It was too good to be true to think they were in the home stretch, and Joey took point with Drenar to sniff out anything unusual. Literally, in this case, and beyond her normal scent capacity as a kitsune. Of course, the others don’t know that, and just buy into the ‘trained alchemist’ bit. It’s only padding it a little bit, to be honest. She gave a withering glare at Volkir’s projection when she removed a chemical trap that would have melted their skin in a particularly gruesome way to die, had they triggered it.

“Volkir? Do you get your kicks out of watching us almost die?” she says after her patience hits its boiling point. “You couldn’t have found us an easier way through here? No, you just had to send us down a deadly, trap-infested dungeon!”

“Hey, that’s the old section! I upgraded to better security which was more sensitive to friend-or-foe identifications.” She’s not buying it.

“This place is worth zero, Volkir! It’s all mothballed, broken, and you’re suffering from Lair Syndrome!” she hisses at him. He adjusts his spectacles on his horns at that accusation.

“I do not.”

“When’s the last time you touched grass?” He doesn’t answer, and a frown emerges on his snout.

“Point taken, Miss Pyromist.”

“Does my bedroom count as a lair?” Drenar asks casually. She almost chuckles at this.

“No, it’s just a thing that some dragons have. They get…attached to things. Sometimes a little obsessively, like they can’t let things go of objects, or lairs that they make.”

“Joey, that’s called hoarding. It’s an actual problem,” Julia comments with a bit of wit. “And yet, I have no desire for gold, building giant dungeons, or burning towns and feasting on livestock! So, that’s cool.”

“Dragons are weird, and I am one,” Angela adds wryly. Joey can still sense some hushed whispers between her and Sam, but she can’t quite make it out. At least they can remain upbeat after the carnage upstairs. Some of those visuals still stick with her. Curtis, and Reeves. Reeves still could die from complications due to the severe wound. Him, trying feebly to hold his guts in–

She shakes her head vigorously. There’s no time to focus on that. He’s still alive.

She's more focused on the smooth worn corridors that seem like a veritable maze of storage, mothballed experiments, and stacks of old papers lining various rooms. Some of it looks like dormitories for kin. Even a set of classrooms on one floor? It almost feels like a liminal space, and she's seen enough creepy viral videos to know nothing good comes of them.

“Okay, there’s a cargo lift back to the top floor that’s sealed off to your right. Might be serviceable, don’t know for sure. You build a lair, and when it gets big enough, you start losing interest in doing renovations after a while,” Volkir states from the armband. Drenar works his way past another door that is unlatched.

“Hey, before we were rudely interrupted by life and deathly encounters, I had questions,” Joey states with remarkable restraint. “Why did the dragons all kill themselves?” strangely, Volkir doesn't hesitate to answer.

“Someone convinced them that escaping from a doomed world was preferable? I don't know, I’m not a very good representative of my species,” he grumbles. “I also spent most of the last seven hundred years in stasis, on and off.”

“Why would anyone do that?” Kyle asks with a prolonged eye roll.

“Because when you’ve got thousands of years to burn, you get bored waiting for civilization to catch up. Also, we torched our empire, remember?” Volkir is giving off this vibe as a know-it-all, and it's slightly grating. “At any rate, the device was networked to an array of mana crystals tied to the then-nascent teleportal network. The theory was that we could use it to jumpstart an astral gate–uh, like a gate off-planet. The dragons did make colonies on other worlds where the seams of reality folded close enough together.”

“And then you found outsiders and smashed them,” Levine concludes. “So, what went wrong?”

“I think someone activated the wrong runes on purpose. They shattered the dragon's bodies to dust. They were trapped in the aether. That's been my theory."

“Uh, is anything else in the aether?” Drenar asks anxiously even as he edges down a stairwell, keeping his autobow trained on the sight line. “I've uh…seen it. I think.”

“What do you mean you've seen it? You can't go there! It's a place where reality doesn't exist!” Volkir scolds. “I mean in theory. We've had to infer some of this by calculations.”

“I've been there twice now. The second time, Luminari drew me in. The first time, my connection with Alex drew me in,” he responds. "If what I saw was the aether, there's weird stuff going on in there. the dragons are indeed trapped--I saw thousands upon thousands of them. And some kind of...gate. It's trippy to the max, and I'm not sure all of it was real."

“If he's seen it, I've seen it,” Joey chimes in calmly. She doesn't elaborate that she might have seen the avatar of an actual goddess--could Gaia exist? And if she does, why is she speaking through Drenar's sword? She's almost certain that the sword is a conduit to something else.

Her arcanist knowledge is getting rapidly shredded by this whole ordeal.

“Uhm, if that's the case, I saw it, too. When Drenar does that blink thingy,” Angela adds. “It's obnoxiously white. It's like a blank canvas, waiting to be brushed with life and logic.”

“Poetic. But disturbing,” Volkir states. The stairs of stone slabs are undisturbed and a fine film of dust is present. “What else did you see there?” Angela goes notably silent, and Joey thinks she must have seen something.

“Volkir? We saw things that make us question existence.” Joey interjects. They have too much on their plate as it is, and Angela radiates a mental nudge of relief. “This device is bridging the gap between our world, and the aether, in some tangible way. A dead biozone came back to life. People are entering the aether, or getting visions of it? This is…beyond my pay grade.”

“Aye, young k–er, um, young alchemist,” he stammers, and she glares at him menacingly. Drenar gives her a curious glance, but says nothing else, and if Volkir wants to keep breathing, he shouldn’t. “I would try to meet you halfway, but, little problem. The security locks were enabled when a certain alchemist set off bombs in the facility." She turns to give that upstart dragon a soul-piercing stare.

“Listen, you overgrown parrot with scales, let me make one thing clear. I’m grateful you were able to do something to keep the staff alive with some of the security fail safes. But don’t piss me off, because I’m the deadliest alchemist you’ve ever seen.” Volkir doesn’t flinch at that comment–what does it take to intimidate these dragons, anyway?

“Touchy much?” Volkir states dryly. She says nothing more in the exchange, after having made her point. She is more concerned with the spiderwebs that are draped all over the place. And more worrying, the size of them. These are significantly larger than what she would have expected from this location, could they possibly be fed by a biomatter converter? A base of fungi, basic proteins, or maybe natural monsters hiding in the vault? The possibilities are there, and she puts a hand up out of caution.

“Problem?” Drenar asks.

“How comfortable are you with killing monsters?”

“More comfortable than I am killing monsters with human faces,” he quips darkly. She glances at him and winces–he probably doesn’t need any more reminders of this awful day, and she points to the webs adorning the slab walls. The corridor leads up to an open set of double doors, rusted with age. “What’s wrong?” he asks a moment later when she puts a hand up to halt everyone.

“Howler spiders.” She points to one crawling slowly on the web, and it’s about an inch in diameter. It could be easily mistaken for a wolf spider that is native to the US, except this one can get a lot bigger, and has deadlier venom. Luckily for them, this one is content with just crawling along, and decides they aren’t worth the trouble. Drenar grimaces.

“Why are there always spiders? What happened to the square-cube law about limb cross-section to volume, and how insects would collapse under their weight if they got big enough?” She nods respectfully.

“Well, you’d normally be right, but uh…magic kinda breaks a lot of physics, you know? I mean, being dragons and all, you’d at least entertain it, right?”

"Joey, even as a dragon, I don't like spiders. They've been around longer than dragons have, and probably will be here long after we're gone." He shudders as the spider crawls away at at its leisure pace.

“Joey, this is a subspecies. The carapace is thicker." Nick takes a hunting dagger and points at the little crawler, but does not otherwise disturb it. “Bigger ones are problematic. They’re fire resistant.”

“Bolts still work. And my boots,” Julia growls. Kyle looks pale, as he should. She has a sinking feeling that whatever is in here, probably is a lot bigger than the stray one wandering around. Levine checks his magazine, and then puts in a full one. Drenar takes this as his cue to the seriousness of the threat.

“Yep. There’s my sign. If they’re big enough you need a magic enhanced battle rifle to kill one, there’s going to be problems,” Drenar states with resignation. He grabs Luminari, and she hears a crystalline ringing sound. It’s so strange how it seems to resonate so strongly with him. “Volkir, if I have to start clearing out infestations, you break open your dragon hoard to my perusal for every weapon, piece of equipment, and edge we can get."

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"Dragons don't keep hoards of gold!" Volkir states with vitriol. "Where did you hear that one from? That crappy pulp fiction that has invaded every library in the past hundred years that you all read for entertainment?! Or maybe a more recent source, like a thousand different manga or web serials?!" Drenar glances at Joey, and shrugs.

"Reality is now stranger than fiction, isn't it?" she quips with a smirk.

"This is still gonna involve killing giant bugs, by my guess. Hardly glamourous." The runes glow with a touch of his fingers to the flat of the blade, and he eases the door open and then peeks his head back, and motions for Joey. She looks in, and growls instinctively.

“Yeah. Fun times.”

The entire storage room–easily six meters high and a few hundred meters across, is chock full of storage crates, shelves, and various other sealed casks and boxes. She can’t count how many there are. It’s too awkward for a dragon with their bulk to easily navigate the crates. There must be tens of thousands, here. The entire room is strewn with cobwebs, some of them big enough to envelop a single humanoid, and entrap them completely if they were caught up in them. “I would say we should burn them, but…”

"Burning could cause problems." Nick pokes a boot at a crate of fire orbs that are cracked open, and he pockets a few. There are more of them, along with various chemicals. "Fire hazard, guys. No flames."

She eyes the nightshade acetate after a second of hesitation and dances around the cobwebs. Even so, she feels the sticky pull of a strand that is now adhered to her hand. “Oh, this is a nice find! Fully sealed, intact nightshade acetate! What a lovely alchemical booster!” she beams. “This room is filled with chemical preamble and artifacts of doom. If any of you smoke, I suggest you don’t.” The warning signs on the side of the wall indicate that doing such dumb things is likely to end badly, including a one way isekai trip to a land of even worse nightmares.

“No one smokes anymore, Joey,” Levine says with a chuckle. “It’s just such a bad habit.”

“Yeah, it’ll be a deadly habit in here, so we can’t light the webs on fire. Just avoid them,” she insists and takes point, her staff in hand. At least that would be sufficient to crush through their carapace. She holds it at the ready, while Levine and Nick keep ranged weapons on their front and back. They move through the rows, while Volkir glances around from the armband projection.

“Huh. Looks like I need to tidy up here. This wasn’t like this last decade.”

“You know Volkir, you should try to be less of a hermit. Help solve some world problems, meet people outside or something. Because this place is infested,” Julia says with vitriol.

“Yep, not feeling the love for spiders,” Angela adds while they work through the veritable maze. Some of the crates have toppled and the contents of various vials, sundries, and a few rusted weapons lie strewn about.

“Howlers are about a meter across, and their venom is deadly. I have an alchemical counter for it, or something chemically similar enough to it that should be enough for one dose. So, don’t get bitten?" She has two doses, but doesn't want anyone to underestimate the threat of these things.

“Any other tips?” Drenar is just to her right, away from her staff hand, and eases his boot over broken chairs.

“Don’t use fire. We can’t risk blowing ourselves up in here. A single stab through their head or body carapace should be enough to do them in, they have a hard outer carapace. They also attack in groups." Everyone quickly gives their acknowledgment.

“It’s kinda…dead quiet, and my dragon danger sense is tingling,” Angela whispers. “Where are they hiding? What do they eat down here?”

“Unruly teenagers,” Nick quips. Angela elbows him in the ribs gently, and he chuckles despite the rebuke. “Make sure the damage you do is thorough.”

Her ears light up with a warning. A skittering sound, just off to their left and right, past the other aisles of shelving that form a labyrinth of discarded equipment. The wisp lights adorning the wood and metal frames do little to alleviate her mood, and she can hear that chittering sound nearby. And there is more than one. “We need to clear this room. Volkir, how close are we?" she asks.

“You’re coming up on a service tunnel. It connects to the caverns below Asqualia, I put my little retreat a little ways off to…you know, avoid cross traffic. I don’t see any security active in the area…wonder if some gilded rats chewed through the arcanist circuits again,” he mutters while shaking his head and tapping a claw to his earcrest. “They shouldn’t be this big, either.”

“How big is–”

Drenar doesn’t finish his sentence because that chittering becomes a screech, and a spider the size of a dog, with green compound eyes, deadly fangs, and eight hairy legs tries to pounce on him from above, and its color mottling almost blends in with the wood and stone floor. It had practically vaulted over the adjacent shelving. He responds in turn by sidestepping and slicing upwards, shearing three legs and part of its abdomen away. It screeches in that completely alien, maddening chatter before he drives the sword through several of its eyes, killing it instantly. The remaining legs curl inward, and it lets out a single nerve-wracking shriek that echoes in the dank, still air.

“Dragons. Men with rocket launchers. A nightmare-level bitch who sings as she’s slaughtering. Golems. And now, spiders. Tell James I just got a bingo,” Drenar growls as he stabs the thing again for good measure and everyone prepares as that skittering, scratchy sound is more than just a few spiders, and he points the way forward. “Let’s move before they box us in!”

Everyone springs forth, and the spiders are skittering around, and above them. One more tries to leap down, but she sees the deadly monster sailing through the air. She times her strike and knocks it aside before crushing its softer underbelly, and a dribble of green-blue ichor coats the staff end. Several more try to ambush from above, and they’re met by Julia’s plasma which burns them on contact, and several bolts from Nick. Levine calmly levels his rifle at one that leapt through the air, and a single round goes through its head and keeps going. The gasping shriek of an alien sound echoes through the warehouse before it tumbles across the ground in a sprawled heap of limbs and viscous goo.

“Left side, over there!” Kyle points out between the rows of boxes a doorway, on the far end that looks like it's been knocked off its hinges, and he slams an armored fist into a spider that tries to latch into him through a gap in the shelf. The massive blow caves the head in, and there’s a drip of ichor off his hand. She shoves the rest of the twitching carapace away with a swipe of her staff, and she splits the abdomen of one open that tries to get him from the back. It squeals and goes flat on its belly, the legs unable to function.

“This is a kill zone! We need to move!” Drenar barks out. Julia is busy bringing a whole new meaning to pest control and uses her plasma grapple to make these bugs into mincemeat. Or, more grossly, viscous puddles that are slowly drenching the ground and spattering on her clothing. She clambers over the top of the shelving with a graceful mantle and directs everyone to a toppled shelf.

“Up and over, let’s go!” she shouts out and helps Levine, who isn’t quite as spry as the rest of the dragons who are now performing superhuman feats of endurance and strength. Joey hops from the top of the shelving to the next, and the whole unit wobbles unsteadily. She wags her hands to keep balance. If she had her tail right now, she’d be using that to balance out, too! Seriously, I am holding back and I’m going to get them killed if this keeps up! But, secrets! Ugh! Brain, let me see logic!

She doesn’t wait for logic to keep up as Drenar and Angela blast the spiders away with overlapping kinetic fields to make space. Kyle also manages to get over the shelving even with the heavy armor he’s wearing. He’s deceptively strong, she thinks in retrospect. They manage to find another broken shelving unit, the spilled contents of packing shreds, and broken vials strewn across the slab stone floor. Levine keeps firing to cover the rear, as does Nick, but a spider knocks him down with a swipe of its legs. He is back in action in an instantt and thrusts his dagger straight through the mandibles of one spider, and then a follow-up strike that shears through a few eyes and kills it.

Relief can’t come soon enough as they hustle inside, and Joey peers around at the glass and arcane barriers enabled units that are in here–this is a higher step of security compared to what has been observed earlier and she glances at the mass of spiderwebs all around them. It’s almost a–oh no.

“Kyle, don’t–”

Kyle slams the door closed, throws a heavy bar across the handles, and leans against it, the door being slammed by the spiders on the other side. “Uh, Joey, what were you going to say?”

Everyone is panting, covered in viscera, and Drenar looks waywardly around the room, then he looks up when he sees her gaze. “Oh we’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yep.” She grabs a canister out of her hopper, thinking of the deadliest pyrophoric compound she has on her right now. Her danger sense is going off like an alarm bell before her eyes gaze upward and wishes she had more explosives.

“Big momma spider?” Drenar asks anxiously when they both see the glimmer of compound eyes in the dark, perched on an intricate basket of cobwebs that sprawl over the room. This is not going to be an easy battle.

“Yep. We should probably run now.”

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