Being able to see was a big thing, and everyone felt a little less tense than they had when the lights were almost completely off. Within a space of about fifteen or twenty feet, visibility was very good now. Past that it got blurry, but there was still at least enough light to see movement in for a good distance further.

  Better yet, the fact that the light was coming from the rings meant that all their hands were free, and the light would follow them. The rocks they already had were tucked into pockets, waiting for a use that would hopefully come before their magic ran out.

  Even so, it’s pretty scary in here. And it seems like we are going downhill.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a bad leader, but do we have a plan here?” Clayton dried his increasingly stress-sweat damp hands on his armor and gripped his spear. There wasn’t even dirt on the ground anymore to use as a grip enhancer. It was all bare rock and branching corridors, none of which were giving him much of a vibe to go off. “We just seem to be going deeper and deeper.”

  “We don’t have much choice,” Alvin said. “I’m the only one of us who would be able to even try to dig out of here, and it wouldn’t be fast. There were miles of rock that collapsed behind us. It would take years, even if I didn’t end up bringing the whole mountain down on us.”

  “There still has to be a better way than just trusting in these corridors.”

  “Really?” Tom raised the feathered part of his face that amounted to his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Because… I don’t know. It’s not fair otherwise.”

  “Clayton.” Alvin’s voice was quiet and a little grave. “Do you know how many people come out of here alive? The Far Places, I mean.”

  “No idea. Not many, I’d imagine”

  “That’s right. My trainer was at least honest about that. Dungeons in the normal worlds have a high survival rate. If you do your research and prepare, supposedly it’s less than a percent of people that get unlucky enough to die, and that drops the more dungeons you’ve survived.”

  “I’ve heard that too,” Tom said. “That most dead adventurers are young adventurers.”

  “Sure.” Alvin nodded. “But here, it doesn’t matter. The system isn’t trying to make sure things are safe and balanced. It doesn’t care if they are fair. I couldn’t get exact numbers anywhere I looked, but it’s much less than a percent. People who come here usually don’t get out.”

  “I’m sensing there’s an ‘and’ coming.”

  “And we are no exception. There might be an exit, there might not. There’s no way of knowing if the system even thought about putting one in. We can hope but there’s no way to find out but pressing on.”

  Hours passed as they walked in the dark. Every now and again, they would find small chamber big enough for all of them to recline in. After passing five or so of them up, they finally decided to rest. Alvin quarried some stone blocks to mostly barricade the entrances and exits with, and they took turns taking watch as they burned about four hours resting. Clayton pulled the last shift, and felt better if still fatigued when the Merkie shook him awake for his watch.

  “I’m up.” Clayton laid his hand on his spear, which he had kept as close as he could while he slept. “Are you going to be able to get back to sleep?”

  “I’ll try. I had something to eat and drink during my watch. I recommend you do the same,” Tom said.

  “I guess I should. It feels odd to be burning through rations so early.”

  “That’s what they are for.” Tom laid down on his back, his shield strapped to his arm and tucked in above his chest like a metal blanket. “Remember. If you see anything coming, yell as loud as you can. Everyone would rather be startled awake by you than teeth in their necks.”

  Clayton had his doubts that there was even a possibility of danger in this place. They hadn’t seen a single sign of life in these caves since the Crystal Roper, and from what everyone was telling him, it wasn’t as if the system was following any set of rules that would have forced it to maintain some minimum level of interest in every zone it generated.

  As he waited and hoped nothing would happen, Clayton played with the light-rocks Grace had given him after he had pointed her in the direction of making the rings into lamps. The normal, conventional rock was more or less burned out now, with on the faintest outline of light making it visible against the darkness. The crystal was still burning pretty bright, apparently having a much easier time holding onto the light magic than a standard-issue stone.

  There wasn’t much to it besides that, but Clayton found himself turning the stone over and over in his hand anyway. There was something about these crystals that just felt interesting to him, like they were a thing to be understood and used. He thought that might have been because they were currently lamps, but pulling an unaltered crystal from the storage and holding it in his hand had the same effect.

  My skill says these are important, he thought. I just wish it would give me the slightest clue why.

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  He sat on the hard rock, leaning up against the chamber’s irregular wall and wishing he could get more data from the skill when the feed of information cut out completely, replaced with something much more ominous.

  The wall is dangerous now? Why?

  “Guys! Danger!” Clayton yelled as loud as he could, gratified as the entire team sprung to their feet with almost no delay. He could only hope he would be as quick when it was his turn to transition from dead slumber to fight-ready. “Something in the wall.”

  “You’re sure?” Grace held her hand towards the wall, ready to hit with a flare at a moment’s notice. “I don’t see anything at all.”

  “The skill says there’s something.” Clayton tracked the feeling of danger as it grew stronger. “Sometimes it misses things, but I’ve never had it be wrong before.”

  The feeling got stronger and strong, but the area the feeling was coming from seemed to be slowly narrowing down. Clayton kept his spear aimed at the very center of it as it finally resolved to a dangerous area about the size of his fist.

  “Is it still coming?”

  “Yeah. Just let me focus. It should be around where my spear is. I think if I…”

  The sentence was never finished. Before Clayton could move or even react, the rock in the danger zone disappeared, replaced by a small, razor-toothed mouth connected to the fastest-moving monster he had seen in this place. He got the point of it immediately. Something that fast and sharp shooting out of a wall otherwise thought of as safe would be a hell of a surprise. It was a lethal, horrible trap, something incredibly unfair in this otherwise boring zone-out of a dungeon.

  Unfortunately for the mouth emerging from the rock, Clayton was cheating. The animal emitted a high-pitched screech as it saw the point of the spear too late and continued forward, powerless to stop its own ambush momentum.

  “Oh. Wow.” Tom gawked at Clayton’s spear. “It socked itself.”

  It really had. The entire front foot-and-a-half of Clayton’s spear was now covered by a forearm sized worm, one that was stretched out near the tail by the wide spearhead itself.

  “It can’t be that easy.” Grace was still pointing her arm at the rock wall. “Can it?”

  “I think it can.” Tom had his shield out and ready but looked much more relaxed than the rest of the team. “I think an enemy like this is usually supposed to be a challenge for a team’s shielder, and his ability to leave the worm open for attack before it gets back in a wall. Clayton’s cheating that whole concept. And whoo, there it goes again. They aren’t very bright, are they?”

  Clayton had barely had time to shake the last enemy off his spear before the next one popped from the wall, once again directly onto his spear point. There ended up being a total of five of the things, none of which were intelligent enough to adjust for the tactic.

  “I can’t believe I leveled off of that. Do you think we can find more of those things?” Tom asked.

  “No idea, but I leveled too. And I have loot coming.”

  “I’m putting everything into intelligence again. Fate sense is just doing too much to not,” Clayton said.

  “What are the other options?” Grace asked.

  “Dexterity to move faster and handle weapons better, and strength just to hit harder. Neither of those have been a big bottleneck so far.”

  “Don’t ignore them, though. Try to keep them in proportion to the free stats, if you can.”

  “I’ll try. Are you all ready for the loot?”

  “Absolutely. I’m hoping for earrings.” Grace pulled back her hair to reveal pieced but unfilled earlobes. “Try for those.”

  “Is that a thing I can do?”

  “She’s kidding.” Tom said. “Just bring out the loot.”

  Clayton did. Two long, gray poles materialized in the air and clattered to the ground, looking a lot like plain granite rods. Picking one up revealed that it wasn’t nearly as heavy, although it otherwise felt pretty much like he expected it to.

  “These say we should talk to you, Alvin. Care to take a look?”

  Alvin’s eyes glinted as he grabbed the pole out of Clayton’s hand. He bent over it for a few minutes, tapping at the dowel at various points and inspecting the surface over and over again.

  “He can’t just look at the description like anyone else?” Clayton whispered to Grace. “This is taking forever.”

  “He really can’t. He’s doing a blacksmith’s inspection. It’s a whole thing. There are techniques to it. Asking him to skip it would be like someone asking you to skip the battle part of a fight in favor of just letting the skill do it.”

  “Ah. I’ll sit tight, then.”

  It took another five minutes, but eventually Alvin looked up and sighed.

  “These are pretty good. I can see three potential uses for them, but one is a pretty obvious waste.”

  “And that is?”

  “My hammer. It would absolutely love one of these for my handle, but it wouldn’t help it in combat, and our first concern needs to be immediate survival until we find a way to hunker down for longer periods of time.”

  “Agreed,” Clayton said. “Sorry though.”

  Alvin waved his hand.

  “It’s fine. We’ll find more stuff eventually. The second thing is as a magical amplifier. The pole itself is a plus magical amplifier, and…”