The wheeled vanguards of the Cordaean 2o3rd Tank Battalion cut a path of relative safety through the veritable minefield of crystal outgrowths. The formation was quickly funneled down into half a dozen small convoys, each with a pair of brave trailblazers leading the way. Ricard didn’t like having to stay as far behind Alice and Casey’s vehicle as he did–more than a few hundred meters, but the clouds of dust formed in their wake could completely obscure anything just ahead or behind them. The tanks could easily and unknowingly plow straight through one of the unprecedented corrupted crystal mounds if impatience won out of over prudence. The vanguards reduced their speed to make less of a disturbance, but the only thing anyone remembered for it was how much longer their ingress into the underworld had taken.

With only a single exception, the six wheelers leading the 203rd’s advance parked themselves a comfortable distance from the entrance into the wild tunnel system. They were more than an hour behind schedule by that point due to the crystals and the needed precautions.

“Oh thank God,” the gunner’s voice came in over the radio, “Entrance is clear. Initial incline is 30 degrees. No changes noted.”

Ricard was quietly taken aback. How was that possible? They were sitting in a field of crystal mounds, but there was no change to any part of the tunnel the scouts could see? The word ‘trap’ buzzed and flickered around the Sergeant’s head, looking for a place to settle and coalesce into a coherent thought, but there was no place for it. The discrepancy was too minor and they knew too little about the situation. In truth, they understood very little about these tunnels and were using them in spite of that. A bad feeling was what Ricard had started with, and that was all he had now.

Nothing to do, he thought, but wait until the vanguard made their way inside and gave the tanks the greenlight to follow. Ricard guessed they would be waiting for roughly an hour before heading in. That was the average time needed for any given mile of the network to be declared ‘armor compliant.’ That status only lasted a precious few days; the Arenas tunnel network was simply that dangerous now.

“No unusual readings in the area,” a crewman of a mobile sensor vehicle spoke up. “Seismic activity is negligible in our AO.”

Ricard breathed a sigh of relief the news. The only thing more dangerous than the crimson veins were the creatures that made them. They were massive wormlike monstrosities, disturbingly quiet on the surface and terribly fast when moving through the veins. An adult worm could swallow an armored column in one pass if not for the immense firepower at the army’s disposal. The Cordaeans and their adversaries the Municans, both had made a point of killing any worms their forces encountered, sparing nothing short of cruise missiles to keep the colossal pests at bay and their men out of harm’s way. If seismic activity was within acceptable ranges, then none of the crimson burrowers was close enough to cause problems.

That was the hope at least. Ricard’s personal fear was that the corrupted crystals were connected with the worms somehow. In the two hours–not one like he expected, but two long hours it took for the vanguards to greenlight their advance into the tunnel system, Ricard still hadn’t come up with any kind of hypothesis worth sharing with the rest of the 203rd. The entire time the tanks sat idly, uncomfortably close to the corrupted crystals jutting out of the ground. Occasionally a tank had inched itself away from one, a tank commander or two complaining of headaches and other inconveniences. Ricard simply hated how simply looking at one seemed to make it grow larger somehow. The illusion always broke when he noticed it, but between his own misgivings and the growing concerns throughout the battalion, they couldn’t risk staying here much longer.

As soon as the scout vehicles started moving into the tunnel, Ricard woke Nicholas up. “Time to move.”

“Got it,” Nicholas’ said, his voice cracking from the long nap.

There was no hesitation from any of the tankers when the scout vehicles started funneling into the underground. Within a few minutes, the 203rd disappeared beneath the rock and sand of the Arenas.

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