The Swiss Guard escorts didn't explain the route. They simply led, and the group followed, and the palace's manicured gardens gave way to paths that became progressively less maintained until they reached the dense northern perimeter where the landscaping had been allowed to grow into something more like actual forest.
The entrance was invisible unless you knew where to look — a seamless section of dense greenery that responded to the guard's gauntlet against a hidden rune by retracting in a way that living vegetation didn't ordinarily move, revealing the blast door behind it.
The lead guard turned at the threshold.
"What you're about to see is classified at the level your access permits carry," he said. His tone was professional rather than theatrical — the briefing of someone whose job was to convey accurate information, not produce an atmosphere. "Standard handling: no external discussion of facilities, operational capacity, or threat levels observed inside. The documentation you signed earlier covers the specifics."
Then he turned, and they went in.
The subterranean complex was larger than the palace's surface footprint, which told Markus something about how long it had been in construction. The architecture changed in stages as they moved through it — from the newer, more precisely finished passages near the entrance, through sections where the construction method was different, the work older.
The mess deck they passed held veteran Sentinels eating in the specific disciplined quiet of people who were between deployments rather than at rest. Their armour was stacked in the manner of people who expected to need it again without much notice.
The training section's mana-simulation arrays were running live scenarios, the chamber's walls active with holographic opponents. The trainees inside moved with the specific economy of people who had been doing this for years rather than months.
The staging bays at the far end were the part that made him adjust his assessment of the facility's scope. Pressurised vaults, each sealed against the atmospheric conditions of the Rifts they opened onto. Squads in varying states of pre-deployment preparation.
He felt the frequency before he saw the door it was coming from.
His spatial sense read it with the immediate, specific clarity it always brought to high-tier mana signatures — the bone-density vibration that he associated with Tier 7 entities and above, coming from behind a set of rune-etched doors that were considerably heavier than anything else in the corridor.
He did not stop walking. He noted it.
Tier 8 mana, contained by stabilising pylons whose glow was visible at the door's seam. A Rift at that tier required something capable of working inside it, which meant somewhere in this facility there were practitioners or creatures whose operational capability was not reflected in any public record he had access to.
He filed this with the specific calibration of someone updating a model that had been missing a significant variable.
Valerian had described the Valerian Empire's public military capacity with reasonable frankness over the course of the tutoring assignment. He had not described this. Which was, Markus thought, also information — the things a ruler disclosed and the things he didn't were both data points about what he considered safe to reveal.
He continued through the corridor.
The Facility Commander was waiting at the Verdant Maw's staging area — a compact, watchful man who had the specific quality of someone who had been running high-risk deployments long enough that the personal danger no longer registered on his face, only the logistical requirements.
"The Maw had a full cull last week," he said, addressing the briefing to Markus and Rosanne simultaneously. "Beast density is well below peak — you're not walking into a saturation scenario. What remains is opportunistic and scattered rather than pack-coordinated. The atmosphere is unchanged." He looked at Rosalind. "The air inside is a Grade-A biohazard without protective coverage. Your wind practitioner's barrier protocol is documented in the site file. Monitor it continuously."
He checked something on his tablet.
"I'll have eyes on your biometric feeds from the control deck throughout the descent. The seventy percent threshold triggers an automatic alert to the extraction team at position A7. They will not enter unless the secondary threshold triggers or you call for extraction explicitly." He gave a brief, functional nod to Rosalind — not the court bow, the nod of a professional acknowledging the person he's responsible for monitoring. "Take care in there, Your Highness."
He went to his station.
Markus took his position at the rear of the formation. "I'm an observer unless I need to be otherwise," he said. "If something goes past what the team can handle within the safety parameters, I'll intervene. Until that point, this is Rosanne's operation."
Rosanne, who had already been running a final check of her healing channels, turned to Rosalind.
"The way it works in a Rift is that I'm the commander and you're a subordinate," she said. Plainly, not with any performance of authority. "Not because of our rank outside — because I've done this dozens of times and you're doing it for the first time, and in that specific situation, the experienced person gives the direction and the new person follows it without negotiating. That's how people come back from dungeons."
Rosalind met her eyes. "Understood."
"If I tell you to pull back, you pull back immediately. If I tell you to hold position, you hold it. If I tell you to engage, that's your cue." Rosanne held the eye contact for a moment, confirming that Rosalind had received this as the operational reality it was rather than a formal exchange. "Good. Donna, wind barrier first thing through."
She stepped through the gate.
The team followed in the sequence they'd established — Donna through immediately behind Rosanne, the wind barrier technique active before her feet had found ground. Then Mika and Shiela. Then Rosalind. Then Markus, last, his spatial sense already extending into the space ahead.
The Maw's atmosphere hit first — not toxic through the barrier, but present at its edges, the specific heaviness of a biohazard-grade environment pressing against Donna's wind sphere from the outside.
The jungle beyond the barrier was exactly what the manifest had described and considerably more immediate in person. The light came through the canopy in filtered green, and the plant life moved in ways that didn't correspond to the wind direction, which was the Maw's particular characteristic: a sentient ecosystem that registered the presence of intruders and began its own slow recalibration in response.
Even recently culled, there were things in the undergrowth. Shiela's head turned slightly, the specific micro-movement of someone whose hemographic range had just picked up a signature.
"Three signatures," she said, low. "Forty metres, east-northeast. Holding position."
"Watching us," Rosanne said. "Standard Maw behaviour — the ecosystem reads the new arrival before it commits anything." She looked at Rosalind. "The toxic atmosphere charges every technique you use. Imprecise output costs you twice — once in mana, once in the overhead the air takes. Clean and deliberate is better than fast and wasteful." She looked toward the signatures' direction. "When they come, they're yours. We hold."
The jungle settled into the attentive quiet of something that was not, in any meaningful sense, simply waiting.
Markus stood at the formation's rear and watched the undergrowth, and waited to see what seven months of work looked like against something that hadn't been calibrated for her.