They ran down the main corridor of the brigship, passing between the empty cells until they reached the stern. Jace’s stolen armour was heavy and restrictive, and with every second that passed, it became harder to breathe. His breath condensed on the visor in front of him.

When the Split flared up, providing him with an alert in glowing golden text, he barely noticed.

[Warning: worldjumper decay imminent. Reach 80% advancement progress and a level rating of twelve (12) to stave off decay. Time remaining: eighty-three and a half (83.5) hours.]

Not good. He told Kinfild the same thing, and the Wielder nodded—as if he had everything planned out.

It wasn’t much of a reassurance.

He pulled up his sheet with a push of will. At the moment, his advancement progress was sixty-seven percent, and his level rating was ten. The vaults had helped, and significantly, but he wasn’t anywhere close.

“Once we get out of here, we’ll figure something out,” Lessa assured him.

But Jace didn’t know if they would get out in time. And, as the plan was, they would return to Lyvarion. That wouldn’t leave much room for error, and they’d be cutting it very, very close even as it was—the darklings on Lyvarion didn’t award as much Aes compared to other beasts.

He could run more Vaults, but there had to be a better way.

Deep down, he knew he wanted there to be a better way. Staying alive was nice, but…this could be something more. He could use it for something more.

What more was, he didn’t know, but there was a drive. Strength could come first, and then he could find something to do with it.

But for now, he went along with the plan. He stepped up to a hatch at the starship’s stern with Kinfild and Lessa, his armour clanking and swaying. He had never once imagined wearing full armour into battle. The heaviest clothing he had ever worn was a thick parka. This was almost twice as heavy.

Before they climbed out the hatch, Kinfild placed a spirit-enhancement on Jace’s new clothes, armour, and Whistling Blade, giving it all a single point boost in Resistance, but also keeping it bound to his body if he did use a hyperdash.

“Play up the stunned victim act,” Kinfild said. “They are looking for us, not soldiers who barely escaped. Let’s not deliver ourselves right to them.”

They pushed open the stern hatch and stumbled out into the hangar. Jace didn’t have to work hard to pretend to be a confused and dazed soldier. He started panting, and flicking his gaze around rapidly, hunting for the exit. He only saw a trail of wreckage and destruction.

The brigship had torn a path straight through the center of the hangar, rending the concrete and ripping apart the carefully painted yellow lines. It had smashed a smaller starship—a ship like the escorts—in half. Some of the ground vehicles had been flung aside. Fires burned, and people rushed around like ants whose hill had just been kicked.

A soldier approached them. He grabbed Kinfild by the shoulders and shouted something in a foreign language. Kinfild didn’t reply. The man tried again, this time in English (at least, it was the language that Jace could understand). “Terginians, Split-forsake it! Are you alright? Come on, men, get yourself to the infirmary! Go!” He pushed Kinfild away, toward a door in the side of the hangar.

Kinfild, Lessa, and Jace ran towards the door. A fluorescent light fell from the roof, nearly crushing Jace. A shelf laden with large brass valves fell over, almost tripping him. He kept running. They passed through the curved doorframe, then into the hallway outside the hangar.

Jace almost expected to come face-to-face with an angry soldier ready to capture him, but instead, he found a horde of beige-shirted ground crew and officers all rushing towards the hangar. A small vehicle scooted along behind them, hovering an inch above the smooth, white plastic of the floor.

“We need to get to a different hangar,” Kinfild whispered. “Head to the right, and we’ll find one eventually.”

“Just head to the right?” Lessa exclaimed.

“Do you have a better idea?” Kinfild asked, stopping in his tracks. “A map of this facility, perhaps?”

“No…”

“Then keep running until we find it!”

So they ran. Debris littered the hallway, remnants of the impact, and the ceiling cracked, about to collapse. When they reached the end of the corridor, they found a hallway that connected perpendicularly with it. No one had challenged them yet. The footsteps of the soldiers were distant, and Jace was getting much better at tuning out the blaring alarms. In the pseudo-silence, he heard a distant sound—a muffled murmuring mixed with the chittering of countless birds.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Lessa’s head flicked left, then right. “What’s that?”

Jace didn’t have an answer, but the bank of windows before them might—or, rather what laid beyond them might. He ran up to the frames. The glass had shattered, and he could lean all the way out.

Below, there was a massive pit carved into the ground. It was kilometers wide, yet it lacked a clear shape; perhaps it was an abandoned quarry. Floodlights hung from metal trellises and supports, illuminating the cavern all the way down to the floor. Jace made the mistake of looking down.

On the floor, a hundred meters below, dark shapes poured out from burrow holes in the walls. They formed up into orderly square battalions, then marched across the floor of the cavern in step, approaching a larger, subway tunnel-sized gap on the other side. Jace’s mouth slipped open.

To call the creatures near-humans would have been stretching the term’s meaning. They were crimson-scaled beasts with a canine snout, clawed feet, and a reptilian mane that stretched half-way down their spine. They wore armour of dirty black steel. Every edge was rough, angular, and sharp, and some of their armour had even been imbued with a glowing orange sigil: a simple X.

“So...those are kobolds?” Jace breathed. He was too far away for any tags to appear above their heads, but a thrumming aura surrounded them—just like the Stenol. The Split abhorred them, too.

“They are,” said Kinfild. “Come on. We must keep moving.”

“But—” Jace raised a finger, about to protest, when Kinfild began marching away.

He glanced down at the kobolds one last time. Lessa kept staring down at the pit, too, her mouth gaping with awe, and Kinfild turned back toward them for a moment.

“Come along,” Kinfild said hurriedly. “If we stop, we are only wasting time.”

Jace took a step away from the bank of windows and sprinted with Kinfild down the hallway. Lessa followed behind after a few seconds.

They raced down the hallway, boots pounding against the plastic-y floor. Flickering fluorescent lights reminded Jace of a hospital or a high school, but the subtle curve at the edge of each hallway dispelled any connections his mind was drawing. There were no windows on the walls, only pipes and a rare spattering of holographic posters with a washed-out, yellowing, and simplified corporate artstyle—and text in the foreign script he couldn’t read.

A group of soldiers ran in the opposite direction, holding their rifles ready, but they said nothing. The disguises were holding.

They turned a corner and approached a different hangar similar to the first. It just had a higher ceiling, and no light poured in from outside. When they reached the doorway, they all stopped and pressed their backs against the wall. Jace peered around the doorframe.

A massive sheet of metal blocked the hangar’s outside opening, and none of the ships were moving. Their furnaces still chugged, puffing dark smoke up to the ceiling, but an enormous fume hood caught the exhaust and sucked it away before it suffocated the workers. It let out a deep whir that drowned out most other sounds.

“They shut the blast doors!” Kinfild shouted over the noise. “They’re trying to trap us in here!”

“It looks like they’ve succeeded!” Jace yelled back.

“Guys!” Lessa warned. “Soldiers wouldn’t just stand around like this! We need to keep walking!”

If Kinfild had his way, he’d drag them back into the main hangar looking for a way out, and he’d get them caught.

Jace would decay in no time, at this rate.

Worse, he’d languish, sitting around doing nothing, not advancing.

He pushed away from the wall and sprinted back through the hallways, heading back the way they came. Destroying kobolds had to award him Aes, so that was what he’d do.

But he couldn’t go after the entire army of them at once.

As they retraced their steps, Jace asked, “What is this place? Why here?”

“It is some sort of secret Koedor-Terginian facility,” Kinfild stated, barely panting despite the constant jog.

“I like secret facilities!” Lessa chimed in. “Kinda exciting!”

“Where are the kobolds coming from?” Jace asked. From what the Wielder had said before, the kobolds were a creature common beyond the Wall, but that didn’t mean much. They had been pouring out of holes in the walls, climbing up from deep underground.

“They likely built the facility atop a corrupted dungeon,” Kinfild said. “To make use of it, surely.”

“Dungeons?” Jace whispered.

“The ancient Kings of Luminias built tombs and massive underground chambers all across the galaxy,” Kinfild explained. “They filled them with treasures for the afterlife, and the walls radiate ambient Aes stronger than anywhere else in the galaxy. But, over time, they’ve filled with darklings.”

They took a stairway down. By now, they’d overshot the original hallway, but Jace didn’t care. That hangar would’ve been sealed up, too. They weren’t getting out of here until things calmed down, and that could be days.

“So this dungeon is filled with kobolds?” Lessa asked. “And that’s where they’re coming from?”

“They have likely turned the dungeon into their hive,” Kinfild said.

A pair of workers in beige fatigues sprinted past in the opposite direction, and Kinfild quited down. Once they passed the workers, they wound down another flight of stairs, then another, and another. They were getting deeper, and they had to be close to the floor level of the quarry now.

Perfect.

The deeper they got, the dimmer the lighting and the more rudimentary the hallways. Rust flaked off the perforated steel stairs, and wires hung loose from the wall. Exposed pipes puffed steam.

The stairs deposited them in a long hallway. At its end…was exactly what he was looking for.

A hole in the earth. Metal merged with red sandstone, and instead of rigid steel, carved bricks lined the edges. Black, oozing vines dripped down from the ceiling, and a layer of dust had accumulated on the floor.

A chain-link fence blocked the hole off, and warning sheets clung to the outside, like old WHIMIS labels back on earth—just Jace couldn’t read them.

His sheets did flare up in warning, though: [Corrupted tomb ahead. Recommended party level rating: twenty (20).]

Jace glanced back at Kinfild, then over at Lessa. Together, their ratings balanced out, and his?

Well, this was a chance to even it out a little.

“I’m going in,” Jace said. “You can follow me or not, but I’m not just going to sit around here because they shut the blast doors.”

He put his hands on a panel in the center of the chain-link fence, then pushed it inward and took a step inside.