Having searched the loading dock of the bread warehouse and thoroughly confirmed that there was nobody there and nothing of interest, Nathan was faced with several choices. Naturally, he chose the one that seemed like a good idea at the time.

That was how he found himself swinging across the ceiling as though on a set of monkey bars, stabbing Saucer upwards with every forward motion.

He’d climbed the wall with his legs for a change, finding handholds in the bricks to keep himself from falling backwards while he walked himself upwards. Despite his efforts to preserve his arm strength, every hand-ahead-of-hand tore at the muscles of his arms and he swore at his past self for every pullup he hadn’t done, which had been all of them. It was twenty feet to the middle of the warehouse where his target was; by five feet he was aching, by ten he was straining, and by fifteen he was dead certain he was going to fall as every muscle from his core to his hands burned with effort.

Nerves wracked to ruin by the time he made it over to the catwalk in the center of the building, he realized belatedly that he could have simply climbed up on the far side and skipped the swinging. Considering this fact, he acknowledged it as a useful lesson to learn for later and promptly set it aside to be digested and to never return as an intrusive memory in a sequence of flashbacks to the dumbest, most cringe things he’d ever said or done.

At least, he thought to himself, the roof was sturdy enough to take my weight. And so was the catwalk. Even if it’s not much of a catwalk.

The viewing and access area in question did, in fact, leave much to be desired. Two 2x4 planks extended from a platform made out of plywood towards the rest of the warehouse, and they terminated halfway across a cinderblock whose width was a mere few inches. The next plank began there and carried through to the next cinderblock, and as Nathan studied the footing and tested the planks his mouth thinned into a grimace.

“I haven’t seen something this bullshit since high school theater and the Walk of Death through the attic,” he complained under his breath. “I bet this is even based on that. It has the complete lack of handrails and the so-tempting cables that at school held up the chicken wire roof of the house, which would absolutely rip out of the ceiling if you put your weight on them. Though at least this one isn’t in pitch darkness and I’m not having to run across it to get from backstage to the light booth.”

On cue, the lights went out on the other side of the doors whose light gaps had been illuminating the room, leaving him in what might have been pitch darkness were it not for…

“Nope,” he snorted, suppressing a laugh. “Saucer, kick it up a tiny bit.”

A slightly less faint glow emanated from his soulbound piece of protean cheat-equipment, giving him once again enough light to see by.

“Alright.” Nathan sighed, shaking his head. He opened his mouth to say something else, but found himself with nothing left to convey to himself or to anyone who might be watching him—like, for example, a pair of powerful delvers with questionable senses of humor.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He started walking forwards instead.

He was pretty sure that for some people, possibly most people, the experience of walking down a pair of wobbly 2x4 planks that were threatening at any given moment to entirely depart their barebones support would be thoroughly anxiety-inducing. The lack of handrails would have made it only worse, he supposed. But he trusted in his skill and the muscle memory from when he’d done something almost identical as a teenager. And, perhaps—or certainly—more to the point, he trusted in Saucer.

Trusted in Saucer as it shifted its weight to shift his center of gravity, keeping him easily in the zone of perfect balance so that he could simply stroll, declining to whistle on account of the need for stealth.

His memory supplied certain details that the scenario was lacking. There was no smell of rust, no faint hint of woodrot or pine—technically firs, but they were all in Pinaceae and that was good enough for him, however wrong that was. There should have been lights shining through the “floor” below, heat stirring the air into motion enough to shift the dust and threaten sneezing or agonizing moments of trying to get grit out of his eyes. Instead, there was only the sharp absence of odors and a spotlessly clean metal door set into concrete at the end of the road, such as it was.

By Saucer’s light and through careful examination, Nathan could see that the door’s hinges were on the loading dock’s side, and there was nothing more than a simple latch preventing him from opening it. The latch was likely locked—there was a keyhole in the doorknob, after all—but it was nothing he couldn’t deal with by simply cutting through it.

He was disinclined to go for that obvious option. It was… too obvious.

Too convenient, he thought, to be anything but a trap.

The metal was cool to the touch as he ran a humming Saucer and also his fingers over it, checking for anything of note. There were no hollows, no asymmetries; nothing stood out at all. So, for lack of anything else to do, he formed his anomaly detector into a long, slender knife and ran it carefully across the top, bottom, and hinge sides of the door.

He almost shoulder-checked it open, then reconsidered. Standing back instead, he placed one face of a staff-form Saucer on the door and pushed.

The door fell open with a thunderous slamming crash, and a spear thrust straight into where Nathan would have been if he’d opened the door in any standard way. He took that, momentarily, as vindication, and then—

“Damn,” the man on the other side said mildly, parrying Nathan’s reflexive thrust with a tightly-controlled vortex of air wrapped around his weapon. “I was hoping after you took,” he continued, deflecting another attack with a twist of his spear, “all that time futzing around with the door, you’d just walk through.”

“I’m a dumbass,” Nathan quipped reflexively, “but not a total idiot.”

The man gave way as Nathan stepped forwards, lashing out in controlled strikes that forced their way through the man’s enchantment and made contact with his spear as he chose to sacrifice the weapon rather than take a hit. And sacrifice it he did—Saucer manifested a razor-thin edge at the point of contact, and the spear’s haft fell apart.

One more step, and Nathan was in full sight of the warehouse proper. And what he saw was… unexpected.