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I went caving once, back in my freshman year of highschool, with a good portion of my class. It had been tight, cramped, and very interesting. I wasn't claustrophobic, and enjoyed the way that the cave had forced all the naturally energetic kids to slow down and look around, lest they crack their skulls on the rock.

We'd gone to a fairly large cave, as far as I understand it. Nothing like those gigantic caverns with vast, open spaces and piles of gleaming crystals or stalactites, which only seemed to exist in photographs. To move from one little 'room' of the cave system to another on my trip, we'd all had to duck, crawl, and squeeze through small spaces, though we could stand up once we were in the next room.

From what I'd heard, most 'real' caves were even smaller than that. Places where you had to squeeze between two rock faces, where you crawled using your fingers and toes, and where the end result was a tiny, cramped hole that Nature had left behind as an accident.

Real life, you see, isn't really like a video game. If you wander out to a cave system in the real world and spend a couple hours dredging through the tiny confines of a cave system, you wouldn't emerge out the other side to a beautiful, gorgeous vista and a shiny treasure chest. The end of a cave system simply meant that there was no way to move any farther, not that you had returned to the surface in some more grand location than where you had entered.

Reality, unfortunately, appeared to have come to an arrangement with the world of Remnant, wherein they both politely pretended that the other didn't exist.

This cave system was huge. I could have driven a car through the mouth of this sucker. The walls were spread out and tall, and the top of the cave sat ten feet above the ground. Some of the apartments that I had lived in were more cramped than this!

Nonetheless, I walked slowly, carefully forward. One step at a time, carefully watching around me for movement. The roof of the cave seemed stable enough, and my footing wasn't going to come loose, but this was enemy territory – their home, their lair, and I was intruding. Any animal will fight the hardest to protect their home, and I was like a burglar walking right in through the front door.

The mag-light I held in my left hand was decent illumination, and had taken surprisingly well to my attempts to imbue it with my Aura over the last few months. It was no weapon, of course, and I could easily do more damage with my bare hands than with it, but if I had to drop it to the rocky cave floor, it wouldn't break.

Twenty yards straight into the mouth of hell, the tunnel curved downwards, like a ramp.

I glanced backwards, at the light of the forest behind me, which already seemed brighter and more luminous as my eyes gradually adjusted to the dimmer light of the cave.

Getting lost would be one of the worst possible things to happen to me in here, save for getting chomped into bits by a Grimm, and I really wasn't eager to get buried under a full mountain's worth of rocks if the cave decides to collapse on top of my head.

I'm not claustrophobic. Stick me in a small room and give me a book, and I'll sit there happier than a clam in high tide. But I am sane, so if you stick me underneath a shifty ceiling with a couple million pounds of rock overhead, don't be surprised when I jump at the first ominous rumble.

A good, deep breath helped settle my rising stomach. I closed my eyes for a moment, and my fingers tapped out a beat on the haft of my Axe.

I started walking again, my Axe resting on my right shoulder. I swept the mag-light back and forth as I walked down the ramp, deeper into the earth, looking for side paths and branching tunnels, but I found none.

Forward, not back, the old quote sprang to mind. That's how the game is played.

My head bobbed in time to an invisible chorus, and my grip tightened on the Axe. My backpack was strapped on tight, and wouldn't shake or flap around when I start fighting. Time to go to work.

The first Grimm charged out of the darkness in front of me with a warbling cry, and my Axe came crashing down from my shoulder, slamming the smooth, scaly body of the Grimm into the rock. Black, oily Grimm blood oozed out in the light of my mag-light, and I brought the Axe down once more, just to be sure. A burst of some liquid splashed out across my workman's coat, and a few drops hit my face, warm and slimy.

I tensed, and waited for the next Grimm to spring out of the darkness, but none did.

After a minute had passed, I looked down at the corpse of the monster at my feet, and I frowned.

This… this…

What was this?

A lizard?

I thought there'd be more wolves, maybe a bear or two down here… but a lizard?

What the hell?

Black skin, leathery in texture, and the same bright white mask... this was definitely some kind of Grimm, but it didn't look like any that I'd seen before. Experimentally, I tipped the corpse over with a nudge of my boot and used my Axe to carefully pry open its jaws; exposing rows of sharp, jagged teeth without doing anything as idiotic as sticking my fingers in a monster's mouth. Unlike Beowolves or Ursae, there weren't any protruding spikes of bone sticking out of the lizard's body. Instead, patches of circular, bone-like scales spread out from the monster's shoulders down, like white polka-dots on the dark skin.

Even more strangely, the lizard only had two arms, and no legs, appearing to use its thick tail as a third limb.

A faint trickle of something at the back of my head hit me, and I stood there for a few seconds, trying to figure out where I had seen this creature before. Was it in the second season of RWBY, when Vale was attacked from underground? I couldn't quite remember.

Then an image sprang into my mind, and I inspected the lizard-Grimm again, trying to pretend that its skin was green.

"…Dodongos?" I muttered in surprise.

I blinked, trying to dispel the image, but it stuck fast, and the back of my head started furiously swearing at the front of my head for refusing to believe that in a world where giant wolves attacked little red riding hood and where the Wizard of Oz ran a highschool for heroes, there couldn't possibly be a goddamn Dodongo.

I looked around, and frantically hoped that the cave didn't have those frigging fire bats or any giant spiders. If they did, I was fucking done.

I ran into another dozen of the Grimm Dodongo-things, one at a time, over the course of the next hour, as I thoroughly explored the unnatural cave.

Fucking Dodongos, man.

There were a few branching paths away from the main tunnel, but they all ended in small, tight spaces that no Grimm could have squeezed through, and resembled actual caves more than this… freeway-like abomination of a cavern that I was walking through.

And yes, before anyone asks, I had smacked the walls a couple times with my Axe to make sure that I wasn't walking down into the throat of a giant monster. Han Solo had taught me well.

But all this expedition had really done was give me time to think. I usually planned out my thoughts best when I was walking anyway, and there was nothing to aid those paranoid thoughts than a jaunt through a spooky cave.

The briefing that Siva had given me (and which the Mayor had confirmed) said that they were being attacked by rampaging groups of Beowolves, and the occasional Ursa or two. There had been no mention of lizards or anything like that, and I'd seen no Beowolves in this cave. Despite caves being good hiding spots for actual bears, that was one of those pieces of information that I had carried over from Earth, and I didn't have a clue if that was actually true or not on Remnant.

And there were none of the other usual signs of any Grimm living here. A few scratches on the cave walls that looked like they had come from the claws of the Dodongos, but they were rare and scattered; if there had been more Grimm in the cavern, scratches would be everywhere, on practically every surface. There also wasn't any human bones or remains in the cave, whether recent or otherwise. No human bodies, no scraps of clothing or splashes of dried blood.

All in all, this looked to be a bust. The buildup of Grimm that had been harassing Arcuda definitely wasn't living in this cavern, and I probably should have turned around and started walking back towards Arcuda before the sun set, so that I could get some sleep and hit the second target tomorrow.

But…

The cave itself was still bugging me.

The weird, Dodongo-lookalikes weren't that strange, because I knew that Grimm came in dozens of forms, each one exotically different. I didn't think that I was arrogant enough to assume that I knew every single one of those different Grimm species, so I could buy that this specific lizard-monster just lived in caves only, and didn't roam the untamed Wilderness near Vale.

What really bugged me was the size of the damn tunnel. Each of the branching paths that I had explored had all ended fairly shortly, shrinking into tiny crevices soon after they split off from the main path, and yet the main path continued deeper and deeper, stretching on into the underdark of Remnant. It was lofty and high-ceilinged despite having no man-made structural supports. Hell, even the ground was mostly flat. You still had to watch each step, but if I had to sprint down this tunnel, I probably could, without suddenly running into a sharp drop or protruding stalagmite.

I'd been walking for an hour, and even with the breaks to investigate those side passages and kill the lizard-Grimm, I had to have walked at least a kilometer by now, and it all went vaguely in the same direction as the cave mouth had gone – at least, so I thought, but my sense of direction wasn't always the best – and that would mean that I'd left the low foothills of the forest behind, and had started to enter the low, looming mountain range that Arcuda was nestled within.

And that was just another strangeness to tack onto the oddity of the sheer size and spaciousness of the tunnel itself. Caves just didn't go in straight lines like this one did, they usually were winding crisscrossing descents that were more vertical than horizontal.

The main path of the cave was spacious, and even if there were no visible supports or braces, it certainly looked like a mine shaft or some kind of man-made cavern. It traveled roughly in a straight line for a long stretch of time. And it was disturbingly large; if they'd had to, I could see the entire city of Arcuda slipping inside this cave and holing up inside it for the winter with ample room for provisions, even for all ten or so thousand people who lived there.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

I dug my Scroll out of the easy-access pocket on the front of my backpack, and checked the time. Assuming that I kept a brisk walking pace to get out of the cave and ran at an Aura-enhanced jog back to Arcuda, I could get back before the sun set… but only if I left right now.

I took another look at the darkness of the continuing darkness in front of me, taunting me with the unknown that lay within, and glanced back into the equally dark section that was behind me, towards the surface. My mag-light shone on the smooth cave walls, scattering across the few pools of tepid drip-water from the ceiling.

This is going to keep me up all night, I realized. Even if I left right now and went back to Arcuda and ate a hearty meal and tried to sleep, I would just be lying in bed, tossing and turning and thinking about this goddamn cave.

I swore softly under my breath, and slipped the Scroll away. There was no point in trying to send a message to the Mayor; even if I could get reception beneath however many hundreds of feet of dirt and rock, I wouldn't have anything to say beyond "May not be back by sundown, but I'm not dead yet."

It's a bright, happy world that we live in, folks, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Theoretically, I was capable of searching and fighting all night long. I had survival packages of food, and a simple trick of Aura would help ignite a compact campstove in my pack; allowing me to grab a bite of food and some hot chocolate to keep going. I didn't quite want to break into the two packets of instant-coffee that I also had, since I'd never actually had coffee before, but I suppose I could drink one of those to keep myself awake if the hot chocolate didn't work.

Aura would help keep me going, of course. So long I didn't take too many hits and deplete my reserves of Aura, I could keep using it to slowly remove my exhaustion and keep myself going.

But, of course, the problem with that was that the more I used my Aura to keep myself awake, the less hits I would be able to take if I actually did run into the large concentration of Grimm that were bothering Arcuda. The less I would be able to push Aura into the swings of my Axe and the weaker my attacks would be.

"Ah… fuck it," I sighed.

I slapped a dirty hand across my face, shook my head a couple times, and started to psyche myself up to continue onward.

Get it done, the back of my head whispered. Don't go back to the city disappointed.

Oh, shut up you, I thought back at it.

Onward and onward, deeper and deeper.

Let's just hope there isn't a damn dragon at the bottom of this cave.

"Fuck," I said to the empty air, as I stared at the impossible sight before me.

I'd walked for another half hour, and hadn't met a single damn Grimm in all that time.

"Fuck, fuckity, fuck," I said, conversationally, with a dissonant tone of happiness in my voice.

The blade of my Axe tapped against the smooth, dusty stonework. I listened carefully as it tinged in the quiet, but the ting definitely sounded like stone, and not wood or papier-mâché or some other material that might have been used to fake the giant stonework door that stood before me.

I backed up a step, and took another look at the gigantic carved stone door that stood before me, plugging up the underground tunnel like a very large cork. Glyphs and carved words adorned it, but I couldn't read them, and they barely seemed to be the same alphabet as the Roman one that all of Remnant used today.

"Fucking fuck," I stated sincerely, as if the words would ward off the absurdity of a giant fucking stone door in the middle of an underground tunnel.

Five minutes of pleasant sounding swear-words later, I wound down my recitation of the Litany of Fucks and sat my tired ass down on the tunnel floor.

The report that the Mayor of Arcuda had given me had said absolutely nothing about a giant stone door that looked like it had been dropped out of ancient Egypt. Nothing about anything other than an 'old cave, suspected to be housing a herd of Beowolves.'

Oh, this was just great. Recruited by a literal snake to go kill some Grimm, and stumbling onto some kind of ancient gate a kilometer down a creepy tunnel in the middle of the monster-filled woods.

Where's a redshirt when you need them, I thought to myself morosely.

Let's wind this back, I thought, closing my eyes for a moment and reaching for my water bottle. A long, slow sip of lukewarm water helped settle my thoughts. Wind it back, and figure it out.

Think, Nick, use that thing you call a brain… think!

You gotta start from the beginning. That's how it always starts. Start from the beginning and work through the data until you find out where the problem originates.

It's a simple trick: pretend that you're giving a report to somebody. That you're explaining yourself to somebody of authority. I've always found that doing that helps me center my thoughts.

Within the Tunnel, I had found the main 'tunnel' to be suspiciously wide and tall, without supporting beams or braces of manmade design. Smooth walls of natural stone, not quarried or inserted in place. The branching paths had been much smaller, and fit the 'normal' size and dimensions of caves, unlike the main tunnel.

There were small numbers of an unknown form of Grimm that closely resembles two-legged lizards, and which I killed easily… but there were no Beowolves, nor Ursae, which were the Grimm that the Client had specified as the targets.

And then after an hour and a half, I found a giant stone door that blocked off the remaining tunnel: a stone door that appeared to have been carved out of the same local stone.

Door: why a door? What was the indication that made me call the obstruction a 'door'? What does the door look like, how does it appear to be constructed? How the fuck did the creators even manage to open the damn thing?

Not just decorative, either. If it was, then the slab in the middle of the door that looked like it slid out of place wouldn't have been necessary, and decorations could simply be carved into a larger rock like the glyphs had been. This thing looked like it could open.

Conclusion: a barrier. Not just a stone door, but a Gate, to keep intruders out in the tunnel and others within.

I looked up from my ruminations, and scanned around the rest of the tunnel.

Tunnel.

Why 'tunnel', specifically? What make this tunnel not seem like a cave? The dimensions, the size, the space, obviously, but what else?

Stalactites. Where were the stalactites?

Sure enough, when I panned my mag-light up, I couldn't see any spires of rock pointing downwards. There were some bumps, and ridges, and what looks like little dots that might, in a couple thousand years, be a proper stalactite, but they were small, and I could barely see them from the ground.

How long did it take stalactites to form? The slow dripping of water, that's how they're made, I knew, but… how long?

Because if that really was a gate, and had been made by something or somebody, then the lack of stalactites could also fit in – after all, I'd reflected earlier on how I wasn't eager to be standing beneath a cave ceiling that could be unstable and might collapse on me – so if somebody else had been sending people down here, then they likely would have thought that same thing, and would have removed the stalactites to reduce the danger.

Which would be why the walls were so wide, why the ceiling was so tall. Nobody sane would want unstable spikes of rock dangling overhead, where a minor quake or rumble of the earth could send them crashing down below.

I'd thought, idly, that I could drive a car into the tunnel back when I'd first walked in… but how true was that? Had the society that built the Gate driven animal-drawn wagons into this tunnel? Maybe this actually [I]was[/I] a winter hideaway, back in the old days when humans were nothing more than wandering tribes struggling to survive in a world full of Grimm.

So… why hadn't they remembered this?

I mean, that's a bit of an assumption that the people of Arcuda hadn't remembered the cave, but… you'd think that the Mayor would have said something like "The first target is an old cave that our people lived in a couple thousand years ago, so we think that the Grimm might be living in it now."

Good God, this was tripping all my goddamn nerves now.

That's a thick door, the back of my head murmured. Why make it so thick? What did they need to keep out?

I almost thought the next, obvious question, but quickly restrained myself before I could jinx it any further.

Backing up, I sat down on an outcropping of rock and quietly cradled my head between my hands as I bid goodbye to thelast chance of this being a simple or easy mission.

I started heading back to Arcuda a few minutes later, after scarfing down an energy bar and drinking some water.

There wasn't much I could actually do about that door, really. I had a simple choice: open the creepy ancient stone door, or don't open the creepy ancient stone door. It didn't take long to decide.

I mean… who on earth would be stupid enough to do that? Even Remnant's movies would have instilled the average Huntsman with a general savviness to how these kinds of movies worked. You don't read out loud from ancient books, you don't steal ancient treasures, and you don't open ancient doors.

Sure, the odds were likely that it really was just a random stone door left over from ancient times, rather than anything supernatural or horror-related, but I wasn't gonna be taking that chance.

My decision was easy enough to make: I started back towards Arcuda, using my Aura to speed up my brisk jogging pace, and I'd ask some questions of the Mayor. I definitely did not want to do anything until I had as much information as possible, and the only source of that might just be the local folklore.

Oral history survives fairly well over the long passage of years, especially when books may be vulnerable to being left behind when the Grimm destroy a village. To share a story, you just need to make it sound cool and tell it to the village children around a big ol' campfire (probably while the adults were getting drunk), and repeat it every year of so. It'll stick in their memories, and they'll repeat the tradition with their own kids… even if it's just to have an excuse to get drunk.

The jog back went quickly, but 'quickly' is a relative term when you're out in the woods. My jogging strides were long, each step boosted by a tiny smidge of aura, and they ate up the ground. It wasn't anything crazy, and I was only moving as fast as I could sprint without the use of Aura – hardly a flash step or anything like that.

But it was sustainable over long distances, it kept my bodyweight centered so that I could side-step and avoid obstacles, and it didn't make too much noise. That was more important than ever, on Remnant.

To some people, the woods are just a quaint throwback to the life before the rise of concrete and steel, of the cities of metal. The woods were just a bunch of trees, some ferns and bushes, and the occasional squirrel. Nothing more.

Those people are idiots.

To being to understand how much goes on in the woods, whether here in this monstrous place or back home on Earth, you have to be silent. There are animals in every little nook and cranny of the woods, and so many of them hide the moment that they hear the ungainly crashing of the bumbling humans in their forest, like a drunk in a family reunion.

The very air is alive in the woods, if you know how to look. Bees and mosquitos and dragonflies, with insects in the loam and squirrels in the trees and all manner of life in every direction.

Those animals are all aware of each other. Like a tuned orchestra, or a crew of rowers, they can hear when something is wrong, they can feel when something is out of rhythm. Humans are a little aware of it, but barely so. A man might notice that none of the birds are singing, but he won't instinctively run for cover because of it. The animals of the forest, on the other hand, definitely will.

I won't say that I'm 'in tune with nature' or anything silly like that. I'm not a bird-watcher or an animal conservationist or a park ranger, or a member of any of those hobbies or professions that could create such a bond… but I am from the woods, in my own way.

From the muddy banks of the Wishkah to the red clay of Georgia, I've wandered the forest enough to know how to move quietly, how to keep the deer from jumping and the birds from fleeing. I'm no expert, and many of the hunters back home would laugh at how mediocre my skills were, but I'm good enough for this purpose.

When you boil it down to purely physical descriptions, it's just an intense focus on your muscle control and a careful eye on the path before you. Watching every step as you run, shifting your feet just a few inches to avoid that stick, to miss that patch of loose gravel, to minimize how much noise your feet make as they slap the dirt. Toe-striking as you run, careful about the precise placement of where your foot goes.

It helps you zone out, if you get decently good at it. Your brain focuses on those small details, and it's easy to slip into an almost meditative state as you run. Other benefits include reducing the chance of rolling your ankle, and most importantly to me, keeping your ass quiet, so that you don't attract giant monsters to your location by charging through the brush like a brown bear during mating season.

It was a tense, long run back after I'd left the cave. The sun was just setting fully, and the last streaks of orange were slipping away as the black of night approached. The forest seemed quiet and still, unnaturally so, and I ran with my Axe carried in one hand, ready to fight if any Beowulf or Ursae (Latin roots, dammit, I don't care if the locals call them Ursai instead) appeared out of the bushes.

But none did, and I kept running.