The mines went down a long way, supposedly all the way to Sunken Sea located so far below the surface, away from the alkaline metals that would turn it into toxic sludge.

Those deep pits were emphatically sealed, as any contamination of the water source of the planet was a massively overdone shooting offense. The Juris had made some rather graphic examples of anyone who even seemed tangentially connected to doing so, and so messing with the water supply was only done with great caution.

We descended a mile of steep cliffs, where massive amounts of stone and ore had been strip-mined in layer upon of layer of elemental wealth, and were now being replaced by unending rains of tailings and scree from above.

My guide was rather shocked when I slid down the face of the cliff instead of taking a lift, but when I told him it was for geomantic continuance of dimensional transfer protocols, he sort of shook his head, chalked it up to crazy pshit, and followed me as I whooped and surfed my way down the side of a cliff face.

I jumped off, turned a quintuple somersault and double layout to land nigh weightlessly on the support gantry a hundred feet above the floor of the canyon.

Naturally the place was completely filled with dust from the scree coming down from above, and the average person couldn’t see a foot in front of themselves. Dust/sandsight could see right through it, and I looked up at the waterfall of stones rumbling down a hundred yards away, slowly building up another mound as the pipes up top slowly moved back and forth to spread the rock out over a larger area.

My Trembling Domain was also unaffected, and although the continuous vibrations from all the falling rock was a little annoying, the vibrations bouncing around actually helped paint everything with incredible clarity, and even gave me additional range.

Nothing interesting, of course. Walkways of steel on rigs that could rise as the canyon floor rose, leading off and down to the sides where yawning tunnels gaped open in the side of cliffs, smooth-bored from the tunneling machines that had plunged into the stone in a hungry search for ore.

Diaz came out of the elevator, in a static suit that would keep the dust off his outer clothes, and the default mask that was standard garb around here. I could see the flicker of the map overlay on his mask, as he totally ignored the dust around, moving with complete assurance despite the cloud and darkness. He seemed surprised to see me completely unaffected as well, muttered something under his breath about lucky psions and their pshit, and gestured me after him.

We went through about a mile of gantries and walkways, all of them on movable lifts, and took a couple tunnels bored through the side of the cliff for transit purposes. We passed a couple of the feeder tubes pumping down lighter tailings for filling the tunnels, vibrating as they pumped the waste stone further out of sight, deeper into the mountain. They were pumping several cubic feet a second, and I could only think how massive the underground sprawl of this mine network had to be at this time.

Biggest dungeon evah? Well, the Warp Gods could probably put together a better one... and Downspire was bigger, come to think of it. Ah well. Couldn’t have orcs and pies in every chamber, either...

“The area we want is where it’s been hitting. The section’s tunnels are almost filled, so the crews are working closer to the scree. It came up and hit them, faded back into the piles. It doesn’t seem to care if the rocks are coming down if its buried, but it won’t come up if the area is under spill from up top.”

“Yeah, rocks at terminal velocity are a bit different than rocks pounding down on other rocks way above it.” I looked over the scene of great hills of tailings and scree formed by the continuous stonefall from above, cracking, ricocheting, and raising the clouds of dust that blinded everyone and made them work off virtual overlay. “I’ll go pull the sucker out.”

“Will you have a problem with the stones?” he asked me. His voice was actually coming through my Band instead of verbal, because of the constant roar of the falling stone.

I glanced at my DR 26/Holy Silver default, and +15 Golden Armor I flicked up. “I’ll be fine,” I told him, basically clad in my own armor suit at the skin level now. He couldn’t see my skin and hair turn gold, but that didn’t mean anything here.

There was a subtle shift in the Warp universe in how armor worked here, but it was very important.

In Power of Ten, Armor was a hit/miss thing. If it hit the armor, it bounced and did no damage. Only if something got through the armor did you actually take damage, but when you did, unless you had some special armor, or you were really good with it, you took all the damage. The attack either punched the armor or got through a weak spot, which was actually pretty realistic.

Armor here was about damage reduction. Armor had an average damage reduction rating, which certain attacks could completely bypass, and crits meant it had found a hole or gap where there was no armor. Mathematically, it represented an average reduction of harm as the armor took the punishment instead of the flesh; an attack had to be big enough to get through the armor, and was sapped of its energy as it did so.

The net effect of this was that people took hits more often, but generally took less damage per hit. The optimal fighting style here wasn’t about trying to hit stuff, but having an attack strong enough to overcome their armor. It was difficult to find someone who could consistently avoid a touch attack, after all...

Furthermore, armor interacted oddly with Damage Reduction. If someone actually had damage reduction, their armor instantly upgraded to only be bypassed by that level of DR. For instance, normal armor could be bypassed by an adamant weapon, which would cut through it like cheese. But, if the person wearing it was, oh, a werewolf, the DR 10/silver would upgrade the armor, and suddenly that DR 5/adamant set of general flak armor was also 5/silver, and the adamant sword wouldn’t chew through it so easily, backed as it was by flesh that wasn’t so easily hurt.

My DR had two levels, of 16/- and 26/Holy Silver, with another possible +10 if I concentrated on using Stalwart and angles to minimize impacts.

16/- was enough to ignore handguns entirely, and 90% of rifle shots. 26/Holy Silver was enough to ignore long rifles and heavy machine guns, and most of a stubber. 36/HS was enough to take heavy gyro rounds without harm, and most of an autocannon when using Stalwart to concentrate on more DR instead of dodging.

Needless to say, the shrapnel bouncing around wasn’t a threat to me at all. 15 points of armor on top of my norm meant a walk-around DR of 41/HS. Unless I was standing in the stonefall, I wasn’t in any danger. Falling rocks didn’t bypass armor. Back in fantasy land, armor wouldn’t have helped at all against area damage like this...

------

I headed down towards the stone mounds. The wurm shouldn’t be that hard to lure out, as it was looking for munchies, and the crews were keeping a safe distance from any scree deep enough to conceal it.

Of course, I trusted their information as far as I could throw it. The likelihood there was only one wurm was slim to none, because that wouldn’t be any fun for the Warp gods who made such stuff happen. Some quiet divine hurr-hurr-hurrs were at work Out There watching hapless men getting eaten by an alien wurm.

I tromped through the edges of the scree, spreading out my weight on my ki and using my Belt to double my weight to make lots of noise. Sure, there was a lot of clattering going on, but the regular footsteps of lunch were what they wanted to hear.

The locals couldn’t actually see what was going on, so I had no reason to waste the teeth, either.

I didn’t have to tromp around the slopes too long when the scree began to shift subtly, and the head of the sand wurm came sliding up out of the lower scree below me in my Trembling Domain, looking like it was trying to be stealthy.

Yeah, no. Come on, and let’s get this over with, I thought, and waited for the first lunge...

---

I was hauling the multi-ton carcass of the wurm down from the scree about fifteen minutes later, trundle, trundle, and about to call Diaz to come grab it and its corrosion-resistant hide when there was movement below and behind me.

Whoa crap!

I dropped the mid-sized wurm I was hauling along by dint of having a claw buried into one of its trilateral jaws, stepped away, and the Big One, a whole damn ten feet thick, exploded out of the scree and swallowed me right up instantly.

Ouch!

Sunuvabitch. I hadn’t managed to wound it. It was diving down as it swallowed me! I was going to have to dig my way out of there!

Well, no! Nyar, nyar! “You are so lucky I’m right here!” Chalice sniggered, as she popped into my hand while I clawed myself to a stop in the big wurm’s esophagus. It was really putting down the crunching pressure, but my boosted 51 DR was laughing at him, and having put some bloody furrows into its pipe, it couldn’t quite bear down like it wanted.

Claws on my feet and offhand anchored into its throat as slimy acid gathered all around me, and the voltage began to crackle off in thumb-thick irritation as I got stuck in its throat. The more it tried to swallow me deeper, the more it hurt, so it just tried to crispy-dissolve me.

I looked up at the nexal three feet above me, and all the teeth back the way I’d come from. I recycled my oxygen inside my lungs with carbon dioxide splitting and suppression of my breathing reflex, waiting for its rapid travel through the depths of the sand to stop.

It spiraled as it moved, constantly sloughing off the pressure and making its path, subtle phrenic power slicing through the matter like it was oiled, giving it a truly impossible speed, even with thousands of tons of earth right above it.

I was being taken for a ride. I wonder if my Band signal had been lost, and they thought I was dead. They were going to be surprised, but I still had to wait for this thing to stop moving before killing it.

-Hey Brekko, do me a favor and contact a Mr. Diaz at the southern mines area.- I /forwarded him the contact info. -Tell him I’m fine, you’ve been telepathically contacted, and I’ll be teleporting out of the innards of a dead wurm shortly, would you? I don’t want him to be panicking or something...-

He /laughed at me...

So, as it chewed through stone and grit at about 30 mph, impossibly fast for a non-elemental creature, I made sure to track and chart everything about where I was, and keep my Visual File of my Lived-Line constant.

It dove into a submerged tunnel, swam past the smooth walls of once what was probably a vehicle repository, and into a side room where the scree had settled. There was about a foot of airspace for the ceiling, churned up as this massive wurm entered, circled itself, and sat there to digest its meal.

Crikey, this damn thing was over a hundred feet long. I couldn’t see the end of it from where I was in its gullet.

Chalice didn’t care as I struck up from inside it slowly and precisely. Parts of the big wurm went dark, and slowly, surely, it died, not even knowing how it was dead.

I severed the nexal from its crystalline nervous system and sent my hair up into the wound I’d made to grab it and haul it back to me, stashing it into my masspack with the others I’d collected so far.

Huh. I could get out of here easily enough, but coming back could be a problem. I certainly wasn’t going to leave all those teeth. Those jaws were huge, and had a lot of teeth!

Grousing to myself about my work ethic, and the bottomless need for credits and raw materials, I began to claw my way forwards through the suffocatingly tight gullet of this wurm, and them bright, shiny, sharp, and valuable teeth on the jaws up ahead of me.