“What do you mean you understand what or why?” Bobby asked. He leaned against the brick wall. There were a dozen doors that lined the room, but we hadn’t even tried a handle yet. It was clear in here, and I needed to think.

  “The Consortium’s dungeons have all worked so far, right?” I asked. He nodded, and after a moment, so did Tori. “I mean, they haven’t always been fair or balanced—the Tyrant Queen was way overtuned for Phase One—but they’ve all been thematically appropriate. This one’s literally unfinished, and we saw a tech working on it before they pulled themselves out and replaced themselves with that Maze Watcher.”

  “And?” Tori crossed her arms as she stared at the doors all around us.

  “And the resonance is wrong, too. It’s not Earth’s, and it’s not Solemnus Six’s, either. This dungeon wasn’t built for this Phase Two. That’s why it’s got the affixes it does. It’s unfinished, and it’s still being tweaked and tuned to whatever Integration it was designed for.”

  “Oh! That’s what’s happening in this room!” Tori pointed at the walls. “It’s trying to change into an Earth dungeon, but—“

  “But it can’t,” Bobby finished. “It wasn’t designed for Earth.”

  “Right. This whole place is probably wildly unstable. I have no idea why it opened here—or who forced it onto Earth—but I’d expect things to get weirder, not more normal. Or maybe both. Maybe we’ll see more Earth rooms as we keep clearing, but they won’t make sense. Like, this is definitely supposed to be a street in a random city. It’s just wrong. We’ll probably see more techs working, too.”

  “What do we do with them?” Tori asked.

  I paused. My first instinct was to fight them, try to kill them, and use whatever we found on their bodies to figure out the Hand That Feeds’s secrets. Violence had been the answer so many times since the world ended that, for a moment, I didn’t even question it. But as I opened my mouth, I had a better idea. “Let them teleport out, or whatever it is they do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” My reasoning was simple: the Dungeon Technicians were working with Charge. They knew how dungeons worked, and there was a good chance that they knew what I’d seen in the Whole New World. I could learn from them—but only if they were alive.

  The doors lining the redstone-walled room were all identical. After a moment to think, I pulled the first one open and stepped through. Bobby followed me, and so did Tori—although she hesitated for a second.

  Sure enough, three Dungeon Technicians disappeared from the chrome-walled, round tunnel we found ourselves in, and a pair of Maze Watchers appeared, along with something new.

  Custodian’s Helping Hand: Level 77 Monster

  It was, in fact, a hand—a hand made from the same ceramic armor as the two Maze Watchers’ bodies. Three fingers led the way forward, with claws that jammed into the steel-grid floor below, popping welds free as it scuttled toward me. I readied the Siege Hammer. “I’ll get this! Take the Watchers!”

  Then its thumb jammed into the floor, and the entire massive hand spun in place. Its fourth finger lashed out. The Siege Hammer and the hand slammed into each other, and for a second, it was silent.

  The air collapsed in on the impact zone. The crack pressed against my eardrums. Eyes flew from the Maze Watchers’ outstretched arms, and spells poured into a void in the dungeon’s foreign-feeling Charge. The moment the spells hit the empty spot, they redoubled, then targeted me. Burning cold and massive pressure washed across me as four spells, then five, filled the void space.

  I backpedaled as the Helping Hand rushed me again. “Take out the Watchers!” The armored hand pushing at me was a problem; it was strong enough to parry the Siege Hammer with its limbs, and fast enough to keep the pressure on me so I couldn’t react. I leveled the Voltsmith’s Grasp, pushing Charge through the different apparatuses and Heart, and fired a pair of rail gun blasts into the monster.

  Armor crumpled from the impacts, and cracks spread across the ceramic. But the two holes were like pinpricks, and the hand simply flipped, limbs cracking as they bent backward, and kept coming.

  Then it flew backward. Tori’s Pull landed, ripping it off its feet, and a series of loud pinging impacts echoed across the room. Bobby’s brass knuckles hammered away at the Helping Hand for a few seconds until the armor collapsed and black sludge poured through the steel floor and onto the Charge wiring below. The Siege Hammer crashed down on the monstrous mechanical hand a moment later, and it faded into nothing.

  Both Maze Watchers had already died, their orbs gone, and Tori had a smug look plastered across her face. “Place is great,” she said.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  I took the experience orb. It wasn’t enough to level me again, but for the first time since the Stronghold, I felt like regular monsters were making real impacts on me. Then I stuck my hand into the gaps the Helping Hand had punched into the floor and fished around until I’d pulled as many Charge components as I could into my inventory.

  I didn’t have a plan for building anything, and I hadn’t assigned my points yet—the question about whether Charge was life force still bothered me a little—but there was every chance that I’d be changing my mind soon, and the parts were free for the taking. They weren’t anything special, but I got a few Emitters and Refiners, plus a Lens Array that looked to be in pretty good shape.

  Then it was on to the next room. We squeezed through the cracked, jammed sliding door and into a cavern filled with jagged, razor-sharp stalagmites and stalactites. It reminded me a little of the Redline Tunnels, our Hardcore Tutorial dungeon. The big difference was that I couldn’t recognize anything as a subway tunnel or platform. It was completely natural.

  We weren’t alone here, either. The Dungeon Technician working on this room didn’t notice us at first; they seemed engrossed in whatever they were doing with a large, shoulder-mounted tool. I held up a hand and watched as they worked. Charge poured in through the oversized tube’s back end, then seemed to spiral around a…black hole? It looked a lot like the boss from the Adler Planetarium dungeon. Tiny, though—tiny enough to fit inside of the tool.

  When I tried to creep closer, though, the Technician spun in place, eyes going wide.

  A moment later, they were gone.

  Custodian’s Feeding Hand: Level 77 Monster

  It looked a lot like the Helping Hand, but instead of long claws, each finger seemed to end in a steel tube almost a foot long and hollow. I revved the Siege Hammer as I tried to close the gap before the monster could take the initiative. Off to the left, Bobby ducked behind a stalactite and worked his way around the flank, and a Gravity Well opened up under the Feeding Hand.

  Or, more accurately, under where it had been.

  Flaming orange Charge poured from the five tubes, rippling across the cavern floor as the Feeding Hand threw itself into the air. Tori’s spell missed—and so did her attempt to Pull it back down into the Gravity Well.

  I skidded to a stop just in time to avoid a wave of steel shrapnel; the fingers each opened fire, one after another, filling the cavern with a shotgun spray of metal. Tori ducked behind a stone pillar, and I braced myself, then let the pellets rip into my chest while blocking what I could with the Voltsmith’s Grasp’s armor. “Pull in three!”

  I waited. Steel rained down on me. Then I opened up with my rail gun, and the Heart in my mechanical arm paid off. Shots pinged off the Hand’s armor, and its five Charge jets turned toward me as one.

  Then Tori cast Pull. The spell ripped into the monster from the side, and its fingers couldn’t redirect it away from the Telekineticist’s magic. It slammed into the ground as I kept firing into it. None of the bolts stored in the Voltsmith’s Grasp were big enough to punch through the ceramic armor—cracks formed, but until I could close in, that wouldn’t work.

  Bobby didn’t give me the chance. His brass knuckles cracked against one of the weak spots my shots had broken open. The bell-like impacts shattered the ceramic plate and blasted black fluid across the cavern, and just like that, the Feeding Hand was dead.

  “Take it,” Bobby said as he stepped away from the experience orb.

  I did.

  Level Up! 73 to 74

  Without spending my points, I walked over to the wall where the Technician had been working. A section of the cavern’s wall was completely missing, and underneath it, Charge flowed in a few conduits that wove in between each other.

  I couldn’t make heads or tails of it—but I didn’t have to.

  The idea hit me out of nowhere. “Tori, Bobby, I have a plan.”

  It took me a minute or two to lay out the groundwork—the overloaded Waypoint Beacon in the Urban Sprawl, what I’d learned from the Stronghold and A Whole New World, and the device I’d built. Then I had to walk them through the beacon’s implosion again. Yes, I was sure it wouldn’t kill us. Yes, I was reasonably confident that dungeon floors didn’t actually exist, at least not in relation to one another. Yes, I knew that went against what we’d allegedly seen and experienced in the Field Museum, but…

  “Look, thinking about dungeons as places, it makes total sense for them to be a connected whole. The Soldier Field dungeon works as a single place. So do a lot of others, but they’re not places, and we have to stop thinking of them like they are,” I said. Then I sighed. Bobby seemed skeptical. Tori seemed annoyed.

  Of the two, I had a better line of attack with her. “Think about how MMO raids and dungeons work, Tori. The space inside the portal doesn’t line up with the space outside of it, does it?”

  “I mean, in the more recent dungeons, it does.”

  “But not early on, right? They were built separately from the world around them—thematically tied, I mean, but not physically present.”

  She glared at me. “How do you know that?”

  “My ex was into gaming. Look, the point is that we’ve been thinking about dungeons as places, but they’re machines—or creations. And if I were designing a machine as complicated as a Tier Two or higher dungeon, I wouldn’t build it as one giant thing. I’d build it as two, or three, or even more. I don’t want the whole dungeon to fail if something goes wrong, and I want to isolate the parts.”

  It was all clicking. The entire set-up. I understood the purpose of dungeons. They weren’t to level up people going through Integration. They were machines that took raw material and transformed it into something the Consortium—or hell, the Universal Order, even—wanted. Either people that wouldn’t survive a quick Integration were changed into people who could, or life force was…

  …Transformed into Charge.

  I pushed that out of my mind for now. There’d be time to think about the implications I’d been deliberately ignoring later—but if I wanted that time, I had to think about the machine itself, not what it meant.

  “The bosses exist as checks between parts of the machine. We have to get past them to move through. But what if we didn’t? What if we could skip a floor—or two?”

  The Charge Converter popped into my hand. I held it out. And I asked the question.

  “Want to jump ahead instead?”