The desert was worse than the glacier.
That was Rex's thought, at least, and he made sure everyone knew it.
"It was too cold there. It's too hot here. Why can't Rubies be in a normal place?"
Nico ran backward across the dunes, grinning at him.
"This is normal place if you're built different?"
Rex threw a rock at him.
Nico dodged it without even looking.
The sun blazed above dunes stretching across the horizon in all directions. Heat glowed on the horizon so far away that the ruins almost appeared to float in the sky. As though sand was pushed off the ground in whispering waves, the air became drenched and stale.
Viper checked the tracker again.
"The signal is directly beneath us."
Rex looked around.
"There is literally nothing here."
Nico stopped on top of a dune and squinted down at a half-buried stone shape.
"Not nothing."
They climbed down and cleared enough sand to reveal a carved staircase descending into the earth.
Massive stone walls jutted from the dune below, engraved with ancient symbols and weathered statues shaped almost like beasts with open mouths.
Viper studied them.
"These are old ruins. That is, very old."
Nico stretched his arms.
"Cool. Loot the place."
Rex added, "It's not looting if we're taking our own Ruby."
"That's the spirit."
The stairway led them deep underground into a buried temple.
The air inside was cooler, but the silence felt wrong. Their steps echoed through long stone halls, where old murals puddled beneath cracked surfaces. Broken pillars rose slightly at odd inclinations. Ancient torches hung on the wall roared to life as they passed through each, and the others had little mechanisms to do so.
Rex narrowed his eyes.
"I don't trust this place."
The first trap triggered almost easily.
The floor clicked beneath Nico's foot.
He stopped.
"Oh."
A hundred darts shot from the walls.
Nico vanished in a blur. Rex crouched and shielded Viper while the darts clattered harmlessly off his arms and shoulders.
Nico looked up at the other side of the hall and said, "Still don't trust it?"
Rex glared.
"No. I trust it even less now."
After that things became more careful, but the deeper they went, the stranger the temple became.
Some rooms were filled with giant rotating stone blades.
Others also had collapsing bridges over deep pits.
In one chamber they found rows of statues holding crystal orbs in their hands. When Nico passed between them, the orbs lit up and fired scorching beams of light.
Then came shadows.
It began with a sound.
A wet scraping sound from the darkness.
Nico turned.
Two glowing eyes appeared at the far end of the hall.
Then four.
Then ten.
The shadow-coated jackals slipped out behind pillars and broken stone walls, their bodies enveloped with a kind of liquid darkness Dr. E had once spread on innocent animals.
Rex walked forward.
"So he was here too."
The creatures lunged.
Nico exploded into motion, slamming a kick through the first jackal's side and wiping the shadow coating off it in a thick black liquid. The freed animal tumbled across the floor and scrambled away.
Rex then grabbed another by the throat and ripped the shadow away with one violent pull. More beasts kept coming. They scuttled across the ceiling. They came charging from side passages. They swarmed in packs to overwhelm them.
Viper shouted from behind a broken column, "These are not normal animals anymore! The shadows are keeping them aggressive!"
Nico ducked under a claw swipe and drove an uppercut into a jackal's jaw.
"Yeah, I noticed!"
The battle carried them through chamber after chamber.
Nico ran along a wall at one point to avoid a whole pack at the same time, then came down in a spinning kick that hit three in one. Rex took the straight line, just marched across whatever fell in front of him until the hall was strewn with pools of shadow behind him.
At last they reached the heart of the temple.
A massive circular chamber opened before them, full of sand and dust pouring slowly from cracks high above. Drifts of debris spread all along the floor. A stone pedestal sat in the middle and four gigantic statues of kneeling warriors stood around it.
Resting above the pedestal, suspended in a beam of pale light, was another Phantom Ruby.
Nico smiled.
"There it is."
Viper held up one hand.
"Wait. In a place like this, the obvious answer is always a trap."
Nico looked at the Ruby.
Then at the room.
Then back at the Ruby.
"...Still gonna grab it."
He walked toward the pedestal.
Rex sighed.
"Of course you are."
As soon as Nico took the Ruby, the beam of light died.
A grinding sound rolled through the chamber.
The statues moved.
Stone cracked and fell away as all four kneeling warriors rose to their feet. Their hollow eyes glimmered and grew with dark energy. Sand poured from their shoulders as they gripped ancient blades in their hands.
Nico looked up.
"Okay. That one was on me."
The stone guardians attacked.
The first swung downward with a blade taller than Rex. Nico darted aside and the sword cleaved the floor open. Rex met the second guardian head on, catching its strike with both hands and snarling as the weight drove him to one knee.
The third and fourth moved with terrifying speed for things made of stone.
Viper backed away toward the chamber wall, frantically checking the tracker and the carvings around the pedestal.
"There has to be a control glyph or core! Ancient defenses always have one!"
"Try saying that faster!" Nico shouted as he jumped from one statue's arm to its shoulder, then punched its head clean off.
The head flew into a pillar.
The statue kept moving.
"Never mind! Hitting it is not enough!"
Rex got slammed across the room by a backhand from another guardian. He rolled, sprang back up, and answered with a punch that cracked the statue's chest.
One of the warriors raised its sword above Nico.
Before it could bring it down, Viper shouted, "The chest seals! Aim for the markings!"
There were old runes carved into each guardian's torso.
Nico grinned.
"Got it."
He sprinted forward, ran straight up the statue's front, and drove both heels into the rune carved in its chest.
The entire torso split open.
A dark crystal hidden inside shattered.
The guardian froze, then collapsed into rubble.
"One down!" Nico yelled.
Rex grabbed another statue's arm, twisting hard enough to rip it off, then used the broken limb like a club to smash the rune-seal in a second guardian's chest.
That one fell too.
The last two came together.
Nico and Rex exchanged a quick look.
Then both charged.
Nico distracted one by running circles around its legs while Rex bulldozed into the other, pinning it against the pedestal. Nico kicked off the first statue's knee, flew across the chamber, and struck the crystal in the pinned guardian's chest at the exact same moment Rex drove his fist through it.
The final guardian turned.
Rex grabbed its sword.
Nico ran up the blade.
Then sprang forward and buried a punch deep into its chest seal.
The last statue crumbled.
Silence returned.
Then the chamber began shaking.
Sand poured faster from above.
Cracks shot through the ceiling.
Viper looked up.
"The temple's collapsing!"
Nico tossed the new Ruby to Viper.
"Hold that!"
They ran.
The escape was absolute chaos.
Whole corridors buckled and broke apart. Ancient stone blocks crashed from above. One bridge gave way under Rex's feet and Nico had to yank him across the gap by the wrist. In another hall, sand poured in so fast it nearly buried them alive before Nico blasted a path through it.
They burst out of the buried staircase just as the entrance behind them collapsed and vanished beneath a wave of sand.
For a few seconds all three of them just stood there breathing.
Then Nico laughed.
"Okay. That was also awesome."
Rex shook sand out of his fur.
"No. That one also sucked."
Viper looked down at the tracker, now glowing brighter with four Ruby signatures gathered in one place.
"One signal left."