"Nice," Gambit said, and held up a belt with a giant gaudy belt buckle.

  “What does it have?” Rick asked.

  “Strength and more strength,” was the reply. “But damn, look how cool that is!”

  Rick thought privately that most pro wrestlers would have been embarrassed to be caught in public with that belt, but held his tongue.

  Nia leaned over and pulled a rod out of the chest. It looked just like the boss’s silver rod.

  “Oh yes!” She sounded awed. “This is so much better than the blow gun. Oh, yeah. Perfect.” She turned and hurled the blow gun back down the corridor they’d come in. “No more stupid darts!”

  “Come on then,” Gambit said as he fastened on his new belt. “Tell us about it.”

  “It’s a Lightning Rod. That’s what it’s called. It can fire a bolt of lightning every 5 seconds. And it can absorb magic attacks and add their power to its next bolt.”

  Daniel’s mouth dropped open. “Wow! Is there another one?”

  “Sorry.” She looked smug about that.

  The chest also had a pair of black leather pants. They had 3 points of Magic Affinity so Daniel insisted that Rick take them. Rick made the girls turn around as he struggled into them. They were tight around his thighs and waist, but not uncomfortable.

  “Well?” he asked when the others had turned to see his near gear.

  “Dude,” Gambit said, “put up your hood – oh hell yes, you look so freaking metal. Like a bass player in a Judas Priest cover band. You’re going to be beating goth chicks off with a stick.”

  Sam snorted.

  Rick sighed and tried to be comforted with his newly-buffed stats.

  After equipping their new gear, they entered the main corridor, wide enough for three to walk abreast, lined with doors marked in Rork script. He could read the signs if he tried, but mostly they seemed to be apartments.

  A distant alarm sounded with a a high ding ding ding noise. The presence in the back of Rick's mind told him it was a system failure warning going off.

  Fifty yards down the corridor, Rick stopped as a tingling filled his mind. He called to Sam, "Hold up!"

  "What is it?" Gambit asked from the back of the group.

  "We're going the wrong way!"

  The others turned and gathered around. The corridor was still empty in both directions. In the distance ahead, it curved away from them until they couldn't see round the bend.

  An insistent feeling tugged Rick towards a particular door, no different from any of the others. “This one! We have to go in here!” There was a small plaque on the wall that read “Maintenance Access”.

  Daniel looked skeptical, but Sam strode back from her place at the head of the party. She opened the door without hesitation. Inside they could hear a faint hum. Rick, following the tingle in his mind, passed Sam and stepped through the doorway into the dark room.

  “Right,” Rick said. "I should lead for a little while. I can sense where we need to go."

  A tube or pipe ran down the middle of the space, filling most of it. The party walked single file beside it on a narrow metal catwalk. The tube glowed with a blue light that twisted along its length.

  "What is this?" Daniel asked. He reached out a hand for the tube.

  "I wouldn't touch it if I were you," Rick advised, and Daniel jerked his hand back. "It's not actually dangerous, but it would feel really weird."

  "What is it? It looks like stone."

  "It is stone," Rick said, but as he was about to explain further, Sam spoke up.

  "It's an artificial ley line."

  Everyone looked at her. Rick was surprised she knew. "How do you know that?"

  "Oh, come on!" Nia snapped. "Everyone knows the city's powered by ley energy channeled into the levistones. After all you,” she stepped up to Rick and thumped his chest armor with a finger, “talk about it non-stop with anyone that will stand still long enough. No doubt she’s been pretending like she cares to get you into bed. Come on, we all looked at the map in the briefing. Just focus on your host’s knowledge a bit harder.” She pushed past Rick and took the lead down the walkway beside the pulsing cylinder of stone.

  Sam passed Rick and followed her. As she did, she muttered, "Well, you do talk in your sleep."

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  Rick followed. "It's not me!" he protested.

  "Of course it's not you!" she threw over her shoulder. "Look, just drop it already." She was clearly embarrassed by the whole scenario.

  They came to a branching where another leyline conduit came in from a side tunnel. The catwalk let them cross over the junction and continue along the larger path. Here, the path was suspended above the cylinder of stone that filled the whole corridor below. The glow was brighter, but not enough to see more than a dozen yards in front of them.

  "We should get to the main junction soon."

  A few more yards on, Rick heard a skittering noise from above. He looked up just in time to see a scaly monster head emerging from a crack in the wall up near the ceiling. The head, like that of a large blunt-nosed snake, poked out for an instant, and then, before Rick could even shout a warning, it dropped from its hole.

  He raised his hands to fire a Force Wave, but it was too quick. It landed on Daniel, just in front of him, who shouted and whirled, slapping his hands at the creature that had grabbed onto his back. His health bar plummeted down as sharp claws dug into his back. Blood blossomed on Daniel’s leather tunic.

  The creature had a body three feet long and a stubby tail lined with spikes, and six legs like most of the creatures on Mars that they had encountered. It hissed and then bit at Daniel's shoulder. Rick grabbed it and tried to tear it free.

  Rick had his dagger on an inventory hotkey. It got in the way of casting, so he rarely used it, but now he pulled it out. He stabbed from the side, trying to avoid hitting Daniel, but he was too tentative and the swing missed.

  There was a flurry of motion above and several more of the creatures emerged. Their bodies glowed blue in the same shade as the leyline conduit.

  One landed on Rick's hood and he heard its claws scrabbling. It couldn't get purchase, since Rick's armor was heavier leather than Daniel's tunic. Their archer really needed some gear upgrades, but so did they all. He spun in place, flailing at the creature.

  It slid down, trying to gain purchase on his shoulder.

  Rick spun and swiped at it with his hand, taking care not to stab himself in the face with the dagger. He kept his face turned away from its scraping claws and snapping teeth, but its health bar appeared on his interface as his own target. His haphazard slash had done some damage and he jabbed at it again with the knife. Two stabs later and it dropped away from his shoulder, either deliberately or because he had done a third of its health in damage.

  A lizard clawed at the leg of his new pants but was unable to puncture. In the dark, he couldn't tell if it was the one he had damaged or another.

  Nia and Daniel were both taking excessive damage from the attacks and everyone in the party was getting hit. In the dark, he couldn't tell how many were on each one, but he threw a Healing Cloud on Nia and then another on Daniel. They were close and he had no line of sight issues, though Sam and Gambit's health bars occasionally went gray as the others blocked his view of them because they were on the far front and back of their group.

  A warning flashed up on Rick's interface that told him his pants had taken durability damage. At the same moment, sharp claws dug through into his leg and he took damage. The area effect of Healing Cloud topped him off instantly, but it was still painful. Rick struck at the one on his leg, flailed away in the dark, only succeeding with a glancing blow. Its target health bar appeared and he could see it was the same one as before, its health down to half.

  As the last of the attacking creatures died, Rick felt the wash of a level up flow over him. He called out the news to his party. “Give me a minute here,” he told them. Grunts and wordless acknowledgements answered him.

  Rick pulled up his skill interface.

  He had two options. The obvious choice was [Restore]. The large heal would be able to fill much more of Sam's health pool than Healing Cloud. If he alternated the two abilities, he could keep a tank better healed while still spreading some other healing around the group. The other option was interesting. [Life Transference] would move five percent of his own health to another target until that target was full or he was at one percent. It would continue until canceled. He could think of a number of scenarios where that spell would be useful, but until his health pool was nearly the size of Sam's, it seemed like a weak option. Not to mention a dangerous one.

  Because Healing Cloud was the only skill he had gotten five points into, there were no other paths unlocked except the first tier on other skill trees, and he didn't need more damage-dealing abilities at the moment. He hoped someday to be able to spare a few points into those, but for now, it wasn't an option.

  He selected Restore.

  The other path, Transference, remained open, which was good to know. He could now split his points between those two paths as well as put points into anything else he had, such as Force Wave or Protection. He definitely wanted more points into Protection. He was excited to see what options it unlocked when he had enough tiers in it.

  The other thing that Rick had not expected was that he was still able to put more points into Healing Cloud. Another set of five tiers had unlocked above that skill. With that being his bread and butter heal – he was going to need a lot more levelling up.

  “You done yet?” Gambit asked.

  Rick looked around, startled. All the others were staring at him. “Oh, sorry, just assigning my point. Yeah.”

  “What did you get?” Sam asked as she set off again. Rick described his choice. She nodded. “Good. Once we start facing stuff that’s the same level as me I’m not just going to be able to eat all these blows. I like knowing you’ll have my back.”

  He couldn’t see her face, which meant she couldn’t see the dopey grin that crossed his face. A warm feeling blossomed in him. Rick cleared his throat. “Keep the tank alive. Healing 101. It’s not rocket science.”

  In another twenty yards, the tunnel opened out. The passage ended in a larger circular room. It was cool here, and the air felt damp. This tube of stone met another glowing channel in the rock. But this one wasn't separated; it fused straight into the wall of the room. They were in a vertical shaft. A narrow walkway let them cross to the other side, where another tube of stone left. Steps were carved in the outside edge of the chamber, which stretched up and down as far as they could see in the dim light. The walls were stone.

  "This is all one piece," Gambit commented as he ran his hands along the wall. "There's no seams."

  "This is the heart of the mountain. We, er… they, experimented for years with channeling ley energy. We finally found the easiest method was to carve a living ley line out of the planet itself. The whole center of the city is a big piece of mountain."

  Daniel was nodding in amazement. "Of course, a flying mountain, like in..."

  Rick shook his head. "No, the mountain doesn't fly. It's just carried. The levistones do all the lifting. The mountain just holds the city together and channels ley energies. There's a ley condenser on the bottom that collects what the planet gives off and channels it into this. And from there we distribute it to the refined levistone crystals, the seven refined levistone crystals around the perimeter of the city."

  "Where to now?" Daniel asked. “I mean, if you’re done with the science lecture, Mr. Wizard sir.”

  "We're going down," Rick said.