The factory floor was a nightmare.

  Pistons slamming massive steel hammers down onto the assembly line’s anvil-like metal blocks. Exposed gearing and cogs the size of my body that whirred along at thousands of RPM. Workers with numbers everywhere, their eight limbs reminding me of spiders, but formed incorrectly, and their pinkish-red eyes staring at me suspiciously for a split second before looking back to their work.

  And the voice on the speaker that shouted across the room every few seconds didn’t help anything. It was almost a relief when it went silent mid-sentence with a squealing feedback sound that echoed across the work floor.

  Almost.

  I checked the dungeon’s completion a moment later, in a relatively quiet space between two conveyor belts and below a massive, free-spinning flywheel.

  Tier Two Dungeon: Urban Sprawl (Floor Two)

  Objective: Defeat the Contraption (0/1)

  Objective: Defeat the Foreman (1/1)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 59%

  Fragile Walls: This dungeon is close to breaking. Its inhabitants will be freed if a threshold of Delver deaths inside is reached.

  Break Counter: 3/5

  “Well, that’s not good,” I muttered.

  “What?” Zane shouted.

  “Well, that’s not good!”

  “No, I heard you. What’s not good?”

  “Taven Liu’s killing bosses, and the break counter’s going up. Someone’s dying in this dungeon. What I don’t understand is how.”

  Zane’s eyebrow furrowed. Then he nodded. “They’re killing each other on the first floor. That’s why that counter’s going up. I wonder what happens if it breaks, but there’s no monsters alive on the first floor to get—“

  “Let’s not think about that,” I said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. We need to get to the Waypoint and figure out how to secure it before this goes even more wrong.” I kept pushing through the machinery, being a lot less careful now. Twice, I smashed conveyor belts apart with my hammer when we hit dead ends—Worker’s rights to work be damned. We were on a timer.

  It took almost ten minutes to get across the rest of the factory floor. The whole set-up seemed designed to keep people from cutting through. The worst part was the alarm we triggered toward the end. It rang and rang incessantly, and every Worker looked up at the loudspeaker, waiting for orders. After a few seconds, when the order didn’t come, they returned to their work, arms blurring again, and I couldn’t help but feel like we’d dodged a bullet or two.

  And then we were through.

  I pushed open a double door, then a second one.

  And there it was.

  Waypoint Reached

  An inactive Waypoint Beacon within this dungeon has been reached. If it is not contested within the next fifteen minutes, it will activate, and [Hal Riley] and [Zane Parker] will gain control of the beacon.

  Time Until Activation: 9:59

  We wouldn’t be moving this thing to Museumtown. Not without a specially-made vehicle. 1.2 metric tons of items in my inventory or not, the pyramid-shaped thing in the middle of the room wouldn’t fit. No way.

  It was a good eight feet wide at the base, three-sided, with the sides curving gracefully upward to a point almost fifteen feet in the air, barely below the ceiling. The sides seemed almost ceramic, the same off-white and glowing purple as Voril’s armor when she’d been the Tower Guardian. Parts of each side were…not missing. Missing implied it was unfinished, and the Waypoint Beacon was one of the most beautiful machines I’d ever seen.

  Not missing, but open. Inside were thousands of tiny gears and Emitters and Refiners—a treasure trove of Voltsmithing parts. Not one of them moved. The Charge inside the Beacon was still.

  But oh, was there Charge? It hung heavy in the air all around the Beacon, like the machinery within was just waiting for a signal before it could use it all, and when it did, I’d see something truly magnificent. It would answer so many questions—and bring up new problems to solve. It was a masterpiece. I wanted to know everything about it.

  And the Fireborn Crusader was on his way to claim it for himself. He’d definitely be here in the next ten minutes—and if he wasn’t, he’d try to find some way to steal the Beacon from us.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Right.” I shook my head to clear it. The power in the air around the Beacon was intoxicating, but I needed to focus now if I wanted to learn from it later. “Let’s get to work.”

  We had a lot of space around the massive Beacon—the room had been a storage garage, with a metal-stepped staircase leading up to a catwalk above and various machines hanging from the second-story ceiling by chains.

  I dropped my pair of rovers—the one with the Taser and the other with a Rail Gun—and sent them to the corners of the room so they could cover as much space as possible. Zane nodded and posted up high overhead, on the catwalk. Then I scattered as many Charge-based explosives as I could across the floor, near the two entryways. The plan was simple; I’d try to win any fight against the Fireborn Crusader before he even got inside. Lacking that, the rovers and Zane would be ready to help.

  It wasn’t pretty. The fight coming our way was going to be rough. But it was the best plan we had.

  There was one other thing I could do, though. I’d felt it from the moment I stepped into the room. The Charge in the air wasn’t in its electric form. No, it was closer to the fluid form I’d been using. But it didn’t have to be.

  The next four minutes passed by slowly. I watched the timer tick down, fiddled with a creation that had just sprung into my mind, and thought about the airborne, fluid Charge. The Heart on my Voltsmith’s Grasp beat slowly. Then it beat faster. I didn’t do anything with it, though. Now wasn’t the time, and I had no idea what shifting the Charge’s form would do to the Beacon. It was better to wait until we were back at the Voltsmith’s Laboratory. Then I could experiment in a controlled environment, and—

  “You have something of mine,” Taven Liu said from just outside the door.

  Waypoint Contested

  An inactive Waypoint Beacon within this dungeon has been contested.

  “You’re the second person who’s said that to me this week.”

  I hefted the Siege Hammer over my shoulder. Its weight felt unfamiliar—I missed the Trip-Hammer, even if it was outclassed. Taven Liu stood in the doorway, his armor dark in the hallway. He hadn’t come from the assembly line room. His pauldron had a few dents in it, but nothing serious, and his sword looked just as intimidating as it had the first time we’d met.

  He stared at me for a moment. The timer had stopped, and neither of us was in a rush for what’d happen next. “And did the other person get what they wanted?”

  “Yep.” I nodded. “After she agreed to help us out, and let me learn from the car she needed fixed. It was the work on her Explorer that let me build the technicals out there. Same deal I offered you earlier.”

  “Well, Hal Riley, I don’t have the same kind of patience. So, I’ll ask one more time. You have something of mine. I need the beacon. If you surrender it, I’ll call my forces off, and we can quit killing each other over it. Otherwise, I’ll have no choice but to take it from you.”

  “No.”

  “Fine.”

  I expected the Fireborn Crusader to charge in. He had the armor, the weapon, and the levels to beat me in a one-on-one fight, and he clearly knew it. I didn’t expect him to take a single step backward and start casting a spell.

  Two snakes made of burning bone formed in front of him, intertwined, as their bodies formed from nothing. The heat in the storage room-turned-Beacon room doubled, then redoubled again. I tried to ignore it. That wasn’t just the two Flamecallers Taven Liu was creating that was causing the room to heat up.

  Zane was making a move, too.

  I had a pretty good idea what he was doing, and I needed to buy him time, so instead of stepping backward against the Level Seventy-Eight and his summoned monsters, I stepped into the hall, blocking his way forward to the bomb trap I’d planted. As I did, the two two-armed snakes finished assembling themselves and surged forward, flames lashing around their faces as tongues flicked through the air.

  The Siege Hammer swung. It made contact. Bone cracked—but it didn’t shatter. The snake didn’t go down. Instead, it flew across the room from the impact, crashed into a wall, and slumped to the floor before picking itself back up, all but unharmed. “You can’t hurt them. Not like that,” the Fireborn Crusader said.

  His sword flicked through the air, and I got the Siege Hammer’s shaft in its way in time for sparks to pour through the air. One hand let go of my weapon, and I reached out for the two-handed sword with the Voltsmith’s Grasp. If I could get a hold of it, I could drain its power and take Taven out of the fight for a few moments.

  But he whipped it back, then swung it at my face, and I had to step backward a full step, halfway into the Beacon’s room. My feet planted, and I swung the Siege-Hammer upward and triggered its mechanism right into the other Flamecaller. It crumpled around the massive blow and hit the ceiling. The Siege Hammer wasn’t as intimidating as the Trip-Hammer had been, but it did pack a wallop.

  But the first Flamecaller was already on its stomach, surging toward me again—and this time, the Fireborn Crusader pressed the attack before I could react to the burning, skeletal snake. I got ready to retreat and to throw myself toward the only cover in the storage room, the Beacon. When the bombs went off, it’d be chaos.

  Then the snake froze for a moment, and Zane murmured, “Yes. Got it.”

  Before I could ask what, the Flamecaller slammed into Taven Liu’s back, claws and fangs ripping into the man’s armor. He whirled, greatsword spinning in a flashing arc as he flailed it against his treacherous summon. The sword cut through the flame and gouged a massive chunk of bone out of the serpent’s neck.

  But he’d made a mistake.

  Wham! The Siege-Hammer slammed into Taven Liu’s left side. Its mechanism fired a second later, and the massive, armored man folded like a newspaper. He doubled over and let the massive hammer drive him into the hallway wall. His sword flailed behind him, and the Zane-controlled Flamecaller surged forward, jaws opening wider than they should have been able to as it tried to engulf the Fireborn Crusader.

  It never made it. The greatsword shot out in a massive, hallway-crossing lunge. Its blade punched through the Flamecaller’s throat, then broke its bone body in half on the way out the other side. The burning snake twitched, flickered, and went out. Its bone body hit the hallway’s concrete floor, shattering. And Taven coughed. “Interesting. Your fire mage is good.”

  “What fire mage?” I asked.

  “Don’t play dumb with me.” Taven stood up from his crouched, lunging position. I braced my hammer, readying myself even as Zane refocused right over my head. If I could buy a little more time, he could get a hold of the second snake and…

  Where was the second snake? I hadn’t seen it since Zane took over the first one. The obvious answer was that Taven had unsummoned the thing, but that didn’t feel right. “Stay on your toes, Zane,” I muttered. “Taven Liu, give it up. We’ve got a plan, and you can’t overwhelm us with numbers. No matter what you do, we outnumber you.”

  The Fireborn Crusader stared at me for a moment. Then he laughed and pulled something out of his inventory. He slid it over his head—a round, plate helmet with a flaming crest made of gold. The rest of it was jet-black, and as his eyes turned toward me, they burned. I braced myself.

  “I told you not to play dumb with me, Hal Riley,” Taven Liu said. Then he turned to smoke and rushed at me—and past me.

  The bombs didn’t detonate.

  I whirled, hammer revving and Charge pulsing in the Voltsmith’s Grasp. The Fireborn Crusader was in the Beacon room.