After cleaning up the floor and taking a long rest, they were ready for floor ten, which consisted of tons of rooms that were laid out like offices. It was clear the offices weren't for the mechanical titans, as they weren't very big on paperwork, but it was a leftover from when the facility was actually in use. That would have been thousands of years ago, at a minimum, as the titans and giants hadn't been around for many, many years.

  Beth stopped Bjorn from just smashing everything, at least at first, but she quickly found there was very little of any worth on this floor. It was tons of old paperwork, much of it made of a plastic-like material that hadn't decayed in all the intervening years. Most of those papers were manifests listing out goods ordered and goods shipped, though none of that had been happening in a very long time. It did make her wonder where the raw materials they were using came from, but it might just be a bunch of Path shenanigans that had no other answer.

  The tenth floor was wholly uninteresting after that, with Bjorn smashing apart a lot of what they encountered, and a bunch of mechanical titans falling to the team easily. It took them days to clear, requiring a rest in the middle, but nothing strange or extraordinary happened before they were done. They rested again at the end of the floor, ready to clear what would hopefully be the last large floor of the place, though Bjorn reminded them he couldn't make any guarantees about what was below.

  The eleventh floor was the largest yet, though they couldn't really tell that until they were a decent way through the clear, but it was living quarters and small businesses. Or, that is what it would have been when the place was still a functional facility. Now, it was nothing but a massive nest of almost all of the remaining mechanical titans, with the most powerful and highest-level beasts they had yet fought located on this floor. Most of the beasts were in the high two hundreds, with not a one lower than level two hundred and eighty, while many were above two hundred and ninety. They didn't encounter anything above three hundred, which was a bit disappointing, as the team was strong enough to challenge beasts at that level, particularly with Veren backing them up.

  Beth was overall a bit disappointed with the ending of this area, as it didn't contain any great treasure or any immense challenge. She enjoyed getting a couple more levels on floor eleven, but she was really holding out hope for floor twelve. If the command center, or whatever was down there, didn't have much, it would feel a bit of a letdown. Sure, they had made some money from the metals, and they had gained ten or twelve levels overall, but it wasn't as great and exciting of an adventure as she had hoped. At least they might get some answers out of Bjorn, or even get some new information on the final floor. She didn't know that there was much else to look forward to.

  Floor eleven was completed in just a couple days. It was much faster than floor ten, even though the floor was huge and filled with enemies, as there weren't any more reinforcements coming up from lower floors. Whatever was beyond that final stairway, it never sent anyone or anything to reinforce the floor. At least, it didn't while they were fighting their way through the floor, though they were attacked a final time when they stopped for a quick break by the stairs down to the last floor.

  They were assaulted this time by an entire group of level three hundred juggernauts, which proved to be a much, much harder battle than anything they had faced so far. It was enough of a challenge that Veren decided to join in, adding just some of his sword skills to the fight, which enormously relieved the pressure on the rest of them. Fighting under some pressure was a good thing, for sure, but dancing on the very edge of death was something that only really Beth was comfortable with, so having a Grandmaster with them was a quite nice safety net.

  Defeating the juggernauts was a time-consuming process that led them all to be exhausted, other than Veren, who stood the first watch while they slept. They rotated out after a few hours for Veren to get some sleep, Bjorn and Sera able to recover fully after only a couple hours thanks to their very high END. After Veren had caught a quick nap, they were ready to press on to the twelfth floor, finishing out this expedition, though with a bit less excitement than Beth had hoped.

  The stairs down were the same, in terms of make and size, as all the others, but they stretched far longer. The twelfth floor was, apparently, quite a bit deeper than the eleventh floor, the group taking five minutes to get to the bottom of the staircase while moving at a considerable speed. Reaching the bottom of the stairway had proved Bjorn partially right; there wasn't just a command center, but an entire complex. Still, that complex was small, relatively speaking, only a fraction of the area of any of the previous floors. The command center was half a dozen rooms linked together by wide hallways and lit by bright blue and white lights, all containing a plethora of consoles and monitors, though Beth didn't think they were monitoring much of anything anymore.

  "Bjorn. Thoughts?" Beth said as they looked into the first room.

  "Kill. Smash," he replied with a shrug.

  "Surely there's some valuable data here? And why the obsession with smashing?" Val interjected, frowning at the massive man.

  "We can keep the computers and enchantments whole until you've looked through them, but we're destroying everything," he rumbled in response. "As to why? That would take a while to explain. Let's clean this place up first. I'll give a rundown when we're done."

  "Let's get this place wrapped up," Beth said, signaling to everyone to get moving.

  The group entered that first room, immediately being engaged in battle by a high number of powerful mechanical titans. This was the strongest group they had seen yet, with the juggernauts acting as normal guards, while there were desolators and royal commanders in every room that were far stronger than the juggernauts. The two people happy here were Beth and Veren, as they felt themselves being pushed by the most powerful of the enemies, while they left the juggernauts for the rest to deal with. Bjorn could fight on equal, or more than equal, footing with even the desolators, so Beth focused on the desolators and commanders with Veren only interested in the commanders. Veren did also help the others when needed, as he had excellent perceptions and battle senses, able to monitor and, in large part, control the flow of battle from wherever he chose to stand within the room.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  All six rooms were like that, but their group was just a bit too strong. While Beth enjoyed the challenge of the commanders, the rest of the enemies weren't strong enough to threaten her, and with Veren backing them up, they didn't have a real worry. Clearing the command center was, in fact, rather simple, and a bit of a letdown for Beth. She was hoping for a much stronger boss or some great challenge at the end, but they didn't find anything like that, only a huge amount of odd data on the computer systems. Fortunately, they had Val.

  "I can retrieve this," Val said once they were sure the rooms were clear. "Unless Bjorn's going to freak out."

  "I will not 'freak out,'" Bjorn answered gruffly.

  "Then I'm extracting the data," Val said, starting to type at one of the stations.

  "I didn't know your girlfriend was a hacker," Beth said to Blood.

  "She's not my girlfriend!" Blood exclaimed at the same time Val exclaimed, "I’m not a hacker!"

  "Eesh, take it easy," Beth chuckled, laughing as Blood took a swipe at her.

  "Anything useful?" Veren asked after a minute, leaning against a console at the back of the room.

  "A lot of production data," Val said with a distant look in her eyes, scrolling through some of the data on her communicator as she managed the retrieval.

  "Production data for a facility that hasn't been relevant in ten thousand years. What a find," Veren said sarcastically.

  "There's a lot of data here about energy production," Val mentioned, ignoring Veren's comments.

  "What does that mean?" Kris asked.

  "Let me analyze it," Val said, continuing to interact with the consoles while looking through some of the information.

  "Grab all the data here," Beth said before following Blood to look around.

  "There's something here," Blood said after a few minutes, standing in the center of the floor and looking around her.

  "You mean, like a secret?" Beth asked, glancing around to see the others also inspecting the rest of the floor in the distance.

  "Yeah. There's something here," Val interjected, having come over to them after finishing with the data.

  "Really?" Blood asked, slightly surprised at her intuition being validated.

  "Everyone!" Beth called, getting the group to gather.

  "What now?" Kris asked as they gathered around.

  "There's a secret passage here," Val said. "I found some stuff in the floorplans. There's a weird missing space that isn't solid below the center of this floor. There's also links to some kind of power system that come up from below the twelfth floor. It only makes sense if there's a thirteenth floor below us."

  "Allow me," Veren said coldly. The rest of the group quickly moved back into the surrounding hallways, leaving only Veren in the intersection. The lanky man walked into the center of the place and drew his blade slowly, lifting it so its hilt was just in front of his face. He closed his eyes and concentrated, a mysterious energy surrounding his body and slowly starting to build. Beth could feel the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck starting to stand up, feeling a resonance with Veren as he focused and drew out even greater power from deep within.

  In a split instant, the time between one heartbeat and the next, Veren's eyes snapped open and brilliant light shone forth. With a very quick flick of his wrist, his sword twisted through the air and slashed into the ground. At the same moment, a hundred sword lights surrounded him and punch into the floor with immense power and unrivaled precision. The floor couldn't withstand Veren's skill and strength with the blade at all, falling apart into small pieces under his blistering attack. What was revealed below his feet was a wide passage descending into the ground, like a thick elevator shaft without any elevator present. It was also at this point that Beth noted, with some amusement, that Veren had some way to hover in midair, even if he wasn't able to move quickly like that.

  "Awesome! Let's go," Beth said, gleefully leaping into the pit.

  "Beth!" Sera exclaimed, partially in exasperation, partially in amusement. She leapt after Beth, wings sprouting out from her back, grabbing Beth by the shoulders and arresting her downward momentum.

  "Wings! I didn't know you could do that in your human form," Beth said to Sera.

  "Thanks to my increase in humanization recently, yes," Sera said, grinning down at the incorrigible girl.

  "Let's go!" Beth exclaimed, pointing downwards.

  "But slowly," Sera said to the rest.

  Veren snorted but started to descend rather slowly, carefully observing everything around him. The rest of the group made their way down in one way or another, with most of them climbing and hopping down the walls. Kris transformed into her phoenix form, taking up a large portion of the shaft as she followed last, not even flapping her wings to slowly descend. It took a surprisingly long time, even considering how much further down floor twelve was than floor eleven, before they reached the bottom. As soon as they saw the bottom, Beth tapped Sera's wrist, the dragon girl letting her go, allowing Beth to plunge down the last hundred or so feet to land on the floor with a heavy crunching sound, scattering some of the many pieces Veren had made.

  The rest of the team was quick to follow them down, with Kris transforming back into her human form above the ground and Bjorn casually catching her. He was also a bit slow in putting her down and letting her go, but it looked like Kris didn't mind; far from it, in fact. The rest of them had gathered up, other than Veren, who had moved out alone to study a door at the far end of the large, empty room they found themselves in. If anyone in the team could wander around alone without needing anybody to worry about them, it was Veren, so nobody on the team said anything about it.

  "Anything?" Andrea asked Veren as they approached.

  "It's locked," he said very helpfully.

  "No shit," Beth quipped.

  "I could cut it…" Veren stated, but was quickly shot down by the group.

  "I don't think that's a good idea," said Kris.

  "I think we've got a better way," added Val, walking up to the keypad and starting to mess with it. The pad made a beeping noise before lighting up and flashing green three times, after which the door itself beeped loudly and then slid open. The massive construct was almost totally silent as it moved back within the wall, revealing a large room beyond.

  As soon as the door cracked open, a gush of energy had rushed out, putting everyone on alert, but they needn't have worried. There were no further enemies on this floor, or at least, they had not encountered any so far, including in this new room. The energy wave had come from the center of the room, where a massive construct sat with a giant mass of energy swirling at the center. There were a dozen columns rising from the floor, surrounded by what Beth guessed were conducting materials, as well as twenty pillars sticking down from the ceiling towards the flowing energy mass. The mass of energy itself was glowing yellow and blue, with a massive amount of power radiating out from it into the surrounding air. Beth didn't even need to be an expert to understand that it was filled with both electricity and lightning mana. A great, great deal of lightning mana.

  "Is this the place's power source?" Sera asked as she stared at the mass of lightning mana.

  "No," Bjorn said shortly. At everyone's frowning looks, he elaborated, "Power sources for these facilities are on the higher floors. We even destroyed some of them earlier. The main facility power would never be hidden in a secret basement floor like this."

  "But what are we supposed to do with it? What is it?" asked Andrea, looking around, but settling on Bjorn, considering he had quite a bit of knowledge about the place.

  "It's a resource that we can use to get stronger," Bjorn said. "It'll be a risk for any of you to use it, but the gains will be immense."