Chương 20: 1 - The 11th floor incident (part 1)

The wasteland was worse up close. From the ledge, it had looked like a dead industrial zone. Walking through it, it was a graveyard. The rusted structures weren't just collapsed. They were melted, warped by heat so intense it had fused metal beams into abstract sculptures. The canals that had once carried something, be it coolant, fuel, or whatever else kept a civilization running, were bone dry and crusted with residue that crumbled under our boots like old scabs. We moved in the same loose formation as before.

Sarah at the front, shield catching the faint bioluminescent light from above. Yukiko, a few paces behind and to the right, a shadow with a katana. Henrik in the middle, glasses flickering as he scanned everything. Astarielle, Liu, and I were bringing up the rear. Nobody spoke. The fortress dominated the horizon ahead, growing larger with every step. It was one of those distances that looked shorter than it was. We walked for twenty minutes, and it didn't seem any closer.

"Something moved," Yukiko said. She didn't point. She didn't need to. I pushed power into my eyes. The colors flipped, and the wasteland lit up with mana signatures. Dozens of them. Small, fast, clustered in the wreckage to our left.

"Skitterers," I said.

"Twenty-something. In the structure at ten o'clock." Henrik raised his staff.

"Formation—" Three streaks of crimson flame cleaved the air above us. They hit the wreckage, each exploding. Metal and sand blew up into the air. [ENEMIES DEFEATED — CORRODED SKITTERERS (24)] [Drops: Corroded Chitin (Common) (24), Servo Fragment (Common) (8), 34 copper, Sparking Mandible (Uncommon) (x1)] Sarah didn't even turn around.

"Could we perhaps, just once, engage the enemy with a plan?"

"Why bother?" Astarielle shouted back.

"The end result is the same, it's just a lot faster if we cast spells first, and discuss philosophy second. As we are doing right now." I snorted, and so did Henrik. We kept walking. The terrain got worse. Deep fissures split the ground, forcing detours around crevasses that dropped into darkness. Pipes jutted from the earth at odd angles, some still leaking a viscous fluid that smelled like battery acid. We passed the shell of what might have been a vehicle, or a machine, but it was military in nature, either way.

Henrik paused by it, glasses flashing.

"This is military hardware. Or was. The design language is consistent with what we've seen in the factories."

"Nobody cares, Henrik," Yukiko said, already ten paces ahead. He adjusted his glasses.

"Knowledge is the only weapon that doesn't dull with use."

"Your personality dulls everything around it." Teamwork was apparently going to continue being our greatest strength. The sentinels found us halfway to the fortress. Four of them this time, coming from behind a collapsed refinery tower. Horse-sized, chitin-plated, glowing mandibles. They moved in formation, flanking wide. Sarah met the first one head-on. Shield raised, she caught the mandible strike, pivoted, and drove her blade up through the joint where the head met the thorax. White flame erupted.

The sentinel thrashed, spraying ichor and sparks. She one-shot the last one, so she either levelled up from the last dive, or she figured out a better approach. Yukiko was already on the second one. Her blade was a silver blur, cutting legs, joints, connective tissue. The sentinel buckled, and she leaped onto its back, driving her katana through the top of its skull. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Liu flowed between the third and fourth like water.

One open-palm strike caved in a faceplate. A spinning kick shattered a leg joint. Golden energy rippled through his movements, each strike landing with the precision of someone who'd been doing this for decades. Henrik raised his staff. Lightning split, forking into two of the sentinels. They seized, electricity arcing through their carapaces. Astarielle was examining her nails, slightly smirking. I glanced at her.

"Really?"

"What? I did all the work the last time around." [ENEMIES DEFEATED — CORRODED SENTINELS (4)] [Drops: Sentinel Plating (Uncommon) (x4), Heavy Servo Core (Uncommon) (x2), Charged Mandible (Uncommon), 1 silver 72 copper, Resonance Shard (Uncommon)]"Acceptable," Henrik said. That was as close to a compliment as he got. We continued. The fortress loomed larger and larger until it stopped being something on the horizon and became the horizon.

Three hundred feet of dark steel and stone, buttressed walls thicker than most buildings, spires reaching up toward the false sky of bioluminescent fungi. The staircase to its entrance was wide enough for thirty people to walk abreast, flanked by those eroded statues that had lost all features. Up close, the statues still had traces. The suggestion of armor. The hint of weapons. They'd been guards, once. Sentries for whatever civilization had built this place. We climbed the stairs.

Each step was carved from a single block of dark metal, worn smooth in the center by uncountable steps. My shoes echoed on the surface. At the top, a doorway. Massive, at least forty feet tall, and open. Not broken open. Just open. As if someone had left the front door ajar and never come back to close it. We looked inside. Henrik raised his staff. Three orbs of light materialized, illuminating the area. We walked in. The inside of the fortress was a maze. Like, an actual maze.

The entrance opened into a broad hall that branched into three corridors, each of which branched into more corridors, which connected to rooms that connected to staircases that led to more corridors. The walls were the same dark steel as the exterior, featureless and identical. The complex probably had a point back in the day, but nothing of that remained. With no reasonable way to interpret the purpose of the rooms, we couldn't figure out where the path forward was. Every hallway looked like every other hallway.

Every room could have been any room. We'd been inside for twenty minutes, and we were already lost.

"We came from the left," Sarah said, pointing back the way we'd come.

"No," Yukiko said.

"We came from the right. The left was the dead end with the collapsed ceiling."

"That was two turns ago."

"It was three." Henrik pulled up a holographic map on his glasses, projecting it onto the wall. Blue lines traced our path from the entrance, twisting and doubling back. He pointed at a junction.

"We went left here, right here, then straight through this chamber." Liu studied the projection.

"I don't believe that is correct."

"It's data."

"Your data shows us walking through a wall." Henrik squinted. Adjusted something. The line corrected itself, but now it showed us entering a room we hadn't been in.

"The spatial geometry of this structure doesn't conform to standard Euclidean norms."

"So, your map is useless," Yukiko summarized.

"My map is perfectly logical. The building is wrong." We stood at another junction. Three identical corridors stretched ahead, each disappearing into the same featureless darkness.

"We should go right," Sarah said.

"The Lord guides the righteous."

"Of which we do not have many. We should go left," Henrik countered.

"Wall-following algorithms guarantee maze completion in simply-connected spaces."

"This isn't simply connected," I said.

"You literally just said it doesn't follow normal geometry."

"Then we should go straight," Liu said.

"The direct path is always the truest."

"Unless it's a dead end," Yukiko said.

"I'll scout ahead." She was gone before anyone could respond, dissolving into the shadows of the left corridor. We waited. Liu closed his eyes and placed both palms against the floor, golden light pulsing faintly.

"The qi flows downward in this structure. The density increases below us, not above."

"We need to go up," Sarah said.

"The waystone is always at the highest point."

"Except for when it isn't," I remarked. Yukiko reappeared from the right corridor. Not the left, where she'd gone.

"Dead end. All three. They loop back to here."

"That's not possible," Henrik said.

"You went left."

"I went left. I ended up right." She sheathed her katana.

"This building is designed to waste our time." Astarielle leaned against the wall, examining her nails.

"The planning part is going exceptionally well."

"Nobody asked you," Sarah said.

"Which is why we continue being lost." I sighed.

"Got any idea?"

"We blow up the ceiling and go up." She raised her hand, crimson light formed around her, and speared into the ceiling. Explosions thundered through the air, heat licking my shields. A hole tore into the ceiling and into the floor of the room behind us. Astarielle spared it a glance.

"This is pure bullshit." We headed forward. After a bunch more rooms and corridors, we stopped at another junction. This wasn't working. But we didn't exactly overflow with ideas. We were about to try another corridor, Sarah's pick this time, because she'd threatened to pray over every single intersection until the Lord physically manifested to guide us, and nobody wanted to deal with that, when Biscuit came barreling out of the darkness.