I emerged into a massive stone chamber. The moment I entered, things felt…different. Sensations changed in an almost imperceptible fashion. The dirt crunched underfoot in a hollow, echoing way. The air nipped at my extremities, my breath misting as I exhaled. Something about this place was just completely unlike where I had been a moment before.
“Can you hear me?” I asked in a low voice, wincing at how loud it seemed to echo despite my lowered tone. There was a brief pause. The bottom of my stomach dropped out, and I briefly considered that there might be some sort of interference here disrupting communications.
Then I thought back to what I’d just said and rolled my eyes. “Can you hear me?” I growled. “Over.”
“Loud and clear,” came Ron’s amused voice. “What do you see?”
“Not moles,” I said slowly. “Which is a surprise.” I kept my voice low, despite the fact that I couldn’t see anything in the chamber. Not in a ‘perfect darkness’ kind of way, but in a ‘dim creepy light shows no movement’ kind of way.
Because I COULD see. The vault of the ceiling was lined with spiderweb fractals of some kind of glowing blue crystal. It was inconsistent, and the combination of the dark and the diffusion made it look like someone had hung the stars on the strands of a funnel web’s home. I kept my eyes peeled, looking for any movement, and stuck to the walls.
Surprisingly, the ground under my feet diverged from the cavern, thinning out to a ledge, and I was careful to move slow so I didn’t fall as I spotted a slight shifting in the dark labyrinth of stone below me.
Crouching down, I reached and switched off my walkie, though I made sure to switch to and from the channel twice before doing so, a signal we’d agreed on in case of emergency. Sticking to the wall, I continued along the ledge, trying to get myself closer to where I’d seen the movement in the dark.
Eventually, I saw a flickering light emanating from between the ridges of stone. As I got closer I could hear some muttered conversation. Unfortunately, the walls were between us. Glancing around, I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the gloom to spot another adjacent ledge, and I climbed over slowly before shimmying out over the gap where the light was emanating from. A gap that a new angle revealed to contain an actual campfire.
Sitting around it were a series of men dressed in simple but sturdy looking clothes, holding sturdy weapons, and speaking in what I expect they thought were hushed tones…in English.
My eyes went wide and I almost fell as my blood ran cold. English? Nobody in this world spoke English. Nobody except my people, and these were NOT my people. I inched closer, wary of falling, and leaned out over the expanse as much as possible without being too obvious, trying to listen.
“I’m just saying I don’t know why the hell we’re HERE, Cutler,” snapped one of the men, a tall dark haired man with a curly beard. “I get that those robed freaks are paying through the nose, but we’ve been down here for fucking weeks and haven’t seen anything except bones and rocks.”
“And moles,” said a cold looking blonde woman with tightly braided hair.
Beard Guy snorted. “Thanks Anna, and moles, yeah. Point is, their stupid door obviously doesn’t lead anywhere useful. We should just TELL them that and go home. Not to mention having to use blades for everything is making me nervous.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” Anna said with a cold little smile. I could see their faces from my current vantage point as they were illuminated by the dancing flames, though the leaping light made it hard to make out too many details. Still, of the four people below, all of them looked competent and dangerous from what little I could tell.
“Look, this is more money than we’ve ever SEEN,” said Cutler, a granite faced redhead with a hard, lined face. Sure, the Tennies are weird, but their money is good, and Duncan will burn their fucking houses down in their sleep if they screw us. We just need to keep mapping until we find SOMETHING useful, then we head back and collect. And the longer it takes, the more we make.”
Tennies. I tried not to curse. The Ten Thousand Doors Society. One of the speaker organizations Alistair had warned me about. I gritted my teeth in irritation. They must have found a door to somewhere in the necropolis. They’d been sending people through to search the way I’d brought over Ron and my friends, but apparently hadn’t hit the edges of the complex yet.
Not that it would last. They were right around the corner from an exit tunnel. Maybe an hour if they knew which way to go, which they thankfully didn’t. If they kept looking they would find a way out.
Which given their general air of competence would be bad. I didn’t know if they were former military, but I knew they had a similar vibe to Ron and the others. If they weren’t former members of some special forces group they were at least very experienced in violence, and that didn’t bode well for me if they noticed me.
I could probably take most of them out, given my vantage point and weapon, but…I couldn’t.
Fighting against someone else was one thing, but taking pot shots in the dark from out of range? At people with no weapons besides swords? People who had done nothing wrong to me so far? Taking shots at the assholes trying to take Alice was one thing, they were actively threatening me and mine, but this? These people were CAMPING.
I stared down at them for a moment, fingers flexing as I battled with myself and finally retreated back onto the ledge, trying to make sure I wasn't spotted.
“Look,” Cutler continued softly after a few moments of sullen silence. “I get it. This is crazy. We’re in another WORLD for God’s sake. It takes some adjustment. But these people have the hookup. They’ve got money, they’ve got resources, and they can get us things we can’t even imagine. This isn’t the only door they’ve been through, and the doors have different stuff behind them. I watched one of them shoot someone with a fucking RAY gun the other day.”
I blanched. There was a Sci-Fi wordworld? How was THAT fair? I shook it off. It was fine. My mana fruits were pretty busted. I was betting we could keep up with ray guns. Not to mention maybe we could pick a few up some time.
Anna sighed. “I hate to agree with Raf, but I don’t like it either. This is squirrely. We don’t have nearly enough leverage.”
“Exactly,” said Beard Guy (whose name was probably Raf). “Also fuck you, but seriously, something stinks about all this. What do we do if they DO decide to screw us? Duncan can get revenge, but that doesn’t help us in here. We can’t even get back without that creepy asshole Simon.”
“He IS creepy,” Anna said bluntly. “He leers. I don’t like it.”
Cutler sighed. “I know. I’ve been trying to get in the way, but he IS the boss. And he has those scary powers. I DID offer to let you sit out, but there’s not much else I can do. My contacts tell me these guys are the next big thing. Wizards or whatever have been making waves all over. A few of them are working with the military. A few are doing the solo thing. Even a couple in organized crime. Whichever they pick, they’re a force multiplier. They can do things that should be impossible.”
Which was ALSO bad. Alistair and I were avoiding big organizations like that, because we were wary about what people do with that kind of power in those situations. But it was clear that some people went another way, and they were doing well for themselves.
I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, but finally came to a decision. Allies. Real allies. I needed someone who knew more about the situation here than I did. Someone with resources and leadership experience. Bankrolling me might have been fine before, but now that I’d seen there people, learned there were probably more teams out there, and heard about the door…it wasn’t enough.
There wasn’t time to go slow and vet everyone now. I needed help, resources, advice. I needed allies.
I had those, nominally, but I had been wary about how much trust to extend. Now it didn’t matter if I didn’t trust Alistair, if I didn’t work with him I was going to end up screwed whether I was ready or not. Taking one last look at them, I inched back along the ledge, slowly moving across the rock face with the graceful surety of a mountain goat. At least a really drunk one.
When I hit the ledge, I turned and headed back the way I came at a brisk walk. After I got far enough, I turned on my walkie.
“Gus-” came a worried sounding voice. “Can you hear me? I just heard your walkie come back on, respond.” Ron sounded controlled but uncomfortable, and I grimaced at the clear issue with my lack of communication, necessary as it might have been.
“I’m here,” I told him as I stalked through the tunnels. “And we have a big problem. I ran into people down here, Ron. Earth people. Spoke english and everything. There’s another DOOR down here somewhere, and one of the rival factions has access to it. They don’t have any of our tech because they’re not ME, but still, it’s far from ideal.”
There was a long pause. “Well shit,” he said grimly. “That IS a problem. Any chance they’re friendly?”
“Considering their bosses are the ones who tried to grab Alice?” I asked grimly. “Probably not. I guess we could check, but I honestly figured that maintaining our anonymity would be more valuable than trying to make friends with expansionist lunatic merchants.”
He sighed. “No, no, you’re right. We have the initiative right now. Can you describe them?”
“I can do better than that,” I laughed. “I can buy an image of them. It’ll need to wait until I get back, but once I have, we can try to dig up some dirt on them. I’m ALSO planning to contact Alistair. We need power, and he’s more than positioned to give it to us. His knights would be incredibly helpful here. Imagine the synergy with the mana fruits. Or even with those warrior techniques Bran told me about.”
This time there was no sigh. “That’s a smart call,” he said immediately. “Laying low might have been viable before, but we can’t afford to stand alone against an organized group of these people.”
I thought back to Ridley, to Esther, and to Bran. All my friends here in this world. I imagined them going up against someone like me. Except this hypothetical person would be hostile and focused. They would almost definitely be hurt. Even if I didn’t know Ridley well, Ether and Bran were close to me. I didn’t want to see them suffer.
Alistair was my only shot at resisting. Not to mention I really did just want to see how his power overlapped with this world. Without my language acquisition, my tech imports, and a dozen other things, our forces wouldn't have managed to improve so fast.
I was still thinking when I emerged from the hallway to find my friends waiting, guns up and at the ready. They weren’t expecting trouble, most likely, but they WERE ready for it. Ron met me as I emerged from the dark tunnel, clapping me on the shoulder as we headed out of the crypt. We had a lot of planning to do.