The Undertrek was a whole different world from the surface. I'd expected it to be dark and gloomy, but the biggest difference for me was the silence. Even with my Focus to block most of it out, the surface was teeming with life and sound. Wind, small animals, distant people. The million little sounds of life that had become like a background symphony to which we all lived.

In the Undertrek there was none of that. No wind, no animals that I could hear, just complete and utter stillness. Silence and dark that made the atmosphere almost oppressive.

"Well." Said my sister sarcastically. "This is nice. It's what I always imagined under my bed to look like when I woke up from nightmares as a child."

Bethy sighed wistfully. "I never looked under my bed as a kid. My daddy used to rent the spaces under all our beds to some of his monster friends. It always felt like an invasion of privacy." At our collective horrified looks she giggled and held her hands as if to ward off misunderstandings. "Oh don't worry. They paid rent."

"This silence doesn't seem natural." I said, shaking off the Bethy shock more quickly after multiple rounds of exposure. "There should be like...worms and shit down here right? Insects and burrowing creatures. We didn't fall into the center of the planet, that was like two hundred feet. It wasn't nearly far enough for us to be in some kind of alternate exosystem or some shit."

Anna shook her head. "You're thinking like a mortal. Consider the difference in the nature of the renown for above and below ground, especially with the added dangers from past civilizations. There's probably a bunch of undead fortresses at the core of this planet or something. Whatever is down there, it's best avoided. We aren't going too deep, and if bats in the belfry over there lives up to her end of this we won't even have to do that."

"Hey." Snapped Chelsea. "That's not necessary. Bethy is down here helping us out of the goodness of her heart. You don't have to be a bitch about everything."

Smirking, the D-ranker raised an eyebrow at her. "Well if it isn't the princess coming to the rescue. You sure you want to pick a fight with me little miss prim and proper?" She gestured to the walls. "We just discussed the lack of sound. No insects or animals means nothing down here to hear you scream."

"If you think Zeke wouldn't notice us down here you're cracked." I said calmly. "Not to mention if you attack her you'd have to kill me, which even if you managed it means no more wishes. Not that it's a problem either way. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop pushing buttons to find out what we're about. If you have questions just fucking ask them."

She grinned. "You got me. I was testing." She smiled at Bethy. "Sorry about that little one. Just checking some things about your fearless leader. I didn't mean to scare you."

Bethy smiled sweetly at her, but she pulled back her lips, exposing razor sharp fangs. Her eyes began to glow a lambent red, lighting the darkness around us somehow far further than they should have and too dimly to see more than dancing shadows. "It's ok. There's no need to be sorry if you didn't mean it. I know you wouldn't really threaten my friend down here alone in the dark with me. That would be...unwise."

Anna's face went pale, and she stepped back slightly, swallowing hard. It was easy to forget that manic wacky Bethy was a Vampire, and the favored youngest child of a man who fought fucking GODS at the S-rank. I didn't think Bethy was E-rank yet, but even if she wasn't I wasn't totally sure she wasn't capable of hurting a D-ranker if she felt so inclined. The pitch black form of Luggage towering over her from behind probably didn't help.

There was also the fact that there was only one family in the universe who had fangs and red eyes like that. Even if Bethy didn't manage to hurt her, Morgan would not take well to someone touching his baby girl. Finding out you're sharing a dark tunnel with a teen apex predator would shake anyone's nerve. The most impressive part was how fucking scary she still managed to look wearing a big yellow hard hat paired with her puffy blacc gothix dress.

"Now that we've finished discussing Anna's gruesome horrible death and the variety of painful ways it might occur, I think we should get back to the mission at hand." I said casually. "She doesn't seem likely to stir up any more trouble." I chuckled. "I think we can just count that as a preemptive pass for any further tests you had in store for all of us, don't you Anna?"

She grinned at me. "You're a mean little bastard when you want to be, aren't you Shane? Yeah, tests passed. Didn't expect to get bullied by a bunch of brats, but hey, if you want to watch the gods laugh, predict the future." I'd never heard that saying before, but I kind of liked it.

"Anyway." Said Bethy cheerfully. "Poptarts and Donuts are back. They did a quick grid pattern sweep of everything within about five miles. They found lots of rocks and dirt, and not much else. But they said some of the rocks had carvings on them. We can check those out if you want?" I hadn't even seen the night pride return. Fucking shadow cats. Squinting, I could vaguely make them out.

Bethy pointed randomly down a tunnel. We had some light from the well above us, and with our Perception we could easily pick it up, but the direction she pointed was pitch black. "They said the symbols are that way."

"Do they know what the symbols are?' I asked hopefully. Maybe we wouldn't have to go down there at all. Rude or not Anna wasn't wrong about avoiding the depths being preferable.

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Bethy just shot me a pitying look. "No Shane. They're cats. Cats can't read. Did you not know that?"

I suddenly felt a lot more sympathetic of Abel and his endless torment (even if I knew he played along). Sighing, I nodded and just followed them down the tunnel forlornly, stoically ignoring the muffled sounds of laughter from Anna and my sister. I was pretty sure even the fucking cats were laughing.

As we moved further into the tunnels, Chelsea held up a hand and conjured a fistful of white fire. The purifying flames cast a bright and sanctified glow on the walls of the tunnels, and somehow I felt the silence recede a bit. There were no noticeable sounds once it appeared, but the quiet just seemed...less.

Our footsteps seemed to echo further on the hard packed dirt and occasional stone we walked over as we traveled down the tunnel. When we arrived at the symbols, Chelsea held up her flame and I crouched down. I peered solemnly at the carvings for a few minutes before nodding sagely and saying. "I was afraid of this." They all looked at me questioningly. I pointed to the symbols."I can't understand a word of what this says."

My sister smacked her forehead with her palm. "Move you idiot." She said waspishly. I snickered as I backed up, having successfully gotten my revenge for their unfair mockery earlier by making them sit around and stare at nothing for five minutes.

She squinted through the light at the tiny etched letters on the stone, reading over them for about fifteen minutes. We all got a bit bored, and Bethy started shifting from foot to foot like she was resisting the urge to start a fire. "You ok?" I asked her quietly. Bethy was energetic and enthusiastic, but she wasn't one to freak out over nothing.

"I don't know." She said slowly. "I feel...like we're being watched. Anna would have noticed though I'm sure. I'm probably just imagining things."

I groaned. "On the list of things you should never say out loud, that's probably third, right after 'I'm sure nothing bad will happen' and 'it's probably just a power outage, I'll go check the fuse box in the basement'. Now I'm SURE something is watching. Can you send the cats to scout for it?"

"I did." She said with a frown. "They didn't find anything. I can't SEE anything either. I just...feel it." I'd never seen her this serious, it kind of worried me.

Anna stepped up next to her, peering out into the dark. "I'm a stealth focused D-ranker. If there's something there I should be able to pick it up. You Perception is well below mine I'm sure. That said, no one with a brain between their ears dismisses the instincts of a Vampire. I had no idea Shane had one of you with him." She narrowed her eyes at the darkness. "I feel something. The dark itself seems to be...alert. Not alive exactly. How did I miss that?"

My eyes widened and I swung them to Chelsea. "Hey, take a break from that and come here." Her flame cleansed whatever was making the air stifled, maybe that was an effect of offsetting whatever was watching.

She grumbled, but stood up and walked over to stand next to me. "Why are we staring into the dark?" She asked as she tried to peer through the gloom. As she stretched out her hand to see better, the dark receded, but even outside the light of the flame it seemed to thin slightly. "Oh." She said in interest. "That's fascinating. Let me try something." She reached into a pocket and pulled out a red metal symbol. Brandishing it in front of her, she bellowed. "RUBRUM GLORIA!"

As she shouted, she channeled flame into her hand, and it was sucked into the symbol, which began to blaze with an incandescent light. The expanded range of the light smashed into the dark around us, and I heard a high pitched scream, overlapping disharmoized voices hurting my ears.

Once it was done, I looked around, able to see the entire cavern we stood in thanks to the still blazing light. "So..." I said conversationally. "Did anyone ELSE notice the big black doors twenty feet from us?"

Anna whistled. "Sneaky. Some kind of stacked Perception overload. A woven charm of overlapping discordant voices pulled together into a spell. Whoever did it stitched it through the darkness around us seamlessly. My Focus pushed it away as useless noise. D-rank work. Probably the Magister. That's not...ideal."

"How did Chelsea break it?" I said in confusion. "If it was D-rank...she hasn't even hit E."

Chelsea shook her head. "I didn't. This is a D-ranked focus. Grandpa gave me the crimson icon to focus my powers of purification. It's basically useless ninety percent of the time, but curses, poisons, and dark based spells and Skills don't hold up well."

Nodding, I made my way forward, moving slow. "Alright folks, we just go in, check on the threat if it's in there, and then leave. Nothing else." I glared at Bethy. "No monster taming."

She pouted but agreed and we stepped up, leveraging the heavy dark metal doors open as we stepped inside. The cavern inside was also pretty dark, but the crimson icon was still lit. Looking out over the larger cavern mostly sunk below the huge ledge we were standing on, my eyes widened in fear.

I thought back to the list, picking through the half remembered possibilities until I found the obvious culprit. Below us, stretching out into the endless distance, lines upon lines of large, leonine forms carved of dark grey rock. I stepped back, covering Chelsea's hand and pushing my sister out of the room as quietly as I could. We'd found the threat. Stone Lions. A LOT of them.