AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm trying to experiment a bit in this issue with swapping PoVs a bit, this is admittedly a weakness of mine since Path of the Paladin is all First Person.
..Petra—Floor 2—Public Staging Area..
The comm clicked in Petra’s ear. Tess’s voice. “Petra. I’m in position.”
“Moving to Floor 2 now. Give us five minutes to make some noise.”
She looked at her team. Mikhail had his shield emitter active; the shimmer was visible across his body. Yuki was three steps behind with her rifle up, scanning the corridor ahead like someone who expected everything to go wrong because it usually did.
The transition between floors was intense as they made their way down. The air thickened, the walls showed denser crystal growth, and the ambient hum that was barely noticeable on Floor 1 became something you felt in your back teeth. The corridors were wider with higher ceilings. More vertical space, which sounded like an advantage until you realized the drones used it better.
“Three contacts,” Yuki said. Eyes closed. [TREMORSENSE]. “Flying. Tight formation. Twenty meters, left branch. They know we’re here.”
Mikhail stepped forward and set himself in the corridor’s center, his vibroblade sparking to life. Petra dropped to his left, vibroblades drawn, weight on her back foot. Yuki braced her rifle against a support column.
The drones came around the corner fast.
Plasma bolts hit Mikhail’s shield before Petra had finished her first step. Two impacts in quick succession, each one flaring the shield bright enough to throw shadows. The shield held, but Mikhail braced against the force. These hit harder than anything on Floor 1.
Yuki’s rifle cracked twice. The lead drone jerked, lost altitude, and Petra was already closing the distance, timing her cut to meet it as it dropped. Her vibroblade caught it across the underside, and it came apart in a shower of crystal fragments.
The second drone swung wide to flank them. A plasma bolt scorched across Petra’s shoulder, finding the gap where her armor plate met her collarbone. She hissed through her teeth, but kept moving. The third drone was hammering Mikhail’s shield, each flare dimmer than the last. At least Tess had helped it take more hits.
Yuki’s third shot dropped the flanker. Petra caught the last one mid-turn with a backhand slash that split it in two.
The corridor smoked. Petra touched her shoulder. The skin underneath was burned, heat radiating through the gap in the plate. Manageable. No healer, though, which meant manageable was all she’d get.
“You’re hit,” Mikhail said.
“I noticed.” She rolled the shoulder. It hurt. “Push forward. We’re here to map and cause a scene.”
They pushed. Three quadrants deep, Yuki called contacts before they appeared, the team handling each engagement with an efficiency that came from months of training together. Yuki’s [RICOCHET SHOT] cleared a cluster of drones in a side corridor without them having to enter it. Mikhail’s shield took hit after hit, but it would not last forever.
Then they hit the intersection.
Five drones in a staggered formation, but behind them was something new. This spawn was more suited for ground combat. Waist-height, heavy crystal plating, blocking the corridor as if it had been built for exactly this purpose. The drones were using it as a rally point, darting behind it for cover and reemerging to fire.
“That’s new,” Yuki said.
“Can you hit it?”
“Crystal armor’s too thick at this range. Need to get closer or hit something structural.”
Mikhail was already advancing. He dodged several bolts before several hits—two, three, four in rapid succession. A fifth bolt punched through a gap and caught him across the jaw. He staggered but kept his feet, blocking the corridor with his body while blood ran down his neck.
“Mikhail—”
“Go.” He managed.
Petra went.
She pulled a handle from her belt and thumbed the activation switch. The plasma blade roared to life, a bar of super-heated energy that hummed against her hand. Tess and Bee had said these would last maybe thirty seconds until deeper floors.
Petra used twenty seconds of it.
The plasma blade went through the first drone as if it wasn’t there, then immediately through a second on the backswing. She was inside the formation now, too close for the remaining drones to fire without hitting each other, and the ground construct was right in front of her. She drove the blade into its chest plate, and the crystal armor parted like wet paper as she bisected it.
The construct seized, sparked, and exploded into dust. Something clattered out of it—a small armored case, roughly the size of a datapad, that skidded across the floor.
Yuki picked off the last drones as Petra killed the plasma blade. Her hands were shaking from the heat bleed and the shoulder burn was pulling with every movement.
Mikhail wiped blood from his jaw. “Nice.”
“Grab that,” Petra said, nodding at the case. He picked it up and stowed it without examining it. Later.
As they pushed forward through the corridors, they encountered only light resistance that Yuki could quickly dispatch.
Then Yuki’s head came up mid-stride, her eyes narrowing. [TREMORSENSE] was giving her something she didn’t like.
“Something’s different.” She held up a fist. “The contacts ahead have pulled back. All of them. They were converging and now they’re forming a line between us and the deeper corridors.”
“A line?”
“A wall. And the ones behind us are closing. But there’s nothing that way, through that corridor.”
Petra looked back down the corridor and cocked her head at the sight. Dozens of amber patrol lights were gathering in the distance. Closing in at a walking pace.
“I think they’re herding us,” Yuki said. “That way, back towards the entrance.”
They didn’t bother arguing with dozens of drones; instead, Petra ordered the retreat, and they moved back through the corridors they’d already cleared. The herding drones held their distance without engaging them.
Petra’s comm buzzed. Tess.
“The maintenance tunnels on Floor 2 are defended. Drones. They came after me the second they saw me.” Tess’s voice was raw. “I sealed the hole. They can’t follow.”
Whatever Tess had hit, the entire floor had reacted.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Just… it’s not what we expected down here.”
“We’re heading to staging,” Petra said. “See you after the reset.”
They reached the public entrance. The drones stopped twenty meters out, and held position like they didn’t want anyone entering. A fully coordinated wall of plasma drones humming just outside the entrance, waiting for someone to walk out.
“That was weird, right?” Yuki said. “I feel like that was weird.”
***
..Tess—Floor 2—Private Staging Area..
Tess opened her eyes and didn’t know where she was.
She was lying on something that hovered. The mag-lev board. The staging area. She was in the staging area.
She sat up. The movement made her head swim for half a second, then settle.
“Feel better?” Asha said.
She was sitting on a crate near the capacitor banks, legs crossed, chewing something from a foil packet. Her med kit sat closed and latched beside her.
“How long was I out?”
“Couple hours. Went down about ten minutes after [PURGE] hit. Normal.” She popped another strip of whatever she was eating into her mouth. “Didn’t want to wake you.”
Two hours. The dermal patch on Tess’s neck had changed from clear to a dull amber. Used up. She peeled it off. Her throat wasn’t raw anymore, and her head felt clearer than it had since the Aether geyser.
Cici was sitting near the maintenance hatch, ears forward, watching them. “Your vital signs improved significantly during your nap. I was monitoring.”
“Of course you were.”
“I also cataloged seventy-three distinct sounds the staging area makes while idle. Most are the capacitor banks. Four are unidentified.” She tilted her head. “I intend to investigate.”
Asha held out the foil packet. Dark, dried strips of something reddish-brown. “Hungry? Veldi jerky. Family recipe.”
Tess took a strip and bit into it.
The first second was fine. Salt, smoke, something earthy. Then the heat arrived, like something trying very hard to be hotter than a plasma torch. It climbed past warm, past hot, past any reasonable threshold, and settled into a slow burn that seemed actively hostile to the concept of taste buds.
Her eyes watered. For the second time that day, and for entirely different reasons.
“That’s…” She swallowed with effort. “Something.”
“Good, yeah?” Asha was already chewing another piece.
“It’s trying to kill me.” Tess coughed.
“Means it’s working. Popular with kids on Kovacs.”
Cici’s nose was working overtime. “The chemical profile of that jerky would qualify it as volatile chemicals on several stations in my database.”
“Veldi aren’t built the same,” Asha said, tapping her tongue. “Different receptors. What you’re tasting as pain, I’m tasting as flavor.”
“Congratulations on your superior receptors.”
Asha grinned. Tess drank from her canteen until the fire banked to something survivable, then sat there for a moment in the staging area’s hum. Two hours ago she’d been running from drones through glowing tunnels. Now she was sharing terrible jerky with a Veldi healer while a robot dog cataloged ambient sounds.
Her communicator buzzed. Petra.
“We’re topside, heading to the estate. Took the public exit.”
“How bad?”
A pause. Then: “We’re banged up. Bring Asha.”
Tess looked at the healer, who was already closing her foil packet and reaching for her kit.
“Time to work,” Asha said as they moved towards the elevator.
***
..Tess—Private Guild Hall—Tertian Estate..
Petra was already talking when they came down into the Guild Hall, her armor’s shoulder piece was off, exposing a plasma burn from her deltoid to her collarbone, blistered at the center, and she was walking Marcus through what had caused it while he made notes on a datapad.
“—three of them in tight formation. Yuki called it before they rounded the corner, but the corridor was too narrow. Nowhere to flank.”
Asha crossed to Petra mid-sentence, scanner out, and turned the burn into the light without asking.
“Keep talking,” she said. “Second degree. Deep in the middle.”
Petra barely paused. “First engagement was manageable. Three drones, coordinated but beatable. Pushed forward, mapped three quadrants.” She pulled up her datapad with her free hand and transferred route data to the situation table. New corridors bloomed in green on the holo-projection.
“Feel that?” Asha pressed two fingers near the edge of the burn.
“Yes.” Through her teeth.
“Good. Nerves are intact.” She pulled an amber hypo from her kit. “Gonna sting.”
She activated [RAPID MEND] and Petra hissed once, then went still as the skill took hold. Tess watched the angry red fade to pink at the contact point, new tissue forming in a wave that spread across the burn. Different from [PURGE], which had been internal. This was visible as it worked. Maybe thirty seconds later, the worst of it was gone.
Across the table, Mikhail sat with a dark compress covering the left side of his jaw and his shield emitter in front of him, housing cracked worse than before. Yuki was beside him, hands restless on her rifle.
“The drones are coordinated,” Yuki said while Asha worked. “Formation flying. Pincer movements. Floor 1 spawns were individuals. These think together.”
“Shield took too many direct hits,” Mikhail said. He touched the emitter housing. “I’m too slow for the coordinated fire.”
“Don’t touch your face,” Asha said without looking up. “Coming to you next.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were about to.”
“Don’t touch the shoulder for an hour,” she told Petra while moving to Mikhail.
“Five-drone group plus a ground construct. Armored, blocked the corridor. I held the chokepoint while Petra flanked—ow!” He jerked away from Asha’s hand as she pulled the compress from his jaw.
“Hold still. You’re luck this was a graze.” She said, replacing the compress with one of her dermal patches.
“—and Yuki picked off shots from cover,” Mikhail finished. “If we had Asha down there, we could have kept going if not for…”
Asha glanced at Yuki. “You?”
“Fine.”
Asha studied her for a beat. Let it go. “You weren’t fighting for long. Without me in there, much longer and someone is getting carried out.”
“That’s not even the worst part,” Petra said.
“The drones changed behavior. They’d been engaging normally. Then they shifted and doubled back. Started pushing us out of areas we’d already cleared.”
“They weren’t even fighting us,” Yuki said. “It was corralling mostly. Herding us toward the entrance.”
Tess’s hands went still on the table.
“I think that was me,” she said. “In the maintenance tunnels. The drones went red and swarmed me. The entire tunnel system felt like it was alive.”
“The timing supports it,” Bee said through the speakers. “Tunnel alert at 14:47. Petra’s reported behavioral shift at 14:50. Three minutes.”
Marcus put his coffee down. “The whole system coordinated.”
“Like an immune response,” Asha said. “Think about it like a body. Tunnels are the deep systems. Floor is the surface. Something enters that doesn’t belong, deep systems flag it. Signal goes out. Surface drones shift to containment.” She looked at Tess. “Tunnels treated you like a virus.”
“Which means going back in triggers everything,” Tess said. “Tunnel drones, floor drones, the entire system.”
“Cameras,” Asha said before anyone could change the subject. “That’s all keeping me out of there. Team’s getting hit and I’m in staging eating jerky.”
“Once the FCN is online, cameras go dark—” Tess started.
“I know how it works. How do we get there faster?”
“We still need the combat team on Floor 2,” Tess said. “Nobody can hear drilling through meters of wall, but the floor reacts when the tunnels are breached. If the Network reviews footage and sees behavioral shifts on an empty floor—”
“They’ll start investigating,” Petra finished. “With us fighting, the drones read as reacting to us. Not to whatever’s underneath.”
Sara had arrived during the debriefing. “Anyone watching Floor 2’s feeds while your team was in there was watching them. With Petra in there for the first time officially in weeks, every eye the Network has was watching you. You couldn’t ask for a better distraction.”
Something moved under the table.
“I have a thought about the drones,” Cici said.
Her nose emerged first, then her green eyes, peering out from under the table’s edge at Tess.
“The maintenance drones examined me but didn’t see me as a threat.” She paused. “They even followed me around a bit. Then they found Tess and everything changed. Whatever they see as a threat, I definitely wasn’t it.”
“IFF Protocols?” Bee said through the speakers. “There is a high likelihood that the spawns on Floor 2 were reading Cici as me, or a neutral party. It could be the companion pet chassis, or Cici, or more likely both.”
“Could be?” Asha said.
“The probability is high,” Bee replied. “But there is not enough information to be more certain.”
“I am offering to through the Floor 2 tunnels,” Cici said. “And lead them away while Tess locates the FCN.”
There was a quiet beat in the room.
“You’re volunteering as a decoy,” Petra said.
“As a scout. I can map drone patrol routes, identify safe windows for Tess to move, and relay positions in real time.” Her tail wagged once, caught itself, and stopped. “I can relay whatever is needed through my shared connection with Bee, too. I can actually help!”
Bee’s voice came through the speakers softer than usual. “I am impressed. And concerned. But primarily impressed.”
“You would do the same thing if you could.” Cici said. “And I’m… a version of you!”
“What about the case?” Yuki said.
Everyone looked at her. She nodded toward Mikhail. “From the construct. You stowed it.”
Mikhail reached beside his chair and set the armored case on the table. Small, with plasteel-reinforced corners. He’d picked it up mid-fight and hadn’t looked at it since.
The latch was mechanical. He flipped it open.
Inside, seated in a molded cradle, sat a shield emitter. The housing was smooth and unblemished, a faint charge indicator pulsing along one edge. It looked new. It looked as if it had never been used.
Mikhail’s cracked MK-VII sat two feet away on the same table.
Tess activated [ANALYZE].
·········································PERSONAL SHIELD MK-IXDesignation: Personal Defense · Energy DispersionLoot Seed: 0xB2A7Status: StandbyHardware: OperationalCharge: 12 / 14 AWUser Tech Skill: 9·········································Shield Envelope …………… Available [Tech 4]Energy Dispersion ……….. Available [Tech 6]Kinetic Absorption ………. Available [Tech 7]Threat Prioritization ……... Locked [Tech 10]Adaptive Frequency …….. Locked [Tech 12]Overcharge Protocol ….… Locked [Tech 15]·········································
“Energy Dispersion,” Tess said. She looked at Mikhail’s cracked MK-VII, then back at the readout. “Your shield is built for kinetic impacts. Physical hits. This one’s primary skill is energy weapons.”
Mikhail picked up the MK-IX. Turned it over once, the charge thrumming and pulsing against his palm.
“The housing keeps cracking because it’s converting plasma into kinetic stress on the frame,” he said. “It was never designed for energy fire.”
He set the MK-IX back in its cradle, then looked at his father’s shield with its fractured housing and its legacy designation, the one he’d carried across every floor of this dungeon.
“Just what I needed,” he said.
“Maybe I won’t have to patch your face up next time,” Asha said, already repacking her kit. “Convenient loot.”
“Dungeons do that sometimes,” Yuki said. “Give you what you need when you’re about to hit a wall. Like they want you to keep going.”
Mikhail picked up the MK-VII and held it out to Petra. “Take it.”
She looked at the cracked housing. “Mikhail…”
“It’s better than nothing. You’re faster than me, you’re the one getting hit in the gaps.” He kept his arm extended. “It’s not built for plasma, but it’ll absorb a hit or two before you need to worry about it.”
Petra took it. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the weight, the history. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I know,” he said.
Sara cleared her throat. “Before we continue planning. The crystal.”
She looked at Tess.
“I’d like to take it to our research facility. Dr. Vasquez has the instrumentation to analyze energy structures we can’t parse here.” A pause. “With your permission.”
Tess thought about it. The crystal had resisted [ANALYZE] entirely, and the Deep Scanner had nearly overloaded trying. Whatever it was, she couldn’t crack it with the tools available, and Floor 2 needed her full attention.
“Take it,” she said. “If Vasquez can figure out what it is while we work the FCN, we’re not wasting time.”
“Two problems, two teams,” Sara said. “I’ll contact him tomorrow and arrange secure transport.”
“One more item,” Bee said. “Floor 1’s configuration. The drill hole Tess sealed is still present in the current layout. I will need to rotate the floor to remove it. A new configuration means new tunnel positions.”
“The hole disappears,” Tess said.
“Yes. Along with the current connection point. You will need to drill again from a new location.”
“Can you get us closer?”
“I will optimize for minimum distance. The previous cut was two and a half meters. I believe I can improve on that.”
Marcus looked around the table. “Tomorrow morning. You all know what needs to happen.”
“Still don’t like sitting in staging,” Asha said.
“Temporary,” Petra said. She rolled her healed shoulder. “Once those cameras go dark, you’re in.”
“Better be.”
Tess looked at the holo-projection. Floor 2 glowed amber above the table, more complete than it had been that morning. New corridors from the combat team’s run. Above it, Floor 1 in blue, about to be reshuffled overnight.
Somewhere between those two maps was the FCN.
“Get some rest,” Marcus said. “Everyone.”
Cici emerged fully from under the table and shook herself, a full-body rattle of plating that made Yuki flinch.
“I like rest,” she said.
The team filtered out in ones and twos. Tess lingered at the table, watching the maps rotate slowly above its surface, before finally leaving the Guild Hall.
Tomorrow, the FCN comes online.