The tunnel slanted up like a question that didn't want an answer.
Lucas dragged the explorer one arm-length at a time, boots he didn't have scraping stone he didn't like. The corridor narrowed until he had to turn his shoulders sideways and pull, rest, pull again. Every metal rasp from the armor sounded like a flare in the dark. Every breath tasted like dust and old coins.
Behind him, the cave breathed back.
Click. Scrape. A crystal somewhere cracked with the delicate cruelty of thin ice, and echoes braided together until he couldn't tell what was near and what was his imagination sharpening itself.
"Almost there," he whispered, though there was no proof of it. "Almost where? No idea."
His pajama ducks gave off just enough glow to paint his hands green. The white vein-guide in the wall had thinned to a thread and vanished entirely, leaving only the slow incline and the smell of cold air somewhere ahead. He shifted his grip under the cuirass lip, fingers numb, and hauled.
[Crisis Adrenaline — 00:25]
Lifting strength increased. Side effects: inevitable.
"Yeah, yeah," he breathed. "Send the inevitable a calendar invite."
Claws ticked in the tunnel behind. Not fast, not a sprint—measured. The crowned one. It moved like it knew time was on its side.
Lucas bit down on panic until it was a bitter seed. He reached back with his free hand and fumbled his lantern from the inventory. The wick coughed a sullen glow. He didn't need light; he needed a voice the tunnel would listen to.
He set the lantern on the stone, took a small rock, and tapped the glass gently three times. The sound was thin, but it traveled oddly—high, bright, carrying around the curve of the passage like a thrown coin.
The clicking behind him paused, turned, considered—and moved toward the echo that wasn't a man dragging a knight uphill.
"Thank you, physics," Lucas whispered, and he dragged.
The incline sharpened. Air licked his face—cooler, cleaner. The tunnel broke open into a cramped chamber cut at a tilt, ceiling shouldered in, one wall cracked to reveal a shaft that went up and up, ribbed by old timber and iron rungs mostly rotted away. High above, a handprint of daylight pressed against a grate, thin as mercy.
Lucas stared. Then he looked at the explorer. Then back at the shaft.
"Right," he said, and laughed once without meaning to. "We do stupid things now."
He braced the man's back against the lowest beam and tested his pick on a seam of stone. The metal sang, bit. Splinters of rock skittered. He shaved a rough notch, then another, building idiot footholds he could curse later. He wedged the pick's single curved head under a sound beam, tested his weight, and didn't fall. Good enough.
"Okay, buddy," he told the unconscious man with the broken light for a heart. "We're going to treat gravity like a suggestion."
He climbed three steps alone, came back down, and hooked the explorer's arms with a strip of blanket twisted into a sling. He hauled. The armor groaned complaint, but it moved. Two feet. Four. He rested. The tunnel below breathed again—patient. He hauled.
[Heavy Lifting — Lv. 1 → Lv. 2]
Strength bonus increased slightly. Stamina cost further reduced.
"Love you," Lucas muttered to the pop-up. "Never leave me."
His hands burned; his lungs wrote letters he didn't have time to read. The shaft made up its mind to be vertical, and he made up his mind to pretend it wasn't. He wedged the explorer against a brace, climbed three more notches, pulled again, each motion a small betrayal of his own tendons.
Halfway.
The crowned thing reached the chamber behind them. He didn't see it—he felt it, a pressure in the air, a quiver in the wood like the shaft itself wanted to fold and hide. Crystal teeth touched stone. The sound was tender, almost curious.
Lucas hooked the sling higher and dragged until the world narrowed to a single hinge of pain behind his sternum. His pajama ducks glowed faintly, more defiant than brave.
The crowned one tapped the lantern he'd left on the floor below. Glass chimed. The sound echoed up the shaft, sweet as a spoon against a cup. A beat later, something heavy pushed at the sole remaining rung ladder and the wood groaned in a language of knots and rot.
"Do not," Lucas panted at the shaft. "Do not you dare."
The rung gave with a noise like an old man breaking a promise. A section of ladder sloughed off and fell, clattering into darkness below.
Lucas swallowed the shout his body wanted. He pressed his face to the wood and whispered to the explorer: "You are very heavy for someone who is mostly light."
He shifted his grip and went again.
Light above widened from handprint to hand. The grate at the top was rusted and bent, crusted with old damp. He reached it and shoved. It didn't move. He braced both feet and shoved again. Nothing.
"Inventory," he rasped. "Pick. Please."
The tool chimed into his hand like a friend. He jammed the curved head between grate and stone, levered until his shoulders sang a note he didn't like, and the iron screamed. The grate hiccupped up an inch.
He levered again, shouting this time because quiet was over. The grate broke loose with an ugly wrench. Wind poured in—thin, cold, glorious.
"Come on," he begged gravity for the second time in one day and hauled the explorer up the final feet, armor biting stone, the sling burning grooves into his palms. He rolled both of them onto the slanted lip above and lay there, seeing a sky so pale it barely counted.
Below, the crowned thing reached the base of the shaft and lifted its face to the light. For a breath-long eternity, Lucas and the creature regarded one another through the ribs of the world—the thing's eyes two steady coals of patient intent, his own two black beads of refusal.
Then the creature lowered its head and stepped back into the dark, like a promise written for later.
[Quest Complete: Aid the Fallen Explorer]
Reward: +1 Strength, +1 Endurance
Title Acquired — Bearer of Light (Provisional)
Title effect: Faint aura steadies allies' breathing and slows minor bleed-outs within 2m.
A tired laugh crawled out of him. "Provisional. Story of my life."
He looked at the explorer; the crack in the chest crystal had closed by a finger's width. The blue light was steady. The man breathed like a bellows that had finally learned rhythm.
"Okay," Lucas croaked to whoever was listening. "Please nobody arrest me."
Figures crested the rise beyond the grate—three, then five, then more—armor that wasn't cave-born, visors that weren't snarls. Their gear looked like it had survived a history lesson and asked for seconds. The woman at the lead had a half-cape pinned with a sigil that matched the tag he'd taken.
"Hands visible," she said, voice clear, almost bored. "Slowly."
Lucas put his palms up. "In my defense," he began, and everything went very bright and very quiet as his body cashed in all the checks he'd been writing.
First bell tolled like iron teeth on the city's roof.
The guards came for Lucas at dawn, boots speaking the damp corridor's language. Barrel Face appeared with a ring of keys; the tall one with the debt-collecting spine did the unlocking. Jeff was already awake, eyes bright in the gloom like a cat deciding if he liked you.
"Advice?" Lucas asked, deadpan, as the ropes bit his wrists again.
Jeff nodded solemnly. "Don't tell them you went into the Depths unless you want to be buried there again. If they ask what you can do, tell the truth slowly. If they offer you water, smell it first. And if Captain Vorn asks you a question twice, the first answer was wrong."
"Great," Lucas said. "Anything comforting?"
Jeff considered. "You have very heroic cheekbones."
"Thanks," Lucas muttered. "I grew them myself."
They walked him through a waking fortress. The prison turned out to be part of a larger body: a mining holdfast stacked in layers like a cut geode—barracks and forges and gantries built into the stone, veins of pale crystal wired into lamps that hummed. Miners in stained coats trundled carts along rails that doubled as streets. He spotted beings he couldn't name—one with latticework crystal grown along the jaw like coral, another with skin freckled by shining dust. Everyone moved with the practical hurry of people whose tools had opinions.
They pushed him into a chamber that was almost a hall, thick with papers and weapons. A long table ran like a scar through the center. The woman he'd seen on the ridge waited at the far end, helm off now.
Captain Rhea Vorn looked like someone carved for command and then left out in the weather. She was taller than Lucas, long-limbed but built like someone who spent her strength, not posed with it. Copper-red hair was braided tight against her skull and coiled at the back of her neck, a few strands escaping to catch the blue light from the veins in her left arm. Her green eyes were the calm of someone who'd seen fires and learned how to walk through them. The half-cape at her shoulder hung just short of her hip, pinned with the same circle-and-line sigil Lucas had found on the tag in the cave.
"Thank you," she said. Her gaze took Lucas in the way a jeweler weighs a stone—dispassionate, interested. "Name."
"Lucas."
"Family name?"
"Still Lucas."
One corner of her mouth almost considered moving. "Origin."
"Complicated."
"Try me."
He swallowed. "Not here."
Her eyes flicked over him again: bare feet, duck pajamas smudged with cave, a miner's pick leaning against the table where they'd set it and his lantern beside.
"You were found above a closed ascent shaft, carrying a half-dead man wearing a Core Shard. We tracked the drag marks back down and found signs of a crowned shard-wolf pack and a collapsed rungline. We also found a broken grate that I'm told had defied five years of maintenance."
Lucas tried sincerity. "Must've been loose."
"Mm." Her gaze went briefly to his wrists. "What happened below?"
He told her—edited for panic, heavy on facts. The campfire, the cave, the crystals, the fallen explorer, the warning, the shard-animals, the climb. He left out the part where he named his pants part of the party. He did not leave out the part where he put his hand on the crystal and felt the world pull him inside out.
When he finished, silence settled like silt after a flood.
"You used healing," said Vorn, not a question.
Lucas wet his lips. "I used… something. The system called it Sacrificial Aid. It took my health to feed his. Two of mine for one of his. I checked. It gives it back if I rest. Or if someone heals me. Which I assume costs someone else something, because this place loves a bill."
The Captain raised her eyebrows at the word system, but decided not to pursue the subject. One of the guards shifted, armor complaining. Another made a sign with his thumb over his heart as if canceling a debt. Vorn's gaze didn't move.
"You'll show me," she said.
Lucas glanced at his bound wrists. "I think 'please' would make this feel less like an autopsy."
She nodded at the debt-spine guard. The knots loosened. The ropes fell.
A door at the side opened. A young soldier limped in, face pale under stubble, bandage wrapped around his thigh with a bloom of red at the edge. He wore the circle-and-line sigil on his breastplate, and embarrassment in his eyes.
"Training pit," Vorn said to the soldier. "Splintered shard. Nothing serious."
"It's fine, Captain," the man said through his teeth. "I—"
Vorn lifted two fingers and he went quiet, but not resentful.
To Lucas she said, "Heal him."
Lucas blinked. "With what, my charming personality?"
"Your skill."
"Right. Just checking we aren't hoping for miracles."
He crouched by the wound. "This might feel cold. Or like betrayal. Not sure yet."
He pressed his palm lightly over the bandage—above where the blood was seeping—and willed the thing that had hurt him to hurt him again.
The world obliged.
Cold knifed up his arm, not from the skin so much as from the bone—like someone had poured winter into the hollow of him.
A braided rope of blue light rose faintly between his hand and Darin's leg, and the air hummed. Lucas's breath hitched. A tight little red number popped above his vision — –8 HP — floating there like bad news.
Darin's breath steadied. The bleeding slowed. Under Lucas's hand, heat returned to skin that had gone paper-white.
[Sacrificial Aid — Lv. 1]
Conversion applied: 8 → 4 HP restored.
Note: Overuse may result in user collapse. You have experience with this.
Explain it to Me Like I'm 5: At Lv. 1, Sacrificial Aid trades 2 of your HP for 1 HP restored to the target.*
"Thank you," Lucas whispered to exactly no one, and took his hand away.
The guard with the debt-spine made that thumb-over-heart sign again, harder. Barrel Face murmured something that sounded like a prayer into his collar.
Vorn neither flinched nor smiled. She studied Lucas's hand like she could see the bones through it.
"That's not temple-grade healing," she said, almost to herself. "No hymns, no chant. No solvent. No offering. And no mana draw on the ambient veins."
Her green eyes lifted to his. "You paid with your own."
Lucas held up a shaky finger. "I prefer invested. It'll come back with interest."
"Blood channeling," murmured the debt-spine guard, as if the words might invite something listening through the walls.
Vorn's gaze cut sideways at him, sharp enough to edit the room. "Words are cheap," she said, then turned back to Lucas.
"No one has performed functional channeling in centuries. Not since the first Depths were sealed and the old guilds burned their books rather than be dragged below to fix what they'd broken."
"Love that story," Lucas said weakly. "Hate the ending."
"Me too," Vorn said. It wasn't a joke.
Silence again. The first bell's echo had long since gone. Somewhere in the holdfast, hammers sang to ore. Somewhere, Jeff was probably composing a new song about the idiot in pajamas who healed with bad math.
She paced once, twice—the controlled orbit of someone who kept motion leashed. When she stopped, the blue light under her left arm pulsed like a heartbeat that wasn't entirely hers.
"Here is the only offer you will get," she said. "Help us stop whatever is driving crowned shards up from the deep veins. Use this—" she flicked eyes at his hand "—channeling to stabilize the wounded when the veins go quiet. In return, I will not only keep you from the lower cells; I will also put every scholar, priest, and smuggler I own on the problem of how you got here. And whether there's a line back."
Lucas stared at her. His heart did something small and unhelpful against his ribs.
"And if I say no?" he asked.
Vorn's eyes didn't change. "Then I return you to where the patrol found you. We mark the shaft sealed. And the Depths will find you before we do."
He swallowed. The room narrowed to three things: the pick on the table, the ache behind his breastbone, and the memory of a crowned head lifting toward the light like a crowned question.
He thought of Jeff's voice through the bars: Tell the truth slowly. He thought of the explorer's crystal pulsing steady, and the little gold frame around the ability that had saved his life by calling him an idiot.
"Okay," he said at last, his voice hoarse and almost steady. "I'll join team Don't-Die-Horribly."
"Good," Vorn said. She straightened, all the softness she didn't have folding back into the lines of command. "We start at second bell. You'll be issued proper clothing."
Lucas looked down at the ducks. "They'll be jealous."
A corner of her mouth almost moved. "Try to keep your humor. It helps in places where light doesn't."
She nodded to the guards. The ropes did not return. Instead, Barrel Face handed him a folded bundle that turned out to be roughspun pants, a shirt that had aspirations to be a jacket, and boots one size too large.
"Welcome to the Holdfast," Vorn said. "Try not to make me regret this before noon."
"I'll pencil that into my schedule," Lucas said. "Right after 'learn what a crown-wolf is' and 'stop bleeding for people I just met.'"
"Second bell," she repeated, and turned away to a wall map pulsing faintly with vein-lines, like the city had veins she could read and argue with.
Lucas gathered the clothes and the pick. The lantern's cracked glass winked the way old friends do. Outside the chamber, the corridor smelled like iron and yeast—the first hint of bread rising he'd felt since the meadow.
He paused at the threshold and looked back. "Captain?"
Vorn didn't turn. "Yes."
"That man I dragged up," he said. "The one with the shard. Is he—"
"Stable," she said. "You may see him when you've earned it."
He made a face he didn't let her see and left before the room could ask anything else of him.
The holdfast breathed around him—stone and engines, people and problems, light singing in wires like captive weather. Lucas slid his feet into too-large boots and tried a step. Then another. His knees made a private list of complaints.
[Enduring Stride — Lv. 2 → Progress: 63%]
Note: Boots reduce terrain penalties. Also reduce toe-stubbing.
He smiled despite everything. "Thanks," he told the air. "Keep the notes coming."
The system obliged, of course.
[Ability Triggered: Explain it to Me Like I'm 5]
Second bell: The one after first. Don't be late.
He laughed, because not laughing would be surrender. The sound startled a passing miner, who squinted at the duck pattern still peeking from under the new shirt and shook his head, muttering something about "apprentices" and "fashion."
Lucas adjusted the too-large boots, tucked the pajama hem deep, and started toward second bell.
Somewhere below, the Depths rearranged their teeth. Somewhere ahead, a woman with a blue-lit arm put pins in a map and called it a plan. And somewhere in the middle, a man who bled to heal decided he'd like to keep his blood and his jokes if possible.
He was provisional. He was alive. And for the first time since waking in the grass, he almost felt like he had a direction that wasn't just "away."