Trace switched to the next rope, taking a moment to study how they had secured it.

  He initiated a video-call to his partner, “Hey, Flash-Fry, are you seeing the same thing I am?” His eyes were being drawn to the wall of the pit, instead of the anchor point.

  Monroe cursed. “If I’m seeing that right, the wall looks like it has claw marks.”

  “Yeah,” Trace glanced downward again, noticing that the movement from before had vanished. “I don’t think this hole is natural.”

  Originally, everyone had been thinking that it was a sinkhole, and large portions of the wall still looked as though they had crumbled naturally. The farther down he climbed though, the more claw marks he saw on that wall.

  Trace reached the end of the second rope, and grabbing an anchor and two long drill stakes, he slowly drove them into the wall. “Why don’t you grab the other ropes in the truck and then start following down after me?”

  “You really think it’s going to be that deep?”

  “No, but I think we might need more once we get down here, and I want something to attach that hook to.”

  Monroe grumbled lightly about being forced to carry more crap down, but did as Trace asked him to.

  The woman above had estimated that she had gone maybe a fourth of the way down using two ropes. The ones she had been using were shorter than his own, at one-hundred and fifty feet each, minus overlap, and the original amount used for the anchor position.

  That meant when he was drilling in those two anchor stakes that he had only descended maybe two hundred and eighty or so feet. The ropes he was carrying were two hundred feet in length a piece, and he wasn’t sure about how long Monroe’s were. The point was, if her estimation was right, then his ropes alone would get them most of the way to the bottom.

  As soon as the anchor was secure, he attached the rope, clipped a carabiner to his belt, and kept rappelling down. Occasionally, bits of dirt would rain down from above as Monroe began his own descent into darkness.

  After the three-hundred-and-fifty-foot mark, he had to switch modes to blackout. All the light from above had faded and while you could still see the hole above, it was no longer giving him any light to see by except in the very middle of the hole.

  Blackout mode was a black and white mode that worked off a wide band of sensors to construct a visible image in zero light conditions. Everything was framed with distinct lines, and it was impossible to read anything flat in the mode. With Trace’s new NetConnect, he was interested in seeing how long he could keep it running. With the generic model, it had been almost as intense as running a bunch of scans.

  It was a little foolish to be trying it out this early on, instead of simply using a flashlight like the others. However, he was still trying to test out the limits of his new hardware.

  The synth-skin of his fingertips began to burn as he descended a little too fast. He gripped the rope harder, slowing his descent. Speed was fine, carelessness was not.

  Another anchor was hand-drilled into the wall. Down this far, more signs were appearing that indicated this place wasn’t naturally created. Tunnels, about three feet high, wove in and out of the wall everywhere he looked. It was from these holes that he had spotted movement earlier, and not the true bottom like he had thought.

  Across the way, an edger suddenly screamed as he fell for several seconds before splattering across the jagged concrete down below. To the others, it probably looked as though the person had merely lost their grip and been climbing without safety gear. For Trace, and in turn Monroe, through the ongoing video call, they saw the rope that had been cut following the edger down into the dark abyss.

  “Tune, are there things still living in those tunnels I keep seeing down there?” Monroe asked Trace over the call.

  “Yeah. Not sure what, but I saw some shadows moving down here earlier.”

  “I don’t suppose you thought to add more anchors to the rope I’m on, did you?”

  “You’re still above them. I’m the one who should be worried. Especially since there are only so many anchors in the bag she gave me.”

  Still, he found himself stopping every fifty feet and putting in another set of anchors. It slowed him down, and he was beginning to feel the building heat at the back of his neck. Trace had already been able to keep blackout mode running far beyond anything he would have thought possible by that point. Thirty minutes might not sound like a lot, but when you were used to only being able to run a dozen scans in a row, it was monumental.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He managed to make it to the end of the fourth rope, and to thirty-five minutes before he had to shut it off and switch on the flashlight. It wasn’t really worth it either, as he felt like his neck and brain were on fire.

  Trace strapped the flashlight to the strap of his bag and upped the gain on his eyes. He could manage that much without overheating. Still, even after only a few seconds of using the flashlight, he was already missing blackout mode.

  Another edger yelled as they fell. This time, they were closer to Trace.

  “There’s something there!” Someone yelled. “I swear I saw something move right before he fell!”

  The pit erupted into people yelling back and forth, talking about the odd tunnels and everything else they were seeing. It was everything Trace could do to ignore them and focus on what he was doing. All the noise they were making was distracting, and while he had brought his earbuds, they were in his bag.

  The tunnel in front of him shook slightly as something began to come toward him. Kicking off the wall, Trace avoided the claws that attempted to cut through the rope. Swinging back in, he grabbed the thing’s arm and yanked it out of the tunnel before it could disappear.

  Holding it out above the void with his black cyberware arm, Trace and Monroe were able to get their first clear look at what had created the tunnels. It was a small pygmy-looking thing, with enlarged eyes, massive fingernail claws, and jagged sharp teeth. It was also apparently male, naked as it was.

  The thing chattered and screamed at him, so with a shrug Trace released the pygmy, letting it fall the remaining hundreds of feet to the bottom.

  “What in the infernal corporations was that thing?” Monroe asked, as he finished sliding down the rope, stopping just above Trace’s head. He handed down two of the ropes so he could keep descending.

  Trace slung one over his head and shoulder and began tying the second one to an anchor. “How should I know? You saw as much as I did. Have you ever seen anything like it? All I can say for sure is that it wasn’t an aberration. The steel goddess isn’t responsible for whatever that thing was.”

  Monroe stared at him, before gradually shaking his head. “I’m not even going to ask.”

  “A job with Revlock a while ago. It was enlightening as to the nature of aberrations.”

  “I said I wasn’t going to ask. Regardless, that was my only guess. If it wasn’t her, then that leaves either something completely natural or the corporations. I know which one I’m voting for. If we were somewhere completely uninhabited and separated from civilization, maybe… But we’re not.”

  “Great, corpo experiments. Who knows how many are down there, and if they are intelligent?”

  “Would you quit jinxing us?”

  Trace winced and nodded, his neck and head aching. Unfortunately, he had run out of drill stakes and was now down to using extra-long spikes hammered into the dirt. Not exactly his favorite method, but it was what they had to work with.

  He placed the anchor inside the tunnel he had pulled the pygmy from, and after swapping position, had Monroe hammer the spike down.

  He and Monroe managed to pull another two pygmies out of their tunnels on the way down before they started avoiding their ropes. About half of the sixth rope lay unused and bundled up on the broken cement floor when they made it to the bottom of the hole. All told, the pit was roughly around one-thousand feet deep.

  They had originally been told that it was a sinkhole, but a sinkhole of that depth was ridiculous. At least in their inexpert opinions.

  The area was a mess. Broken concrete and metal shelving that had turned into sharp, jagged spears. The bodies of the fallen edgers lay alongside the pygmies and crushed unrecognizable monsters.

  There were a couple of edgers already looking over their quadrants. Monroe called the group they had joined above and let them know they could come on down. While he was doing that, Trace attached the hook to the extra rope Monroe had brought down for him.

  In their area of the pit wall, there were several tunnels for the pygmies, but that was it. The next quadrant over, however, had a large tunnel tall enough for even Monroe to stand up in. Oddly enough, that wasn’t something that any of them found encouraging.

  The light from the other flashlights kept interfering with how high he had the gain raised in his eyes. When they weren’t in the way, he managed to notice another three tunnels. All four of them were within one-hundred and eighty degrees of each other.

  Each of the tunnels differed in width, but were roughly the same height.

  Mel-Gear -Monroe had mentioned that was the woman’s name- and her team joined them as they were all splitting up. Each of the tunnels except theirs was getting groups of between ten and twelve edgers. There would have been more, but well, four edgers had died just on the way down. That tended to scare off the more skittish folks.

  Some edgers only wanted to do a certain type of job, and this one had taken them out of their comfort zone.

  “Who’s going in first?” Trace asked, kneeling on the ground as he inspected his shotgun, and stuffed his cargo pockets full of extra shells from his bag.

  The group looked from him to Monroe and shook their heads. Monroe couldn’t be in front; the tunnel ceiling was only a couple of inches above his head. He was a big man with broad muscle-bound shoulders. They needed someone smaller. That they could easily shoot over and around if the situation called for it.

  Trace was shorter than him and lean, but he was still six feet tall. If he was put in the front, then he would need to stand to the side, out of the way. Everyone liked the look of his shotgun though. In an emergency, having something like that up front would be very useful.

  “I’ll take the lead if you’ll cover my side?” A short man wearing a mask that covered the bottom half of his face said. He was carrying an assault rifle with an extended magazine, and a second one taped to it. The barrel of the rifle had a flashlight attached to it.

  “Sure, just keep your light pointed forward. I’ll have the gain on my eyes turned up once we enter to help me better see in the dark.”

  The group whistled in appreciation. “Expensive eyes,” One of them muttered.

  “I can do that.” The short edger agreed. “Do you need tape to attach your flashlight to your shotgun barrel or handguard?”

  “If you have some, then sure. Having it that far forward would keep it out of the way, while providing light for the rest of you.” Trace quickly taped the flashlight in place and took up his position on the side of the tunnel.

  With twin nods, the two edgers entered the tunnel.

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