The glow I’d seen on the other side of the door was emanating from a thick layer of luminescent moss growing over the walls. My fingers began to itch at the idea of a new potion ingredient. Something like this held a world of possibilities and I very much liked that.

No, bad Joe, stop being a greedy ass, I berated myself.

I held my hand behind me, forcing Nora to keep out while I scanned the wide-open hall. Many tunnels spiked off of the room, all of them jutting off in different directions like spokes on a wheel. My Blindesense showed me three danger zones we should avoid but none of them were in this chamber. I stepped away from the gap of the door letting Nora, Stella, and Boopzy filter in.

“Where are they?” Nora asked, lifting her axe as she glared about looking for monsters to murder.

I grabbed her arm and urged her to lower it. All it got me was a snarling growl. Sometimes I forgot how much she hated it when I grabbed her arm.

“Sorry,” I muttered, hastily letting go before she started breaking small but important bones. “There aren’t any monsters here. Keep your voice down though, they’re not far away. That means you too Stella. No barking, alright?”

Stella hung her head like I’d scalded her, staring up at me with big wet eyes. It made me want to drop to a knee and give her a big hug but even with the monsters far away we weren’t exactly in a safe place.

Nora stepped further into the chamber. “What happened here?”

There was something in her tone that made me look away from my girl to the room we were standing in. Aside from being dark, it wasn’t all that much different from what I remembered before. There was still a pool of foul slop in the center of the room with its small concrete island and many bridges. The solid brick that made up Ryan’s strategy table was still there in the middle, completely intact and still sporting the odd little figures the old red-haired man had liked to play with.

“It’s the same,” I said.

“No, it’s not. It’s… broken,” Nora said, faltering on the last word.

I stepped up beside her, bending one way and then another trying to see what the hell she was talking about. The floor looked almost spotless which was odd now that I was thinking about it. How could a floor be pristine in the middle of a sewer?

It wasn’t just that though. The air didn’t hold the same stench as it did outside the big iron door. Granted, it was still a tad on the musty side, but not unpleasant. The steady drip of water kept up a beat, echoing gently around the chamber almost like music. The soft howl of air rushing through the tunnels only added to the melody.

If anything, this place felt more real than it had before. Without the cacophony of people running about in a mad rush to get somewhere and the constant yelling just to be heard this place was almost peaceful.

“I like it,” I said quietly.

Nora stiffened and slowly turned to face me, her brow wrinkled and mouth forming a little ‘o’ until she spoke, “You like that the monsters killed everyone?”

I flinched. Couldn’t I just have a single thought without it being turned into something else, and why did that something else always have to be the worst possible version of what I said?

“You know that’s not what I meant. The quiet is just nice, that’s all.”

“It’s wrong,” she muttered.

She twirled her axe and kept walking, heading for the tunnel that had once housed Theo’s bed chamber. That wasn’t entirely accurate, I suppose it had been all of ours at one time or another.

“Do you really think they’ll just be waiting for us back there?” I asked.

I focused on my Blindsense again, scanning for green auras that could lead us to our friends. As far as I could tell, they weren’t there. I turned my head to eye the reddish auras behind us, frowning when I realized where they were now located.

The auras had gotten closer together. They were still far away from us but seemed to be forming a pack. That didn’t seem good. It especially wasn’t good because they shouldn’t have been able to do that so quickly.

I had spent far too long crawling around in the pipes above this place. I’d learned just about every hall and every room in this place in my search for information. No tunnel connected the three the auras had been in earlier. So either, they dug their own tunnel or they somehow learned to jump through walls.

“What are you looking at?” Nora asked.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“There are monsters back there,” I replied. Nora tried to spin but I pushed her onward. “They’re not close, they’re just there.”

“I don’t like that you can do that.”

“And I don’t like that you could easily chop me in half but here we are.”

We reached the end of the tunnel where a grate separated us from the damp darkness on the other side. Frank let out a little chirp, tilting his head at the thick steel bars. I’m sure he could still remember teasing me by waltzing through them and almost alerting Theo to my presence.

I told him to hush before facing the door. There had been so much build-up to this moment that I wasn’t sure what we should do. Barge in with weapons drawn, or sneak in and scope it out before the muscle moves in? What was the best play?

Nora made the choice for me by compressing the lever and throwing open the door. Stella growled and shifted her bulk in front of me to keep me from rushing forward with Nora. All things considered, I was grateful for her instinct.

The stench of rot came flying out of the room in a dense fog that had me retching over the grate. My vision blurred as my eyes flooded with water. Frank screeched and disappeared through the tall metal bars, his ebony feathers blending in with the darkness on the other side. Boopzy came rushing out of the room, his many tentacles slapping the concrete as he made his way to me and the safe pocket on my chest. He buttoned it shut in a hurry, quaking in his chosen hiding place.

Stella was sniffing at the air, seemingly unbothered by the stench. To her, this was all information. Information that could be vital for her to know. Seeing her do that only made the churning in my guts so much worse.

Nora rushed out of the room, her face an odd mix of red and green as she slapped her hands against the opposite wall and bent over, sucking in deep breaths. I patted her back as she heaved, sweat beading on her forehead and then trickling down her face and over her chin.

“Don’t…” Nora groaned between heaves. “Don’t.”

I ignored her, giving her a final hard strike to the center of her back before forcing myself to take a step toward the door. One small step and then another until my hand was on the cold wood of the door and I was there. Stella was still pressed hard against my legs, refusing to leave me for even a moment. I was grateful for her support when the mountain of horror came into view.

The room we’d all shared at one time or another was small but now it was non-existent. Every inch of it from the floor to the ceiling was crammed with corpses. All of them were bloodied. Some of them were even torn to ribbons. Three of the ones nearest to me were Crafters I’d met before. I didn’t know their names but seeing them lying there amidst the others, their bodies contorted into unnatural angles, with their bloodshot and empty eyes staring out at me was confronting. Interspersed amongst the dead Outsiders were the remains of different monsters. Skeletons, Crocs, Scorpions, and even Tentarats.

This is why the halls outside this room had seemed so neat. The monsters had gathered up every single one of the remaining Outsiders and tossed them here like garbage.

And to top it off, the severed head of Ryan sat upon a pike in front of the mountain of death. His jaw was hanging wide open, his eyes reduced to sickly caverns in his skull. Three deep parallel gashes marred his cheek. Somehow I’d always thought this man invincible. I guess no one is too shocked to learn I was wrong again.

I did as Nora had done, stumbling from the room and bracing my hands against the wall to keep my feet under me.

“I told you not to go in there,” Nora said from her place on the floor outside the area spoiled by our heaving.

My chest was aching from the convulsions too much to bother answering. Stella whined and pawed at my legs. I reached out a shaking hand to scratch at her ears. That seemed to settle her a little but her tail was still barely wagging which was not a good sign.

“Tell me you didn’t see them in there?” I finally managed.

“No,” Nora said, her mouth muffled by her head resting on her lifted knees. “Did you?”

Stella abandoned me to continue her vile sniffing as I stumbled over to where Nora sat. “We have to find them.”

“Did you see any giant arrows in there pointing the way because I sure as hell didn’t,” Nora snapped.

I would have opened my minimap to look for a new place to search only it wouldn’t have helped; the minimap didn’t show underground structures. Why would the game offer us something as simple as multi-layered maps? Cleary, in my position as a player, I was asking too much.

“They have to be in here somewhere,” I said.

“Maybe they’re back that way with all the monsters you saw?”

Frank shot out of the darkness behind us and landed on my shoulder, bending forward and dropping a half-shattered bolt onto the ground at my feet. I swallowed past the lump in my throat and slowly turned my head to the bird.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Shut the hell up!”

Frank took off down the hall on flapping wings. I yanked Nora to her feet and chased after the bird. I focused on my Blindsense, watching the red auras merge into a bigger ball of danger. Was there even such a thing as monsters that could merge? Was this a many small robots combining into one mega robot type situation? Is it bad that I would be so okay with that?

The closer we got to the danger though the less excited I was to see exactly what they were. A deep, dark, tangible gloom settled over the halls we were running through. Even without the stench of death in our noses, the air around us screamed menace. The moss didn’t seem to grow deeper into the tunnels leaving us with only Boopzy’s blueish glow to navigate by. I was starting to understand what Nora had meant when she called this place broken. If you looked beyond the initial calm there was something very wrong lurking in the darkened halls.

A noise that had the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end came echoing down the newest tunnel we’d just entered. Stella rushed out ahead of us, her growl deep and territorial. The howling came again, louder and angrier than before.

And with the howling came a voice that spoke only in my head, repeating what she had said the very first time I saw her, ‘She is weak for now but she will grow. Don’t let the wolves find her until she is ready.’