This chapter kicked my butt.... orz♛———♛—————————♛———♛
Bert chuckled under his breath as he watched the line of adventurers stare at the opening in the cliff with unrestrained awe. He couldn’t blame them. The first time Alpha had led him through those doors — barely a few days ago — Bert had stood in the same spot wearing the same slack-jawed expression.
The twin slabs of rock had finished retracting into the mountain’s sides, revealing a wide, vaulted passage lit by steady bands of white light embedded in the walls.
“Alright, folks, stay together and keep moving,” he called, pitching his voice the way he did in the Guild Hall when drilling new recruits. Not that any of these men and women were green adventurers fresh from training. Still, he knew how easily wonder could freeze a person in place. Even knowing this wasn’t built by some divine being, even knowing the scale of what a Dungeon Core was capable of, he had stood rooted in place for a full minute before remembering to breathe.
It wasn’t the scale of the construction that had shaken him so much. Or even the strangeness of it. Cultivators did and saw stranger things every day.
It had been the implication.
It had been what Alpha was building here.
Bert wasn’t even sure Alpha fully grasped what he had made. What this place would mean to adventurers. To Halirosa. Maybe even to the world beyond it.
In cultivation circles, people often lectured about the four factors that determined how far someone could rise: time, talent, resources, and luck. Entire sect philosophies were built around those pillars.
Time was merciless. No one ever had enough.
Talent was arbitrary. You were born with what you were born with, and the world expected you to wring every drop from it.
Luck… scholars had debated its nature for millennia, dissecting fate and fortune as if either could be pinned down. Even now, little about it was truly understood.
But resources?
Resources were tangible. They could be claimed. Hoarded. Bought. Stolen. Controlled.
With enough resources, talent could be supplemented. Time could be compressed. Luck could be nudged in your favor. You could buy tutors, buy pills, buy manuals. Pay people to take risks you wouldn’t. You could step over a hundred obstacles that would have killed someone else.
Every clan and sect in Halirosa understood that truth.
That was why they hoarded Deep access. Why sect gates stayed guarded, and tolls climbed until a man’s purse bled dry. Whoever controlled the flow of materials controlled how far others were allowed to climb.
The Nexus threatened that control.
Even if the adventurers trailing behind him hadn’t realized it yet.
The first few stepped through the cliffside entrance as if they expected a trap to spring, hands hovering near weapons, bodies angling instinctively into defensive spacing the way they would when entering an unknown cavern.
Bert only chuckled softly.
The air shifted the moment they crossed the threshold, as though they had passed through an invisible membrane.
Outside, the wind had scraped against armor and stung exposed skin. Inside, the air felt warmer — still crisp from the mountain height, but without the bite. The corridor sloped gently downward, broad enough for five to walk abreast. Instead of rough-cut stone, smooth black metallic walls lined the passage, interrupted only by the seamless strips of white light that erased every shadow.
One of the younger adventurers slowed just inside the entrance and turned in a slow circle.
“What… is this?” he breathed.
The awe in his voice was raw. He had likely never seen anything like it.
Bert knew he never had. The strange metal walls bore a repeating pattern that reminded him faintly of dragon scales — only hexagonal instead of teardrop-shaped. The embedded lights neither flickered nor dimmed the way spirit lamps often did. More unsettling still, he couldn’t sense even a trace of spirit energy in the structure. His spiritual senses insisted the construct was mundane stone and metal, yet his eyes and ears told him otherwise. That contradiction had unsettled him the first time he stepped inside.
Rather than answer the young adventurer’s question, Bert moved past the first cluster and continued deeper into the passage.
“Don’t clog the doorway,” he called over his shoulder. “Plenty more to stare at ahead.”
The group exchanged uneasy glances, then shuffled forward.
A few moments later, the corridor opened into the station proper, and the line halted again.
This time, no one murmured. No one questioned.
They simply stared.
The mountain’s interior unfolded into a vast chamber that felt less like a cavern and more like a small city carved into the mountain.
The ceiling arched high overhead, ribbed with sweeping bands of dark metal that vanished into the rock at measured intervals. Light panels embedded along the walls and structural supports cast the same steady, shadowless glow as the entrance, bright enough to erase any sense of being underground. The scale alone drew a low whistle from one of the adventurers.
Broad platforms — large enough to hold a modest house — extended from the carved walls. Enclosed bridges and open catwalks linked them in layered tiers across the open air. As they watched, one such platform rose smoothly from the ground, humming faintly before locking into place with a solid, resonant thud. Workers stationed atop it immediately began unloading heavy crates, moving toward an attached pillar that stretched from floor to ceiling.
Stairs and ramps zigzagged between levels, allowing steady traffic without choking the main floor. Along the outer edges of the chamber, squat rectangular structures lined the walls. Some were wide and reinforced like warehouses, their large doors rolled open to reveal stacked crates and bundled supplies. Others were narrower and more orderly, windows lit from within like offices or barracks.
At the chamber’s center stood a massive circular platform, elevated above the surrounding floor and kept meticulously clear. Everything in the station seemed arranged around that disc, as though the mountain itself had been carved to accommodate it.
Men and women moved between stacked supplies. Most wore simple work leathers or practical gear suited to hauling and construction. Humans pushed loaded carts along clearly painted lanes while two dwarves barked clipped instructions at a cluster of massive ants carrying bundles twice their size. A goblin shouted from atop a half-finished structure, directing a team in bright yellow hats as they raised new supports. Near one wall, a knot of elves argued over a glowing slate, rather animated as graphs and charts flicked constantly across its surface. A dragonkin stood with a beastkin near the edge of a platform, speaking in low tones while pointing toward a stack of sealed crates.
Most of them were remnants of Bosco’s bandits — one of Icefinger’s lesser enforcers who had blundered into Alpha’s cavern. Hugo and Dr. Maria had once been counted among them, though for very different reasons. If the rumors back in the village were accurate, their numbers had grown in recent weeks as well. Antchaser and the other hunters had apparently taken to clearing out surface bandit camps as a form of training. Judging by the size of the workforce now spread throughout the chamber, the goblin hunters had been busy.
Not that they were slaves. Bert had been careful to confirm that with Dr. Maria. According to the Dungeon Core’s strange rules, these people retained certain rights. With good behavior, they could reduce their sentences. Some could even work them off entirely. The clever ones had recognized the opportunity quickly. The less clever… Bert wasn’t entirely certain what became of them.
Prisoner or slave, Bert couldn’t deny the truth, however: Halirosa would’ve done worse to most of these people without blinking.
Among the workers, one group stood apart.
For one, they were stronger by a noticeable margin — mid-Golden Spirit cultivators among a sea of high-Bronze and low-Silver. More than that, their posture gave them away. Where others worked with guarded pragmatism or even quiet relief, this group carried themselves like coiled wire. Most of this group seemed to keep to themselves as they worked. And though they did the work assigned to them, they watched everything with the tight, cautious focus of someone who hadn’t accepted their lot.
These were the remains of Magnus’ forces, if Bert had to guess, many of whom had been a large part of Icefinger’s ‘elites’.
While some of the lower-ranked workers chatted during their breaks, laughing or tossing coins in quick games of chance, Magnus’s men rarely joined. The way they constantly glanced around the station, occasionally eyeing the entrance, or sneered as their foreman gave them assignments struck Bert as odd.
Typically, Alpha only allowed the most well-behaved and cooperative of his prisoners this far from the main cavern.
He wondered what Alpha was planning.
He led his adventurers deeper into the station, boots ringing faintly against the reinforced flooring as they approached a central platform raised slightly above the main floor. Another group waited there in loose formation.
Antchaser’s hunters wore the same sleek black armor Bert had come to associate with Alpha’s people. The plating swallowed the light, blurring the line between body and shadow. Each carried one of those strange ranged weapons — similar in concept to a crossbow, Alpha had explained — but built in a way that defied any mechanism Bert recognized.
As Bert approached, one of the larger figures stepped forward.
Even without armor, Boarslayer nearly matched his height, if not his width. With it, she cut a far more imposing silhouette. Several of the adventurers behind him hissed and instinctively shuffled back a few steps.
Bert only grinned and extended his arm.
The goblin woman clasped his forearm in greeting, squeezing just a little harder than necessary.
“Headed back already, are ya?” he asked.
Boarslayer’s helmet peeled open in smooth, segmented plates, revealing a familiar sneer.
“I have no idea why you surface dwellers like it up here so much,” she said flatly. “It’s too bright. Too open.”
Bert barked out a laugh that echoed off the metal ribs overhead.
Boarslayer’s gaze slid past him toward the line of Guild members filing in. Her lip curled faintly, as if she’d caught an unpleasant scent.
Bert turned and scanned the column.
“Strom!” he called. “Front and center!”
The man forced his way through the line and stopped in front of Bert, posture snapping upright from long habit.
“Yes, sir, did you need—”
His voice cut off.
His eyes locked onto Boarslayer.
For a heartbeat, Strom looked as if he’d forgotten how to breathe.
His mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened again.
Bert clapped a heavy hand onto Strom’s shoulder.
“Strom here’ll be the acting captain for the relief,” Bert announced, pitching his voice so the nearby adventurers could hear. “Figured I’d introduce you now and get that out of the way.”
Strom gave a stiff nod, though his eyes never left the goblin woman.
His mouth moved as if he were trying to assemble words, but what emerged were incoherent grunts.
Boarslayer arched a brow. “Is he stupid, or something?”
Bert laughed outright. “No,” he said easily. “Quite capable, I assure you. I reckon he’s just never seen such a powerful woman before.”
Color immediately flooded Strom’s face, and Bert was certain he could see steam rising from the man. Though that could have just been the snow melting from his armor.
Boarslayer’s smirk sharpened.
“Anyway,” Bert continued, turning back to business, “I’m just delivering the new batch and picking up the returnees. How long until they arrive?”
Boarslayer glanced toward the massive central platform. “Not long,” she said. “We should head over and wait, now that you’re all here.”
Her helmet folded shut with a soft, mechanical click. She pivoted and gave a brief hand signal.
Her hunters fell in without hesitation and began moving toward the central lift.
“Well then, so should we.” Bert turned toward the assembled adventurers. “Our ride will be here shortly. This way.”
He set off for the platform after her.
As they walked, Strom edged closer, lowering his voice.
“Sir…” he ventured.
Bert glanced sideways, brow lifting.
Strom swallowed.
“Do you… think I have a shot?”
Bert didn’t answer immediately, and Strom’s heart beat in his chest.
Then Bert threw his head back and laughed.