Loot collected, resources reasonably recovered, the group—now made up of five—backtracked to the main path. With Alyx and Marco, they had little difficulty with the nest of snakes in the previous room.

Standing in the main hall again, Cass looked between the doors. She still didn’t know which way was forward, and now, they didn’t even have Alyx and company coming from one direction to narrow it down.

Salos hopped off her shoulder walking directly to the one to her right. “What are we waiting for? You have a time limit, yes?”

“Is that the right way?” Cass asked, looking between the two largest doors.

He turned, an eyebrow raised. “Of course.”

“How can you tell?” Pellen asked. “They look the same?”

Salos frowned. “No. They do not.”

Cass looked between the doors. “Yeah, they do, Salos.”

Alyx and Marco nodded beside her.

Salos sighed. “Really? How do you all get anywhere? Look. Above the doors.”

Cass stared at the space above the doors, but nothing happened.

He sighed again. “Look. With your Mana Sense. Cass cannot be the only one of you with the skill.”

Alyx shrugged. “I don’t have it. Only mages have it usually.”

Marco nodded.

Yet another sigh slipped from Salos’s lips. “How do you expect to fight mages without it? You know, never mind. I don’t know what I expected. Anyway, you two, Cass, mage lady, look.”

Cass activated Mana Sense. Above the door was a green, glowing script. She turned around and looked at the opposite door. That had more of the script, this time in purple. Each of the side doors had their marks over them. Most were green. The door they had just come out of was grey. The room she and Pellen had fallen into had a red X over it.

“Yes, there are lots of symbols over the doors,” Pellen said. “But they don’t mean anything. At least, not to me.”

“Abyss,” Salos muttered. “You mean Rogue Script is out of fashion too?”

“Rogue Script?” Cass asked.

“It is—perhaps was—a shorthand frequently painted on walls to provide direction. The story goes it was originally invented by a gang of thieves who used it to scope out their targets and provide their allies with instructions. But, by my—” He caught himself. “By the end of the previous era, it had entered the common dialect and was a favorite method for providing non-intrusive directions into buildings.” He nodded his head at the door in front of him. “So this one simply says ‘lower level’.” He nodded at the door behind them. “And that one ‘higher level’. Ergo, we go this way.”

Pellen’s eyes had gone wide again. A hundred questions were poised there, all at war trying to get out first.

“Let’s go!” Salos said, trotting up to the door before Pellen could ask any of them.

There were four rooms and four hallways between that door and the stairs down. Each of those rooms had a few monsters in them, mostly snakes. One had a horde of gophers. Another had a pair of crocodiles as well.

The five of them mowed them down with little trouble, with Marco and Alyx acting as their front line, Pellen supporting from behind, Cass filling the space in between with Wind Blades, and Salos striking down vulnerable targets where he could. The enemies of this quality and in these numbers were unimpressive.

“We must have passed Fioreya,” Alyx said as they rested in front of the stairs leading down. “Since we have not seen any monster corpses.”

Marco nodded. “She’ll catch up fast with us clearing the way, though. This was probably too early to break ahead.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Alyx shrugged. “If we’d had control over it, I’d be more concerned about it. But, since this position’s fallen in our lap, we’ll do what we can to keep it.”

“Is there anything we can do to slow her down?” Cass asked.

“We could try leaving some monsters alive,” Marco said. “But she’ll blow through most of this type unless there’s a lot of ‘em and we’re not getting through unless there isn’t.”

There wasn’t much arguing with that. The group continued down shortly after.

The next floor caught Cass off guard. Instead of the endless halls of dark stone, they entered a wide cavern of natural stone filled with glowing, pink crystals.

“What?” Cass asked.

“The crystal farm,” Salos answered like it was the single most obvious answer.

“The what?” Alyx asked.

Salos looked up at her. “The crystal farm?”

“Are you implying that the creators of the Vaisom Catacombs knew how to propagate magic crystals?” Pellen asked, her eyes again wide and hungry.

Salos cocked his head. “Is that not a well-understood technique?”

Alyx and Pellen shook their heads.

“Huh,” Salos muttered. “How do you get anything done?”

“Then this is not a natural formation?” Pellen asked.

“No. Of course not,” Salos said, walking deeper into the cavern. “Does this look natural?”

It looked natural to Cass, but Salos kept talking as they walked.

“See the striations in the stone? Clear indication that it was worked with a stone shaping skill. And there,” his tail twitched toward a seam in the wall. “That likely opens and closes for the maintaining staff. And—“

Salos froze.

A shiver ran down his spine and continued down Cass’s.

Something was approaching. Something familiar. Something desirable.

Something hers.

“Salos?” Pellen scooted closer, still greedily waiting for him to finish his thought.

Salos blinked. “Apologies. That is a shortcut.”

“Is it?” Alyx asked skeptically. “I’ve never heard of a shortcut anywhere in the Catacombs.”

“Would you have, though?” Salos asked. “And have we not ‘found’ two already?”

“I don’t think we should count Cass blowing up the floor between floors as ‘finding’ a shortcut.”

“I didn’t blow it up!” Cass protested.

“Are you suggesting it was Pellen’s plan?” Alyx asked.

Cass scowled but let the argument ride.

“My point still stands,” Salos said.

Alyx scowled down at him, her eyes flicking between the seam in the wall and the cat. “How do you know it’s a shortcut?”

Salos leapt onto Cass’s shoulder to look Alyx in the eyes. “This floor meanders through ‘natural’ caverns for a long time. Good for the accumulation of potential needed to grow these crystals. Bad for efficiently maintaining them. So what would you do as a designer?” He waited half a second as if he was looking for an answer.

“OH! You make servant—” Pellen started to say.

“You make servant passages for your workers,” Salos spoke over her. “And those are highly efficient with a centralized staff and materials room so one can quickly get between sections of the cavern.

“In fewer words: a shortcut.”

“And you can just open this shortcut?” Alyx asked.

Salos shrugged. “Cass should be able to pry it open if nothing else.”

“And what if you’re wrong about it being a shortcut?” Alyx asked. “It could be a dead end. We could waste a lot of time and end up right back where we started.”

That was a valid concern, but they needed to take this risk.

“You wanted to put more monsters between us and Fioreya, right?” Cass asked. “Isn’t this a good way to do it?”

Cass couldn’t explain why she wanted to go that way so badly. But she did. Something was there. Something was waiting for her. For them.

“If he’s right,” Alyx repeated. “Which we don’t know.”

Cass bit her lip. But they knew. What they needed was that way. It was the right way. It had to be.

That was irrational. Unreasonable. Ridiculous.

But true.

Claim it.

“Salos can sense the history of stone,” Cass blurted. “He can feel past people walking through this way. What he’s saying isn’t a guess based on logical construction. It happened.”

It was half a lie. Or perhaps half a guess on her part. He could sense the memory of stone. Whether he knew what he was saying was true from what the stone was telling him or from his memories of walking these corridors in the past age or if he was making things up to get where they needed to be, Cass didn’t know.

It bothered her she didn’t care if it was true. It bothered her she was so willing to do this.

But they needed this. They had to go that way.

They had to.

“Yeah?” Alyx asked, her eyebrow rising.

Cass could feel Salos’s displeasure at one of his skills having been shared, but it was tempered by the shared need to go that way. He nodded.

Alyx sighed. “Alright. Let’s see where this takes us. Open it up, Cass.”

Cass nodded. She put her hand on the wall. She could feel that the stone wanted to move, that it especially wanted to move for her. It was unnatural. It parted easily, with barely any Focus expended with Elemental Manipulation.