The tunnel wasn’t a sheer drop, but it was close to it. They continued to pick up speed until Angel had to squint to keep the wind from his eyes. The catacomb had smoothed the material out so that it didn’t scrape them on the way down.

Angel kept an earth canister loaded in his arm, prepared to use it to create a spike and stop his fall in case the catacomb decided it no longer wanted to play nice. Lilian had no such luxury, but he was pretty sure that a fall wouldn’t cause her much trouble, even at this speed.

As they grew deeper, the slope of the tunnel started to increase. Their speed slowed until it was little more than a fast walk. Faint light appeared in the distance, growing closer by the second.

Angel slowed himself, crawling the last few feet to peer out of the tunnel. The huge cube that made up the catacomb’s core rested before the huge staircase. The sentry artifact that Angel had left during his previous visit floated beside it lazily. He crawled out of the tunnel and rose to his feet, brushing his clothes off.

“See? We’re friends,” Angel said.

“You didn’t think that before you went down the tunnel.”

“Sometimes friends do things they don’t mean to each other,” Angel replied, starting up the staircase towards the core.

The light in the room changed from yellow to green in what Angel hoped was a greeting and not a farewell. He took the disk artifact out of his pack and set it on the stairs before the core.

“Here. A gift for your time.”

The light flashed green again. Lilian climbed up the stairs behind Angel and glanced around the room. “You know, I haven’t been in a Great Catacomb in years. Even during the Great War, it was considered incredibly dangerous to try and get near one of their cores. How did you manage to get it to let you in?”

“I am a man of incredible charisma and talent.”

“Humble too,” Lilian said dryly.

Angel scoffed. He took Blue out and activated the artifact. “We won’t be long, Mr. Core. I just want to borrow some of the energy here so my little friend can see the System.”

“You’ve named a traveling fortress carrying enough artifacts to level a city Mr. Core?” Lilian asked.

“No comments from the peanut gallery, unless they’d like to suggest a new name for Mr. Core.”

“What about Dennis?”

The lights in the room turned red.

“See?” Angel asked. “It likes Mr. Core.”

Green filled the room once more. Lilian threw her hands up. “I give up. I’m getting teamed up on by a child and a magical cube.”

Angel strongly debated sticking his tongue out at her before deciding that he didn’t need to give her any more ammunition. He turned to Blue, who had been floating silently above his hand ever since it had been activated.

“Blue? Any luck connecting to the System again? Is the magical energy here strong enough?”

“It is,” Blue reported, its voice strained. “Reconnection to the System began during my activation sequence. It is approximately sixty percent complete. My storage units are not sufficient to contain all of the data that the System is sending. The majority of the data will be lost after the connection is severed.”

“I expected as much,” Angel said. “That’s fine. As long as you can get an answer for my question, this will be a success. Should I wait until you’re fully connected for that?”

“Yes. I am shutting off all non-necessary processes. Standby for System integration.”

The light emitting from Blue’s core dimmed and it wavered in the air. It sank and Angel grabbed it before it could fall. Several seconds passed. Then a faint chime emitted from the artifact. Blue hummed, floating out of Angel’s hand as the light within it redoubled in intensity.

“System integration has been achieved. Please state your query to the System.”

“I showed you a ring inlaid with gemstones some time ago,” Angel said. “It had a set of runes that we couldn’t fully understand because a significant portion of them were missing. I want to know what those missing runes are.”

“Query has been delivered to the System. Approximate time expected for response is five minutes.”

“Huh. I was expecting a lot worse,” Angel said.

“You’re assuming the System has the answer,” Lilian said. “It said expected time to response, not time to a correct solution.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Angel replied. He sat down on the steps and took two empty canisters from his bag. He refilled them and returned them to the cylinder in his arm. He glanced up at the cube above him, then pulled out a few pieces of scrap metal he’d packed away and started working them with his hands.

Using Liquid Metal, he morphed the metal into a very rough shape of a bird. Its legs were stumpy and one of its eyes was about twice the size of the other, but it looked more like a bird than a different animal, which counted as a success in his mind.

“Query answered,” Blue reported, breaking him from his reverie. It’s voice warbled and cracked as it spoke. “A proposed set of runes has been delivered. Would you like me to save this to my memory banks?”

“Yes,” Angel said, shooting a victorious look at Lilian.

Blue chimed, but once more the sound sounded warped. Angel frowned. The artifact jittered erratically, bobbing as if it were caught in a powerful slipstream.

“What happened to Old World Magic after the Great War?” Lilian asked. “Can you ask the System that?”

“Query has been delivered to the System,” Blue said. “Expected response time is–”

A spark shot from Blue’s core and it dropped out of the air. Angel reached to grab it, but the artifact caught itself and floated back up before he could.

“Error. This query is forbidden,” Blue crackled.

“Forbidden?” Lilian asked, taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“This query is forbidden,” Blue said again. “Wonderful is not permitted to access this information. Further attempts or methods to circumvent this order will result in a removal of Wonderful’s System access.”

“That’s enough,” Angel said before Lilian could ask anything else. “Blue, disconnect from the System.”

“Ending System Integration.”

Blue dimmed and fell once more. Angel caught it and cursed, tossing it to his metal hand. Blue was burning hot. He sent a command to the Star Fragment to make sure it wouldn’t try to eat his artifact.

“What happened?” Lilian asked.

“Blue was overloading,” Angel said. “It might have gotten seriously damaged if I didn’t stop the connection. Actually, it might still be damaged. It nearly burned my hand.”

“Isn’t the whole point of a System artifact connecting to the System?”

“There were those permissions as well,” Angel said, his lips turning down in a frown. “I was under the impression that the System was an information processing tool and database. There shouldn’t be any sort of limiters on it beyond what the artifact interacting with it can handle.”

“That’s what I knew it as too,” Lilian agreed, scratching her head. “Walling off information… that’s not good at all.”

“It means someone modified the System,” Angel said grimly. “And it happened during or after the Great War, since Blue should have been able to handle it and Blue likely dates from before the war. Are you sure it wasn’t the Reawakening?”

“As sure as I can get,” Lilian said. “I wasn’t the most up to date with our plans since I was a field agent, but I knew the basics. Soul and Heart were the ones that did most of the planning, and Mind stepped in once Heart died. None of them ever believed the System was anything more than what we thought it was. Mind didn’t even use a System artifact.”

“So there’s another player,” Angel said, standing up and pacing up and down the stairs. “And whenever someone tries to keep you out of something, that probably means its important. The System could very well be involved with how Old World Magic vanished.”

“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. There’s no guarantee the other person is still alive,” Lilian pointed out. “Someone might have messed with the System during the Great War. Information is power, so it makes sense that someone would want to stop it.”

“That’s true,” Angel admitted. “I don’t know, and I don’t know if we’ve got any good way to figure it out from where we are. We’ll add it to my ever growing list of questions. For now, we got what we needed so long as Blue didn’t fry itself. We’ve got the Key. If the System has anything to do with Old World Magic, we might very well find out when we figure out how the Key works.”