Reaching the centre of the ruins was proving troublesome. From the small portions of scouting that Ro had done during the guild’s initial raid on Old Yon’s hideouts, they knew the ruin stretched to encompass the circle of dead ground that surrounded the city. Considering that Deadacre itself was centred in that field, Kaius knew it was likely that they were heading towards the centre of the city.

  Unfortunately, all the known entrances to the ruins lay on the outskirts of the city. On a straight shot, it should have taken them an hour or two to walk, but the ruin had proven a warren. Not all of it was in as good repair as the shaft they had entered. Tunnels had collapsed, worn away by millennia of decay.

  The layout of the ruin itself was convoluted and confounding. They would have long since gotten lost without Kenva’s wayfinding capabilities allowing them to keep a true heading.

  They were well into their seventh hour of exploration, and they were only just reaching their destination now. Yet for all that exploration, they had found little of note within the ruin.

  “What do you think all this is for anyway?” Kenva said from the back of their group, looking around at yet another stark tunnel of strange alchemical stone and exotic ward-lights. “There are no workshops, no storage facilities, and we haven’t seen anything similar to housing or places of rest. It’s just tunnels and rooms full of devices and pipes.”

  Kaius grunted, shrugging his shoulders. They had passed through one such area barely half an hour ago, where the tunnel had opened into a space three hundred long strides wide with a ceiling that soared far overhead.

  The entire thing had been a tangled mess of pipes. Blocky machines of steel were attached to them with odd little ward-like diodes, most of them blinking red. Concentrated mana had sparked off dust and smoke. Mechanisms were dusty and corroded. While they hadn’t deeply explored the space, it had been one of dozens. Most were half-broken, as worn fittings spouted plumes of steam, and shimmering liquid dripped from the ceiling, reeking of a dozen different magical affinities.

  Every one of those rooms put them on edge — the roaring pipes and the grinding clank of unseen gears slipping against each other. It was complex industry beyond anything he’d ever seen. He couldn’t even imagine artisans working on crafts so large; whole guilds wouldn’t even be enough.

  Worse, failing artifice and clear signs of alchemy meant danger. As much as they had wanted to figure out what those machines were for, they had a mission, and none of them were eager to see what would happen when a collection of artifice the size of a city block failed explosively because one of them went prodding and disrupted the delicate balance that had preserved the machines for millennia.

  “I think this is all just access ways and infrastructure,” Ianmus said. “For maintenance. Like the main thoroughfares of a town. You don’t build a house in the middle of a road or on top of the well.”

  “But why?” Porkchop asked, “I barely understand your lot’s insistence on building massive cities when a village would do. But this is the most accessible part of the ruin. You’d think we’d find a little more down here.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Ianmus said. “For all we know, there had once been a fort or a town above all this. Could be that this is the equivalent of our sewers, and all the important stuff was buried even deeper.”

  While the mage’s words made sense to Kaius, he still struggled to comprehend the scale of it all. The access ways were immense, many times the size of Deadacre. How could they need so much space dedicated to simple maintenance pathways?

  How big of a town must it have supported above — especially when they hadn’t seen any signs of defences or a way to get deeper into the installation? Though it surely existed. Kenva had pointed it out more than once in sections of collapsed tunnels where the structure of the ruin had failed: whatever shielding was used to obscure the flow of mana in the walls grew less effective, and their ranger had seen similar half-perceived conduits of mana pushing deeper into the earth.

  They just had to hope that wherever it was, they would find it soon. The central segment of the ruin was entirely unmapped, and — based on the records they had read of other ruin explorations — he was almost certain that was where they would find their path deeper. It could easily take them weeks to scour the place if they were unlucky.

  The thought made him frown. If there was anything truly interesting here, it would be deeper — behind locked doors.

  “How far are we, Kenva?” he asked, trusting in their ranger’s sense of direction.

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  “Not far. Half an hour, an hour at most, until we reach the very centre of the ruin.”

  Thank the gods. While his fascination with the ruins hadn’t failed overmuch, he would admit that the pitch blackness of the tunnels had grown a little eerie.

  It wasn’t constant, with the ward-lights above, but about a third of the tunnels they walked through had fallen into enough disrepair that the enchantments had started to fail. Another few centuries and perhaps these tunnels too would collapse.

  Plus, they weren’t anywhere near the areas that had been used as hideouts by Old Yon and his men, and it was clear they trod a path that had gone unwalked for millennia. The air was stale, thick with the dust of centuries, and the moulded stone used to construct this place seemed to catch their voices, projecting them further until they echoed just faintly enough to sound like other voices around every bend.

  As they pushed deeper towards the centre of the ruin, the access ways changed rapidly. While they stayed the same rough size and shape, struts and bracing quickly lined the tunnels — more of the same moulded stone creating arches and pillars. Shortly after that, breaches in the tunnel appeared.

  At first he thought it was yet another bracing archway, but as they crossed through the second one, he realised there was a slot that disappeared up into the ceiling, revealing a bar of gleaming, mana-enriched steel. A gate or blast door of some sort, he presumed. That put them on edge. The things were a stride wide, and there was a blast door every fifty or so long strides. If they somehow triggered the system’s defences and those doors fell and sealed, with how tough the moulded stone was, they could struggle to retreat.

  Still they pushed on, watchful, every sense tuned to their surroundings.

  Kaius hoped beyond hope that they would find something. They had to. He didn’t want to spend months down here scouring the long-entombed grave of a forgotten city.

  Then, in a blink, they turned a corner and were greeted by a vast chamber: an arched dome shimmering with ward-lights and a high-pitched bell ringing somewhere in the background. A honeycomb of bracing stretched throughout it, looking strong enough to survive war magic dropped by a Platinum-ranked classer.

  The dome was so high that Kaius was almost surprised it didn’t breach into the streets far above. Hundreds of long strides wide, it had dozens of different entrances — a confluence of tunnels that ended in its reaches. And in its centre there was a hole, fifty strides across, plunging down gods knew how far into the earth. Kaius could just make out the spiral of a staircase winding down around its edge.

  They stopped dead at the end of their passage, staring around with suspicion.

  “Well, I dare say we found something,” Ianmus said.

  “We definitely did,” Porkchop said, sniffing the air curiously.

  “Kaius,” Kenva said, grabbing his attention.

  He looked over to see the ranger staring up, eyes narrowed in suspicion at the honeycomb reinforcement of the dome.

  “Look at that,” she said.

  Tracing her gaze, he found what she was looking at. Each octagonal segment had holes in the wall behind it, surrounded by small metal end caps. They were thin — just barely wide enough to thread a finger through. Suspicious. Still, he received no warning from Sergeant’s Insight of imminent danger. It was possible that the advanced construction was enough to confound his Skill, but he sincerely hoped that wasn’t the case, for all he could think was that it definitely looked like some sort of defence for the central room.

  “Murder holes,” he muttered.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Some sort of trap, at least. My skill’s not warning me, though. What about you?”

  He shook his head. “Let’s just go check out that hole.”

  Edging forwards, they reached its lip and peered down. It was flawless, as if it had been snapped into existence by a god's will. Much like the dome above, more suspicious holes dotted the sides — thousands of them.

  Yet it barely held his attention, for at its base, some hundred to hundred and fifty long strides below, the bottom of the shaft opened up. An archway cut into one wall held a gargantuan door crafted out of the same steel that lined the gated defences of the tunnels they had just left.

  There was no visible mechanism — just gears sealing it closed and the inscrutable evidence of magic suffusing its very centre. The only thing he could see that gave any hint of how to get past it was on the door: a flat panel at chest height. Considering the gate was nearly five times his height, it had to be something important.

  “I think we found our way in,” Kaius muttered.

  Kenva nodded. “That’s not the only thing.” She pointed down towards the door — directly below them — to a spot that had escaped Kaius’s eyes.

  He saw what had caught the ranger’s attention immediately. Skeletons. Delvers of a sort, still garbed in their clothes and boots, though the magic had long since broken on the crafted equipment. Four of them. Little more than piles of bleached bones.

  Kaius shared a look with Porkchop. It was too conspicuous. The way the bodies had fallen suggested one thing and one thing only: a violent death.

  “I take the front, you take the rear?” Porkchop suggested.

  Kaius nodded, and they started their descent, edging their way down the stairs. Unspoken in their coordination, they were on high alert. His skills might have been silent, insisting that there was no threat, but his eyes said otherwise. He could see defences, and he could see bodies.

  Kaius knew, deep in his gut, that there was danger here.

  They had to be cautious.

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