The high ground is tactically superior. Everyone knows that. It's Strategy 101.

But when the high ground is a crumbling shelf the size of a dinner plate, and your tank has just fallen twenty feet below you into a pit of hungry mouths, the high ground can go hang itself.

"Boss!" Relay squeaked, pressing himself against the rock wall as a pale claw scrabbled over the lip of our ledge. "They're climbing! They're fast!"

I looked down.

Splitjaw was visible in the flashes of my sword's light. He was at the bottom of the sinkhole, a dark island in a sea of pale, undulating flesh. He was swinging his broken spear like a bat, smashing chitin and bone with every stroke, laughing that terrible, breathless laugh of his.

But he wasn't moving. He was pivoting on one leg. The other one, was folded under him at an angle that made my stomach turn.

"He's stuck," I realized. "He's not tanking. He's drowning."

I kicked the claw away from the ledge, sending a crawler tumbling back into the void.

"We can't pull him up," I said, voice tight. "No rope. Too heavy."

"So we leave him?" Relay asked, terrified.

"No." I grabbed the back of his tunic. "We go down."

"That seems counter-productive to the whole 'living' thing!"

"Gravity is free, Relay. Try to enjoy it."

I didn't give him time to argue. I didn't give myself time to think about how stupid this was. I shoved off the wall, dragging the screaming runner with me, and we slid down the slope of loose debris that formed the side of the sinkhole.

It wasn't a graceful descent. It was an avalanche of gravel, dust, and kobolds.

We hit the bottom hard.

I expected stone. I expected dirt.

I landed in *mulch*.

The floor of the pit wasn't earth. It was a foot-deep layer of pulverized insect shells, old bones, and decades of molted skin. It crunched wetly under my boots, smelling of ammonia and rot.

"Disgusting," I gagged, scrambling to my feet. "0 out of 10. Would not visit again."

"Sovereign!" Splitjaw barked, decapitating a crawler that lunged for me. "I had this handled!"

"You have a bone sticking out of your shin, Splitjaw!" I shouted, parrying a set of mandibles with the flat of my blade. "That is the opposite of handled!"

"It's a flesh wound!"

"It's a structural failure! Formation! Now!"

We slammed back-to-back-to-back. The classic triangle.

Splitjaw sat against a pile of rubble, covering the low ground with sweeping, brutal strikes. I took the front, keeping the Sovereign's First Flame moving in wide arcs to force them back with heat. Relay stood in the middle, darting out with his stylus to stab at eyes—no, they didn't have eyes—at sensory pits whenever a crawler got too close.

The System, helpful as ever, decided to quantify our doom.

[Combat Zone: Substructure Nest]

[Enemy Density: High]

[Stamina: Dropping]

[Survival Probability: < 1%]

"Less than one percent," I muttered, ducking under a slash. "I liked fourteen better."

The fight fell into a rhythm. A horrible, wet, frantic rhythm.

Swing. Crunch. Step. Swing.

There were too many of them. They poured out of the cracks in the walls like oil. They were pale, translucent things, all legs and teeth, moving with a jerky, twitchy speed that made them hard to track.

For every one I burned, three more climbed over the smoking corpse. They didn't care about death. They only cared about biomass. And we were the freshest meat in the dark.

"I'm overheating!" I yelled. The relic in my hand was vibrating violently, the heat bleeding up my arm. It wasn't designed for sustained combat. It was a symbol, a torch. I was using a lighter to fight a forest fire.

"Keep burning!" Splitjaw roared, burying his spear-point in a soft throat. "They hate the light!"

"I can't keep it up forever!"

Relay wasn't fighting.

I realized it with a jolt of panic. The runner had stopped stabbing.

"Relay! Eyes up!" I snapped, kicking a crawler back.

"The dust..." Relay whispered.

"What?"

"Boss, look at the dust!"

He pointed with his stylus. Not at the monsters. At the air.

The air in the pit was thick with the debris from the collapse, a choking grey fog. But near the floor, to our left, the dust wasn't settling.

It was moving sideways.

A distinct, swirling current of grey was being sucked into a narrow fissure in the rock wall, obscured by a pile of shattered crate slats.

"It's moving," Relay shouted over the chittering roar. "That's not a dead end! It's an intake!"

I stared at it. The Dungeon breathes. I knew that. Everyone knew that. But I'd never seen it inhale.

"A vent?" I asked.

"A way out!"

"Or a blender," Splitjaw grunted, struggling to pull his weapon free from a carapace.

"I'll take the blender over the bugs!" I decided. "Relay, clear the debris! Splitjaw, on me! We move!"

"I can't walk, Boss," Splitjaw said, his voice dropping an octave. The bravado was slipping. He looked pale, even for a kobold. The blood pooling in the mulch around his leg was significant. "Leave me. Plug the hole with my body. I'll buy you time."

I stopped swinging.

I turned to him, ignoring the crawler that hissed inches from my face.

"Splitjaw," I said, voice low and dangerous. "If you suggest dying one more time, I am going to tell Cinders you stole her spoon."

His eyes went wide. "You wouldn't."

"Try me. Now move!"

I grabbed the back of his heavy leather harness. Relay grabbed his good leg.

We heaved.

Splitjaw screamed—a raw, jagged sound that cut through the noise of the battle—as we dragged him over the uneven ground.

The swarm saw the movement. They surged forward, sensing weakness.

"They're too thick!" Relay cried, stabbing frantically at the wall of pale flesh closing in. "We can't get to the wall!"

He was right. We were ten feet from the fissure, but there were fifty monsters between us and it. We needed a plow. We needed a bomb.

I looked at the sword in my hand. The Sovereign's First Flame.

It was pulsing erratically. Overheated. Unstable.

"System," I whispered. "How much mana do I have left?"

[Mana Pool: 18%]

[Warning: Reserve Critical.]

"Dump it," I ordered.

[Query: Clarify.]

"All of it," I snarled, raising the blade high above my head. "Dump the buffer. Bypass the regulator. I don't want a sword. I want a star."

[Alert: Relic Integrity Risk. User Safety Risk.]

[Executing...]

I squeezed my eyes shut. "COVER YOUR EYES!"

I felt the drain instantly. It felt like someone reached into my chest and yanked out a rib. The cold snap of mana exhaustion hit me at the exact moment the heat left the blade.

There was no sound.

Just white.

Absolute, erasing whiteness.

Even through my eyelids, it was blinding. The darkness of the pit was annihilated.

The scream from the swarm was deafening. It wasn't anger, it was agony. These things lived in the deep dark. Their skin was raw, wet, sensitive. I had just set off a flashbang in a room full of people with hangovers, except the flashbang was made of holy fire.

"GO!" I screamed, my vision swimming with purple spots.

We didn't walk. We scrambled.

I hauled Splitjaw with a strength I didn't know I had. Relay kicked debris aside. The monsters were reeling, thrashing on the ground, clawing at their own faces. The wall of flesh parted.

We hit the fissure.

"In! In!" I shoved Relay toward the gap.

"It's tight!" he yelled, diving headfirst.

"Suck in your gut!"

I grabbed Splitjaw by the belt and shoved him after the runner. He groaned, twisting his body to fit his broad shoulders through the jagged crack.

"My leg—"

"Forget the leg!" I pushed his boot with my shoulder.

The light was fading. The First Flame flickered and died, leaving only the dull red glow of cooling metal.

The swarm was recovering. The screaming stopped. The hissing returned.

I looked back. A sea of recoverning nightmares turned toward me.

"Bye," I whispered.

I dove into the hole.

I felt a sharp, agonizing pinch on my tail.

I didn't look back. I kicked out blindly, my boot connecting with something wet and crunchy. The pinch released.

I shimmied forward, the stone pressing against my chest, my back, my ears. It was claustrophobic. It smelled of dust and old air.

Then the floor vanished.

"Whoa!"

I slid.

We all slid.

It wasn't rock anymore. It was smooth. Polished.

We tumbled down a chute, picking up speed, twisting in the dark. It felt like being flushed down a giant drain.

I hit the bottom a few seconds later, landing in a heap on top of Splitjaw, who let out a breathy oof.

"Get off," he wheezed.

I rolled away, gasping for air. "Alive. We're alive."

I waited for the chittering. I waited for the monsters to pour down the chute after us.

Silence.

No, not silence.

A hum.

A low, steady, rhythmic thrumming. Thrum-thrum-thrum.

I sat up. My eyes were useless in the pitch black. My sword was dead weight, cold and grey.

"Relay?" I called out.

"Here, Boss."

"Splitjaw?"

"Leg still hurts. Still mad about the spoon threat."

"Good. Don't die yet."

I fumbled at my belt for my backup—a mundane flint striker and a bit of oil cloth Cinders insisted I carry. My hands shook as I struck the flint.

Snick. Spark. Snick. Spark.

The cloth caught. A small, yellow flame flickered to life.

I held it up.

"Okay," I said. "Let's see where we—"

The words died in my throat.

We weren't in a cave.

The floor beneath us was a metal grate. Below it, darkness, but I could hear the rush of water—fast, industrial water.

The walls weren't stone. They were lined with panels. sleek, black, seamless panels that reflected the firelight. Pipes ran along the ceiling, thick as tree trunks, pulsing with faint blue light.

"By the Flame," Splitjaw whispered, staring up. "What is this?"

It looked like the inside of a beast. A beast made of iron and lightning.

Relay crawled over to the nearest wall. He reached out a trembling hand and brushed away a layer of grey dust.

"Boss," he said, his voice trembling. "Look."

I leaned in.

Etched into the black metal, in sharp, angular lines that looked nothing like the mystical runes of the elves or the scratchings of the goblins, were characters.

**SEC-EAST-04 // VENT-MAIN**

**MAINTENANCE ONLY**

They were letters. Block letters.

"Those aren't magic runes," Relay whispered.

I stared at them. I recognized the font. It was the same font the System used in my notification windows.

"No," I said, a cold chill settling over me that had nothing to do with the damp air. "They're serial numbers."

I looked down the long, echoing hallway of pipes and grating. It stretched on into the dark, endless and artificial.

"We aren't in the dungeon anymore," I said, standing up and helping Splitjaw to his one good foot.

"Where are we then?" Splitjaw asked.

I looked at the pulsing blue pipes. I looked at the metal walls.

"We're in the plumbing," I said. "Welcome to the engine room, boys."

[Zone Discovered: Deep Infrastructure]

[Lore Fragment Unlocked: The Machine Beneath]

[Experience Gained: You have survived the teeth.]

I stared at the notification. It didn't feel like a victory. It felt like I'd just opened a door I was never supposed to find.

"Let's move," I said, the darkness pressing in. "Before the mechanic shows up."

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