Seven nearly plummeted into the lava as her pickaxe chimed. The sound was obscenely loud in the silence, pinging off the walls of the cave with such force that she felt it humming against her teeth. Swearing, she pulled the handle towards her from where it was slung over her back.

  Text scrolled in the air over the pickaxe, courtesy of the dice within. At least she hadn’t managed to drain that one yet. A part of her wanted to, but it was her only ticket out of this mess. The text scrolled into the air in a sickly green color, a stark contrast against the orange of the magma below:

  WELCOME TO HELL’S MAW. CURRENT SHIFT LENGTH: TRIPLE OVERTIME (72 HOURS). QUOTA: 777 SHARDS. FAILURE TO MEET THIS QUOTA WILL RESULT IN LIFT LOCKOUT. NO EMERGENCY SERVICES WILL BE PROVIDED AT THIS TIME, AND COUNSELING WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UPON RETURN. GOOD LUCK!

  “Of course it’s 777 shards,” she snapped, shoving the pickaxe away. “Rook must think he’s some kind of comedian.”

  “Well…” Pocket began.

  Sighing, Seven turned her attention to the bridge again. On a normal shift, she’d maybe get a hundred shards if she was lucky. She’d gotten somewhere in the two hundreds that first night with her spelunker dice. Even with it, she’d be lucky to get enough to meet Rook’s requirement in the first three days here. And that was to say nothing of how much she’d be able to collect with whatever…this was.

  Seven winced, glancing at the cathedral ahead, and took a deep breath before stepping onto the rickety bridge. It held for now, and she took one creeping step forward at a time.

  “You’re not really considering going into that place, are you?” Pocket asked.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Do you have a death wish?”

  “I might.”

  That, at least, shut Pocket up momentarily, but he recovered quickly as she took another tentative step onto another metal slat. “We should just stay by the entrance,” he said, his voice nervous, his color flashing various shades—something she noticed he did when he was panicked. Not that she could blame him, exactly. “Someone has to come back for us at some point.”

  “Pocket, you’ve been with LMC for long enough to know better. They won’t come back for us. They’re not coming back for us even if we meet the shard count.”

  Pocket let out a little gasp. “Of course they’re coming back for us. You really think they’d—“

  The bridge groaned. Her foothold gave way. And Seven’s foot plunged through the metal bridge and into thin air.

  Shit.

  There was no time to think; she grabbed at the first thing she could find, which, in this case, was one of the searing metal chains that the bridge was hanging from. Her arm slammed into the chain with bruising force, but it stopped her fall.

  For several seconds, it was all she could do to hang there, Pocket’s squealing echoing across the cave, her own breathing harsh in her ears as she stared at the swirling magma below—and her feet, dangling precariously above it.

  White-hot pain raked up her leg—she must have scraped it on the metal on the way down. Swearing quietly, she fished for purchase with her other leg on the rock wall nearby, her right arm shaking from holding her body aloft.

  She was a few feet away from safety. More than close enough. If she was careful, maybe she could make it.

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  One painstaking move at a time, Seven found a slot in the crumbling rock wall, keeping her body suspended with her arms, and slowly dragged herself across thin air and onto the other side of the canyon. She flopped over onto her back as soon as she hit the crumbling rock, her chest heaving, her hands shaking, her leg throbbing viciously.

  Pocket appeared on her chest, his color faintly green, and Seven looked at him—then at the last few slats of the bridge, broken and dangling over the chasm.

  “Yes,” she finally answered. “I really think they’re not coming back for us.”

  This time, Pocket didn’t argue.

  ***

  Seven huddled in the cathedral’s entrance, her pack leaning against the wall, her pant leg drawn up to examine the wound beneath. It was just her luck to be trapped down here and injured; the sharp metal of the bridge had raked all the way up her leg and into her thigh, narrowly missing several arteries. She was lucky not to be bleeding out, and as it was, there was still blood everywhere.

  Pocket paced back and forth nearby—or tried to, anyway. She wasn’t sure if a slime could pace at all. He muttered to himself as she splashed the gash with an antiseptic, wincing at the vicious sting, and dug for bandages in her pack.

  “Pocket, why is this such a shock to you?” she demanded. “You’ve spent most of my first few weeks joking about pancakes and mattresses. Don’t tell me you didn’t know how LMC really works.”

  “They just told me this was an adoption agency,” he moaned. “I thought, new slime, new life! Sure, it was a little sketchy, but then you showed up, and I had a good feeling about you, and there were pancakes, and mattresses, and most importantly, no dungeons.”

  Seven froze, the bandages half-unraveled in her hands. “What do you mean, no dungeons?”

  “Where else do you think slimes come from?” He asked, still pacing. “And now there’s no pancakes, no mattress, only dungeons and lava and—“

  “Pocket,” she interrupted, “why do you keep going on about dungeons? This isn’t a dungeon, it’s…uh…”

  Seven trailed off, bandages still in hand, examining the massive building behind her, built into the rock. It was practically the size of a castle, complete with barred windows and massive doorways. She was crouched in what might have been a stable—if any of this made sense at all.

  But it was hard to figure out why it was here, and who might have built it. The environment was completely inhospitable, and unlike the upper levels, there was no evidence of LMC here; she hadn’t seen a pickaxe at all since coming down here.

  “I’m sure it’s not a dungeon,” she said, trying to force calm into her voice as she carefully wrapped her leg, wincing at the pain. She hated seeing Pocket panic, even if he was a little melodramatic to begin with. “We’ll find out what it is and get out of here in one piece—together.”

  “I don’t want to find out what it is,” Pocket snapped, going red. “I want to take another tunnel out of here. Any tunnel.”

  “We can do that,” she said, finishing the bandage on her leg. “Doesn’t make any difference to me which direction we go. First thing we need to do is get our bearings and get away from the drop point. After that, maybe we can set up a camp of sorts and fan out from there looking for ore. There’s always a way to win.”

  No sooner had the words left her mouth than her pickaxe chimed again with another message. Frowning, Seven twisted around to see the dice pop-up’s message:

  HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED. INCREASED RISK TO WELL-BEING OF LMC EMPLOYEE. PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

  “Oh you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, then forced herself to her feet, her new wound pulling in protest. Pocket hopped onto her shoulder, now far too quiet as she shouldered her pack, listening for the source of the warning.

  At first, there was nothing. Just the faint bubbling of lava and the steady drip of nearby water. Then, Seven felt faint vibrations—as if something was rattling the very earth beneath her feet. The rocks beneath her boots clattered with each step, and something screamed in the darkness of the adjacent tunnel—the only other way out of the main cavern.

  The sound sent a chill down her spine, every hair on her body raising in some sort of instinctual protest against the noise. It was unnatural and guttural, the sound of something that regretted its very existence—and was determined to make anyone else existing pay for it. The roar came from everywhere and nowhere at once, though the bulk of it sprang from the dark tunnel across the cavern from the cathedral-castle.

  “Guess we’re not going that way after all,” she whispered. Pocket nodded a little too fast on her shoulder, his gelatinous form jiggling with the force.

  “Agreed.”

  “Run?” she asked.

  “Run,” he agreed, still nodding.

  Seven ran just as the thing crashed through the walls.

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