Scholarly Entry #T29-157-Lm8:

  Delver Management Contracts, Part 1

  Naturally, many who aren’t familiar with the workings of the Underfold find themselves questioning how it is possible for anyone but the System's chosen ones–the Delvers–to be the ruling class. Skills, items, experience points, and levels. All of these things are exclusively given to those who signs the Systems contract. How, then, is it possible that Delvers are still forced to bend to the rules of corporations such as the Nexus and the old conglomerates?

  Well, you see, the curious thing about the Underfold—if one were forced, at axe-point, to pick just one—is that while physics, geography, and occasionally entire species tend to wander off for a nap without warning, paperwork never does. Contracts signed beneath the System are upheld everywhere.

  This makes life remarkably simple and, simultaneously, deeply complicated. Simple, because once you sign something, it sticks. Complicated, because once you sign something, it sticks. The difference is subtle, but important, and generally becomes clear around the moment you realize that “lifetime service” includes your next seven lifetimes and any others you may unexpectedly acquire.

  Naturally, this has made lawyers in the Underfold both extremely rich and extremely terrifying. Not because they’re powerful sorcerers or demonic masterminds—though, statistically speaking, some of them are—but because they’ve learned the ancient and deadly art of putting a comma in just the right place.

  Many a soul has been lost to a stray semicolon…

  ***

  Even in his youth—his younger youth, when he was still a student with ambitions rather than just plans—Lionel had been meticulous. The sort of person who thought “research” was something you did to make sure your research was properly researched. Who owned several highlighters, each with a strictly defined purpose. Who once tried to cross-reference three different celestial almanacs just to determine the most auspicious time to propose a joint venture in a cursed swamp.

  So naturally, when it came time to prepare his first ever Delver Contract—the big one, the real deal, the ceremonial scroll you slap on a desk when you become an Official Nexus-Registered Manager—Lionel had spared no effort.

  He had spent months poring over case law, sample clauses, and horror stories. It was airtight. Elegant. Practically art. It was a weaponized agreement, forged in bureaucracy and dipped in golden intentions—a document so elegant and watertight that no Delver, no matter how stubborn, reckless, or thick-skulled, could possibly object.

  It was supposed to be the crown jewel of his graduation. It was supposed to be the first step in a long and illustrious career. It was supposed to be—

  Well. Things happened, and Lionel’s dreams quietly got shelved somewhere between “Idealistic Vision” and “Unclaimed Lost Property.”

  But now, a little over a year later, Lionel still had the contract. He still took pride in it. He still believed in its perfection.

  It was, however, currently on the floor.

  Being scribbled on.

  He had provided her with a pen—a pen—but the terms looked as though they’d been scrawled with a blunt crayon dipped in chaos.

  All at the hands of a girl who had the sort of expression small children wear when they’ve been allowed to name a boat, a planet, or a previously unnamed natural disaster.

  “Eight cookies?” Lionel repeated, looking at the text with the resigned horror of a man watching someone draw a mustache on a priceless painting.

  The contract lay sprawled flat, its previously impeccable formatting now featuring stars, spirals, and one doodle that may have been a dragon, a cat, or possibly Lionel himself.

  “You want eight cookies for signing the contract like—what, a down payment?”

  The Pink Menace scoffed and rolled her eyes in the universal language of adolescents.

  “Eight cookies?” she repeated, in a tone that suggested Lionel had just confused apples for socks. “That obviously says—”

  She looked down.

  Paused.

  Tilted her head.

  Then, with the solemnity of a rogue cleric correcting scripture, leaned forward, scratched out the number, and replaced it with a new one, carefully adjusting the angle which, incidentally, made all the difference.

  “Infinite cookies?” Lionel said, in the tone of a man who had just discovered new depths of disbelief. “You want infinite cookies, unlimited nap times, and… six meals a day to sign the contract? For what, exactly? You’ve already erased every clause that even vaguely implied you’d be doing anything resembling work.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said. “Look here. There will be so much effort on my part.”

  Lionel, against his better judgment, followed her finger to a section of the contract that could best be described as freeform crayon literature. There, among the smudges, he read:

  ‘As a token of respect toward all tributes offered to the signee, she hereby swears to never let a single cookie crumb or even soggy noodle go to waste.’

  “This could really backfire on me, you know,” she said gravely. “But it’s a risk I’m willing to take for the sake of our future cooperation.”

  Something twitched at the corner of Lionel’s mouth. It was not a smile. “You know what,” he said, “give that back, and I’ll be sure to give you some reeeeally good benefits.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  And so, as Annabel Smith and Lionel J’Khall wrestled their way through the fine print of their improbable partnership, the rest of Ashenmoor quietly moved toward its final hour.

  ***

  Mari pounded on the door with desperation.

  “Sir? Sir?” she called, again and again, voice cracking beneath the rising bedlam coming from the floor below. It wasn’t so much the sound of something going wrong as it was the sound of all the things going wrong, loudly, and at the same time.

  Metal clanged, glass shattered, someone screamed bloody murder.

  Alana’s voice rose above the din, her cries reaching whole new levels of innovative profanity every time something sharp came too close or something heavy didn’t get out of her way in time.

  Too many shapes were moving down there—too many sharp objects being swung, too many screams, and all of it too frenzied.

  Desmond’s voice was one long string of whimpers and interpretations of the word “please,” though at some point he'd begun shrieking something about an arm. Possibly his. Possibly someone else's. There was mention of fingers. Probably fewer of them now.

  Mari didn’t want to know. She wanted the door to open.

  She kept knocking—no, beating—at the door, rattling the handle like it might develop a conscience. “Sir! Please, we need to—”

  The door groaned open, stalling the words in her throat.

  A tide of smells rolled out. Ozone. Sulfur. Burnt solder. The sort of acidic tang that warned your lungs they might be on fire. But underneath it all was the unmistakable stink of scorched flesh and hair.

  It was the sort of place that screamed bad idea before you'd even stepped in. Her Third Eye twitched, recoiling from the room’s very existence.

  That left her regular eyes to squint into a gloom barely held back by a few blinking, exhausted lights.

  Shadows clung to every surface like guilty secrets. Machinery loomed in jagged silhouettes, and one of them shifted.

  Not just flickered, not just trembled.

  Moved.

  Mari flinched. Not visibly. Just... internally. In the way where every fiber in your body remains on edge even as your eyes can’t stop looking.

  It was human—or at least, something wearing the general outline of one. She was perched on a table dyed the colors of her insides. A quilt clung to one shoulder with all the modesty of a retreating army, while her gaze remained locked on her fingers. What parts of her body Mari saw was an unsettling jigsaw of skin, metal, and ideas best left unexamined.

  A light pulsed from inside her. Inside, illuminating the lattice of veins beneath her skin. Metal, glass, runes, and tubing twisted their way into her side, a grotesque sort of symbiosis pulsing in rhythm with her heart. Or possibly the machine’s. It wasn’t clear where one began and the other ended.

  Two more lights—this time orange, faint halos present in her eyes—swiveled toward the open door. Mari felt them find her. Felt them notice.

  Not just Mari, but the shrieking, clattering madness still raging below. It had never really stopped. It was just that for one, cold second, it had felt very far away.

  Then Alana let out a screech that was part rage, part fury, and part creative swearing, and the moment cracked.

  “Yenna?” Mari managed, breath catching in her throat.

  The young woman didn’t answer.

  But someone else did.

  From the floor came a wheezing rasp like an old accordion begging for retirement. A figure—once upright, now more of a suggestion of verticality—gasped:

  “Go,” the shopkeeper coughed, with all the dignity of a man trying very hard not to lose anything too essential. “Get rid of the foolish nuisances. Make them remember why they once feared Edrik Kain.”

  And for a brief moment, the flickering lights brightened just enough to illuminate the faintest expression on Yenna’s lips, then, they were snuffed out completely.

  ***

  “Shit, shit, shit…” Desmond hissed under his breath. He clutched the remains of what had recently been his hand and now more resembled a failed anatomy diagram under his arm like a wounded bird.

  Around him, chaos raged. Metal clashed, wood shattered, people did their best impressions of large, meaty instruments being played poorly. But louder than all of it—louder than the chaos, the shrieking, or even the very convincing argument his bones were having with gravity—was the thunder in Desmond’s chest.

  He had taken shelter behind the latest casualty of Alana’s vengeful-spree—a solid metal drawer now married permanently to one of the townsfolk’s ribcages. It wasn't a dignified place to hide, but dignity had already left the building arm-in-arm with his hopes of survival.

  The air was thick with the scent of blood. It clung to his lungs, coated his teeth, and left an iron tang that made the word fresh feel deeply inappropriate. Somewhere nearby, Alana screamed something profoundly impolite.

  The last time he’d seen her, the woman had been a blur of red and rage, tangled in a deathmatch over the pneumatic riveter.

  They were going to die.

  Not in the poetic sense. Not even in the heroic sense.

  He was breathing in staccato hiccups now.

  That was never a good sign.

  And then—just as Desmond’s thoughts were curling nicely into the fetal position—a sound.

  Thrum.

  Soft. Subtle. But unmistakable. It seemingly began within the drawer beside him, turned into a low rattle, then a deeper vibration that made the air itself shiver. It was the kind of sound usually reserved for the arrival of freight trains or elder gods.

  It spread through the room, drowning out even the loudest screaming.

  Across the shop, dozens—no, hundreds—of tiny filigrees and whisper-thin engravings came alive. Runes on bolts. Sigils on springs. Glyphs so small they’d seemingly been etched with a hair plucked from a watchmaker’s eyebrow.

  They lit up one by one, not with fire or fury, but with the pale glow of ancient knowledge reluctantly clocking in for overtime. Centuries of artificing stirred as if someone had politely knocked on the vault of the dead and asked for a loan.

  And then, gradually, they began to perish. Not break. Not stop. Perish. Like wisps of smoke spiraling into the heart of a storm, the souls of the objects—the gears, the screws, the very proud little copper coil that had once believed itself indispensable—were being drawn out, tugged skyward by forces best not questioned.

  Desmond felt his breath catch as he followed the trail of pale, spiraling energy upward, toward the top of the stairs where a young woman stood.

  She was wrapped in a blanket of blood and gauze-thin dignity, a quilt barely clinging to her shoulders as if even it wasn’t sure if it should still be here. Her skin was slick with blood, but it was the light—that light—that made her terrifying.

  A slow, steady pulse beat from somewhere within her chest, casting long shadows with every thump. And then there were her eyes.

  Two rings of orange, bright and burning, not with rage, but with purpose.

  She looked at the ruined shop below as though she was calculating it. Not judging. Measuring. And for each shape she saw, each moving blur still standing in all the wreckage, a Spark Bolt flickered to life above her shoulders.

  Not the screaming, squirming bolts Desmond knew—the ones that mostly behaved like fireworks that had grown up on a diet of broken rules and bad ideas. No, these were quiet. They were small. They gleamed like tiny silver stars—calm, clinical, and deeply uninterested in negotiation.

  They didn’t hiss, scream, or flare. They simply were, and that was somehow worse.

  She whispered something—words lost beneath the roar of Desmond’s pulse, though he chose to imagine it was something dramatic and final, like “Begone,” or “Silence.”

  And then the stars fell.

  Not from the sky. From her.

  No flash, no warning. One moment they were suspended in the air around her like ornaments on a very ominous tree, and the next they lanced across the room in a lattice of silver lines, too fast to dodge, too precise to miss.

  Each found a target.

  Each ended a problem.

  And the entire shop, already half in pieces, was consumed in a roar of fire, light, and the kind of noise that made silence seem like a mercy you hadn’t earned yet.