Chương 69: Chapter 68: Dungeon Crawl

They took her through a door in the back of the tabaccheria that led to the stairwell, and then down. Two floors, into a cellar that should have smelled like a basement, and instead smelled of the faint mineral bite of moving air from deeper in the earth. Cecilia counted the treads on the way down out of habit, but the space was clearly used regularly. No spiderwebs. No debris in the corners. The floor was clean enough to suggest that they cared, not so clean that they expected anyone to come looking.

While Turin did have an extensive network of underground tunnels, mainly clustered under this historic city center, she had never personally ventured belowground to explore. There was something disquieting about leaving the familiar, structured surface behind and stepping into the subterranean labyrinth that sprawled unseen beneath the streets.

Even her father, as daring as he'd been, never used the tunnels for smuggling operations, preferring more traditional routes and avoiding the inherent dangers of the maze below. If her father never ventured there, that only heightened her unease. At the bottom of the stairs, they stopped at a reinforced metal door. Tommaso pushed it open and they filed into the dark. He reached for the wall beside the frame, his hand brushing along it until he found something.

A light flickered on overhead, the low buzz of an electric current briefly breaking the silence. Then a soft, steady glow flooded a passage too wide for a cellar and too dry for a sewer, eighteenth century by the brick, one of the several hundred the city kept under itself and mostly declined to discuss. The light wasn't strong, but it cut through the darkness just enough to see the tunnel stretch ahead of them. They started walking.

Tommaso took the front and brought the pipe down off his shoulder, Marta and Nicolò fell in behind with a gap between them wide enough for someone to swing an arm through. Elia went to the back, and Sofia came last with the notebook under her arm. Luca slotted himself into the gap between Marta and Nicolò, and neither of them looked at him twice. He had been in this building for one evening and part of an afternoon, and the shape had already grown a socket that fit him. Irritating.

Or a relief, she couldn't decide which. She didn't let either show. The tunnel curved gently, the kind of bend that lets a passage feel like it's going in one direction until you're suddenly going in another. After a few minutes, they hit the first fork, a right turn into an intersecting tunnel that looked just like the one they'd come from. No marks, no chalk, no signs.

"How do you know where you're going?" she asked. Marta glanced back over her shoulder, a smile at the corner of her mouth that said she'd been waiting for the question.

"We don't," she said.

"She hasn't started yet." Behind them, Sofia stopped walking. The others stopped with her, unprompted. Tommaso turned and put his back against the brick and set the pipe across his knees, Elia sat down on the floor, Nicolò folded his arms, and Marta stepped out of the line and stood facing her, and in the space of about three seconds four people had arranged themselves into an audience. Sofia took the rubber band off the notebook and did not open it.

"Something has been eating its way up through the roots of this place since the thaw," she said.

"It takes the iron first, and it takes it slowly, and it has never once had a reason to hurry. It has opened a vein behind it, and the vein runs upward. While it stays open, the dark has somewhere to climb. Tonight we find the thing that opened it, we take the vein back off it, and we close it." Nobody said anything at all. Cecilia had sat through a great many openings of a great many meetings, and that one would have held a room of grown men. What she marked was the silence around it.

Four people who had heard this woman talk this way before had gone quiet for her anyway, and had gone quiet before she started. Then the System text came up in the air, floating just over the tunnel in front of them. QUEST: THE HOLLOW VEIN It has been climbing since the thaw, taking the iron as it goes. Behind it it has left a vein in the rock that was never meant to be open, and nothing that comes up a vein like that has been invited. OBJECTIVE: CLOSE THE VEIN CONDITIONS: NO ONE CLIMBS THE SHAFT.

NO PARTICIPANT REDUCED BELOW ONE QUARTER. AUTHOR: RECOGNIZED REWARD: EXPERIENCE (STANDARD + CONDITIONAL) Every line the System had ever put in front of Cecilia came down from somewhere above it, in that flat register, in that slightly off-putting syntax that made everything read like an instruction for an appliance you hadn't asked for. This one had a byline.

A woman in her second year at the university had spoken out loud in a corridor, and the System had taken them down, set them in its own font, and stood behind them.

"Right," Sofia said.

"The tunnel ahead of you runs a long way and it drops as it goes. The air is wrong at the far end of it. You will notice that before you see anything." The tunnel ahead of them dropped. Cecilia was looking straight down it when it happened.

The floor tilted away from the toes of her boots and went on tilting, brick sliding into brick, courses arriving already dirty, the mortar lines coming in with a century of stain on them, and the whole of it settled into a grade a man could walk down without putting a hand to the wall. Further along, past where the lamps carried, the ceiling came down with it and kept the headroom where it had been. The draft on her face changed.

It went cooler and wetter and carried something underneath it, old iron and turned earth. She stood still for a moment with her hands in her pockets.

"How much of that is real?" she asked.

"All of it, while we're in it." Sofia had started walking.

"The System doesn't do metaphors. If I say the floor drops, you can fall down it."

"And if you say there's a monster?" You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Then there's a monster, if there's one available to put there." She looked back, and there was something almost apologetic in it.

"That's the part everybody gets wrong. I'm not making them. The System puts a certain number of things in the area every week and doesn't consult me about what they are. I take what I'm given, I hold them, and I decide when they arrive and from which direction. After that, they're loose, and they're nobody's." They walked it, and Cecilia used the walk. She set the new shape of the situation against the old one she had carried in and measured the fit. It sat too comfortably.

Four gamers and their dungeon master running a System instance underground. It didn't explain the Authority discrepancy, but it made a piece of the puzzle feel less wrong than it had. Monsters died down here and didn't show on the street. But she owned the streets above them, and if the System's measure of territory wasn't confined to what was visible, then a suppressed neighborhood could easily read as controlled, whether or not it technically was. She kept walking and kept her face straight.

"Tell me the boundaries," she said.

"What you can and can't do. I want to know the shape of it." Sofia's voice came from ahead of her, low, unhurried.

"I can move walls, doors, floor level, inside a limit I can feel and can't argue with, in anything the System already thinks is a dungeon. Tunnels, cellars, our stairwell. A flat doesn't work, an office doesn't work, the street doesn't work. Nothing structural. I can't dig, I can't make a room that wasn't there, and everything I put up goes back to what it was if I leave the boundary."

"Which is why you don't leave." Sofia glanced over her shoulder.

"Mostly, yes."

"And the monsters?"

"I choose the moment and the direction of the arrival, and I get a margin on how they behave in the first seconds, which is worth more than it sounds. After that I can take about fifteen percent off what they are." Sofia's thumb moved along the edge of the notebook.

"That's a feel rather than a dial. I get a feel for it, I check the feel against what actually happens, I adjust the feel."

"And the objective?"

"The objective's mine. That's the whole of it, really. Everything else is arranging furniture." Cecilia walked on and did the arithmetic she had been assembling since the stairs. She had people in the Palazzo she could not yet put into a live engagement, and one method available for changing that, which was to put them into a live engagement and count who came back. She had been buying experience at the only stall in the market, at the price that stall charged. Calo's ear.

The two men who had sat at the back of the operations room eight days ago with their boots off and their calves wrapped. A second-year college student had a dungeon that generated experience on a schedule, under her control, in an environment that supposedly allowed for mistakes, using the neighborhood's own weekly allotment of monsters as stock. There wasn't any way to value the offer that didn't put it ahead of every alternative.

"Nico," Sofia said, ahead.

"You're going to hear something in about a minute and I want you listening for it before it starts."

"Hear what?"

"You'll hear it before you see it. They're coming up behind us." Nicolò swore and turned around, and the others turned with him. They formed a loose semicircle with Cecilia in the middle, watching the slope they'd just come down. Then the sound arrived. It came off the brick from every direction at once, a hard flat baying with no source in it, and it hit Cecilia in the sternum and put something briefly white behind her eyes. Her hand was on the pistol before she had decided anything about it.

"Echo Hounds!" Nicolò shouted, with both hands over his ears. Five dog-like creatures came down the tunnel at a dead run, hairless, heavy through the shoulder, their heads all ear and no eye, and the leader put out another howl that arrived like a hand flat on the chest. Nicolò answered the howl. He opened his mouth and put out a note that came into the body before it came into the ears, and it went up the tunnel and met the howl, and the two sounds folded into one another and stopped existing. The pressure went.

The white behind Cecilia's eyes cleared. Two of the Hounds broke stride with their heads swinging, blind the way a thing that steers by sound goes blind when the sound stops coming back. Elia and Tommaso each produced a club of black iron with glyphs glowing red at one end. The weapons looked out of time and not quite balanced, but both wielders handled them like they were accustomed to the feel.

Marta pulled a rod from inside her jacket, pointed one end at the slope, and spoke a word under her breath that made the air at her hand shiver and spark. A bolt of lightning hit the nearest Hound in the head and it fell. Elia swung into the next, a wild, open swing, but he made the angle. The iron cracked into the thing's ribs and threw it hard against the wall, where it slumped. The second swing he took lower and across, into a shoulder. It came apart under the hit and didn't rise again.

Tommaso closed the distance on his own target. The club hit the third Hound at full stretch, two-handed, a high backswing that put his weight into it, and the head of it burst open like a fruit under a mallet. The remaining two charged past the first rank straight for the backline. Elia turned and stamped his foot, and out of a floor that had been dry brick, root came up, pale and thin and fast, and went through the Hound's forelegs and put it on its face a stride short of Nicolò. It thrashed. The root held.

Elia kept his foot down with his teeth bared. Tommaso moved past him and drove the end of his club down through the back of its skull. The last Hound leapt. Marta pointed her rod and a second lightning bolt took it out of the air. It hit the floor twitching and lay. Cecilia's gun was in her hand, and her hand was still. The safety hadn't come off.

The thing was so small in the space between the two people in front of her, between Marta with the sparks running down her rod and Tommaso with the black blood off his club. Five of them. Under a minute. Not a wound in the group. Nicolò wiped sweat off his forehead with the heel of his hand. Marta leaned her rod against her shoulder and watched the bodies. Elia pulled his boot out of the roots, which retreated back into the floor, and didn't take his eyes off the tunnel.

"I know that doesn't look like much," Sofia said, behind her.

"The creatures here are deliberately on the low side of the scaling." Cecilia put the pistol back into its holster and turned to look at her.

"You've found a place to fight, you can make the fights survivable, and you can reset them in a week." Sofia nodded.

"More or less."

"How much experience does that run pay out?" Another nod.

"At the tier these guys are working in, a decent run gives between thirty and fifty percent of what you need to level. A week between runs. Safe XP." No credits. No drops. Nothing but the quiet run, and what they earned at the end of it. Luca stepped up beside her. He looked a little pale but steadier now that the noise was gone.

"How do you control the XP curve? Is it tied to the tier, or can you adjust it directly?" Sofia glanced down the tunnel, then back to him.

"The System sets the payout. I can't change it. But I can adjust the encounter design, which changes how efficiently we earn it. The tighter the party plays to the objective, the better the XP per creature killed. I keep notes, track what works. It's not exact science, but it works well enough."

"You've been doing this since April?"

"And May. And June." She tilted her head, her gaze slipping past Luca to the bodies on the ground.

"It took a while to work out what I could do with the ability. Once I did, it was just... repetition."

"And you're getting fifty percent of a level, per week, with zero chance of death," Luca said, his voice flat with something that wasn't quite envy.

"That's... incredibly efficient."

"I guess so." Sofia's eyes came back to Cecilia, steady and direct.

"So now you know what we have." Cecilia nodded, the whole of it settling into its place. A hidden training ground, under the streets where nobody could see, with a controlled output and no random variables. It was the kind of resource people would kill to control, and these five had it, quietly, because one of them had picked the right class for what she wanted. She could put every analyst and enforcer who needed combat hours into these tunnels.

They could fight their way through, get experience, get used to their classes, all without getting maimed or dying in an alley because the numbers went the wrong way on them. She looked down the tunnel, at the bodies that would dissolve into the System soon enough. The blood on the floor, already starting to fade. Then she looked back at Sofia, the Dungeon Master, the girl who'd bent a corner of the System to her will and built a place for her friends to grow.

"Yes," she said.

"Now I know."