The pair continued walking through the dark tunnel, their only guide being the faint silhouettes of the group ahead of them and the sound of their footsteps. One of the silhouettes began to grow larger as it came closer to them. It was Junyo.
"How're you guys holding up?" He forced an awkward smile.
The older gentleman cast a sidelong glance at the tall figure ahead before turning back. "Fine." His tone was stern. "But isn't it embarrassing having to continuously apologise for him?"
Junyo sighed. "It gets like that sometimes, and he means well, truly." He rolled his eyes. "He just isn't very people-smart, and I understand that."
"Hmph." Kompto's breath smoked in the cold. "Regardless, we should catch up with the rest of the group."
As they caught up to the party, a pebble fell from the darkness and landed squarely on the man's head.
"Creed, are you alright?"
"Ah—what the hell?" He pressed a hand to his aching forehead, then bent to retrieve the thing that had struck him. Hard. Cold. To the eye, it was only a rock. He turned it once in his hand, frowned, then passed it to Junyo.
"Wait, hold on." Concern drew Junyo's features taut. He summoned his Leere and ran a quick scan over the rock. "Just as I expected. This rock is an obsidian ore."
"Obsidian?"
"Yeah, you can tell from its glass-like features, it's also a little too dark to be just a random pebble."
His eyes dropped to the shard again, black as spilt ink, catching what little light there was and holding it in a dead kind of gleam. Not stone, not ordinary stone, not something that should have been here at all.
Ji-Soon stopped short and moved back towards them, closing the gap in a few quick strides. His fingers curled slowly at his sides.
"Wait," his voice came out thinner than he meant it to. "Did you just say that rock is obsidian?"
'Obsidian ores don't usually fall from the ceiling.'
Ji-Soon slowly lifted his head.
Above them sat what he had taken for a boulder. Only now, looking at it properly, it felt wrong. Too misshapen. Too still, in the way something living tried to be still. Its surface was dotted with dark pits, and around its body glowed two faint red rings.
His breath caught.
The ground beneath them gave a small tremor.
Pebbles skittered.
"Wait," Ji-Soon said again, sharper now. "Guys… what is that?"
Everyone turned.
The boulder shook.
Not shifted—shook, like something inside it had begun to wake. Dust spilt from its sides. The red rings brightened. A low rumble rolled through the cave again, deeper this time, close enough to feel in the ribs.
Then a red icon flashed above it.
"That's not a boulder! Everyone, get ready for combat!"
The thing's claws scraped against the cavern roof, its body pressed flat as it stalked from above. Tang-Ji barely had time to draw breath before Ji-Soon's hand shot out, gripping her shoulder and slinging her backwards. She slammed against the far wall, gasping, just as the creature smashed into the spot where she had been standing.
Its landing sent up a huge cloud of dust, making visibility worse than it already was.
"Ah, shit! I can't see a goddamn thing here!" Decker charged straight into the dust cloud.
Junyo's voice tore through the din. "Wait, you moron! HEY!"
Too late.
The monster's body split apart.
Dozens of smaller mites scattered from it at once, swarming across the cave floor, crawling over the walls, slipping through the haze like pieces of the dark had broken loose and come alive.
"What the fuck!?" Decker jumped back, dodging several high-velocity rocks hurled at him. They tore past him in a blur and struck the cave walls with sharp, violent cracks. "These little shits are everywhere!"
He stepped out of the dust clad in deep-blue armour. A spine-shaped generator ran along his back, pulsing with crackling energy that spilt across the cave and painted the walls in an eerie glow.
"Alright, you shits! Time to die!"
He lunged forward in a mad dash straight into the swarm.
"
Ji-Soon called out his Leere. "Decker! I need you to buy me some time while the slots are running. Then I can support you!"
"Piss off! You'll just get in the way. Hell, you might even hit me! I am the big glowing target, after all!"
A rough jest—and then he dove deeper into the chaos, eager to show off.
"HAHAHAHA! Can't catch me!"
Ji-Soon clicked his tongue.
The mites were already closing in.
He started kicking them away, sending them flying back in the hopes that it would stall them for a little longer. Kompto joined in, unable to use explosives in an environment like this unless he wanted to bury the mites and all of them together.
"I've debuffed their defence severely!" Junyo called, fingers moving rapidly across his Leere. "You should be able to kill the mites now instead of just repelling them!"
Ji-Soon and Kompto stomped down hard, crushing the ones that climbed too close, reducing them to piles of ground-up dust. But more kept coming. From the rocky floor. From the cracks in the wall. From places that had looked empty only a second ago.
Tang-Ji summoned her Leere and moved to charge the cluster in front of her, but her foot caught on a rock hidden under the dust. She stumbled hard and dropped her shears.
The metal clattered once against the stone, then vanished somewhere into the haze.
Her breath snagged.
She looked ahead, but not even the light from Decker's armour could cut farther than a metre or two.
Then movement.
Several mites peeled away from the stone around her, their bodies blending so seamlessly with the cavern that it felt less like they had appeared and more like the ground itself had decided to crawl.
They noticed her.
"Watch out!" Ji-Soon moved to reach her, urgency breaking through instinct before thought could catch up.
But his legs jerked to a stop.
He looked down.
Mites had latched onto him in masses, crawling over his boots, his calves, halfway to his knees. He tried to wrench himself free, brushing them off in frantic handfuls, but more took their place. His balance snapped from under him, and he hit the ground hard, panic rising sharply in his chest as more and more of them crawled onto his body.
'Damn it! If only I had a bit more time!' Reaching out to his slot machine through the crush of limbs and stone. 'If only I had a bit more time. I might have to use it now.'
Around him, the rest of the group was starting to buckle under the same pressure. Mineral Mites swarmed over Kompto's boots, their serrated claws gouging at his ankles until his legs felt like anchors sunk in quicksand. Junyo tore at the ones climbing his calves, only for more to wriggle higher towards his waist. Even Tang-Ji staggered backwards as mites clung to the hem of her coat and the fur lining of her hood.
Decker, the lone island of defiance, hammered at the onslaught with brutal efficiency—but each swing sent new morsels of stone-shards and dust raining down, threatening to bury him in the debris.
Then, through the scrape of claws and the chittering press of bodies, a single, melodic—
'clink-clink.'
—rang out.
Ji-Soon's slot machine had finally stopped.
All three reels displayed a gleaming hammer.
"Oi, jackass!" voice cracking. "Pull the lever! Give us something to smash our way out!"
Decker paused mid-swing, head cocked beneath his mask. On the next heartbeat, he strode over and yanked the lever free, lifting it like a conductor's baton.
A weapon dropped into his grasp.
Heavy. Iron-bound. The head of it was broad and brutal, gleaming even in the dim blue haze.
"For me?" he teased, hefting the weight with ease. "You really shouldn't have!"
He planted the hammer's head into the rocky floor.
The impact cracked through the tunnel like a gunshot.
"Right," he rumbled, shoulders squared. "Everyone drop low. I need—" He paused, voice low, "—absolute stillness. One twitch and I'll test the steel in your kneecaps."
"Rush technique, deployment level 2, Midnight Rampage: Special," he exploded forward.
His hammer descended in titanic arcs.
Mites shattered under the blows.
Stone powder rose in thick spirals.
Then it settled.
The path ahead lay nearly clear.
The mechanical giant eased onto his weapon, the glow receding from his armour until only the hammer's runes pulsed faintly before vanishing altogether. He lifted one eyebrow beneath his mask.
"Not bad, right?" He rolled one shoulder. "What'd you think of my new move?"
From the edge of the clearing, Ji-Soon pushed himself up and crossed to Tang-Ji, offering her his hand.
She stared at it for half a second before taking it.
"Thanks," she said quietly, letting him pull her to her feet.
"You know, quiet girl," Decker said, his ego already swelling back into place, "you should really work on not being useless."
Tang-Ji said nothing.
'He's right.'
The thought came low and bitter.
'So far, I've had to be saved over and over, without doing any of the saving myself.'
"Leave her alone, dude. We appreciate your help, but it doesn't mean you get to be a dick." The words came quick, Ji-Soon's rebuke slicing clean through the moment.
"Listen, cunt! If you keep pampering her like this and keep letting her do nothing, we'll all die when we have to rely on her. Something about the weakest link, right?"
Ji-Soon had only just drawn breath to speak when the ground beneath Tang-Ji split open.
Not cracked.
Opened.
One moment she was there; the next, the earth had unstitched itself under her feet and swallowed her whole, quick as a mouth closing over prey. Ji-Soon lunged without thinking, hand shooting out for hers, desperate, almost there—
—but the ground sealed shut before their fingers could meet.
Nothing.
No gap. No trace. No sign that she had been standing there a second ago at all.
Silence fell so suddenly it felt wrong, like the cave itself had stopped breathing.
Ji-Soon stood frozen, arm still half-extended, his pulse slamming against his ribs. His mind refused it. Refused the smoothness of it, the impossible neatness. A person did not just vanish. Not like that. Not right in front of him.
Behind him, Decker took a slow step back, then another, his usual sharpness gone thin around the edges. For once, even he looked stripped of language, left only with the ugly shape of panic.
"Oh… shit."
Ji-Soon's hands rose to his head as if he could hold the moment together and force it to make sense if he pressed hard enough. His voice came out hollow, scraped raw.
"She's gone," he said, staring at the sealed earth. "Just like that…"
"DAMN IT!" He shouted, slamming his fist into the hard, rocky wall of the cave. Pain welled up in his hand, causing tears to form in his eyes.
Suddenly, a hand pressed against his back.
He flinched, but the weight of it grounded him. He looked up to find the older man in a trench coat standing there, his expression unreadable, eyes as sharp as the world around them.
"Don't worry." Kompto's voice was calm. "She'll turn up if we keep moving. She went below us, didn't she?"
Ji-Soon nodded, eyes clouded with pain. "Kaz is going to kill me when he finds out I lost her."
The older man's gaze softened just a fraction, but his voice remained steady, anchoring Ji-Soon to the present. "Then we find a way down. She will be fine. That girl is stronger than you think. Stronger than even she knows."
Ji-Soon didn't answer right away, his hands still shaking, the weight of his own doubts heavier than the bruises on his body. "I know... I have to believe in her," he whispered, almost to himself.
Kompto gave a small nod, his lips barely curling at the edges. "Then let's move. We'll find her."