Tess arrived at the estate an hour before dawn.
She’d meant to sleep. Marcus had said rest, and her body had agreed, but her mind had run scenarios until the ceiling of her bedroom aboard the Reprieve felt like it was shrinking. Somewhere around 5am, she’d given up and caught the first tram.
The estate grounds were still dark. The garden path was just visible between low hedges, stone pavers cool underfoot, the air carrying that green, living smell that still caught her off guard.
Light from the workshop cut a warm line across the path ahead, its heavy door propped open. Tess crossed through and took the elevator down to the Guild Hall.
Yuki was standing at the situation table, hands braced on its edge, studying the holo-projection above it. She’d changed clothes since last night, but her eyes said she hadn’t slept. The map of Floor 2 rotated slowly above the table’s surface, more detailed than before. Camera positions in red. Corridors mapped. Estimated dimensions were filled in where actual data was missing. Timing overlays pulsed at intersections.
Marcus sat at the far end with his coffee and three datapads spread in front of him, each showing different overlays of the same floor plan. He looked up when Tess walked in.
“You said first light,” Tess said.
“I said first thing,” Marcus replied. “Yuki said first light. We compromised.”
Yuki didn’t look up from the map. “I don’t sleep well before an operation. Marcus apparently doesn’t sleep well at all. We made use of the time.”
The map was impressive. Tess moved closer, reading the annotations. Routes in green and amber, timing markers at intersections, fields of view plotted from each camera position in translucent red cones.
“New data?” she asked.
“A technician ran some of Floor 2 late last night,” Marcus said. “Survived. Downloaded a terminal map and sold it to the Delver’s Guild this morning. Bee acquired it.”
“Acquired?” Tess raised an eyebrow.
“Purchased,” Bee said through the Guild Hall speakers. “Through legitimate channels. I have a procurement budget now. Sara was very specific about the paperwork.”
Cici trotted out of the elevator, paws clicking as she walked. She’d followed from the tram and had spent the walk through the estate grounds re-cataloging every smell between the gates and the workshop door with the focus of a librarian indexing their collection. She made a beeline for the space under the situation table and circled twice before settling into a compact curl, nose tucked against her tail.
“Good morning, Cici,” Bee said.
“Good morning. The underside of this table smells like old wood and Marcus’s coffee. I’m claiming this spot.”
Over the next hour, the rest of the team filtered in. Mikhail first, with a nod to Marcus. Petra next, reading the map from the doorway before she’d fully entered the room. Asha last, dropping into a chair with the economy of someone who didn’t waste energy on entrances.
“Sara has a meeting, so everyone’s here,” Marcus said. “Yuki.”
Yuki straightened. She had a stylus in one hand, and she used it like a conductor’s baton, tapping the holo-projection as she spoke. She didn’t wait for the room to settle.
“Here’s how we get Tess into the maintenance tunnels.”
***
The plan had three phases.
Phase one: registration. Petra, Mikhail, and Yuki enter Floor 2 through the public dungeon entrance as a registered three-person party. Standard delving team, nothing unusual. They take the normal route from the entrance toward the quadrant where the private staging area ended up..
“We will need Tess and Asha in the staging area, open the door briefly, relay what you see,” Yuki said. “Then we find it.”
Phase two: camera kill. Starting from the eastern approach, the three-fighter team works in a pattern, systematically destroying every camera they pass. Yuki’s [RICOCHET SHOT] could hit cameras around corners and behind ceiling mounts without slowing down. Mikhail tanks incoming spawns. Petra handles anything that gets close.
“We create a blackout corridor,” Yuki said, tracing the route in amber on the holo display. “Twelve cameras along this path. Each one goes down, the Network’s view shrinks. By the time they realize it’s coordinated, we’ll have a blind zone connecting the main floor to the staging area entrance. And it all looks more or less like an accident.”
Phase three: pickup. With the cameras dead along the route, Tess and Asha emerge from the private staging area, accessed directly via the Guild elevator, into the cleared zone. The full team pushes together to the nearest maintenance hatch, where Tess enters the tunnel network while the others hold position.
“Total exposure time for Tess and Asha: under ten minutes on the main floor,” Yuki said. “In, through, done.”
She set the stylus down. The plan hung in the air above the table, with clean lines and precise timing; the whole thing resting on the display like a blueprint.
Marcus leaned back. “Timing’s tight but the structure is sound. What’s the extraction?”
“Reverse of insertion. Once Tess is in the tunnels, we pull back to staging. If anything goes sideways, the Guild elevator gets us all out clean. If Tess gets the FCN on, then we stroll back.”
“Spawn density?” Mikhail asked.
“Based on reporting scaling, expect coordinated response within three minutes of entry. We’ll be through before the escalation hits critical.”
Petra traced the route with her eyes. “What about the cameras we don’t destroy? The ones outside the corridor?”
“They see a delving party that went into a quadrant, and got into a firefight. Happens every day. Nothing suspicious about destroyed cameras in a live combat zone.”
Tess studied the plan. It was thorough. It solved every problem she’d been turning over in her head for days.
“I like it,” she said.
“I have concerns,” Bee said.
The frenetic energy in the room disappeared.
“The new map data from the technician’s run is more complete than our previous projections. I have been cross-referencing it against Floor 1’s architecture while Yuki presented.” A pause that stretched one beat too long. “I cannot locate any maintenance access hatches on Floor 2.”
Yuki’s stylus stopped mid-tap. “What?”
“Floor 1 has maintenance hatches at regular intervals along the main corridors. Fourteen confirmed locations.” The holographic display shifted. Floor 1 appeared beside Floor 2, hatches highlighted in blue on one map. The other was clean and featureless. “Floor 2’s map data shows zero. I have checked the scan data three times. There are no maintenance hatches on Floor 2.”
Nobody spoke.
Tess stared at the two maps hanging side by side. Floor 1, dotted with blue. Floor 2, empty. She ran through it again, looking for something Bee might have missed: a hatch in an unusual position, a gap in the data. Nothing.
“Could they be hidden?” Petra asked. “Recessed into the walls? Sealed over?”
“Possible but unlikely,” Bee said. “The technician’s scans along with the map would have detected structural anomalies behind the walls normally referred to as ‘secret doors’. The data shows solid construction at every point where Floor 1 would have a corresponding hatch.”
“Unique architecture,” Marcus said. “Floor 2 was built differently.”
“Or deliberately sealed. I have no way to confirm either hypothesis without sensor data I do not have.”
Yuki stared at her plan. The amber route still hung in the air, leading to a destination that didn’t exist. She looked at it for a long time.
“Well,” she said. “Shit.”
The room remained quiet. The plan was unraveling around them; the routing, the timing, the choreography—all of it hanging without a floor to stand on.
Asha had been leaning back in her chair throughout the entire presentation, arms crossed, watching. Now she unfolded, stood, and stepped into the elevator without a word.
“Asha?” Marcus called.
“Hold on.”
The elevator hummed upward. A minute passed. Above them, the muffled sound of something heavy sliding across the workshop floor. Footsteps. A grunt of effort. The elevator descended again.
Asha stepped out, carrying the large plasteel case by its handle with both hands, forearms straining. She walked to the situation table, set it down with a solid thunk that rattled Yuki’s datapads, and popped the industrial latches.
“Think we can use this?”
The lid swung open. Inside, nestled in custom-cut foam that had seen better decades, sat a piece of equipment built for one purpose: cutting through things that didn’t want to be cut through.
It was massive. Nearly a meter long, heavy-framed, with a barrel housing thick enough to serve as structural support. The casing was scarred and dented from years of hard use. Power conduits ran along the exterior in armored channels. A focusing array at the business end was visibly skewed, knocked out of alignment by some old impact that had cracked the surrounding housing.
Tess’s hands were reaching for it before the rest of her caught up.
She ran her hand across the machine before straining to lift it out of the foam. It was a lot heavier than it looked, and the trigger was broken. Holding it out, she activated [ANALYZE].
The readout bloomed across her vision:
·········································BFD-3600 LASER DRILLDesignation: Industrial Mining / Precision CuttingLoot Seed: 0xD4B1Status: OfflineHardware: DamagedPower: 0.0 / 24.0 AWLast Error: Focusing Array MisalignmentUser Tech Skill: 9·········································Primary Focusing Array ………. Damaged [Tech 5]Power Distribution ………………. Damaged [Tech 3]Thermal Regulation …………….. Offline [Tech 4]Beam Calibration …………………. Degraded [Tech 6]Crystalline Bore Assist ………… Offline [Tech 7]Resonance Bore Mode ………. Available [Tech 8]Harmonic Cutting ……………….. Available [Tech 9]Pulse Modulation ………………… Locked [Tech 11]·········································
Tess set the drill on the table and turned it under the holo light, tracing the unseen skill crystals with her fingers. Five modules down. The focusing array was the worst of it, physically knocked out of alignment. Power cell casing cracked. The whole thermal system was dead, and the calibration crystal was about to go, too.
But it was intact. The beam emitter was sound; and the structural frame was undamaged. Two modules were sitting green: Resonance Bore Mode and Harmonic Cutting, both within her Tech level to enable, waiting for the hardware beneath them to come back to life.
“This is dungeon tech,” Tess said. “Whoever built the core mechanism knew what they were doing.”
“It’s a laser drill,” Asha said. “Cuts rock, metal, crystal, hands if you’re not watching. BFD-3600.”
“BFD?” Yuki said. “I’m going to guess that doesn’t stand for ‘Basic Functionality Drill.’”
“It does not.”
“It needs a ton of power,” Tess continued, turning the drill to inspect the cracked power cell. “But the underlying structure is solid, and two higher-level functions are already available at my Tech level. If I fix the Bore Assist crystal, this thing gets resonant frequency matching. It would tune the cutting beam to whatever material it’s hitting. Rock, plasteel, crystal. The drill adapts on its own.”
“You fix it?” Asha asked.
“Give me the morning.”
“The question,” Marcus said, “is whether or not it can cut through dungeon walls. Even if the corridors don’t have hatches, the maintenance tunnels have to exist. But if cutting through dungeons was easy, more people would do it.”
“They do exist,” Bee said. “And this is where I have useful information. The dungeon’s maintenance tunnels are not constructed from the same materials as the primary corridors. Corridors are dense plasteel reinforced with crystalline substrate. They withstand combat damage, Aether surges, and being reshaped regularly. The maintenance tunnels are different. Lighter construction. Thinner walls. Service-grade infrastructure built for accessibility, not durability.”
“So the drill could cut through,” Tess said.
“A BFD-3600 with functional Bore Assist should be more than capable. The question becomes: where.”
The holographic display shifted. Floor 1’s tunnel network appeared in blue, rendered from Bee’s full sensor coverage. Below it, the estimated Floor 2 layout hung in amber, less complete, full of gaps.
“Floor 2’s tunnel network should run parallel to Floor 1’s in most sections,” Bee said. “Approximately three to four meters of material between them. I have identified two locations where Floor 1 tunnels pass close enough to projected Floor 2 tunnel paths that a vertical cut may connect them.”
Two markers appeared on the Floor 1 map, pulsing green.
“Here, in this quadrant.” The first marker was highlighted. “And here, in this one, near a junction. Both are deep enough in the tunnel network that accidental discovery is unlikely.”
“Those are projections,” Marcus said.
“They are. I have no Floor 2 sensor data. But Floor 1’s architecture provides strong precedent for the layout below it. I have many models for the floor configuration, at least six of them show that the location connects correctly.”
“Aren’t those illegal?” Petra asked, nodding at the drill.
“Oh yeah! Definitely. Not on mining stations, though.” Asha said. “May have smuggled it with me when I came planetside. Heard there were good repair shops here.” She looked at Tess. “Now I know why people kept pointing me in your direction.”
Cici’s head emerged from under the table, ears swiveling. “I would like to contribute. I can detect active electronics through walls. I confirmed this capability this morning with the junction box in the upstairs hallway. If there are live systems on the other side of a floor, I could tell you before you cut into something you’d rather leave alone.”
“That’s useful,” Petra said.
Cici’s tail thumped against the floor twice, hard enough to echo off the stone. “Thank you. I have been practicing.” She paused. “Also, something smells burnt in the northeast corner of this room. Old burn. Months ago. Someone spilled coffee on something electrical.”
“Definitely wasn’t me,” Marcus said, moving his coffee off the table.
“Transport,” he continued, turning back to the map. “That drill has to weigh twenty kilos. Dragging it through kilometers of tunnels isn’t going to be easy.”
“The mag-lev board,” Tess said. “It can carry the weight and hold position while I cut. Steady platform, hands free.”
“And if the cut puts you into a Floor 2 tunnel, you’re in,” Yuki said. “No cameras. Just you, the tunnels, and the FCN.” She was nodding, the frustration from earlier sharpening into focus. “So the public team still runs Floor 2. Noise, combat, energy signatures. Standard delving party doing standard work. If anyone picks up vibration or thermal bloom from the drilling above, it reads as combat activity.”
“Camouflage,” Marcus said.
“Better than camouflage. An Alibi.”
“There is one more factor,” Bee said. “Floor configuration. I control Floor 1’s layout rotations. The next scheduled reset is this afternoon. I can adjust the tunnel geometry to minimize the distance between the drill point and the projected Floor 2 tunnel above it. Once the configuration locks in, I will hold it.”
“How close can you get them?” Tess asked.
“I will not know until I run the rotation. But closer than they are now.”
BEE: I have 14 contingency scenarios prepared for the drill operation. In 11 of them, you are safe. I am working on the other 3.
Tess read the text and didn’t respond. There was nothing to say to that except thank you, and Bee already knew.
The new plan sat between them. Not as clean as Yuki’s original. Not as theatrical. But simpler, more direct. A plan that relied on a good drill, steady hands, and a repair technician who’d spent her life opening things that weren’t supposed to be opened.
“Tomorrow morning,” Marcus said. “Tess fixes the drill, Bee runs the reset, we execute after.”
“No,” Tess said.
Marcus looked at her.
“The reset is this afternoon. Once Bee locks the floor, I want to be in those tunnels. We’ve got less than two weeks before the auditor arrives. Every day we wait is a day we can’t afford.”
“Tess…”
“I fix the drill this morning. Bee runs the reset this afternoon. I go in after. Accessing the tunnels on floor 1 is easy, I’ve done it a dozen times.”
Marcus looked around the table. Yuki shrugged. Petra’s expression said what it always said when Tess dug in on something. Asha was already closing the latches on the drill case.
“The reset is not for several hours,” Bee said.
Tess looked at the ceiling. “Fine. We have breakfast first.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Cici said, scrambling out from under the table, paws scrabbling on the stone, tail at full speed. One of her back legs kicked out sideways as she stood, and she pretended it hadn’t happened. “I can’t eat but I would like to attend. The smells are always exceptional. Last time Marcus dropped a piece of toast and I got to inspect it.”
“You licked it,” Marcus said.
“Inspected. My mouth does not produce saliva. It is a valid diagnostic method.”
Asha snorted.
Tess pushed back from the table. Around her, the room was already shifting from planning to motion. Yuki gathered her datapads while Marcus nursed the last of his coffee. Petra stretched overhead. Asha had the plasteel case off the table and into the elevator before anyone else stood, and Cici was orbiting Tess’s ankles, nose working, tail going, every bit a dog who knew that breakfast was next.
Less than two weeks. A broken drill, an untested theory, and a hole to cut between floors.
She’d worked with worse.
“Breakfast,” she said. “Then we get to work.”