NOVEL NEXT 66. A Promise of Treasures (Jack)
The message ended. Jack found himself staring at the phone screen for a beat too long before pocketing it.
Silence filled the cabin as if the world held its breath. Outside the small window, clouds drifted past like smoke, and Jack found himself thinking about patterns -how things connected in ways that weren't always visible until it was too late.
Susie broke the silence, "Why is this such a big deal, boss?" Her voice carried that edge it got when she was trying not to show fear.
"Sometimes it's worse when dungeons appear in areas that already have, or are known for having, strange and unusual occurrences, weird creatures, and other such myths. Think of dungeons like nuclear reactors gone bad -magic leaking out like invisible fallout, warping everything it touches, twisting cows, chipmunks, and even the grass into something alien."
"That sounds awful," she said, and he could tell she was thinking back to the giant sand worm dungeon. She rubbed her arms as goosebumps sprang out on her flesh at the memory.
"That's nothing compared to the ones that start out as cryptids. Imagine a chupacabra, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster. Those ones are pretty normal." Jack's knuckles whitened where he gripped the armrest. "Now look at ones like the Slenderman or other such creatures being enhanced by the presence of a dungeon."
"That's scary."
"You're telling me," he murmured as he thought back to a time when he took on a dungeon whose entrance was located under a little boy's bed. Everyone else thought it was just his imagination. It turned out that most of the myths people believed to be imaginary are truer than anyone could have guessed. The same goes for the good ones and the bad.
If he hadn't remembered the monsters that haunted his own bed back on Earth, who knows what would have happened? But he did. And so he took on that boy's dungeon solo. It still gave him the creeps, and ever since, he still had a habit of checking under his bed whenever he slept in one.
Susie went quiet for a moment, processing. The plane's cabin suddenly felt smaller, the recycled air thicker. "You're saying the dungeon doesn't just create monsters -it supercharges what's already there?"
"Exactly. And Santa Lucia?" Jack's voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "That place has been a magnet for weird shit since before recorded history. Native tribes are cautious when hunting there. Called it the 'place where shadows walk in daylight.'"
He pulled up satellite imagery on his tablet, the mountain's snow-capped range looking deceptively peaceful from above. "If there was already something living up there -something that's been feeding on the strange energy of the area for centuries, maybe millennia- and now it's getting a massive power boost from dungeon radiation..."
"Christ." Susie's face had gone pale. "Holy shit, Jack. And that's happening across the country?"
Jack was quiet for a long moment, staring at the mountain on the screen. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of old nightmares made real. "Around the world. And yeah, and if we can't deal with it, we're in for a horror show that makes the worm dungeon look like a garden stroll."
Sys: Jack, I've used the satellite grid to gain real-time data from Jessica's phone. Energy readings from the target site just spiked. Whatever's up there, it's getting stronger.
Outside the window, storm clouds were gathering on the horizon, dark and unnatural, moving against the wind.
Jack: How bad is it, Sys?
Sys: Jack, it's worse than she was letting on. I'm detecting unusual energy signatures. Multiple dungeon sites showing increased activity -six locations across several time zones.
Jack pulled up a world atlas that Sys sent him. There were a number of pulsing red dots. Tiny epicenters of dungeon activity, scattered around the globe.
It looked familiar, and it wasn't until he took the image and mentally flattened it out into a cartographer's rendition of the world map that he realized why. With a flex of intention, he shifted the continents so that the locations and their points of disturbance formed a more complete image. He leaned on his prior skills of cartography and his heightened mind attribute, letting intuition guide him as he worked.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
After a few moments of restructuring the map as if it were a global jigsaw puzzle, he was disheartened to see that his suspicions were confirmed.
The map no longer represented modern-day Earth. Instead, it more closely resembled what geologists called the theoretical supercontinent, Pangaea. Only, Jack knew it was far more than a theory. The biggest continent in the Otherworld shared a very similar shape.
And when the points were superimposed over the corrected landmass, they revealed a startling truth.
On a hunch, he focused on the placements of three more locations where he recalled unusual dungeon activity occurring years ago, before he successfully shut them down. At least he thought he had.
What the hell is going on?
He marked them with quiescent blue dots.
Adding those three points completed the constellation, which those on Earth called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters, and their parents, Atlas and Pleione.
Shit. Jack's blood went cold as he read the location tags for each hotspot. "Susie."
She looked up from checking her gear. "Yeah?"
"Change of plans. We're not just dealing with one site." His voice carried a new edge, sharp and urgent.
"How many?"
"Lucky number 9. And they're all waking up." If my suspicions are correct, he thought grimly. And he feared that they were.
Sys: Estimated time to critical mass: 21 hours.
A timer started ticking down in the corner of their vision.
"Thanks, Sys," Jack said sarcastically.
Sys: You're welcome, Jack.
"But I only count 6," she said, confused.
He sent her the updated map, and she frowned.
"What're those blue ones?"
"Think of them like Caldera volcanoes. Quiet for now, but if they were to erupt…" He made a boom sound as he mimed an explosion with his hands.
She resumed reading their locations, and her eyes grew concerned as she read each location tag.
"California, Morocco, Russia, Egypt, the United Kingdom, the Bermuda Triangle, Greece, the middle of the Western Pacific, and Puru," she paused in her recitation and looked up at Jack for confirmation. "I can't say with one hundred percent certainty, but I'm pretty sure that each of them coincides with locations known as being hotspots for paranormal, or hell, even UFO-type activity." She turned her attention back to Jack. "Am I right?"
He nodded.
"So now what do we do?" Susie demanded. She was looking to him to lead, and it stung -but not as much as it used to.
"First, we come up with a plan."
∞
The private cabin hummed. It was luxurious, he had to admit that he never got used to that. Seats that were stitched in cream leather that never squeaked, a table bolted to the floor with cupholders big enough for whiskey tumblers. A thin line of moonlight washed the wing outside. The pressurized air tasted stale, with that ozone tang from a cabin ionizer and a hint of jet fuel that sneaks through anyway.
Susie had her seat belt low across her hips, one heel braced against the baseboard. She watched the clouds peel past like layers of gauze.
Before wheels-up they'd done the delver's sky-rite without comment. Two knuckles to the bulkhead, a quiet, "To lost parties and found paths." Old guild habit. Superstition, sure. It helped.
Jack thumbed his phone awake, caught the weak satellite bar, and called. No speaker, privacy screen on. His jaw worked while it rang.
Jack called Jacob, and this time his brother was quick to answer.
"Yeah, what is it?" Jacob asked gruffly, threads of concern in his voice, but he sounded distracted as well.
Jack's eyes traced the recessed lights that ran along the ceiling. "Well, I have a change of plans," Jack said. "It seems that the time scale has been bumped up significantly."
"What do you mean?"
"Remember how I said I needed that group, the list of potential prospects, yesterday?" Jack asked.
"Yeah, well. I need more than what I originally planned or intended. And I need you to also get me in comm' with any of your contacts in the government. Don't be obvious about it. Don't reveal who I am. I'm just a concerned citizen with a tip for their hotlines. I know you know who to contact, who to be in communication with, and I'd like you to do that for me."
Susie's gaze slid over, and she gave him a quick check. He returned her a small nod. The jet clawed for altitude, engines a steady animal roar under the floor.
"What do I tell them?" Jacob asked.
"You tell them," Jack said, "that whatever plans they had. They're gonna have to scuttle those. The dungeons are waking up. We're gonna have at least 6 breaches all at once. Possibly 9. In near as many different time zones. I can give you the coordinates."
Jacob's voice caught, a sudden gasp clearly heard over the line.
"What does that mean, Jack?" Jacob asked.
Jack angled the phone away, looked at Susie, catching her eye. They both wore a grim expression as he spoke into the phone. She nodded at him.
"What it means is that I'm going to need to give out some information that I was holding in reserve, in the hopes that the right people -and by necessity, some of the wrong- will use what I give them to do the right thing, or at least do the expedient thing."
"What are you talking about?" Jacob asked, curiosity coloring his voice.
Jack smiled. Not the warm kind. More the, 'I wish we had time for better options kind'. "You know what I was telling you about those Prismata and the other resources that a dungeon might have?"
"Yes, like the monster parts the government collected at the dungeon eruption you helped stop."
"Exactly. If you can't persuade people to do something, it's time to switch to convincing them. And what better way to convince people who are consumed with greed than to give them the promise of treasures?" He nodded as he spoke, his voice resolved. "And for those who prove to be of a nobler bend, well. I'll be getting in touch with them directly."