The city had been empty for a very long time. You could tell because nothing in it was surprised to see us.
This place, I had been told, was a Class Three dungeon, on the lower end. Difficult, but still within our capabilities. I was glad; I still had the occasional nightmare about being in the Ebon Maw.
The Unnamed City was exactly what it sounded like. Someone had decided that was sufficient and moved on, which I respected.
It was built like a real city — streets wide enough for carts, buildings of varying height pressed close together, a market district with permanent stalls and overhangs that suggested someone had once done a brisk trade in something.
The architecture was Delvenmoor adjacent. Close enough to Moorhaven that my brain kept trying to populate it with people and kept finding nothing.
That was the uncanny part. Not the darkness — the dungeon's false light was actually rather pleasant, a warm amber glow that filtered down from somewhere above the rooflines and gave everything the quality of late afternoon in a city that had forgotten what afternoon was.
Not the silence either, exactly. It was much more the texture of silence in a space that was built for noise. Streets designed for footsteps and cart wheels and the general productive chaos of people going somewhere. Now just us, and our mops, and the bodies.
There had been quite a few of those.
This dungeon had become the home for some pretty dangerous monsters: There were the Shade Crawlers – flat, shadowy things that descended on prey from the rooftops and overhangs. Removing them required a lot of climbing.
Then there were the Echo Wraiths. They were, apparently, mana manifestations that took on the form of the city's former residents. You couldn't tell that from the remains, however – when killed, all that was left behind was a glowing pile of ashes that Tessa had to scrub the mana from until they were disposed of.
Swarms of Mana Leeches seemed like they would've been a problem for the adventurers; dozens and dozens of them were scattered in piles on the cobblestone.
I had been told that there were more dangerous things that lived deeper in. I had not been thrilled to hear this.
We'd spent the first two hours working through the residential quarter — small houses, shuttered windows, the occasional personal effect visible through a doorway that I had learned not to look at too closely. The adventuring party that cleared the dungeon had been extremely thorough, as well as horrifyingly messy. We dissolved, scrubbed, reset, and moved on.
The market district was next. I could see it from where we were — stalls with fabric awnings in colors that had no business being this vivid underground, overhangs and covered walkways creating a layered maze of partial walls and shadow. Kael had already identified three pressure stone mechanisms and two false doors on the approach. SCRUB was somewhere ahead in the maze, mapping.
It was, by the standards we were currently operating under, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
I found myself mopping coagulated blood out of a gutter. The Grime Reaper made the work significantly easier, but it was still exhausting.
Tessa was removing excess mana from a falling door trap that Kael was examining. She was humming cheerily and none too quietly.
Kael coughed. "Tessa?"
The halfling girl looked over. "What's up?"
"You're distracting me."
"Oh. Sorry."
She ceased her humming for all of thirty seconds. I heard Kael sigh and say nothing more.
Alara was busying herself with a mortar and pestle, making healing salves and mumbling something about how I was going to make her use all of them. I chose to ignore her.
Hask was simply observing. He stood at the center of a large square, where an impressive stone well was constructed. It was huge, with an enclosed stone housing on four pillars.
The foreman's gaze was fixed on the well opening, but he was too far away for me to see his expression.
Once I had finished sopping up the remaining gore from the gutter, I joined Hask by the well. "Something wrong, sir?"
He shook his head. "Not at the moment. But something bad came out of there at some point."
I chose not to press further.
Once the area was clear, we headed toward the market district. As we walked, I gazed around at the city. The place would be beautiful if not for the sense of impending doom that was very clearly hiding behind the serene golden glow.
Tessa jotted something down in her notebook before tucking it away. "There's a lot of unique mana signatures here. I wonder what this place was like…"
Kael shrugged. "This might be how the dungeon has always been."
"But what if it was a normal city before? What if it got transformed into a dungeon? OOOO! What if it was once a thriving city full of monsters? OR! OR! What if-"
Their conversation blended into the background as I walked. I moved a few steps ahead of the group and checked to make sure I wouldn't be seen. "Console."
The display appeared.
There it was. NIGHT STEP IV.
What was it? I had been agonizing over it for the last two weeks. I had gone to the library to research it and found nothing. Alben had been curious as to why I wanted to know, but I couldn't bring myself to confide in him. Not with this.
I had only been able to assume that it was this ability that moved me across the street, back in the Tangle. But how had I triggered it? And how did a level four skill even appear on my console in the first place? I wasn't a stealth specialist, and even if I was, I certainly wasn't that proficient.
None of it was adding up. And I found that to be more than a little frustrating.
I noticed, distantly, that I had walked further than I intended. I also noticed that I didn't particularly want to stop. Both of those things should have concerned me more than they did.
I wasn't sure how long I'd been walking before I realized I couldn't hear Tessa and Kael behind me anymore. I looked up and saw that I was alone in an empty marketplace. My group was nowhere to be seen.
I felt a pang of urgency in my stomach and tried to take in my surroundings.
The marketplace was beautiful in the way that empty things sometimes are. Without people to clutter it, you could see the bones of it clearly — the careful arrangement of the stalls, the logic of the layout, the way the covered walkways created shade over the areas where the most foot traffic would have been. Whoever built this place had known what they were doing.
The awnings were still taut. No rot, no sag. The amber light caught their colors — deep reds, faded blues, something that might once have been green — and made them look almost warm. Almost inhabited.
Almost.
The stalls still had goods on them. That was the part that got under my skin. Bolts of fabric, folded with care. Ceramic wares arranged by size. A display of tools whose purpose I couldn't identify, laid out with the precision of someone who had intended to come back.
Nobody had come back.
The silence here was different from the residential quarter. There it had been the silence of private spaces — the quiet of rooms that were meant to be quiet. Here the silence was disturbing in a more fundamental way. Marketplaces are supposed to be loud. The absence of noise in a space specifically designed to contain it felt less like quiet and more like something holding its breath.
I stood very still.
The amber light moved.
Not much. Just a shift at the edge of my vision, somewhere between two stalls on my left. The kind of movement you see and then immediately doubt because nothing is there when you look directly at it.
I looked directly at it anyway.
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Nothing.
I kept looking.
My hands tightened around my mop as the light flickered again, this time a few feet away, behind one of the stalls. Something was here.
Did the adventuring party miss a monster? Did one respawn prematurely? Was this something else?
The light shimmered again. Even closer. Whatever this thing was, it was quick. Silent.
I breathed in deeply, letting it out in a measured exhale. Shifting my feet, I held my mop in front of me. For the last two weeks, Hask had decided to train me one-on-one in frontlining and combat, off-book. He had said the Guild standard training was "stunted."
I went through his lessons in my mind; his training had been borderline brutal, but I discovered that I had a knack for it. Even he had said he was surprised at how quickly I had begun to improve.
Now, it seemed, was the time to put that training to the test.
The thing approaching me rapidly moved in, and for the briefest of moments, I caught a proper glimpse of it. As I did, I remembered Kael mentioning one of this dungeon's documented monsters: the Amber Vestige.
The deep unease came first. Something at the edge of the stalls that my eyes kept sliding off, like a word you've read so many times it stops looking like a word. Then it shifted, and the details assembled themselves whether I wanted them to or not.
It looked like someone had studied people from afar for a very long time and got most of the details right, except the important ones. The limbs were different sizes, neck slightly too long. The color was the worst part. It had the amber of the dungeon light in its skin — not a reflection, something deeper than that. Like the light had been folded into it. Like it had been here long enough to become part of the atmosphere.
Its face was the last thing I processed, and I wished I had processed it less.
It was mostly smooth, with no traces of physical features. Where the face on a person would be, this thing seemed to have a vague resemblance—nothing concrete, but just identifiable enough to be uncanny. The only thing it definitely had was horrifyingly sharp teeth.
It didn't have eyes, exactly.
But it was looking straight at me.
One moment, we were standing, appraising one another. Next, it was on me.
The thing rushed me with speed I was not prepared for. I saw a gnarled, hand-like appendage bubble and twist into jagged claws to rake at my face. I shoved my shoulder to the side and winced as it grazed my ear. I felt warm blood flowing and a searing pain at the site of the wound.
I took a breath in and shoved my body against it, slamming it hard where ribs should have been. I managed to knock it off balance for a split second before it rounded on me and struck out again with those wicked claws. I brought my mop up to block it, pushing its arm high. With a grunt, I dropped low and tried to sweep its leg with a low kick. It jumped nimbly, hands gripping the mop handle.
It didn't roar, or growl, or snarl. It was deathly silent, and that was worse.
I twisted the mop, forcing its arms to cross. While I had it tangled, I sprang up, slamming my head forcefully into its own. My vision blurred, but I could see it had dazed the Vestige as well. It soundlessly stumbled back, shaking its head. After a second, it hunkered low and lunged at me.
The grapple was short but violent. My mop was the only thing separating me from snapping jaws. This monster was preternaturally strong and was quickly overpowering me. I had to do something fast. I spotted my bucket, upturned on the ground not far away. It was move or die.
I spat in its face.
The Vestige looked more baffled than hurt. But it was an opening.
I lunged the few feet for my bucket, and as soon as my fingers touched the handle, I swung around and hit the thing in the head as hard as I could.
The resounding CLANG! echoed across the market. And it had a noticeable effect on the monster, far more than the impact did. It stepped back, clutching its head.
Sound.
I stumbled back, scrambling at my belt. After a second of fumbling, I found it – my flare gun.
As quick as my fingers would let me, I loaded a canister into the barrel and fired, black smoke rocketing into the sky. Not the danger signal. Didn't matter.
What I needed was the ear-piercing shriek the flare gave off. The Vestige's knees buckled, and it collapsed momentarily.
That's when I learned that it had been toying with me.
Its body language changed to that of a cornered animal, and it leaped for me, still utterly soundless. Before I could react, I felt the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I looked down to see one of the things' horrifying arms buried to the wrist in my shoulder.
I screamed and tried to stumble back, but it caught me, pulling me with its inhuman strength toward that hungry mouth.
My mind frantically searched for an answer, any idea to get me out of this. It was in that moment, as I saw death staring me in the face, that I felt my brain become lucid. I knew what to do.
With one smooth motion, I loaded another canister into my flare gun, cocked and shoved it directly into the monster's mouth.
I pulled the trigger and watched the thing's head explode in a cloud of smoke, fire, and shrieking.
Its face melted almost instantly, which shocked me until I remembered Kael's modifications to the guns he had made months ago. They had a much bigger boom now.
As the corpse collapsed, so did I. My vision was swimming, and pain raced to every corner of my body. My shoulder was bleeding profusely, and I felt like I was going to vomit. I tried to crawl in the direction I had come, but I was falling in and out of consciousness.
It was at that point that I wondered why I wasn't afraid.
I definitely should have been, when I saw three more Vestiges flicker out of the light a short distance away. They raced toward me. "Fuck."
I fell onto my back and wondered briefly how one accepted one's impending death.
I let out a shuddering breath, feeling the wound on my shoulder and seeing the blood soaking my hands.
As my vision began to fade fully, I heard a voice. "Lithwell! Interference! Veyne, barrier on Callister, get him stable! Tessa, Mana Purge, now!"
I saw a shimmering golden light bloom into existence over me as everything went black.
I woke up staring at the underside of a stone wellhouse and decided that was probably not a good sign.
Alara was the first thing I saw when I turned my head. She was kneeling beside me, one hand pressed firmly to my shoulder, lips moving around an incantation I couldn't quite hear. Her expression was professionally neutral. I had learned to read that expression: She was bottling an emotion.
I blinked against the glow of the dungeon light and let out a low groan as I felt the dull throbbing in my shoulder. I guessed that I had been healed more substantially than I deserved, probably.
Alara pursed her lips. "Foreman, he's awake."
She held eye contact with me for a moment longer. "You do that again, I'm not healing you. Idiot."
She stood and walked away. Before I could fully sit up to see who else was around, I felt a heavy impact against me and was suddenly staring at the world through a tangle of bright red hair.
Tessa.
She didn't bother to hide her tears. "LORNE! I thought you were dead! What happened?! Why did you go off on your own?! I was so worried about you! Did you kill that thing?! With a flare gun?! That's so cool! I'm so angry at you! You had me so scared! Don't ever do that again! You're so unbelievably cool and also a huge fucking jerk!"
As she sobbed into my jumpsuit, I patted her head awkwardly. "I'm sorry Tessa, I don't know what happened."
I looked up from her to spot Kael off to the side of the well, focused intently on a damaged SCRUB. The little robot was sparking violently, smoke billowing.
Hask was seated on the lip of the well, gazing at me intently. He carried no wounds, but his jumpsuit was soaked with blood, which meant that it wasn't his own. A similarly bloody utility axe leaned against the well near him. "Welcome back, Callister."
I winced as Tessa shifted her weight onto my shoulder by accident. "Foreman…what happened?"
He stroked his beard contemplatively. "You got lured. Adventurers missed some monsters."
Once Tessa finally sat up off of me, I rubbed my head, still dazed. "Yeah."
The group was silent for a long moment, the only sounds being sparking metal and beeping from SCRUB.
"So."
Kael settled cross-legged on the cobblestones, pulling SCRUB into his lap. He didn't look at me while he talked, which meant he was either focused on SCRUB or processing something he didn't want his face to show. Probably both. "The Vestiges. You want to know how they got you."
It wasn't a question. I waited for him to continue. "They work in packs. Four of them in this case — one to lure, three to wait. The lure uses the dungeon's ambient light to draw the target forward. Increases the warmth in one direction, dims everything else slightly. Subtle enough that you don't notice it happening. Your brain just decides that forward is where you want to go."
He paused, turning a screwdriver carefully as he adjusted a dented panel on his companion. "The other three handle the group. They can project a false afterimage of the target — close enough to fool casual observation. Movement, shape, general presence. The group keeps walking with what they think is the full team while the lure pulls the target deeper into the kill zone."
He finally looked at me. "You were looking at your console."
He said it without inflection. Which, from Kael, was its own kind of inflection.
I said nothing.
"We were talking to something that wasn't you for approximately four minutes before SCRUB flagged it. He noticed the mana signature was strange. The afterimage projects the shape but not the mana. He came to me immediately."
He gave SCRUB a very deliberate approving pat. SCRUB beeped with what I interpreted as modest satisfaction. "The black flare gave us your location. We moved as fast as we could."
He didn't add anything else. Just turned back to SCRUB with that focused attention, which told me the conversation was over. I noticed his jaw was set in a way it hadn't been before we entered the dungeon.
I didn't push it. He wasn't wrong. "Is SCRUB okay?"
Kael's answer took a while to come. "He'll be fine. When we found you, I had him use his echolocation device to disorient the vestiges with sound. It worked somewhat; I'll have to add new functionality for stuff like this. But they got to him and knocked him around a bunch. The foreman took care of the vestiges."
I sat with that – I had put the entire group in danger by being distracted. And SCRUB had gotten hurt. My stomach twisted with guilt.
Hask pulled me from my thoughts. "There's a lesson here. For all of us."
We all looked up at him. "Be more alert. Callister got lured; we didn't notice, not even me. This could've been much worse."
I appreciated him making it about the group and not just me. But I didn't feel like the others were to blame.
Hask continued. "But that flare to the face was a good move, Callister. Nice work."
"...Thank you, sir."
He stood up from the well and hefted his axe, wiping blood from the blade on his uniform. "You all did well. Lithwell, get SCRUB patched up quick. We have to get the job done."
He looked out at the city around us. "Four of those things being here isn't good."
The knot in my gut clenched tighter.
With that, he promptly turned on his heel and made to walk the perimeter. The four of us sat there, all with our own complicated emotions. None of us expressed any of them.