As the pair of them began to slowly explore the tunnel, Terry learned something very important. Tunnels were super boring when monsters weren't appearing in huge numbers and trying to kill him. After he'd seen the first fifty feet of basically unchanging rock walls and timber supports, he was pretty sure that he'd already experienced everything a mine tunnel had to offer. Things didn't get even remotely interesting until the tunnel split. Both branches angled down rather sharply, but there was nothing important to distinguish them. He tried to feel around with that enemy sense that only seemed to work when he wasn't too distracted, but he came up empty.

"Which way should we go?" asked Kelima, keeping her voice down.

Terry didn't think it would actually keep their voices from carrying, but he followed suit.

"Which way do you think we should go?"

The noble girl spent about five minutes studying the two options. Terry thought that was about four minutes and fifty seconds more than they deserved. Even so, he kept his mouth shut. He had asked the question without any qualifications. There also wasn't any obvious, immediate danger, or he'd have picked one and been done with it. As things stood, he could give her time. She turned to him when her inspection was done.

"Right?"

He rolled his eyes.

"You took five minutes to ask me if we should go right?"

"Well, how am I supposed to know which way we should go?"

"Okay, here's what we'll do," said Terry, pulling a coin out of his pocket. "Heads, we go right. Tails, we go left."

"Okay."

Terry flipped the coin, caught it, and slapped it onto the back of his other hand. He lifted his hand to reveal what he thought of as heads for this world's currency.

"It seems the gods agree with you. Right, it is."

Terry veered that direction, Kelima right behind him, and they continued their stealthy march forward. For his part, Terry was mostly looking for any stray bits of ore that might have gotten left behind. Nari had shown him a little piece of it so he'd know what to look for. It might be more accurate to say that she'd shown him the only piece of it that she'd ever been able to get her hands on. It was so small that she couldn't make anything from the tiny amount of pure metal she could harvest from it. He'd asked if he could take it along with him to use as a reference. Her response had been less than receptive.

"I would sooner swallow molten glass," she'd told him. "Do you have any idea how much it cost me to get this?"

"Obviously not," he'd answered. "How could I?"

"About five years of earnings. Do you think you can match that?"

Terry hadn't been sure. He did have a meaningful sum in credit with the Guild. Then again, Nari was a master blacksmith. Probably the kind who only took really expensive jobs. In the end, Terry had just spent an hour studying the rock really, really hard so he'd be able to pick it out in a dimly lit tunnel. Yet, try thought he might, he hadn't seen anything that looked like what he needed. He supposed that probably meant that this part of the tunnel had been mined out already. Either that, or whatever vein of the stuff they had been mining was deeper inside the mountain. That idea did not fill Terry with joy.

One of the things he'd learned about monsters was that a lot of them were, much like humans, kind of lazy. If they sensed an intruder wandering around the edges of their domain, they'd pay attention. However, if the intruder didn't get too close, and the monster wasn't hungry, they'd routinely just ignore the person in favor of…Well, he didn't rightly know what they did. The takeaway was that they'd ignore the intruder in favor of whatever monsters did when they weren't being death machines. Terry felt like, at the moment, they were still on the edge of the territory the mountain's monster cared about.

He had an intuition that state of affairs wasn't going to hold. The deeper they went, the more they would draw that thing's attention. At some point, he and Kelima would stop being an annoyance and become a priority. That was an outcome he really wanted to avoid. He'd had enough boss fights just recently. In truth, Terry had had his fill of any kind of violence. It seemed that even killing monsters came with an emotional toll after a while. Not that he was going to become a pacifist. It just wasn't practical in Chinese Period Drama Hell.

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It would, however, be nice to go a few days without something spraying blood, or goo, or acid, or any other kind of fluid on him while it died. What remained of his clothing was starting to get really worn out. Not to mention it always felt gross or even hurt when that happened. How anything could survive with massively caustic acid inside of it, he didn't know. All he knew was that some of the monsters in the forest did, in fact, have acid in them. Damn them.

"Terry," said Kelima in a harsh whisper.

"Hmmm?" asked Terry, his attention snapping fully back on their surroundings.

"Where is that fog coming from?" she asked, pointing at the ground.

Terry looked down and saw that Kelima had been right. A thick soup of fog swirled around his legs, almost up to his knees.

"Shit," said Terry.

"What?"

"I guess we're going to have that fight, after all," he said, looking over his shoulder to confirm his suspicions.

It wasn't obvious, but he could see that the tunnel simply stopped in a flat wall, maybe a hundred feet back. Kelima looked momentarily triumphant, having wanted to fight the monster from the start. That look faded as the reality settled on her. They were going to have to fight something that neither of them knew anything about. A battle scenario that strongly favored the monster. It had also chosen to take up residence inside this mountain. That suggested the monster favored this kind of environment or could draw some advantages from it.

"I guess we should get a move on," said Terry, speaking in a normal voice.

"Why are you talking so loud?" demanded Kelima in that same harsh whisper.

Terry gave her a look and said, "Really?"

Kelima stared back before she said, "Oh. It already knows we're here and, apparently, where we are."

The pair trudged along, more or less letting the fog serve to guide them in the right direction. Terry did take the precaution of rolling a loose stone ahead of them periodically. He wanted to make sure there wasn't a concealed hole ahead that would send them spiraling down into an endless chasm. After they'd walked for another fifteen minutes, steadily descending toward what Terry assumed was the heart of the mountain, he spoke.

"Idle curiosity. Your parents didn't happen to give you a magical escape treasure of some kind, did they?"

Kelima gave him a startled look and shook her head.

"I've heard of those kinds of things, but my family could never afford one. You only get something like that if you're royalty or maybe a duke. I guess you might find one in a ruin, or maybe a dungeon."

"That's too bad. I get the feeling that this would probably have been a good time for you to use one."

"Why?"

"Just a feeling. Also, it would have been a lot more convenient if I only had to watch out for myself in this fight. Sidekicks tend to die in these situations."

"Sidekicks?"

"Secondary characters usually fated to die at the hands of the villain. It's a cheap way to force the main character to grow, or send them on a killing spree."

Kelima was full-on glowering at him by the end of that.

"And I take it you see yourself as the main character in this example?"

"Yeah. What of it? Are you trying to say that you think that you're the main character in this situation?"

She opened and closed her mouth a few times before a stricken look crossed her face.

"Oh fuck," she said. "I'm going to die in here, aren't I?"

Terry waggled a hand in the air and said, "It's not for certain. I'd say it's sixty-forty against you."

"I need to hide or go back or—"

"It won't work. Going off by yourself gives you a near-perfect chance of dying. At least, with me, there's a chance I can protect you," said Terry before pointing ahead to a well-lit opening. "Besides, it looks like we're here. Might as well go see what's in there."

Terry had to blink a few times when they stepped into what looked like a small cavern. He idly noted that the unobtanium he'd been looking for was found in abundance in the cavern walls. Mostly, though, he was looking at the shrouded figure sitting on a throne of bones. Crap, thought Terry. Not a monster. At least, it wasn't exactly a monster. It might be a necromancer or a lich. The problem was that it was something that would probably think its way through a fight. That kind of opponent wasn't really Terry's specialty. He'd take a big dumb monster any day.

"Foolish mortals, how dare you invade my domain?" said a feminine voice with what sounded to Terry like a British accent.

The creature kept talking, making threats, and Kelima was tugging on his sleeve and saying something about getting ready to fight. Yet, all Terry could focus on was that accent. The more he heard it, the more certain he was. He didn't snap out of his daze until the figure rose from the throne and dark energies started to swirl around it. Terry did the only thing he could think of. He dropped his axes and held up his hands in the I surrender pose that anyone from Earth would immediately recognize.

"Wait!" he shouted.

Much to his surprise, the dark energies slowed in their menacing swirl. Terry didn't wait for the opportunity to pass him by.

"I just have two questions. First, what would you say if I told you that the only thing I want here is some of that ore?" he asked, pointing at the wall. "Second, why do you sound like a BBC news anchor?"

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