The chains on the mausoleum door were rusty, but thick.
Silas didn't bother picking the lock. He gripped the chains with both hands. His knuckles turned white, his skin hardening like cured leather.
With a grunt that echoed deep in his chest, he pulled.
CRACK.
The iron links snapped.
He kicked the heavy stone door open. A blast of stale, cool air rushed out, smelling of natron, dried flowers, and millennia of silence.
"After you, Dead Man," Cassidy said, lighting a small oil lamp with her mechanical hand. "Try not to wake the neighbors."
They descended a spiral staircase carved directly into the bedrock. Down here, Silas felt his senses sharpen. His Grave Sense expanded like sonar. He could feel the hollow spaces behind the walls, the weight of the earth above, and the faint, static hum of thousands of sleeping bodies.
"Watch your step on the seventh stair," Silas said without looking back. "It's trapped. Pressure plate rigged to a ceiling collapse."
Cassidy gingerly stepped over the marked stair. "How do you know that?"
"The stone told me. It doesn't want to be disturbed."
[The Necropolis]
The staircase ended in a cavern so vast Cassidy's lamp couldn't reach the ceiling.
They weren't in a simple catacomb. They were standing on a wide avenue paved with obsidian blocks. On either side rose structures that were too large for tombs—they were temples, palaces of the dead, built by a civilization that predated the current era by centuries.
The First Necropolis.
The architecture was alien—monolithic, brutalist, covered in carvings of coiled serpents and weeping suns.
Rows of stone sarcophagi lined the streets like silent soldiers.
"Mother of luck," Cassidy whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "This isn't a shortcut, Vane. This is a museum of nightmares."
Silas walked to the nearest sarcophagus. It was made of black basalt. He ran his pale hand over the lid.
"They are asleep," Silas stated. "Deeply. The preservation magic here is strong. As long as we don't break the seals, they won't move."
"Great. Let's keep tiptoeing then."
They walked for an hour through the silent city. Silas led them unerringly through the maze, his instincts pulling him toward the deepest point.
But as they went deeper, the silence began to change.
A vibration started in the floor. A rhythmic thumping that they felt in their teeth.
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP...
The smell changed too. The dry dust was replaced by the acrid tang of burning oil, sulfur, and fresh, raw Tar.
[The Violation]
They turned a corner around a massive pyramid and stopped dead.
The ancient city was being invaded.
In the center of a vast plaza, a monstrous machine was at work.
It was a steam-powered industrial drill, three stories tall, anchored to the plaza floor with massive iron spikes that cracked the ancient obsidian pavement. Smoke bellowed from its stacks, pooling against the cavern ceiling.
The drill bit—a spinning cone of diamond-tipped teeth—was boring directly into the side of the largest temple.
Dozens of workers swarmed around it. They weren't normal miners. Their skin was grey, their eyes vacant. They carried pickaxes, hauling chunks of black rock away from the drill site.
But it wasn't rock.
Silas watched as a chunk fell and cracked open. Inside, wrapped in rotting gold resins, was a shriveled, tar-soaked mummy.
The workers weren't mining ore. They were mining the Ancients.
"They're grinding them up," Cassidy hissed, disgusted. "Turning the old kings into fuel."
"The Tar down here is purer," Silas's eyes narrowed. His Hallowed Ground aura flared involuntarily, angered by the desecration. "It's saturated with ancient death. This is high-grade fuel for the capital."
[The Foreman]
A whistle blew, sharp and piercing.
Standing on a metal catwalk above the drill was a man wearing a heavy, leather apron over an armored suit. He wore a brass helmet with a visor pulled down, obscuring his face. He held a whip in one hand and a satchel of dynamite sticks in the other.
The Foreman.
He saw them.
He didn't seem surprised. He just pointed his whip at them.
"Intruders!" his voice was amplified by the helmet, metallic and harsh. "Add them to the grinder!"
The grey-skinned miners dropped their tools and turned. There were at least twenty of them. They shuffled toward Silas and Cassidy, moaning softly.
They were Thralls—people so corrupted by Tar exposure they had lost their higher functions, becoming simple drones.
"I hate zombies," Cassidy groaned, drawing her revolver. "They never have good loot."
"They aren't zombies," Silas said, planting his feet. He felt the weight of the surrounding stone, drawing strength from it. "They are trespassers."
[Respect for the Dead]
The Thralls charged.
Cassidy opened fire. BLAM. BLAM.
Two Thralls went down, headshots. But they kept twitching.
"Vane! Do your creepy thing!"
Silas didn't move until the first Thrall was within arm's reach.
He didn't use his shovel. He used his new strength.
He grabbed the Thrall by the throat. His grip was crushing. He lifted the man off the ground with one hand and threw him into three others, knocking them down like bowling pins.
The Foreman up on the catwalk laughed. He lit a stick of dynamite.
"Fire in the hole!"
He tossed it.
The dynamite landed near the base of a tall, slender obelisk next to Silas.
Silas saw the fuse burning down.
He couldn't stop the explosion. But he knew the structure. His Grave Sense told him exactly where the stress points were.
BOOM.
The explosion rocked the cavern. The base of the obelisk shattered.
The massive stone needle began to fall—straight toward Cassidy.
"Move!" Silas lunged.
He didn't push her out of the way. He braced his shoulder against the falling multi-ton stone slab.
He groaned, his boots sliding backward on the obsidian floor, carving grooves into the stone. His muscles screamed, his skin hardening to its maximum density.
He held it. Just for a second. Long enough for Cassidy to roll clear.
Then he let it drop.
CRASH.
The impact shook dust from the ceiling.
Silas stood up, dusting off his coat. He was unharmed, though his shoulder ached coldly.
He looked up at the Foreman on the catwalk.
Silas's grey eyes glowed in the dark.
"You're making a mess of my floor," Silas boomed.
He slammed his shovel onto the ground.
Ability: Hallowed Ground.
A wave of pressure expanded. It hit the base of the giant drill.
The machine groaned. The vibrations of the drill bit suddenly went out of sync with the ancient stone.
CRACK... SNAP.
Three of the massive anchoring spikes sheared off, unable to withstand the sudden shift in structural integrity.
The drill tilted violently. Steam pipes burst.
The Foreman screamed as the catwalk buckled under him. He grabbed a chain, dangling over the grinding gears of his own machine.
Silas looked at the chaos. The Thralls were confused, the machine was failing.
"Now," Silas said to Cassidy. "Through the temple breach. That's our exit."
They ran past the smoking drill, through the hole it had bored into the ancient temple, leaving the Foreman hanging and the city of the dead roaring in anger behind them.