The Bunker hadn’t changed much, from what he could recall. The same walls of rough brick, the same smooth stone floors. The same lead pipes, running to and from the innumerable little nooks like giant veins. All of it, eerily vacant. Open doorways and workshops and meandering halls, the faint vibration of machinery a distant heartbeat.

The only thing that had changed was that he could see it all, now.

Damaged or not, his faceplate lit up the surroundings as though it were mid-day, completely invalidating the scant red light oozing down from the small glass orbs imbedded in the ceiling. In that sense, it was all new to him – the feel of the tunnels was different when he could see all the way to the next intersection. It was less claustrophobic in one way, but more in another; before, he was hemmed in by the darkness, only capable of navigating due to the tight confines of the corridors.

Now he could see how small they actually were, real walls taking the place of imaginary ones, and the whole floor seemed so much… less. Less mysterious, less confusing, less… interesting, for lack of a better word. The Junk Pit was no longer an alien city, just a collection of slightly dusty rooms strewn with mechanical detritus.

…Ah, perhaps I’m just not in the mood. Racing down winding tunnels like a bird’s shadow, even the most decadent surroundings would fail to leave an impression – appreciating whatever charms the Junk Pit might hold when reasonably visible would be like trying to listen to a beautiful song during a hurricane.

And hurricane was the correct word. Lu blew from room to room, not stopping in any place for more than a tenth of a second. Is Bull in this room? No. This one? No. This one? No…

Searching the Bunker took less than ten minutes, during which he crossed paths with not a single person. Again, eerily vacant. I suppose everyone is up above? You’d think they’d be underground, trying to avoid the Sun, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Rather than wait for an elevator or make his way out to the spiralling ramp, he simply stepped off into an empty shaft and Space Ripped his way into the elevator at the bottom. Psychic floor. If I’m going to get caught, it will most likely be here – maybe I should skip this one and come back later?

…No. If he’s here, and I search the entire rest of the Pit first, it would be completely idiotic. I’ll just hope that this floor is as empty as the Bunker.

And as he sprinted through the organic, twisting tunnels, his blurry silhouette not even casting a discernable shadow, it seemed that his hope wasn’t in vain – he didn’t run into anything alive as he scoured the floor, not even in the Grandmaster’s cavern. The huge metal door wasn’t even closed properly, merely hanging ajar as though it led to a servant’s quarter or some such.

I’m getting a bad feeling. They wouldn’t leave a prisoner all alone, so..?

Next was the third floor, which was, again, empty. Green fields lay with farmer’s tools strewn about, some seemingly mid-harvest. The fourth and fifth floors were the same, and by the end Lu was barely glancing around as he raced. Is it… no, they can’t be abandoning the place completely, surely?

But the heat, the Sun coming down, the way the surface has transformed… If I lived here, I’d have considered moving when the ground started boiling.

Was Bull even here?

Floor six, which should have housed the Joeist and Stinger-Tail cultists, was empty as well. Not a single sharpie, the sandstone halls completely silent but for the distant rumble of whatever was still running – ventilation, maybe.

The Mechanicals’ three floors weren’t even lit, everything stripped down completely. The metalworking machinery was gone, either hauled off or packed away in some hidden corner, and it was so barren and cavernous that Lu took less than a minute to examine the entire area.

As Lu prepared for another fall, his guts were turning – and not from the heights. I have to check. There must be something – a trail, a clue, something.

The sharpie processing area didn’t do anything to dispel his rising nausea. It was exactly what he would have pictured in his head, save that the butchering tools were well-maintained, rather than caked with gore and rusted like his imagination painted. Cages, but no Bull.

…The bottom, then.

----------------------------------------

The huge vertical tunnels that cut through the nursery floors were erratically spaced, constructed wherever was convenient to dig down rather than placed logically were people would be able to find them. As such, there were a hundred different routes from one end to the next, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you might wander for days.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

That was how Sulphur talked about them, at least – Lu’s personal experience amounted to a handful of trips with little exploration. Presumably, the man had inserted a little hyperbole; a bit of spice to flavour the story of his home. Lu knew several paths downwards, but in his frazzled state he simply chose the first one that sprang to mind: the original path he had travelled together with Sulphur, which went down through a verdant forest and a scrublands and a misty cliff-face.

Falling through the long elevator shaft was anxiety-inducing, much more than the shorter ones between single floors. With those, he could see the bottom with the aid of his faceplate’s divinations – not so with this much deeper one. The bottom was far out of sight, seemingly endless, and he struggled to hold down his gorge as he fell for almost a full minute.

…It occurs to me that I’ll have to climb all the way back up, assuming Bull isn’t down there. Maybe he could use the escape treasure again? It seemed expended with only the one use, but if he used the splinter somehow…

Before he could finish the thought, the end of the tunnel came into view, a wall – floor, rather – of dull metal rushing up to shatter his bones. Space Ripper. The technique took him through the ceiling of the elevator while simultaneously halting his momentum, and Lu’s boots touched the floor as lightly as if he had rode down normally. There we go. Much faster. If the first few steps he took after exiting were shaky, well, there was no-one around to see.

The cavern forest is just as beautiful as ever, at least. Glowing leaves fluttered in his wake as he moved, small insects turning into thin smears against his body which his enchanted armour sloughed off.

…But even this is different. Everything feels like it’s holding its breath – and where are the sharpies? Were they all up above, as well? I didn’t see any women up there, and they stand out rather a lot. If everyone is evacuating, surely the women would go as well?

He shook his head, banishing the mystery. Not important. I just need to keep moving. A deer-thing snapped its head to the side as he whooshed past, its ears turning down is its gaze followed him. There will be answers deeper down, where the people live – there must be.

----------------------------------------

Another long fall, then the sandy cavern. Unlike the wastes above, there was actual life down here, cacti-like plants and shrubs and burrowing creatures. But still no sharpies.

Desert Crossing Fist was the best movement art he knew, but far from the only one. Hardened Steps, a very simple but otherwise mediocre spell, had been fairly easy to turn into a technique. The thing was inefficient to cast with his space-aligned stomach, but it took him to the next elevator quickly enough. But to his displeasure, he couldn’t just use Space Ripper to fold himself through the bottom of the elevator into the open shaft.

However they had constructed the pulley-free elevator, it was apparently quite bottom-heavy. With his current mastery of Space Ripper, he could move nearly thirty metres – assuming optimal conditions, open space and sensing exactly where he was going. Teleporting blind was much more limited, but he could still manage somewhere in the area of a half-dozen metres.

But no matter how he speared his spiritual sense down through the elevator’s floor, he couldn’t find an open space to move into. His teeth clenched. Damn. I should have taken a different path… Would it be faster to go back up and use a different elevator?

No, probably not. Blast through?

…No, let’s not go shearing through potentially-load-bearing structures while deep underground. I’ll just have to ride it normally, and endure the wait. Maybe some meditation would calm him down.

----------------------------------------

The long ride through the Stone Waterfall’s area of effect was… not calming, no. But it did give him time to think.

Bull is… almost certainly not here. The thought was almost physically painful. But that doesn’t mean he’s dead! He could be in any of those crude little huts on the surface – or maybe he’s escaped on his own!

…Ah, but if he did that, wouldn’t he make for Horrible Swamp immediately? He definitely read all my reports, so he would know what direction to go…

Could we have passed him on the way? Surely not! Even discounting my own eyes, someone would have sensed him. Tai Sho’s divinations, if nothing else; the man talks about them constantly, so they must be good for something.

For a moment, the urge to extrude the man out into the elevator to ask him some pointed questions was overpowering – but he discarded it. No, no. That’s a last resort – things went entirely too coincidentally to have us as the only two remaining. I can’t trust him. Not that Lu would accuse him of engineering the whole situation, that was going too far, but… suffice to say, something smelled.

I’m sure he’ll survive the trip home just fine inside the closed space. The sect designed them as emergency transport, it’s not like he can suffocate or anything. If someone in the seventh realm could even suffocate; Lu wasn’t certain exactly where that particular line lay. I think it’s seventh realm where you no longer have to breath? Maybe sixth – it’s second for food and drink, fourth where aging stops completely… Ah, but I might be imagining a pattern where none exists. The need for sleep disappears at the third realm, so that doesn’t fit at all…

Lu let his thoughts meander on useless topics as he descended, and after a minor eternity the sound of grinding gears stilled as his momentum shifted, his body lightening for a fraction of a second.

There we are. Last floor. The door slid open, and he took a deep breath as mist-covered grey stone filled his vision. Though his helmet, the glowing fog was rendered much more transparent, allowing him to see the entire cavern.

…Beautiful. He had been a little afraid that his lack of wonder was a product of ripping out a chunk of his soul, but it seemed that fear was unjustified. But not enough to dally. Bull is waiting.

He skipped the cliffside path entirely, simply bounding down the mountain without even lightening his weight. Space Ripper, as always, provided a perfect landing. …Maybe I shouldn’t rely on it so much. It’s a cheap technique, but I’m still outpacing my natural regeneration.

…Well, I’m almost at the end, anyway. His boots hit the sandy bottom of the floor, the valley where the glowing mist pooled. No distant scraping could be heard; there were still no sharpies. The only sound was the dull thump, the ever-present machine-noise.

…Was that present when I lived here? Something about it seems off. Like the other extraneous thoughts that popped into his head, he shook it off. Doesn’t matter. I can see the elevator from here – and this one shouldn’t have an extra-thick bottom.