Chapter 54 - Swing Above The Abyss

"Good luck on the other side," Cleo said with a smile before jumping into the capsule. Even though the guidelines suggested removing all kinds of casual clothing and entering with special undies only, she couldn't care less about such trifling matters. 

"Let's hope we can find each other as soon as possible," Tom replied before nodding his head and turning around. He wasn't going to watch the girl fall unconscious. After all, that would mean wasting the opportunity she was giving them. 

"Be ready to climb, run, jump and do all sorts of stuff," Tom said as he turned his eyes to Claudia. 

"That's..." she hesitated in her response. "I'm pretty athletic, but doing all of that with a heavy backpack?" Claudia shrugged at the sheer thought of doing dangerous by itself with an additional burden. 

"You can either carry it and stop whining or starve once we are inside," Tom replied coldly, peeking through the hole in the containment sheets. 

And sure enough, at the same time as Cleo's capsule lit up, stuff started to happen within the interior of the Dome. 

'What a clever design,' Tom thought when a single tile on the floor right underneath the black vortex disappeared. Whether it slid to the side, turned around and moved down, or just vanished in thin air, he couldn't decide. 

Thankfully, it didn't really matter. Not like the thing that happened next. 

After some mechanical noises, a long, metal arm grew from one of the four cubes placed in even distances away from each other and the vortex itself. Once its grabbing arm reached the hole in the floor, the arm twisted and reached inside the opening.

"This is our chance," Tom muttered as he grabbed the edges of the hole in the metal before pulling himself up. The weight of the backpack was hard to ignore, but he still managed to keep his mobility. 

Sadly, the same couldn't be said about Claudia.

"Come," Tom extended his hand to the girl while watching how the arm continued to move around within the hole. 

"Uff... Thanks." Claudia finally managed to pull herself up with Tom's help from above and his brother's help from below. 

'From how red she is, they didn't really mind where they were touching,' Tom thought when noticing the hue of the girl's cheeks.

"What now?" Claudia asked after catching her breath. She then looked at the place to which Tom's eyes were glued. 

"We need to hurry," Tom replied before starting his descent. Even though he dug pretty far down, the hole was still roughly in the third of how deep the insides of the Dome were. As such, after the initial few steps, he just fell to his knees and slid the rest of the distance. 

As he continued down the curved wall, Tom had to fight the urge to look behind to check how Claudia was doing. As worried as he was for her, he was unwilling to look away from where he was going. 

'Given the importance of this place, it's bound to be riddled with traps and sensors.' So Tom thought once his slide finally stopped due to the floor getting too even with the ground. 'Some I can find out, others I can only hope will either malfunction or won't be automated.' Tom wished as he moved up from his knees and started to slowly approach the wiggly arm. 

"Hey..." Claudia said, only for Tom to instantly turn his head around and burn her with his intense stare. He then raised his finger to his lips in the common gesture ordering silence. 

With that slight mishap out of their way, the two continued towards their target. 

Once they were just several feet away, the mechanical arm stopped wiggling. Right now, judging from how the cable powering it started to retract at a worrying rate, it was clear that it found what it was looking for before. 

When the two of them reached the hole, the arm was already pulling an androgynous, naked body out. 

'It's just like the characters in the lobby,' Tom noticed before shaking his head and looking over at Claudia. "It's do or die right now," he said with a stern face before correcting his timing and jumping up. 

Tom reached forward in the middle of his jump, catching the lifeless avatar's leg. Despite how stiff its entire body was, he could tell with just a touch that the avatar's skin and insides were just like an actual human. 

For a moment, the arm trembled. Tom only glanced towards the hole in the containment, almost invisible from a distance. 'This arm was fitted to lift a single avatar at a time,' he thought grimly, but there was nothing he could do. 

'Right now, I can only hope the uncles will do something about it,' Tom tightened his teeth, not daring to look down. Unfortunately, the hole where the avatars were stored had to go so deeply into the ground that he could easily lose his composture if he were to look down. 

The arm jerked a bit... But then, it continued to pull the avatar up. And then, as if sensing that it was the last moment, Cleo finally gathered her courage and jumped. 

But she missed. Her hands didn't reach the avatar's legs due to how slow she was to make up her mind. And in this single moment, she finally realized the situation she was in. 

With nothing to grab on to.  In the middle of the air. With a seemingly endless hole underneath her feat. 

In a single instant, Tom could see the terror appearing in the girl's eyes as she realized what was about to happen now. 

'Fuck!' Tom cursed in his mind as he let go of the avatar's leg. While he was risking the entire operation by doing that, he wasn't willing to just watch how Claudia would plunge into the abyss. 

"CATCH!" he shouted, pushing himself against the avatar. Then, with some kind of miracle, Cleo managed to grasp at his ankle with one of her hands, instantly driven by her momentum into a wide swing. 

The metal arm started giving out a worrying noise. With a line, three human's heights long, the weight of Claudia and her backpack alone had enough leverage to overburden it. 

"Drop your back!" Tom shouted, entrusting his entire fate to his instincts. Right now, he was latching to the avatar's body in the exact same way that Claudia held on to him: by holding the avatar's ankle for his dear life. 

"I'm on it!" Claudia shouted back, clearly giving the panic a comfy spot in her head. But even though she was barely holding on to a stable mental state, she still managed to shrug off the backpack, allowing it to fall directly into the hole under them. 

'That's going to be a massive pain later,' Tom thought, watching how the damning evidence fell out of his reach. Then, when he shouted to the girl, he had no time to tell her to drop it anywhere but in the hole. 'Now that I think about it, she wouldn't be able to do it either way,' he thought, forcing himself to calm down. 

With a huge weight off its bearings, the metallic crane started to move up again. 

"Climb up!" Tom ordered the girl, worried that she wouldn't last long just by hanging on to his ankle. 'I don't know what will happen in the vortex, but it's better to be close than spread out so far,' he thought.

For a moment, Tom was torn between the pain of holding nearly the triple worth of his weight on his hands alone and feeling Claudia's hands touching him all over as she climbed up. 

"I'm here," she said before starting to hyperventilate. Both the traumatic experience and the task of climbing up while having nothing underneath tired the girl out. 

"Hold on, we are about to enter the vortex," Tom said as he raised his eyes up. 

Just like he mentioned, the crane was nearing the end of its job. But rather than inserting the lifeless avatar straight into the hole, it stopped roughly three meters away from what looked like the event horizon of the vortex. 

Then, with the release of condensed air, the avatar was blown off toward the vortex.

But instead of falling due to the excessive weight, it appeared that something pulled on it. 

'It's as if it fell down the gravity well,' Tom thought as he stared into the ever-enlarging darkness of the vortex. 

"Where are you?!" Claudia's sudden shout forced Tom to look around, only to realize that despite still holding the girl in his arms, he couldn't see her at all. In fact, he couldn't see anything. 

But before he could even get scared, this strange experience came to an end as the two of them fell down on the cold, stone tiles.

"What is this place..." after taking a moment to calm down, Claudia asked. 

"As if you didn't know this already," Tom muttered as he grabbed Claudia's shoulders... Only to shove her out of him, finally allowing the man to get his breath back. But rather than dawdling on the matter, Tom quickly stood up. 

After the quick check of his surroundings, he finally dropped his guard a little before reaching with his hands to the girl. 

"Welcome to the real Dungeon," he said while helping the girl up. "But as much as I would like to treat you to something to celebrate our first time in here," Tom's smile soured a little as he averted his eyes. 

"But it looks like we will need to be really careful with our supplies, don't we?" Claudia finished Tom's word for him, proving that she didn't lose her edge despite how tense and weird the entire situation was.