Chapter 34:

Sinon summoned her rifle, her anti-material rifle, and fired it with a tremendous explosion that shook me down to my core. The security door bent inwards with a hearty shriek. Sparks flew from the large crater Sinon had put in it. She pulled the bolt back on Hecate and fired again. The door didn't survive a second shot. It was blown clean off its hinges and tumbled down the basement stairs.

"Oh...yeah, that works too," I said.

"You owe me one," Sinon replied.

"You can put it on my tab," I peered down the basement stairs. A row of naked lightbulbs strung together on a wire was secured to the right wall. At the very bottom lay the crumpled remains of the security door. Nothing screamed 'entrance to top-secret vault' yet, but I wouldn't know for sure until I scoped it out.

Before I could start down, Argo nudged me aside and started down the stairs, "S'cuse me. I'm gonna go check this place out."

"But I might need you to watch this place while I'm down there. All the expensive artifacts in the world won't mean much if those guards outside retake this store and trap us inside," I said. Argo threw me the same slightly amused look people give when entertaining the babbling words of a child.

"I seem to recall part of our deal bein' I get a first-hand look at that vault to see what kinda info I can glean off it. Sorry, but I got a vested interest in this too," she said and continued on her way without waiting for an argument.

I sighed and turned to Sinon for any kind of support. She simply shouldered her sniper rifle and nodded. "Be careful down there. Who knows what you're going to find."

"Yeah, got it. Noya, you doing okay?" I asked into my earpiece.

"Holding them off just fine. Best to just do what the boss says. I can take care of these guys no problem if Sinon can give them two targets to shoot at," he said. Despite enduring the thickest of the fighting, he didn't sound the least bit winded.

"Alright then," I said, then gave Sinon a slight nod. "Time to go plunder a vault."

"I hope it's worth all the trouble we've been through," Sinon said.

"I'll bring you a souvenir. Sound good?"

Sinon rolled her eyes and gave me a playful shove. "Get going, already."

I went after Argo, down in the dimly lit basement. The temperature dropped several degrees once I was inside. A pungent odor wafted through the air and I scrunched my nose to keep from breathing too much of it in. The walls, made of cobblestone, were as dry as the land above, with not even a drop of moisture to be found.

Several dusty bookshelves tall enough to almost touch the ceiling were spaced evenly along the perimeter of the room, packed to the gills with old tomes, paperbacks, and even encyclopedias. A long table took up most of the center. Cardboard boxes and plastic bins covered every inch. Some were tipped over with their contents spilled out, mostly consisting of old knick-knacks, dinnerware, and electrical components.

But no sign of a vault.

Argo stood on the other end of the table with her arms crossed, turning in a slow circle. Between the darkened room and the concealment offered by her hood, it was hard to tell what she was thinking. I circled around to meet her, looking for anything out of place. No dice.

"It ain't going to be somewhere obvious," Argo said as if she could sense what I was thinking. "After all the hoops we had to jump through, the prize ain't gonna be given to us just like that. They'll make us work the whole way through."

I grunted in response and started perusing the nearest bookshelf for anything cliché like a lever disguised as a textbook.

Hey, it could happen.

I didn't find anything suspicious. Grimacing, I ran my hands along the wooden surface of the bookshelf in case there were any hidden buttons or switches. When that didn't work, I pulled the entire thing towards me to check behind it, making sure to double-check every inch once that didn't prove fruitful.

I repeated the process with two more bookshelves. No results. Worry began to flood my insides. Then I noticed something strange as I approached the bookshelf standing opposite the basement stairs. It was already pulled forward a few inches, not right up against the wall like the others. Curious, I tugged it even further and checked behind it. I didn't see anything at first. Until I looked up.

There, on the wall right below the ceiling, was a glass dome about the size of a baseball sticking out of the cobblestone.

"Argo, help me with this," I said. She quickly came and together we pushed the bookcase aside.

"Well, whaddya have here?" A feline grin spread across Argo's face as she examined the dome.

"Hopefully our vault is full of secret goodies," I said, reaching up to give it a quick tap.

It beeped loudly noise before I could.

I jerked my hand back, worried that I activated some kind of trap. But to my surprise, a blue cone of light shot out and washed over me, so bright that I had to shield my eyes from the light's intensity. Then it vanished as quickly as it arrived and the glass dome gave a heavy drone. Nothing else happened.

I chewed on my lip. It scanned me for a reason. I just needed to find out what. Then I realized I already had the answer sitting in my inventory.

"Moment of truth," I muttered, opening a holographic window. A few taps later, the keycard, the thing that started this whole mess, appeared in my hand and I held it out in front of me, swallowing the growing lump in my throat. The same beep from before came, the cone of light hit me, and as I waited, holding my breath, silence fell.

The dome beeped again.

Then it chirped.

A section of the wall below it groaned. The cobblestone, the fake cobblestone, I realized, split apart lengthwise, opening the way for a short passage that led to an elevator and I stared slack-jawed throughout the whole thing. The keycard worked. Argo's intel was right on the mark. Which meant the vault was real and just a few steps away.

I couldn't help myself. I reared my head back and let out an enthusiastic cackle that would make a mad scientist proud.

"Argo, please, please, please remind me to give you a tip when this is all over!" I exclaimed. Argo beamed and it was hard to miss the pride in her voice

"No prob. Gratuities are much appreciated."

"What happened?" Sinon asked through my earpiece.

"We're in. Just give us a few more minutes and we'll be out," I said as I walked into the small passageway. The elevator awaiting us was one of those old-fashioned ones, with a scissor gate that looked to be about two centuries past its prime. It whined with an awful creak when I pulled on the handle, but it managed to open without too much difficulty.

The inside was smaller than I thought. Argo and I were forced shoulder to shoulder when we stepped inside. I closed the gate behind us and pressed the only button on the control panel. The elevator shook and rattled, but then the carriage began its descent.

"Think there'll be enemies waitin' for us?" Argo asked as she summoned her shotgun. I took the chance to rummage through the pouches on my belt for another medical syringe to top off my health.

"There might be a security system, but it's not like we broke in. We came in by a perfectly legitimate method so I doubt we're going to get ventilated the moment we step outside," I reasoned. I fished out one of the injectors I had been looking for and injected it into my thigh.

"How sure are ya?" Argo asked.

"Eh, seventy percent?"

"Real comfortin'."

We spent the rest of the ride down ready and waiting for anything that might come at us once we exited the elevator. Eventually, the carriage eased into a slow stop and I pushed the scissor gate aside to step out with another security door a couple of steps away. I raised my MP7 and twisted the knob, finding it unlocked. I pushed the barrel of my gun through first with my finger resting gently against the trigger.

Darkness lay on the other side. Not the kind of darkness you see when you turn off the lights in your room. It was the kind that filled forests out in the middle of nowhere or in caves deep under the ground, the one that touched that ancient fear of the unknown.

Argo brought out a flashlight from her inventory and handed it to me. I flinched when I clicked it on, expecting some vile monster to be staring right back at me. Thankfully all I saw was the catwalk we were standing on. It was suspended by wire rope that reached up into a ceiling I couldn't see. I aimed the flashlight straight up, but the darkness swallowed its illumination. Down below was no different.

I couldn't shake the feeling of being very, very small at that moment. The hairs on the back of my neck curled and I released a shuddering breath.

"Hey, I'm gettin' a bad feelin' about this," Argo whispered to me.

"That makes two of us," I said, taking a single hesitant step. The catwalk creaked under my weight, but with how cavernous the chamber was, it was more akin to a banshee's wail. "Stay close to me and keep an eye out. If you see anything even remotely threatening, shout it out."

I kept a hand on the nearby guardrail to stave off vertigo rolling in my stomach as we walked. The feeling of being watched only seemed to worsen the further we went. Shapes stretched and moved at the corners of my vision.

The banging of metal and the scrape of rust echoed around us. I tried to rationalize it, pass it off as ambiance created by the devs to psych us out. But the more we walked, the more frequent they became. Like something was eagerly following us, ready to pounce.

That 'something' skittered right underneath us. I snapped my eyes down between the gaps of the grate floor but didn't see anything.

I resisted the urge to run, if only barely.

After a few tense moments of silence, I caught sight of a small room erected on a landing supported by steel struts protruding out of the wall. The windows were clear enough that I could see the interior was saturated with a dim red light and tiny dots of yellow and green blinked on and off. I sped up my pace just a bit and Argo dutifully followed suit. I threw the door open and swept my MP7 from side to side.

We were alone, or about as close to alone as we could be considering the noises outside were reaching a heightened pitch. I handed the flashlight back to Argo and ran my hand along the inside wall, looking for a light switch to flip on, but there was nothing there except cool metal.

The crimson glow washing over us was enough to let my eyes adjust to our surroundings. To our left were a few windows that would have provided a nice view of the room outside if it weren't a nightmare-inducing abyss at the moment.

Banks of consoles were lined up against three of the walls with another in the dead center of the room. Each one had an array of dials, buttons, levers, and other complicated stuff that I could only guess the purpose of. The small screens on each one were filled with static, crackling and buzzing, creating a low roar that accompanied my own tense breathing.

"Ya see what I see?" Argo pointed at a massive monitor screen, easily taking up the entirety of the far wall. A topographical map of the entire Wastelands was displayed in perfect detail, right down the hills and valleys that made up its barren landscape.

While interesting, it didn't add up. We were expecting a vault, not a control room. What was the game here? Was there more going on that I didn't know about? Admittedly, information about everything surrounding the vault had been light.

Even its location hadn't been known until Argo took an educated guess. At this point, I wasn't sure what to expect. But at the very least, I did know there were more mysteries to solve.

Argo and I entered the room and circled around the center console to examine the monitor more closely. Blips of red were scattered across the map but there was a single yellow dot near the top of the Wasteland's border. Each one was connected to a blue electricity symbol in the northwest corner of the map by a silver line.

Valley Moor.

That's when it clicked. All the pieces fell into place. I turned around to take in the sight of the control room again and the words fell from my mouth, "This...no, it's right. It has to be. It's not a vault."

"What? Whaddya mean it ain't a vault?" Argo asked. I motioned at the monitor, my mind working at a furious pace.

"It's not a vault," I repeated. "It was a power plant the whole time. Ikuchi was expecting the wrong thing."

I drew my attention to the console beneath the monitor and started messing with the controls. Most of them didn't do anything but sometimes the console would beep. Other times heavy machinery outside would start whirring with considerable effort before dying.

There was a point to it all, I was sure of it. Ikuchi was expecting treasure that no one had ever seen before, and maybe he was right in that regard, but it wasn't going to be delivered in a vault-like he suspected. It was like Argo said, the devs were going to make us work before giving us our due reward.

So I started working.

"So the big question is: what is this supplying power to?" I asked myself. The power plant was critical, I knew that much. I glanced up at the map again, studying every blip, then turned a dial to see if anything changed.

A single white dot moved from the power plant's position in Valley Moor to a red blip on the southern edge of the Wastelands. Nothing else happened. I grimaced and kept trying, so focused on the task at hand that I didn't notice Argo had joined in until she started pulling levers and pressing buttons alongside me.

We worked diligently, testing different combinations and coming up with theories about what the game wanted us to do. Time seemed to melt away as we were fully engrossed in solving the puzzle before us. Nothing else mattered to us at the moment.

"Sinon, that guy with a rocket launcher, did you kill him?" Noya's voice suddenly asked.

"Negative. I saw him skulking around behind one of the buildings, but I thought you took care of him."