Alex and Lila approached the final door and room in this lab. They had both made considerable growth both as individuals and as a team where certainly, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
Both of them wholeheartedly agreed that without the other, they likely would have died a few times, especially in the beginning. The golems had been getting easier to handle on their own for a while now. They took turns facing off against them individually with the other only stepping in if things got hairy. Half of the time neither of them needed the other to step in. It was only when a matchup had been particularly bad that intervention was needed.
Yet, as they approached this door they felt something was different. Where all other doors had had only one key slot, this one had three.
They had faced off against many different kind of golems. There had been the red brutish golem, the electric one, a water golem, and even a plant one. That one hadn’t been particularly difficult, but it was extremely annoying. Vines kept creeping up and entangling their legs just as they were going to strike causing their coordination to fall apart. Battles with the golems had ranged from a few minutes to hours with the plant one taking the better part of a day just because they couldn’t land a single hit on it. Eventually it had exhausted its resources which lead to its demise shortly thereafter. Now, neither of them knew what was going to happen.
Lila looked uneasily at Alex.
“What do you think this means,” she asked.
“Well for one thing, this one is going to be different than the other ones,” he replied sarcastically.
She gave him a flat look as she cast an icicle straight for him. He batted it away effortlessly.
“How should I know? I’m just as clueless as you are. All I can guess is that this is either going to be a much stronger golem or there will be multiple golems that we need to defeat,” Alex said brushing off ice shrapnel from his new symbiotic armor.
It was all black except the eyes which were glowed blue. It was the dopest thing he had ever seen. It got even cooler when he was channeling his P.E. too. It pulsed with the same blue color his eyes glowed in. It really felt like the armor was alive. Which now that he thought about it, it was. How could it be symbiotic if it weren’t, at least to some degree. More than once he had seen Lila look at him with covetous eyes. It wasn’t his fault that he had gotten arguably the best item they had found thus far. It was his turn.
“It’s only fair,” he said aloud.
“What is? What are you even talking about?”
“Oh nothing. Just thinking it’s only fair to have more golems since there are two of us.”
Nice save. I’m so smart.
“Yeah I suppose that makes sense. There’s only one way to find out though,” she agreed as they both began walking forward.
As they prodded the key slots as they had multiple times at this point, they expected a golem to appear or maybe three yet they never expected what actually appeared.
Nothing.
The stupid thing didn’t work. It did absolutely nothing. No golems and it didn’t even open or anything.
Did we do something wrong? Did we miss something? We missed a door somewhere. That had to be it, right?
“What the f…”
Alex trailed off as the floor began to shake. A crack appeared as a molten hand stuck out of the ground.
They had gone up against fire golems a few times. They had been one of the hardest ones. They were mostly unaffected by Lila’s ice powers. It still hurt them but it didn’t do the piercing damage that she designed them to do. It was more akin to how water put flames out. Which is what they had ended up doing most of the time, just launching a bunch of ice until they cooled off enough for Alex to finish off.
That tactic might work here but Alex imagined that it would take a lot longer and he wasn’t sure if they had the reserves to do something like that. They had improved a lot but probably not that much.
They began their assault. Lila tried using the same tactic, but quickly saw that it was having little effect. She instead opted to use one of her new abilities, ice wall is what she called it. It allowed her to conjure up large blocks of ice that could be used as shields. They were thick and could really take a hit. They had experimented with it against one of the brute golems. He had charged at them, Lila conjured up a wall, and they waited. The golem hit it hard and while it had still broken, it nearly stopped the golem in its tracks. It was a significant obstacle.
Alex expected her to set up some walls to act as cover so that they could get closer and to keep some of the pressure off of them. Instead she started to create small chunks of wall instead of fully formed ones. As she made them, she had Alex hurl them at the golem. Each hit connected causing a huge chunk of the golem to harden and slough off. The golem was huge, but they were slowly whittling away at its mass.
Obviously, the golem didn’t like this and it wasn’t going to just sit there as they pelted it from afar. It began a volley of its own. Magma flew across the corridor toward their stockpile of ice and instantly melted all that Lila had made for their assault. Both of them dove to safety before the vapors could hurt them.
Luckily, the golem was extremely slow. It was slowly crawling towards them, but it would honestly take the better part of an hour for it to reach them. That wasn’t a problem for it as it could still hurt them from where it was, but at least it wasn’t going to give them a bear hug anytime soon.
Lila began forming more ice chunks for Alex to throw, but they were constantly being bombarded with molten artillery. The corridor was rising in temperature as well. It was starting to get more and more difficult for Lila to form her ice.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
They were running out of options to beat this thing. Lila’s mana was diminishing fast and it’s not like Alex could just punch literal lava.
The heat in the hallway was palpable. Both of them were drenched in sweat and they were starting to get extremely dehydrated. In each of the rooms they had found stores of food and water and Alex was looking forward to a big drink of water when they got in.
The magma golem fired its arm in their direction and a glob of scorching lava came at them. Lila conjured an ice wall. She didn’t have enough time to conjure a large one, it was just big enough to block them. The magma pushed into it, a wall of vapor materialized as the ice super heated. It came off the ice wall and towards them. It began burning Lila and Alex, their skin already a mess of bubbles and pus as it was literally melting their skin. Lila conjured another wall to her side to protect her from the heat. She was about to make one for Alex when he held his hand up gesturing for her to wait.
Alex could feel something happening, but didn’t know what to do with that feeling. He had felt something similar to it the last fire golem they had gone up against. He had felt like he was on the cusp of something, but hadn’t been able to make anything of it. Now, he was up against an opponent that was tens of times stronger than the fire golems had been. It was because of this increase in heat that Alex was beginning to feel something. His P.E. was slowly climbing.
It wasn’t a lot and he really wasn’t sure what to do with it, but he was able to absorb the thermal attack that was his environment. It began building a few minutes ago, but with the increased heat from the vapor coming off of the ice wall, his stores had taken a drastic increase. Before, it was expanding by a few points a minute, but with that one hit it had climbed a full one hundred points.
When he took hits from something he could use that kinetic energy in its same form by using it in the form of kinetic energy. He released it in differing ways, but it was the same type of energy.
He hadn’t received a physical attack from the golem as it was still pretty far away and yet he was receiving potential energy.
He had to assume it was because of the heat. There was such a thing as thermal energy. He knew that from school, but he had no idea how he could use it to hurt what was essentially a being of pure heat. He couldn’t just radiate heat out. That wouldn’t do anything except make both of them more hot and it would likely only help their opponent.
No, he needed to use something else. A million ideas popped in his head ranging from turning into microwave man to just using the heat to light up like a light bulb. Obviously, those were bad ideas. Maybe not bad, just not useful at all in their current predicament.
“My P.E. is going up from the heat. I’m trying to think of a way to use it. I can’t come up with anything that will help. What do you think I should do?” Alex yelled over the shattering ice wall as the projectile finally shot through causing both of them to dive away.
“I’m not entirely sure how your power works, but could you possibly condense all of that heat somehow? You know, and make a sort of beam with all the energy? It’s kind of how lasers work. You could do something like that.”
Alex suddenly had glorious visions of laser vision and a hot girlfriend that he would meet at superhero school that would constantly cheat on him for some guy with claws. Well, the last part wasn’t so glorious, but the first two parts would be sweet. Actually why did he even think about that last part? That just didn’t fit in his awesome vision at all. Sometimes Alex didn’t understand his own brain. He smiled goofily at the weird thought which earned him another strange look from Lila.
She probably thinks I’m crazy. She looks at me like that all the time. Maybe she’s the crazy one for not ever having any thoughts like this in her brain.
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Lila just didn’t understand Alex sometimes. He could do some amazing things. More than once, he had swooped in and saved her life, doing something you only ever see in movies because it was extremely unrealistic and she would look at him and just be in awe. Especially since he got that armor. She was still mad that he got that. She had taken her concussion bracelet out of turn because she felt like it would be a perfect addition to her arsenal. Not only had it been another dud overall, but the very next thing they found was that armor. Not only did it make him even more durable than he was before, but it also helped him with his abilities. It was sickening.
But all that just made him look even cooler when doing things that literal super heroes did. And then when he was done he would deactivate his mask and give her a goofy grin and just ruin the whole thing he had going before.
Other times, like right now, he would be so deep in his own head thinking about, well Lila had no idea what he was thinking about. Sometimes he would get very serious, but other times he would just have that stupid face that he always had. Lila seriously couldn’t tell if he was a weirdo that just did some cool stuff sometimes because of his powers, or if he was a pretty cool guy who did some weird stuff every once in a while. She liked him, but why was he so weird?
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Alex saw her staring at him and got a little uncomfortable.
How long was I zoned out for?
Alex tried to regain his train of thought.
Right, laser beams.
He focused inward on his metaphysical dams. He pushed all of the energy he had accumulated into his right hand. As it was all entering, he began to feel pressure build. He kept pushing it into his hand, but the pressure just got worse and worse. As the last vestiges of the energy entered, he closed off the dam. He then began thinking of a trash compactor as he squeezed the energy into a smaller and smaller space. The energy began to condense. The pressure was immense and he couldn’t take it anymore.
The energy left the palm of his hand leaving a coin sized hole in the palm. Luckily, Alex had the presence of mind to aim his palm at the golem. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough presence of mind to aim it at anything vital to the creature.
A focused beam of energy shot forward in the blink of an eye. It looked like something straight out of a Sci-Fi movie. It blazed forward and hit the golem in its side. A hole formed where the beam passed through. While the creature was heat incarnate, a beam traveling that quickly was bound to do some damage. Like a bullet leaves a bigger hole than it should when puncturing flesh, this projectile did as well. A four inch hole had been punched through the golem.
It roared in anger. It’s anger only increasing its ferocity. That was ok as Alex now had a way to fight back. He would literally fight fire with fire.
The golem launched another glob in their direction. Alex tried to catch a part of it to recharge his diminished reserves. It seared his hands and he recoiled with an extremely manly yelp.
Baby steps Alex. Just because you can take a bite out him doesn’t mean that you’re ready for the all you can eat buffet.
“New tactic. Can you block the bulk of his shots so that I can absorb some of the heat? I know you’re getting tired but I think this is going to work,” Alex asked Lila.
The next few minutes were them trying to work together while not taking too much damage. It was a lot of back and forth. The golem would throw some lava at them, Lila would block as Alex absorbed, and they would fire back. Slowly the golem shrank as pieces of it were forcefully removed.
All three combatants were running out of energy. Luckily for Alex and Lila, there were two of them. That and the golem was the size of a cat now. They had this in the bag. At this point the heat radiating off the golem was almost negligible for Alex due to his durability. He went over to the golem. It was trying to run away, but its small size didn’t make it any faster than it had been. Alex wound up and kicked the golem into the wall. With the splat of victory, this battle was over.
Alex and Lila both collapsed, not even having the energy to sit down. Hours later, they both awoke ready to explore the room they had just unlocked. When they entered however, they realized they weren’t the first ones there.