Mercy and I talk for another 15 minutes before Jose comes back to get us. We have comms but I guess he wants to deliver the report in person. I turn to him with a smile on my face. “Jose, what's- Oh, shit.”

Jose's shoes are splattered with blood and yellow pus. “The second floor had cancer cluster monsters. They were gross.”

“Sorry about that,” I say, trying to be cheerful. “But hey, we cleaned up here and the currency is mohars.” I pull out a couple of golden coins with Arabic script on them. They're actually quite beautiful. I already have 78 of the things in my inventory.

“More importantly,” Jose says, “you good?”

I nod. “Yeah, I'm ready to go. Thanks man, for this and, well, for everything.” He just punches me in the shoulder and nods.

We follow him down R-32 to the exit to the second floor which, of all things, is the way Jose and I came into the damn place all those years ago. We travel through the long, narrow tunnel until we enter an area with green glowing stones illuminating shallow pools of water.

I immediately grab my goggles and prep my full protective headgear when Alicia comes over and waves me down. “There's no radiation,” she says. “None at all.”

I ask the obvious question, “so what's with the green glowing rocks?”

She goes to the wall and raps one with the grip of a pistol. It immediately shatters. “Just glowing glass, apparently.”

“Maybe real Uranium is too expensive for Cthulhu?” Mercy asks. She's obviously relieved that she doesn't have to switch to her hazmat suit costume. It's hot in there.

“Possibly,” says Alicia. She pulls out a handheld device from her inventory and waves it around. “I'm not getting any radiation from anything even remotely close by. For a Uranium mine it's awfully clean of rads.”

Dungeon. That's right, it's a dungeon. “It has to be clearable,” I say. “If entering a room killed you two hours later, it couldn't be cleared. That wouldn't follow the rules.”

In the time since the Dracosys first altered the world, we'd learned a lot about it, and inferred even more. Pretty much everyone thought that it was some evil genius's work, and not a god or devil or multiversal monster. And that was largely due to “the rules.”

Every dungeon, ruin, castle and arena followed rules, and for dungeons “has to be clearable” was one of them. No impossible walls to get through. No permanently sealed doors. No one-way teleporters to nowhere. Things could be tough, things could be lethal, things could be unfair. But the dungeons couldn't cheat. This was a system based on games. And games had to be winnable.

“Still, keep an eye on your rad badges.” Alicia was referring to the white badges each of us had pinned to our clothes. If it turned black, that was bad.

I see Quins and Franco poking monster corpses and arguing over who has to pick up the loot from the leftover goo. Behind them is the way forward, a narrow, single-file tunnel. I look at Mercy. “You want to clear floor three with me? Give these guys a minute to clean themselves up?”

She nods and says, “henshin!” Thin, iridescent, horizontal rings begin to appear around her. Dozens more rings appear, smaller around her feet and head, while they're wider around her middle. They eventually form a complete sphere. As soon as it completes it swirls with blue and white, then fades away and Mercy is now in her “White Falcon” suit.

The first layer of the outfit is a spandex-like black bodysuit, and over it are pieces of white and cobalt blue armor. A bracer covers each arm. The left bracer has a long blue blade that runs back past the elbow. The right bracer has a mini-gatling gun. The mecha style armor has pointed pauldrons that look like jet wings. Her chest armor is a small, curved breastplate. Around her thick thighs are plates of armor that only cover the outsides of her legs, leaving the insides uncovered. The knee high, plate armor boots have one-inch heels and jet boosters on each ankle.

This is all topped off with a white, angular helmet that covers her face but somehow lets her hair out back. Her most important equipment though, is the backpack and the spear. The backpack features two short, dark grey wings that glow with blue energy. The spear is a long grey rod ending in a rectangular, unbladed head.

Mercy slams the butt of the spear into the ground and a blue laser-spearhead bursts into being atop her weapon. Then her wings glow and she jets off, hovering right above the ground. I run after her.

We barrel down the descending tunnel to the third floor, her jet wings easily twice as fast as I can run. And I'm already running at superhuman speeds. We emerge into a small chamber filled with hundreds of glowing green crystals. The entire floor seems like it's maybe the size of half a football field. And it's crammed full of enemies.

Uranium Elementals. Tier 3. Not actually made of Uranium, but they do shoot lasers. And they're made of dense crystal, not the cheap glass we used in the previous floor. Good luck!

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Possible Loot: depleted Uranium shells, glow sticks

The four legged, crab-like monsters are hanging off the walls and ceiling. Each one is made of dozens of crystals with no organic looking parts at all. Each glowing green monster is about half my height, but there's dozens of them that I can see, and this place looks like a damn maze of crystal walls.

The five elementals near us glow brighter and I shout, “lasers!” I pull four wakizashis in front of me and cast Holo Shield on each. Each curved short sword is suddenly encircled in white light, becoming a platter-like shield. I pull them in front of me as green lasers stream from the enemies. Three lasers hit my shields, their streaming beams not letting up. I'm not worried though.

Mercy Mahar's “Angle Frame - White Falcon” suit is almost unfair. Two elementals fire their beams at her, but the beams just splinter into fading sparks as they connect with her future tech armor. She rushes forward and swings the spear wide, the energy blade cleaving two elementals in half. The others let up the lasers aimed at me, and turn to her. I take the opportunity to step forward, activating Lunge, Lancing Stride and Shadow Stab. The Lunge slides me 4 feet closer, Lancing Stride increases my damage while I'm advancing, and I use all four wakizashis and both hands to cast Shadow Stab six times. Shadow blades tear up into the crystal bodies of the elementals, as I'd hoped. The three shatter apart and stop moving.

“How many?” Mercy asks, knowing that my radar now encompasses 120 feet out.

“Eh, less than a hundred?” I answer. My increased Intelligence lets me count that there are exactly 94 left, but I don't like to show off too much.

Her voice sounds just a little electronic coming out of her helmet. “It's currently two to three then. But I'll catch up.” She leaps thirty feet into the air and jets over to a cluster of elementals. I just hear the cracking of crystal. “Now it's seven to three,” I hear her yell. Goddamn that woman is sexy.

I turn and run around a corner to find more targets. Either these things take too long to charge their lasers or I've gotten too fast. I slam Shadow Stabs up into three more crystal monsters. Shadow Stab, now at 212% proficiency, sends up a sharp spike of darkness that's about 6 feet long and a foot wide at the base. I figured laser crystal monsters would be weak to darkness, and I was right. These blades aren't sharp or strong enough to punch through even regular wood, but against these things the blades are deadly.

I whip around another corner to find a dead end and two more monsters. I quickly dispatch them, and move on. I call out “eight!”

Mercy fires back with “twelve!” I don't see her up among the crystals hanging from the ceiling, but I can hear the high pitched whistling of her wings and the crash of her spear against monsters.

I dash back and take another turn. This time I'm greeted with a whole hallway of rock monsters. The dozen of them begin to charge their lasers. I pull my hands together with the palms aimed forward and cast Obsidian Sphere. A ball of darkness four feet across bursts from my hands and begins to slowly fly forward. Against fast, or even normal speed foes, this attack is worthless. But against creatures that mostly stay put and act like turrets? It's deadly.

The black orb flies forward and hits the first elemental, slowing just briefly before pushing forward through it. The crystal body left behind is pitch black like stone, and falls off the wall, dead. I hear the lasers of the elementals fire but the beams of light just hit the black void ball between them and me. The bright lasers just disappear into the unnaturally black void magic. The ball hurtles forward and eats five more monsters before it fades from existence. That leaves me with six more to kill.

I rush up and perform a series of Shadow Stabs, piercing each monster once as I move past it. I turn after I've run all the way down the hall and look back. They're all dead except one, which then is shattered apart by a barrage of gunfire from above. I look up and see Mercy flying overhead, her arm mounted chain gun whirling to a stop. “nineteen!” I call up.

I can almost her her grind her teeth as she says, “eighteen.”

We both go in opposite directions and the sound of two superhumans ripping and smashing apart crystal creatures fills the room.

“Twenty four!” I yell over the din.

A few seconds and a burst of machine gun fire later I hear “twenty seven!”

I find another dead end alcove but it's fortunately chock full of monsters. I pull half a dozen shadow stabs up from the ground, some of the blades piercing more than one monster. “thirty three!” I shout.

I hear the crash of crystal and an elemental corpse flies over my head and into a passage to my right. I turn the corner to see Mercy using the suit's power to beat one monster to death with the corpse of another. The two bodies smash apart with tremendous sound. “Thirty one,” she says, and flies up and over a wall I'll have to run around.

I hear more gunfire and I find another cluster of monsters. That's when I realize that I'm smiling. This. Is. Awesome. We're just crashing through these monsters that, by all rights, should be impossible to kill for normal humans. But we're not normal humans anymore. I crush another cluster, then another after that before getting to a round room where I find Mercy waiting. She's looking down a big hole in the floor.

I come up alongside her and look down as well. There's a really, really big elemental. In the big hole. It must be 20 feet across and filling the entire hole with its body.

“Forty four,” I say looking down at the creature.

“Fifty five,” Mercy says, and throws her spear down into the monster. The spear sticks in the top of the crystal. Mercy flies up to the top of the room and flips upside down. She braces her legs against the ceiling and pushes off, flying straight down at high speed. Her palm is outstretched and impacts with the butt of the spear. There's an explosive whirl of wind and crystal shards as the impact creates a shock wave. Then, after a split second, the entire creature shatters apart like glass and the shards drop down into a cavern below.

She flies back up with her spear and stands before me, a powerful goddess of steel and I dumbly say, “I will give you literally anything you want.”

The face guard and visor of her helmet retract and I see her smirk. “Then it's a good thing that all I want is you,” she says, then pulls me forward by my belt and kisses me fiercely.