They called it a sky bridge, which didn’t make much sense to Velik, since they’d had to dig several hundred feet into the side of the mountain to get to it. Without Jensen’s [Treasure Hunter], nobody would ever have known it was there. No one had doubted him when he’d pronounced the location of the dig site, however, and fourteen hours later, a man with an enchanted pickaxe had ripped through a sheet of metal a foot thick, letting them into the ruin.

  It was their third such expedition in the last half a year, and by now, nobody doubted their leader’s ability to sniff out valuables. So it was with considerable excitement that they started lowering ropes for the forward assault team to get in there, all of them eager to clear away any lurking monsters that called the sky bridge home.

  Velik was the first one down, ignoring the ropes and simply dropping into the hole to fall seventy feet through the dark. His legs flexed as he hit the ground with a soft thump, and he rose to his full height. Dust clouded the air, making it hard to see through the shadows, but his keen eyes picked up movement coming his way.

  “Incoming,” he said with a frown. His nose twitched as he inhaled, trying to get a scent besides old, stale air and swirling dust. Some sort of oil? And steel? A lot of steel. Something else, too. Maybe something burning?

  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d fought an enemy that wielded fire magic, but something made him think that wasn’t the case here. A moment later, something that looked vaguely man-shaped strode out of the dust. It was close to ten feet tall and four feet wide at the shoulders, and despite the fact that it wasn’t holding a weapon, it didn’t hesitate for an instant as it closed in on Velik.

  He’d never seen one in person before, but Velik knew about the artificial creations of talented artificers and engineers. What surprised him was mostly that this one was still active after what had to have been centuries without any sort of maintenance. He doubted it would hold up well, but for the sake of the expedition, he hoped he was wrong.

  The golem, after all, was part of the prize.

  Velik met its rush with his spear, easily slipping away from its grasping hands and driving the tip of his weapon into its armpit. The spear bit deep into the metal, and he wrenched the limb free of its socket. Something snapped and hissed inside the golem, and its arm fell to its side, limp. The golem didn’t seem to notice or care, other than shifting its torso so that its remaining arm could grab at its target.

  Ten seconds later, the golem was on the ground, its limbs detached from its torso and the glow in its eyes dead. At about the same time, the rest of the forward team reached the ground. Two of them held lanterns, not that those did much good at the moment, but bad air was a common problem in old, sealed ruins, and Jensen had hired a wind mage specifically to counteract that problem.

  The man certainly wasn’t dressed in any practical manner. Instead, his whole body was wrapped in colorful robes with fancy stitching and patterns embroidered on them. The robe was hooded, and he always kept the hood up, which must have made it difficult to see with his fine blond hair constantly spilling out around his face. He’d introduced himself as Tempest when Velik had met him two months ago and refused to answer to anything else.

  His heavy robe whipped around him as he floated down, manipulating air currents in some way to avoid breaking his leg. At the same time, dust spewed through the hole in the ceiling like an eruption, billowing out in great clouds, only to be replaced a few moments later by fresh air.

  “If you’d waited a few seconds, I could have done that before you dropped down here,” he told Velik with a sneer.

  “Good to know,” Velik said back placidly. Tempest liked to take his time with everything he did, to add a lot of pomp and ceremony to his magic, and by jumping in, Velik had forced the mage to skip all that. The shadows of the man’s oversized hood couldn’t hide the petulant scowl twisting his lips, and Velik resisted the urge to smile.

  “Two more golems coming in,” the group’s other scout reported. Unlike Velik, she was actually a scout class. That had a lot of overlap with his own hunter class, but she was twenty levels lower than him and the raw stat difference was more than her specialty skills could overcome, especially since Velik had his own skill dedicated to sensory amplification, tracking, threat assessment, and stalking prey.

  “Three,” he corrected absently. “There’s another one coming from the opposite direction as that pair.”

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  It wasn’t a particularly challenging fight. Most of the forward team was around level 30, and even though the golems weren’t technically alive—and thus weren’t recognized by the system as monsters—they weren’t any stronger than the average enemy of the same level. Velik took out the pair coming in from the north hallway while the other four people ganged up on the last golem.

  “Careful about damaging them,” Jensen called out from the hole in the ceiling. “Those are worth a lot of money.”

  “You’re welcome to come down here and do it yourself then,” Velik yelled back up.

  “That’s what I pay you for,” Jensen said. “Is it safe now?”

  “For the moment.”

  The excavators started coming down the ropes, some of them graceful, others with halting motions as they awkwardly climbed. After a few minutes, the whole team of twenty was on the floor and setting up their forward base. Jensen had purchased a massive extradimensional storage artifact with the proceeds from the second expedition, which was placed in the center of the floor. Modular wall panels were pulled out of it, along with framework and bracings, which the workers quickly started setting up.

  They’d broken into the sky bridge at some sort of atrium, which actually worked out in their favor. It gave them a lot of room to set up their camp, if nothing else. The drawback was that there were at least eight exits from the room, though all but three of them had collapsed and would need to be dug out before those parts of the sky bridge could be looted.

  “I’ll do my initial sweep,” Velik told Jensen once things had gotten started. The rest of the forward team would stick around the base to protect it from roaming golems while Velik was gone, which was exactly the way he liked it. His job was to find bigger threats and dispose of them before they became a problem.

  Hopefully there’s something besides these old machines down here, or I’m not going to gain a single level the whole time.

  With a mental sigh, he called up his status to review it. He’d certainly grown over the previous two expeditions, but not quite enough to reach his next goal.

  [Name: Velik]

  [Race: Human (Duskbound)]

  [Class: The Black Fang]

  [Level: 47]

  [Physical: 146(+46)]

  [Mental: 85(+22)]

  [Mystic: 71(+55)]

  [Free Points: 0]

  [Decarma: 48674]

  [Skills:]

  [Apex Hunter (Rank 9)]

  [Dread Lance (Rank 5)]

  [Burden of the Beast (Rank 4)]

  [Aspect of the Wind Tamer (Rank 4)]

  [True Form (Rank 3)]

  [Gear:]

  [Harbinger of Dusk (+15Ph, +5My)]

  [The Sixth Plague (+10My)]

  [Fangs of the Wind Dragon (+10Ph, +5Me)]

  [Night Striders (+6 Ph, +2 Me]

  [Invoker’s Pendant (+20My)]

  [Earcuff of Unbreakable Will]

  [Cloak of Whispers (+10Me, +10My]

  [Traveler’s Bracelet]

  [Life Giver’s Ring (+20 My)]

  [Heart of the Inferno (+10 Ph)]

  [Silversilk Shirt (+10Ph, +10My)]

  [Nightstalker’s Pants (+5Ph, +5Me, +5My)]

  If nothing else, his budget for gear had exploded. Everything he was wearing was ranked at least epic now, with three pieces being legendary. It was a huge step up from his old setup, and he thought he’d done a fantastic job of patching up his weaknesses once he’d been given a nigh-unlimited budget to work with. He even had his own spatial storage now, albeit a much smaller one than what Jensen was using.

  He was confident he could take out a monster at up to level 60 at this point, and he doubted there was anything even close to that strong in these ruins. The golems still being active indicated that a more powerful monster had probably never stumbled across the sky bridge, which made sense since the whole thing was apparently underground.

  “Hey,” Jensen said just before Velik could walk away. “[Treasure Hunter] is telling me the big score is about two hundred feet beneath us, just a little bit to the east of this room. The golems are showing up on my skill, so chances are there’s a real big one there. Don’t obliterate the thing shutting it down, okay?”

  “If it’s anything like the ones up here, I wouldn’t worry,” Velik said.

  “You’re going to get yourself in trouble making assumptions.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine. This ruin isn’t going to give anything for levels though, not with nothing but golems in here. I want to secure it as quickly as possible so I can spend some time in the mountains.”

  There were plenty of monsters up there, some of them even higher level than him, and Velik was hungry to get to level 50 so he could unlock another skill slot. He already knew exactly what he wanted, too, as long as nothing better showed up in the meantime.

  “Just… retreat if it ends up being too durable to safely dismantle, please? We can’t spend pocketfuls of dust if you [Dread Lance] the loot.”

  “Fine, fine,” Velik said. “I promise I won’t obliterate the super expensive murder golems when I find them. Alright?”

  “Don’t obliterate anything. Half the value in an undiscovered sky bridge is the raw materials salvaged out of the equipment,” Jensen said.

  “I’ll do what I can to preserve it. I’m leaving now,” Velik said.

  He picked a tunnel, more or less at random, and started walking down it. The workers paused in setting up the barricade just long enough to let him slip through, then got back to work behind him. From there, it was just how Velik liked it. He set off to explore, alone and unconcerned.