The maintenance tunnel was narrow—they were all narrow—and Tess was noticing it more now.

  She crawled forward on her hands and knees, tool belt scraping against ferrocrete, the medical kit bumping against her hip. Amber emergency lights flickered every ten meters, casting long shadows that stretched and twisted as she moved. The air smelled like dust and old metal, with an undercurrent of something sharper—ozone, maybe, or residual Aether discharge from the explosion.

  The map overlay in her vision showed the path ahead, a winding route through Floor 1’s substructure. Green lines traced the maintenance tunnels, blue markers indicated access hatches, and a pulsing red dot marked Petra’s location in Sector E. Tess was maybe halfway there.

  Her knees were going to hate her for this.

  “Bee?” she said, her voice echoing slightly in the enclosed space.

  BEE: I am here. Tracking your position. You are maintaining good progress toward Sector E.

  “How’s Petra?”

  BEE: Still in the chamber. Minimal movement. I believe she is conserving energy. The Alpha-Spawn is currently patrolling the primary corridor approximately forty meters from her position.

  Tess crawled past a junction where three tunnels met, following the green line in her overlay. The floor was uneven here, pitted and scarred from decades of neglect. She had to squeeze through a section where the ceiling had sagged, pressing herself flat to slide through.

  “How are Carys and Mikhail doing?” Tess asked.

  BEE: They have re-entered Floor 1 through the north access corridor. They are moving carefully, staying in areas with recent Delver activity. I believe they are trying to assess the Alpha’s behavior patterns before engaging.

  Smart—better than charging in blind.

  Tess reached the next access hatch—a circular door set into the tunnel wall, marked with faded yellow hazard stripes. She pressed her palm against the access panel beside it.

  The panel flashed green, and the hatch cycled open with a soft hiss.

  She crawled through into the next tunnel segment, and the hatch sealed behind her automatically. The new passage was slightly wider, with better lighting. Tess sat back on her heels for a moment, catching her breath.

  “Bee,” she said slowly. “Why don’t delvers use these tunnels?”

  BEE: I am sorry?

  “The maintenance tunnels. They go everywhere, right? Bypass the main corridors completely. Spawns can’t fit in here. It’d be the safest way to move through the floors.”

  A pause.

  BEE: The maintenance access system is restricted. Administrative access only. Delvers could not open most hatches.

  Tess looked back at the hatch she’d just passed through. “But I didn’t do anything. I just touched the panel.”

  BEE: That’s… An interesting observation. The dungeon systems likely recognize your {null} class designation as a repair subroutine. To anyone else, most hatches are locked. They would require bypass codes or physical cutting tools to access, and both would trigger security alerts that would reset the floor.

  Tess blinked. “I’ve been walking through locked doors this whole time?”

  BEE: Correct. I assumed you were aware.

  “I just thought…Well I guess I didn’t.”

  BEE: The access control system is one of the few subsystems still functioning at full capacity. It has never failed. You simply have permissions that supersede the restrictions.

  Tess looked at her hands, then at the sealed hatch behind her. She’d been moving through the dungeon like she owned it, and apparently, on some level, she did.

  That was unsettling.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “Good to know.”

  She crawled forward, following the map overlay. The tunnel sloped downward slightly, then leveled out. Each hatch she reached flashed green at her touch, each sealed passage opening as though it had been waiting for her.

  It would have been impressive if it weren’t so eerie.

  The amber lights flickered as she moved deeper into Sector E. The air grew warmer. Not uncomfortably hot, but noticeable—like standing too close to an oven. Tess wiped sweat from her forehead and kept moving.

  “Bee, how far am I from Petra’s location?”

  BEE: Approximately sixty meters. The next junction will bring you within range of the chamber. However, I should warn you—thermal readings in that area are elevated. The Alpha-Spawn passed through that corridor recently.

  Tess’s stomach tightened. “How recently?”

  BEE: Thirty-seven seconds ago.

  She froze, listening. The tunnel was silent except for the faint hum of ventilation and her own breathing.

  “Where is it now?”

  BEE: Moving south toward the stairwell access. The patrol pattern suggests it is guarding the route to Floor 2. Petra is trapped between its position and the staging area.

  Tess started crawling again, faster now. The map showed the junction ahead—a T-intersection where she could turn toward Petra’s chamber. The tunnel walls were warmer here, almost hot to the touch. She could smell something acrid, like burned plastic.

  She reached the junction and turned right. The tunnel narrowed again, forcing her to crawl on her elbows. Her tool belt caught on a protruding bolt, and she had to wriggle backward to free it.

  “Come on,” she muttered, shoving the belt higher on her waist.

  The tunnel opened into a small service alcove—barely two meters across, with a maintenance terminal mounted on the wall and a cluster of conduit pipes running along the ceiling. A narrow ventilation grate was set into the floor, and beyond it, Tess could hear something.

  A low, rumbling growl. Distant, but unmistakable.

  She pressed herself against the wall.

  BEE: The Alpha is passing through the corridor below you. Do not move.

  Tess held her breath.

  The growl grew louder—a deep, resonant sound that vibrated through the floor. Heat radiated up through the grate, and a flicker of orange light danced across the alcove’s walls. Tess could hear the heavy scrape of claws on ferrocrete, the hiss of super-heated air.

  Then, slowly, the sound faded.

  BEE: It has moved on. You are clear. Your elevated heart rate is noted.

  Tess exhaled shakily. She’d process that later.

  BEE: Petra’s chamber is directly ahead. There is a maintenance access door approximately ten meters from your current position.

  Tess looked at the tunnel ahead. It continued straight, ending at another hatch marked with yellow stripes. She crawled forward, ignoring the ache in her knees and the heat still radiating from the grate below.

  When she reached the hatch, she pressed her palm to the access panel.

  The panel flashed green, and the pressure seals released with a hiss.

  The hatch swung open, and Tess was greeted with a disaster.

  The corridor beyond was scorched black. The walls were cracked and blistered, ferrocrete melted into smooth, glassy patches. Emergency lighting flickered weakly overhead, casting the space in a sickly yellow-green. To her left, the corridor ended in a pile of rubble where part of the ceiling had collapsed. To her right, a heavy blast door hung at an angle, its frame bent and twisted from some massive impact.

  The door to Petra’s chamber.

  Tess squeezed through the hatch into the corridor and stood carefully, scanning the area. The door was warped, the top hinge torn free. It leaned inward, leaving a gap of maybe fifteen centimeters near the floor and a slightly larger gap near the top.

  “Petra?” Tess called quietly.

  No response came from inside the chamber.

  She moved closer to the door, crouching near the gap. “Petra, it’s Tess. The Technician. We met outside the dungeon. Can you hear me?”

  A shift of movement from inside. Then a voice—hoarse, pained, but unmistakable.

  “Toolbelt?”

  Tess almost laughed. “Yeah. It’s me.”

  “How the hell did you get here?”

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  “Maintenance tunnels. Are you hurt?”

  A pause. “Broken collarbone. Maybe cracked ribs. Burns on my left side. And I think I have a concussion because this conversation doesn’t make sense.”

  Tess knelt by the gap, peering through. She could see Petra sitting against the far wall, her polished armor scorched and dented. Her left arm hung awkwardly, and her face was pale beneath streaks of soot and blood.

  “I brought a medical kit,” Tess said. “I’m going to pass it through.”

  She unclipped the kit from her belt and slid it through the gap near the floor. Petra leaned forward with a wince, grabbing it with her good hand.

  “Sealant foam, bandages, stim injector, pain suppressors,” Tess said. “Use the foam on the burns first. Then the stim if you need it.”

  Petra opened the kit, her movements slow and deliberate. “You came through the maintenance tunnels. Alone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those are locked.”

  “Apparently not for me.”

  Petra looked at her through the gap, eyes sharp despite the pain. “What kind of Technician are you?”

  Tess didn’t answer as she decided. She pulled the communicator from her belt and held it up. “This is connected to the dungeon’s AI. She can see the Alpha through the cameras. If you keep this with you, she can guide you out safely. I’ll need it back.”

  Petra stared. “The what!?”

  BEE: Tess, are you sure this is advisable given her family?

  “You heard me.” Tess slid the communicator through the gap. “Bee, say hello.”

  The communicator crackled to life, CORE-B’s voice clear and steady. “Hello… Petra. I am monitoring the Alpha-Spawn’s position. You are currently safe, but you must remain quiet. It will return to this corridor within the next three minutes. Please reduce the communicator’s volume to the lowest it can go.”

  Petra took the communicator, turning it over in her hand. “This is insane. I definitely hit my head.”

  “Welcome to my week,” Tess said.

  She stood and examined the blast door more closely. The gap was maybe fifteen centimeters at the widest point—not nearly enough for a person to squeeze through, even without armor.

  “Bee, is there a maintenance hatch inside Petra’s chamber?”

  BEE: Checking floor plans. One moment. I should mention that my architectural database is twenty years out of date, but these guard stations rarely change.

  Tess peered through the gap again, scanning the walls inside. A supply room with storage lockers, the walls scorched black—no secondary exits that she could see.

  BEE: No, that chamber was a guard station, sometimes referred to as a Checkpoint. Maintenance access was intentionally excluded for security reasons. The only exits are the blast door you are looking at and a standard door leading to the main corridor on the opposite side.

  “So I can’t get to you from here,” Tess said to Petra. “Not through maintenance. And this door’s too warped to open without cutting equipment.”

  Petra looked at the gap, then gestured weakly toward the wall behind her. “The other door is intact. Opens to the main corridor. But that’s where our fire-breathing friend is patrolling.”

  BEE: Anxiety Protocols: 68%. This is a problematic configuration. Petra’s only viable exit requires traversing corridors currently occupied by a hostile Alpha-spawn.

  “Yeah, I’m getting that,” Tess muttered.

  She moved to examine the blast door’s frame. Bent outward, the locking mechanism sheared off. The door itself had been blasted inward by something with incredible force.

  There was no way to fix this without industrial equipment and several hours of work.

  “What happened?” Tess asked.

  Petra was applying sealant foam to a burn on her side, her jaw tight. “We found the stairwell to Floor 2. Set up a trap out there to take down whatever was guarding it. Fire-based Spawn showed up, and the trap went off early. Carys and Mikhail got out. I didn’t.”

  “And the Spawn?”

  “Very pissed off.”

  Tess looked around the chamber she was in. The walls were scorched, and the ceiling showed damage in a radial pattern from the center of the room. The fire suppression nozzles overhead were dark, their indicator lights offline.

  “There goes my original plan. Fire suppression’s dead,” Tess said.

  “I noticed.”

  Tess stood and moved to the maintenance terminal embedded in the corridor wall near the door. She activated [ANALYZE], and the system’s structure unfolded in her vision:

  ·········································

  SECTOR E FIRE SUPPRESSION NODE

  Function: Environmental Safety · Fire Response

  Status: Degraded

  Last Error: Power Failure Cascade

  User Tech Skill: 4

  ·········································

  Detector Array ………. Offline

  Issue: Power loss

  Pressure Reserve …….. Online — 100%

  Nozzle Control ………. Offline

  Issue: Circuit damage in activation relay

  Manual Override ……… Available

  ·········································

  The system was offline, but the pressure reserve was still full. If she could reroute power to the detector array and bypass the damaged activation relay, she could trigger the suppression manually.

  Like a lot of her dungeon repairs, it might not be a perfect fix, but it might work once.

  Tess pulled her multi-tool from her belt and pried open the terminal’s access panel. Inside, the circuits were a mess—blackened and cracked from the explosion’s shockwave. She started tracing the power lines, looking for an intact pathway.

  “What are you doing?” Petra asked.

  “Fixing the fire suppression. If I can get it online, it might slow the Alpha down.”

  “That thing shoots fire. Water isn’t going to stop it.”

  “No, but it might make it avoid this section. Give you a window to move.”

  Petra was quiet for a moment. Then: “You’re not what I expected.”

  Tess didn’t look up from the terminal. “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. Someone less… competent.”

  “I fix things. It’s what I do.”

  She found a bypass route through a secondary circuit and started splicing connections. The work was delicate—one wrong move and the entire system would lock out. She worked slowly, methodically, testing each connection before moving to the next.

  Behind her, Petra’s breathing was labored. The stim injector hissed.

  “AI… Bee?” Petra said quietly into the communicator. “Where’s the Alpha now?”

  “Approaching the stairwell to Floor 2. It is holding position there, guarding the access point. I believe it is operating under a territorial directive—defending the route to the lower floors.”

  “So if I try to get to the stairs, it’ll come for me.”

  “Correct. Your only safe route is back to the staging area. But the Alpha’s patrol pattern blocks that path as well. You are effectively trapped until the floor reset in five hours and forty minutes.”

  “Great.”

  Tess finished the bypass and closed the access panel. She activated [INTERFACE], and…

  [INTERFACE] ERROR: 0/4 AP

  She paused. Zero AP. She’d used her last point for the dispenser ticket. The skill wouldn’t even activate without AP?

  She stared at the terminal, then at the damaged circuits inside. Without [INTERFACE], she couldn’t force the manual override. She’d need to repair the activation relay the old-fashioned way—physically replacing the damaged components.

  “Problem?” Petra asked.

  “I’m out of AP. Can’t activate the override remotely. I’ll have to fix the relay manually.”

  “AP regenerates pretty quickly in an active delve. When was the last time you used it?”

  Tess looked at the damage. The activation relay was buried behind three other circuit boards, all of which would need to be removed and reinstalled. This was going to take a while to fix.

  “Half an hour maybe? First time I’ve used them all up,” Tess answered.

  Petra leaned her head back against the wall. “Probably faster now with the increased Aether. So we’ve got maybe another half hour, maybe less, until you get a point back. Do we have that kind of time?”

  Bee’s text in her interface lit up.

  BEE: Tess, I am detecting movement. The Alpha is moving to this corridor. Estimated arrival: two minutes, eighteen seconds.

  She looked at the bent blast door, then at the maintenance hatch she’d come through. “Petra, it’s coming this way. I have to get back in the tunnels. Will you be okay?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really.”

  Petra managed a weak smile. “Then I’ll be fine. Go.”

  Tess grabbed her tool belt and moved toward the hatch. She paused at the opening, looking back at Petra through the gap in the door.

  “Bee will keep you updated,” Tess said. “Stay quiet. Don’t move unless she tells you to.”

  “Understood.”

  Tess crawled back into the tunnel and pulled the hatch shut behind her. She hurried through the service alcove and back to the T-junction, putting distance between herself and the corridor.

  BEE: The Alpha has entered the corridor. It is inspecting the blast door.

  Tess froze, listening.

  Through the tunnel walls, she could hear it—a low, rumbling growl that made the ferrocrete vibrate. Heat radiated through the surrounding metal, and she could smell smoke.

  BEE: It is moving on. Continuing patrol toward the staging area route.

  Tess exhaled slowly. “Is Petra okay?”

  BEE: Yes. She did not move. The Alpha did not detect her.

  “Good.”

  Tess sat back against the tunnel wall, thinking. The fire suppression needed manual repair, which would take too long while the Alpha was actively patrolling. Even if she got it working, triggering it once wouldn’t be enough to clear a path for Petra to escape.

  She needed a better plan.

  “Bee,” she said quietly. “Can you pull up a map of Sector E’s environmental systems? I need to see everything—fire suppression, ventilation, blast doors, cooling systems.”

  BEE: One moment.

  A schematic unfolded in Tess’s interface—a wireframe diagram of Sector E’s infrastructure. She could see the fire suppression nodes, the ventilation shafts, and the emergency blast doors that divided the corridors into sections. The cooling system for the Aether conduits ran beneath everything, a network of pipes and heat exchangers designed to manage thermal buildup.

  Tess studied the layout, her mind working through the problem.

  The Alpha was patrolling between Petra and both escape routes—the stairs to Floor 2 and the path back to the staging area. It was territorial, defending the stairwell. That meant it would prioritize threats near the stairs over threats elsewhere.

  If she could create a distraction near the stairwell, pull the Alpha away from Petra’s position, Carys and Mikhail could move in and extract her while the creature was occupied.

  But the distraction would have to be convincing. Heat, noise, movement—something the Alpha would interpret as a threat. And that was going to come with danger.

  She looked at the cooling system on the schematic. If she reversed the flow in one of the heat exchangers, it would trigger a thermal buildup alert. The system would vent excess heat through emergency release valves, creating a localized hot spot that the Alpha might investigate.

  Not an actual threat, but maybe enough to pull its attention.

  “Bee, can you track the Alpha’s response to environmental changes?” Tess asked.

  BEE: I have limited behavioral data, but yes. I can observe its reactions and adjust predictions accordingly. What are you planning?

  “I’m going to herd it. Use the environmental systems to create hot spots and cold zones, make it move where we want it to move. Pull it away from Petra long enough for Carys and Mikhail to get her out.”

  BEE: That is… highly experimental. I cannot guarantee the Alpha will respond predictably. My spawn behavioral models are based on approximately forty-five minutes of observation, which is not statistically significant.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  A pause.

  BEE: No, unfortunately.

  Tess pulled up the cooling systems on the map. The heat exchangers were manual-access only—she’d need to physically reach each one to adjust the flow. But the maintenance tunnels connected to most of them. She could move through the substructure, triggering vents and adjusting temperatures without ever entering the main corridors.

  “Bee,” Tess said. “Can you relay a message to Petra?”

  BEE: Yes. I will relay her responses.

  “I’m going to move the Alpha away from your position. When Bee gives you the signal, you run. Carys and Mikhail will meet you halfway.”

  BEE: “Run where?”

  “Back to the staging area. It’s the only route we can clear.”

  BEE: “And the stairs to Floor 2?”

  “Blocked. The Alpha’s not going to let you through.”

  There was a long delay, then Bee relayed Petra’s response:

  BEE: “I wanted to get to Floor 2.”

  “I know. But right now, I want you to not die. We can worry about Floor 2 later.”

  BEE: “Fine. I’ll follow your lead.”

  Tess looked at the schematic again, tracing potential routes. She’d need to hit three heat exchangers in sequence—create a pattern of thermal alerts that would draw the Alpha south, away from both Petra and the staging area route. Once it was far enough away, Carys and Mikhail could move.

  She stood, adjusting her tool belt. Her knees protested, but she ignored them.

  BEE: Tess… this is dangerous. If the Alpha does not respond as expected…

  “I know. But I can’t think of a better way to do this. If we wait for the floor to reset, Spawns are going to drop right on top of her, right?”

  BEE: That is likely. Floor resets are not known for their consideration of trapped delvers. I will track the Alpha’s position and provide real-time updates. Please be careful.

  “Always am.”

  Tess crawled back into the tunnels, following the green lines on her map toward the first heat exchanger. The path wound south, deeper into Sector E, closer to the stairwell and the Alpha’s territory.

  She could hear it now, growling and pacing in the distance.

  Petra was waiting with a broken collarbone and a communicator. Carys and Mikhail held position to the north. And through it all, Bee watched—tracking everything.

  Tess reached the first junction and turned left, heading toward the heat exchanger access point. The tunnel walls were hotter here, and the air was thick and uncomfortable.

  The map showed the exchanger ahead—thirty meters.

  She crawled forward towards the heat, and into the fire.