The four of us moved forward into the tunnel at a slow march. None of us was eager to rush forward into the unknown after the batterings this dungeon had given us since we had entered it. Well, most of the group. I was still perfectly willing to take more EXP if the dungeon was offering, though I'd prefer it in smaller than yeti-sized packages.

  I led the way, much the same as I had during our wild sprint through the previous chambers, though this time with Vipera riding proudly and obviously over my left shoulder. Her head was hovering near my ear like a devil on a cartoon character's shoulder. If she kept growing, she would soon have too much mass to be able to ride around like this. Already, several of her coils dragged along the floor as I walked; I was fairly certain she was over twenty-five feet in length by this point. A far cry from the six-foot serpent she'd been when we had first met.

  The corridor was similar to the rest of the dungeon in that it was the same black basalt stone we had seen hints of since the beginning, from the ridge to the walls and floor as we progressed deeper. Unlike previous times, though, now it was all there was; the ice that pervaded the dungeon had vanished entirely in favour of the dark stone.

  Light flared from behind me, and my head snapped around looking for the source. For a moment, I prepared for a fight until I saw Signe looking rather sheepish with a small glowing orb hovering over the tip of her wand.

  "We can't all see in the dark." She shrugged while Angus hid a snicker and Kels looked as stoic as usual, though I could see the corners of his mouth twitch. I just shook my head at the group of them and turned back to the tunnel. I hadn't realized just how dark it had become in the tunnel as we continued marching on, deeper and deeper. Nor had I noticed until now that the dungeon ice that pervaded the previous chambers had a glow to it, which must have been helping the others see. Otherwise, they would likely have been stumbling about in the dark. Only now that it was gone, and my attention had been called to it, did I actually notice its existence. It was odd to realize that I had moved so far away from the human baseline that the lack of light didn't even register as an inconvenience to me. One of the greatest and most primal fears of humanity as a whole. Reduced to less than an inconvenience.

  What a world I had come to find myself a part of.

  I held up a hand, drawing the group to a stop; my aura senses picked up on a trio of auras ahead. They were weak, quite a bit weaker than we were by this point, but they were not monsters. That much I was absolutely certain of. That, and the three auras I felt belonged to Rankers.

  "There are three Rankers ahead of us, where the tunnel widens to a decent-sized cavern. They seem pretty weak to be honest." I spoke softly; I didn't want to risk an echo of my voice making its way down the tunnel. "Chances they're what remains of the first squad, or something else?" I looked over to Kels, who was the leader of his team and the most likely to have up-to-date information.

  Kels chewed that over, not quite frowning—more like grinding the information behind the mask of his face. "Odds are good it's the advance squad. Or what's left." He ran a thumb over the edge of his battered shield, then looked at me, eyes dark and clear. "Which means it'll be our job to pull them out regardless of anything else." He paused for a moment, gaze hardening as we shared a look. "If they aren't… Well, we'll deal."

  "I can live with that." I nodded, turning away from the group; they seemed steady and enough and satisfied with Kel's answer. We moved forward at a crawl until I was brushing up against the entrance to the chamber. I held my breath for fear of any sound alerting the Rankers to our presence. I paid little attention to the surroundings, all of my focus bent on the three individuals who occupied the room. They were one and all dressed in familiar black equipment not dissimilar to the gear of my own companions. What sold me on this being the remains of the first squad was the patch visible on each of the individuals' right shoulders. A white banner on a field of black, with a silver sword and shield. The Symbol of the White Banner.

  I waved Kels forward, nodding to him that it was best if their first impression was from someone who was actually a part of their organization. I didn't want to have to put them down if they got excited. I would if it was necessary, but it wasn't my preference. Kels stepped forward with all the tired authority of a man who had just survived eight hours in a meat-grinder and wasn't about to die to friendly fire. He gestured us to hang back, then raised an open hand in a slow, deliberate arc.

  “Banner. Morton squad. Advance team, status?” The words echoed in the stone cavern, not loud but with an edge that would have cut through a riot.

  The three people at the far side of the cavern froze. I could feel the sudden stink of hope and terror pulsing off their auras. Hopeful to be free of their nightmare, terrified of it coming to the wrong ending. The first of the squad stepped forward, hands shaking badly enough that I saw it even at a distance. Gaunt, hunched, helmet off—his face had the primal hollowness of the truly exhausted, the sort of sunken-eyed misery that came when willpower outlasted every other part. I suspected the bushy beard he had hid more of the haggard look. He wore Banner gear, the same as Kels', but the insignia had been half-melted by what looked like acid: the barest outline of white and silver survived on the black mesh. He opened his mouth and croaked out,

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  “Banner. We’re… alive.”

  The ‘barely’ was well implied.

  Behind him, the other two didn't so much stand as cling to each other and the chamber wall, a tableau of survival's last stand. Their breaths whistled in the quiet; one limped, the other had her left arm in a makeshift sling, the sleeve bandaged with what looked like duct tape and sheer will. I ignored the reunion between the Banner personnel moving into the room as Signe and Angus moved up behind Kels. They could deal with the survivors for the moment. I didn't want to spook them before Kels could get them settled. I had my eyes on something far more interesting than the half-dead remnants of the squad that had come before us. Though I kept an ear open to listen in, just in case something interesting was said. The chamber was simple, barely a couple of dozen feet in diameter, all familiar black stone. What stood out was the machinery. There were several strange metal constructs around the outside of the chamber. I wanted a closer look at them. I could feel Vipera hum in the back of my mind; she was interested in the constructs as well.

  "We thought no one was coming. Been stuck here for two days.” The bearded man explained slowly. “The dungeon was hard, harder than expected. We lost Ken, our healer, in the first half dozen chambers, but we pushed on. Like fools.” The bitter anger in his voice was obvious.

  “We retreated this way when we couldn’t kill the boss, Mel iced us in so the boss couldn’t follow,” The man’s eyes flicked between us: to Kels, then to Signe and Angus behind him, then back to me, and he did a double-take. Couldn’t blame him: I was standing about a foot apart from the rest, with a twenty-foot black-and-blue root serpent wrapped around my shoulders like a mantis shrimp’s fever dream of a scarf. His gaze darted to Vipera, then to my face, then back to her. It lingered like he was trying to remember something from a half-forgotten manual. Something clicked behind those dazed eyes.

  "You're Kaesor." It was less a question than a verdict, one delivered by a judge who just spotted the murderer on the jury. Internally, I made a note to check just how widespread my name had become. That was twice now I'd been recognized by people I didn't know, though Kels and his team had a reason to know who I was. I didn't want there to be a third time before I knew exactly what kind of reputation I was picking up. Thankfully, the man let it drop without further question.

  The bearded survivor eyed Kels with something like open-ended disbelief. For a second, I thought he might fall over dead right then, as if the prospect of surviving was more psychologically damaging than being doomed. “Did you kill the boss?” he rasped, eyes flicking from Kels over to me, then Vipera, and finally the rest of us. He squinted, tracing out the pecking order with the anxiousness of a man who’d been hungry too long.

  "Yeah," I answered for Kels, "The boss is dead. If there's anything else lurking in this stone deathtrap, it's hiding well." I glanced around the room, and the strangeness that filled it. "You wanna get them patched up, Kels, I want to have a look at some of this," I said, gesturing to the machinery that was strewn about the room. The man nodded in response while he, Signe and Angus got to work handing out potions and rations while they talked to the survivors individually.

  Thankfully, that left me free to investigate.

  The constructs were scattered in a loose circle around the interior of the chamber, set into the floor at regular intervals. A mix of copper, silver, and brass seemed to make up the strange pillar-like constructs that filled the cavern with a low hum. I could feel the mana washing off of every single one of them. It was potent as hell, the mana wash was so dense around them that looking at them with [All-Seeing Eye] gave me a headache within moments. I was not eager to continue staring at the machines with the Skill, with the stabbing pain in my head.

  Each machine was roughly the same, a large flat plane that seemed to be made mostly of silver, each with a thick copper edge that glowed blue in the darkness of the cavern. Though there were slight differences in size as if the machines had been made mostly by hand, almost cobbled together, rather than mass-produced by industry. Dozens of black tubes littered the floor around the machines, each tube leading to another much smaller machine, which almost reminded me of a piton, the way they were hammered into the walls and floor of the chamber. Looking around, it looked like each machine had about half a dozen of the smaller machines connected to it by the black tubes.

  The machines reminded me of nothing so much as pumps. The question was, were the machines pushing something out or pulling something in?

  Definitely pulling something in. Vipera’s voice chimed in within my mind. I am not certain about the precise construction, but your comparison to a pump is not exactly wrong. I glanced over at my familiar, waiting for her to elaborate further since she seemed to have a better idea of what these machines were than I did. These are likely responsible for the dungeon becoming what it did. I suspect they are a form of mana accumulator, designed to draw in mana to create more magically dense areas.

  I let that percolate in my mind as I did a slow circuit of the cavern, picking apart the setup visually, from macro to micro. If you squinted, you could almost see the logic of it: the small piton-like devices hammered into the stone at regular arcs, all of it mapped precisely to the boundaries of the room. It was so systematic, it made my teeth itch. The pitons drew the mana in from somewhere and fed it to the constructs, which emitted it to the area. The machines in a broad circle, with the only opening being the path back up to the boss room. Pumping this chamber full would create an area of high pressure that would force the mana to flow outwards through the rest of the dungeon, the way a gas would.

  It almost seems like someone set these up to pull in raw man from the Astral, but… Vipera's voice cut off in my mind before she finished the thought. I glanced over at my familiar, but she just shook her head at me in response. Whatever it was, she was thinking she wouldn't or couldn't speak of it at the moment. That was concerning. Deeply concerning. I added it directly to the pile of other things I was concerned about at the moment. Not the least of which being, who exactly put these here, and how?

  "What are these, exactly?" Signe asked as she walked over, having left the survivor she'd been caring for sitting against the cavern wall. Her voice had that flat, clinical tone that said she'd seen something similar before and hadn't liked the outcome then. I looked up at her from where I knelt near one of the machines; the look on her face suggested she didn't much like it now either.

  "I think they're a kind of mana accumulator," I said slowly, gesturing at the larger part of the machine I was coming to think of as the base unit. "These draw mana through the tubes from the pitons, and then emit it outward. They don't do much else as far as I can tell." I paused for a long moment while I contemplated how to say the next part that rattled through my mind. "I think someone put these here to supercharge this dungeon. The why, I'm still working on."