For the next few days, they did nothing but descend. They gathered scrap and spare technique cards from the tombs of the twelfth and thirteenth levels, of course, which Rallemnon seemed not to care about. At least, he hadn’t gone out of his way to open tombs and raid them, not did he pick up any of the remains of the automatons he’d smashed through on his way down.

  The trail of destruction he’d left was obvious. But they didn’t follow it exactly. No sense in stepping exactly where he had stepped, not when they had a card that pointed them directly at their target.

  If they could take a more direct route, they did. They’d make up for his head start simply by taking a perfect, straight line.

  But the automatons were growing greater and greater in number, and they attacked not in groups of three or more—usually two regular automatons and one flying hunter automaton, which always tried to apply Curses of some sort.

  It meant a nearly constant flow of Aes. Jace absorbed as much as he could from the automatons, and what he couldn’t get from them, he took from the tombs. The deeper they travelled, the more important the Luminians in the coffins were, and the more treasures they were buried with.

  Not just technique cards, but elixirs too. Some were temporary attribute enhancing elixirs, which Jace had little interest in (he didn’t want a temporary boost in attributes; that felt like a recipe for disaster when it wore out).

  But the real treasure elixirs were those that provided a permanent boost of raw Aes. They didn’t have a difficult extraction process, not like the accumulator nodes, and they provided a boost much greater than the automatons.

  With one elixir, a vial of glowing gold liquid with a cork stopper, he took in enough Aes to pass the next phase of Soul-Circle Opening—the sixth stage. Not enough to reach the seventh stage, though now, his advancement progress sat at 56.7%. He was close.

  As they delved to the bottom of the thirteenth level, Perril said, “Once you have the Halcyon Spear, what’re you gonna do with it? Sell it?”

  Jace shrugged. “I…wasn’t really sure. The thing is, I’ve got four people helping me, now, and we kinda have to split the loot.”

  They were walking down a straight hallway, following the whims of the Questforging card’s pointer needle. Not much to look out for, and plenty of time to talk. “I can’t just take it all, and you guys need equipment and resources, too.”

  Kinfild raised his hands, then said, “Sadly, Mr. Baldwin, I will not take resources from you—not at this hour. My share goes to you, as was my pledge to the Crimson Table. Whatever is left of my institution, I intend to honour it.”

  “Okay, then…” Jace sighed. “Lessa can’t use cards or elixirs, but we’re working on that. Still, Perril and Ash, you two have to want something, right? Or…you know, being what you are…” Jace stared intensely at Ash, hoping he’d get the point—he wasn’t sure if Perril knew Ash’s lineage and didn’t need to out the man unnecessarily. “You could probably use some more resources.”

  “I have acquired some elixirs of my own before I contacted you,” said Ash. “However, my abilities strictly limit my processing speeds. I cannot integrate Aes as quickly anymore, considering how difficult my aspect is to create Aes for. So, as I descend I have been processing Aes. You will likely notice my level increase soon. It simply is not as easy as having a starship’s hypercore in your gut.”

  Jace chuckled. “I…suppose that helps convert Aes to the right aspect faster.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So…you don’t want anything?”

  “If we find armour of any sort, I might take it, though the chances of ancient Luminian armour fitting any of us without tampering is a stretch.”

  Jace nodded slowly. “Yeah…that’d be a problem.”

  “But if you gather enough steel, or a previously enchanted suit of armour,” Perril suggested, “you could have a weaponsmith convert it into a better product for you, which fits better and has more appropriate enhancements.”

  “And you, Perril,” Jace added, “I imagine you’d hope to get something out of this, right?”

  “We’ve already dealt in a couple transactions, aye?” Perril asked. “Well, consider this: I helped your friend out of a desire to help her, out of my compulsions. But you helped me escape, and I haven’t paid that back yet, aye?”

  Jace glanced down at his hand. “No…”

  “So consider that our first deal. Then, if I stick with you folks afterward is yet to be seen, but I wouldn’t mind a few elixirs and some Luminian steel of my own to pawn off for Solars, get myself back on my feet.”

  “Makes sense,” Jace said.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “But, once you do have the Halcyon Spear, you’re going to need a quick escape,” Ash said. “Do you have anything planned?”

  “We have a starship, but we’ve strayed quite far from it,” said Kinfild. “If I found a scavenger’s transmitter, if they have any, we could signal Err-Seventeen, and he could pilot the Luna Wrath over to us.”

  “I brought a wireless transmitter,” Ash said. “But it won’t work with these shields up—for sending messages offworld or onworld. The shield-Aes is too disruptive to our communications frequencies.” He crossed his arms. “Sadly, I only learned that once I placed it in my storage ring. Now it is just taking up space.”

  “But once we take out the dungeon core,” Jace said, “the planetary shields will go down. That’ll have to stop the disruptions, too.”

  “I would hope.”

  “Then that’s our escape plan,” Lessa proclaimed. “Kinfild should be able to patch the transmitter in to the right…I dunno, signal channel thingy.”

  For the next few hours, they continued walking, dealing with automatons, dodging traps, and retrieving relatively useless cards from the average Luminian tombs. Perril gathered scrap, and they filled the storage ring with useful mechanical components.

  It wasn’t long before they arrived at the crust-lift—which would bring them to the fourteenth level—but they stopped in a small room a few intersections away from the main lift’s chamber.

  It was getting rather late, according to Kinfild’s measure of time, and Jace needed a good rest. Besides, with five of them now, they didn’t have to take as long of watches.

  Jace, being an early riser, took the last watch, after a restful night. He paced back and forth across their little room, hunting for any sign of tampering or trouble. For the first hour, there was nothing, and he spent the time distributing the next four attribute shards he’d accumulated. Two in Resistance, bringing it to sixty-six, and two in Vitality, bringing it to fifty-four.

  But in his second hour, the hallway outside began rattling, and the floor shook subtly.

  He didn’t need to extend his senses far to find three automatons outside. They trundled down along the hallway outside, making straight for this room.

  They’d wake the others, and Jace couldn’t have that.

  For one, the others needed to rest and recover. They’d all been using lots of techniques, and they needed as much sleep as they could get. For another, Perril was making a replacement hand for him, and she needed to be well-rested in order to build such a precise instrument.

  And Jace needed the practice, anyway.

  He drew his Whistling Blade and held it in his left hand, then activated his fortification technique.

  In the dim light of the hallway outside, two shield-aspect automatons marched toward him, and one gravity-aspect hunter automaton hovered along behind them. It probably counted as a Curse-delivering automaton, but it was only level thirty-five, and he’d increased his resistance significantly since his first encounter with a hunter automaton.

  If the past three hunters he’d dealt with couldn’t land a Curse on him, this one wasn’t either.

  Jace was about to just charge in, practicing with his fortification card, and chop them up a little—it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge, not since he’d reached level thirty-eight, but he stopped.

  It being too easy wouldn’t help him. He still had other cards to practice with and abilities to learn.

  He also activated the Questforger card. It shouldn’t really have had a combat purpose, and he knew exactly where his main threats were. But there was something more about this card, he was sure of it, and maybe if he used it closer to a target, he could figure it out.

  Technically, it was a Curse, but he didn’t have any Potency. But that was a problem for later, because these automatons didn’t seem to have much Resistance. They’d focussed more heavily on Vitality—or their creators had designed them with more Vitality in mind.

  And he still had to figure out what sort of Curse it put on them. That too.

  He focussed intently on the automatons, targeting them instead with his technique. When he activated the card, a wave of perception washed off him, spreading in a sphere outward.

  It illuminated them with a golden sheen that only he could see, like it had before, but now, time seemed to slow. He couldn’t focus on all of them—his brain just wouldn’t let him. Two became fuzzy, and instead, he thought about the hovering hunter, which would still be his biggest problem.

  Time slowed more and more, or perhaps his mind was speeding up. A tether of energy passed between him and his target, but that tether reached a little farther.

  It stretched into the beyond, not a physical place, but something deeper, which he couldn’t truly comprehend. The Split, hyperspace, the alternate mesh beneath everything that governed all existence.

  But it didn’t just know the present—it also knew the past and the future.

  In a flash, Jace understood. Before the hunter drone could even attack, he saw exactly where it was going to increase gravity, where it wanted to grip him with an invisible hand and slam him into the ground, and he stepped aside.

  It missed. The burst of gravity thrummed behind him, catching empty air. Specks of green Aes washed out in a beam, projected from the automaton’s core, but it accomplished nothing.

  “Oh,” he said, then his lips slipped up into a smile. “That’s neat.”

  But the automaton registered his dodge, and it prepared another attack. This time, the card prophesized a sweeping pulse, a gravity-Aes curse, carving an arc across the hallway. Nearly impossible to dodge.

  He could tank it. That’s what his Resistance was for. But he didn’t want to. There had to be a way to dodge it.

  He could jump, maybe, or press his back right up against the wall.

  His perception kept lengthening, and time felt like it was slowing, but he couldn’t explain it. He thought and thought and thought, but he couldn’t come up with a solution.

  Then, finally, the bubble popped, and his technique sputtered out. The card hovered above his hand, the runes at its core glowing red-hot from overuse, and the entire thing steamed.

  The technique passed over him, trying to Curse him with increased gravity, but he resisted it.

  He’d have to do this the old-fashioned way, then.