They all agreed that they needed to leave immediately. Soon, someone would get suspicious that the medical tent had been closed, or worse, there would be more injured scavengers who needed attention, and they’d all get caught.

  Now that the scavengers—and possibly Rallemnon—had cleared out the eleventh level, they would have a smooth route, and they needed to aim directly for the next crust lift.

  After explaining briefly how the questforger card worked—so Perril would trust its directions, mostly—Jace triggered it, focussing on the idea of the next crust-lift, and charted their course.

  As he triggered it, though, he sensed a pull. Something distant, something dragging on him, beckoning him into the far-away. It wasn’t the same as using a hyperjump. More like a vault core calling him away to deal with darklings, only there were no darklings.

  But the more he focussed on the second nested function, the stronger it resonated. The vault core had been melted into the material of the card. Its essence infused the card’s very weight, and now, he had to trigger the residual function.

  He cast a wave of perception out around the nearby dungeon, his senses extending farther than they ever would’ve regularly. Whenever they passed a hiding, inactive automaton, or a patrol of scavengers, they lit up yellow-gold in his mind. He couldn’t make out many details except their size and general shape.

  It was creating a model of his surroundings in his mind, and revealing the location of the enemies—all the enemies the Split detected.

  “Woah,” was all he could muster.

  But, even then, he got the feeling that wasn’t all it could do. Identifying enemies was one thing, but that was just enhancing his senses. It was locking onto them, and it wanted him to do something more with them, he just couldn’t say what that was.

  Something more to do with the vault core, that was certain.

  “Do we have a route?” Kinfild asked. He picked up Lessa again, who was still unconscious. They’d wrapped her in a blanket, along with her equipment and her plasma rifle.

  “I know which way to go,” Jace confirmed.

  “Once we get to the twelfth level,” Perril said, “I’m expecting that was stop and hunt for mechanical components.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Jace said with a grin. “We’ll be doing plenty of looting. We just need to sneak out of here.”

  When they reached the crust-lift to the twelfth level, Lessa began stirring. When they were in the crust-lift, she began mumbling incoherently. Finally, when they arrived at the bottom and darted into an alcove, a sheltered room filled with Aes accumulation cells, she opened her eyes.

  Jace only barely noticed. Turned out, guardian automatons were awfully protective of the crust-lift’s power source, even though Jace had no plans on disrupting it.

  He, Ash, and Perril dealt with the onslaught of nearly ten [Level 40] automatons. While Perril didn’t have any weapons, her draining combo still damaged the automatons and made them slower, and would eventually have destroyed them if Jace and Ash didn’t cut through them with Whistling Blades.

  After all was said and done, Jace had reached level thirty-seven, and he hadn’t butchered the automatons too badly (even though he’d been swinging with his left hand, and was less precise). There had to be some useable parts in the scrap heaps.

  While Perril went searching through the heap of scrap, Jace rushed back to Lessa and knelt beside her.

  “Hey, you big idiot,” she whispered, sitting up slowly. “I didn’t die too badly, did I?”

  “Thank you for saving me,” he said, looking straight into her eyes with earnest. “I mean it. I don’t know if I could’ve taken another hit back there.”

  “Looks like you returned the favour, so we’ll call it even,” she said. She rubbed her stomach. “Like nothing happened, though by the Split, it doesn’t feel like it.”

  “I’d bet. Take it easy.”

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  “Absolutely not. I’m hungry.”

  “Okay, well, that’s an acceptable reason to not take it easy.”

  Kinfild chuckled, then pulled open Jace’s backpack and retrieved a set of rations. “Don’t eat too quickly. You’re still recovering.” He passed her the rations, then backed away. “I will leave you two to it.”

  “You guys better not treat me like a fragile little…I dunno. Fragile.” Lessa crossed her arms across her stomach. “Better not.”

  “In fact?” Jace smiled. “You’re gonna love our plan. Guaranteed.”

  “Do I get my Solars back if I don’t?”

  “You haven’t paid me in the first place.”

  Jace then explained their idea to her, trying to be as detailed as possible. If he was thinking about the best team they could make, they had him and Ash as front-liners, to keep the enemies busy, and they had Kinfild as a support—to curse and weaken their enemies. Perril could heal and be a defensive support, if she stayed with them.

  But it was just a marksman…or some sort of ranged damage that they were missing. A single plasma rifle was good, but if they could give Lessa an extreme upgrade?

  After hearing the plan, though, she blinked a few times. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.

  “I’m sorry!” Jace exclaimed, raising his hands. He backed away slightly. “If you don’t want, then—”

  “No,” she whispered, then lunged forward and caught him in a tight hug. As tight as she could manage in her current state. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t resist. “No, no, I love it. If we can make it work. I just…everyone always told me I shouldn’t be adventuring. No one thought I could do it. That I’d need magic if I was going to find my way offworld. You’re…you guys are the only ones who believed in me and let me have my own choices.”

  She sniffled, then rested her head against his chest. One of her horns nearly poked his eye—his good eye—but he turned his head to the side just in time. The tip of her pointed ear pressed against one of his chest bandages, and the scar stung more than usual, but he didn’t flinch away.

  “You’re welcome, Less,” he whispered back, then wrapped his arms around her as well. She was surprisingly warm, and her lifeflame flared back to its full brightness. “I promise, we’ll get you through this.”

  She stayed there for a few seconds, before finally pulling away and returning to the ration packet Kinfild had taken out for her.

  She poked her stomach again. “Ugh, feels like there should be something there. A scar or something.” Then, with a soft laugh, she added, “Thought my resort-going days were going to be over.”

  Jace rolled his eyes. “Yeah, ‘cause you went to so many of those.” He smiled. “Besides, you’d still look very nice.”

  “Then maybe that’s a hint.”

  “All the more reason to make it out of here alive, I’d say.” He rubbed his shoulder nervously, then glanced at the others. “They’re filling up your storage ring with scrap. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “As long as some of that scrap goes toward making you a hand,” she said in between mouthfuls of food. “You’ll need a new one sometime, too.”

  “I think Perril is still okay with making me a new hand.”

  “What about your face?”

  Jace chuckled at the bluntness, then lifted his bandage slightly. “I might need a bit of a mask.”

  “It’s not…that bad,” Lessa said. “It’ll look pretty neat when it heals up, though. Maybe grow a beard. Or maybe I’ve just read too many romance holocomics where the guy has a cool scar.”

  He rubbed his chin. Given how long they’d been down here, he should’ve gotten a bit more of a beard, but then again, blond hair took a while to turn into a proper beard, and he’d never tried letting it grow out. “Not sure if beards are my thing.”

  “Not the scruffy type, are you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Are you two done over there?” Perril asked. “We’ve gathered everything useful over here.”

  “One second,” Jace said. “I’ll let you finish eating. Come meet us when you’re ready. And hey, if you need a lift, we can always carry you.” He said the last sentence with a massive grin, and it was Lessa’s turn to roll her eyes.

  “And to think I missed the glory of it all!” she lamented jokingly. “Don’t worry about me, alright? You got your few seconds of worry, and now it's time to turn myself into a superhuman candlefolk almighty warrior.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Jace stood up and walked over to Kinfild, Ash, and Perril. “Get anything good?”

  “A few automaton joints I can make use of,” Perril said. “Was just reviewing the equipment your friend here has, aye?” She pointed her thumb at Ash. “We can cobble together a welding setup once we have all the components in place.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “I figure we’ll work on your hand first,” she said. “Seeing as you’ll need to use a sword sooner than later. While I want to help your girlfriend—”

  “She’s not…”

  “Sure. So while I want to help her, and I will, I think we need to work on you first.”

  Jace chewed his bottom lip. “Did you tell her I was a worldjumper?” He looked at Kinfild, then Ash.

  “They did, but that wasn’t why,” Perril said. “For our sake, that’s one thing, but because I like your spirit, and I think you deserve a new hand.” She reached up and rubbed her neck. “Oh, it’s good to not be a scavenger lackey anymore, I’ll tell you that for free, with full use of my abilities.”

  Jace nodded. “Understood. Then…we need to keep moving. We’ll deal with the automatons as quickly as we can, and I’ll accumulate as much Aes as I can, but ultimately, it’s a race to the bottom. Rallemnon is looking for the spear, and so are we.”

  He couldn’t let their enemies have the weapon, but likewise, he couldn’t let Rallemnon, a servant of the Generous Hand and the darkness, go free. If nothing else, they’d rid the galaxy of a terrifying foe.