Tiny flecks of molten sodium fling in every direction, and pinpricks of pain sear through my hands, raised in defense.
[4 points of Fire damage sustained. Damage reduced. You have resistance to Fire type damage.]
“Blazing Abyss!” Nek cries. Rei and Zakaiya, heading my warning, have already bolted back up the tunnel, and all that’s left of them is their retreating footsteps. “What was that?”
“An experiment,” I sheepishly admit. “And frankly, a bad idea. I’m playing outside my wheelhouse here.”
“That was fire magic?” Mirzayael asks, seemingly unperturbed by the explosion. She steps forward, peering down at the small singed crater left in the ice.
“Not exactly,” I say. “Or I guess more accurately, the closest my world got to magic. The Dungeon Core did most of the work, though.”
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“It was a chemical reaction,” I explain. “Admittedly, stronger than I was expecting. My knowledge of this field of science is fairly stunted, however, so I probably should be wary of dabbling too far in this direction.”
Aerodynamics were much safer. Stick an airfoil in a wind tunnel and the worst you had to worry about was a little turbulent flow.
“Can it be used as a weapon?” Mirzayael asks.
I think about all the ways chemistry and atomic physics has been applied toward warfare back on Earth. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Can you make more?” Mirzayael asks. “This could be a valuable asset.”
“I could,” I admit. “But it would be extremely volatile. It reacts with water, so storing it would be difficult. It would be best to only create some when we needed it. Have you something in mind?”
“Not… specifically,” Mirzayael says, which makes me strongly suspect she does. “But I do want to see what your chemical reaction is capable of. Can it get through the ice?”
“Maybe,” I admit. Given how little mana the last bit took to create, I could easily retrieve more from the Core’s catalog. “However, I’d be concerned about all of us being too close when it ignites. We’d need a delayed delivery mechanism of some sort.” I tap my chin, already excited by the idea of a new problem to solve, despite all reason cautioning otherwise.
Something that could slowly dissolve, gradually introducing the sodium to the ice? Not sure what that might be. A mechanical hinge of some sort, that could be used to drop the sodium from a distance? I suppose I could set up a pulley-type system with Mirzayael’s thread. Or something timed rather than manual. Something that could be calculated…
“Ah!” I sort through the Core’s catalog, finding the ore I was looking for. With a little prompting, the Dungeon Core withdraws a hunk of cloudstone we’d gathered.
It’s so unintuitive to have to hold the rock to keep it from floating up and out of my grasp. Instead I turn my hand upside down, balancing the floating rock beneath my palm. I push down like I’m dribbling a basketball, and the stone bounces against my hand.
“This should work,” I say, taking hold of the cloudstone once more. I task the Core with shaping the stone into the form of a bowl while I mentally skim through the metrics that had been gathered on the rock when it was stored in the Core’s catalog. Density, wind magic capacity, mass, and most importantly, buoyancy. That makes it pretty easy to calculate how much sodium would balance it. And from there, assuming this world’s gravity is about the same as Earth—I mean, it feels about the same, though I should probably perform some experiments to calculate it more precisely—I can estimate the time it would take for a miniature cloudstone vessel full of sodium to sink and spill out over the ground.
As the cloudstone finishes forming itself into a bowl, I get the Core to start refining more sodium for me. This time I’m not surprised when the cube of metal appears before me, falling into my waiting bowl. Of course it doesn’t look like table salt. Sodium is a type of metal in its purest form, isn’t it? God, what chemists back on Earth would kill to have something like the Dungeon Core to refine elements into their purest form. Tragically, I lack the knowledge to utilize it to its fullest potential. Maybe I can try sketching out what I remember of the Periodic Table one of these days. What I’d give for a Chemistry 1 textbook!
After a minute of work, my airship of sodium is fully stocked. I carefully cup it between my hands, testing its weight and lowering my palms. It drifts gently down before settling in my hands once more. Good. We should be able to precisely time this.
“Alright, I’m ready,” I announce to Mirzayael, who has been curiously peering over my shoulder as I work. Nek has also been hovering nearby, but with a much healthier amount of caution. “Once I release this, we should have thirty seconds before it reaches the ground. That should give us time to retreat back down the tunnel. After it detonates, we can come back down and check on the results.”
“Thirty seconds isn’t a lot of time,” Nek comments.
“I could remove a few of the cubes,” I suggest. “I’ll need to recalculate how much time that would give us.”
“No,” Mirzayael says. “It’s tight, not impossible. Besides, I am interested to see just what this magic is capable of at full strength.”
“It’s not magic,” I remind her. And not nearly full strength, but I decide to keep that part to myself, lest she demand more fire power. It’s a good thing the Core hasn’t found any caesium. That would have been something.
“In that case,” I say, “tell me when.”
I position myself to run, holding the bowl out at arm’s length.
Nek and Mirzayael retreat a few steps down the path.
“Ready…” Mirzayael says.
Nek turns tail and flees. “Now!”
I let go of the bowl, dashing after them. My heart hammers in my chest as my feet hit the ice, talons digging into the surface as I haphazardly slip and lunge down the hallway, laughter bubbling out of me.
How absurd this is! Dropping a slow-motion bomb and running away as quickly as I can. Like a kid lighting a bottlerocket and then diving behind a fence. How unscientific. How dangerous.
How fun!
It’s the most that’s gotten my heart going in years. I mentally count the seconds as I sprint through the tunnel, lungs burning, legs sore. Nek spares a horrified glance behind him at my giggling, which only makes me laugh harder. Light appears before us. We race down the slope and out onto the landing.
“Are you mad?” Nek asks, giving me a baffled look.
I shake my head, smiling and panting. “Ten,” I say between breaths. “Nine. Eight. Seve—”
An explosion rocks the room as a loud bang echoes up the ice tunnel. Flecks of ice hiss down from the ceiling. For the next minute, secondary explosions crackle and snap from down the tunnel. Then, it all goes quiet.
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Startling all of us, Mirzayael laughs. “Your count was off.”
I grin. “I noticed.”
Nek shakes his head, though I’m not sure which of us the gesture is aimed at.
I lead the way back up the tunnel, using my Spark to lead the way. I quest carefully ahead, testing every step before I press forward, no matter how stable it may seem. I don’t have enough mana to expand the Core’s range, so I can only sense a few feet in any direction. Not nearly enough to trust the structural integrity of the ice beneath me. Even so, it holds all the way back to the end. There, however, the floor is missing.
I’m not sure if the sodium was enough to melt through the rest of it, or if it was merely enough to crack the ice and cause a section to fall away. Regardless, there is now a great hole in the ice chamber, and from it comes the breeze of a pressure differential, and faint sounds.
Mirzayael stops just behind me. “You hear that?”
“Yes,” I say, my stomach fluttering with excitement. “That rushing sound?”
“Running water,” she says. “Not far down, I think.”
It’s the thermal spring, burbling somewhere in the chamber below. We’re so close, I can taste it!
I hold my hand over the gap, but my firelight is swallowed by the dark.
“Step back,” Mirzayael says. “This is where my abilities are needed.”
Mirzayael quickly spins a length of silk, braiding it into a rope even as she produces more. Eventually, she ties her silk around her spear, wedges the weapon over the gap, then drops the rest of the thread into the chasm beneath us.
“Are you ready, Outsider?” she asks.
“I’ve never been more ready,” I say, nervousness and excitement dancing through me as I peer into the dark. I won’t be able to keep a light going while I climb down the rope. It will be in complete darkness.
Mirzayael smiles, exposing her needle-like teeth. “Good. Then follow me.” She runs a hand along her silk, then skitters down into the dark, vanishing. The rope goes taut a moment later.
I cautiously sit at the edge of the pit, scooting up to the overhang and dangling my legs over the side. I have to lean forward to grab the rope, which is slightly nerve wracking, but at least the silk is less slippery than it appears. I take a breath, glance back at Nek and the young scouts, who look as nervous as I feel, then push off and rappel down into the dark.
The rope swings slowly from side to side, and I occasionally have to kick off the ice as I descend. It’s only around me for another few feet, however, and I can hear when I pass beneath the last of it. The distant sounds of running water shift from a muted closeness, to an echoing expanse. I can practically feel the open space around me.
My arms burn as I descend, hand over hand. I’d never had much upper body strength as a human—at least, not since I was a teen. This harpy body seems better suited to the physical task, but not by much. Soon the muscles in my arms and torso start to burn, and my fingers ache.
“Mirzayael,” I call, my voice echoing into the black. “Watch out. I might slip.”
Something touches my shoulder, and Mirzayael’s voice speaks into my ear. “It won’t be much of a fall.”
I jump in surprise, my grip slipping from the rope. My feet hit the ground at the same moment, though as unexpected as it was, they quickly crumple beneath my weight. Mirzayael catches me, an arm slipping beneath my wings to stop me from falling the rest of the way to the floor. She pulls me back to my feet.
“Thank you,” I say, regaining my balance. I blink rapidly against the black. “How can you see anything down here?”
“There’s still a little light above us,” she says. “And my eyes are better adjusted to the dark. Come, let’s get out of the way before Nek jumps down on top of us.” Her hand tugs gently at my sleeve.
I carefully step over the uneven floor, following her pull, as I summon a new light to my hands. I squint against the brightness, but my Spark doesn’t go far. Light shimmers off Mirzayael’s carapace and dully lights the floor—stone again. But the chamber is clearly far too large for my flames to even begin to illuminate. The sound of running water is louder down here, somewhere gurgling off to our right, and it’s accompanied by the smell of sulfur.
I grin. By my estimates, we’re slightly upstream of the same river that runs through Ollie’s cave. And that means…
Core, check out the stone beneath us, I say. We couldn’t sense what it was before, right?
Sure enough, a simple scan of the rock comes back as Unidentified. Well then. Time to identify it.
The Core bounces around like a puppy the moment it can tell I’m going to give it the last dregs of my mana to analyze the stone. New ore! It can’t wait. It’s been so long since it’s had anything new to eat!
You’d have more to try if you were willing to consume that spring water, I point out. With that amount of mana we could have explored the entire cave system by now.
The Core pointedly ignores this as it sets about tasting the stone, dissolving a few square inches beneath my feet.
The energy hits me like a shock of lighting, zapping straight from the Core’s mind into my own. It’s so intense, so concentrated, that it momentarily erodes all my other senses—sight, sound, sensation, gone in a flash.
[Bonus Mana: 1283] Echo reports.
“...er? Are you alright? What happened?”
I blink as my sight returns, briefly disoriented. I’m on the ground, Mirzayael’s hands tightly clutching my arm. The Dungeon, Core, meanwhile, is ping-ponging around my head.
It found it! IT FOUND IT! It’s been so long! It had almost forgotten what it tasted like. So perfect! So pure! So much power.
“Ow.” I rub my forehead as the Core’s thoughts reflect over the top of themselves like echoes in a cave. “Yes, I’m okay. I just wasn’t prepared.”
Mirzayael’s grip relaxes. “Prepared for what?”
I Check the new stone that’s appeared in the Dungeon Core’s catalog.
[Mana Ore. A magical ore with absorptive properties which collects dense concentrations of mana from its surroundings over the course of decades or centuries.]
I can’t help but grin, echoing the Core’s elation. “We found it. The vein of mana ore.”
Mirzayael helps me to my feet as I tap into the incredible mana reserves I now have, using it to feed the Core’s range and expand our sense to fill the chamber around us. I can now “see” the lightning-bolt of ore zig-zagging through the surrounding stone, passing beneath the thermal river, and disappearing even deeper into the earth. If just this tiny scrape of rock gave me so much mana, I can’t even begin to fathom what magic I’d be capable of if I allowed the Core to consume the entire vein of ore.
In fact, I’m not sure that would be wise. But I don’t need to absorb it all at once. Keeping such a vast reserve of mana gives the Core an enormous area which it can sense and effect. As long as I have enough mana to maintain that, I should be able to harvest more of the mana ore remotely, no matter where I am in the Catacombs, anytime I might need it.
Because we’re moving back into Fyreneth’s Fortress.
Even without my light, I can sense the floor around me. Through the Map Interface, every nook, every pebble is apparent. The circuit lines in the Catacombs and the equivalent lines in the broken section of stone might as well be neon signs. I can see it all so clearly, how it should fit together—where the mana ore also fit into all of this.
“Come,” I tell Mirzayael, turning back around and leading her to the corner of the Catacombs that is exposed beneath the glacier. I can see the entire buried city this way. Every room and courtyard. Each collapsed wing and crumbling wall. I can fix it. I can restore it all.
“Where are we going?” Mirzayael asks, following me anyway. Now I’m the one guiding her through the dark.
“Just here,” I say, raising my hand to the underside of the Catacombs. I brush my fingers over the rock, picturing what I want. My fingertips feel electric with possibilities. The Dungeon Core eagerly presses against my mind, waiting for my mana, waiting to turn my vision into reality.
“It’s been long overdue,” I tell her. “But it’s high time the Fyrethians regained their home. Hold on.” And I relinquish control.
The Core carves out more gouges in the ground and mana floods into me like a conduit. The stone rumbles beneath our feet. Ice cracks over our heads, showering us with flecks of snow. The earth comes alive.
I don’t bother reconnecting the lost, broken sliver of the city. Instead I recreate it, exactly where the Catacombs are missing a piece. New earth appears in thin air, brought out from the Core’s inventory, already exactly the right ore it needs to be. More rises up from the ground to fill in the gaps, reaching around Mirzayael and I to flow into the wall like liquid. New tiny stone circuits replace the old, completing broken lines, fixing the damaged loops, and seeing it all come together, it’s abruptly so obvious what they were for. Finally, after all the new stone has fixed itself in place, I make the last connection: the mana ore hooks directly into the circuits of the Catacombs, and with the will of the Dungeon Core, the city comes alive with magic.
Mana floods through the circuits. I feel the magical synapses firing, ancient and dormant spells being activated. The Dungeon Core’s consciousness spreads through the Fortress, and I am pulled along with it, watching the runic lights in every room turn on, spells to move stale air begin to clear the palace, life breathed back into the dormant city.
Most of the pipes that were once used for plumbing are clogged, so we clean those out as well, widening the tunnels, pushing stones and earth through the pipes like giant earthen street-sweeps. Once they’re clear, the spells embedded in the tunnels activate and begin pulling water up from the springs. Some of it pours into the bathhouses, some of it runs beneath the streets to warm the city, while still more passes through filtering spells and becomes drinking water.
It’s all so elaborate. Planned so meticulously, each spell a gear in a magical machine to an artificial paradise—this oasis in such a desolate terrain. My heart aches for what Fyreneth had created. That it went buried for so long without being able to act as the home for her people it was designed to be.
But no longer will they have to suffer quietly in their caves. Now they will be able to live and grow as they have always deserved to.
And I won’t let anyone put a stop to that. Not the Jorrians, and certainly not the gods.