As Hal fiddled with the door, one of Tori’s eyes was locked on him the whole time.

  He was being stupid—and Tori knew when people were being stupid. There. Was. A. Fight. And instead of clobbering the low-level orcs that swarmed across the bleachers and through the wood-and-iron houses to get to them, Hal’s focus was entirely on the door.

  She’d be less annoyed if he hadn’t confessed that he could just open it.

  Instead, she was babysitting him as he stared at the door, twisting wires and playing with gizmos. An orc rushed him, and he didn’t move a muscle—not even when Tori Pushed the monster into the door a foot from Hal’s face. It wasn’t fair. They needed to keep moving. This wasn’t a joke; it was a Tier Four dungeon, and Tori had no idea how much longer they’d be clearing it.

  “Is he okay?” Erika asked, eyes on Hal. Her face screamed worry to Tori, but she didn’t care. She knew that Erika only needed Hal alive to get the Explorer running for her. The moment she got that, the woman was out of here to freaking Wyoming.

  “He’s fine. Focus on the fight. It’s a ‘defend the point’ fight.” A trio of orcs closed in on Erika as she kept staring at Hal. Tori groaned, used Gravity Well to bunch them up, then Crushed them. The woman turned, finally noticing, and Tori growled, “Focus. On. The. Fight.”

  Erika jumped back into the battle, and Tori glared at her back for a second before she, too, went back to fighting. It was bad enough babysitting one adult through a raid encounter, but two? Two was just too much.

  The fighting around me faded into the background. It wasn’t a problem—or at least, it was one that had a solution, and that solution was Tori, Erika, Zane, and Carol. The problem I wanted to focus on was the door. And more accurately, understanding what interaction the door had with Charge, and how the Charge resonance I’d been feeling worked with the dungeon.

  But before I could do that, I needed to focus on the simplest application of Charge, creating my own device.

  It took less than twenty seconds to cobble together a rough, Rube’s Principle-compliant device. It was simple: an Emitter, a Charge battery, and some wiring to connect them, plus a tail of wire that wasn’t connected to anything. Yet.

  I didn’t fill the battery with Charge, and I didn’t equip it as one of my four items. It wasn’t built for that. Instead, I touched it against the shattered, splintered wooden door, then wove the tail wires through the cracks until they made contact with the iron inside. The plan was simple; I wanted to see the Charge flowing, not just feel it.

  Back at Cindy’s, we’d had similar devices. They were a lot more complex—computers, really—that we could plug into the cars’ system to get an error code and then have a machine tell us what the problem probably was. That didn’t always work, though. Sometimes, we got a car like the Explorer that’d throw the wrong codes. Other times, the code would fix the problem, but only for a little while.

  I’d never fully trusted the computers. It made more sense to figure out the issue myself, then to think through whether it was correct. But in this case, the resonant Charge in the dungeon wasn’t operating under rules I understood. None of the Principles of Voltsmithing I’d learned really applied correctly. The Principle of Technomancy was the closest, but we weren’t working with a magic item. Not unless the dungeon counted as one.

  And I couldn’t take apart a dungeon.

  When the sensor connected to the gate, it went haywire. The Emitter started vomiting bright orange Charge outward, spraying it into the air in rapid-fire bursts that sometimes lasted only a split-second, but in one case went for almost five before stopping. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it—but I could see Charge flowing through the device, and through the dungeon.

  I couldn’t understand it. Not yet. But it was a step in the right direction. Charge—at least in the dungeon—applied itself similarly to how it did in my devices, or in magical items.

  The next step was to destroy the door and try to get a look inside. If the Principle of Technomancy was actually applicable, it’d be full of Voltsmithing components.

  But I didn’t need to. I’d destroyed a lot of dungeons before—starting with the rails that had ripped the Redline Wyrm off of its tracks and let us slow it down long enough to kill it back in the Hardcore Tutorial. I’d never seen anything that looked like a Voltsmithing tool or device. Besides, destroying the gate would be hard. Not impossible, but hard. And it’d probably have defenses against that.

  So that led me to my third and final step: opening the door.

  There were two ways. I didn’t know the first at all. I only knew that it had to exist because most classes—heck, most parties—wouldn’t have access to Charge.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  But the second way was pretty simple. Now I dumped Charge into the battery. All four of my spare Charge poured into it through the wire device. It wasn’t much. The Emitter vomited a little burst of orange into the room in front of me. But it was enough to destabilize the whole thing. The door’s resonance fell apart, and after a second, I kicked it.

  It squeaked open on rusty hinges.

  Objective: Defeat The Warlord (1/1)

  Objective: Breach the Inner Gate (1/1)

  Objective: Survive (1/1)

  Completion: 42%

  Area Message: The Stronghold’s second floor has unlocked. This floor will remain unlocked for twenty-four hours, after which time the first floor will reset.

  The tide of orcs stopped as we hurried down the tunnel that the gate had been blocking, and the resonance faded. I tried to figure out why, but Tori kept glaring at me—and she was right. We needed to focus on the dungeon itself. I’d learned a lot already, and we had a whole new set of challenges ahead of us.

  Tier Four Dungeon: The Stronghold (Floor Two)

  Objective: Stop the Red Furnace (0/1)

  Objective: Access the Work Floor (0/1)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 0%

  Open Environment: Dungeon monsters can leave this dungeon for limited time periods.

  Open Floor: Once triggered, the dungeon’s bosses will roam freely.

  Alarmed: This dungeon’s monsters will alert other monsters near them, and will flee to find reinforcement.

  Lethal: Aspects of this floor’s environment will be instantly lethal to delvers and monsters alike.

  The tunnel stretched around the outside of the Union Center’s bulk, under the bleachers. A few last remnants of concrete, gigantic TVs, and posters with athletes’ faces on them remained, but for the most part, it was just a tunnel: stone walls carved out of the ground, spiked bramble roots sticking into it from every angle, and a packed dirt floor that covered the worst of the tripping hazards.

  It was, however, lit. Bulbs sprouted from the wall every twenty feet or so, shrouding the whole thing in orange light that supplemented the weird twilight in most—but not all—dungeons. And it was loud. It sounded like dozens of men with hammers were pounding on steel. I’d heard similar sounds before. Dad had made them with a sledgehammer when he tried to repair a busted plow or realign a tractor’s axle after an accident, and I’d heard them at Cindy’s garage, too.

  Sometimes, mechanical agitation was the quickest temporary repair we could make.

  That meant hitting it with a hammer.

  In this case, though, it didn’t sound like a repair job. It sounded like construction. “Tori, we’ve got enemies up ahead. I don’t know what, but it’s the second floor. It’ll be worse than the first sets of orcs.”

  I checked the Bio-Electric Scanner. It was hard to read—life signs were everywhere, especially above us, where the curving tunnel arced under what was probably the orcs’ village and work floor. But ahead of us, at least a dozen motes of Charge glowed brightly. “Definitely worse. A dozen-plus.

  “Right.” Tori took a deep breath, then pointed down the tunnel, where the orange glow was brighter. “Get ready. We’ve got enemies.”

  “I just said that,” I said.

  “I know, but I’m in charge here, right?” Tori waited for me to answer. “I mean, you did put me in charge when Erika asked why you were listening to me, correct?”

  Tori was going to give me a migraine. After a second, I nodded begrudgingly.

  “Princess Tori is in the house!” she loud-whispered. “Alright. Strategy is as follows. I group them, Zane blows them up, Carol and Hal play bodyguard, and Erika picks off the stragglers. Got it?”

  Everyone nodded, and Tori stared at me smugly for a second.

  Then we headed down the orange-glowing tunnel, toward the room at the end. As we closed in, the glow increased, and the smell of molten metal and sweat filled the air. I couldn’t hear the idling Trip-Hammer, much less what anyone else was saying. As we rounded the corner, we saw the reason why.

  A dozen Orc Hammerswingers—the Level Sixty-Two to Sixty-Four orcs with wide, heavy hammers—stood around four massive slabs of iron, three to a slab, swinging their hammers in rhythm as they pounded the steel into a semblance of flat. Not one of them wore armor or clothes, but their hammers would be almost as devastating as the Trip-Hammer in close range. And in the back, molten red-orange steel shone its light over the room.

  It had to be the Red Furnace. The size of the cavern and then a few feet, it was built into the ceiling and down through the floor. It was more or less round, an oval-shaped tank with a smaller, oval-shaped door. Waves of heat ripped out from it as a massive leather-and-bramble bellows cranked up and down next to it.

  The hammering stopped. The groan of the bellows kept echoing through the room, but the twelve orcs’ eyes locked on us.

  “Alright, here we go,” Tori said. “Pulling.”

  She Pulled. The farthest group of orcs flew through the air and crashed into a second group, and she immediately used Gravity Well to pin them in place. Zane started casting, and I revved the Trip-Hammer as Carol dashed toward the closest upright group. Her spear flashed, and an orc screamed in pain. Blood splashed across the room, sizzling as it touched the massive steel plates.

  Then a wave of fire exploded outward from the bunched-together groups, and the remaining orcs howled. They charged, and the Trip-Hammer howled even louder as I slammed it down onto the first Hammerswinger’s weapon. Its shaft cracked. Then so did the monster’s arm and shoulder.

  Erika had vanished. I looked for her, but couldn’t find her anywhere. Two more orcs closed the gap, but they weren’t aiming at me. They wanted Tori and Zane.

  I reached behind me and dropped my three rovers. Their engines revved quietly, all but drowned out by the bellows’ blowing. Then their rail guns opened up. Tiny bolts slammed into the orcs, punching holes far too big for such small shots. I joined them, shifting the Trip-Hammer to my off-hand and firing two shots from the Voltsmith’s Grasp.

  Then the fight was over, just like that. A charred, smoldering pile of orcs disappeared, leaving behind a pile of experience orbs. My hammer slammed down on an orc’s head, and it exploded, then vanished. Carol finished killing one, and my attention turned toward the furnace.

  It was still running, its bellows pumping automatically. But I didn’t feel any resonance. There was no Charge.

  Something else was happening here, and I had no idea what.