For several seconds, the Iron Hand member simply stared at them. Then she took off running towards their quadrant.

The Divemaster let out a sigh. "And just when I'd thought you'd developed some actual sense," he said. Rix shot him a flat stare but made no reply. What was the point?

Instead, he looked to Luna, who nodded, and they broke into a run of their own, heading for the western quadrant. A single spotter was basically the ideal outcome. They had talked through all the different ways they thought this could go. Even with their little show in the morning, Rix knew the Iron Hand wouldn't just take him at his word. They'd want to confirm he wasn't going to show up.

The worst case was that they would spend the entire dive, all twenty of them, sitting by the portal. If that's what Rix and Luna had seen when they walked through, they would have immediately backpedalled into the prison to reassess. But Rix hadn't thought that likely. They were Iron Hand members, but they were also Martial Souls, and with that came a certain greed. There was no easy way to convince twenty divers to give up their entire day for something that may never come. What about tomorrow? Or next week? How long would Han expect them to sit by the portal? There were fades to slay and essence to earn, and with every wasted day, their competition grew stronger.

No, what had been much more likely — and what seemed to have taken place — was that they waited a little while before eventually leaving a single set of eyes, just in case.

And that set of eyes was now attempting to bring the entire rest of the Iron Hand down on top of them.

The moment Rix and Luna got out of eyeshot of the dive site, they veered to the north, though it took some time to find a gap in the canyon's rocky walls. The western quadrant was just a distraction. That was where Han expected to find them, and now it was where they'd been seen heading.

Their real target, obviously, lay elsewhere. At that distance from the portal, the quadrants weren't very wide. It didn't take them long to cut through and into Shadow Runner territory. It was hard to tell exactly when you crossed those arbitrary thresholds, but after a few minutes, they were confronted by two divers who stepped out from behind a nearby tree. Rix recognised them from Wing's table that morning.

They looked the two of them up and down for a moment, then the one in front grinned. "Looks like we're the lucky winners."

All the Shadow Runners had been told that for today, Rix and Luna were safe in their territory. And whoever found the pair first was to act as a guide, taking them through until they hit the other side.

Due to the way the territories were divided into quadrants, coming at the Iron Hand section from the front was asking to be caught. But the sides were another matter. The Iron Hand and Shadow Runner quadrants bordered one another, which meant slipping across would be easy, especially with most of the Iron Hand busy following their false trail.

Their two escorts led them across the zone diagonally, taking them both deeper and closer to the opposite border. Though it was a relatively short journey, they met three fades en route, two of the armour-plated behemoths Rix had fought the first time he ventured into the Mid Whisper zone, and a solo beast that resembled a giant badger. With four Martial Souls present, the battles were all over fast.

"There really are more fades here," he commented to Luna after the third kill.

She grinned. "Sounds like we better pull this off then."

As they went, the landscape shifted, going from rock to woods and eventually to thick jungle. The shrubs here were denser than anywhere else Rix had been in the Fractured Realm, and the trees were so tightly packed that they blotted out much of the light. It was difficult territory in which to hunt, but it was ideal to skulk and hide.

Soon enough, their two escorts came to a halt in front of a tree. Wrapped around its trunk was a piece of black cloth.

"This is as far as we go," said the Shadow Runner. "Any further to the east, and you're in Iron Hand territory."

Rix nodded in thanks.

"Heavens' speed," the man said.

While the ever-changing nature of the Fractured Realm made giving exact locations for things something of a tricky proposition, they had some idea where they were headed. It turned out entropy fields were relatively static. Also, Wing clearly had a mole in the Iron Hand's operation that had given fairly precise directions.

The source had said the pearl was being kept in a ruin close to the border with the High Whisper zone. That, in and of itself, was interesting to Rix — he'd never seen anything man-made in the Fractured Realm before, though it made sense that such a thing would exist. Every realm had previously been a planet, a place with people and cities and roads and infrastructure, all things that entropy would dismember and then stitch back wrong.

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Rix and Luna moved slowly, methodically. Stealth was the aim of the game now. Though in theory, there should be nothing but a skeleton crew left in the Iron Hand's quadrant, they didn't know for sure.

Rix felt a brief flash of panic that maybe they'd been read that morning in the mess hall, that their plan was obvious and that around the next tree, twenty Iron Hand members lay in wait. But the jungle stayed silent around them.

After thirty minutes of careful exploration, the scrub began to thin, and in a clearing they found what they were looking for. Rix's eyes widened as he took it in. The source had been right — it was a ruin, but the scale of it caught him off guard. This wasn't just the shell of a former building; this was a mass of tumbling stone at least two hundred feet square, like the scattered bones of some dead colossus.

The building had once been a huge dome carved from massive brown rocks that had been hewn into bricks and stacked several stories tall. Time, or perhaps entropy, had taken its toll, though. The roof was mostly gone, collapsed in some spots and totally missing in others. Though the walls at the front and back were mostly intact, they had crumbled to the ground on either side, leaving gaps at least ten feet wide. Through the one closer to them, Rix could see a sliver of what looked like a massive room overflowing with rubble and broken furniture. There were the remains of several corridors and hallways running off and alongside that central atrium.

"I dare say this is it," Luna whispered.

"Is it bad luck to raid a temple?" he asked because that was what it brought to mind, though it was hard to be sure of its function. The building had a brutal squatness to it, with none of the delicacy or elegance of Cloudpiercer's tiered, angular construction. A structure built by alien hands.

Luna grinned. "Depends on what they worship. Could be the god of thieves, couldn't it?"

Rix's grasp of religion was tenuous. People in Cloudpiercer worshipped, make no mistake, but they worshipped power. All the city's biggest temples were dedicated to the Chronicles or the System itself. He'd visited those halls on many occasions, hoping that somehow that fleeting communion might give him the strength to follow in their footsteps.

He'd heard that in other places, temples were dedicated to more esoteric things: non-human entities, the various aspects. Some dark places apparently even worshipped the fades and the forces of entropy. But it seemed to him that the Martial Path already provided all the answers about what to venerate, for what was more powerful than someone who could challenge the heavens themselves?

"Let's hope whoever they worshipped cleared out when entropy took this place," he said. "Just to be safe."

They picked their way carefully around the outskirts, making sure to remain hidden. As they drew closer to the building, Rix felt the first familiar prickle in his mind that said an entropy field was near. There was something else there too, though, something sweet and powerful that thrummed in his spirit eye. It had to be the treasure. By tracking the strength of those sensations against his movement, he was able to discern that the pearl likely lay toward the back of the building where the roof still held.

Their plan was to spend a little time observing, checking for traps, guards, or any other tricks. At first, it seemed that maybe the pearl was unprotected, but as they continued to circle, eventually their view through the broken walls widened enough to reveal two sentries leaning against the wall in the centre of the main temple room. Rix and Luna were well hidden behind the forking trunk of a large, dark tree, so they stood and watched through its branches.

The men were dishevelled. One bore a shallow gash down his arm, while the other's robes had been shredded across one side of his chest. Rix couldn't help but notice that one of them wielded the largest jian he'd ever seen. It was a comical thing, about two-thirds the height of a man and as thick as his thigh.

Both men looked nervous, their eyes scanning the jungle through the gaps in the walls. It didn't take long for the reason to reveal itself. Just a few minutes into their stakeout, two fades burst from the scrub on the other side of the building. This was a sort Rix hadn't seen before — long and lupine. They bounded on four legs with easy grace.

Rix tensed, his hands closing tight around his weapon, but the fades made no move towards them. No, they seemed to have eyes for only one thing. He watched as they paused at the edge of the ruin and sniffed the air before racing around towards the main room.

"Incoming," called one of the guards, apparently having heard their approach. As one, the men moved to engage, reaching the fades before they'd even fully entered the building proper. They fought there in the gap in the wall, their blade work crisp and precise, but the battle had a strange tenor to it.

"They're trying to get the pearl," Rix whispered, as it clicked. The fades weren't fighting to kill. They were fighting because the Iron Hand were in their way. And they did so with reckless abandon. Every time a gap presented itself, the fades would try to dash through to the back of the room, even if it exposed them to attack. Rix had never seen them so desperate before.

The two men seemed to understand their mission, though. Whenever one of the fades moved to disengage, they'd follow, always keeping themselves between the creatures and their prize.

Understanding dawned on Luna's face. "It makes sense, I guess," she said. "They're attracted to regular treasures, and this is like a super treasure."

The battle lasted a frantic minute, but the men were up to the task, dispatching their foes with ruthless efficiency. Han may have taken most of his best to hunt Rix down, but the men he'd left on guard duty were no slouches. Rix wasn't close enough to detect their strength, but they fought like men with years of experience in their styles.

"So, we're running in, weapons drawn, right?" asked Luna, as if on cue.

Rix gave a low chuckle. "I think we can do better."

He had a plan.

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