Well.  This is a problem.  LIDAR isn't going to be reliable in here, and you can only pal about in a humid sauna wearing dungeoneering gear if you have a power for not dying of heat exhaustion.

...this is going to need an esper, isn't it.

A few minutes of wearing DRT gear in the balcony to set up beacons and cameras reveals that fighting a robot in the dungeon is going to best be done by someone who doesn't need armor.  They could just shoot every robot.  This would, technically, accomplish the goal of clearing the dungeon.  But there's almost certainly people in those crates.  And those robots are moving awfully fast.

Yeah, this needs an esper. 

Carol's called in.  It's not hard to get Carol to do a dungeon, especially these days.  She's wearing short shorts, knee and elbow pads, a vest with her usual accoutrements, and a tank top.  Oh, and she's stuffed ice packs into the inside pockets of her vest.  And her CamelBak is 80% ice by volume(for now).  What happens, pray tell, when she drops a 150-pound DRT-standard training dummy onto the elevator platform?  Will the elevator come to her?

The dummy thuds onto the platform.

A robot rolls up to the dummy and scoops it up like a forklift, then turns to another robot waiting with an open crate. The first robot tips the dummy into the crate, the second robot uses a smaller pair of arms to put a lid onto the crate, and they roll away into the aisles, huffily and puffily.

Well.  Okay then.  I think I played a horror game like this, once.  "Sinkhole to base, we're going to need a lot of crowbars for this.  Over."

"Sinkhole, we're thirty feet behind you."

She flushes a little, and turns around and flips off the wiseacre.  But she grins a little while doing it.  "Old habits die hard."  She'll procure a rope, tie it off to the balcony, and drop it off the edge.  Does anybot try to package her rope for delivery?

Nobot reacts to this.

Well then.  She'll reach for her power, no, Carol, that is not responsible behavior.  She'll rappel down and hold on when she's about ten feet up off the ground.  Does anybot react to her now?

Nope. The ground-level robots all continue merrily zipping along on the smooth, matte black stone floor. She can feel puffs of additional heat from the steam exhausts each time one passes near the elevator, though.

Ew.  She takes a moment to drink from her CamelBak.  Draws her first combat knife from its sheathe.  Then drops down the rest of the way.  She's ready to reach for her power, the second anything tries to package her.

Perhaps surprisingly, still no reaction.

However, it'll be pretty hard to go anywhere else without getting run over. Each robot is wider than she is tall, all the paths between the shelves are only just wide enough for one to turn around, and there are enough robots moving overhead that you can't easily pick out the sound of the ones approaching at ground level.

Great.  Neat. Fantastic.  So she, a combat esper, specialized in murdering monsters, has been called into a weird factory full of monsters which cannot be meaningfully engaged without potentially risking the life of a civilian.

She'll reach for her power, leap to a shelf.  If she doesn't get packaged, she'd like to ask the only question her precognition ever bothers to answer:

How can I destroy this robot utterly?

None of the nearby shelves are empty but there's enough room for her feet to fit next to a pallet, and the riveted, black-painted steel corner post serves as a handhold.

The most direct path to utter destruction of this passing robot and a steam engine fan’s happiness is to fire a couple shots into the vertical cylinder that makes up the rear third of its body.

Carol's from Lowell, Massachusetts.  Why does this matter?  Because Lowell used to be a huge manufacturing hub, back in the 1800s.  It started off with hydropower by way of watermills, but steam became ascendant in the 1870s.  Carol's public school education has taught her what happen when you destroy a boiler.

It's quite nasty.  She lets the vision fade, and leans into the annoyance, because if she's annoyed she's not feeling anything else she can't just destroy these things until she's out of things to destroy.  Rrrr.

The steam engine fan's happiness can survive, for now.  "Is anybody in here?"

Chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff.

Well, that's a 'not nearby', at least.  Her kingdom for a sensor esper, as usual.  Oh well.  For climbing, she doesn't particularly need her power.  She'd like to know how tall the weird factory ceiling is, please.

There are at least twelve levels of shelves above her before even esper vision is defeated by the fog.

The primary obstacle to climbing up the shelves is that at every other shelf level (starting at the one right over her head), there is a set of rails attached to each shelf edge and extending outward, and the robots run on these rails when they're not on the ground. She can wait for a time when no robot might be turning onto this track section and, with some amount of inconvenient reaching for overhangs, climb up between the rails and onto them, then to the next shelf, then to the shelf above to be less next-to-robots.

Twelve floors of shelves later, the view is thirteen floors down to the ground floor and ten more floors up, because the fog is getting thicker as she ascends.

"Sinkhole to base.  There's at least twenty-three levels' worth of crates in here.  We're definitely going to need a bigger rescue team.  I'll engage monsters and find the core, but this place seems endless.  Over."

"Copy that.  You make it safe for us, we'll handle the rest."

Okay, think.  How do I handle this one?  Carol sips icewater and holds an icepack to her face while clinging to the side of a shelf.  I could destroy the tracks and see what happens.  But, if a civvie's in the crate, that's...going to be a problem.  Could just find a bot without a box and shoot it in the back, stupid box of bolts would have it coming.  Eh.  I'll explore more before I make a call.  She drops down, closer to the base level, and begins making her way deeper into the weird steam factory.

Shelves! Shelves! Sweat! Shelves!

There are no long, clear paths anywhere; every stack of shelves eventually ends in an aisle past which another set of shelves continues perpendicularly. In order to progress in a straight line, she would have to stop walking along a shelf and start crossing shelves and leaping across aisles. Everything is built in clean right angles and uniform sizes, but there aren’t any aisle numbers.

Well.  Time to hop back down and reorient, she hasn't gone so far as to be unable to find the exit.  Let's get some spraypainting going.  One DRT-standard spraypaintjob, coming right up, as she explores deeper into the dungeon.  If she sees a steam tank that's further than thirty feet away, boxless, and not hurtling through this factory at breakneck speeds, she's probably going to take a shot at it, because fuck these stupid little gremlin box sorters.

... that's the backlash talking.  But she doesn't mind backlash, these days.

Why would they ever not be hurtling through the factory at breakneck speeds while not in the business of picking up or putting down a crate? They certainly don’t demonstrate any such reason.

Well.  That's pretty Goddamn annoying.  She'll take to calling out every time she makes a spraypaint mark, then.  If she doesn't get to the end of the dungeon in another twenty minutes, that's important information to have and she can make a decision about it then.  Also, being this hot is pissing her off.  She'll have another drink about it.

“help? hellooooo? heeeeeelp?”

It’s a very weak voice but yeah there is apparently somebody over there.

Oh, great.  Fantastic.  A victim.  "Hey, I'll be right over.  I'm an esper, you're going to be alright."  Fuckin' figures.  She's going to jump on over.  "You alright in there?  Are you injured at all?"

“hhhh…water…”

The sound is coming from this crate over here! Other properties of this crate include that it has rows of inch-sized air holes at the top and bottom of all four sides, that the top side is a lid like she saw the robots putting on, and that the lid is nailed shut around all four sides.

Thankfully?  Her first icepack has melted quite a bit by now.  Kinda fucking sucks I won't have that icepack.  "Here, I'm going to crack this thing open.  I'll get you a water once the front is off, I just need you to stay back.  And when it opens, I need you to stay in there a little longer, okay?  Can you do that for me, hon?"

“okay…”

Thump. “which…side…”

The one on the front, dummy.  "Here, I'll tap it a few times for you.  Just stay away from the taps for a little bit, okay?"  But actually, first.  She's going to retrieve a bit of rope and tie it off around a nearby bit of racking.  Then she'll prep the other side for the victim: enough to get the torso in, and she can snug it up under the armpits later.  It won't be comfortable but it's a lot more comfortable than letting a victim fall to death.  "Okay, hole coming up for you." 

Is this box stronger than an esper-grade prybar?

Hahaha no. The wood is nothing special. You could say it broke like kindling, but nothing in here is dry enough to start a fire.

While she's trying to pry open one side, the lid starts coming loose too.

Well, that's not great, probably.  "Careful, hon.  I've got a harness for you, okay?  I just want you to loop it under your armpits, when the time comes."  Let's swap to the lid, maybe that'll be easier.

Yep! These nails are much less structural. Shortly the lid is off and the victim (male, incomplete attempt to take off his shirt within the confines of the crate, flushed, sweaty, droopy) can look up at her.

"Hey, there you go!  You're doing great.  Here, I've got this ice cold water for you..."

The victim isn't, actually, that hard to bundle off to the exit.  Well, not hard if you have esper strength and have been rock climbing since the age of eight years old.  Despite her backlash, Carol's actually pretty good at soothing and chivvying civvies.  She would like to take a break in a slightly-cooler area, though, and make a plan.

Thermodynamics says the slightly coolest areas are at the bottom! She could even lie down and press her cheek against the stone floor, if only that didn’t come with a substantial chance of being run over.

Ha ha ha no.  She's out of here.  Arguably she should stay in the sauna warehouse dungeon to try and adapt to it, but it is currently Fuck This Dungeon O'clock.  Instead, she'll pop out of the portal and present her report:

The civilians are in hundreds or maybe thousands of rapidly-moving crates.  Carol does not have any way of finding civilians in crates other than a trusty crowbar.

Some of the crates are being zipped around by little steampunk forklift drone things.  These may have civilians inside of them.  And destroying the tracks might put dungeon victims at risk.  She'd really like a precog on this one if she has to hit crate-bearing steamdrones.  Or a teleporter who can do sensoring would be fantastic.

It's wicked hot and humid and the vics are probably at risk of heatstroke.  She's not currently at risk of heatstroke, but expeditions longer than an hour are really not great.  Especially if she winds up fighting.  After an hour and a half, she's turning back even if it means abandoning a civ or losing a shot at the core - it's just not safe to operate like that.

Also, she's going to refill her canteens, refill her face, and unload some of the water she's drank before going in.  She's too hot to be hungry right now, but she'll probably want some ice cream after this.  Maybe a milkshake.

Well, for sheer annoyance this is going to wind up a B-rank.  Possibly a low A-rank, considering the trouble that getting civilians out and locating the core are going to be.  Definitely not a C-rank.  They're going to need a sensor, and ideally an esper team specced for rescue rather than murder as well.