The monorail rumbled to a halt in a long offloading tunnel. Brakes engaged with a squeal and repellers thrummed.

  The tunnel ran straight through the base of the magazine tower, its walls angular and tall, with haphazard loading platforms and cranes at the right height to lift cargo off the flatbeds or drag it in and out of the boxcars. Already, blue-skinned workers in simple khaki uniforms rushed about, operating cranes or wheeling trolleys.

  Jace climbed down the ladder of the viewing and landed in a crouch on the train car’s floor. “That’s a lot of cargo.”

  “There are a lot of soldiers to feed,” Lessa said. “And arm. And clothe.”

  “And apparently, plenty of trinkets to store.” Jace ran over to a side window and looked out, scanning the platform next to them. They wouldn’t have long to make this work, so he had to be quick.

  “Not just trinkets,” Lessa replied.

  “Yeah, they’re Wielder advancement materials.” He shrugged. “How many of the non-Wielders even know what they are, do you think?”

  “I know what they are,” Lessa reminded him.

  “Sure, but you also looked into that a lot and read a lot. You think the average soldier knows what a Vault Core is?”

  “Probably not. That’s why it hasn’t been stolen yet. You know where we’re going?”

  “I’ll use the Questforger card when we’re out of danger.” He mentally called up his hyperdash card and manifested it above his hand. “When they start running to the front of the train, get out onto the platform.”

  She nodded. “Got it.”

  Jace targeted a stack of crates at the corner of the very end of the platform—a perfect place to dip into unseen—and triggered his hyperdash card. He flashed through the air, passing unhindered through the wall and the crates, and when he emerged, he was completely out of sight.

  But soon, they’d be expecting word from the back of the train, and if Jace didn’t cause a distraction, they’d find Lessa. She could probably take out all the soldiers, but the last thing they needed was alarms going off.

  Though, there’d probably be alarms anyway, considering they’d find the back car of the train empty, but at least this way, they’d have a little more time.

  Ducking between boxes when no one was looking, Jace navigated up toward the front of the train. Soldiers offloaded cargo from both sides, moving quickly, but they made ever-growing piles of cargo, which were perfect hiding places for Jace.

  Finally, when he reached the first third of the train, he paused at the first crane he found. It was a simple device mounted on four kyborg struts. Each could walk, and it carried itself around like a spider, holding wooden crates on its boom.

  Jace, hiding behind a stack of steel barrels, drew his Whistling Blade, and when the soldiers turned to face the monorail once more, looking away, Jace slashed off the crane’s back leg. He pulled his blade back immediately. It’d look like an accident—mechanical failure of some sort—until closer inspection.

  At least, that was what he hoped.

  The crane tilted forward, and it chirped a warning in the kyborg language of clicks and clunks. The box hanging from its boom swayed, then smashed into the side of a boxcar, ripping open the thin metal. Wires sparked, cables snapped, and flames sprang up from something in the boxcar.

  Just hope that was munitions, Jace thought. He stood up and pressed his back against the wall, but no one saw him. Soldiers ran from all across the platform, some carrying extinguishers, and others holding rifles. They all shouted in a language Jace couldn’t understand.

  He inched along the wall, moving slowly to not draw attention to himself, then slipped through the doorway to the rest of the facility. To stay out of the way of any reinforcements, he hid in a mechanical alcove. Wires and pipes pressed up against his back, but at least he was out of sight.

  A few seconds later, Lessa sprinted through the doorway. Her exosuit’s boots skittered across the floor, and she came to a halt in front of him. “Jace?” she whispered.

  “Here,” he said, ducking out of the alcove and stepping into the hall.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “Good distraction.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now which way?”

  He activated the Questforger card, calling on the Split and directly manipulating it with his hyperspace aspect to show him where his target was—this time, he focussed on the vault core he wanted to find. He didn’t know exactly what it would look like, but he just needed to give the Split enough to uncover it.

  In a flash, a needle of blue Aes appeared, springing out of his chest and illuminating a path in the air. It pointed almost directly upward.

  “We need to find an elevator,” Jace said.

  “Don’t look at me,” Lessa said. “My first time here, too.”

  Jace took off down the hallway, and Lessa clanked along behind him. He sprinted along until his fortification technique card wore out, which was only about ten more seconds, and Lessa slowed down to match his regular pace—which was still much faster than a regular human now.

  They rounded corners and took stairways, traversing the plain interior of the facility as fast as they could. Tubes and clumps of wires covered the walls, and grates lined the ceiling, venting steam and sparks.

  And they hadn’t even done any damage to the facility. Jace swallowed. This place must’ve been old, judging by the cracks in the concrete and the rusting walls. The less time they spent here, the better. And not just because they had a uniform fitting appointment in a few hours that they wouldn’t want to be late to.

  “You’d think they might want a cohesive floor plan,” Jace hissed when they rounded a corner and came upon yet another hallway—but this time, with a taller ceiling and slightly broader run.

  “I think it’s a bit of a mess down here because of all the monorail entrances from all different directions,” Lessa said. “But this one looks promising.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jace said.

  The hallway extended as far as he could see, with swaying incandescent bulbs turning the entire hall yellow. They sprinted along it. A monorail must’ve entered overhead, because the hallway rumbled and shook.

  About halfway down, they came to a set of curved doors inlaid into the wall. A display shone above them, reading out a couple different letters in a foreign language—extra foreign, not the command galactic tongue spoken around here. The letters flickered, and the doors hissed open sideways, revealing a troop of four Khirsan soldiers. The soldiers looked just as surprised to see them, but Jace used a hyperdash to flash between them.

  Lessa blasted one with her rifle and another with her wrist-mounted launcher, and Jace, now within arm’s reach, cut down the last two. They afforded him whispers of Aes as a bounty for slaying them, but it wasn’t much compared to the recent gains he’d received. Where a few months ago, it would’ve felt like his chest was on fire from absorbing all the Aes, he barely noticed now.

  Jace stepped over the smouldering bodies and into the room beyond the doors. It was a small cylindrical container. That had to be an elevator. It certainly looked like one.

  Thankfully, it hadn’t taken them too long to find it. His tracking needle was still active. Jace stepped inside and pressed a button on the control panel. The labels were all in a different language, and he had no idea what they were trying to say, but he figured the numerous buttons in an array all had to correspond to the floors.

  This vault core was probably really high up in the tower. Jace pressed a button near the top and crossed his fingers.

  Only seconds after Lessa stepped into the elevator, the doors slammed shut. Soon, someone was going to see the bodies in the elevator, and he had to hope that they didn’t make any stops along the way, or they were going to get caught.

  The elevator shot up, making Jace’s knees wobble for a second, before he steadied himself. It lurched and whirred, but they were on their way.

  “Well, that went pretty smoothly,” Lessa said.

  “You can still jinx it,” Jace said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  “Alright, I’ll admit. I don’t know what you mean when you say jinx. I was kinda just pretending I knew.”

  Jace tilted his head. “It’s like…when you say something, and the opposite happens. You make something bad happen with your words.”

  “Does that happen much where you come from?”

  “Uh…no, it’s just a superstition.”

  “Weird.”

  “You’re a walking candle.”

  Lessa chuckled. “Alright, alright, point taken.”

  As they rose, the angle of Jace’s tracking needle softened, until finally, it dipped flat altogether, then abruptly shifted down.

  “Shit. We went past.” Jace tapped the control panel furiously, pressing buttons until the elevator chimed and lurched to a halt. Then, he selected a button a few floors below the one it indicated they were on right now. The elevator reversed course, and his stomach rose for a few seconds as the floor dropped beneath them.

  Finally, it came to a halt—and with the tracking needle pointing almost perfectly horizontally. The doors slid open, revealing a long warehouse that had to take up almost the entire floor of the tower.

  As soon as Jace stepped off the elevator, his tracking needle sputtered out, leaving them facing a dark room nearly three hundred paces across—and probably about fiver storeys tall. Aisles upon aisles of shelves ran down along it, each loaded with hundreds of wooden crates loose trinkets.

  “They’re just hoarders, then,” Jace grumbled. “But I’m not searching through that.”

  He activated his reset card, then reactivated his tracking card. It pointed in the same direction as before.

  “Alright, we’ve got our course again,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before they find those bodies—or realize that there was no one in the back of the train, whichever happens first.”