The light was failing.
Will saw it in the way the shadows between the trees stopped being mere cover and merged into a solid, heavy pitch. It was the specific transition that meant night was closing in, and the dark had deadly opinions about large groups moving over open ground.
You need walls, Khan rumbled in his mind. A group this size after dark is a dinner bell for whatever made that roar.
Will scanned the terrain. The hills were full of ruined topography, but it was all wrong—too exposed, too collapsed. The exhausted women and terrified children wouldn't survive a night in the open.
Then Tyson pointed.
A ridge ran east to west along the hillside. It was high, sheer, and completely swallowed by a hundred thousand years of thick vegetation. At first glance, it was just another geographic feature. But the geometry underneath the heavy moss was wrong for natural stone. It was too straight.
Will looked at it, his eyes tracing the rusted, fossilized grid bleeding through the dirt.
"That's a skyscraper," he breathed.
"Was," Tyson corrected, his voice raspy.
It had fallen sometime in the first few centuries after the apocalypse. It had tipped and crashed across a natural ravine, its steel spine bridging the gap. Over the next hundred millennia, the earth had aggressively reclaimed it until the glass and the hillside became the same entity.
High ground. Natural walls, Khan assessed rapidly. Single entrance, if the Builder has the stamina to seal it. Yes.
Before they pushed inside, they took stock.
The corporate cache spread out on the dirt carried a different weight in the failing light. It wasn't video game loot; it was heavy, bloodstained gear that had been carried a very long way by men who killed for a living.
Nothing fit perfectly.
Tyson forced a heavy chest piece over his broad shoulders. The corporate metal pinched fiercely at his underarms, but it covered his vitals, so the big man just gritted his teeth and locked the clasps. Don geared up with quiet, fearful focus, swapping his broken armor for a lighter leather rig. Will restocked his quiver and pulled a corporate short sword from the pile, the unfamiliar grip heavy and cold in his hand.
Maddie found a real sword.
She picked up the P.A.C.I.F.I.C. standard-issue blade, testing the weight. It was heavy, demanding every ounce of her fifteen [Strength], but it was balanced steel. She strapped the scabbard to her hip, her scraped, bruised hands trembling slightly from the adrenaline crash, but she locked it in tight.
She binds her wounds and immediately reaches for heavier steel, Khan murmured, delivering what he genuinely considered the highest possible compliment. A violent, stubborn little thing. I find this admirable.
"Khan," Will warned out loud, rubbing his temples.
Maddie looked up from her buckle, raising an eyebrow at Will. "I can hear you, you know."
Khan went instantly silent, recalibrating the fact that Will's exhaustion was making him speak to his mental parasite out loud. Will decided to pretend it hadn't happened.
The scout group arranged itself.
Will signaled for Tyson and Don.
The large one understands violence, Khan noted. The brother needs to earn his place tonight. Give him the point.
Will nodded, adding Maddie to the Vanguard.
Allison took the entrance without being asked. She would seal it once they confirmed the interior was clear, but hollowed-out concrete this large would require heavy, sustained concentration. She leaned against the fossilized steel frame, looking pale.
"Try not to find anything terrible," Allison said.
"Working on it," Will replied.
The women and children settled around her. The older, dark-haired woman was already organizing the camp layout—not with military efficiency, but with fierce, maternal instinct. She shoved the children into the most protected alcove and stood in front of them with a jagged piece of rebar.
Will stepped into the dark.
The interior announced itself immediately as something deeply, uncomfortably wrong.
The building's skeleton was intact, but rotated ninety degrees. The floors were walls. The walls were ceilings. The structural shift triggered an immediate sense of vertigo. They were walking on shattered, reinforced glass that looked down into dark, horizontal elevator shafts. Thick, pale tree roots hung from what used to be the floorboards like alien tentacles.
Tyson took the lead. Will fell in behind him, with Maddie and Don a few steps back.
Will deliberately slowed his pace, letting the Vanguard push ahead so he could walk shoulder-to-shoulder with Don.
The younger man was clutching his borrowed sword so tightly his knuckles were white. The heavy gagged presence of Curtis waiting outside was pressing down on him.
Will didn't offer a clean, philosophical speech.
"You held the line," Will said quietly, keeping his eyes on the dark hallway ahead. "When the guard leveled that crossbow at you. You didn't run."
Don swallowed hard. "He's my brother."
"I know," Will said. "Which means gagging him was the hardest thing asked of anyone today. But you did it, and that's why we're all still breathing."
Don didn't stand taller—he was too physically exhausted for that—but his grip on his sword shifted. He held it a little less like a shield, and a little more like a weapon.
Good, Khan said privately. Loyalty forged in blood does not break. He will fight for you now.
The structure opened up as they moved deeper. Cramped, sideways offices collapsed into larger voids, and walls gave way to spaces that the jungle had aggressively devoured.
And the walls had started to glow.
It was the eerie, unnatural luminescence of things that had been absorbing ambient mana for a hundred millennia. Jagged crystal formations had grown along the old corporate concrete, catching the pale blue bioluminescence of the moss and throwing it back in slow, steady pulses.
Tyson dropped back a half-step to walk beside Will. They had already traded names in the mud, but the silence between them was still settling, the two men figuring out the exact geometry of their trust.
"MMA fighter," Tyson rasped, his voice bouncing softly off the sideways ceiling.
Will looked over.
"Before the Tutorial," Tyson clarified, keeping his heavy gaze scanning the dark ahead. "Woke up in chains in this world."
Will looked at the bruises around the big man's thick wrists. The System's baseline healing hadn't erased the deep, bloody grooves the corporate iron had left behind.
"We'll find the Corpos who put them there," Will said.
Tyson just nodded once, the violent promise understood.
They walked another twenty meters into the glowing, overgrown ruins.
And then, without warning, the floor dropped away, and the sideways skyscraper opened into the cavern.