I wave away the notification and focus on where the mass stood. A concave base with dozens of pulsating plastic wires now holds nothing, but the plastic connected to it didn’t heed my command. It doesn't feel like the mass did, either, so whatever modifications the system did to turn it inert must’ve been enough to remove my control over it.

  “I guess I won’t be commanding everything to turn into coins.” I chuckle to myself as I try to set a single hex into my coin holster–and fail miserably. “Hexagonal shape doesn’t fit into the round hole. Should’ve seen that coming. Pearl, do you think we can tinker with it?”

  “If we have the materials, yes. But we’ll have to go find them somewhere.” Pearl turns and stares at where the mass once was. “Looking at that thing made me nauseous, but now that it’s gone, I kind of feel… wrong. Once the system figured out it couldn’t make new shellraisers, it instantly pivoted to using them as materials. I just… it makes me feel like we’re… absolutely nothing to it.”

  “You were dangerous enough for it to hate you.”

  Pearl shakes her head and laughs. “That’s one way to look at it, I guess. Time to go back up?”

  “What?” Clutter swivels to look at us. “We haven’t even found the heretic yet! How can we leave now?”

  “Because the heretic isn’t here. Look around you; this place only has the prototype prison and the fake shellraiser. Unless there’s something in those lighthouse-like towers, we’ll have to find another underground space like this if we want to find the heretic.”

  “But… but…” Clutter frowns and glances at one of the towers. “The quest said we were eventually supposed to come here. If it wasn’t to look for the heretic, then what else would it be? Does anyone but you two even care about shellraisers enough for this to be significant?”

  Pearl glares daggers at Clutter. His eyebrows shoot to his forehead as he stammers out an apology for his piss-poor phrasing. I sigh and shake my head before Pearl can verbally rip him a new one.

  “I get what you mean, but don’t say it like that. Makes it sound like nobody gives a shit about us.”

  He snaps his mouth shut and nods vigorously. Pearl grumbles in annoyance, but seems like she’s going to let it drop. Clutter does have a point, though; the quest was going to eventually give us access to this place. So what was the point of it? Revealing that the plastic is made of fake shellraisers isn’t a hard-hitting revelation to anyone but us, and the quest wasn’t made for us at all. Plus, we didn’t even have possession of the fake shellraisers in the first place.

  I shake my head and nod at one of the lighthouse-like towers. “Let’s go take a look from the top. If there’s anything else here, that’s where we’ll see it.”

  Clutter nods and runs off before anyone utters another word. I roll my shoulder as I follow him towards one of the lighthouse towers further from where we came in, flipping a single six through my fingers as I go. The thing feels so much different from the other coins; almost like it’s already an extension of my will even before I push a spell into it. It also reminds me a little too much of the dead shellraiser we found with the beacon.

  Pearl tugs on my earlobe as I shove aside some plastic cables to clear my path. I raise an eyebrow to show I’m listening. She clears her throat and points at my coin.

  “You should make sure they actually… work.” She says slowly.

  Now why’s she worried about that? “Is there something I should know?”

  She frowns and shakes her head. “It’s just a feeling. Hopefully I’m wrong.”

  “But if you aren’t, we need to find out sooner than later.” I palm the coin and focus on pushing a shield into it. My thoughts slip into the coin with unbelievable ease. The spell smacks against it like a fly ramming into a glass door. “...Damn, you’re right. What’s wrong with this thing?”

  I flip the coin over and try again. The spell struggles to push its way in, but the material of the coin absolutely refuses to let the magic in. But my thoughts–my intents and commands–slip right in once again. I frown and flip the thing to double it’s Worth, just to see if it’s magic resistant for some reason, but it doubles just fine.

  “Hrm. Clutter, slow down a sec.” I say to Clutter’s back. “Something's weird here.”

  He tilts his head to the side and turns to face us. His eyes trail down to the coin in my hand, then back up to me and Pearl. “The coin isn’t working with your spells?”

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  I raise an eyebrow. “How’d you know?”

  “Because you’re holding a six Worth coin.” He states simply.

  …Am I missing something here? “Yes. I am.”

  Clutter fidgets awkwardly. “Um… you never told me this, but Illumisia did, so don’t get mad at me–she said your spells only work on coins up to five Worth. Unless you evolved them and forgot to tell us, I mean, in which case ignore everything I just said.”

  I blink dumbly and pull open my Class Card. All my spells are still greyed out, but his words ring true–shield and projectile must only work with a five-Worth coin or less. It’s all I’ve been able to make until now, so I’ve never even run into this problem before. Which means all these new coins only work with purification and relocation. Except… I also have two spell evolutions I put off for pretty much no reason at all. Once I un-grey my spells, that’s the first thing to do.

  One last attempt sends purification into the coin. It slips in without a problem. I shake my head and chuckle to myself as I stick it in my pocket and motion for Clutter to keep walking. He shoots me a smile and bounds off, leaving me to catch up to him as he closes in on the lighthouse tower. Up close, it isn’t that impressive. A tower that’s a little shorter than ours, with a much larger area at the top with what looks like a lightbulb set inside of it. There isn’t a visible entrance, but a lot of the plastic cables snake up and around the tower before disappearing into various parts of it.

  “Looks even more like a lighthouse up close.” I note as we come to a stop. “Wonder what it was lighting the way for.”

  “It could be a watchtower, too. To make sure things don’t get in or out without people seeing them.” Pearl suggests with a grimace. “They did have something pretty valuable in here, after all.”

  Clutter puts his hand on the wall and opens a hexagonal door. “Maybe they just liked the shape; I’m not sure the system could be really worried about anything breaking in or out from a place like this, after all. Not now, at least.”

  Not now, sure, but maybe before this place disappeared off the face of the planet. And if that’s the case, it becomes a question of what the system was defending against–and when it built those defences. Because after the shellraisers were defeated and Illumisia was captured, the system had no real enemies. So it must’ve been before then.

  I duck into the lighthouse before the door closes behind Clutter and find myself in the middle of a landing room much like our tower’s. The stairs are much nicer, though; closed in with a handrail, actually carved into the side instead of just jutting out of it, and without any space between them where we could slip and fall through. Plastic cables breach the walls at random all the way up to the top, all of them continuing into that area where I can’t see or feel them.

  Clutter starts for the stairs without saying a word. I follow closely behind as I study this place a little more. Nothing jumps out at me, which is a little surprising, but the closer I look the more I notice a shape repeated again and again; carved into the stairs, the actual shape of the lighthouse itself, the handrail, even the holes the wires come in from. All hexagons.

  “Hey.” I say to get the other two’s attention. “Did we ever figure out what’s with all the hexagons?”

  Pearl shakes her head. Clutter shrugs. Well, that’s that, then.

  We climb the rest of the way in relative silence, and once we emerge from the stairwell, exactly what you’d expect is waiting for us at the top. A giant crystalline prism connected to a light source, which is in turn connected to dozens of plastic cables that litter the floor like sleeping snakes. A glassed-in room with nothing else to show is all that remains, and from where I’m standing, it sure looks like there’s nothing else to this underground laboratory-slash-whatever it actually is.

  I nod at the window. “Either of you see anything I missed?”

  From the sag in Clutter's shoulders, that’s a ‘no’. I stare at the wall for a solid thirty seconds, trying to make sense of this weird-ass place we found ourselves in, but the only answer I can come to is that this was made specifically for the quest. Obviously all this shit wasn’t made in a blank room, but it was definitely put here to emphasize them. And to get some kind of a reward from the quest.

  “Hey, Clutter, can you access the tower controls from here?”

  His expression shifts from dejected to interested in a split second. “Yes. Why? Wait, do you think I could connect this place to our tower?! That’s a great idea! I’ll try it right now!”

  I step out of the way of Clutter nearly sprinting towards the prism with all the plastic wires connected to it. Since that was what I was about to ask him to do, I keep my mouth shut as he plants one hand on the prism and opens up his Class Card with the other. Truth is, I highly doubt much of anything will happen. But this place has to have rewards for regular people in this quest, right?

  A burst of grey light flares from the prism. I grimace and raise a hand to block the light, but before my hand even reaches my face, it’s gone. And by it, I mean the underground grey facility. In its place a sea of walls sprawls out endlessly. I blink in surprise and look up. Sure enough, the not-right-sky vomits rain like a broken sprinkler struggling to cover an entire parched yard. My jaw hangs open in disbelief as I turn to face the center of the yard where the mass of shellraisers once stood. Our tower is nestled perfectly where it once was, plastic cables already twisting around it as dull magic worms its way into the thing.

  Clutter grins with an eager laugh. “I can’t believe that worked!”

  “Yeah. Neither can I.” I state with disbelief. “Maybe now we’ve got enough power to make some grey magic.”

  “Yeah! Let’s go see!”

  He rushes off without waiting. I share a look with Pearl, who returns a near mirror of what I’m feeling. Whatever this means for our tower… we weren’t supposed to get it for a long while. This could change a lot of things.