You’re right, Hunter said. The [Warp] emanations in this place feel… intense. And strange.

  He hovered several thousand meters in the air, a snowy taiga stretching out below him in every direction. The work site was easy to spot, but not because of the hole they were digging: that had been scaffolded over and covered with what appeared to be steel plating, the same kind that shipping containers were made of.

  The structure covering the hole was insignificant compared to the huge piles of earth and stone that stretched away from the hole in neat lines. He knew that excavating anything would be much easier now that everyone had magical powers, but looking at the piles of fill, he could scarcely fathom how deep the pit must be. A kilometer? Didn’t the Earth get too hot once you got down far enough?

  Remember: we don’t know if they’re testing something, or if they’re uncovering something they’ve found, Kylie said. The fact that they changed my scouting schedule makes me think it’s the latter, but not with any certainty. If you had to dig a giant hole somewhere and keep it hidden… you’d probably pick a place like Siberia.

  Or Antarctica! Ashtoreth chimed in.

  They might not just need depth, said Kylie. But to actually get into the planet. In Antarctica, you’d have to get through all the ice first.

  Pfft, I could get through the ice in an hour.

  Hunter checked to be sure that he still had {Buff: [Ashtoreth’s Cloak of Less Visibility]} on. It increased the rating of his stealth abilities and made it harder to detect his mana fluctuations. Then he wrapped himself in his [Shadowcloak] and descended on the unsuspecting facility.

  Hunter had eaten mages with the rest of them. Not as many as Ashtoreth or Kylie, but [Warp] was one of his aspects, and they’d been sure to feed him plenty of spellcasters who knew it inside and out.

  He focused his magical senses on the mouth of the gigantic hole. Extremely small amounts of mana bled from the metal structure, radiating outward in tangled ripples and waves.

  Almost a half an hour later, he heard Ashtoreth’s voice in his head.

  So… how’s it going?

  Hunter scowled. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

  …What?

  Patience, Ashtoreth.

  He couldn’t really blame her for asking. Kylie and Ashtoreth would both have been better at reading the mana in the air than he was. They’d have figured out what he needed to before now.

  But one thing he had determined was that there was no way that the entire area was blanketed with a detection spell capable of sensing him. If that were true, the mana would have been so thick in the air he could have tasted it.

  Still… there was definitely divination magic down there, and not just the small component that one used to target a teleportation spell. He could see the waves it was giving off: faded echoes of some kind of area-detection spell, their structure fraying into soft ripples as they left its range.

  He frowned down at the pit. As he saw it, there were two possibilities.

  One, he thought to himself. The spell is covering the mouth of the pit. The only entrance.

  He floated closer, sure he was safe. Two: because they know that the only person they’re really hiding this from is Ashtoreth, they’ve concentrated their detection magic lower, hoping that I’ll teleport past the entrance and into their trap.

  With time, he was sure he could sense which one they’d chosen. And that meant that he had to spend as much time as was required to figure it out. No sense in taking unnecessary risks.

  Another half-hour later, and he’d successfully determined that divination spell was actually blanketing the area over and around the metallic structure that covered the pit. Everything below it felt, to Hunter, safe to traverse.

  The shorter the distance he teleported, the harder it would be to sense him. It probably wouldn’t make much of a difference—the abundance of mana in the air already gave off a strong impression of [Warp] magic, and would do a lot to mask him from even the most sensitive of observers.

  Still, he flew in low as he dared, then warped into the open space beneath the shadow of the massive metal covering.

  The first thing that he noticed was that the air was much hotter. Harsh floodlights had been installed into the metal and the walls of the pit around him, revealing the world with bright white cones of dust-filled luminescence. Thankfully, he hadn’t landed in the light of any of these, as [Shadowcloak] was drastically less effective while illuminated.

  He could immediately see why the humans had been selective about the enchantments they’d used to protect the place. Inside, the air was practically choked with mana, all of it emanating from below. The level of maintenance that even a simple enchantment would have required under the constant bombardment of runoff mana was staggering; the pit was basically a magical microwave.

  Looking above him, he saw that a massive, multi-floor facility had been built beneath the pit’s metal covering. It reminded him of the hanging structures that had been built all along the roof of the outer market.

  Look how much they’ve built, he said, looking up at the facility. It hasn’t even been two months.

  They can teleport construction equipment, supplies, and personnel here from all over the world, said Kylie. If this place is a priority for them, then they can get a lot done, especially with a magical labour force.

  Makes sense, he said. I can see some people coming outside now—they haven’t sensed me. They’re wearing some kind of uniform? Protective equipment, looks like.

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  A group of people had left the facility to arrange themselves on a balcony that was suspended above the pit. Their gear made them look a bit like astronauts in spacesuits: heavy canvas suits that covered their body and had plastic plating affixed to them.

  Hunter’s incredibly high [Dexterity] meant that he could make out the runes that faintly glowed along the plastic plates. They’ve got gear to make them easier to enchant with flight spells and protection from heat enchantments. He made a quick check of their levels. Looks like one of the level 300s we boosted is casting a relatively slow flight spell on all of them so that they can descend and work—I’m going to wait for them to go, then follow.

  Runed equipment or no, he had to wonder how long the team of workers would even have before the flight spell wore off. If the mana in the air was coming from below, the team probably had twenty minutes, tops, before they’d need to return and re-enchant.

  They spent a long time checking and re-checking their gear, and he couldn’t blame them: it was life or death, after all. Then they moved to the edge of their platform and leapt over the side in pairs, all of them floating downward and gradually picking up speed.

  Hunter followed. A white glow was emanating from far below, and the air decreased in pressure and increased in heat as he got lower and lower.

  Every piece of magic in this place is constantly being bathed in chaotic mana, he said. Will our telepathy still be fine?

  The voice that answered was Ashtoreth’s. Should be. Telepathy is… sort of special. It’s almost impossible to interfere with. The really short explanation as to why is that it uses the system itself to send signals.

  Good, said Hunter.

  Dust was thick in the air, and it stuck to the sweat that had gathered on his skin as he descended, irritating him. Any time his tattoos were covered up by anything, it gave him a sort of nagging feeling, almost like a supernatural itch. He had to resist the urge to stop and brush himself off.

  The floodlights rose far out of sight, and he was soon navigating only by the headlamps of the workers ahead of him as they lowered themselves toward the white glow below. They picked up speed, and very soon his enhanced eyesight could make out what the white glow actually was.

  Far enough down, the sides of the pit were covered in a crisscrossing web of conjured light. He puzzled at the strands of magic: the pit was huge. The light was a form of enchantment. But the maintenance of such a thing would have been an extraordinary feat in this environment.

  He watched as the team of workers that he’d followed down all floated to a section of the webbing and began to manipulate the mana there, maintaining whatever massive spell had been wrought.

  There’s some kind of glowing web all over the walls when you get down far enough, he said. It’s conjured. There’s a lot of people down here maintaining it. He took a quick look around, picking out hundreds of white headlamps against the background glow. And I mean a lot of people. I’m going to hang in the dark here and see if I can’t figure out what it is before I go further.

  Identifying spells wasn’t his strength. Kylie was the natural mage: looking at a tangled mess of mana and figuring out which three different overlapping spells had made it was something she was very good at.

  Hunter? Not so much.

  Still…

  I think… I think it’s actually kind of simple, he said at last. It’s cooling the rock. And it’s a failsafe against a collapse. There’s a mana reservoir somewhere that the light-web will pull on to strengthen itself if it gets too heavily squeezed. At least, I think that’s what’s happening.

  Hmm, Kylie said. The internet says that if you dig deep enough, the rock is under so much pressure that it gets strange physical properties.

  So it’s helping them dig further, Hunter said. Which means it’s not what they came for. I’m going further down.

  He tried to position himself near the center of the pit, where the ambient glow from the webbing would give the least interference with his [Shadowcloak]. Then he lowered himself, keeping an eye out for anything that might be a detection spell.

  But it didn’t take him long to reach the bottom.

  A huge silver disk, almost as wide as the pit itself, lay below him, glowing faintly at the base of the pit. Conjured lights hung in the air above it like stars, and several platforms and structures had been built into the rock around it. He saw people, too: they were moving about on the platforms with notebooks and tablets, studying the silver disk.

  He turned his attention to the disk. He couldn’t tell what he was looking at with just a glance, but as he examined both the mana coming off it, and the runes inscribing its surface, it became obvious that it was a warp conduit.

  Two possibilities, he thought. One, humanity is building something that the Eldunari have give them the blueprints for, and they’ve buried it as deep as they possibly can because they’re trying to hide its magical signature.

  He shook his head. The magical signature penetrated rock easily: it was [Warp] magic. The whole point of its existence was moving from one place to another despite intervening barriers. If they’d wanted to mask these energies more than they already had, they wouldn’t have spent so much time digging, they’d have built and enchanted an encasement out of plastic, ceramics, or glass.

  Two, he thought, this was buried in the Earth by the precursor humans. By Dazel.

  How long had it been here? It couldn’t have survived without magic—but did magic work when a world hadn’t been initialized? Yes, he realized: Ashtoreth had managed to warp to Earth just before the system apocalypse had begun, and she was magical by her very nature.

  Yet his bloodline hadn’t manifested until he’d been initialized, and neither had anyone’s racial abilities. He scowled. No way something like this would survive the heat and pressure unscathed for thousands of years—not enough that it had clearly-discernable runes carved onto its surface.

  It’s a warp conduit, he said. They’re studying it. I’m almost certain that it was left here by precursor humans.

  The petals of the rose, said Ashtoreth. We need to figure out where its going.

  Right. Hunter stared down at the silver disc. The runes were clearly legible—it just took him some time to determine which of them were essentially functioning as the conduit’s address. Another few minutes saw him copying them into his stele.

  A few minutes later, and he was floating a thousand meters above the Siberian taiga once more, brushing the dust from his tattoos and breathing a sigh of relief.

  You think we’ll need the actual conduit in order to warp to wherever it leads? Kylie asked.

  Only one way to check! Ashtoreth said.

  Right, Hunter said. I’ll find a spot in the forest here. One second.

  He landed beneath some pine trees, cleared a spot, and began to inscribe the runes onto the ground. A minute later, and he’d cast the spell—which immediately failed.

  It didn’t work, he said. But it didn’t feel like it was because of range. It—huh.

  What is it? Ashtoreth asked.

  The system had sent him a message.

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