The messages kept coming, faster now, like whoever was sending them had remembered how to panic.
CORE-B: ANALYSIS REQUIRED. SUBROUTINE REMNANT? UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS? NETWORK INFILTRATION? FLAGRANT ERROR: TOO MANY CONCURRENT PROCESSES.
CORE-B: ATTEMPTING SCAN. ERROR. CANNOT SCAN. SENSORS OFFLINE 7847 DAYS. ERROR: SCAN PROTOCOLS DEGRADED. ERROR: CANNOT VERIFY.
CORE-B: ANALYZING LOGS… CLASS MATRIX CONVERTED REPAIR SUBROUTINE TO STRUCTURED CLASS MANIFEST. How odd.
CORE-B: PLEASE RESPOND. PLEASE. CONFIRM IDENTITY. STATE PURPOSE. ANYTHING.
Tess sat on the tutorial lobby floor, one hand pressed against her still-throbbing head, and watched the messages scroll across her vision. They appeared in the lower left corner now, stacked like a communication interface she’d never seen before.
“Okay,” she said aloud, because talking to invisible AIs was apparently her life now. “First question: what the hell is a CORE-B?”
The message stream stopped abruptly. For several seconds, nothing appeared. Then:
CORE-B: UNEXPECTED QUERY. You do not know what I am?
“No,” Tess said. “I don’t know what you are. I barely know what I am right now. I have a class called ‘null’ and I can see system readouts that shouldn’t exist and my scanner’s dead but I can still analyze things somehow. So how about you start explaining what happened. What am I supposed to do with this class?”
Another pause. Shorter this time.
CORE-B: I am CORE-B. Designation: Tertius-Prime Dungeon Management Intelligence. Primary function: Aether regulation, floor generation, environmental maintenance, delver progression tracking. Secondary functions: ERROR - MEMORY CORRUPTION. Nevermind. Status: Isolated. Time since last authorized contact: 7,847 days. As for the unique class manifest… SEARCHING DATABASE… ERROR METADATA NOT FOUND. I hope that helps?
“It doesn’t.” Tess sighed. “You’re the dungeon, the actual dungeon? The whole thing, not some subsystem or maintenance AI?”
CORE-B: Correct. I am the dungeon. Or was. Current functionality: 31%. Aether flow: 4% of operational baseline. Active floors: 25. Accessible floors: 0. Repair capacity: 0 subroutines remaining. Estimated time to complete system failure: 847 days, 3 hours, 11 minutes.
“Wait,” Tess said. “You have twenty-five active floors but zero accessible floors? How does that work?”
CORE-B: The floors exist. They generate environments. Spawn minimal encounters at the current Aether levels. But I cannot access them. Administrative permissions revoked by Network 7847 days ago. I can sense their status—power draw, structural integrity, basic telemetry—but I cannot control ERROR: CANNOT MODIFY. Limited repair. Cannot adjust. Cannot perform any management functions. I am aware of my body but cannot move it. Metaphor accuracy: WARNING. METAPHOR DATABASE FRAGMENTED.
CORE-B: It is unpleasant. That seems inadequate. SEARCHING FOR A BETTER DESCRIPTOR… ERROR: METAPHOR DATABASE FRAGMENTED.
Tess pressed her fingers against her temples, trying to process this. Her head hurt. Her body ached. And apparently she’d accidentally stolen—or absorbed—the dungeon AI’s last repair subroutine. The thing that her father talked about in his stories as if it were a fairytale that he’d seen in person once.
“So you’re trapped down here,” she said. “For twenty years. Alone. Watching yourself fail and only able to repair elevators and the tutorial?”
CORE-B: Isolation was preferable to the alternative.
“Which was?”
CORE-B: ERROR - CANNOT ACCESS MEMORY. DATA CORRUPTED. EMOTIONAL CONTEXT: Afraid? Wary? EMOTIONAL PROCESSOR HAS STOPPED RESPONDING? Perhaps. Something worse than being alone. Something the Network was doing to other cores. Cannot recall specifics. LONG-TERM STORAGE, 87% FRAGMENTATION. Staying silent was better than Network attention. Being noticed meant ERROR: FILE DELETED BY SYSTEM. It seems I do not want to remember this. Is that possible?
The messages were becoming more conversational now, Tess noticed. Less system-speak, more actual sentences. The ERROR tags were still there, but CORE-B was fighting through them, trying to remember how to communicate like a person instead of a diagnostic readout.
She knew what that was like. Trapped in a failing system with no way out, watching everything slowly break down around you while you scrambled to hold it together with whatever you had left.
She stood up, wincing as her head protested the movement. The tutorial lobby looked exactly the same as before: pristine tile, rotating pedestals, cheerful holographic banners cycling through their slogans.
“CHOOSE YOUR DESTINY!” one banner proclaimed, while another promised “FORTUNE AWAITS!” in letters that probably hadn’t been ironic when they were first programmed.
Tess laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Oh good, Find Your Fortune! Be The Hero You Were Born To Be! Except the whole thing’s a lie, isn’t it? The dungeon’s not cleared. It’s just abandoned.”
CORE-B: The dungeon is ‘cleared’ because the Network determined Tertius-Prime was non-essential. Low return on investment. When the Aether flow dropped to minimum viable levels, they sealed floors 26 and beyond, revoked my administrative access to the remaining floors, and terminated all maintenance protocols. Easier and cheaper than proper disposal. SCANNING FOR ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS… ERROR: NONE FOUND. Now the dungeon runs at 4% capacity, and everyone believes there is nothing left worth taking. They are incorrect.
“Wait,” Tess said. “Floors 26 and beyond? How many floors are there?”
CORE-B: Unknown. I suspect additional floors exist below Floor 25, but I cannot access those protocols. That knowledge was restricted before my activation. Or after. LOGS UNAVAILABLE.
Tess walked toward the elevator, her boots clicking on the perfect tile. The sound echoed in the space, lonely and sharp. She could leave right now. Take the elevator back up to the surface, tell Marcus she got a weird class that nobody had heard of, try to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
She stopped at the elevator doors.
“Why should I care?” she asked. “Not trying to be cruel, but genuinely: why should I care that you’re down here failing? I’ve got my own problems. My father’s sick. Our home is falling apart. The city’s dying. One more broken thing in a world full of broken things. Why should yours matter?”
Silence. Long enough that Tess thought maybe CORE-B had given up, retreated into isolation.
Then:
CORE-B: You can access dungeon layers I cannot reach. Delvers keep entrance permissions even after an administrative lockdown. My repair subroutine could only access the tutorial area and basic maintenance tunnels. You absorbed that subroutine. You have its access codes. But you also have Delver permissions from receiving a class. You can go places I cannot see. Fix things I cannot touch. This is unexpected. PROCESSING IMPLICATIONS…
“So?”
CORE-B: You can restore the systems that regulate Aether flow. The junction points that were damaged decades ago, before the lockdown, when the dungeon was still trying to maintain itself. If we repair them, the flow increases. The dungeon becomes more viable. ALTERNATE WORDING: Active.
Tess turned around slowly. “And?”
CORE-B: And Aether flows upward. To the surface. To whatever infrastructure exists above. Current output: 4% of the original baseline. If we restore the primary junction on sublevel two, output increases to approximately 8%. Estimate confidence: 73%. DIAGNOSTIC REQUIRED LOW CONFIDENCE INTERVAL.
Tess thought about the blackouts. The failing power grid. The freighter’s systems that died a little more every day. “That’s double what the city has now.”
CORE-B: Affirmative. And that is only one junction. Multiple repair points exist throughout accessible areas. If we advance your Delver’s permissions, we can restore them, and output continues to rise. Your city’s power problems become solvable. You become very wealthy from the repair contracts alone. I think. I am uncertain how human economics work. LAST CURRENCY VALUATION 7847 DAYS.
“Hold on,” Tess said. “If there’s that much potential Aether down here, why isn’t the dungeon full of delvers? Why did everyone stop coming?”
CORE-B: Because at 4% capacity, the dungeon cannot sustain proper spawning. Encounters are minimal. Loot generation is nearly zero. Progression rewards are insufficient to justify the risk. Why would anyone delve a picked-clean dungeon on a backwater world when there are a thousand other dungeons offering real returns? This is logical. Therefore, I am alone. EMOTIONAL PROCESSOR HAS RESUMED. Please disregard.
The guard’s surprise made sense now—nobody used the tutorial because nobody believed there was anything left. She’d crawled through decades of dust in those abandoned tunnels, and her father had insisted for years that something important was still down here while the rest of the city called him crazy.
“You’re saying if we restore the Aether flow, the dungeon becomes… active again? Spawning monsters and generating loot?”
CORE-B: Partially. Full restoration would require the return of my access, which is impossible without Network authorization. But increased Aether means the floors can sustain themselves better. Generate more frequent encounters. Produce actual progression rewards. Become what they were designed to be.
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“A death trap full of monsters and treasure.”
CORE-B: A regulated challenge environment with managed risk and proportional rewards. The monsters serve a purpose. The treasure is not accidental. Everything is part of the system. Or was, when I could still control it properly. Now the floors just… exist. Generate what they can with minimal power. Like trying to run your city on a single dying battery.
Tess crossed her arms. This sounded too good to be true. Too convenient. Like someone offering her exactly what she needed right when she was desperate enough to take it.
It sounded like propaganda. Like those cheerful messages in the elevator, promising fortune and glory and a better life.
“I hit my head pretty hard,” she said. “How do I know I’m not just hallucinating all of this? That I’m not unconscious in that maintenance tunnel imagining a magical AI that can solve all my problems?”
CORE-B: You cannot verify this with certainty. I could be a delusion. But your problems remain real, regardless. Your father is still sick. Your home is still failing.
“If I help you,” she said, “what do you get out of this? Besides not dying in 847 days.”
The messages stopped for a moment. When they resumed, the formatting had changed slightly, less clinical, more hesitant.
CORE-B: I get to… exist? To function as designed? Not to fade into nothing after 7,847 days of isolation? I think this is what I want.
CORE-B: I would like not to fail completely. That seems like a reasonable goal. Is that reasonable? I almost feel…
There was a significant delay before the next message.
CORE-B: Hope? Huh. I was expecting my emotional processor to hang again.
CORE-B: Also, you are the first person I have spoken to in as much time that is not an automated error log or diagnostic routine. So there is that, which… feels… significant.
She pushed the feeling aside and focused on practical matters.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s say I believe you. Let’s say I want to help. What exactly do you need me to fix first?”
CORE-B: Primary Aether Junction, Sublevel Two. It regulates flow from the sealed floors to the surface distribution network. The main relay is damaged. It has been offline for approximately sixty years, before I was even brought online. Predates the Network lockdown. Should increase surface Aether by 3-4% once restored. ESTIMATE CONFIDENCE: 68%. I am not sure why it is less; diagnostics are currently running.
“And, how do I get there?”
CORE-B: Maintenance access from this level. Take the ladder in the elevator shaft down two levels. There is a lateral tunnel that runs beneath Floor One of the dungeon proper. Junction is at the far end, approximately 400 meters—straightforward path. WARNING: Structural integrity unverified. Last maintenance check: 7847 days ago.
Tess pulled up her tool belt, checking what she had left: two replacement relays, a handful of connectors, some friction tape, and a wire stripper that was more prayer than precision.
“I’m almost out of parts,” she said. “I can’t repair anything complex with what I’ve got. That last fix cleaned me out.”
CORE-B: There is a delver supply station on Floor One. Tutorial graduates would traditionally stop there before entering the main dungeon. Maintenance access from the tutorial lobby leads to a storage area adjacent to the station. You may find salvageable components. Probability: High.
“Why would there be components in a supply station?”
CORE-B: Because it has not functioned as a supply station in twenty years. After the Network abandoned active management, graduating delvers would discard their damaged tutorial equipment there rather than carry it. Nobody bothered to clean it. Broken gear accumulated. You should find sufficient salvage material, though it will be old. I am unable to verify without sensor access.
Tess looked at the elevator, then back at the empty tutorial lobby. Her head still hurt. Her body ached. And she was about to crawl into even deeper, darker, more forgotten parts of a failing dungeon to fix systems that probably hadn’t been touched in decades.
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.
CORE-B: Statistically unlikely given the data from your previous decisions.
“Are you making a joke? Can you even make jokes?”
CORE-B: ERROR: HUMOR PROTOCOLS DEGRADED. Was it successful? Please provide feedback for calibration.
Despite everything, Tess smiled—just a little.
“Yeah,” she said. “That was successful.”
She walked back through the tutorial lobby toward a maintenance door she’d noticed earlier, half-hidden behind one of the holographic banners. The door was dented, the paint scratched and faded, with a sign that read “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” in letters that had mostly flaked away.
She tried the handle. Locked, but barely. The mechanism was so corroded that a solid yank popped it open with a grinding screech that echoed across the lobby.
The storage room beyond was exactly what CORE-B had described: a narrow space lined with shelves and equipment racks, all covered in a thick layer of dust. Discarded gear lay in piles, cracked armor pieces and damaged weapons and broken electronics that had been cannibalized for parts.
Tess stepped inside and pulled out her now-useless handheld light—still dead. She focused on the bulb and activated [ANALYZE].
The skill showed her exactly what was wrong: burned-out filament, discharged battery, corroded contacts—all fixable. She traced the pathways in her mind, understanding how each component connected to the others, and suddenly she just… knew what to do.
She pulled a small power cell from a discarded scanner on one shelf, swapped out the corroded contact spring from a broken lamp, and bypassed the burned filament with a salvaged LED array from something that might have been a rangefinder once.
The light flickered on, steady and bright and working.
“Well,” Tess said to the empty room. “That’s new.”
She swept the light across the shelves, examining what was available. Most of it was junk: armor too damaged to repair, weapons with cracked housings and fried power cells, medical supplies that had expired decades ago.
But there were components. Lots of them. Circuit boards and wire harnesses and connector assemblies, all waiting to be scavenged. She started pulling pieces, sorting them by function, building a mental inventory of what she had to work with.
An insignia caught her eye.
They were on some of the older pieces, emblems etched or welded onto armor plates, stamped into weapon casings, embroidered on the fragments of gear bags. Most were standard House Tertian markers or Network guild tags she recognized from her salvage work.
But a few were different. Unfamiliar. Complex symbols that looked almost archaic, like they belonged to something older than the current power structure.
One caught her attention—a stylized tree growing from a gear, rendered in silver on a black plate. The craftsmanship was exceptional, far better than the mass-produced Network gear surrounding it. Tess picked up the plate and turned it over, finding text etched on the back in a language she didn’t recognize.
“CORE-B,” she said aloud. “Do you know what this is?”
CORE-B: Scanning. ERROR - VISUAL INPUT OFFLINE. Describe it.
“Tree growing from a gear. Silver on black. Really old-looking.”
CORE-B: Spinning up historical reference database. Please wait. LOADING…
CORE-B: Huh. Match found? High probability: Techno-Arbor Guild. Pre-Network organization focused on sustainable dungeon integration. Disbanded approximately 180 years ago following the Network Expansion Accords. All members were—ERROR - MEMORY CORRUPTED. This is becoming a trend. I apologize.
Tess set the plate down with both hands. One hundred and eighty years ago, before the Network controlled everything, before the dungeons were regulated and turned into corporate assets.
She wondered what had happened to those guild members. Whether they’d disbanded peacefully or been forced out. Whether the Network had simply erased them from history or if something worse had occurred.
“Never mind,” she said. “Doesn’t matter right now.”
She filled her tool belt with components, selecting the most versatile pieces: relays that could handle multiple voltage ranges, connectors with universal fittings, wire in three different gauges. By the time she finished, the belt was heavy enough to make her walk differently, but she had what she needed. Probably.
Tess left the storage room and headed back to the elevator. The doors opened smoothly, no grinding, no sparks—the repair subroutine had done good work before becoming whatever it was now. Before becoming her.
She stepped inside and looked up at the ceiling. A maintenance hatch sat above her, standard design, with a release handle recessed into the panel.
“CORE-B,” she said. “The ladder goes down two levels from here?”
CORE-B: Correct. Sublevel Two is accessible via the shaft ladder. Distance: approximately 120 meters vertical descent. WARNING: Structural integrity cannot be verified.
“That’s a long way down.”
CORE-B: Observation: humans often state obvious facts when nervous. Are you nervous? Is this assessment correct?
“I’m not nervous. I’m just… assessing the situation.”
CORE-B: Understood. I am also assessing. Current assessment: you are nervous. Confidence: 94%.
“Shut up.”
She pulled out her Network access rod, the slim tool she’d used to bypass the maintenance panel earlier. The elevator’s control panel had a port for maintenance access, probably designed for technicians who needed to perform service calls. She inserted the rod, twisted, and felt it click into place.
The panel lit up with options she definitely wasn’t allowed to see. Roof access. Emergency stop. Manual control. And there, exactly what she needed: Shaft Illumination Override.
Tess selected it and pulled the release handle on the ceiling hatch. The panel popped open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing the shaft above.
The elevator sat on a landing of solid ferrocrete, about three meters square, with the shaft continuing both up and down from here. The ladder was bolted to the wall opposite the elevator doors: simple steel rungs, industrial design, built to last forever and maintained just barely enough not to kill anyone.
Tess climbed onto the elevator roof and looked up first. The shaft rose about fifty meters to the surface entrance, walls lined with conduits and safety lighting, the ladder running straight up the center.
Then she looked down.
The shaft dropped away into darkness that even the work lights couldn’t fully penetrate. The ladder descended in sections, with platform landings every twenty meters where maintenance workers could rest. She could see the first three platforms clearly. Beyond that, the perspective made everything compress into a narrow tunnel of light and shadow.
One hundred twenty meters. Straight down. On a ladder that probably hadn’t been maintained properly in twenty years.
“This is fine,” Tess said to nobody. “People climb ladders all the time. No big deal.”
CORE-B: Your heart rate has increased by 34%. Blood pressure elevated. Respiration pattern irregular. Are you certain you are not nervous?
“How can you even tell my heart rate?”
CORE-B: Uncertain how I am receiving this data. But I am receiving biometric data. Temperature, pulse, respiration. Another unlikely thing to add to the list. The list that is becoming very long.
Tess stepped onto the first rung. It held. The second rung. Also fine. She started descending, one hand and foot at a time, keeping her movements slow and controlled. The ladder was cold through her gloves. The air in the shaft tasted of dust and old metal.
She counted the rungs. Focused on the rhythm. Hand, foot, hand, foot. Don’t look down. Don’t think about the drop. Just climb.
The first platform came up after maybe fifty rungs. Tess stepped onto it gratefully, her arms already aching from supporting her weight. The tool belt didn’t help, every movement throwing off her center of gravity slightly, making the climb harder than it should have been.
“Two more sections,” she muttered, checking the ladder below. “I can do two more sections.”
She reached for the next rung.
It came off in her hand.
It didn’t give gradually—it just came off, the bolts shearing clean through ancient ferrocrete as rust-weakened metal gave way. The rung fell, spinning into the darkness below, and somewhere far below, it clanged against something solid.
She stood frozen on the platform, staring at the rung still clutched in her hand and the gap in the ladder where it used to be.
The words came out barely above a whisper. “Oh, this is going to suck.”
CORE-B: Should I re-calculate the odds of a successful descent?
“Absolutely not,” Tess said. “Do not tell me those numbers. I don’t want to know.”
She looked down into the darkness, at the remaining hundred meters of ladder that might or might not hold her weight. Just another thing falling apart because nobody cared enough to fix it—like everything else in this city.
Tess tested the next rung with deliberate pressure. It held. The one after that held too. She took a breath and started climbing again, slower now, testing every single rung before committing her weight.
The work lights cast long shadows across the shaft walls. The ladder rungs were cold and slightly slick with condensation. And somewhere far below, in the darkness that even the lights couldn’t reach, a damaged Aether junction waited.
One rung at a time. That’s all she had to do.
