Deep beneath the earth of Deadacre, Kaius looked upon a shattered tunnel of alchemical stone and beheld true devastation.

  Heart still pounding from their close brush with the installation’s defences, Kaius crossed past the immense vault door. He was alert, ready for anything. Only the gods knew if the last trap had faltered due to simple luck and age.

  The core of the Imperial ruin had been devastated. Where the exterior they had just journeyed through had been relatively pristine — the only obvious damage from time-related decay and natural collapse — the tunnel ahead had been destroyed by battle. Great cracks spiderwebbed their way around the stone walls and floor, while the ward-lights that hadn’t been shattered flickered every few moments. Metal debris and stone rubble littered the floor.

  If it had only been that, it would have been hard to say whether combat was the cause. Yet one thing made it clear. Every few steps, barricades and palisades made of shaped alchemical steel, similar to the door, had risen from slots in the floor.

  Each faced them with its defensive side, clearly a fallback point if the vault door they had just passed through was ever breached. Yet something was wrong. They were broken and torn — shattered, splintered, and twisted as if struck by titans. The problem was the angle: they had been blown outward, not in. No exterior force had breached the vault. Something had tried to break out, destroying defences as it went.

  There hadn’t been a fight down here, there had been a war. Yet the sight before their eyes only raised more questions.

  “Where are the fallen warriors?” Porkchop asked. “Even if they were keeping something locked up here that escaped, there should be fallen amongst the debris. There are no signs of repair or cleanup — whatever rout happened here was total, so where are the bodies?”

  Kaius could only grunt. He had no answers.

  “More importantly, why?” Ianmus asked. “I’ve never heard of Imperial ruins being used to contain dangerous threats. What tried to escape is what I want to know.”

  “An invading force?” Kenva asked, though her tone made it clear she wasn’t confident in that assessment. “They could have infiltrated and then been caught as they tried to escape.”

  “One that left everything else pristine? I doubt it,” Kaius said. “Besides, an infiltrating force to break into a place like this would have needed to be a small number of extremely powerful individuals. They either would have escaped — in which case we would already have seen signs of their passage above — or they would have fallen, in which case there should have been some signs of repair or otherwise.”

  Regardless of the answer, Kaius felt more uncomfortable with the fact that the blast doors surrounding the reinforced dome above had sealed themselves tight.

  Even the vault door behind them, partially open, showed signs of damage and wear, great rents torn through the reinforced steel to reveal the gearing of its internals. Kaius’s eyes settled on it for a moment. Perhaps this was an opportunity to learn more — to prepare themselves before they pushed deeper into the facility. A valuable thing, considering the likelihood that this was a military installation was only growing by the minute.

  “Let’s halt for a minute,” Kaius said, nodding towards the vault. “If I can learn more about the mana flows or their runes, we might know why the vault let us in so easily. If we’re lucky, I might be able to confirm if the defences of this place are failing.”

  “Good plan,” Porkchop replied. “We can set up a defensive line and keep watch.”

  Not ungratefully, Kaius left his team to it and approached the slab of steel that towered overhead.

  Peering into the rents in the steel casing, into its complicated internals, Kaius clucked his tongue as he saw that most sources of magic were still encased in armour. Still, he could get a fair bit closer.

  Laying a hand on a damaged section, he focused his will and pushed his mana beyond him. Without the pressure of impending doom, he noticed something interesting. His control — while lesser than within himself — seemed just a hair easier while it was still within the influence of his Authority.

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  Thinking about it more, it only made sense. Xenanra herself had said that it was an extension of his natural zone of influence. Regardless, he was grateful for anything he could get. External mana manipulation felt like he was trying to thread a needle while wearing thick leather gloves.

  Reaching in with his mana, he fumbled blindly in the dark for the first threads of bright power. It coursed through the formation within, and he followed it carefully. With time on his side, he was almost able to picture the shapes of the runes that had been used — almost.

  His mana control was not so deft that he could recreate the formation from feel alone, yet what he sensed piqued his curiosity even further. The burgeoning sense of familiarity he’d had when he first inspected the vault door remained. It was barely a hint, but the feeling niggled.

  Kaius clenched his jaw, suppressing a growl of frustration. He knew those structures — those formations. Perhaps some predecessor to the scripts he already knew, or a close cousin. Ykkardian or Vhaxanish? It was possible — they were both ancient scripts, with origins he knew far less about compared to more modern inventions like the Supplementary.

  Regardless, unless he was willing to risk activating defences by trying to breach the vault door himself, it would have to stay a tantalising unknown.

  Following the formation through the door, he moved slowly, tracing it into the walls — where his eyes widened in shock. It was interconnected perfectly, in a way that eclipsed his knowledge and expertise. When Kenva had said she’d seen lines of magic tracing the tunnels above, he’d assumed they were simple power conduits, supplying the various formations of the ruin with energy. He’d been wrong. With this close an inspection, even shrouded as it was, he could tell there was no break.

  Moving slowly, he traced the connection where it split and branched like the weave of a loom. It joined the lights above, looped and connected down beneath the floor into the risen barricades, and into more unknown nexuses and arrays controlling functions deep in the walls that he had no frame of reference for.

  The entire ruin was linked into a single runic formation of mind-boggling complexity.

  He stood rooted to the spot as the ward-lights above pulsed. How was that even possible? The larger and more complex a formation grew, the worse the problems of instability became.

  As far as he was aware, the largest formations used in city defences had to be maintained at least once every few years, lest they start to fail. How had these persisted for millennia when they were far beyond even that in scale? Even more, those wards tended to be simple — this was anything but!

  The same formation controlled traps, detected intruders, opened doors, set defences — everything.

  “Impossible,” he whispered.

  “Found something interesting?” Ianmus asked.

  “This entire facility is an artefact,” Kaius said, awe filtering into his voice.

  Kenva looked over her shoulder from where she’d sidled behind a mostly intact metal palisade, her bow in hand. “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know — this is so far beyond me its hard to even guess. Those conduits you sensed are runic links. Each formation I’ve seen could better be described as a single array. This entire place is fuelled by the same construct.”

  Nearby, Ianmus leaned on his staff and raised an eyebrow. “That’s…”

  “Immense, I know,” Kaius finished. “But it’s still the truth.”

  Frowning for a moment, Kaius turned back towards the door. “Give me a moment. I need to check something more.”

  Scouring it closely, he found two connections, the flow of magic within them clear. One fed the door and the traps beyond it, while the other led deeper into the facility. That one, it seemed, had suffered damage in whatever clash had occurred, running beneath a section of wall that had been shattered. The complicated branching weave of flowing mana abruptly went dark.

  He nodded to himself. “I think we’re going to need to be extra cautious about activating any defences.”

  “Oh? Why is that?” Porkchop asked.

  “From what I can tell, and from some of the records we read, there has to be some level of redundancy built into this place. I think each individual formation can operate independently, even if they’re networked into a single whole. But if we trigger the defences in one place, it could activate them everywhere.”

  “What’s that got to do with the door?” Kenva asked.

  “Its outward connection to the facility is broken. Whatever caused it to fail, I assume the damage that let us inside won’t have spread that authorisation to the rest of the facility.”

  He rose to his feet, drawing his blade as he joined his team. Regardless of the danger, he knew one thing: the flow of mana had a source. And if this facility’s mana reactor was supposed to be the centre, it stood to reason it would be the very heart of the formation. Between him and Kenva, they should be able to trace the flow and follow it.

  Sharing his thoughts with his team, he got a series of determined nods in turn. Slow and cautious, they picked their way forwards through the ruin of an ancient battle, alert and ready to find whatever had caused the failed desperate escape attempt.

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