Jace concentrated inward, focussing on his core and pillars, then illuminated the pillar with the active fortification card in it.

  With a push of willpower, he willed the card to stop. Nothing happened.

  Then, he adjusted his timing. As his core fluctuated, he thrust the card out, and with a pop, it slipped out of the pillar. At the same time, he stopped feeding it Aes.

  It rematerialized above his hand, and for the first time, he assessed it. Same as before, the name was: [Technique Card: Lightvein Braces the Virtuous (Legendary) (Fortification) (Compatible Class: All) (Compatible Aspects: Hologram, Light)]

  [Technique description: Once every two (2) minutes, fortifies the user’s limbs and weapons with a surge of Aes. Temporarily converts three times the user’s Potency and Resistance into Agility, Strength, and Vitality. Card can stay active for a maximum of thirty (30) seconds.]

  Simple, but it worked. It took utility stats and converted them into useful combat stats. The Legendary status must have come from the short cooldown and long activation period. In battle, he could keep a fortification card active for three quarters of the time, assuming his body could handle it.

  Jace socketed the card again, but didn’t activate it. He could surely work with Lessa to make it closer to his aspect and more useful to him, but he could worry about that later. For now, they had to get the doors open.

  He ran back to the door he’d entered through. Over the past few days, he’d been improving his perception, and he was starting to understand the mechanisms of traps better. Or, at least, view how they worked.

  But when he tried to sense the mechanism of the door, he first stalled out. He sensed nothing but a sheet of metal.

  A door didn’t inherently pose danger to him.

  He narrowed his eyes. If he didn’t get this door open, then he’d be stuck here, alone?

  But he wouldn’t be stuck. He could just phase back through the door.

  His friends would be, though. Lessa and Kinfild, alone with Ash, who may or may not have been their friend. This door was standing in between him and his friends, and he couldn’t continue onward without them.

  Or, moreover, he wouldn’t.

  At that thought, a twinge of danger lit up his senses, and the mechanism of the door illuminated in his spiritual perception. An Aes detector on the wall beside him would triggered a chain reaction, opening a channel in the tomb overall and using powerful shield Aes from far below to fuel its systems.

  Here, there were motors fuelled by Aes—which he didn’t fully understand—and locks…and pretty much any component. Where the modern galaxy had electricity and steam and coal for fuel, the Luminians had relied solely on arcane energy.

  He placed his hand on the Aes detector. It wasn’t calibrated to such a finicky level, and it wouldn’t trigger if someone walked past it. Someone had to feed the detector directly, and they had to do it from this side of the wall.

  With a clank, the door shot up into the ceiling. Kinfild and Ash stood a few paces away from it, and they immediately settled into a fighting stance, but Lessa, who stood at the very brink of the doorway, and had her arms raised as if she had been pounding on it, stumbled forward.

  “I figured out how to open it,” said Jace. He stepped back and humorously motioned to the chamber where he’d fought the automaton. “Welcome. I had a slight delay, but the room should be safe now.”

  Kinfild raised his eyebrows. Ash nodded, as if expecting such an outcome.

  And Lessa marched forward, then flicked his shoulder. “Don’t get yourself hurt.”

  “I won’t.” Jace grinned. “Uh…by any chance, would you be willing to help me with a new card, and store some extra ones?”

  She was walking into the chamber, but she glanced back over her shoulder. “Of course. Over there?”

  They gathered the extra cards from the coffin, the cards that Jace hadn’t picked up and socketed, and placed them in the storage ring. He was contemplating taking the extra attack card, but since it was just a light-aspect card, and he already had an attack technique, they were better off using it as material to reforge his other cards.

  Then they continued on. Jace opened the second door, revealing another hallway, but it was short, and he could see the crust-lift at the end of the hallway.

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  They ran to the lift and navigated down to it, and along the way, only one automaton waylaid them. Ash hung back, and he only used one technique—a forging technique, which he used to erect a shield of his “tractor beam” Aes in front of him. It created a wireframe rectangle with a bright pinprick at the very center. Anything that entered the rectangle got pulled into the central point, and it didn’t leave.

  Jace demonstrated his new fortification card to the group, and he barely needed them to distract the automaton anymore.

  Needless to say, it made the next few days of delving and descending much easier and faster. They used the crust-lift to descend another level, then traversed the eighth level with ease.

  Considering they were more than halfway to the bottom now, and only a few levels from the tenth…Jace had to admit he was impressed.

  But the arcane pressure of the dungeon was an ever-present weight on his core. It settled down and it didn’t leave, like there was someone standing on it. He wasn’t sure what Lessa felt, because she didn’t have a core to feel pressure on, but she had to be feeling something much worse, being as close to a regular person as they had in their group.

  But she’d said she would hold it together, and Jace didn’t want to pry. Still, he paid attention, in case anything bad happened.

  In the eighth level, the automatons were all around level forty-five, and sometimes, two or three attacked at once, at which point, Ash stepped in to destroy one, but always—and weirdly dutifully—left one for Jace to destroy.

  Well, he was supposed to be some kind of galactic hero…

  One night, when they settled down to eat (Ash had brought his own rations, so he wasn’t throwing off their balance), Jace asked him, “What are you doing? Not just here, I mean…but like, in general. Are you just like a fancy soldier for Lady Fairynor?”

  Lessa and Kinfild were both sitting a decent distance away, tending to a small campfire to heat up their food. They didn’t really need it; each level they descended, it was getting hotter, but they wanted a warm meal. But they weren’t really paying attention, and probably wouldn’t interrupt.

  “I am, yes,” said Ash. “If she commands it, it is done—or I die.”

  “Why?”

  For a second, Ash froze. He narrowed his eyebrows, and the grey tattoos on his face scrunched up with confusion. Such a thing was probably rare to ask.

  “I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it,” Jace said. “But I’m curious. She was nice to us, sure, but not like…this all-commanding authority that compels me to do her bidding. Not that she wasn’t competent, no, and she did save our skin—”

  “She saved me as well,” said Ash.

  For a moment, Jace stared. He was about to ask Ash to elaborate, but he didn’t want to push too hard, and the man would speak if he wanted.

  Finally, Ash added, “I was a light-aspect Watchman, this you know. I had been training under a different master, and I hadn’t fully advanced beyond my training yet—I was only around level twenty.”

  “So the…the Watchmen I killed on Kinath-Aertes were still in training?”

  “Likely.” Ash nodded. “Regardless, when the dark Watchmen turned on us, me and my master were escorting Lady Fairynor and her sister, and in the chaos of that…inquisition, they killed my master. Lady Fairynor saw the writing on the wall, and hid me. Then, she guided me into masking my aspect, and eventually, altering it altogether.”

  “So you’re just a Watchman? You guys are kinda like…rangers, then?”

  “We were.”

  Jace got the sense he wasn’t saying everything, but he didn’t know how to phrase the question, so he left it alone and went back to his meal.

  For the rest of their journey through the eighth level, they cracked open coffins and dealt with automatons—both hunter and regular forms, and one unique type that walked on three legs and was twice as tall as the others.

  Every night, before they settled down to rest, Jace used the Vault Core. The beasts it sent him to deal with were hardly a challenge anymore, but he still needed to practice with the Whistling Blade, and more importantly, he needed to keep the Split’s attention on his system, so Lessa could view it. She enhanced the Questforger card a few times.

  By the time they’d reached the eighth level’s crust-lift, Jace had reached [Level 35] from the automaton destroying, and he’d accumulated eight more attribute shards to distribute.

  Knowing how the fortification card worked, there was no sense applying them in Agility or Strength anymore, aside from what he wanted as a base level—and so far, he was satisfied. Instead, he applied them to Resistance. Six to Resistance, to be precise, and two to Vital. It put his Resistance at sixty-two and Vital at fifty-two.

  Getting closer to his fight with Neikir…but he was going to make it to the right level in time, and hopefully, he’d have enough technique cards in time. Maybe not enough to fill all his pillars, but enough to contest the scavenger…prince?

  Hell…it might be much easier than he initially thought. If Neikir was the best this world had to offer?

  But there was still the matter of the quest: the actual Destined quest, which commanded him to kill someone named Rallemnon. That…had to be more difficult.

  Moreover, just outside the eighth level’s crust lift, they uncovered one last coffin, which contained enough cards for them to begin the reforging process. Five more technique cards. Most were rare, but there was one legendary which none of them could use.

  “How…are we going to melt them down?” Jace asked. “We can make a fire, and it’ll probably melt the metal, but we don’t exactly have a cauldron.”

  Kinfild glanced at Ash. “I was thinking we’d simply carve it into the stone, however…I have become aware of a different storage ring in our presence.”

  Ash sighed, then pulled off his glove, revealing a small silver ring on his left hand. It had no inscriptions, save for a glowing turquoise inscription of a crown on its upper face. Otherwise, it had been perfectly sized to him.

  “My family storage ring, yes.” Ash fuelled it with Aes, causing a glowing line to wrap all the way around the ring. It expanded until it was the width of a barrel, revealing an interior. “I suppose I might have some alchemical equipment in here.”