The process of mineshaft triangulation basically relied on smell. The land was criss-crossed with highlighted scent tracks, most of them left by the Centurions patrols who ranged these hills. But the mines themselves had a scent: the smells of beaten rocks and unwashed humans, metal slag and spent fuel.

We made a hidden camp inside of a narrow cave. Doc held the fort while Angel, Lulu and I loaded up the small arms and a couple of turrets and went to hunt a way into the mines proper. It didn't take me long to track down ventilation shafts cored out of the hills, billowing clouds of scent and heat out into the open air. The Centurions had managed to avoid an evil organization trope and hadn’t built their vents big enough to allow a human or a legion to crawl around in them.

The further north we went, the older the scent trails became. It was the cold stale air I was hunting, because it signalled abandoned shafts. Like most people digging a mine in a videogame, the early settlers here had gone all over the place, excavating tunnels wherever they hit a payload of coal or iron in the hopes they'd find more. Of course, it didn't really work that way - as the settlement had matured, they'd set up a more thorough, organized kind of system. The older tunnels had either been backfilled or abandoned, but unlike the actual Romans, the Iron Centurions weren’t expert engineers.

It took a while. The sun was creeping down to the west when we hit paydirt. Literally: an old mineshaft boarded off and partly filled with dirt. The dirt berm was only about six feet deep, and no challenge for me and Lulu - who cast Quicksand on it and liquified the whole thing. The plug of earth melted away to reveal a clean, rectangular shaft that went in straight for about fifty feet before plunging down into the earth. There were no torches or other illumination.

"Perfect," I said. "Can't see shit, though."

“It’s fine. We can light a torch once we’re in… just give me a second while I tell Doc where to bring the rest of the gear.” Angel glanced back behind her, shoulders ruffling. A wind had picked up, hissing through the scrubby brush that stretched across the hills. She couldn't hear it, but she felt it slither across her skin, damp with the promise of yet more rain. "I don't like this place. Feels haunted."

"Probably is. Who knows how many people have been killed here." I padded in, sniffing intently. Dust, old webs... and new ones. Now it was my turn to shiver. Spiders... I didn't want Angel and Lulu to see me scream and cringe away like a little bitch from the first palm-sized spider I saw. Because I would. I came to a halt, tense while I waited for Angel to catch up. After a few minutes, I heard her follow in. A small fire sprang to life, and revealed... nothing, really, except hand-hewn cave walls, still covered in pick marks.

"If iron's so rare it can't be spent on armor except for the higher ups, they mustn't dig a whole lot of it out." Tense and wary, head swivelling at every tiny sound, I picked up the pace.

"Most of it comes from Patron gifts, like how we got it," Angel voiced. She tried to keep her voice soft, but being unable to hear herself... it echoed in the emptiness of the old mine with enough volume that I winced. "Who knows: maybe it all comes from patrons and this place only produces copper. Wouldn't surprise me."

"Just so you know, this place amplifies every sound like crazy," I thought back to her, pinning my ears against my skull. “Might want to stick to sign.”

"Oh. Sorry." She signed by the side of my head instead.

We moved on in tense silence, following what felt like miles of tunnels until instinct caused me to freeze, one foot half-way to the ground. A familiar thrill thrummed the nerves of my back, causing the puds to unfurl and wave restlessly in the air.

"What is it?" Angel signed quickly, moving her hand back to her gun.

"I don't know." I backpedalled, snorting: and then I saw it. A wire was stretched out across the tunnel at ankle-height. Shin high, for a human. "Actually, yeah I do. There, look."

Angel peered down at the tripwire, then up. "There's more of them... there has to be. We must be getting close if they're setting traps."

"I can step over this one, but there could be anything ahead." I lifted my head and sniffed deeply. There was what could be poetically described as a 'carceral aroma' wafting on the air. Less poetically, the place fucking stank. "I think we're coming up on the occupied parts of the system, too."

Angel dropped to the ground, and went over to examine the wire. She traced it back to the mechanism that connected it. "Oh, nice. This goes back to a frag grenade and an alarm."

“Eeee…” Lulu made a tiny sound of alarm at the mention of a grenade.

"A grenade AND an alarm? Maximum overkill." I was suddenly conscious of all my many waving limbs, and pulled my tail and tentacles back in close. "Guess they need a bell to ring so they know where to go pick up the loot, along with any chunks."

"Something like that." Angel leaned in and began to fuss with the device she'd found. My eyes widened as I realized what she was about to do, but I forced myself to hold my ground and watch as she unhooked the wire and led it back to the crude grenade. She caught the secondary alarm-generating string and kept tension on it with a foot while she liberated the explosive, handling the devices with next to no anxiety. The same could not be said of Lulu, who squeaked and tried to pull me back down the corridor.

"Nice. This will come in handy. These things are really expensive, resource-wise." Angel made sure the pin was secure, then folded the grenade into her inventory. She took out a small wooden peg, hammered it into the floor - I winced again - and wound the alarm wire around it. "We should find more of these. If we can take grenades into the Rachini fight, that would be fantastic."

"Sure, we can do that. But you're gonna have to walk from here," I replied. "Sorry, but your enormous, girthy brass balls are too heavy for me."

“Tungsten ovaries, thanks.” Angel grinned at me in the gloom, and led the way into the tunnel.

“Got it. Great band name.”

We found traps everywhere after that, all of them near intersections in the mines. While Angel disabled them, I kept guard - and felt, rather than saw, the incoming presence of others while she was kneeling beside a pressure plate, eyes narrowed with concentration as she stacked counterweight rocks onto it so she could liberate the dynamite underneath.

"We got company." I leaped over her, ruffling her hair.

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"Be careful. These are nastier than the tripwires." Angel glanced up worriedly. "I can't move from where I am right now, or this will turn me into dog food."

"Noted."

Torchlight wobbled along the walls further down. I eyed the ground ahead, but while my instincts were good, they weren't 'spot buried pressure plates in the ground in the dark' good. Not all the time, not reliably. But then I glanced around at the seven-by-nine-foot shaft and remembered that I was, in fact, a monster. A very strong one made for climbing.

A pair of two guards in deep blue cloaks and leather armor, talking softly, rounded the bend of the tunnel ahead. No Legions... but the guards carried portable alarm boxes that looked very similar to the ones Angel had been scavenging. They had crossbows and clubs instead of swords. The clubs had smooth bronze caps for maximum bonk. They wore boiled leather breastplates over padded armor, a bit more comprehensive than the Centurions standard flappy-skirt ensemble.

"Prison guards. I'm thinking the tripwires and shit were to keep people out, and the plates and dynamite and these patrols are to keep people in. Hope they're not about to head for Angel. It's better to not kill them... if they aren't ninered, they'll go tell someone they were killed."

Lulu wobbled in agreement.

There was a Y-shaped fork near where we had hidden: braced in the shadows of the cavern and pressed against the ceiling, upside down so that my paler belly was concealed against the stone. My stamina was running out faster than I liked due to all the weight in my Inventory, even with Lulu helping to offset.

"So yeah, I was saying to him bro, you can't just walk up and tell her something like that." Neither of the two men were paying the least attention. They'd probably walked this uneventful route a hundred times for weeks, months, even years. "And he was like, nah bro, I already did it. I just, like, straight up went to her and told her he was screwing around on her with Claudia."

"Dude! No way!" The other guard let out a stifled, nervous laugh as they swung around the corner, heading right toward Angel. They were going to run right into her. If I threw a rock or something, they’d turn the other way… and get suspicious. And suspicious guards were even more likely to notice the flash of chalk-pale skin beneath Angel’s hood.

“Yeah way.”

"Dude! She's gonna kill them both, man! You don't fuck around on those Gold Cloak bitches."

"Like, I know, right? So anyway, once my shift is done, I need to go talk to him, and like, knock some sense into-"

But neither guard were going to be looking out for anyone, because a pair of tentacles unfurled from the ceiling and wrapped around their necks.

A week ago, I wouldn’t have had the finesse it took to choke them out. I did now, even if my monstrous instinct was to snap them like a pair of wet twigs. I held on just tight enough, watching their HP trickle down as throbbing indigo torpor meters appeared above their heads. They filled up a lot faster on humans than they had for me or Lulu, and after a couple seconds of no blood to the brain, the pair passed out and went limp.

“Man, humans in this game are so damn squishy.” Even with the most delicate of pressure from my noodley appendages, the two guards were now sub-25% HP. I dropped them like ragdolls to the floor. The vibration from them hitting the ground caused Angel's head to jerk up, just as she was tucking the now-disabled mine into her inventory. Her eyes widened.

“Noodles!” She signed. “They’re going to report their deaths!”

"They aren’t dead. Figured that if we can’t contact Merc when she’s captured, then these guys lose their clan chat or whatever they use to coordinate if WE capture THEM." I groaned as I padded back toward her. "So, here's what I'm thinking: we tie them together and use some of those traps you’ve salvaged to rig them to explode if they try and break free. They can either wait for someone to rescue ‘em, which takes up resources, or they can blow themselves to God and Kingdom. Their choice.”

"Good idea. And yeah, you can’t send or receive player messages when you’ve been captured or imprisoned by another player." Angel nodded. “I can rig something fun. Just uh… keep them unconscious.”

I glanced at the pair of sprawled men. Human torpor bars filled fast, but they also drained fast. A full charge only lasted about three minutes. “You know, I bet some of my fans would dig the hell out of this. I could charge a hundred bucks an hour to slowly choke someone out over and over again.”

“Noodoo!” Lulu’s silvery skin flushed pink with outrage.

“What?” I chortled aloud at her. “They’re consenting adults, aren’t they? Don’t worry, I’ll make ‘em sign a waiver.”

Angel, already busily assembling wires, glanced up as I picked up the pair of now-semi-conscious guards to fill up their Zzz bars again. “… Just as well people can’t get brain damage in this game.”

We left the pair looking like a couple of dames in distress out of some old-timey action movie: tied to each other inside of a ring of obvious explosives that would go off if they moved off the pressure plate underneath them or separated the toggle between their bodies. If they were very clever, they could probably MacGyver their way out of it. The likelihood of any alpha clan grunt being that smart was very low. Angel was kind enough to leave a note for them on the wall explaining their predicament. For that alone, I received another low-tier Patron box from the mysterious Yosano Akiko. Whoever she was – Akiko being a female name, and all – she was apparently into predicament bondage. The box contained three stamina potions and ammo for Angel’s shotgun.

After about another six hundred feet of walking through closed shafts, we reached an active work site. There, I caught a familiar smell. The Maroons. They’d brought the scents of Eden with them, too subtle for a human nose but immediately recognizable to me. I pulled Angel behind an ore wagon as a second patrol wandered by, two Centurions as clueless as the first pair.

“Damn… that was close.” Angel made to leave cover as they vanished into the hazy darkness ahead.

“Hold on.” I held her back on instinct. Seconds later, shuffling and clinking prickled my ears. A chain gang and attending soldiers, who stomped past us with whips and picks and empty buckets.

“Yeah. Definitely too close. We’re going to have to work FAST.” I let go of Angel’s shoulder only once I was sure there was no one else following up. “Once we find those cells…”

“We’ve come this far. We can do this.” Angel’s pale eyes were steady with determination. “I’m not afraid any more.”

Lulu mumbled. “Ooo… oom oofrood.”

“I know, kitten.” I gave Lulu a reassuring little pat. “Now we go. No one else is coming, but I smell shit from somewhere. A lot of it, like a sewer or something.”

“Sluice canals, I bet,” Angel signed. “They’re a cheap schema to craft for mass-occupancy indoor builds like this one. Basically just open channels or pipes that run from the slave cells to a big midden or a tank.”

Angel knew her underground structures, and her nose – not as sensitive as mine, but paired with a brain that understood architecture in a way I never would – led her to a chained metal door. I broke the bronze lock with my teeth. Inside was basically what Angel had described, a roughly-hewn tunnel with many small pipe outlets coming from the ceiling. It was just big enough for me to walk as long as I kept my tentacles close and my head down. The pipes fed into a sluggish channel of mixed water and poop. The smell was indescribable, but the privacy and the space were exactly what we needed.

“Why did they have to include shitting in this game. It’s supposed to be a rule in VRs, man… no pooping.” I kept half an eye on my map. As we moved down the dark, damp corridor, the fog of war parted to show faint details just outside my view range.

“Poop can be recrafted into fertilizer, and given they have to feed about a thousand people in Fortuna and the warfront, my guess is that the sewer tunnels feed into a big tank somewhere,” Angel signed from ahead.

“Ahh. The circle of life. Ain’t nature grand, Lulu?”

Lulu didn’t have any kind of face to grimace with, but I felt her displeasure well enough. She slunk along behind me, hopping over every patch of slime despite it being about the same texture as her own body.

At the end of the damp corridor was a wooden door, and beyond that was the dull roar of a very large room. On the map, it showed the hint of a large round chamber with many small compartments around the perimeter.

"Cells," I thought to Lulu and Angel. “It’s gotta be.”

“Maybe. Could also be like… a bathroom, or something.” Angel, less concerned about the filth than Lulu, pressed back against the wall to get out of my way. “Can you smell any guards?”

“I literally can’t smell anything other than a decade’s worth of second-hand slave gruel, but I guarantee there’s guards outside this door. So let’s get ready to rumble.”