Yuki Tanaka had not stopped talking since they left the workshop.
Petra adjusted her vibroblades in their sheaths and let the words wash past. Something about sight lines in the entry corridor, then a tangent about crystalline refraction angles and bullet trajectories, then a comparison of spawn behavior across three planets Petra had never heard of. The woman talked the way some people breathe—constantly, automatically, and apparently with no need for input from others.
Mikhail walked on Yuki’s other side, his expression the careful neutral he wore when he was choosing not to react. He caught Petra’s eye over Yuki’s head and gave the smallest shrug. Your call.
No, Tess’s call. Tess had invited this woman. Tess trusted her father’s judgment. Petra was here to fight, observe, and decide whether Yuki Tanaka was worth the risk she represented.
So far, the evidence has been mixed. The woman handled weapons with an automatic ease that came only from years of daily practice. But skilled and reliable were different things, and the distance between them had gotten people killed before.
The public dungeon entrance was busy for this early in the morning. A knot of low-level Delvers crowded the registration desk, checking gear and swapping advice that was probably wrong. The Delver’s Guild attendant looked bored. Floor 1 had been stable since the Alpha went down. Routine runs, predictable spawns, nothing that made the news.
Tess was underground. She’d taken the Guild elevator twenty minutes ago, descending into the maintenance tunnels that only she could navigate. Petra could hear her through the earpiece: the faint hum of the mag-lev board, Bee’s voice giving directions in the background.
“Party of three,” Petra told the attendant. “Floor 1. Standard delve.”
Yuki handed over her credentials without breaking stride in her lecture about spawn adaptation cycles. The attendant processed the registration, noted the Level 9 Ranger with a clean record, and waved them through without a second glance.
“…and on Veridian-9, the spawns would actually learn your patterns. Third run through, they’d start countering your formations. By the fifth, you’d need a completely new…”
“Yuki.”
She stopped. Looked at Petra.
“Save it for inside.”
Something flickered across her face, closer to catching herself mid-habit than taking offense. “Right. Sorry. I talk when I’m…” She rolled her neck. “Never mind. Ready when you are.”
Soon, the massive doors opened. Delvers from the previous rotation filed out, and before they knew it, they were trekking through Floor 0 to the banks of elevators. Scanning their Delver’s cards went without issue, and the three of them stepped inside, watching the doors close with a chime.
The elevator descended quickly. The familiar chime of Floor 1 arrival, and the air turned cooler and drier, carrying the faint ozone bite of Aether that Petra associated with work. She drew her vibroblades as they stepped into the staging area.
Bee’s voice came through the earpiece, clear and professional. “Fourteen delvers currently registered on Floor 1, all arriving shortly. I am routing you through sector D in the current configuration as that seems the least likely path for them to take. Single contact outside the staging area. Forty meters, stationary.”
“Understood,” Petra said as they stepped into the dungeon proper. She was moving before the word finished. Vibroblades out, weight forward, closing the distance. Forty meters was nothing. She could cover that in seconds.
Yuki’s rifle cracked.
The sound was sharp and controlled, a single report that echoed off the corridor walls. The crystalline construct, the one Petra had been closing on, staggered sideways. A second shot punched through its core before the echo faded. Dust, then nothing.
Petra stopped mid-stride. One blade still raised, the vibration humming against her palm with nowhere to go.
Yuki lowered the rifle. Already scanning ahead. “Contact down.”
Petra sheathed her blades and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She’d been fast. Yuki had been faster from forty meters away.
Mikhail’s hand rested on the hilt of his father’s vibroblade. He’d left the shield emitter off. Floor 1 spawns weren’t worth the power drain on damaged hardware, and he was right. His eyes tracked Yuki with the quiet calculation of someone revising an estimate upward.
“Two more,” Yuki said. “Thirty meters, left corridor. One flanking through the parallel passage.” She hadn’t checked a scanner or consulted a display. “I feel them through the floor. [TREMORSENSE]. The flanker will be on us in about ten seconds.”
A detection system with legs. Petra filed that alongside the rifle speed and the economy of motion.
“Mikhail, take the flanker,” she said. “I’ll handle the left.”
They moved. The flanking spawn rounded the corner into Mikhail’s vibroblade—clean, efficient, a single stroke. Petra intercepted hers as it emerged from the left corridor. Two cuts, core exposed, dissolving. Standard work. She and Mikhail had done this dozens of times.
Yuki had watched without raising her rifle. She’d known exactly how long it would take them.
Through the earpiece, Bee’s voice shifted from tactical to something else entirely: “Tess, that is not the correct junction.”
“It’s fine, Bee. I’m going around.”
“Going around adds ninety meters to your route. If you had taken the left branch when I indicated…”
“The left branch had a collapsed ceiling panel last week. I’m not squeezing through that again.”
“The panel has been cleared by the ambient reconfiguration cycle. It is perfectly traversable.”
“You monitored the cycle. Did you actually verify the clearance?”
A beat of silence. Then, with the faintest edge of concession: “…I will verify.”
Petra glanced at Mikhail. His mouth twitched—the closest he came to laughing while armed.
There was something almost domestic about it. Bee’s precise irritation and Tess’s stubborn pragmatism, bickering over tunnel routes as if they’d been doing it for years. She spoke with Bee regularly: status updates, tactical coordination, and run briefings. Clipped, businesslike exchanges. But lately Bee sounded more and more normal. More human.
“Tess is maintaining pace on a parallel route,” Bee said, her voice shifting back to the clipped cadence Petra recognized. “Proceed through sector D. Next cluster in approximately eighty meters.”
They pushed deeper.
***
The chamber opened wide enough that the corridor walls fell away on both sides, the ceiling vaulting upward where crystal growths climbed the support columns in slow spirals. A room where spawns clustered because the geometry offered multiple angles, elevation changes, and cover.
Bee confirmed what Yuki had already sensed. “Seven contacts. Mixed formation, Levels 4 and 5. Two additional entering from a side passage to the south.”
Nine spawns. Petra settled her grip on both vibroblades and rolled her shoulders.
But Yuki had already changed. The chatter, the restless energy, the running commentary—all of it went quiet. She holstered her sidearm and brought the rifle up. Her posture shifted into something Petra recognized because she’d spent years training her own body to do the same thing: a combat stance that looked loose but wasn’t. Every joint aligned. Every muscle loaded and ready. The difference was that Yuki made it look like breathing.
“Stay behind Mikhail,” Yuki said. “Give me five seconds.”
The rifle cracked, but the sound was wrong. Sharper, with a harmonic overtone that buzzed against Petra’s teeth even from three meters back. A skill activation. The barrel pulsed with faint amber light as the round left it.
The round struck the crystal wall at a precise angle and fractured into burning shards that tore through two constructs in a diagonal line. Before they’d finished dissolving, Yuki fired again. The second round ricocheted off the far wall, caught a third construct mid-turn, and punched through a fourth that had been flanking behind the first.
Four down in two shots. Every detail registered: the angle selection, the weight shift between shots, the rifle tracking to the second target before the first had finished dying. She’d never seen anything like it.
The remaining five rushed forward.
Petra moved. One construct closed from the right. She intercepted it with both blades, a crosscut that separated its upper body from its legs. Fast and committed. The sort of kill that would have earned a nod from her instructors at the estate.
A construct lunged from Yuki’s blind spot. Without looking, Yuki drew a knife from somewhere Petra couldn’t track, flicked her wrist, and buried the blade in the thing’s neck joint. It crumbled. Mikhail took the next one with a clean vibroblade thrust. Petra caught the fourth as it tried to circle behind them.
The last one died to Yuki’s sidearm. A single shot, drawn and fired in one motion, before Petra had even registered it as a threat.
Nine spawns. Maybe twelve seconds.
Petra cleaned her blades. The motion was automatic, giving her hands something to do while her mind processed what she’d just watched.
She was fast. She knew she was fast. She’d trained for years under instructors who pushed her until her muscles screamed, drilling combinations until the vibroblades felt like extensions of her arms. She was good at this in the way dedicated training made you good: polished, technical, and reliable.
Yuki hadn’t trained like that. Yuki had fought. Real engagements, on real floors, against spawns that adapted and coordinated and killed people who hesitated. The gap between practice and experience was something Petra had understood in the abstract. Watching Yuki clear a chamber in twelve seconds made it concrete.
During the fight, Petra had noticed something else. She’d tracked that first construct, the one on the right, the one she’d killed. Yuki had tracked it too. The rifle had come up. Then paused. A half-second where Yuki could have taken the shot and chose not to.
She’d left it. The way you let a younger sparring partner take a point.
Petra looked at Mikhail. He met her eyes. He’d seen it too.
“We need to be better,” she said.
He nodded. That was the entire conversation. They’d been fighting together long enough now that the shorthand covered everything else.
Yuki retrieved her knife and flipped it back into its sheath. She looked at both of them with an expression that held no smugness, which almost made it worse.
“You’re both good. I mean that.” She fell into step beside them as they moved toward the corridor exit. “Petra, your close-quarters speed is incredible. Mikhail, your timing with the blade is the best I’ve seen on this planet.” She let that sit for a beat. “But you’re fighting each spawn like it’s the only thing in the room. Deeper floors won’t give you that luxury. You need to see the entire room before the first shot fires.”
“How long did that take you to learn?” Petra asked.
“Years.” Yuki slid the rifle into its sling. “But I think we can do it faster.”
Between the first rifle crack and the end of that fight, Petra’s read on Yuki had changed. Under the chatter and the showing off, Yuki understood what she knew and could explain why it mattered. Someone who’d been standing still for two years and finally had people worth talking to.
They were approaching a corridor junction when a maintenance hatch opened in the wall beside them.
Tess stepped out. Tools on her belt, mag-lev board hovering behind her in the tunnel darkness, looking as if she’d been walking alongside them the entire time.
“Nice work,” Tess said.
Yuki spun, both sidearms clearing their holsters before her feet finished moving. She froze, eyes jumping from the hatch to the tunnel stretching behind Tess to Tess’s unremarkable expression.
“Where did you—you’ve been in the walls?”
“Maintenance tunnels. They run through the entire floor.” Tess pulled herself out, boots landing on the corridor floor. “Bee guides me through. I can get almost anywhere without being seen.”
“You can move through the inside of the dungeon.” Yuki’s voice rose. “While we’re fighting out here, you’re just running around inside the walls.”
“Repairing things, mostly. But yes.”
Yuki’s face cycled through shock, delight, and what looked like a tactical revelation hitting all at once. Petra remembered her own reaction the first time Tess had appeared from a wall panel beside her. It had been less enthusiastic, but that could have been because she had nearly died that day.
“Can anyone use these tunnels?” Yuki asked.
“Just me.” Tess left it there.
Petra caught Tess’s eye. The smallest nod passed between them. So Yuki didn’t know about Tess’s class. Good to keep quiet about that for now.
“I should get back inside before another party wanders through,” Tess said. She stepped onto the mag-lev board. “Bee’s got you on comms. More floor to cover.”
She disappeared into the hatch. The panel sealed behind her.
Through the earpiece, Yuki said to nobody in particular: “I love this team.”
They cleared two more clusters on the way to the transition corridor. Levels 4 and 5, which barely slowed them down. Petra tried to apply what Yuki had said. See the whole room. Map the positions before the first blade swings. It was harder than it sounded. She kept defaulting to the nearest threat, the most immediate movement, the trained response that said close distance, engage, move to the next. Yuki was doing something different: reading the geometry of every fight before it started, prioritizing targets by threat and position simultaneously. Like watching someone play a different game on the same board.
The stairs to Floor 2’s staging area stood at the far end of the transition corridor.
Petra stopped walking. “That’s enough for today.”
Yuki looked at the door for a long second, then turned back without complaint. “Floor 2’s down there?”
“Plasma drones with coordinated firing patterns,” Mikhail said. “Nearly killed my shield in seconds.”
“We’re not ready,” Petra said. She didn’t soften it. There was no point. “But we’re closer than we were this morning.”
They had a few hours to kill before the surface doors cycled. Tess could use the Guild elevator anytime, but Petra, Mikhail, and Yuki were stuck until the rotation ended.
Yuki put the time to use. She walked them through positioning drills in an empty corridor, calling out imaginary contacts and making them prioritize. Left flank, right flank, two behind, one closing fast. Petra got it wrong more than she got it right, but by the third run-through, her instincts were shifting. See the whole room. Every threat at once.
***
The restaurant in Sector 5 served exquisite food and had a back room that seated eight. Sara had reserved it under a name that wasn’t hers. Petra had stopped noticing when her mother did things like that. You didn’t survive decades of Tertian politics without learning to book a table nobody could trace.
The team filled one side: Petra, Mikhail, Yuki, Tess. Marcus, Sara, and Amos took the other. Her father sat at the end of the table with his datapad face-down beside his plate, giving the conversation his full attention in that quiet way of his. Everyone had their earpieces in still, because at this point leaving Bee out of a conversation felt wrong.
Yuki had her chair tipped back on two legs and a glass of something amber in her hand. She’d been giving her tactical assessment for ten minutes, and Petra had listened to every word.
“Petra.” Yuki pointed with a chopstick. “Your close-quarters work is so good. Fast, aggressive, you commit hard.” The chopstick didn’t waver. “But you over-commit. I counted at least twice today where you pushed past the engagement line and left your flank open. Floor 2 spawns are gonna punish that.”
“I noticed,” Petra said.
She had. Both times. The lunge at the construct in the chamber that left her right side exposed for a full second. The pursuit around a corner without checking what was behind it. Yuki had said nothing at that moment. She’d covered the gap with a sidearm that materialized in her hand like it had always been there.
“Good. That makes it easy to fix.” Yuki turned the chopstick toward Mikhail. “Your defensive work is solid. Textbook. And that’s the problem—textbook means predictable, and Floor 2 spawns adapt. You need to vary your positioning. Push forward when they don’t expect it. That vibroblade is a primary weapon. Use it.”
Mikhail considered this with the measured silence he gave everything. “The spawns on Floor 2 coordinate. Overlapping fields of fire.”
“Then we need you moving in patterns they can’t model. I ran an off-world dungeon where the spawns adapted faster than anything here. I can teach you what I learned.” She met his eyes. “If you want.”
“We want,” Petra said.
“The biggest gap isn’t skill,” Yuki continued. She set her chair back on all four legs and leaned forward. “It’s decision speed. You’re both reacting to threats individually. Floor 2 is going to throw five at you simultaneously and expect you to prioritize all of them in real time.”
“For what it’s worth,” Marcus said from across the table, “watching from the Guild Hall was something else. Bee was narrating the entire run.”
“I was providing tactical analysis,” Bee’s voice said in their ears.
“Uh huh, and the whoop after the ricochet kill was purely analysis.”
“Performance assessments are a component of them, yes.”
Her mother suppressed a smile. Sara had been listening with the patience of someone accustomed to briefings that ran long, her glass untouched, taking in data. She’d been warmer since recent events, especially after the spawner facility that had nearly killed them a few weeks ago. More present, more willing to let the edges of the general show as something softer. But she still ran a room, even when she wasn’t speaking. Petra knew the difference between polite attention and active calculation. This was the latter.
“You worked for Yuri Kellmar for two years.” Amos’s voice was mild, unhurried. He’d been watching Yuki through the entire debrief with the same attentive stillness he brought to trade negotiations. “Now you’re sitting at a table with House Tertian. How does Yuri feel about that arrangement?”
Yuki met his gaze without flinching. “Yuri let me walk. No strings, no conditions. He knows I’m not the type to sell out people who treated me well.” She shrugged. “Besides, the Kellmars and Tertians aren’t enemies. Different circles, but no bad blood. He’d probably be offended if you thought otherwise.”
Amos considered that for a moment. Then he inclined his head, just slightly. Acceptance. Petra had seen him use that exact gesture to close contracts worth more than most people earned in a lifetime.
“Then the trial was successful?” Sara said.
Tess looked at Yuki. “You’re in. No more trial.”
“I was in from the moment I saw the Guild Hall.” Yuki raised her glass. “To the team.”
They drank.
“To not dying horribly,” Amos added, raising his glass a beat behind the others. His tone was bone-dry, at odds with the warmth in his eyes. Petra had grown up with that combination—her father’s humor lived in the gap between what he said and how he said it.
“Morbid but fair,” Petra said.
Mikhail set his glass down, turning it slowly on the table. “Now we just need a healer to keep that promise.”
Then three datapads buzzed at once.
Marcus, Sara, and Amos reached for their devices at the same moment. The shift crossed the table in silence. Petra knew her mother’s expressions better than anyone in this room, and the one forming now was the worst kind: the tightening around the eyes, the jaw setting into a line that meant Sara was already three moves into a problem nobody else had seen yet. Marcus’s face went flat. Amos read his screen and placed the datapad face-down with deliberate care, the same way he’d been holding it all evening.
“What?” Tess said.
Marcus rubbed his face. “Our healer. The one we were going to recruit.”
“Asha,” Bee said through the communicator. “The offworlder.”
Sara was still reading. “Arrested. Sector 9 security. Public disturbance, destruction of property, and…” She scrolled. “Assaulting a Network official.”
The table went quiet.
Mikhail looked at his empty glass. “I take back the toast. Should have been more specific.”
“Assaulting a Network official,” Yuki repeated. “That’s bold.”
Marcus set his datapad down. “The one free healer on the planet I could find, and she’s sitting in a holding cell.”
Sara’s eyes moved across nothing. She wasn’t reading the datapad anymore—she was calculating. Petra had grown up watching this exact process. The math behind the composure. It never got less impressive, or less unsettling.
“Sector 9 administration owes us two favors from the water treatment expansion,” Amos said. Quiet, practical. Already working on the problem. “One of those should cover a release into Tertian custody. The question is whether we want fingerprints on this before we’ve even met her.”
Tess took in the table, her gaze moving from Marcus to Sara to Amos to the communicator where Bee was already pulling whatever data she could find on Sector 9’s holding records.
“At least now we know where she is,” Tess said.