Their descent took a few minutes. Whoever had been responsible for the mine's expansion had opted to dig straight down, prospecting for a fresh vein. Apparently, it took them a while. In the confines of the cramped hole, vague notions that this might not be the wisest idea sprung into Alex's mind, but he clamped down on them. He was not going to be seen as a liability. Taking risks would always be necessary to secure the kind of power he needed, and at least this time he'd had a choice in the matter.

In a way, the decision to descend to the fourth floor was the first time he'd willfully chosen to pursue the danger that surrounded him lately. If in the process he got to prove that he wasn't a burden? All the better.

They arrived in another tunnel. Not surprising, but the dull environs had started to wear on him a little. It had been about three hours since they'd entered the mine, and already the stale air and lurking darkness frayed at the edges of his mind. It felt like a day had passed at least. With the renewal of Tirus' faerielight came the boon of sight and a hesitant curse from the man.

"That's not from a swarmer." he said, pointing toward the opening they'd emerged from.

Alex could only agree. Surrounding the hole were claw marks, chunks torn from the stone at odd angles.

"A Monarch?" Lyra said, inspecting the markings.

"Could be. Something big squeezed through there." Tirus said.

"What's a Monarch?" Alex asked.

"You know how wolves live in packs?" Tirus said. "Swarmers are similar. Leave 'em alone for long enough and one of them evolves. Turns into something real nasty."

"It usually takes years, though." Lyra remarked. "Do we really believe an entire swarm escaped notice for that long?"

"Depends how deep in their cups Reliquia's unit were."

"If it's a Monarch we're dealing with, then this mission just got bumped up a rank. We need to tell the sergeant. Let's go back." she said.

"Wait," Alex said, looking between the hole in the ceiling and the passage extending deeper into the mine. He chewed on his lip. "No chance the Sergeant hasn't found his way down here already. It sounds like this is important."

"It is. Even the boss'll struggle with a Monarch on his own. Type of thing you send a dedicated Gold extermination unit for, not a Silver combat unit. Especially not with a rookie, no offense." Tirus said.

"None taken. Never said I'd take on a Gold. But we'll be too slow if we go back up."

Lyra groaned, palming her face. Alex made to argue his case further, but she shook her head.

"He's right. We'd have to cut back all the way to the central cavern, then go down the sergeant's tunnel... it'll take an hour, at least." she said.

"An hour in which the sergeant will have been pressing forward. Doesn't seem like a good plan to me." Alex said.

"So, what, you want to carry on?" Tirus said, blinking. "That's risky."

He shrugged his shoulders. The thought of running into a Gold monster didn't sound good to him, but they'd achieve nothing by running away. It didn't strike him as especially likely that the monster varied its route. They could be the only ones aware of the possibility. Besides, after all the chest-puffing he'd done to get himself down here, he didn't intend to quit so easily.

"We have mission critical intelligence. We either get it to the sergeant or consign everyone else to death. I agree with Alex." Lyra said, taking a deep breath. "Our only choice is to push on."

***

Shrieking echoed through the tunnel network.

They had collectively agreed to minimize their use of power while on the fourth floor, with Lyra releasing her passive augmentation and Tirus dimming his faerielight to a dull glow - enough to see by, but hopefully not enough to announce their presence. With the Mitovampyria able to detect energy, any significant use of power would announce their presence to the entire floor. Alex could almost feel each individual cry pierce his body.

Fortunately, the original miners had operated linearly. Rather than opt for a sprawling map of passageways, they'd cut long corridors through the earth, connecting at perpendicular angles. The opportunity to make a left-or-right decision came rarely.

Progressing through the cavernous underground required their full attention, with particular focus on avoiding the roaming monsters. Through their endless shrieking, they could divine the location of any nearby threats; a loud, shrill sound indicated the presence of a monster nearby, and informed them of the need to avoid a particular path. On occasion, this saw them change course and walk back on themselves, but this happened rarely enough that their progress wasn't meaningfully impeded. Even in their number. The old mine stretched a great distance.

Without any knowledge of Campbell's location, they were forced to roam the tunnels near-randomly. Alex knew that Campbell had taken the southern tunnel, which served to give them a general sense of direction, but if his route had been anywhere near as winding as theirs then it would serve them little. They just had to take it step by step, hoping to find the sergeant or the other sub-unit throughout their travels.

"Wish we could signal Alera." Tirus whispered, keeping low to the ground.

"You know we can't. If she could sense it, any of the monsters could, too." Lyra replied in a similar hushed tone, her ears pricked up for the slightest sound.

They quickly fell back into silence. Now that they had decided to keep their power usage to a minimum, their volume became a real concern. What good would it do them to announce their presence? No, even as much as Alex itched to voice his half-dozen concerns to the rest of his group, it would achieve nothing. It wasn't like they had anything incredibly important to talk about, anyway.

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One unspoken consensus they had arrived at prior to their side-mission was to avoid the passages marked by claws. They were rare, and usually took quite a bit of examination to identify them, but whatever creature called the subterranean environment home clearly travelled around this level fairly regularly. He could only hope that it made its home - nest, burrow, whatever it did - further into the mine. They were still only on the fourth floor. Hopefully, that would keep them from the immediate danger.

Lyra rounded a corner. In the span of a breath, she returned, pushing Alex back in her haste to take cover behind the wall.

"What?" he breathed, noting the haste of her movement. "Something down that way?"

"A lot of them. Room's big - must have been a break area, or something. Counted at least twenty. Can't go through there." she replied, darting her head around the corner to take another look.

"Nowhere else to go." Tirus said, keeping an eye on their rear. "Last clear tunnel was at least fifteen minutes back. Who's to say we won't just run into the same problem back there?"

"We've got no choice." Alex said, low to the ground. "We'll have to get through. Somehow."

"Unless you've got anything special, I've not got any ideas." Lyra said.

"Can't go in blazing, neither." Tirus said. "We'll have a whole swarm on our heads in a heartbeat."

"Anyone know what their eyesight's like?" Alex said, locked in thought.

"Either terrible or fantastic. That's how it usually goes with the underground sort." Tirus said.

"They used sound to find us the first time, right? Bet it's the former."

"No matter how bad the eyesight, they'll struggle not to notice us walking through their nest, Alex." Lyra said.

"Then we don't make it that simple. I've got an idea."

He reached into his satchel. In choosing to bring his mother's crystal stele, he hadn't really expected to find a use for it. Engraving usually required a steady, quiet environment, somewhere to focus your attention wholeheartedly on the process. The mine was neither. However, it did offer a potential solution that he hadn't expected. Producing the tool with a grin, he looked between the other two.

"A stick? How's that gonna help?" Tirus asked.

"Not a stick." Lyra said, giving Alex an assessing look. "That's a tinker tool. Rare one, too. They're expensive. How on earth did you get one?"

"Town tinker. Apprenticed under my mother. That's not the important part, though." His hands grasped blindly around the floor for a moment, struggling to see in any detail thanks to the dimness of the faerielight, but thankfully his prize was plentiful. He picked up a medium-sized stone, about the size of an ordinary ball.

"You gonna throw a pebble at them?" Tirus muttered.

Alex had to suppress a snort; it wouldn't do to alert their foes. "No. Give me a few minutes and I'll see what I can do."

The art of enchantment took significant skill, learning, and a knowledge of the structures you intended to use. Like issuing instructions with the written word, only carved permanently into your material of choice. It had its own language, its own conventions, grammar notwithstanding. Through enchantment, you could manifest effects that were outside of your abilities. This didn't come easily, however.

First, any material required a nexus. This served as the central node of the enchantment - the core through which the effect was governed. It also held the energy required to power the enchantment. This was arguably the easiest part of most small projects, as a standard nexus formed the very first step in any curriculum for enchantment; the more complex the end result, however, the more sophisticated the requirements would be for the nexus. Thankfully, this particular design only needed to work in a short burst, and he could simply employ one of the pattern he'd already memorised. He got to work.

It formed a cylindrical rhombus shape on the face of the pebble. A hard design to engrave quickly, but his mother had drilled him for endless hours until he had the technique down pat. It still occupied his attention, but he had sufficient concentration to avoid the distraction of knowing that twenty ravenous monsters were just around the corner - literally.

With that complete, the real work began. While the nexus acted as the central node of the enchantment, it didn't penetrate the material sufficiently - a supporting pillar, but not the roof itself. No, the real difficulty in any enchanting process came with the circuitry. Providing avenues for the power to traverse, logically consistent with the desired effect and matching the nexus design, required much more on-the-spot ingenuity. It varied from material to material, not just in respect of the actual substance - stone, wood, paper - but also the shape, size, and density. An improper circuit design would fail to sustain any effect channeled through the nexus. This could manifest in improper function, the destruction of the object, or worse still - an explosion. Alex would rather avoid all of the above.

Employing the stele with expertise, he carved several notches in the stone. While it might sound complex, the general rules of thumb had been pounded into his skull as surely as the etching he made in the stone. This didn't follow any of the established designs he knew, like the standardized template of your average light-stone, but it also didn't require any intricate energy manipulation, power regulation, or complex aspected energies. As far as those things were concerned, this was as simple as could be.

It took around ten minutes for him to finish, time in which Lyra and Tirus watched on impatiently, but finally - it was done. He held the stone aloft, catching as much of the light produced by Tirus as he could, and with a smile he declared it finished.

"That's great. What is it?" Tirus said, looking unimpressed. Alex didn't blame him. No matter how you dressed it up, a stone remained a stone.

"It's a power emitter. Fairly basic design, cribbed from light-stones, mostly. It'll send out a neutral power signature when activated." Alex replied.

"So... you've made something that will lead them right to us?" Tirus questioned, raising his eyebrow. "Isn't that exactly what we're looking to avoid?"

"No, idiot," Lyra said, turning away from her prior focus on watching for approaching enemies. "It's a stone. You can throw it. Obviously."

"Oh, right." Tirus nodded at that. "Good thinking, actually."

"All we need to do now is get it somewhere we want to lead them. I was thinking we pick one of the other tunnels leading out of that room and lob it as hard as we can."

"It's a solid plan, but..." Lyra hesitated. "What if we send them all down a tunnel where one of the other teams is?"

"Then they'll deal with it. Right now, we need to get this information to the sergeant, or none of it will matter." Tirus said.

"Alright. Give it here."

Alex complied, trickling a small amount of energy into the stone - slow enough to avoid detection - before handing it over.

"You'll get one shot. When you're ready to throw it, push your finger into the pattern on the face. It'll start working in about five seconds... or so."

"Got it."

She lined up her shot. Grasping the stone tightly, she pulled back her arm as she rounded the corner. Her target acquired. He noted the moment she drew on a trickle of power - her posture shifted, just a tad, in the way that augmenters usually did when reinforcing themselves - before launching the payload at a speed eclipsing anything he'd ever be capable of.

It tore through the air, whistling as it covered the room, though remaining inert. Alex counted down in his head. At the four second mark, the cavern erupted into motion - shrieking and howling drowned out his own thoughts, twice as loud as he'd grown used to, and he peeked around the corner to watch the swarming Mitovampyria chase the stone down a passage.

"Looks like it's working."

"Good for us. How long will it last?" Lyra said.

"Not long. Fifteen minutes at most. Didn't get to channel as much power into it as I wanted."

"We'll manage. Let's move."