After two days’ travel, they reached the tenth level. By now, the dungeon’s pressure was all-encompassing. It pressed down on Jace’s shoulders like he was at the bottom of a swimming pool, and it pressed inward on his core from all directions. Not painful, but noticeable.

  He kept an eye on Lessa. She needed more sleep, now, and her tail and eyes didn’t seem to glow as brightly, but she made no comment. Still, they stopped waking her up for night watch and let her rest all through the night.

  It wasn’t fair. Jace wished there was something he could do, some way that he could help her be more like…them. The idea that mortals, non-Wielders, should just never have the same advantages was endlessly frustrating.

  Aside from the fact that she was a friend, of course. Friends helped each other

  Maybe some day, he’d have a way to do something more for her.

  As they travelled, they collected more unusable cards from the coffins and put them in Lessa’s storage ring. If they could accumulate more material to reforge a card, then that was what they had to do.

  His next target to reforge was the hyperdash. It already had a bunch of enhancements, and it was in need of a new slate, anyway. But it was also his most trusty and most used card, and it was the best choice.

  Whenever they encountered an automaton, now, Jace, Kinfild, and Ash handled it. While Jace fought and kept his techniques active, it gave Lessa the perfect opportunity to work on card enhancements.

  She worked on both the hyperdash and the cleanse card, but mainly the cleanse card. Since Jace had a mythic-grade card now, it wouldn’t function to reset the Questforger technique. Not a big deal on the surface, because he wouldn’t need to reset it often, especially not in battle, but his other cards were improving as well, and he’d need a full reset eventually.

  By the time they reached the tenth level, the cleanse card now read: [Technique Card: Purify (Common) (Utility) (Compatible Class: Hyperspace Hunter) (Compatible Aspects: Hyperspace)]

  The name had changed, becoming closer to his Path, and now, it functioned with only hyperspace Aes.

  The new description read: [Once every twenty (20) hours, cleanses all Aes channels in a three (3) meter radius. Removes char buildup and spiritual strain, and resets cooldowns of all other technique cards Mythic grade and below. Enhances and opens Aes channels for a period of thirty seconds, and grants the user +10% Resistance and +10% Strength.]

  Three meters’ radius? That was pretty good. In a fight, he could do more than just cleanse his own cooldowns, now. If someone was standing next to him, it should work.

  And, for the hyperdash, the description read: [Once every eighty (80) seconds, allows the caster to trigger a hyperdash in a chosen direction. Caster will not interact with solid objects. Distance limited by fuel cell Aes output and scales greatly with caster’s Resistance rating.]

  Not a huge boost, but lowering the cooldown, and scaling greatly had to mean something, right?

  Though, lately, he hadn’t exactly been pushing his dashes to the limit. There really was no need to dash much farther than ten meters in a combat scenario, and it was a little unwieldy to just generally move around with.

  There had to be something else he could do with it, some way to shift that into a benefit. As they walked, he asked, “Could my…tangibility be variable during a hyperdash?”

  “It’s possible, I guess?” Lessa said. “There might be a way to do that, though it sounds like it’d be a reforged ability.”

  “What if I used two cards at once? Like, a forging card and the hyperdash.”

  “Some cards’ abilities can naturally stack on each other,” Kinfild said. “It’s possible that you could modify a card’s effect simply by activating it at the same time as a card whose ability was continuous.”

  “Like a fortification card, then.” Jace rubbed his chin. “I’ll think on it, but it’d be nice to do something with the distance I’m moving. If I could…I dunno, funnel it into a different ability, or use it for a different purpose.”

  “Maybe you’ll figure something out when we reforge it,” Lessa suggested.

  After that, they continued onward, with Jace contemplating what to do with his abilities while trying to guide them.

  Using the enhanced Questforger card was like trying to pay attention in a class full of chattering students. But then multiply them by a thousand, and make the majority of them into a whisper because of how far away they were.

  He wasn’t even sure what points of interest the card was specifically picking up on, but it could effectively track an object all across an entire planet and tell him where it was. Assuming he could lock onto it with the Split and convince the energy field that he did actually need to know where it was.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Jace’s first few attempts to lock onto the dungeon’s core hadn’t yielded any results. It was too ambiguous, and he didn’t exactly know what kind of core he was even trying to lock on to.

  But then he considered the kobolds’ queen-core. He knew what that looked like, what it felt like. The dungeon’s own core had to be about the same as the kobold queen-core…just a different aspect, he guessed.

  If the dungeon was a Shield-aspect dungeon, it’d feel like shields.

  The next time a pulse of Aes ran through the dungeon, fuelling the walls and filtering through the runes, Jace locked onto it in…well, in his senses. It felt like a protecting coating, like an impossible-to-crack eggshell. Despite being a hostile, defensive structure, it also had aspects of comfort and home.

  He concentrated on the feeling, and combined it with the will to find something like the queen-core, and activated his Questforger card.

  The card responded.

  [Subquest available: Find one (1) dungeon core. Reward: None]

  Perfect.

  The hyperspace Aes needle pointed almost forty-five degrees downward, through layers of stone and rock, which first made Jace’s stomach drop. They were on the tenth level, now.

  But if it was far enough away, they’d have to contend with the curve of Ifskar’s crust. That meant they needed to travel horizontally much farther than Jace originally anticipated. Could they even make it in a week—they only had about a week before Jace’s confrontation with Neikir was supposed to take place.

  Not on foot. But still, they walked east, following the needle’s general cues, until they reached the very edge of the dungeon segment. By now, they’d accumulated about fifty more cards, none useful, most common-grade, and kept them in the storage ring.

  At the segment’s edges, there were eight different crust-lifts in a ring around the level. One for each cardinal direction, and one for each diagonal as well. They took the lift that angled to the southeast, which was the closest they could get to acknowledging the Questforger Card’s will.

  Instead of an elevator on the interior, the lift boasted a long tunnel with a moving platform and an incomprehensible control panel. Before anyone could tell Jace not to, he activated the lift, and it shot off to the side.

  Again, gravity doubled, but it wasn’t just downward this time. Weight pushed from the side, keeping him grounded as the platform tried to slip out from beneath his feet. It was like trying to ride a train standing up, if the train was constantly accelerating and you had nothing to lean against.

  After a few minutes of intense pressure, though, the platform stopped. It deposited them in another crust-lift’s central chamber, only…a couple hundred kilometers (by Jace’s estimate) to the southeast.

  And in a different segment of the dungeon.

  They wandered the hallways of its tenth level as well, prowling toward the next crust-lift. This time, they aimed for a lift almost directly to the east.

  The different dungeon segment had a layout almost exactly like the first. Same shaped hallways, same overall floor plan, with sprawling chambers and winding tunnels in a vaguely circular tube through the crust.

  The only difference was the people buried. According to Kinfild and Ash, each different segment hosted a famous Luminian Wielder at its fifteenth level, and everyone else buried in the tombs were their families or retinue and loyal servants.

  “So then…who did the main tomb belong to?” Jace asked when they reached the third new dungeon segment—after travelling along an especially far crust-lift and sleeping a night away. “Like, the guy who put the core here and built this dungeon in the first place?”

  “I have no guesses,” Kinfild said.

  Lessa only offered a shrug, then reached up and rubbed her forehead, as if trying to massage away a headache.

  “I, in fact, have a suspicion,” said Ash.

  The three of them looked at him expectantly.

  “The Wall-king,” Ash explained. “He was a great Luminian Shield-aspect Wielder who built the Wall and provided the Shield-Aes accumulators for it with his own cards.”

  Jace swallowed. He couldn’t purge the paintings in the minor architect’s tomb from his mind—the depiction of the Wall decaying and collapsing.

  Did the dungeons have something to do with that?

  But Jace’s heart also sank. “So…this core and Halcyon Spear. They’d probably be a shield aspect, and good for a Wielder who used shields?”

  “We have yet to see,” said Ash. “But a weapon like that? Its power should not be underestimated, and it might have many uses for many Wielders.”

  “Were you hunting for it, too?” Jace asked.

  “As soon as I heard the Halcyon Spear was here…yes, it crossed my mind,” Ash muttered. “But should the Worldjumper take hold of it, I would not stand in his way.”

  Jace raised his eyebrows, not entirely convinced, but they continued on.

  For the next few days, they crossed the planet, travelling east and slightly south, using the horizontal crust-lifts to their advantage. They dispatched any automatons they found, and broke into any coffin they could, which nearly filled the storage ring half full with confiscated weapons and technique cards for reforging material.

  When a trio of [Level 36] Shield automatons ambushed them, Jace finally witnessed Ash’s reforged mythic card in action. He latched onto one automaton and drew it in with a pull of his hand, like he had it on a rope, then slashed through its midsection in a single cut with his Whistling Blade.

  Jace didn’t get the Aes from that specific automaton, but he reaped his Class’s rewards for killing the rest of the automatons they found.

  So much so that, by the end of the week, when they arrived at the central dungeon segment, he’d reached level thirty-six, and had ten more attribute shards to distribute.

  He barely considered it, though, as they marched into the central core segment of the dungeon.

  There was no other segment it could be. Outside the crust-lift, an enormous open gate awaited them, with a grand marble bridge and an arched hallway beyond—a hallway tall enough to fit the Luna Wrath in ten times its height, and wide enough to fit a soccer pitch.

  Above the main entryway, separating the crust-lift from the tomb, was an enormous golden shield sigil with a hammer engraved in its center and unreadable text carved above and below.

  “Woah…” Jace breathed. “I guess…I guess we’ve arrived.”