Heath pulled up the calendar, as he had been doing more and more frequently since they set off. Another week and a half, and they would be at the outpost. That last box laughed at him as those days stretched off into eternity. He wanted to go for a run, something he usually hated with every fiber of his being. He wanted to smell air that wasn’t full of stacil flowers from his maintenance Skill. He wanted sunlight, any sunlight, on his skin. Spaceships could keep them healthy, and the Loon was religious about insisting breakfast was still the nutritional sludge, so they weren’t deficient in anything, but his endurance only went so far. He’d taken to pacing the ship like a trapped animal, pouncing on any dirt he could find.

  “Heath, need you on the bridge. Something weird going on.” Emerald’s voice came through the speaker in the galley.

  Desperate for something to do, Heath hurried over. On the bridge he found a System telemetry grid pulled up. Or an Aetherized Argo- Mana Wave Power-Matrix reading, if you had half an hour to kill just to say the name. It didn’t matter what it was called, the readings were way off from what a random uninhabited solar system should generate. There was no mining outfit or automatic terraforming to break up the expected monotony. Just a couple of gate monitor platforms to keep track of traffic, and a wide-expanse of dark in between.

  “Something’s out there,” Heath said, a bit unnecessarily.

  “Agreed, Captain. Crewmember Emerald and I have already eliminated the chance of life forms, the readings are too irregular to match anything in the standard database.”

  “Any guesses?”

  His most experienced crewmember shook their head. “Nothing I’ve seen before.”

  “Location?”

  “Far reaches. Only just inside the major gravity well for the local star.”

  Jenny Mae, who had followed Heath from the galley for something to do, chimed in with an unwelcome update. “That’s about two days of extra travel if we want to check it out.”

  Heath chewed on his lip. “Dangerous?”

  “Nothing in the scan indicates such, Captain.” The Loon’s answer was good, but left him with a choice. Extra time to check it out, on a run while the crew was already worn thin, or skip something potentially important.

  “How does our eta look?”

  “Ten days, Captain. Bringing us in 3 days ahead of our projected schedule.”

  So they had plenty of time, too.

  He teetered on the edge for a few minutes, before ultimately jumping off. “Change course towards the anomaly.”

  “Put me on speaker to the whole ship, Loon.”

  “Attention crew. Something strange in the outsystem. The kind of thing the Empire pays good money to flag. We’re changing course. Expect another two days in-system before jump.”

  He hunkered down and braced, the avalanche of footsteps on metal floors signaling the others’ reaction.

  ********

  The Wandering Loon approached the anomaly with all hands on deck. None of their more specialized sensors had picked up on anything, which should mean it wasn’t dangerous. But as Heath had learned the hard way, runs that should be safe killed plenty of good spacers.

  “Loon?”

  “Distance to center of disturbance, approximately four hundred kilometers. Cutting speed for approach. Displaying on screen.”

  What appeared was anticlimactic. In fact Heath didn’t see anything at all. The screen was full of a standard view of space, stars and distant galaxies glittering faintly against the deep black in between.

  “Where is it?” Copperfield asked.

  “The anomaly has been centered in the viewing screen,” the Loon replied.

  Heath looked harder but there was still nothing there. A few minutes later, they had mostly decelerated down to and were finishing their approach as a gentle fly-by.

  “Distance to target, fifteen kilometers.”

  Something clicked in his mind, and Heath realized with horror what was going on. “Reverse thrusters, back up!”

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  “Thrusters on.” The Loon replied.

  “We’re still getting closer.” Jenny Mae said.

  “Fuck, full power reverse Loon!”

  “Full power reverse in progress. No change.”

  “Shit, shit, shit. All crew brace. Loon, cut power to propulsion for now and arm weapons.”

  The inexorable pull didn’t release them, despite the Loon’s best efforts. Heath had realized why nothing was visible too late. It was a trick of perspective. Contained amid anchoring arrays, a full barrage of sensory equipment, and multiple Classer guards, a rent in the fabric of reality was easy to spot.

  Out in the distant fringes of a star system, where only remote specks of light broke up the expanse, their eyes glossed straight over it.

  A dungeon. One large enough for the Loon to fly through the entrance, along with a hundred identical ships if they had anyone to bring with them.

  A dungeon that didn’t want to let them go. Fairy tales always started this way, with an undiscovered dungeon pulling in the unwary. Usually never to be heard from again.

  They were almost to the edge, and there wasn’t enough time for a full explanation. “Prepare to enter a dungeon.”

  With barely a moment to blink they were sucked inside.

  Copperfield raced towards his mech suit, while the rest reacted by diving into their station controls. All the practice, in other delves and in the drills they had been running for weeks, paid off. Ekaterina opened targeting systems while Emerald and Jenny Mae scanned and condensed all of the data they were receiving.

  The screen was still on a visual display, and Heath analyzed for anything he could figure out. It was almost like nothing had happened. They were still floating in space, though the closest star was even further distant, barely distinguishable from any others. Even so, he could tell they were somewhere entirely new. No one made it years as a spacer without reviewing more than their share of star charts, and this was like nothing Heath had seen before. There weren’t quite enough stars for one thing, the edge of the dungeon, he hoped, and not something more sinister.

  “Report?”

  “Definitely a dungeon. Readings make more sense now. Ship-capable too, which is why I missed it, waves were too wide and I didn’t think. I don’t know how the first fucks through the system missed that.” Emerald’s anger was not what they needed right then, especially when it was so clearly self-directed.

  “Rank estimate?”

  “One. No wait. More than that.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Argo density readings say nearby is rank one, ish. But we’re getting bounce back from further out, and the readings are higher. I can –”

  “By the Trickster and the Crone,” Ekaterina swore. It was the harshest thing Heath had heard from the Wizard, the formal curse fitting her noble accent. “It’s a graded dungeon. Rank one near the entrance, scaling up higher the further in you go.”

  “Fucking fuck,” Heath said. “I thought those were made up for streaming vids. What’s the highest reading we’re getting?”

  Emerald took a long moment to respond. Longer than any good answer would take. “Rank six. Low rank six,” they said.

  A squeaking cough came from Jenny Mae’s station. Heath could barely manage a thought let alone a coherent sentence. Rank six. Even at the lowest end that was Level 250. Those didn’t exist, not on the Rim. Functionally immortal unless something killed them, Classers at that level were more myth than reality. Dungeons to challenge them were rare, and the people who controlled them had access to wealth at a level Heath couldn’t fathom.

  Ekaterina had been thinking along the same line. “A rank one through six escalating density, open world, full ship complement…” She audibly swallowed before continuing. “My father would beggar our House for the rights to something like this. When word gets out, this system will be the most valuable resource on maybe the entire Rim. Even if the reset isn’t for another thousand years, everyone with a fast ship and a scrap of power will be out here to stake their claim.”

  Heath let that sink in. The Empire spanned tens of thousands of worlds. The Rim was thousands of systems on its own. He sank back in his seat at the implication.

  A tinny crackle preceded Copperfield’s voice, relayed through both the mech and the ship. “And how much will they pay us for a head start, and knowledge of what’s inside?”

  Heath’s eyes went wide. His first instinct had been to hunker down near the entrance, until the fluctuations calmed down enough to let them go back through. But Copperfield had a point. If no one else had been in here before then they were getting all the available data. That was probably worth more than Heath had made, in total, combined, through his entire life. Enough to get every upgrade he and the Loon had dreamed of, and some they hadn’t dared. No one would ever be able to threaten them again.

  There was a beat of calm before he started issuing orders. “Full scanner range with everything we have. Ekaterina, keep those guns hot. Coppefield, engage the tether and head outside. We’ll want as many options as we can find. Loon, full recording.”

  The chorus of “Aye Captain” in response made them sound, almost, like a real crew.

  It was only a few minutes wait, but it felt like he aged a full decade in the meantime.

  “Closest monsters located. On screen,” Emerald said.

  At first, there was nothing to see, like the dungeon entrance all over again. Then the Loon started layering different types of data. Mana fluctuations, and non-visible light refraction, heat sensing, and the argo currents that powered the universe, but were invisible to all but a few rare classes.

  The result was something Heath had no words for. A lizard? Fish? Dragon? It was hard to say. Delicate fins fanned out from a central body, fluttering like flower petals, fading from a deep indigo through a violent magenta and into an almost-blinding orange at the edges. They appeared paper thin on screen, almost translucent, though there was no way a dungeon monster would be so vulnerable.

  Attached to the fins was a body out of whatever nightmare realm lived just under the surface of human life. A scaled back, black as night, with forelimbs tipped in razor-sharp claws. Flippers for its rear limbs, though Heath was sure that didn’t make it any less dangerous, and a tail that doubled the monster’s length, tipped in a point of jagged bone. Three rows of eyes marked the sides of its head, no pupil or iris, just obsidian orbs that could absorb more than visual light out in deep space. And on the underside, a gaping maw, filled with rows of jagged teeth.

  That was awesome and frightening in equal measure. But not the most worrying thing. One of the Loon’s scan layers had helpfully marked out distances. That thing was at least ten times as long as the Loon itself.

  “What in all the hells,” Heath breathed.

  “It’s a kaiju,” Jenny Mae said. “There are only two confirmed dungeons with the monster type.” Her voice was shaky as she helpfully pulled up a bestiary entry and sent it to the main screen alongside the feed.

  “Great, how do we kill it?” Heath asked.

  “Conventional wisdom says you bring a few dozen friends. Maybe we could shoot at it?” She slowed down and her voice went up like it was a question at the end.

  “How many of those things are out there?” Heath asked the bridge at large.

  “Just getting data back now,” Emerald answered. “That fucker is definitely not a lone wolf. Dozens in the rank one region, more further out. Looks like they get bigger and meaner-looking the closer you get to the star.” The viewscreen split again, this time a map with the Loon as a lone green dot, amidst hundreds of red.

  “Thoughts?”

  “Let’s go for it, Cap.” Two layers of tone-warping comms did little to dim the enthusiasm bleeding through Copperfield’s voice. “We can’t just leave. Think of a first run bonus on a dungeon like this. I bet we could buy my whole home fleet with whatever we pull off one of those.”

  “Umm, The Beginner’s Guide to Delving warns against unknown threats at rank one.”

  “That’s for weak delvers that have never been inside a dungeon. We are a strong team of Classers, on a very fast ship. Those things are too ponderous to move quickly, no dungeon would be that out of balance.” Ekaterina leaned towards the projection, eyes gleaming.

  “Yes, for once she’s right.” Copperfield was on a roll now. “We crushed the last three dungeons we did. JM is still catching up but the rest of us are in the high thirties. And the oldy is even higher. We can do this.”

  He felt bad for Jenny Mae but Heath ultimately agreed. They were prepared. And the rewards would be worth it. “Advance on the kaiju.”