When they arrived at the center of the crust-lift, they found that the elevator platform was only just returning.

  Both a good sign, and not. It meant that someone—likely Rallemnon—had descended a few hours before them. They were close, but he still had a lead, and the time it took for the lift to reset kept him ahead.

  As the platform slowly climbed up the last few feet, then clicked into place at the center of the shaft, the runes and glowing vaults of power in the walls hummed, then began to refill with blue light.

  He triggered the Questforger card quickly, acting on a hypothesis, and focused on what he thought the purification crystals would feel like. Rather than trying to target the idea of the crystal, he locked onto the function it would provide to his hand, the idea of taking his Aes and making it usable for his mechanical hand.

  Which still hurt like hell, but as long as he didn’t move it too fast, or hit anything with it, it didn’t hurt.

  The good news is that, from what he’d seen, it was completely stable. The connection point halfway up his forearm was no weaker than his arm would’ve been as a regular flesh-and-blood limb.

  With the Questforger card, he didn’t try to trigger the second function; that would overload the card and it still needed to cool down. He’d have to save its predictive function for a fight where he really needed it. But the tracking needle pointed almost directly downward. If Jace had to guess, it was directing them to a clump of automatons in the fourteenth level—right below the crust-lift’s destination point.

  Even more odd was that in his perception, the entire fourteenth level registered as a threat.

  Not that it had lots of automatons. The dungeon itself. The walls, the hallways, the floors…they were the same as an automaton.

  “Kinfild…” Jace said with a warning tone. “Do you know anything about the fourteenth level? Anything special?”

  “I am not aware of the dungeon’s functions this deep into the earth,” Kinfild said.

  “It may be a last line of defence before we reach the core,” Ash suggested. “What are you sensing?”

  Jace tilted his head. “You guys…can’t sense it?”

  “Your card extends your regular senses far beyond the reach of an average person,” Perril said. “We’ll sense it when we get closer, aye.”

  “Average wielder,” Lessa corrected Perril. “I still won’t sense anything at all…”

  “How close are we to finishing her armour?” Jace asked.

  Perril tilted her head side-to-side a few times, then pursed her lips. “We should have enough material by the time we reach the bottom of the fourteenth level—at the rate we’ve been going.”

  “Still, don’t think you can just put a scanner in my armour, right?” Lessa asked. “Be a bit big. I was under the impression that we were keeping it maneuverable still.”

  “How…how big is a scanner?” Jace asked. Obviously, small enough to fit in the Luna Wrath somewhere, and small enough to fit into the Thegn of Eight’s starfighters, but he’d never seen one outside that context.

  “About the size of a dinner table, give or take,” Kinfild provided. “Like most of our modern achievements, it functions with an array of technique cards to simulate a spiritual sense and detect its surroundings.”

  “Huh,” Jace said. “Suppose I could’ve guessed that.” He reached out and triggered the switch, activating the crust-lift and sending them shooting down through the tube—and toward the fourteenth level.

  When the enhanced gravity abated and dropping floor came to a halt, Jace cautiously stepped off. He held his Whistling Blade in his left hand, but slowed to let Ash lead the way. As soon as he got this hand functional, it wouldn’t be such an issue.

  He’d heard of amputees feeling like they had a phantom limb, though he’d never really paid it that much attention. He was sure what he was feeling right now, though, because the hand really wasn’t missing anymore. There was a prosthetic, but there wasn’t, and right now, the discomfort of the still-healing stump overwhelmed anything else. Supposedly, Perril had used her abilities to fix the tip of the limb, but that must not have registered in his mind or nerves yet.

  They crossed a walkway to the edge of a regular crust-lift ending chamber. It looked, on the outside, at least, like all the others. But then they descended along the walkways on the outer edge, and expressions of concern crossed Kinfild’s, Ash’s, and Perril’s faces. They focused on something below them.

  Jace sensed it too with his regular senses. It was like an automaton, but spread out over the entirety of the fourteenth level—a massive cylinder of danger beneath them, with concentrated specks where each individual automaton waited.

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  Just to be sure, Jace triggered his Questforger card while focusing on the purification crystal—the main function was off cooldown again—and it pointed directly at the nearest clump of slumbering automatons. Although he couldn’t see them with his bare eyes, he knew where they were supposed to be from his enhanced range of perception.

  “Perril, or anyone who knows, do the automatons have purification crystals in them?” Jace asked.

  “I think so,” Perril said. “It seems that they all use shield-Aes from the main dungeon for fuel, purify it for their motors, then taint it with a different aspect for their respective functions.”

  “Then why haven’t we gotten any crystals yet?”

  “They shatter when the automaton dies,” Perril said. “When its core explodes, it lets out a resonance that breaks the crystals still in its system.”

  “Ah. Then we’ve gotta steal a crystal from one and separate it before the core explodes? Where…where exactly are the crystals?”

  “Their heads.”

  “Okay, then. I think I’ve got a plan. We just need some prey.”

  The stone walkway descended to the bottom of the chamber, where they passed through a yawning doorway. They crossed over a small footbridge with no railings, passing over a small chasm, before arriving at a cylindrical hub with eight doors. It was Luminian steel; it shimmered a faint brassy-silver in the light of Lessa’s tail.

  Only one door connected to the bridge, and there were no other bridges within the little chamber.

  They stepped into the cylindrical room, then descended a spiral staircase, boots clanking on the metal steps. Inside, there was no stone—only wires, engraved runes, and glowing amber veins of advanced shield-aspect Aes.

  Eventually, though, the stairwell deposited them in the center of a hallway. It was tall, with angled walls like the rest of the facility, but everything was made of metal, and here, there were very few rune-lines. The few that Jace actually identified were all blazing hot with shield Aes.

  The hallway had many branches, but at least half of them were blocked. Transparent shields of orange mesh blocked them. They shimmered in a chain-link pattern, blocking physical matter and objects in hyperspace.

  Needless to say, it was much brighter in these hallways. With the light of the shields reflecting off the metal combined with the light of Aes travelling in veins along the walls—not even in rune-lines—it was almost like daylight. After spending so much time in the dim underground, he blinked a few times, and had to squint for a half-minute as his eyes adjusted.

  They continued along. This time, Jace led the way, making a bee-line for the first automaton he sensed. They were in clusters, and this was a cluster of three.

  “There’s a group of automatons waiting for us around the corner,” Jace said when they were a few paces away from the next unblocked intersection. “I’m going after the closest, but I need you guys to either destroy or distract the other two while I draw out the purification crystal.” He glanced back at Perril. “How many will I need? One for my hand, and some for Lessa?”

  “I had a different strategy in mind for fuelling her armour, actually,” Perril said. “I looked through you backpack, aye, and I figured you might be willing to part with some of your other trinkets.”

  “The accumulator nodes?”

  “Aye. They can absorb pure-aspect Aes directly from the Split, and they won’t be too bulky if we attach them to her armour.”

  “If you can extract the Aes from—” Jace cut himself off, then shook his head. “Not now. We’ll worry about that once you have enough material.”

  Then, without waiting, he leapt around the corner.

  As soon as he emerged from cover, a panel in the wall whirred open. No steam, no smoke, no hissing. Like a garage door peeling open, it revealed three automatons waiting within.

  Kinda thought they’d blast out of the walls, like all the others.

  But this level of the dungeon was just different.

  Once his initial surprise faded, he took a wide stance, held his Whistling Blade out to the side with his left hand, then triggered his hyperdash. He flashed through the air and emerged only a few feet beside the automaton’s head.

  As soon as he began falling, he activated his fortification card and flooded his blade with hyperspace Aes, then slashed straight through the automaton’s neck. That wouldn’t be enough to kill it, but its mechanical head still toppled to the side and fell to the floor with a clang.

  Jace kicked off the automaton’s shoulder and plummeted to the ground, then tucked his head and rolled. The automaton’s head was right beside him. With his fortification still active, he gripped a coil of sparking wires and tugged the head farther down the tunnel, away from the automatons.

  If Perril was right, then something about killing the automaton created a resonance through its body, and it probably had to do with the exploding core. Whether the head was attached or not didn’t matter. He had to get the crystal out before the automaton died.

  And before they killed him. The automatons turned around to face him, but not before Ash triggered a card and tugged them all toward him. He slashed through one’s knees with his own blade, and Kinfild and Lessa peppered the other with fire and plasma. For now, they were busy.

  From his vantage, Jace couldn’t see any sort of a crystal inside the head. Gritting his teeth, he slashed straight through the head one more time, hoping he didn’t shatter the crystal. It wouldn’t be the end of the world—there would be more automatons—but it would be annoying.

  The head fell into two halves. Its wires and tubes ran up to a chamber at the center, and hovering within it was a clear crystal. Like quartz, but slightly more transparent, and with a faint golden tinge.

  But the field that kept the crystal suspended was fading. Jace lunged forward and snatched the crystal out of the air. It was about ten centimeters long, and it’d fit into the back of his wrist, but just barely.

  He pulled open the panel, then slotted the crystal into the machinery of his hand.

  Immediately, his body registered a new presence at the end of his arm. With his senses, he detected new Aes-conducting tubes connecting where his old channels had been severed, ready to accept Aes.

  With a grin, he flooded the channels. Aes flooded up to his hand, fed through the tubes, and filtered into the chamber with the crystal. The crystal took his hyperspace Aes and converted it back to pure, aspectless Aes before pumping it into the rest of the mechanical hand.

  He could still control it. He could tell it which motors to use, with artificial tendons to contract, which fingers to move.

  Reaching across his body, he clamped his right hand’s fingers down on the Whistling Blade’s hilt, then switched back to his good hand.

  “Now we’re back.”