Page 4 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

A massive cavern spread in front of us, awash in bioluminescence like some bizarre rave.

It resembled an enormous egg set on its side, with the wider end to the right ending in a solid wall and the narrow end to the left splitting off into several dark passages.

The cavern’s floor sloped to the center where a wide stream ran through the cave from left to right.

The water was like glass, perfectly clear.

At the banks, the stream branched into several small pools bordered by rimstone dams, some shallow, others deeper.

The pools flowed into each other, stretching toward a flat island on our right.

The stream split around it and emptied into a lake, its waters moving slowly and disappearing under a spectacular flowstone wall where layers of calcite formed a frozen stone waterfall.

Melissa turned to London.

The blade warden surveyed the cavern. “Go ahead.”

“I need lights, people!” Melissa called out.

The mining crew spread out, planting floodlights along the nearest wall.

The only flat space available was directly by the entrance, and the mining crew managed to fit three out of the four carts on it.

The portable generator on the central cart sputtered into life, and bright electric light illuminated the cavern.

The sloping floor was ridged with calcite, and it looked slick. A good way to break a leg.

“Much better,” Melissa declared. “It’s almost like we know what we’re doing.”

London nodded to the tank. Aaron moved to the left and planted himself in the narrower part of the cave, between the dark tunnels and the mining crew. London stayed at the entrance, guarding our exit route. The three strikers fanned out along the perimeter.

It was my turn to shine. The cavern walls were awash with swirls of bright green mixed with rust-colored metallic deposits. Promising.

I took a deep breath and flexed .

The official term was talent activation, but to me it felt like flexing a muscle I didn’t normally use.

The world turned crystal clear. The edges of the rimstone dams and contours of the flowstone waterfall came into sharp focus, as if I’d adjusted my eyes to a higher resolution.

The outlines of individual mineral deposits glowed slightly.

I focused on the closest wall, scanning and evaluating, sorting through different hues. Malachite, copper-rich chalcopyrite, decent but not exciting. Cuprite, quartz, calcite, trash, garbage, junk…

A patch of funky plants to the left glowed with dull, pale pink. Healer Slipper. A weird variant, but definitely in the same ballpark as the more common varieties. If processed, it would yield a potent broad-spectrum antibiotic. A decent haul, if nothing else showed up.

Unlike Melissa, who only sensed ores and only when she was on top of them, I evaluated everything in my environment, organic or inorganic, and my talent tagged it with glowing colors.

Red meant something useful, something I needed or wanted.

Blue was toxic, yellow was dangerous, and occasionally I would get weird shades like white or brown, which told me nothing.

Of all the noncombat Talents, the assessors were the most confusing for the scientific community.

Nobody, including me, had any idea how my abilities worked.

I could look at something and just know that it was a poisonous liquid, or a chunk of iron, or a plant with coagulation properties, but the exact mechanism by which that knowledge was deposited into my brain remained a mystery.

If this was a video game, I would’ve cast an Identify spell, and a little window would pop up, telling me information about the item, but this was real life. There was no window. Just me.

So far, the cavern had been relatively disappointing. The more dangerous the breach was, the better the loot. Usually, orange gates offered a little more. I pivoted slightly, turning away from the wall.

The inside of the stream lit up like a Christmas tree. Well, that was something.

“Gold in the water,” I announced. “Check the pools.”

“Go!” Melissa barked.

The miners scrambled over calcite walls. The pools directly in front of them ran a little deeper, and the water came up to their thighs.

Sanders thrust his hand into the pool and pulled up a tangerine-sized gold nugget. “Holy shit!”

The mining crew erupted into a controlled frenzy. Three of the miners went into the pools with small buckets, while the rest positioned themselves on the slope and shore, in a human chain leading up to the mining carts.

I kept scanning. Gold was okay. Just okay.

“We got time, people,” Melissa called out. “Don’t hurt yourself. Gold is heavy. Don’t get greedy, no more than thirty pounds per bucket. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

A bright swath of deep crimson flared on the edge of my vision.

I’d learned long ago that the intensity of the glow was situational.

If I was starving, my talent would start tagging all the food sources in the vicinity with bright red, ignoring valuable mineral deposits right under my feet.

The more I wanted something, the more saturated the glow was, and whatever this was glowed with the red of a priceless ruby.

I turned slowly, following the irregular contours of the radiance, and focused. A thick vein running from the center of the cavern all the way to the far wall...

It couldn’t be. I squinted at it to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

No, it was there. And the crimson got deeper at the other end of the cavern. There had to be at least ten cubic yards there, maybe more.

“Melissa?”

“Yes?”

“Dump the gold.”

The mining crew stopped. Sanders closed his fists around a handful of nuggets and hugged them to his chest. Gold fever was a real thing. Something about the bright shiny yellow metal made people lose their minds.

I pointed to the beginning of the vein along the wall of the island, by the two pools closest to the shore. “Adamantite. From here to there. Solid, less than a foot down. We’ll need more carts.”

Melissa splashed into the stream to the adamantite vein buried under calcite deposits and put her bare hands onto the stone. She grunted, squeezed the rock surface with her fingers, shook from the strain, and stumbled back.

“Goddamn! Team One here! Team Two there! I want those drills running five minutes ago!”

The gold went flying. The mining crew grabbed their drills. Safety glasses and noise-dampening headphones went on, and they waded into the river and attacked the dams and the island.

Gold was expensive but adamantite was twelve times more valuable, because it could be refined into adamant.

In the same family as osmium, adamant was incredibly durable.

Adamant-enhanced armor could withstand machine gun fire.

Adamant-coated blades cut through solid metal and monster bones like butter without losing their edge.

We found it rarely and usually in small deposits.

A cubic yard of adamantite was a record-breaking haul that would mean a big bonus for every guild member that entered this breach.

We had a lot more than a cubic yard here.

In all my time crawling in and out of the breaches, I had never found a vein half that large.

The drills chiseled at the rock with a dull roar.

The first chunk of adamantite fell free, a dark, almost black basketball-sized rock that looked like frozen tar in the crystal-clear stream.

The drills stopped as everyone stared at it.

Melissa tried to lift it out of the water, couldn’t – it was ridiculously heavy - and laughed.

“We’re gunna be rich!” someone yelled.

“Ada, I love you!” Melissa declared. “Marry me!”

“Sorry, I don’t want to ruin such a good friendship.”

People laughed. Next to me, London cracked a smile.

“Friend zoned,” Melissa groaned.

“It’s not you, it’s me, Mel. I’m the problem.”

More laughter.

Melissa shook her head. “Back to work, people! And someone help me with this rock.”

The miners resumed their drilling.

The vein continued under the stream, veering across the cavern floor to the left and behind the far wall.

Getting adamantite from under the water would be cumbersome, and our time was short.

The wall deposit lay deeper, but it was a better bet.

Once they were done with the island, I would tell them to move there.

I went down the slope to the water. London nodded to Elena, and the scout followed me.

The best place to cross was to the left, by Aaron, where the stream was relatively shallow. I headed there and waded in, careful where I put my feet. The rocks were damn slippery, and the water came up past my knees. Magnaprene wasn’t the most comfortable fabric, but it was waterproof.

I hiked over the shallow calcite ridges to the wall, pulled a can of fluorescent paint from the pocket of my coveralls, and set about tracing the contours of the deposit in bright Safety Yellow. Elena crossed the stream and lingered on my left, looking toward the tunnels.

I painted the cave wall. A hell of a find. Not that I would get anything out of it other than bragging rights. Government employees didn’t get gate loot bonuses, and that wasn’t why I’d taken this job.

The steady roar of the drills filled the cavern.

I was thirty-three when I saw my first glow.

One of the larger US guilds somehow obtained permission to sell sebrian knives to the public.

Sebrian was found only in breaches, and the knife prices started at a thousand dollars for a tiny pocket blade.

Our advertising agency had taken the contract and promptly sent it to me with the key phrase of “rugged luxury.”