Taran hates enclosed spaces.

Honestly it’s little wonder. His entire kit, and that of almost all of his companions, revolves around firearms. Everything else requires giving up too much control and too much stability, never mind the cost in Qi and more. The absolute best place to use a firearm, forever and ever, is in an open field with no cover.

And where is he now? An enclosed, dark-as-fuck tunnel where he can barely see ahead of himself, full of winding turns that anything could be hiding behind.

Oh sure, there’s advantages to it too. Hard to run big circles to try and dodge things when there’s walls to either side, and his shotgun works wonders in enclosed spaces like this, but neither advantage offsets the absolute nightmare that is flickering lighting from gunfire and blind corners.

Taran hates enclosed spaces.

Shapefixit, apparently, fucking loves them.

The little goblinoid never stops moving, twitching and flinching at the slightest sound with a massive grin on her face, long ears held tight against her body until they stop, at which point they shoot upright, taking in things he likely can’t even detect. He thinks she’s somewhere in the Core Formation realm and enjoying the enhanced senses that come with it, she must be at least near it to be on this mission, but neither one of them has really had much need to flare their Qi, and he’s a prime example about how cultivation levels and actual abilities can be wildly inconsistent.

The thought brings up a sour taste, and he tries to keep it quiet.

Most of him / themselves is still asleep, but those who are awake are sympathetic to the thought. Hao Kai sends a general feeling, like a soft pat on the shoulder, while Tracker quiets for a moment, the constant impressions about the terrain and their environment slipping back to allow Taran’s more general unease with the dark to take over.

He clicks his tongue, lightly, refocusing himself. He doesn’t have the energy to waste on shaking his head, not with how exhausting it is to walk nowadays, so he uses the tic as a stand-in for a deep breath or larger movement. Now’s not the time for melancholy.

Shapefixit looks back at him, eyes impossibly wide and dark in the shadows of the tunnel. “All good?” She asks, her voice sounding as much like a series of chirps and growls as normal exhales and pronunciation. It manifests as a hell of an accent, one he’s only barely managing to pick through.

“All fine,” he rasps. He uses as little energy as possible, keeping it almost sub-vocal in place of moving his vocal cords and throat into the state needed for a whisper.

If there’s one thing he likes about the goblinoid, it’s that they make talking easier. He barely has to force the air out for them to hear him, and compared to how loudly he has to talk with everyone else, it’s a relief.

She shuffles along the hallway a bit more, stretching a drop of Qi across hands and feet to crawl across the ceiling like a spider, and he can’t help but wonder where it is she’s from. It’s clearly some kind of technique, but he can’t picture anyone that didn’t already live underground having such a technique so ready and developed. She’s seemed plenty comfortable down here in the tunnels, avoiding any of the snakes that occasionally slither by without even looking and casually climbing the walls, but he’s not a fan of being presumptuous, and goblinoids, unlike many of the beast-blood races, are a bit of a mysterious subject.

Simply put, they’re weird.

Some people seem to believe they were made artificially, some time in the distant past, thousands and thousands of years ago. Others believe them to be mere mutations, a cultivation technique or environment gone wrong only for them to eventually re-emerge. Some claim they live in burrows, others that they live deep beneath the earth, others that they are only ever born in the edges of the fourth ring and must crawl their way to civilization, explaining why so few ever survive. The most popular story he’s heard in the mouth of commoners, back when he was more involved with them (or less involved, technically, if you consider his… state) is that they’re born from cursed wombs, passing on said curse to the next thousand children, which is why most goblin communes have so many.

He has no idea which is true (though some sound more ridiculous than others), but he does know that, among the research files and hidden documents Taurus brings with him in his Researcher’s supplies as they travel, there is a scroll on them. Unlike the files most modern scholars tend to use for private research, a sleeve of thick paper holding a dozen other slips of paper inside, the scroll is heavy, its ends are capped in jade, and its case is made of metal. It is thick, it is dense, it is sealed with a powerful Qi signature, and it is very, very restricted. Took him a month before he gave up on trying to open it.

He’s learned quite a bit in the time since he’s met Shapefixit, though.

How abnormal they are compared to a “normal” goblinoid is a mystery, but whatever they are, they can fight. They seem almost suited to this encounter. With every touch on the machinery of the constructs, or even on the flesh surrounding it, she released a flush of Qi into their opponents, freezing them almost immediately and making them easy targets. Whatever she did to them, he noticed as they entered the tunnel they emerged from that many of their fallen opponents had strange, blockier chunks to their metals and flesh that he’s fairly certain weren’t there before.

And since they’ve been in here, they have not. Stopped. Futzing.

Every corner they scurry ahead of him into, he feels their Qi pulse, and finds a much smoother and more efficient looking curve to its edges. Every wall they crawl on, he notices that they leave no claw marks, and finds its rougher edges smoothed. Hao Kao helps him to admire the craftsmanship of cleanliness done so quickly, while Tracker can’t help but grumble in the back of his mind about just how much of a waste it is, how they might have learned something about those who made the tunnels from the messiness of their patterns.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Taran, meanwhile, just finds it kind of punk. Screw this tunnel, she can make it better.

“I like what you’re doing with the tunnel,” he whisper-rasps. “Neater. It’s nice.”

She turns, owlish eyes facing him, and her face is alien enough that he has no idea what expression she’s making for a while. Then, her mouth shifts and two rows of incredibly sharp-looking teeth smile at him.

“Is good!” she clicks and warbles. “Can feel better. Under-trembles, walking trembles, much better like this, more clear. And done so messy. Pah! If you want a tunnel, you make a good tunnel, not messy. Is waste of tunnel!”

It takes effort to smile, but he expends the energy anyway. It’s only polite, and the enthusiasm the smaller figure shows for their opinions is more than a little infectious after so long walking in the dark. “I’m glad,” he says. “No enemies coming then? No, uh, under-trembles you can feel?”

They shake their head. “None coming closer,” she whispers, long ears flopping as she tilts her head back and forth. “But big noise. Soon. Chamber, large. Many tick-ticks and scrapings.” She shudders. “Bad, bad ugh on the ears.”

He nods. “We’ll quiet them soon,” he says.

She looks at him, eyebrow raised comically high as she looks over all his many guns (which, in spite of Tracker’s best efforts, still fucking rattle a bit as he walks).

He shrugs. It’s what he’s got.

She seems to take the point, though he’s not sure she’s particularly impressed with him anyways.

Hao Kao sends him some encouragement, giving a general energy of paternal support and a comforting pat on the back.

Tracker sends him the impression that yes, he really isn’t that impressive, and his guns are way too noisy and have way too many bullets.

He sends back her way an unsavory thought about how her rifle is a bunch of twigs and flowers and how that’s dumb, to which she cackles at him that obviously it’s dumb but it’s all they can do, left as they are.

Yeah. Fair enough.

Then, Shapefixit stops, flicking up one ear in place of a hand in a clear “halt” sign.

He realizes belatedly that they’ve been walking a while longer. There’s a snake coiled about his ankle, pale and purple in the dark, and he quickly kicks it free, trying not to wonder what Jun Vral or his superior may have learned or told Shapefixit while he… lapsed. Time can… slip, when he’s being introspective. He needs to be more careful with that, here. Focus, and be ready to switch fast as needed.

He crouches, desiccated and painfully tired flesh groaning to him as he does and cold metal pins and needles literally digging into him as he moves. So lowered, he makes his way forward, one hand on his shotgun, until he makes it to the corner that Shapefixit is looking past.

There, around the corner, is a small slope leading down and opening up into a massive, darkened room. The slightest hints of light shine in it, a strangely clear whitish-grey light illuminating the slightest edge of one of its walls.

Slowly, he starts to crawl forward, channeling as much of Tracker as he can without fully swapping them in to move as quietly and smoothly as possible. The added energy being used to animate their limbs more fluidly immediately takes a toll, making him feel a bit more pained, a bit sleepier, but he’s used to pushing past it by now. Shapefixit takes up the spot above and behind him, and together, the two descend in towards whatever lies beyond.

He isn’t sure what he expected, moving down into a place like this. More of the undead, yes, obviously. Dug-out dirt, of course. Some degree of cold sunstone, absolutely. But as they turn the corner and look out into a larger, adorned chamber, he can’t help but be stunned.

At the end of the tunnel is a small dugout, a few snakes slithering about in it, an area of poorly tilled earth and stone supported by mediocre mining-pillars that lead out into a clearly man-made set of almost a dozen freshly-dug tunnels, each one with their own line of snakes crawling through it. He can detect no traps, no real tools, only some large wheelbarrows and shovels (many of them made by a clearly amateur forgesmith) placed next to piles of fresh dirt. It’s the massively sloped hill of stone above the little dugout and its tunnels that truly catches his attention, or, more accurately, the thing embedded in it.

It is a perfect rectangle of cold, alien stone, glowing with a white-grey light that infects the room around it.

Divinely perfect. Its angles look sharp enough to cut glass, even in the spot where it’s being mined.

And it is being mined thoroughly. One side of it is almost concave, pieces of it broken off into further perfect chunks and pieces, like even as it is broken apart its constituent pieces remain geometrically and mathematically perfect. Piles of quarried stone in rectangles, cubes, prisms and more all lay piled, many of them haphazardly, into hills and assorted clumps. There are tools strewn about, many of them made by that same black metal as the weaponized undead constructs, almost all of them in varying states of disrepair. The room itself is empty of any movement, every one of its shadows visibly empty, with the only proof of recent residence residing in the footprints (many of them bare) heading towards the dugout and its tunnels or away, into a further, larger tunnel, almost thrice the height of the ones Taran and Shapefixit have arrived through, on the opposite wall.

Almost as soon as he pauses to wonder if this place was mined exclusively with the constructs sent up to intercept them, he hears a sound coming from that very same tunnel. Slowly, bit by bit, the cavern begins to fill with the sound of marching feet, the drumming of bare foot against stone and the ticking of black steel against earth and rock becoming slowly more and more overwhelming. There are tens, maybe dozens of the constructs making their way towards them now.

He cocks the hammer on his revolver. Makes sure that each holster’s enchantment is working properly, each one tied with black string and wax to a different needle in his body, drawing out what it needs to reload them in slow, sustained bursts. Checks that Hao Kai and Tracker aren’t draining too much, that their current level of awareness is sustainable in a prolonged fight. Hao Kai is a duelist, Tracker a stealth specialist and hunter, and there aren’t many others inside him that have the right mix of strength, knowhow, and care to fight in a place like this. He’s not sure where Raika and the others are, if Shapefixit maybe got them here a faster way or if the others somehow delayed the only other member of Taurus’ squadron, but it seems for now, he and the small, dangerous goblinoid are the main line of attack in wiping out the incoming constructs.

He takes a deep breath, even though it feels unnatural to do so. Lets his Qi rise, discordant and mutilated thing that it is, feeling Shapefixit doing the same, the ground around them beginning to shift and reshape itself to better suit a fighting retreat and a stable platform to fight in. He takes out his powder-shot pistol, letting it glint the black of oblivion and forcing himself not to notice how well the glow of the cold sunstone compliments it.

He sees the glint of black steel in the distance, and goes to pull the trigger.

And then the wall about fifty feet above one of the tunnels on his left explodes, and someone that drips pain and whose Qi billows into the room, unblocked by stone and the overbearing weight of the sunstone’s glow, falls into the room, landing with a thud against stone far below.

Behind it, from the ruin it has made of the wall, there is a rumble.

It is only later that he realizes it is a growl.

The wall explodes, spraying a thousand pieces of shrapnel across the room as a twisted thing of sharp edges and strange growths and dripping magma and porcelain bone falls onto the emerging constructs.

And then the pieces begin to fly.