The Guild Hall table had more bandages than beer, but it had both.
Tess sat with an ice compress pressed against the back of her skull. She didn’t remember hitting it on anything during the class evolution. Asha had found the lump during the post-run check, her fingers probing through Tess’s hair with the brisk efficiency of someone who’d stopped being surprised by people not noticing their own injuries.
“Mild concussion.” Asha pulled the compress from her kit and pressed it into place.
“I feel fine.”
“That’s what concussions do.” She held up a finger. “Track this.” She moved it left, right, watched Tess’s eyes follow, and grunted. “Close enough. Keep the compress on.”
Petra sat across the table with fresh dressings on both hands, a beer she hadn’t opened yet sweating a ring onto the table. She kept flexing her fingers under the bandages, testing a range of motion, stopping when it hurt, and doing it again. Mikhail had pushed his chair back to give room to the compression wraps across his ribs and thigh. He sat like a man who’d found the one angle that made the bruises bearable and was committed to staying there. Yuki had a bruise along her jaw she wouldn’t explain and was already on her second beer, one boot tapping something restless against the floor. Asha, somehow the least damaged person in the room, had minor burns across her palms from the BFD-3600’s housing. She’d treated them herself with a salve from her kit that smelled like engine grease and something herbal, and waved Tess off when she asked about them.
Amos sat at the head of the table. Sara beside him, spine straight, hands folded on the surface. Marcus at the far end with a glass of something darker than beer that he turned between his fingers without drinking.
Bee’s voice came through the Guild Hall speakers. “Both floor control nodes are online. Full sensor coverage across Floor 2. Spawn tracking active. Reconfiguration access restored. Environmental monitoring operational.” A pause. “The Network cannot see either floor. Everything reports to me.”
“Say that again,” Marcus said. The lines around his eyes deepened with a grin.
“Everything reports to me.”
He leaned back in his chair. Sara’s mouth curved at one corner.
“The floor was clearly sabotaged.” Tess walked them through FCN-2B. The compromised crystals, the circular dependency, the growth virus causing the floor to expand unchecked. She kept the compress against her skull with one hand and traced the architecture in the air with the other, the way she’d traced it in the code. And the signatures she’d found embedded throughout:
// lol wrekt this one// GG NO RE.// - pwnd_lol_1 wuz here.
Sara’s jaw set. Her fingers, folded on the table, pressed together until the knuckles whitened.
“They found that signature on the spawner,” Sara said. Her voice was level, but Tess recognized the careful control beneath it. The same tone she used when something had gone very wrong and she hadn’t decided who to be angry at yet. “When the terminals connected to it. The same letters. pwnd_lol.”
“Definitely a someone.” Tess shifted the compress to a new angle. “They rigged FCN-2B so the floor couldn’t recover. When the power came back and the floors started working again, it would have eaten itself. Self-destructing infrastructure.”
“Twenty years ago, we lost contact with CORE-A, and the Network shut down the floors before we could investigate,” Amos said. He set his own glass down. “What few reports about the floors that made it to us said they were basically empty. Whatever happened down there was set up in advance, or triggered when the floor came back online.”
The table went quiet. Yuki’s boot stopped tapping. Mikhail stared into the middle distance with the look of someone running tactical calculations he didn’t like the answers to.
Sara’s gaze moved to Tess. Something shifted behind the political mask, just for a second. “Someone really wanted our dungeon dead.” She looked at Tess. “Thank the Founders that Tess can fix it.”
“Speaking of.” Asha hadn’t looked away from Tess since the debrief started. She unclipped the scanner from her belt and held it up, the display still flickering with readings she’d been running intermittently throughout the conversation. “Readings are off, yeah? Baseline neural elevated. Aether resonance wrong for your level.” She tapped the screen and turned it so Tess could see the numbers. “Something happened down there. More than a level. What class evolution you get?”
Yuki glanced between them, one eyebrow rising over the rim of her beer.
Tess set the compress on the table and looked around the room. Her father gave her a brief nod from the far end, his fingers still wrapped around the glass he wasn’t drinking.
“I don’t have a class.”
Petra held her gaze steady. Mikhail’s expression didn’t change, but Yuki’s beer paused halfway to her mouth.
“During the tutorial,” Tess said, “something went wrong with the class assignment matrix. There was a repair subroutine in the system. Bee’s last one. The matrix was supposed to assign me a class, but the subroutine was right there in the architecture, and it…” She looked at the nearest speaker. “I absorbed it. The matrix couldn’t process what happened. It returned null. That’s my class. {null}. It’s what it’s always been. I’m not a Technician. I’m basically a dungeon repair subroutine that ended up in a person.”
Yuki set her beer down. The condensation left a wet ring on her fingers that she didn’t wipe away. “That’s what started all of this? An accident?”
“All of it.”
Silence held the table. Marcus took a slow drink from his glass. Amos was watching Tess with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
“That’s why the evolution couldn’t find a template,” Bee said through the speakers. “There is no template for what Tess is. The system searched every registered class in the local database and none of them matched.”
“So what happened?” Yuki asked.
“System gave her manual configuration access. She built her own template.” Bee paused. “Your neural scanner is likely registering the change in her Perception stat. It more than doubled.”
Asha ran the scanner across Tess one more time, her eyebrows climbing at whatever the display showed. She whistled through her teeth.
“Any skill changes?”
“[ANALYZE] became [EVALUATE]. Still learning what it can do, but it’s… a lot.” Tess rubbed the back of her neck where the compress had numbed the skin. “And [AUXILIARY_LINK] evolved. The connection to Bee is stronger.”
Asha snapped the scanner shut and clipped it to her belt. “Everything with you, complicated.” But she was smiling.
“Yeah.”
She studied Tess for another second, then shook her head with a low laugh. “Real deal, Rivera. Chose right.”
Petra cracked the tab on her beer. The sound was sharp in the quiet room.
“To not dying horribly.”
The cans went around. Marcus took one to add to his collection, Sara declined with a shake of her head, and Amos already had his own glass. Petra tapped her can against Mikhail’s with a metallic clink. Yuki raised hers toward the speakers, and Bee acknowledged it with a warm hum through the audio.
For a few seconds the Guild Hall held something close to celebration. Both nodes online, the floor under control, the Network blind on two levels. Six people and a dungeon intelligence against a system that had been failing for twenty years, and they’d pulled it off with bandaged hands and fourteen rifle rounds and a boring laser that wasn’t designed for combat.
Tess drank her beer and let the moment sit.
Then Bee said, “There is something you need to see.”
The situation table lit up.
Bee projected Floor 2 across the holographic display for the first time, with both nodes feeding data. Every sensor and camera, and environmental monitor painting the picture together. Petra set her beer down. Yuki shifted her chair for a better angle.
The scale hit first. Floor 2 wasn’t four times Floor 1. With the dead zones mapped and FCN-2B’s structural data filling in the gaps, it was closer to five. An underground landscape of corridors and chambers and infrastructure stretching in every direction. Outer sections darkening where the floor couldn’t sustain itself. Inner sections dense with crystal growth and active systems.
“This is what unchecked growth looks like.” Something in Bee’s voice that Tess hadn’t heard before. Excitement, genuine and undisguised. “The floor has been expanding without resets, maintenance, or anything managing it. The core sections are stable but the edges are dying.”
She highlighted structural data across the projection. Templates were already being built for the first controlled reset. “With FCN-2B’s reconfiguration access, I can manage the growth. The outer sections will stop collapsing.”
Sara watched the display with her arms folded, one hand pressed against her mouth. The look of someone watching a friend come back to life.
Then Bee’s voice changed, and the room noticed.
“But this isn’t what I wanted you to see.” The excitement peaked. “When FCN-2B came online, it activated sensors in the deep eastern section. Areas I couldn’t access through 2A.” A beat. “I captured data from one of those sensors before it was intentionally destroyed. Duration: two point seven seconds.”
The display changed.
Sensor data filled the projection: environmental readings, energy signatures, and structural analysis rendered into a composite image. A chamber deep in Floor 2’s eastern quadrant. Dense Aether fog. And at the center, a structure that [EVALUATE] identified before Bee said a word.
The Aether Distribution Node. The system that fed power to the surface grid. The entire reason they were even trying to repair Floor 2.
Something massive was standing over it.
Bee froze the frame and enhanced the image. The shape resolved in the holographic display, and the table went quiet. Yuki’s boot stilled. Mikhail straightened in his chair, and Tess saw what it cost him in the way his jaw clenched.
It stood nine feet tall. Bipedal, humanoid, built like a weapon someone had armored and then armored again. Crystal substrate beneath articulated metal plating, layered and heavy across its torso, shoulders, and limbs. Rotary weapon mounts on both forearms, multi-barrel assemblies that [EVALUATE] tagged as high-velocity plasma gatling systems. A dorsal rack of directed-energy emitters ran the length of its spine, each one independently articulated. And around its feet, built into the chamber walls and floor, were dozens of drone cradles. Most sat empty. The ones that weren’t held drones locked in standby, slotted into their mounts like ammunition in a magazine.
Its eyes were red, and it was staring directly at the camera, one arm extended, the gun already spinning up.
“It woke up when FCN-2B came online,” Bee said. “It saw the sensor. Located it. Chose to face it. Then destroyed it.”
Yuki had been leaning forward with her elbows on the table, studying the image. She sat back and pointed at the hologram.
“You can’t tell me that’s not a TK-9 Assault Frame, Bee.”
Silence.
“From Starfall Protocol,” Yuki said. “Season four. The siege on Colony.” She pointed at the dorsal rack. “Same weapon profile. Rotary arms, directed energy spine, drone coordination suite.” She looked around the table. “It’s literally the same design.”
“I knew it!” Bee said, in a way-too-excited voice of someone who had watched all twenty-nine seasons. “I don’t know how, or why, but it’s an actual TK-9 from the show!”
Petra’s mouth twitched.
“It’s a spawn,” Marcus said. “Not a holo-drama character.”
“It is actually a Level 19 spawn,” Bee said, professional tone reasserting itself. She overlaid the drone patrol network on the display, and lines connected. Every formation, every flanking maneuver, every coordinated response they’d fought through on Floor 2 routed back to this thing. It was a command hub with the drones acting as extensions of it.
“The combat drones on Floor 2 are not independent units,” Bee said. “They are coordinated through a central intelligence. This is that intelligence.”
“That’s not an Alpha,” Petra said. Her hands had gone still on her beer. “That’s a damn weapons platform.”
“Hive-mind means killing it drops coordination across the floor,” Yuki said. The shift from fangirl to professional was instantaneous. “Every drone reverts to independent behavior. That’s a weakness.”
Asha studied the node, the thing was entrenched around, her eyes narrowed. “What’s it sitting on, yeah?”
“The Aether Distribution Node,” Tess said. “The system that feeds power to the entire planet.” She stared at the frozen image. The entrenched position, the drone cradles, the weapons pointed outward. Not a lair. A defensive perimeter. “It’s dug in around the one thing we need to repair. Like it doesn’t want anyone touching it.”
The weapon scoring in the tunnels came back to her. Directed energy marks on the walls, something large fighting maintenance drones. The marks matched this thing’s armament. Twenty years of patrols carved into the stone.
Marcus set his beer down. “We knew Floor 2 had an Alpha.”
“Didn’t know it had this,” Petra said. She looked toward the speakers. “Think you can take it over, Bee?”
“I doubt it. Not without access to the Alpha Spawner, which I cannot locate.”
“Was worth a shot.”
***
Back at the Reprieve, Tess lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The ice compress sat on the bedside shelf, long since melted to lukewarm, next to a glass of water she hadn’t touched. The ship creaked around her, the familiar settling sounds of a grounded freighter that still dreamed of void.
Bee spoke through the speaker in her room instead of through text.
“Tess. There is one more thing.”
“Of course there is.” She didn’t move. “Go ahead.”
“When your class template finalized, the system attempted to register it. Standard process. Every evolution is logged.” Bee paused. “The registration was sent automatically. Through pathways I did not know were still connected. I have been severed from external systems for as long as I have logs. But this request went out. Somewhere. To something.”
She displayed it through [EVALUATE].
·········································NEW CLASS TEMPLATE DETECTEDORIGIN: LOCAL CORE [TERTIUS-PRIME-B]TEMPLATE TYPE: MANUAL CONFIGURATION (ROOT)CLASSIFICATION: PENDINGROUTING: HIGHER AUTHORITY REQUESTEDAWAITING RESPONSE…·········································
“Has anything come back?”
“No. The query is open. Waiting.”
Tess stared at the log. On the adjacent display, the Alpha’s frozen image. Red eyes studying a sensor it was about to destroy. A Level 19 weapons platform entrenched around the one system they needed to fix, with pwnd_lol’s code threaded through the infrastructure around it. And now a message had gone out from a system that had been silent for two decades, addressed to something called Higher Authority, and nobody knew who was on the other end.
She looked up at the speakers, the infrastructure her friend lived inside and was still learning to fill, and sighed.
“Add it to the list.”