Or it had been a mine at one point at any rate. When he examined the walls for confirmation of his theory, he discovered countless facets that had been gouged out of the bedrock. Marks left behind from what must have been decades of hard labor, miners chiseling away at the rock to extract… whatever it was they were digging for down here.

Although he was concerned for her safety, Nick resisted the urge to call out to Sophia. He couldn’t afford to make too much noise and risk alerting the lair’s residents to his presence. He was worried about what had happened to his traveling companion, but he was no longer afraid that she had been suffocated by the swirling vortex of sand.

Since they had stumbled into an event that was sanctioned by the System, Nick trusted it not to kill her out of hand while transporting them from one environment to another. However, what happened during the event itself was an entirely different prospect.

With that goal in mind, he resolved to waste as little time as possible, rather than engaging in the extensive planning he preferred. He turned his attention to the task at hand and began examining his surroundings, scanning the enclosure for any sign of his missing partner while tracing out a route that would lead him from where he stood to the lair’s exit.

The great cavern in which he found himself stretched on for the length of a football field. It appeared to have served as a central nexus for the abandoned mining operation. Nick ran his eyes over the decaying remnants of metal tracks, interspersed by the occasional mound of a rusted-out cart. Skeletal profiles that looked like the remains of ancient beasts.

From this angle, Nick could see the entrances to at least a dozen tunnels, branching off from the network of tracks crisscrossing the chamber. And that was just what he could make out from where he stood. There were likely more passageways ringing the enclosure that were hidden from view by the contour of the cavern’s wall.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

This place is huge. Hopefully I won’t have to explore it all to find the way out. We need to reach the tower, and we’re running out of time.

He soon realized that all the infrastructure was laid out over solid bedrock, weaving around the pockets of dark sand like a series of highways connecting a cluster of islands. The tracks were set as far away from the sandpits as possible, which made him nervous for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on yet.

Not having found anything that offered a clue as to which path he should take, he began walking as quietly as he could, trying to use the uneven walls and decaying carts to break up his profile. He was hoping to make himself harder to spot to anything lurking deeper within the cavern.

He instinctively avoided crossing the open sand, although size up didn’t seem to think that they were any more dangerous than the rocky floor beneath his boots.

But Nick was unwilling to blindly trust the skill to identify every source of danger, as helpful as it was in a wide variety of situations. His caution was in part because size up had become less reliable since leaving the tutorial behind him. He had a growing suspicion that the skill could fail to recognize certain forms of danger entirely. Possibly due to the presence of other skills and abilities designed to counter perceptual powers.

He wasn’t sure how the results of competing skills were determined, but he doubted that size up would work on something with a concealment skill that was significantly higher than his own. A danger sense radar jammer if you will. Not to mention, he had just been sucked into a patch of sand without prior warning and had no desire to repeat the experience.

Regardless of the specifics, with size up capped at ten for now, it would become increasingly less reliable over time. On a brighter note, it seemed like the skill would always help Nick recognize certain types of danger quicker and more reliably than he would without its guidance, boosting his natural powers of perception.

Creeping forward, Nick soon found himself standing in front of the first tunnel lining the walls of the cavern. It was a long, narrow straightaway that seemed to have been dug out to facilitate moving ore from one part of the mine to another. Figuring that one way was as good as another until he had more information, he stepped past the threshold and began exploring the mine, hoping to run into his partner before the flesh-renders found them.