“Found the archives room, looks empty.” Larsen reported.

  “Don’t count on it, this illusion shit they can do is a pain. Just because it didn’t work the first time doesn’t mean we’re immune. Pipe me your feed.”

  A second passed and a crisp visual appeared at half-transparency over my HUD. When I moved too fast, or for too long, the image would rapidly disappear, but seated as I was on the floor, it remained solid.

  I watched Larsen’s helmet cam as she pied the doorway into the archives room.

  “Definitely the right place, I see those cubes you mentioned.” She said, walking her way around the threshold of the doorway to check the room from the outside.

  Pieing a door with a knife wasn’t exactly a smart idea, but not doing it was definitely a needless risk.

  She stepped forward into the room and swept the room with her scanners, feeding the results to my suit.

  Large and full of pillars that reached up to the tall ceiling, there were short pedestals arranged in a geometric pattern with silver cubes resting atop them. A quick count from Larsen’s suit put the count at thirty-seven different cubes, intact. There were eighty-two different pedestals though. Some cubes were left unmolested, their pedestals undisturbed, but many of them had shattered silver shards and melted metal still glowing from the heat.

  “Someone’s been through here, scorched earth, it looks like.” Larsen commented.

  “Got that right. Any signs of stealth?”

  “Room’s too hot for thermals. Standby, pulse out.”

  An amber ghost flickered into existence at the other end of the room, its gaze fixed on Larsen.

  “That who I think it is?” I asked. The figure was staring right at Larsen, making it look like it was also staring at me.

  “Looks like it.” She responded.

  “Alright, no games. I want to get Eric to a doctor soon, disable whoever that is by any means necessary.”

  The figure flickered, changing colour to the customary red of a hostile target.

  Eschewing a reply, Larsen charged and launched into a series of manuevers with her knife, bridging the gap between the two.

  I watched the display with a small amount of interest. The liberal use of magic I’d expected occurred in short order, flames and lightning flinging themselves with reckless abandon from the Davian’s fingertips.

  As the first flashy attack left his fingertips, the stealth around the man disappeared as well. Davian, face twisted into an incensed snarl pressed Larsen back with his magic.

  Most of his attacks found nothing but air from the start, but once Larsen was in his face, close enough to share the same breath of air had she been sans helmet, well, it was all over for him. Not wanting to kill him, she stepped towards him at a forty-five degree angle, letting a thrust of his hand harmlessly pass her by, flames reaching out from his palm to scorch nothing.

  As his splayed palm reached her she stepped past it and twisted his arm the wrong way, forcing him to the ground as she smashed the side of his knee with a sickening crunch and his legs went out from under him.

  He screamed and I refocused my attention on my actual surroundings.

  “Good work. I’ll meet you halfway.”

  “Roger. This guy was an overseer, right?”

  “That’s what he said.” I mentally shrugged, pulsing another scan of the surrounding tunnels. Nothing. Nothing but bodies, anyway, ones that weren’t moving.

  “In other words, he can’t fight worth a damn. He’s a bully, a thug, not a soldier.”

  “Makes sense, I guess. I suppose just expected more out of a literal wizard.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get your wish eventually, probably staring at a dozen battle-tested mages that have been fighting for over a decade.”

  “Are you… intentionally taunting Murphy?”

  “Hey, if the prick wants to stick on us on a planet with no internet connection and no shoothouse, the least I can do is annoy him.”

  I shook Eric gently to get his attention. “Can you stand?”

  “Maybe.” He said, looking himself over with undisguised disdain.

  “Well, you’re going to have to, we’re meeting up with Larsen and finding a way out of here.”

  He hauled himself upright at that, using my armoured shoulder to get his feet under him.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Let’s go and see if we can find an exit, shall we?” I nodded towards the corridor we’d come through.

  As we made our way out of the gate room, we passed the bodies of the guards we’d taken out and Eric bent to retrieve one of the fallen spears.

  “I’d prefer a sword, but this’ll do.” He said, when I gave him an appraising look.

  I followed my HUD marker, the wafer-thin floating line guiding me through the maze of corridors without obstructing my vision.

  I checked my suit’s power usage, and total percentage.

  “Proc, list power levels.”

  Power levels at twenty-six-point-four percent. Estimated time until critical status: Nineteen hours and fifty-five minutes at current usage levels.

  It was getting lower than I’d like. I had less than a day, quite probably a whole lot less since I anticipated a fight in the near future. It seemed like absolutely everything wanted to kill us and we couldn't go anywhere without finding something or someone that wanted to pick a fight with us. Maybe I'd have two or three more days if I didn’t use the more power-hungry sensors and turned off the artificial musculature.

  I’d fight like I was soaking wet, but maybe that was better that than running out of power. I wouldn’t be fighting constantly, so the power level probably wasn't as bad as it sounded, and I could stretch what I had a bit more if needed. Still, the knowledge weighed on my mind and I was thinking about it a lot.

  “Larsen, suit power?” I queried.

  After a moment, she responded.

  “Twenty-seven percent, about a day, give or take a few hours.”

  “Same story here. When we get back, I’ll rig up a few solar cells.” I checked my scanners again. The whole situation just felt… wrong. There was no one else around.

  “Did you get anything out of Davian yet?” I asked.

  “He’s surprisingly tight-lipped, but I did manage to get something out of him. He says the attack will come from below the capital.”

  “This planet, or at least this country do seem to like their subterranean fortresses. It’s a start, I guess.” I mused.

  “Mars isn’t so different, is it?” She asked.

  We reached the end of the unremarkable corridor, taking a left turn.

  “I guess not, but Mars doesn’t have an atmosphere and cosmic radiation’s a bitch. We build underground because it’s cheaper and easier. Doing it on an Earth-like planet’s a whole different ball-game though.”

  I checked my HUD. We’d make contact with each other in a few minutes. The place was bigger than I’d first thought, if that was possible and the complete lack of people—minus the ones we’d dealt with earlier—was creepy.

  “He tell you how to get out of here?” I asked.

  “Nope, but there has to be a way out. They had to have gotten in here to build this place somehow, right? I doubt they’d be quite so paranoid as to seal the exits after it was finished.”

  I’d seen Larsen’s armour from a while away, her translucent blue figure growing larger as we drew closer together. A few moments passed and I rounded the corner. I hadn’t paid attention to all of the fight, but Larsen’s armour had a few new scorch marks, some frayed straps and some scratches.

  Davian looked worse. A black eye, cracked ribs, dislocated arm, the list went on and my bioscan made sure it was a detailed one. He looked like he’d gone three rounds with a pissed off kangaroo. He was surprisingly quiet, but the defeated rage in his eyes was unmistakable.

  “Hasn’t said anything else?”

  “Haven’t had the time. Broke one of his fingers though, to get the answer to where the attack was coming from.”

  I glanced around quickly, letting my armour scan for stairs, or a ladder, any kind of route to access the surface. I didn’t see anything, but I could see the outer edge of the facility we were in, where the many corridors and side halls terminated. The entire place was basically just a big square mesh of corridors and rooms with one or two levels to it.

  “Yeah, well, don’t trust what comes out of his mouth. He’s probably just telling you what you want to hear to make sure you don’t put the hurt on him some more.”

  “You think he’s that committed?”

  “Don’t know. I’m not sure if they’re terrorists, or terrorists and something worse.” Larsen admitted.

  “Well, we’ll figure it out later. Knock him out, and keep an eye on him.”

  Fortunately, dragging an unconscious prisoner around wasn’t as difficult as it once was. With augmenting armour, we could do it easily. The trade-off of not having to deal with a prisoner resisting but needing to carry them around with you wasn’t as big of a deal as it once was.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  After a few moments of thinking, Larsen’s fist crashed into Davian’s head, turning him off like a light switch. She dragged him around with one hand gripping his collar, unconcerned for his comfort.

  Eric gave Davian a hateful glare—unconscious though he was—which I hadn’t missed in the slightest. I hoped that Eric had the common sense not to start shit while we were in the field. The last thing I needed was to break up a fight between the two while we were in combat.

  I made my way down the corridor, sensors, scanners and things of that nature on full alert, chief among them eyeball mark one.

  “This is fucking creepy.” I muttered to Eric, mirroring my earlier thoughts. He trailed slightly behind me to my right.

  “It is unnerving, I will admit. It reminds me of the headquarters under Wolfport, only disturbingly vacant.” He responded.

  Davian hadn’t said a word, which was a welcome surprise, considering what I would describe as his haughty—if not arrogant—attitude when we’d spoken before. Getting the shit kicked out of you tended to temper a man’s attitude though, so I wasn’t that surprised by his silence. It would probably hurt for him to speak, judging my the bruises and wounds Larsen had inflicted on him.

  “I’ve got something.” Larsen said, just an instant after an orange ‘potential threat’ marker popped up, dead ahead at the end of the passageway we were in.

  My eyes locked onto the marker, but it was behind the end of the passage, not in it. I frowned as the marker disappeared suddenly.

  “A door?” Eric wondered, voicing the question before I could manage it.

  “Or a false wall.” Larsen said.

  “Eric, if I break through that thing, there isn’t going to be a magic tripwire waiting to ruin my day, is there?”

  Eric cast his weary gaze around the corridor. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he seemed satisfied when he turned back to me. “I doubt it, not from this side, anyway. What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll see in a moment.” I manually calibrated the strength of my armour’s musculature putting most of the available power into my arms and shoulders. “Right, stand back you two.”

  I strode over to the wall, placing my armour’s palms flat on the stone wall. It wasn’t just a silly affectation; I was sending pulses of ground-penetrating radar and assorted other energies into and through the wall, revealing the other side.

  As I’d begun to suspect, the wall wasn’t actually there, not really. I quickly noticed that while some of my sensors read as there being a solid wall there, LIDAR and sonar for one, but that made some amount of sense, since sight and sound were the primary senses. My radar and ultrasound on the other hand said there was nothing in front of me, continuing through the so-called wall to map the rest of the passageway. The wall was an illusion, albeit a well-disguised one.

  I stood back from the wall and launched myself shoulder-first into the wall. Not hard, but enough to see if it was just a matter of a firm impact. I bounced off it with depressingly little effect.

  “Uh, you good, Edward?” Larsen asked, holding back a laugh.

  “Just fine.” I chuckled. “Another illusion. I’m assuming there’s a key or some kind of magic token that lets people through. I’m just going to have to cut through the thing.”

  Maybe Eric could’ve helped if he wasn’t shot to hell, but I still didn’t have a good idea of his talents, and I was personally a complete incompetent when it came to actually using magic. I wondered at that, was the magic Gift Eric had some kind of hereditary thing, or could it be acquired somehow?

  The shield giving the illusion of a solid wall wasn’t going to be as strong as the domed entry shield we’d teleported inside to get here. That had been a very obvious defense built mainly for strength and to resist an active attempt at breaking it. By comparison, this was probably just enough to prevent people from stumbling through without the use of force. Fortunately, I had force aplenty for the job.

  I queried the power core embedded in my knife’s hilt as I cocked my arm back. The blade wasn’t as bad off as my suit, thankfully, since it only needed to power up when I wanted the knife’s edge repaired. It’s power level sat comfortably in the green, barely any drain on its battery at all.

  Cutting through the wall with my knife was the work of moments and I shattered the illusion as the shield behind it failed to withstand the concentrated force of my knife.

  The illusion having been banished, I noticed that what it hid was decidedly different to anything I’d seen before. Rectangular doorways, circular platforms for gateways, they were all noticeably the same style of architecture. The metal archway in front of me had crisscrossing lines of silver and looked to be of a different style. Whether that was significant remained to be seen, though.

  I stepped through the archway, wary of a trap, muscles tensed like coiled springs, ready to throw me this way or that. My left arm collided with a wall, lightning flashing between two points in the space I’d just occupied.

  My eyes pivoted to the left, up the corridor, then I checked my surroundings.

  “You good?” Larsen called, from a few metres away. She’d kept a six-meter spacing between us, with Eric a similar distance behind her.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Watch yourself, there might be more.” I picked myself up off the ground, wary of another trap. Taking another bolt of lightning would ruin my day, and I’d already been hit by one before; I had no desire to repeat the experience. Honestly, I was still surprised my armour had held up to the stress, considering it wasn’t really designed to shrug off powerful electric shocks like that.

  I swept the area in front of me with different scans, satisfied after a moment that it was devoid of any threats I could detect. Unfortunately, I was very much aware there were threats I couldn’t yet detect. I held a hand out to Larsen and Eric, gesturing for them to stay back for a moment.

  Inching my way forwards, I encountered no more obstacles, coming to another threshold, this one a well-maintained rectangular doorway, the iron door ajar.

  “I think we’re clear. Move up.” I waved them forward, eyes on the section of my HUD that acted similarly to a rear-view mirror in a car. I could see the next section was a corridor running perpendicular to the one we were in.

  “Going left.” I said, as I stepped around the threshold of the door, pieing off the left side of the doorway. If I was going to encounter something, it would be a lot easier to throw myself to the side than backwards.

  Fortunately, all that greeted me when I entered the next area was a series of what looked like safe deposit boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling on each side. The walls were covered in them.

  “This isn’t a bank, so… a crematorium?” I wondered, stepping into the hallway proper.

  “These are catacombs. Space outside the walls may be plentiful but no one would dare venture out there to bury bodies. It is easier and safer to store their ashes here.” Eric explained somberly from behind me.

  “Just how old is this place?” Larsen asked.

  “The catacombs, or the city?”

  “Either.”

  I walked slowly towards one end of the hallway, a quick glance at a certain section of my HUD giving me a view of what was behind me.

  “Most of our cities are older than living memory. The most recent was perhaps seventy years ago, built near the southern border. Many of the cities nearer to the capital are hundreds of years old, however. I’m afraid I cannot say for certain how old these catacombs are, but certainly a century or more.”

  “How many people are here?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t be certain, not knowing which city this is, but upwards of half a million, perhaps.”

  I considered that, then pressed on. “With me,” I jerked my head towards the end of the corridor. “I want to find a way to the surface. I guess we’re lucky this place was built beneath a city and not an ocean or something.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Having our own Atlantis would be great. It’d be very effective concealment.” Larsen snorted.

  “Yeah, concealment’s a word. I bet it’d conceal our corpses brilliantly when the seams failed and the pressure imploded our lungs. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it would be to build and maintain?” I shot back.

  “Atlantis?” Eric interjected.

  I pulsed a series of scans, spying a spiral staircase some distance away, a dozen corridors down, perhaps ninety metres or so.

  “Yeah, there’s a myth from our homeworld that tells a tale of a mythical city that sank beneath the ocean. I don’t remember all the details.” I shrugged. I’d never been one for mythology. My focus had been on martial history and philosophy, not mythology, religion and ancient history.

  “You spoke of building under the ocean as if it was possible…” Eric trailed off.

  “It is. I admit, it would be a pain, certainly more so than building on land, or in space, but it would be possible.” I grinned, taking a certain amount of delicious satisfaction at shocking the man, again. It was almost becoming a game, to see how hard I could hit him with what to him must’ve seemed like patently impossible statements of fact.

  “Space?” Eric’s single uttered word completely shifted my train of thought. Another glance at my HUD.

  I mentally chastised myself, sighing audibly. “Larsen, would you mind explaining it to him?”

  I didn’t relish the thought of trying to explain the history of aerial flight, rocket propulsion, the space race and a hundred other things just to put ‘space’ into the proper context.

  As I examined the tunnel I was in, I had my suit map me a route forward. The range on sonar and ultrasonic wasn’t infinite, but it was decent. I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought, but the catacombs were remarkably well-maintained. Very little dust, damage, or debris was around. I wondered if there was some magical equivalent of a cleaning robot, or if someone did it all by hand, or by magic.

  We walked along in silence, well, I did anyway—Larsen was busy trying to explain the concept of a star to Eric.

  It was uneventful and I noticed very little in the way of other escape routes. Clearly, that false wall had been used to get in and out of the facility, but I didn’t see any signs of anyone. It wasn’t like the movies, I couldn’t see the heat of footsteps, especially in an area that saw regular traffic.

  “Do you think they teleported out? Someone had to have come this way, right?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Eric disagreed, “they could’ve used gates to escape, but anyone who came this way would likely have been long gone by the time we discovered the catacombs.”

  I grunted. “My armour agrees, I don’t see any heat signatures that might indicate foot traffic. The stairs are just up ahead, time to find out where we are.”

  Eric quickened his pace to keep up with me, Larsen merely moved off to the side slightly, dragging Davian around wordlessly and taking advantage of the wide passages of the catacombs. I’d practically forgotten he was with us and truth be told, he was a lot more pleasant knocked out than awake.

  As we made our way up the spiral staircase, my suit got better scans and my ground-penetrating radar did a better job of mapping the space between us and the surface. It was definitely a city up there, a long, long way up. It seemed the catacombs were buried deep here, whichever city ‘here’ was, a few hundred metres by my suit’s best estimates.

  “Who the hell puts a graveyard down thirty flights of goddamn stairs?” I scowled. It wasn’t that I was physically tired, more that I was sick of walking up stairs that never seemed to end. Had the people who built this place heard of elevators? Hell, they had teleporters—gateways, they could’ve used just as easily. Instead, for some reason that still remains a mystery to me, they used stairs.

  Larsen laughed. “Come on, Ed, maybe this city has a really good masseuse. It’s not going to take that long to get topside.”

  “Are you saying I’m stressed out?” I asked her, eyes narrowing slightly.

  “A little bit, yeah.”

  I chewed on that for a moment.

  “I guess I am, a little. What about you?”

  “You mean, am I stressed out and in need of a massage?” She laughed again. “This is relaxing, Edward. There’s not a single dipshit butterbar out here who thinks he’s God’s gift to the Corps. Fighting a vampire is new and challenging, sure, but I could say the same for a lot of the frontier.”

  I glanced behind me, stopping for a moment. “You holding up okay, Eric?”

  “Well enough, though I will be spending several days, if not weeks, sleeping. This is exhausting.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d carry you if I could, but I don’t want to be lugging you around if we run into trouble.” I laughed, imagining that ridiculous scenario playing out.

  It wasn’t long before we reached the apex of our journey, walking out into a rather normal-looking reception area. The man at the front desk didn’t even seem to notice us, but I quickly gestured for Eric to take a seat, before I shouldered the front door open and made a beeline for the nearest guard. The city was practically indistinguishable from the others I’d seen, very little stood out to me at a cursory glance.

  “You there! Come quickly! My friend’s been attacked!” I shouted as I approached. The guard started, but followed me with only the briefest pause, his halberd gripped in both hands.

  “Where was he wounded?”

  I grimaced. “Hell if I know, I don’t know a damned thing about magic.” I said, as I entered the building again, Larsen trying to placate a distraught receptionist. Clearly no mage, just a young man with a slightly stunned expression on his face.

  I turned to the guard as he came into the room, vestiges of surprise from my earlier declaration still on his face. As soon as he saw Eric though, he went straight from surprise to shock.

  “My lord, what happened to you? And who are these… people?” His fist crashed against his shoulder, distress and concern plain in his voice.

  “There is no time for that.” Eric growled at the guard, before clutching his leg and hissing. “You need to get me to a healer, and send these two to the capital immediately. Get some more guards and secure this building from top to bottom, the tunnels have a concealed entrance to a hostile underground base. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, my lord!”

  “Then be quick about it, and get me the Captain of the Guard; lives are at stake.”

  I watched as the guard sprinted outside into the street, bellowing for more guards to join him. I took a look over at Eric. He looked paler than he did before, but not due to blood loss, just sheer weakness, I think.

  I looked at Davian's limp form, resisting the urge to insult him under my breath, or worse, break something important of his, like his brain. If we’d lost Eric to Davian’s torture… Well, regardless of if we returned with Davian or not, I don't think we’d have ended up on the good side of Lilith or her government and I certainly don’t think our alliance would have panned out, Eric being who he was. I needed to see to it that Eric made it home safe, along with the elusive fugitive we’d finally hunted down.

  Something told me that wouldn't be as easy a task as I'd hoped it would be. August seemed to throw up roadblocks and giant pains in my ass at every turn and I expected just getting back to our base of operations would be far from a cakewalk. There was nothing to be done about it though, I'd just have to keep things simple and fight my battles one at a time.