“Miss? Are you Lady Anna’s escort?”

Katherine tore her eyes away from the dark mansion looming above and beyond the towering spiked fence, and calmly turned her gaze to the guard that had approached her, briefly roving over his weapons, his demeanor, his stance.

He looked more like a tin bucket, but she supposed that it was effective in keeping away trouble, something that was sorely needed with how the third floor was like right now.

She nodded.

“Yes, I am. Is she coming outside soon?”

His expression twisted into a light, sympathetic grimace.

“I’m afraid Lady Anna has been forbidden from doing her usual erm… stroll. Security concerns, and with the situation outside being as it is, I’m sure you understand. Lady Anna said she will send a letter to your apartment when your services are required again. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”

She stood for a moment with a blank space in her mind, an empty void where a directive and a purpose used to be.

Her hands hid within her coat pockets as she turned and walked away, without a second word.

Two empty, soulless eyes slid across terrain and flesh and cloth alike, unseeing, wandering without a clear goal.

She would never not be thankful of what Emhreeil had done for her. Years and years spent ruminating and fantasizing about freedom, what it would be like. But she couldn't claim that it was a wholly positive thing for her, to suddenly be free.

She wasn’t used to stagnation before attaining freedom. This feeling of not having anything to do. There was always something. Some chore to do, some preparation, some command, schedule, or person to help. She also wasn't used to being so directionless. When she’d been granted freedom one afternoon, without any warning but a vague sentence spoken days ago, she realized how lost she was within the limitless paths laid before her.

How the world could feel so very empty when it suddenly became so vast, and all that occupied it was herself, alone.

It felt like breathing manually, like she was overthinking her every step until all she could do was stumble and wonder why the more she thought about it, the more unstable her path became.

Red light eventually filtered into her vision, and her steps slowed, struggling to bring focus to her gaze as it moved over tinted glass.

Her eyes rose, inspecting the establishment, the corny quotes of eroticism plastered all over it.

She’d been to this brothel many times. Never as a client or worker, of course. She’d follow Lady Anna and do her job, standing guard as she healed whoever she could, however she could, nothing more and nothing less.

But for a brief moment, she considered it, just this once. Maybe laying with someone would clear her head. Fill that numb, cold void.

Then she remembered what she’d seen inside such establishments, in the back rooms where no clients went. Teenage girls beaten bloody, goblin girls, little better than children, curled in unresponsive balls, eyes somehow emptier than her own.

Her eyes lost focus as she turned, and kept walking.

She needed something.

Anything.

As a child, twenty-something years ago and an entire sea away, she’d watch from underneath the stands in the fighting pits between people’s boots, day after day, whenever she had free time. The way people fought, the way they moved. The way they died, blood and broken teeth mixing into the orange sand.

It hadn’t taught her how to fight well, but it had taught her better than most.

She could try that. Find some bar a little too large to be reasonable, wander down to the fighting ring usually held below. Maybe waltz into the third floor’s lower reaches, amongst wooden boxes and firelight within metal barrels, pay for two gaunt unfortunates to fight for her amusement in their improvised fighting rings, wrestling in the gray mud.

Would that fill the void with nausea or nostalgia? Maybe guilt as she’d wonder what Emhreeil would think of her for contributing to that?

She kept walking, dispassionate, lost in her thoughts.

The noise around her rose and fell, from growled whispers in the tight confines of alleyways, to buzzing little market streets, selling trinkets and Dungeon curiosities, supposed maps and miracle potions, a hazy, empty mass of senses that molded together in her memory before quickly slipping away altogether.

Maybe she should have been more careful, paid more attention, but she just couldn’t find it in herself to care. Coupled with the fact the third floor was rapidly turning into a war zone, something like getting mugged was the least of her concerns while roaming the streets.

She did have to dodge out of the way of a pickpocket though, a few times.

Children, always.

Eventually, her eyes moved over a vaguely familiar alley, a quaint little tailor’s shop at the corner, and just beyond it, a familiar square.

There was an orphanage there that did some minor medical care for cheap to fund itself, tucked away behind a blocky apartment building, just behind the square’s main street. She could honestly only remember it because she’d seen her first ever Awakened stray somewhere around here. And because it was the first time she’d seen a Skill cast spend so much of Lady Anna’s mana, just for an ear infection.

Her mind transitioned from that thought, wandered to all the times she’d help with things big and small as Lady Anna did her work, positioning her patients, giving her tools and the like, like an assistant.

She wanted to do something along those lines. Try to be like those people she admired and appreciated.

There weren’t a whole lot of those. At least not by comparison. Emhreeil was always what first came to mind, then Sir Carmian Kervile, Lady Anna’s father, and Lady Anna herself. Part of it was their kindness, but she was not self-aware enough to know the deeper reasons as to why she admired them, and she did not care to be introspective about it either. It was what it was.

She slowly wandered forward for a few seconds, the bottom half of her face obscured by her coat’s high collar, staring down the cramped alley, before eventually deciding on what she’d occupy her time with.

A bright red uniform, with metal pauldrons engraved with a gear, torch, and a chevron underneath, hurriedly jogged past the alley and out of sight.

Like being suddenly doused in cold water, her senses sharpened and flit back into her mind, the fugue she’d been entrenched in being snapped in an instant. She stopped in her tracks, turning around without a second thought.

The faint, chaotic background sounds in her mind processed, turning from empty noise into yelling voices and the scuffle of clothes and shoes grating against stone, into the sound of impacts and grunts, a concert of struggle.

Her steps slowed once more, until she’d ground to a halt, indecision gnawing at the back of her neck. Wisps of smog passed through the entrance of the alleyway, dancing around the metal bars of its open gate, obscuring the outside world. The alley suddenly felt so much more private than it was. A little piece of the world, cut away for her convenience, to give her a moment to think.

She tightened the collar around the bottom half of her face, the acrid stench of wandering chemicals lessening, her eyes observing the uneven grimy cobbles underneath her boots, the barred window sinking into the floor just beside them as she listened.

It didn’t sound nearly as bad as some other scenes she’d had to turn away from since a week ago. There were no screams of agony, no explosions. There was no sound of shattering glass and quickly roaring fire. There was no group of guardsmen beating submission onto random passersby just to send a message.

No sound of blades whistling through the air.

It sounded like a minor scuffle at best. Someone got too uppity, maybe their spine was a little too rigid to bend down for a chest-puffed guard. She wanted to intervene, truth be told. She wanted to fight, even if just to feel her blood pump with adrenaline, in a fight where the stakes were not death but a single beatdown.

But there was no…

Weight, in that thought. No drive, no fuel.

It was like saying she wanted to be eating fresh bread tonight. It felt empty, muted, and passionless.

Her steps resumed, a faint direction in her mind.

A church, a house of healing, a clinic, the aftermath of a battle. Anywhere where she could help with her meager medical knowledge, attained through observation alone, she’d go there. In fact, why stop there? She was terrible with children, but she was great with chores. An orphanage, maybe, or one of the Crow Church’s soup kitchens, she could help there as well.

Because she had to do something.

And the only way left to go was down. She didn’t know what the second floor was like right now, and she didn’t care.

Cobbles slowly turned to textured metal, alleys opened to vast squares and overhangs. Her eyes peered through the railings at the countless lights below and above, some obscured by wandering clouds of smog, some drowned out by wires and cables.

In a seemingly meaningless alley, a group of tense, quiet strangers formed, waiting for the lifting platform within to get back up, and she moved in to stand amongst them.

At first, she’d been baffled at how and why everything was so chaotic in the Dungeon. A tiny alleyway could hide within a massive, busy store, while in the most hard-to-notice places one could conceive of, laid countless lifts, to take people up and down through the gargantuan, metallic plates that formed what one could easily describe as a beehive of a country.

The lifting platform’s upper mechanisms whirred to life, and she kept all senses but her sight on her surroundings as she politely pushed through the crowd, curiosity tugging at her.

With one hand firmly grasping a pipe beside the latticework door of folding metal, and her ears open for anyone rushing to push her, she extended her neck and leaned forward a little.

Four cables as thick as her arms, of magisteel alloy, extended down a dark metal shaft, several hundred feet deep, and in the small open area she could see at the bottom, no bigger than her thumb nail, was another sprawl of homes and factories and streets and towers of various purposes.

She had little appreciation for the arts, having spent more than a decade in Emhreeil’s home. She’d grown used to them.

But there was still something infinitely humbling in the nigh infinite scale of the Dungeon. In the fact she was but one worthless soul, letting time flit by among a dozen million more, trapped in a colossal island people called a country.

A tiny dot of black quickly ascended, a metallic contraption just twelve feet wide and long, more of an open top box than a platform.

She leaned back into the safety of flat ground, without her back exposed to anyone, and pressed against the wall like everyone else, a silent aura of distrust in each of their searching eyes, hers included.

The platform soon enough rose to their level, with a loud, off-key ring and a flash of red light.

The folding metal doors creaked and groaned for a moment, attempting to move on their broken rails, before giving up, and through them squeezed in a small crowd of people, some wearing colors, some not.

Two of them, guards.

There was a sudden spike of tension in the air, in the way even the hushed whispers of conversation and the shuffles of clothes suddenly turned dead silent, the way two dozen eyes nailed themselves to the two of them within the cramped alley, hers included.

The senior guardsman’s steps paused as he looked at them with a subtle weight in his gaze, as if weighing a decision, while those from below simply wandered onwards to continue their day.

She idly remembered hearing something about a curfew, declared by The Guard to those who would listen.

But then again, crime lords, average people, religions and businessmen ruled the third floor. Few listened to the Guard.

A decision was made in the tense silence, and he tilted his head down a little and said something in a polite manner as he pushed through, something she didn’t quite catch. It somehow sounded snide, like an attempt at a joke, despite most likely being an attempt to diffuse the tension.

Her eyes flicked to a young man’s shifting hands, the pointy end of a shank moving about his pocket, his grimy scarf wrapped around his nose, highlighting the scaled ridges of his cheekbone, slowly drawing her attention to the hatred in his eyes.

She knew what was about to happen, and wished no part in it. She maneuvered between a dozen different people that were trying to leave the tight alleyway, and brushed shoulders with another dozen, flitting into the slowly refilling platform.

Some hesitated between looking at the tense scene and getting on the lift, delaying further. Seven people joined her on the platform, most mimicking her behavior if they were able. Back to the bars, eyes shifting and observant, and gazes heavy.

As the lift’s mechanisms groaned to life, and her organs began pulling upwards from the suddenly rapid descent, the sounds of a struggle roared to life, just out of sight.

The descent continued, uncaring. Her eyes flit up, the pitch black confines of the shaft lit by only the dim yellow light crystals just outside the alley. The chorus of yelling voices and meaty thuds quickly elevated to elated yells and cathartic spews of profanity, the cracking of bones.

Her eyes flicked back down.

Two versus two dozen. They never had a chance. They’d probably die.

She couldn’t find it in herself to care. Much like with everyone else down here, it was difficult for her to look past the uniform and look at the person wearing it. Many of which were even worse than said uniform.

Faint light burst from around the rim of the platform and washed over her boots as the shaft rose quickly above them, like a curtain peeling back to show the wider world.

Cautious or not, she couldn’t stop her eyes from wandering to the side, admiring the scant few moments of beauty one could find down here, in the countless glittering light crystals and light bulbs, spotlights and occasional enchanted signs gently glowing purple. Much of the dizzying complexity of the Dungeon was being obscured and distorted, blurred by wandering pockets of smog which looked like innocent mist from afar, rather than gray-brown clouds of poison.

Her gaze drifted to the left, observing the nearby tower, a massive cylinder-like structure, customized progressively to add balconies and banners and cables and a myriad other details. Towers that were created just as much for structural support as they were meant for decadence, to those who could afford such.

Maybe if she had high enough Perception, she would peer into one of its countless windows, beyond the mirror enchantments, and see those within staring back at her, eye to eye, for just once.

Her head turned, looking through the bars and trying to figure out if she could recognize any of her usual routes from above.

Despite their quick descent and the vast distances, she could. She could see the gigantic piles of gravel and the dark spot of slave lodgings, nestled near the walls in the far distance, barely visible due to distance and smog, one of their most frequent visits. Half-forgotten explanations were brought to the forefront.

Lung burns from chemical gasses, paired with inhalation of mana crystal dust, leading to lung rot, people coughing out shimmering blood, then bits of their own lungs, until they would inevitably die. Interaction with unprocessed, raw mana crystals without any alchemical lead protections, leading to severe mana poisoning. People who had used mana before, or had developed their mana circuits to any degree, would likely die screaming within a few months.

Slave mines rarely had anyone within them that lasted for more than five or six years. Especially considering the vast majority of slaves were goblins, which were notoriously fragile.

It was where Lady Anna had gained the vast majority of her Levels.

And current beliefs.

Treatments there were… out of her range. She was no mage, she had no in-depth knowledge of how anything worked inside someone’s body, and she had no Skills to cleanse people’s bodies like Lady Anna.

Brown eyes shifted, moving from one spot to the next. She faintly recognized the blue-painted banners of two clinics extending high above their surroundings, miles apart, of blue syringes and a scalpel, intertwined, topped off with light crystals hidden within blue-tinted glass, lighting the dimly lit streets they were nestled in with soothing blue, easily spottable from anywhere.

Which was the entire point, from what she knew. The sheer contrast of blue against dark gray, browns, greens, and striking yellows and orange, made it difficult not to notice them.

They were more… official clinics, however. House Tillenhall’s clinics. They had standards, and would not accept some random nobody’s help, even a minor one, not without hurting their reputation and prestige, which was already waning as far as she knew.

Her eyes continued as the world below grew closer.

Some flickers of red and green, purples and enchanted signs that looked like they were moving, just barely. Brothels and casinos, bars and general hotspots of recreation. She dismissed them.

A lot of flickers of fire, of writhing masses nestled within alleys and squares.

Even from up here, she could hear the faint roar of their chants, a faint glimpse of undulating masses, turned towards some unknown speaker.

It was rather bizarre that the faces of the brewing civil war were a bizarre union of religious figures, crime lords and Adventurers of all people.

Yet, Lady Anna’s irate ranting when questioned on the absurdity of this, made more sense the more she observed.

She could understand why the religions got involved. The Six-Eyed crow’s church had many beliefs and genuine grievances that spoke to the people. They were aligned on the same tracks, for the Six Winged Dove was always one step away from using the nobility above to prosecute them out of existence, which was a sentiment the common people shared heavily, if one simply removed the religious aspects and replaced it with a common hatred of those above, that had been brewing for four hundred years.

The cultists of the Struggler’s Mantle wished to capitalize on the situation to legitimize themselves, throwing their lot in with the Crow, citing that struggle and war with those considered as ‘stronger’, were… the… meaning of life…?

She couldn’t quite remember.

The Gatekeeper’s Church was, as usual, painfully neutral and quiet in her eyes, though Lady Anna had said something about a missive that spoke of the tragedy of lives shortened, or some such. But they had no real stakes in any of this, so she could understand. It was the same case for the other minor religions.

The crime lords that called themselves ‘Barons’, as if in mockery of those above, that were the only real authority that existed in the lower ends of the second floor, and all around the third? It was painfully simple. They’d carved themselves a place in the Dungeon, and thus wished to keep the influence of the kingdom as far away as possible. There were rumors of an alliance, at least temporarily.

Which she also understood. They saw a bigger threat to their survival than each other, and banded together.

It was all a bit complicated, but much of it made sense.

But Adventurers? Much like Lady Anna had eloquently said, there was no reason for the Adventurer’s Guild in the third floor to put its foot into the meat grinder that was to come. In fact, it was in their absolute best interests to shut up and be quiet until this all blew over, so they could continue doing what they usually did, without any real consequence or change.

There were ideas as to why, maybe due to the Guildmaster’s origins, or due to the fact many Adventurers had come to consider the Dungeon their home and saw the heavy hand that the upper capital used in trying to assert control over it.

But those reasons all felt… weak. It felt like the Guild had decided to put itself in the ring, and half the Adventurers just followed because they wished to complain about the portals being shut down to better control the flow of resources that trickled down to the third floor. She doubted any of them would put their blades where their mouths were.

Then there was the fact that all the common people were split between wanting this war to happen or prevent it, to keep the Dungeon as it was or to allow the kingdom to bring order, exchanging one group of uncaring exploiters for another, but with the vague hope of stability and peace that the Dungeon Barons could not and would not offer.

Above was… very tense. Below was slowly and steadily turning into a warzone the more people resisted and the more things escalated from both sides. The Guard kept pushing harder in an attempt to assuage the worries of the Highborn about the ‘Dungeon terrorists’, or simply to not lose face by appearing incompetent. Perhaps even for petty revenge. She had little doubt that the standing army would soon be called forward, however small it was in comparison to Carmera’s population.

Civil war was a fast reaction in her mind. Something that just sparked like a candle and burned until either side won.

This had proven her wrong. It was a painful grind of butting heads and trying to see who would back down first, until heads turned to swords over the course of many, many days filled with chaos and conflict.

It was annoying and too dangerous for her to reasonably entertain involving herself with.

She also didn’t doubt that those above simply wanted to institute order in order to begin collecting taxes properly, something which the gangs have made an impossibility for decades, collecting said tax themselves.

It was so tiresome.

In fact, why was she wasting energy thinking about all this? It was all such a headache to sort in her mind. So… complicated. And it was all for something that, in truth, she could not care less about beyond a surface level curiosity to know who would next hold the leash around the Dungeon's neck.

A white flash of light extended up to the sky before being devoured by the smog from within an alley with the faint crackle of lightning, fading away in an instant.

With a defeated sigh, her eyes moved down to stare at her own boots.

She’d have to go even lower. Far, far further down, close to the entrances of the fourth floor. She doubted any of The Guard would have gone down there yet. They were stretched unimaginably thin among the second and third floor.

So she would head deeper and deeper, until she found someone or somewhere to help, like Emhreeil or Lady Anna likely would.

It was almost ironic, that the deepest reaches of the third floor had suddenly turned into the most peaceful and safe.

They descended past roads and bridges, past metallic platforms hundreds of feet wide yet still cramped with shops and people, and her eyes drank it all in.

The lifts were commandeered by the gangsters a while ago, so she’d only taken their services once or twice, unwilling to part with a few coppers for their use. But with how things were right now, neither side cared enough to station people at the lifts. And she could not deny that she had been missing out.

The buildings and factories below eventually rose around the platform, drowning out the lights and intertwining levels, embracing her back into tense mundanity.

The hiss of enchantments and a slight rocking of the platform was the preamble to the platform once more being embraced by a metallic shaft, correcting the platform into fitting properly, and she lifted her head, staring up at the numerous buildings and facilities glued onto the top of the level above, nestled just underneath where she’d started her descent, at all the numerous complex yet muted sights she’d went past.

Or their undersides, rather.

Their momentum suddenly slowed before halting altogether, and she was jerked out of her idle thoughts with the muted thud of the platform sinking into place. Her eyes fell to observe the doors, and as they creaked aside, their intertwining bars folding to let them out, her eyes flicked to the group of five Guards huddled around a close circle just to the left.

The way everyone in the platform had a shared moment of hesitance was mildly amusing, but the red light started flickering, and thus, they were forced outside, squeezing past each other.

Fortunately, besides a wary look by a couple of them, nothing happened, and she filtered out of the alley with everyone else, continuing to walk through the streets.

It felt so different, yet the same.

There was a sense of… energy, energy that always seemed to be lacking in the third floor outside a select few places. It was the best way she could put it.

That sense of life and activity.

It was in the char marks of liquor bombs occasionally painting the metal and stone beneath her feet black, in the way she would turn out into a big street and see the remains of makeshift barricades made of sheet metal and fabrics and wooden palettes, shoved against the walls for people to drag into place whenever necessary.

In the way people’s eyes had lost some of that… that fog of apathy. That cold sheen of distrust. Not much, but some.

The distant, rhythmic chanting of words she could not quite make out certainly added a hint of unity and community this place didn’t seem to have before.

She wished to slip back into her usual fugue and wander through the streets, down to her destination, but with such a stark difference, such developments happening all around her, it was difficult to do so.

It was curiosity that made her steps slow, before eventually changing direction, vigor renewed.

She wanted to see what the chanting was about.

It took more than a few minutes of maneuvering through alleys and some of the more open, wide streets, but by simply following the chanting and the cheering, she eventually found her way. She walked through an alley, turned her eyes to the right, and was met with a loose wall of people, dressed in browns and grays and blacks, rough worker’s pants and a myriad more, pumping their fists up with passion.

It felt so strange to see something like this, in the third floor of all places.

And she was…

A little too short to see what was happening. Curse her genetics. Though she was sure being malnourished as a child did not help with that.

For once, as she approached someone to ask them a question, it didn’t feel like she was about to have a mental spar, or impromptu interrogation. If anything, the sheer… energy of the crowd, it felt like it was seeping into her, somehow. She kind of… liked it?

Even if the chanting of ‘off with their head’ was a rather grim one. And very loud.

“Excuse me, sir?” She asked and lightly tapped at a middle aged man’s shoulder, jerking back when he whirled around, eyes wide and wild, before settling on her and relaxing, his shoulders drooping.

“Succubi’s tits, you scared the shit outta me.” He groaned out, almost yelling to be heard over the chanting, before taking a deep breath through his nose and resetting his shoulders. “Whaddya want?” He asked, not quite cagey, but not exactly friendly either.

“I was just wondering what exactly this is all about. I haven’t been paying much attention.” She asked- well, more like yelled, and the man's brows rose.

“What do you think it is? Buncha spooks got caught by the Beakers, they’re executing the bastards. Wanna stick around? Ye might catch one o’ their heads!” He exclaimed with almost childish excitement, gesturing vaguely behind him, and as if on cue, a round, whirling object rose above the crowd and fell in an arch, spewing blood all the while. The chants broke into roars of elation and savage glee, and the man turned around, leaning and jumping to catch a glimpse, roaring along with them, fists raised high.

Her nose wrinkled as she fought to keep the disgust off her face.

Any positive feelings she might have had about this odd congregation vanished in an instant.

These people were acting like animals. And to some extent, they’ve been treated like animals, so she could… kind of understand them.

That didn’t mean she had to like it.

As she turned and walked away, she idly wondered if ‘spooks’ was the new slang for the Guards or if the people getting executed were just some rival gangsters.

She sighed through her nose as she began making her way to one of the numerous lift stations, preparing herself to part with a few coppers.

By the time she got there, even her prodigious stamina had been getting somewhat wrung dry. Between dodging conflicts, trying not to get lost, and the sheer distance, her Endurance meant that she’d negated an exhaustion-induced coma in exchange for her feet being in constant pain.

And the gondola trip was not nearly as entertaining as the platform. It was essentially a repurposed train segment stripped bare and turned sideways before being connected to a wire lift system. She was not well versed in the history of the Dungeon, but judging by the flaking paint and the numbers on the segment, this was likely ripped from an actual train and dragged down here for this purpose.

Not very confidence inspiring.

It also had much less visibility, to start with.

Additionally, it was slow, the descent was diagonal rather than straight down, and she couldn’t relax at all, as the “gondola” was not very stabilized. Gentle rocking was fine, if a bit annoying, but coupled with the stomach-cramping heights stretching out below her just beyond the windows, it made her feel like a stretched wire on the brink of snapping, tense to the core.

By the time the lift slowed and the disembarking horn sounded, she felt almost twice as tired as when the ride began, basically stumbling out of the moving death trap along with the other two dozen passengers.

Many headed for the factories, twisted titans of glass and steel and pipeworks in the distance.

She stood for a moment, watching the crowd disperse and allowing the knot in her stomach to unwind itself, before turning and walking towards the railing, eyes meticulously flitting through the eye-hurting mess of complexity that was the dungeon’s deepest habitable reaches.

No blue lights. No banners she could see. No clinic signs.

Then she saw it, the sign of a Crow’s church, six feathers arranged in a star, each cradling a beady eye in the middle, each glowing a soft red, towering hundreds of feet into the air with the help of a thick metal tower at its base. Nearby said church, she thought she idly recognized a soup kitchen, near the glass factories. And as she turned her head and leaned forward a little to squint, in the distance, she could vaguely remember the red-painted roof of an orphanage.

None of those destinations were close, but it was close enough for her poor feet to handle.

And they were the only places she could see from this position that fit her goals.

So, she began the long trek down once more.

“Just hold him down?” She asked, just to confirm, and the nun, clad in a feathered cloak of what she assumed was black dyed chicken feathers, turned to smile and nod at her.

She breathed out slowly, a hiss of a sigh, and set her left forearm across the man’s knees and her right hand across his chest.

She wasn't sighing because she didn't want to do this, she was sighing because she was frankly, completely exhausted. After working in the soup kitchen of this specific church for almost four hours, and walking what she estimated to be twenty-something miles total today, she could barely walk straight anymore.

Which was a good thing, honestly. She didn't mind. She was planning to go to that orphanage after she was done here, if she didn't collapse from exhaustion first.

But trying to hold someone down while feeling like a sack of rocks was not her idea of fun.

He was a little too out of it to react or understand what was happening, and by the time he felt the nun’s bonesaw rake through his lower leg, a twisted, inflamed mess, it was too late for his screams to change anything.

It was over in ten seconds, and she kept holding the man down as another nun came and used a single burst from a sprinkler full of healing potion on his stump, a diluted mix, just barely enough to hasten the healing process to where the blood would clot and stop the bleeding.

Then she was practically shoved out of the way in the cramped confines of the backrooms, which she provided no protest to as she waited for the nameless nun to finish her work.

It took a while.

And so did every other patient after him. It was a slow, slow grind where minutes felt like hours.

The vast majority of it was actually far more mundane than the first person she helped with. Bringing warm water, throwing out dirty bandages, helping with minor things as the nun did the brunt of the work.

She still felt like a walking puppet, but at least the strings guiding her had some semblance of purpose.

In the dead time as the nun finished up with setting back the blankets of a sickly old man, she turned to observe the room with a tired gaze, and her eyes immediately jerked to the underside of a single, strangely well-taken care of bed in the corner, drawn there by subtle movement where there shouldn’t be any.

Big brown eyes within a scruffy little green head topped with brown hair stared back at her, and she dumbly blinked at the goblin that had seemed to claim the underside of a patient’s bed as its lurking place, clad in a severely oversized red shirt and hugging a rucksack seemingly made of said shirt.

“Is that supposed to be there?” She questioned, not bothering to turn her head around, continuing the odd staring competition she’d started with the goblin.

“What?” The nun asked, before a soft ‘oh!’ of realization left her. “Yes, it is. It’s the patient’s. Normally we’d turn away those who practice slavery, but judging by how attached and loyal it is, we assumed it’s been treated well. As well as… some other factors.” The nun cryptically said, and she turned around to stare at her blankly.

Oh, she should probably do the eyebrow thing.

She tried to raise a questioning brow, but the movement was awkward and twitchy, so she instantly gave up and returned to her deadpan expression. She was just not used to emoting.

“You can’t say something like that, in that tone, and expect me not to ask what those ‘factors’ are.” She commented, and a smile spread across the woman’s motherly face.

“I know, I’m just hesitant to speak of them. Things have gotten much more tense since, uh. More tense.” The nun fumbled, the smile disappearing, before her head turned, regarding her with a single critical eye. After a few seconds of stillness, she tucked the sheet fully under the mattress, and sighed, getting up to look her eye-to-eye.

“It’s not exactly a secret, but try not to spread this around. We don’t need more trouble than we already have here.”

She nodded wordlessly. The nun gestured to the bed with her chin.

“Long story short, that girl killed a guard and a guard captain in one of the processing facilities nearby, walked out covered in blood and gore, wearing the captain’s clothes and jacket, all the insignia scratched off, and collapsed in the middle of the street just outside. It wasn’t anything amazing in the greater scope of things, but it certainly gave some people the realization that the guards are just meat and bone beneath their fancy uniforms. Some factory workers stumbled onto her and brought her to us, about two days ago.”

She couldn’t quite contain the mild widening of her eyes as she turned to look at said patient.

They looked more like a breathing skeleton from afar. She could see the lines of their bones through the blanket. And she’d killed two guards that she herself would have trouble dealing with, individually. Never mind together.

“That’s… impressive.” She simply said, too tired to convey how impressive that was though her tone, then tilted her head just a smidge. “What’s her problem? Besides severe malnourishment?” She asked, much like with all the other patients she wished to satisfy her curiosity about.

“Well, she’s likely not going to make it, so I doubt there’s any reason to focus on her.” The nun said in a rather subdued tone, and Katherine let her brows furrow into a light frown.

“Why wouldn’t she make it? She just looks skinny. And… absurdly pale.” She added, a little awkwardly.

Because being pale in the Dungeon was normal. Everyone, unless a traveler or of some desert descent, was pale as a corpse down here. Being almost as white as the sheet that covered you, wasn't. The woman's skin, if removed of scars and bruises, was a couple shades away from porcelain white.

“She breathed in a lot of toxic fumes. Some occasional, thankfully mild, seizures because of it.” The nun sighed out as she began, and started walking towards the patient’s bed. She dutifully followed behind her.

“There’s signs of some substantial chemical poisoning, but we don’t know the specifics. She’s also a little out of it, in general. Keeps muttering about blood, rats and vampires. Keeps vomiting out anything we put into her besides simple water, so we’ve been trying to give her some simple broths, but the moment it gets any more complicated than a bit of salt or chicken broth, she starts vomiting it out again. And while The Crow cares for the forgotten and the broken, and thus, so do we, I’m afraid we cannot afford to inject her with healing and nutrition potions until she improves, nor afford the services of a healer Pather. I expect her to pass soon. Best I can do is make it painless for her and pray to the Gatekeeper to bring her soul to rest.” The nun whispered, her voice heavy.

A shared silence passed, before the nun sighed once more, then turned towards her.

“Go to the kitchen and ask for some water with chicken broth, the girls will know what you mean. Bring it here, will you?” The nun asked, and she simply nodded, turning away to fulfill her task.

Two minutes later, she was expertly balancing a slightly-too-full teacup in her hands as she walked back into the large ‘sick room’, and she lethargically made her way to the nun, who was busy with…

Not much. She simply seemed to be considering how many blankets would be too many to put on the woman in the bed. Her eyes moved to the woman’s face, or what remained of it, and she had to suppress a sympathetic grimace, one that became increasingly difficult to conceal as more of the woman’s body was revealed as the nun removed the blankets to replace them.

She'd seen comparable injuries before, but still. That had to have hurt.

Half her nose and right nostril seemed to have either melted or been torn off. Her ears were much the same, just two tiny nubs of healed flesh remaining where the outer ears should be. A good fourth of her bottom lip seemed to be missing, as did a good fifth of her upper one, as well as a decent chunk of both her brows. She was completely bald, and it did not look like the result of a haircut as much as it did the result of poison and chemical burns. Tiny pockets of flesh seemed to be missing all along her face, cheekbones and jaw. Not to mention the state of her fingers and the numerous pockets of discoloration on her skin.

Likely another result of chemical burns.

Judging by the way the blindfold around her eyes seemed to sink into her sockets a bit, she wasn’t sure she even had eyes.

Her right arm had been cut off and seemingly cauterized in the most crude way she’d ever seen, and she could easily count the woman’s ribs with a glance. Her legs were both swamped within two thick casts, her right all the way up to the thigh and the left just under the knee.

Her eyes roved up to return to her face, but she paused as her eyes moved to her neck.

A really, really long neck. Just long enough to be strange on a human, just short enough to not be creepily uncanny.

“Is she an elf?” She blurted out, blinking rapidly in surprise, and the nun turned to her, her brows furrowed in confusion.

“...Why would she be an elf?” The nun asked, with a genuine sense of curiosity.

She tried to gesture towards her neck with a jut of her chin as she moved a little closer, careful not to spill the hot drink in her hands.

“Really long neck. Besides their beauty and the ears, that’s the third way to tell an elf apart from a human. Oh, and they don’t have hair on their body, at all. That uhm, fuzz.” She fumbled quietly, remembering how confused and fascinated Emhreeil was when she realized that normal, average people have hair on their arms, even if just a little bit.

That was almost a decade ago and she still found the memory funny.

The nun made a sound of realization, tilting her head as she nailed her gaze on the woman’s almost uncannily long neck, then moved her hand to feel along the woman's knee, which was something that would have been a lot more inappropriate if it wasn’t being done by a nun.

“I guess she is. Or was, soon.” The nun sighed, and turned to her, gesturing towards the woman. “You’ve a steadier hand than I, from what I’ve seen. Try to very slowly make her drink that. If she says something, just vaguely agree, she seems to like that. I will go deal with some more pressing tasks, I’ll be back soon to give you something else to do.”

She nodded, and crouched down beside the bed, scooping her right hand beneath the woman’s nape and gently lifting as the nun walked out of sight.

A murmured jumble of nonsense left the woman’s mouth as she said something that did… vaguely sound like ‘blood’, mixed in with other gibberish.

“I see. That’s very interesting. I'm sure you're right. Could you drink this for me?” She said in the best impersonation of comfort she could muster for a complete and utter stranger, her voice almost as tired as the woman's.

It somehow came off incredibly sarcastic, which was not her intention at all, but she was too numb to feel embarrassed about it.

The woman seemed to actually pause, her head turning towards her just a little, her left hand twitching up, the phantom sensation of something brushing against her face making her tense in surprise.

"Kaaht?"

She wasn't numb enough to not freeze in place once her mind processed that croak, clearer, more energized than anything else she'd heard from the woman so far.

A voice that was scratchy, soft and lyrical, tired and grumpy and likely still half-stuck in sleep. A voice she'd heard a thousand times, spoken in almost that exact tone, heavy with sickness or exhaustion from nights spent without sleep.

Her eyes frantically jerked from spot to spot, progressively widening. The slight slant of her brows, their rough shape. The curve of her lips, a familiar bow shape. The oval shaped face, the tiny crescent scar on her left cheek, from a slap that involved a nail and a lot of blood.

Her hands shook, one caressing skin she'd never thought she'd feel again, the other struggling to stop the cup from clattering to the floor, her breath frozen in the middle of a gasp.

"Ihm… misst… eew." The woman, the person that couldn't be, slurred out, and she felt her chest tighten, her lungs, eyes, and heart, all burning in tandem for different reasons, each heartbeat feeling like a fist slamming into her ribs, her pulse pounding along the sides of her head.

"Gods above, what happened to you?" She breathed out, her voice warbly as hot salt raced down her cheeks, her eyes examining every scar, every injury big and small, with renewed horror.

The cup shattered in her palm, but she felt neither the scalding burn nor the shards of porcelain digging into her palm, water and soup mixing with her blood. She took a deep, stuttering breath, trying to calm down, crush her emotions and find how she could even begin to process all this and find a way to fix it all, loosening her fist to let the chunks of porcelain tinkle against the floorboards, the scent of antiseptic and sickness flooding her brain.

Her eyes opened to the sight of a skeletal arm jerking away from the bed to grasp onto her hand with speed that genuinely startled her, yet even that paled in comparison to the sheer numb shock she felt when she saw Emhreeil, Emhreeil the girl that ate like a sparrow, poking and nibbling at her food like it was about to attack her, all for the appearance of etiquette, jam her open mouth against her bleeding palm and suck like a starving leech, her dry, sandpaper tongue licking at her wound as if it was the only source of liquid for miles.

She couldn't even process what was happening, blinking rapidly to try and clear her sight of tears, staring mutely at the disturbing sight before her, tense as stone, her jaw hanging open, her emotions an utterly dizzying whirlwind of ecstatic joy, horror, pity, confusion, disbelief, and complete bafflement.

None of those emotions faded for an instant.

Not when Emhreeil detached and gasped for breath almost a full, incredibly long minute later before passing out again, muttering about how much she missed her, not when she broke into a dead sprint towards the nearest relay station and almost got into a fistfight to force herself within, not when she called in her favor in a frantic panic, not when marched into the Church three hours later with an entire squad of House Kervile's best and walked out with a mumbling skeleton cradled in her arms, a terrified little goblin trying to hide in her shadow.

"Can you stop doing your interpretive dance and just tell us what you're thinking? It's been a goddamn hour." Shaile groaned.

"Yeah, I... don't mean to pressure you, but just because we're the first to find the scene doesn't mean we have all the time in the world to do our job." Dyce agreed, and he ignored them, setting another careful step, [Wild Recreation] working in tandem with his senses and expertise to forge pieces of the puzzle from minor clues, sticking and gluing them together to form a greater picture.

That picture was one that bode ill for them if they wished to get the full reward. Tracking paid well, but if they could catch this thing…

He was getting distracted, so he abandoned that line of greedy thinking to focus on his job.

He continued prowling around the decomposed remains of the gangster, tilting his head left to right, horizontally and almost upside down, his slitted eyes buzzing from one tiny indent in stone to one specific splash of blood against the floor, tracking it's pattern, mentally retracing it, forming the wound, the angle, before flicking to the next.

Another twenty minutes of grim silence passed, filled with his coworker's idle chatter, background noise he easily filtered out to focus.

Then he let out a long, long breath, and straightened, patting his coat down and smoothing the fabric.

If only he could also forgo the mask as well, but alas, not even his [Poison Resistance] could blindly tank all that flew in the breeze down here.

"I've got quite a lot. Pessimistic estimate: this thing is extremely, extremely dangerous. We shouldn't even consider taking this job. Optimistic estimate: this thing is really dangerous and really lucky. The risk is a bit more than usual, but more than worth it. Pick whichever you want, for I have no clear verdict." He began, and didn't bother waiting for questions or requests from his annoying audience before continuing.

Their silence was enough.

He pointed to the claw marks in the stone.

"Claw marks. No broken stone fragments, just dust. Clean cuts. No brute force. About an inch deep. Extremely dangerous claws, could likely cut through basic metal armor without much effort. Could be some Skill, but if it's not a temporary effect, forget melee. Simple suicide."

He turned and pointed to the decomposing corpse. Or, its pieces, rather.

"Decomposed for the most part, with the exception of the acid flies eating some bits here and there. The dog's scent likely triggers basic scavenger instincts, which explains why we even have any remains to work with. Meaning that it's fairly dangerous, even by this floor's standards. Additionally, the way this person was killed is extremely alarming."

He moved closer, grabbing the right pant leg and hauling it up, pointing at the clean cut behind the knee with his other hand.

"Cut straight through the leg tendons, the joint, and an important artery. Clean, single cut."

He grabbed the corpse's shoulder, and flipped it onto it's chest, then pointed at the blood-caked gash across it's lower back, something he noticed while almost touching the floor with his head. The so-called interpretive dance.

"Single cut across bottom of the spine, likely with the purpose of partial paralysis. Lack of scrapes against the stone by the heavy lead boots of the gangster supports this theory. She fell and was paralyzed. Then torn apart. Either a very lucky string of cuts… or our dog has fought and killed so many people it knows all their weak spots. Could also be some Skill that shows weak points, though that's unlikely."

He walked to the rotting, mangled sphere that once was a head, and picked it up, grabbing the loose jaws and spreading them open sideways to show his coworkers, swatting away an errant fly that buzzed out from beneath its hanging tongue.

"Area around the jaw, including cheeks, neck, and jawbone joint, was cleanly severed. The inside of the mouth has puncture wounds as well, from its claws. But under the neck and between the two ends of the bottom jaw bone, the entire area was not severed, but ripped apart through brute force. The broken jawbone supports this. Coupled with the puncture wounds inside the mouth and the single puncture wound on the underside of the jaw, this dog has human hands. Thumbs included. It grabbed onto the jaw bone and tried to rip it off manually. Which requires… well, more strength than the average person in the Level ten range."

And this was where Shaile opened his obnoxious mouth again, waving his hands in the air like a clown.

"Whoahwhoahwhoah, hold on. I don't care how mutated that bastard says it might be, what fuckin' dog has human hands?"

"A mutated one. Useless rhetorical question. Moving on." He let go of the skull, and kicked it away to tumble off into the canal, before pointing at the charred remains of something.

"Giant slab of meat back there. Mostly eaten by various things, but it was obviously part of something fairly massive. This thing is either an opportunistic scavenger that came here to feed on a carcass, or can bring down opponents roughly five to nine times its size, assuming it's normal sized."

He turned to point at the two pieces of metal innocently sitting about thirty feet away.

"Harpoon shot. Went through our prey, then got cut off. Assuming the person who got mauled wasn't a complete troglodyte, they shot the harpoon first before coming close. Which means this dog did everything I mentioned just before, after being impaled by an iron bar as thick as my finger. That means it isn’t easily disabled nor easily frightened."

He turned to point at scuff marks and needle points that his coworkers likely couldn't see.

"Circle-like indentations in the stone. Tiny, small puncture wounds in the stone, done by needle. Following the trail of blood and the splatter patterns, the dog likely killed the woman, tore her head off, and just a couple feet away, was attacked once more before it could eat anything. Needles were probably some kind of hunter gear, poison could be anything, the circles were likely netting weights. It was taken down, then netted, then dragged away to about… there." He pointed about sixty feet away, to a pile of person-shaped charcoal.

"Scratch patterns are simple. Some kind of small container, cage, or box. Judging by the faint footsteps of dried blood being on the left side of where the cage was, there was likely a second person on the other side. They put the dog in the cage, then person number one betrayed person number two. Poured alchemic oil on them and burned the corpse to be rid of any evidence or insignia. Sloppy job, but it did the trick, mostly. Judging by the less burnable parts of the outfit though, like the lead boots, they're likely from the Prospector's Guild, or one of the cleanup crews they have around here for wading through the canals. Workers, in short."

Silence reigned for a few moments.

"Can you follow the trail of this guy?" Dyce tried, and he scoffed in reply.

"Of course not. Do I look like a clairvoyant to you? This place is massive and the footsteps would fade out after a couple minutes at most. I don’t even need to check to know they went straight to the nearest lift. After that, I have no clue. Just follow simple logic. Why would two people grab a dog that Ironheart's been clamoring after and not bring it to him?"

Dyce tilted his head, rubbing at the chin of his mask.

"They're either working for a rival, want it for themselves, or wish to sell it for an even bigger profit. Judging by your words, they're not wrong about possibly getting a far better deal if they went with either of the latter options."

"Good, so there are some neurons still firing in that tumor you call a brain." He snorted.

"Go fuck yourself, Tracer." Dyce sighed tiredly, getting off the wall he was leaning on, and began mutely fiddling with the comms tablet to report their findings to the boss.

Tracer just sat in place, his eyes roving over every inch of his surroundings to no avail.

It felt like he was being watched, yet he couldn't find the eyes that followed him.

And he felt many of them. He could be wrong of course, and he was certainly no stranger to the odd bout of paranoia, but this felt too… solid. Too real.

"We'll do our report back on the third floor. Let's go."

Dyce sent him an annoyed look, likely seeing this as another challenge to his authority or something juvenile like that, but he only had to glare at him and gesture with his eyes at their surroundings for him to get that something was up and nod along, his features relaxing into understanding through the muck of his gas mask.

"Yeah, good call."

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad. com or Scribblehub. com, you are reading stolen content from free sites that run no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google the story name with one of those websites next to it and you'll get to my story on the sites it was meant to be hosted on.)