadows. My NightVision let me see just fine, but the others were already breaking out chem lights and strapping them to weapons so they could see better. The walls were perfectly smooth, continuous planes of stone without any visible seams. The floor was the same, flat, solid, and slightly gritty under my boots. Above us, a ceiling of massive blocks arched so high it felt more sky than roof.

  As I looked around, I didn’t see any sign of carvings. No decorations of any sort, really. There were no comforting hints that people had ever been there, just cold rock.

  The air grew warmer and more moist, the deeper we went into the structure. It was tinged with that mineral smell you get when you crack open a rock that hasn’t seen daylight in a few million years. Far at the back of the hall, the floor dipped, just like I’d seen from outside. A steep ramp led downward from the main level.

  We advanced toward the ramp. Alex drifted a few feet to my right, hovering just off the floor. He’d been flying more lately, and I couldn’t blame him, but I kept my feet firmly on the ground. I only had so much mana, and I wanted to save it for when I really needed it.

  Marion walked in the center of the group, sheltered by warriors on all sides. Those white crystals she’d socketed were potentially the sole thing that would keep us alive, if we ran into another monster like the fungus giant, so the rest of us were well-incentivized to keep her alive.

  Johnson and Clark were on our left flank, Kelly and Rodriguez on the right. Ruiz and Anderson brought up the rear.

  At the head of the ramp I paused, stunned by what I was seeing. “What the hell is that?”

  I knew what it looked like, but that couldn’t be right.

  Thirty feet down, the ramp leveled into a small landing. There, hovering above the floor, was a circle of swirling green brilliance. It wasn’t uniform. It rolled and folded on itself like glowing smoke trapped in glass, with flecks of brighter emerald popping and fading. The glow painted the stone a sickly sea-foam that made it feel like we were all underwater.

  “Well,” I said as Alex came up beside me to stare at the thing. “That looks familiar.”

  Alex floated a hair higher, studying it. “Not subtle, that’s for sure.”

  “It looks exactly like a dungeon entrance,” I said. “Like, right out of a modern fantasy game. If I see a floating tooltip telling me the recommended party level, I’m turning around.”

  Kelly came in range to view it. He was a buff white guy with red hair. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “How many of you were gamer geeks growing up, anyway?” Ruiz asked, his voice holding an edge that said the joke was mostly to keep his nerves steady.

  I kept staring at the light and got that little dizzy sway you get when you look down into the ocean from a cliff. “How? I mean, did we make our games because this existed once and someone remembered? Or is magic… I don’t know, like bending itself to fit what we think it should be?”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Alex didn’t answer right away. He hovered closer, squinting, head tilted in thought. Finally, he spoke. “Both, I think.”

  “Both?”

  “Legends tend to start somewhere,” Alex said, his voice still soft as he explained his theory. “We’ve got centuries of stories about doorways to other realms, under-hills, fairy mounds, labyrinth mouths, a host of old tales about this sort of thing. That’s the old part. But our minds are full of new images, too. We’ve seen fantasy dungeon game UIs, color-coded raids, literal ‘Enter Instance’ prompts. If magic is a system that needs to interface with humans—and I’m increasingly convinced it is—there’s no reason it wouldn’t pull from the collective library housed in our minds to make the unfamiliar legible.”

  “So we’re user-testing a magical operating system?” I asked. “Gotta say, I love that for us.”

  He actually smiled. “Legends from an earlier cycle provide the concept. The modern zeitgeist provides the skin. Cross-reference enough human heads and you converge on something ninety percent of us recognize when we see it.”

  “Which is comforting,” Dara said, “right up until the mushrooms explode again and we all die from the spores.”

  “Point taken,” Alex said. He looked around at the group. “We should proceed, unless anyone is seeing a good reason why we shouldn’t?”

  I was tempted to point out that the fact we were seeing what was obviously a dungeon portal meant that we were almost certainly headed toward something dangerous, but there was no point. We all knew that before we’d climbed the first step. We needed the white crystals this place might have as rewards. Alex was right that finding more of those would be worth the risk.

  We edged down to the landing toward the swirling lights. I crouched and picked up a pebble from a chip in the ramp and tossed it. The instant it touched the green, it vanished. There was no splash, no sizzle. No sound at all. It was just gone, vanished in an instant.

  “Rope?” Ruiz suggested, always the practical one.

  Anderson came forward with a coil of the stuff, which he passed up to me. I tossed the head of the rope into the glow, holding onto the rest of the line. The rope pulled taut for a heartbeat, then slackened. I pulled back, and the rope came freely. The last foot of it was clean-cut, like something had closed around it and burned through.

  “Okay,” I said. “That was weird.”

  “I think we can expect more weird once we go in,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, I feel like that goes without saying,” I muttered.

  “All right, everyone. We’re going in,” Alex said, his eyes not leaving the portal. He took a long breath, then looked around at the team. “Masks on, at least at first, because we don’t know what we’ll find on the other side. No one breathes unknown dust. Marion, I want you to stay in the center. Cameron and I are on point. Dara, right behind us. Ruiz, you’re rear guard. Everyone else two-by-two staggered. Anyone goes down and starts growing salad, Marion gets priority access with Cleanse. If we can drag them back through safely, we do. If not—”

  He trailed off, and none of us added what we all already knew. We’d all seen Roberts’s body outside. We knew the risks involved in going into this place.

  “This could be the stupidest thing I’ve done all week,” I said.

  “Didn’t you tell me you punched through a limestone wall with your bare hands today?” Alex asked.

  “Right. So this is only second place.”

  Alex’s mouth went tight, not quite a smile. “The rewards warrant the risk. Those white stones are key, for starters. They could make a massive difference in our ability to survive all this. But there’s more than that. If this place is what I think it is, even partially, it could give us a way to scale safety. We could use it to train teams and level our people up much more safely.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t wrong. A predictable factory for power in a world that kept improvising new ways to kill us? That was priceless.

  “I know. And I’ve got your back, Alex,” I said, rolling my shoulders.

  “I know that, and I’m grateful. On your call,” Alex said, and the team shifted as one, every eye on me. I didn’t ask for that. I wasn’t ever going to want it. But the moment was here and it was mine.

  “Step carefully,” I said. “Eyes open.”

  I took one breath that tasted like cold stone, and then stepped forward into the green light.

  The world folded.

  It was like someone turned a page and I was ink that had to move with the story. The green went through me instead of around me. For a fraction of a fraction my body felt both there and not there, while my eyes saw only viridian fire, and then—

  —the light let go of me, all my senses returning to normal in a flash.

  I stood on different stone. Air hit my face. It was warmer, wetter, and threaded with a musty smell. I stepped forward, and behind me, my team arrived one by one. Each blinked into place with a little flash of green light.

  I returned my attention to our surroundings while the rest of the party arrived. We were in a corridor. It had the same seamless walls as the building we’d left behind, but the color had shifted a shade darker, like someone had deepened the saturation slider. Overhead, the ceiling hung lower, about ten feet above us. High enough that it didn’t feel cramped, but low enough that flying wasn’t going to give us much extra room to maneuver.

  Alex hovered an inch, testing the air. “Interesting. It seems like the arrival point might be a safe spot, at least for the time being. It’s a good sign that we weren’t attacked immediately upon arrival.”

  I glanced back behind us. There was no ramp, nor any sign of an exit portal. “Any idea how we’re getting back out of here?”

  “Probably by finishing the dungeon, right?” Marion said. “There ought to be a portal at the end that brings us back out.”

  We all looked at her.

  “What? You think boys are the only people who play computer games? Seriously, guys.” Marion chuckled at our shocked faces.

  I looked at Alex. He looked at me.

  “Well, she’s right. Since there’s no exit portal right where we came in, odds are good it’s waiting for us at the end. Welcome to the dungeon,” Alex said, and for once there wasn’t any irony in it at all.

  “Let’s make this worth it,” I said.

  We set our spacing and moved deeper into the unknown.