Chương 141: Chapter 139: Threshold

"Took you long enough," Cyrus said.

"How many attempts did you need, exactly?" I answered, and a couple of Verdugo's people snorted. Cyrus let the corner of his mouth twitch, then tipped his head toward the center of the chamber. The three carvings were all lit now. As the sun's glow steadied, a low grind started up under the floor, and a circular seal at the center of the room began to turn, stone teeth catching against stone teeth as it sank a finger's width and started spiraling open.

"That's our way down," Cyrus said.

"It will take a while to open," Alice pointed out. We compared the fights in pieces. All three bosses had been level twenty-five, all three had hidden their nastiest tricks for the finish line, and the room itself was the enemy as much as the thing standing in it. Verdugo's dark grass, Cyrus's scythe, our false sun. And then we were funneled into the same room, with one way moving forward. Three trials, one exit, I thought. Meaning whatever's down there needs three parties to deal with.

We decided that each cave's drops should be claimed by the team who'd cleared it, so the Sun Chamber's haul was ours to divide. The boss had dropped four pieces of equipment, one of them being an Epic. [Shroud of the Hollow Sun] Epic Level 22 Light armor Defense: 28 Intelligence: 12 Wisdom: 8 Shadow, Dark, Void, Necromantic damage increased by 8% All spell cooldowns are reduced by 10% in darkness Armor Skill: Shadow Wings Conjure a pair of wings from shadows, granting the ability to fly for a limited time.

Duration: 12 seconds Mana cost: 80 Cooldown: 4 hours Restriction: Art of Magic"Flight?!" Talion gasped, and I understood his reaction immediately. Being able to fly was not something I'd seen so far, and even if the skill itself was extremely limited with a short duration, enormous cooldown and a high mana cost, the utility it provided was pretty much endless. And the bonuses to dark attributes made every head in the circle turn toward the corner.

Somnus cracked one eye open, looked at the cloak, and for once didn't make a joke. He pushed himself upright and scratched his head.

"That is," he said, "a fine piece."

"It should be yours," I nodded.

"All in favor?" Nobody objected.

"Try not to enjoy it too much," Alice told him.

"No promises." The next piece was a club. A macuahuitl, to be precise, flat and broad, the same shape the Warden had carried, its edge set with teeth of dull gold instead of obsidian. [Dawnward Macuahuitl] Rare Level 22 Mace Attack Power: 122 Strength: 8 Vitality: 5 Wisdom: 5 Holy abilities have a 10% chance to cause "Burn" It was a decent weapon.

"Rafael," I said, and held it out.

"Is this an upgrade for you?"

"I'm still using the Emerald Bane," he pointed out.

"The weapon skill is great, but the stats are starting to become obsolete. I can switch back to use Emerald Slash when needed.

"Here you go then," I offered him the weapon. Alice nodded in accordance. He looked at me, then at the club, then back at me, and I watched him weigh whether accepting loot from another team would put Second Wind in some kind of debt. Cyrus saved him the trouble.

"Take it," the mage said.

"We'll settle it however he wants later. A weapon that fits you is wasted sitting in storage." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Rafael took it, tested the weight with a slow swing that stopped a careful distance from Verdugo's head, and inclined his chin.

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it," I said.

"I will hold it over you," Verdugo said cheerfully.

"Now I owe you. I hate owing people. It makes me responsible." The next item was a ring, a level 22 Rare that instantly reminded me that I was still using incredibly low-level accessories. [Warden's Gold Band] Rare Level 22 +5 Dexterity +5 Agility 10% additional Mana regeneration while in combat"Something for you, Orion," Denxy said, and I slid it on instantly.

"Looks like a wedding ring," Leona smiled.

"Well," I said, "I'm of age, so…" That had earned a couple of laughs. The last item was an amulet boosting wisdom and having resistance against both dark and light attacks. It went to Desirae, and she put it on with the small nod of someone whose numbers had just gone up.

"That's all," I said.

"We good?"

"We're good," Alice said, and behind her the seal finished turning, the last ring of stone dropping away into a black crevasse. The way down was a staircase. It was carved straight into the rock, wide enough for six to walk next to each other, and it went down, and down, and kept going.

The walls started close, fitted stone pressing in on either side, but after a few hundred steps the right-hand wall simply stopped, opened into nothing, and the stair became a ledge running along the edge of a drop I couldn't see the bottom of. We'd been going for at least half an hour before the scene changed. It came into view in pieces as we descended, like cities do when you're on a plane that has just descended past the clouds. Blunt, terraced silhouettes, stepped sides climbing toward flat crowns.

The scale was unlike anything I'd ever seen; that became apparent when a building passed close enough below, and we realised it was supposed to be a pyramid that dwarfed the entire cave we'd just fought through. And there were more of them. Causeways ran between them on stone arches, some still whole, some broken halfway and ending in the dark. At first, I thought the pyramids were sitting on the cavern floor, but the longer we descended, the less that seemed to be the case.

They were built on terraces, and the terraces were built on platforms, and the platforms were built into the walls themselves, layered one beneath the other like the whole cavern had been carved into a vertical city. Some roads ran level for hundreds of meters before disappearing into tunnels. Others sloped downward in long, ceremonial ramps wide enough for an army to march through.

There were plazas, too, broad stone spaces with no roofs and no signs of habitation, just empty ground and broken pillars arranged in careful patterns. Lune's little sun showed the nearest steps, the nearest carvings, the nearest edge of the drop, but everything beyond that existed as shape and implication, although Twilight Hunter helped me see beyond the darkness.

A line of pyramid stairs, the curve of an arch, the square mouth of a temple entrance, a tower rising from below us, its top level passing our ledge, then its middle, then still more of it stretching downward until the darkness swallowed the base. The pyramid we'd first noticed passed beneath us slowly as the staircase curved around the cavern wall.

Its top platform alone was larger than the entire chamber where Ajaw K'in had been waiting for us, and when we finally saw the side of it properly, I counted at least seven major terraces before the lower half vanished. There were stairs running down every face, and at each landing stood carved figures of goblin priests with masks, warriors with spears, and bat-winged things looming behind them. The carvings were massive; a single masked goblin head was taller than Denxy.

The stair kept to the cavern wall, switchbacking down in long, flat runs that let us see more of the place with every turn. Between and beneath the pyramids sat entire districts of stone buildings packed shoulder to shoulder, flat-roofed and windowless, divided by streets that ran straight until they hit a plaza or a flight of steps and bent away. Channels had been cut along some avenues, dry now, the stone in their beds pale and smooth where something had once run over it for a very long time.

It was all intact, more or less. There were collapses here and there, but the entire thing was well preserved. The dust lay even and undisturbed across every surface Lune's light reached, and where it caught the gold inlay set into the stonework, it threw back a dull shine, like coins left at the bottom of a well. The cold deepened as we went, and with it came the smell: the same sealed-away air I'd noticed past the Sun Door.

"That's a city," Denxy said.

"That's a region," Somnus said behind us, his Night Vision helping him see farther than our comrades. Nobody talked much after that. By the time the stairs finally bottomed out, I'd stopped trying to hold the scale of the place in my head. The last steps opened onto a broad landing of black flagstone, a plaza of sorts, ringed by the dark mouths of avenues leading off into the city proper.

Directly ahead of us stood a single freestanding arch, and the moment the last of us set foot on the floor, a System Notification appeared. Depths of Xibalba (Expedition) Caution: This dungeon spans a great distance. Estimated clear time: 12–16 hours. Logging out before completion will erase all progress for every member of the expedition. Do you wish to proceed? [Enter] [Withdraw]"Twelve to sixteen hours," Carmen read aloud, slowly, as if saying it slower might shrink the number.

"That's not a run. That's a day job."

"Not even," Denxy said.

"You can clock out of a job." He wasn't wrong.

"Has anyone in Silverwing reported a dungeon like this?" I asked Cyrus.

"Anything that runs a full day? Anything that locks you in?"

"No." He didn't hesitate.

"I read the regional forums every morning. The longest clear in the kingdom is the Ravencrown city dungeon, and even that's a six-man dungeon with five-six hours of content." He looked around at the rest of us, and I watched him finish the math before he said it.

"If this is the first expedition in the kingdom, first-clear bonuses would be worth more than everything we've seen."

"And people are already trying to clear the three caves," Rafael said.

"Before long, someone else will get here."

"So it's now," Verdugo said, "or it's after a hundred other people have done it." Nobody's done this, I thought. We could be the first. The world kept rewarding pioneers, and a dungeon of this scope was certain to shake it.

"If you've got a shift in the morning, a class, a person at home who'll call a hospital when you don't wake up for a day, say so now and step out, no hard feelings from anyone. I'd rather go down with however many will see it through than lose the whole thing at hour ten," I said, and Cyrus nodded immediately. Denxy rolled his shoulders and muttered something about his sister feeding his cat, Desirae was already retying her hair like she was settling in for a long shift. Some of us had already decided.

Carmen looked at Rafael. Rafael looked back, and whatever passed between them was an old thing they'd clearly had before.

"I have a long day tomorrow, but I'm in," she said.

"I'll pay for it later. Some things are worth it." That left all eighteen of us standing in front of the arch. Verdugo got to his feet and shouldered his axe, the grin finally back.

"Well, hermanos," he said.

"Nobody's ever been down there. Whatever we find, we find it first." I looked around the circle one last time and got a nod from every face in it, then accepted the prompt. Welcome to the Depths of Xibalba. There is no road back but forward. Far above us, the stair sealed itself shut.

"Right," I said.

"Let's find out what they put down here."