The BFD-3600’s power readout climbed while Tess ran through the rest of her checklist.
Plasteel armor, every seal checked twice. A face mask rated for Aether exposure from the estate’s emergency stores, replacing the flimsy one. The pulse pistol sat on her right hip. Sara had pressed it on her after the first tunnel run, and Tess hadn’t argued. The mag-lev board hovered beside the capacitor banks with the drill secured on top, its charge ticking upward.
Cici sat at the maintenance hatch, ears forward, tail making promises her dignity couldn’t keep.
“Your tail is wagging,” Tess said.
“It is not.” A pause. The tail completed two full oscillations. “The hardware is expressing readiness. I have no direct control over this output.”
“You’re excited.”
“I am prepared. There is a meaningful distinction.” Her rear end hit the floor without consultation. “I am also sitting now. I did not intend to sit.”
BEE: Combat team is entering Floor 2 via the public entrance. Petra confirms they will push the eastern corridors to draw attention.
“Got it.”
The drill hit 24.0 / 24.0 AW. Full charge. Tess pulled it from the capacitor banks and locked it onto the mag-lev board. She had her armor, her mask and goggles, her sidearm, her drill, and a mechanical dog who could make maintenance drones think she belonged.
Last time had been a blind scramble into the unknown. This time was a job.
“Bee, confirm the distance.”
BEE: Junction D-14 places you approximately one and a half meters from the projected Floor 2 tunnel network. I optimized the rotation for the thinnest barrier section using density readings from your first breach.
Down from two and a half meters. Bee had delivered.
“Let’s go.”
She opened the maintenance hatch, guided the mag-lev board through, and dropped into Floor 1’s tunnels. Cici followed.
The floor rotation had changed the geometry. Junction D-14 was wider than D-7, lower ceiling, different branching. Crystal veins in the walls ran thicker here, almost as if she was already in the Floor 2 environment.
“We’re close to the boundary,” Tess said. “I can feel it already.”
BEE: Ambient readings confirm elevated Aether concentration. Safe at this distance. The barrier wall should be directly ahead.
Tess parked the mag-lev board and oriented the BFD toward the wall. She pulled her mask up, sealed it against her face, then pulled her goggles on over her eyes.
“Cici.”
“I know.” Already retreating around the corner. “My audio processors have registered a formal protest regarding last time. I will be several junctions away.”
Tess braced, engaged Resonance Bore Mode and Harmonic Cutting through [INTERFACE], and pulled the trigger.
The shriek filled the tunnel. But this time the drill pulsed from the first moment, reading the material and adapting on every frequency shift. No brute-force grinding through a meter of plasteel that didn’t want to be cut. The BFD found the crystalline lattice structure, matched its resonant weakness, and worked with the material instead of against it. The wall parted in layers. Plasteel slag dripped in glowing lines. Crystal dust hazed the air.
One meter. The beam chewed through the densest layer without slowing. One and a half. The resistance thinned. The pressure building on the other side was familiar now, and Tess eased off the trigger before punching through.
The wall blew out. Warm Aether rushed through the hole, but this time she was prepared. She turned her shoulder into the flow and let it wash past until it settled.
Eight minutes. 18.6 / 24.0 AW remaining.
“Clear,” Tess said.
Cici appeared at the end of the corridor, trotting forward. “May I go first? If drones are near the opening, I should be the first thing they see.”
“That’s the plan. Go.”
Cici approached the hole. Yellow light from Floor 2 painted her chassis in warm amber. She sniffed the edge, ears rotating, then squeezed through without hesitating.
Tess waited. Her hand found the pulse pistol and stayed there. The last time she’d been on this side of a wall, two drones had gone red and she’d vaporized one with the BFD. The memory was closer to the surface than she’d expected.
“Two drones,” Cici said from the other side. “They are adjusting course. Coming to investigate.” A pause. “Yellow lights. They are scanning me.”
More waiting.
“One is examining my left rear leg. The other is circling.” Silence from the other side. “They seem satisfied. They are leaving. Patrol resuming.”
“Do they know I’m here?”
“Nope! The Aether bleeding through the hole may mask your signal. Or they simply do not care about anything behind me.”
Tess set the BFD on the mag-lev board, pulled it through the hole, and climbed into Floor 2.
It hit her the same way. Crystal ribs pulsing with rhythmic yellow light. Wider corridors, organic architecture that felt grown rather than built. [ANALYZE] painted the walls with data the instant she looked: structural integrity, power flow traces, energy density measurements. Richer than anything on Floor 1. Her skill had more to work with down here, and it reached for everything it could find.
The air was thick through the mask. Warm and present, but manageable.
BEE: Your readings are stable. The mask is performing well. I still have no sensors on Floor 2, so I am relying entirely on what you share through [ANALYZE].
“Understood.”
Cici was ahead, fifteen meters down the corridor, standing at a junction. Two crystal drones hovered near her, bobbing like curious attendants. One extended a diagnostic tool and touched her front leg. Cici’s tail wagged.
“They like me,” she reported.
“Don’t lead them back this way.”
“They are content at their junction. Scouting ahead now.”
She trotted forward. The drones followed for a few meters, then lost interest and peeled off to resume their patrol.
This was how it was going to work.
Cici moved ahead to each junction. Her ears and nose read the space, and she reported back: drone positions, patrol directions, timing. Tess counted the window out and moved.
“Two drones, heading east. Approximately forty seconds before the next pass.”
Tess moved. Quick, quiet, the mag-lev board gliding behind her in Whisper Mode. She was halfway across an open junction when Cici’s voice came back.
“Stop. One is turning around.”
Tess dove under the mag-lev board, ignoring the hum of its magnets through her armor and tools. The amber glow of a scanner swept over the drill and board, sweeping the walls as she heard the drone approach.
The light swept down toward her, over the edge of the mag-lev board, and kept going. The drone turned left at the junction ahead and disappeared.
Tess let the air out through her teeth.
“Clear,” Cici said. “That one changed its route. Good idea with the mag-lev board! Magnetic interference would likely scramble anything the scanners pick up from underneath it.”
“That’s what I was banking on.” Her voice was steadier than the rest of her. “But it was just a theory until now.”
“That should help us if there’s any other surprises. One drone at the next junction, stationary. Wait.”
Cici trotted into the drone’s line of sight. It turned and scanned her like it were some kind of checkpoint. Cici sat. The drone circled once, clicked something at her with its tool array, then drifted down a side passage.
“Go.”
They pushed deeper. The tunnels branched and reconnected like root systems, the organic geometry shifting with every junction, and [ANALYZE] mapped it all as they moved, feeding data to Bee through Tess’s vision.
BEE: I am building a tunnel map from your data. The architecture is considerably more complex than Floor 1. More redundant pathways, more junction nodes. This system was designed for resilience.
“Or it grew that way.”
BEE: The distinction may not apply on Floor 2.
Petra’s voice crackled through Tess’s earpiece. “Engaging in the eastern quadrant. Making noise. You clear down there?”
“Clear. Cici’s handling the drones.”
“Got it. We’ll keep the eyes on us.”
The corridors changed as they went deeper. Crystal ribs grew thicker, their light brighter, the junction nodes more elaborate. The amount of Aether in the air just one floor down was substantially higher than Tess had expected. She worried that the tunnels on Floor 3 might be too concentrated for her to even work safely in.
They progressed through two more junctions. Each one had an access panel beside a sealed hatch. Tess pressed her palm to the first. The light flashed green; there was a click, and the hatch opened. The second panel opened in the same way. Standard dungeon access control, and her class was recognized without issue.
The third junction reacted differently.
Tess pressed her palm flat against the access panel. Nothing happened. The panel was warm and powered. It was reading her hand. But nothing happened.
She tried again. Same result.
Every access panel in the maintenance tunnels worked the same way. Palm flat, green light, hatch opens. She’d never met a maintenance door that said no up to this point.
This one said nothing at all.
“Bee, this door won’t open.”
BEE: That should not be possible. Your class designation has root-level maintenance access. No standard lock should refuse you.
“It’s not refusing. It’s like the signal goes in and doesn’t come out the other side.”
She focused on it with [ANALYZE].
The panel’s internal architecture bloomed in her vision. Four signal pathways ran from the reader to the lock mechanism, the same basic design as every other access panel in the dungeon. She’d seen it dozens of times. Four stages: [Authorization], [Verification], [Handshake], [Release]. The reader confirms identity, validates the access level, completes the handshake, and opens the lock.
Except these pathways weren’t connected right.
The [Authorization] signal came in and hit the first relay. Instead of passing forward to [Verification], it routed sideways into [Handshake]. [Handshake] fed into [Release], but [Release] looped back to [Authorization] instead of activating the lock. And [Verification] sat isolated, disconnected on both ends, doing nothing.
A loop. The signal entered the system, traveled through three stages in the wrong order, and arrived back where it started. Then it did it again. And again. Her palm sat on the reader while her authorization cycled through a closed circuit that never reached the lock. It never passed through [Verification], and without [Verification], [Release] couldn’t fire.
Tess knew what damage looked like: corroded contacts, broken connections, dead pathways. Everything here was intact. Every relay operational, every connection clean. The hardware was intact, but it was as if someone had taken a working system and rearranged it into a configuration that could never succeed.
“The pathways are scrambled into a loop. [Authorization] never reaches the lock.” Tess said.
She traced the routes with her finger against the panel, following each pathway through [ANALYZE]’s overlay. Four relays, four stages, three wrong connections.
BEE: Can you restore the original routing?
“The relays are physical. Small, but I can see them through [ANALYZE].” She pulled her multi-tool from her belt and selected the finest probe. “Same as rewiring a junction box, except the panel is behind the housing. Input to stage one, stage one to stage two, all the way through.”
[Authorization]’s relay was recessed in the panel housing, a crystal contact no bigger than a grain of rice that Tess had to approach from behind the box itself. [ANALYZE] highlighted it and the slot it should connect to. Tess worked the probe into the gap, levered the contact free from the [Handshake] input, and guided it across to [Verification].
The contact seated with a faint click. [ANALYZE] refreshed: [Authorization] to [Verification]. Clean signal, live pathway.
[Verification]’s output was a dead end, disconnected and leading nowhere. But the original connection point to [Handshake] was still there, just empty. She bridged it with steady hands and the probe’s tip.
[Authorization] to [Verification] to [Handshake]. Two down.
The last fix was the hardest. [Release]’s relay was oriented backward, its output feeding into [Authorization] instead of the lock mechanism. The crystal contacts only carried signal in one direction, which meant reversing the relay required physically rotating it in its housing. The gap was barely wide enough for the probe’s tip.
“Cici, status?”
“All clear. Two drones just passed, heading north. Nothing approaching.”
Tess pulled a second, slightly larger probe from her toolbelt and worked it in at an angle, gripped the relay between the two, and rotated it. The probe slipped. The relay tilted in its housing, and she caught it before it dropped into the gap behind the panel, pinching it against the wall of the slot with the flat of the probe larger. Her fingers were cramping from the fine work.
She repositioned, got the grip back, and finished the rotation. The relay seated with a click, and Tess let out a breath.
[ANALYZE] refreshed. [Authorization] → [Verification] → [Handshake] → [Release]. Four stages, correct order, clean pathways.
With the box now fully online and lit up in her vision, Tess noticed something tiny etched into the substrate. Whatever it was, had been there long enough for crystal growth to partially obscure it, but [ANALYZE] picked it up. Compact, efficient, with a kind of deliberate flair to the construction that felt less like engineering and more like showing off.
Six blocky letters: GG NO RE
“Bee, any idea what those letters mean?” Tess asked, pressing her palm to the panel. “And maybe how they got there?”
Green light and a click. The hatch opened.
BEE: This is the first time I’ve seen something in a substrate that survived a floor reset. The groupings would suggest some sort of cipher. I will check public records, but my access is limited.
Tess was going to respond, but the corridor beyond the hatch looked very different. Cici had scouted ahead while Tess worked the panel, and was standing at the next junction with her ears flat and her nose working hard.
“Tess.” Her voice was low. “The walls.”
Score marks and deep gouges carved across the crystal ribs at varying heights, from knee level to above Tess’s head. The crystal had regrown over the worst of them, slow mineral healing, but the scars were still visible beneath the recent growth. Dark lines under translucent skin.
Tess ran her fingers along the nearest gouge. The edges were melted smooth.
“Directed energy,” she said, looking through [ANALYZE]. There was no way the maintenance drones did this with their tools. “And physical impacts. Something hit these walls hard enough to crack the structural ribs.”
The marks continued down the corridor. Deeper scoring. A section where the structural ribs were shattered entirely, regrown into a rough mass that didn’t match the surrounding architecture.
Whatever had come through here had been large and fast.
BEE: The damage is consistent with something moving through this corridor at speed while sustaining fire. The weapon burns are on the walls and ceiling, consistent with smaller units firing from elevated positions at something at ground level.
“Drones shooting at something big.”
BEE: Or something big shooting back. Some of the directed energy burns exceed anything the maintenance drones carry by a significant margin. Both sides were armed.
Cici pressed close to Tess’s leg as they moved through the damaged section. Her ears remained flat. The corridor turned, and the scoring continued around the bend, trailing deeper into the network.
Tess followed the trail.
The tunnel widened into a chamber roughly four meters across. The ribs arched overhead to form a vaulted ceiling, covered in damage. Cables ran along every surface, bundling at junction points, splitting toward different branches of the tunnel network. Scorched equipment housings lined the walls, their crystal components dim but intact, covered in a fine layer of mineral dust.
And in the center, connected to every cable run in the room, sat a console on a metal pedestal.
“Bee.” Tess said. “Whatever it was, it found the FCN.”
She activated [ANALYZE].
The system unfolded across her vision:
·········································FCN-2A — FLOOR CONTROL NODE (SENSORS)Function: Camera Routing · Sensor Distribution · Environmental MonitoringPower State: Emergency ReservesOutput Efficiency: 3%User Tech Skill: 9·········································Crystal A — Sensor CoordinationStatus: Degraded — 35% FunctionalityIssue: Primary routing decayed
Crystal B — Camera RoutingStatus: Degraded — 44% FunctionalityIssue: Connection substrate corroded
Crystal C — Environmental ProcessingStatus: Degraded — 40% FunctionalityIssue: Data pathways deteriorated
Crystal D — Signal AmplificationStatus: Minimal — 15% FunctionalityIssue: Power starvation·········································Connected Systems:FCN-2B (Floor Control Node — STRUCTURE) .. DISCONNECTEDFloor 2 Camera Network ……………………………………. DEGRADEDFloor 2 Environmental Sensors …………………………. DEGRADEDFloor 2 Spawn Tracking ……………………………………… ROUTED TO FCN-2BFloor 2 Reconfiguration Control ………………………. ROUTED TO FCN-2BFloor 2 Active Infrastructure ……………………………… ROUTED TO FCN-2B·········································
Tess read it multiple times hoping it would change.
“Bee.”
BEE: I see it.
“FCN-2A.” She stared at the designation. “Two. A.”
BEE: Yes.
“Floor 1 had one node. One FCN. Cameras, sensors, spawn tracking, reconfiguration. Everything in one box.”
BEE: Apparently Floor 2 does not.
The connected systems list sat in her vision like a bill she hadn’t expected. FCN-2A handled cameras, sensors, and environmental monitoring. Passive systems. The eyes. Everything she needed to blind the Network was right here in this room.
But spawn tracking, floor reconfiguration, active infrastructure—everything Bee would need to actually operate Floor 2—routed to FCN-2B. A separate node somewhere else.
“You’re kidding me,” Tess said. “There’s two.”
BEE: FCN-2A is the sensory array. If you repair it, I gain camera feeds and environmental data. The Network loses surveillance on Floor 2. Asha can enter and the team can move freely.
“And FCN-2B is where?”
BEE: With cameras and sensors online, I should be able to find it.
Tess turned back to FCN-2A and went over the list. Four degraded crystals, corroded substrates, power starvation. But the architecture was simpler than Floor 1’s FCN had been. The damage was straightforward. She could fix this.
And then she’d need to do it all over again.
Cici sat in the chamber entrance, ears rotating, facing the corridor. Keeping watch without being asked.
Tess set her tool belt on the console.
“Cameras first,” she said.