Chapter 38 - Change the Equation

Depth increasing. Stand by...

I absentmindedly took a sip of my lumpy porridge cup as I stared at the message, but my depth remained frustratingly un-increased. With how much fanfare there had been before my choice, I had expected a bit more of an immediate payoff. Instead I was being asked to be patient…

Which was the word of the day.

We’d been down here for an indeterminate amount of time, and things were looking exactly the same. Hours of walking past identical looking bricks, identically grimy mortar, and identically empty lantern alcoves proved to be a different test to everyone’s mettle. At least I had my System interface to stare at, but there was only so much that could be done in there. I had the combat log pretty much how I wanted it now, but that only killed a couple hours of time.

That didn’t stop me from scrolling through things, however. It was either that or stare at the back of the merchant. Even without looking, I knew where the sweat stains on his clothes were, the positioning of his hand on the wall to keep his balance. The rest of the civilians were in front of him, in the middle of our formation.

Behind me was Trix followed by Samila who would be dutifully keeping an eye on our rear, a tiny lantern affixed to her belt to give her plenty of light to see by now that the locals needed it. Geddon had a similar one up at the front.

“Intersection. Bearing left,” Sissa’s voice chimed in a sing-song sort of way meant to sound light and just a touch bored, her way of telling us she was just as affected by the situation as the rest of us. I could hear the indecision in her voice, though. She, as the ranking guard, was responsible for us all, and the passages were giving us nothing to go on. With every decision we were further from what we knew.

The intersection was like all the others, perfectly right-angled with four arches meeting in the middle to form a point, a lantern alcove for each hallway.

The group paused to allow Trix to scratch a set of arrows on the stones to indicate where we’d gone, just to make sure we weren’t going in circles.

I took the opportunity to sip some more tasteless gruel. My Underfed debuff was gone, but Trix insisted I get more food in me, probably fattening me up for when he needed to heal me again.

In light of recent events, I couldn’t argue with that logic.

I sighed. We were walking single file through the most banal death trap ever conceived. Of course, maybe that’s how it got you, lulled you into a false sense of confidence then dropped the floor away. I shook my head and tried to focus.

The kid didn’t seem to feel the tension the grownups felt and started to act like a kid again. It had been a long time coming. Honestly, I was surprised at just how quiet his grandmother was able to keep him in the Undercity when we were being hunted. Now, in defiance of the oppressively boring environment, he bobbed and weaved through the group, ran his hands over the brickwork, played little jumping games where he’d only step on the odd shaped stones… kid stuff.

It was during one of his little skips that he changed things for us. His foot landed badly, and he reached out to steady himself on the wall.

“Ow!” The kid’s shout echoed off the hard surfaces of the tunnel and broke the plodding time spell we’d all been under. He winced and pulled his hand away from the wall, sucking air through his teeth.

A dam broke. Suddenly, everyone was engaged.

“I told you not to act a fool,” his grandmother chided, already wrapping the boy up in her arms. “Twist your ankle and one of these people will have to carry you. We are all still in grave danger, and you mustn’t make it worse.”

“No. It’s not that, ma. It cut me,” the boy argued.

Trix was moving straight away. He bounded up to the boy and stood to his full height to take the boy’s hand and give it a look.

“It’s alright. Let me see,” Trix said, leaning in close.

“I told you boy. I told you not to act a fool. When I speak of this to your father, he’ll get an ear full,” the grandmother continued.

Trix let out a displeased hiss. “Please, Miss. Calm yourself and get out of my light.” He poked at the cut and pulled out a bandage from somewhere, wrapping it around. He turned to me with an uncertain look. “This isn’t from a stone.”

Taking the cue, I bent down to the kid’s level and examined the wall, running my fingers along it, over the imperfections in the rock, through the rough grooves between. Then I felt a prick on my fingertip. Something was protruding from the mortar, about a millimeter long and wire thin, very sharp. Sharp enough to get a bead of blood out of my finger before the System closed it back up.

“Looks like you are coming away from your adventure with a scar, young man, and what a story you’ll have behind it,” Trix said encouragingly, finishing his binding on the wound. “Your friends will be very impressed.”

I rested my fingers on the little barb and probed it with Shape, letting my mana flow over it and map its contours. It was shocking just how fast I could do this now. I probably had Tempered Channels to thank for that.

One point in the positive column.

I still wasn’t sure if I was happy with acquiring Tempered Channels. What little testing I’d done concerned the hell out of me. Any ability that involved Volatility felt different now than what I remembered. I could still direct it, giving it a path to leave my body, but I didn’t feel in control of the power as acutely as I once did. In fact, the experience had grown unpleasant, biting, like I was spooling barbed wire in the cold with numb hands.

Using Shape and my own personal mana, on the other hand, felt like second nature to me. What’s more, the mana itself was more forceful, more elegant, irresistible. I felt it twist and weave between the molecules of the thing in the wall, stretching on further and further. I felt the metal, sensing the matter and how it was bound together even before it was saturated.

“It’s metal,” I announced as I channeled myself into it. The thing was long and thin like a wire but also had barbs and cutting razors at regular intervals that hooked into the mortar like hagbrush roots. I wasn’t able to saturate it yet due to its size, but I could tell the general direction my mana flowed. It went on and on.

“Is it some kind of trap?” Sissa asked.

I shook my head. “Not sure. It’s a wire… a weird one. Wait!” I paused, blinking. My mana had reached the end, and I’d reached full saturation. Slowly, I Shaped a finger-length piece of the stuff out of the wall and thinned out the middle until I could snap it off with my prosthetic. What came away in my hand was a silvery metal of some kind.

Consume Tendril? Y/N

You gain knowledge of Cobalt. [1/10]

You gain knowledge of Nickel. [1/10]

You gain knowledge of Deep Lead. [1/10]

“The end is that way,” I said pointing in the direction we were going. “Don’t know what it’s for, but it’s something.”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Sissa looked through me, lost in thought. “The question is whether to follow it or get away from it.”

“I say we follow it. If it is connected to a trap, the architect of this place will have believed it is worth defending,” Geddon said from the front of the group.

Sissa nodded. “Better than running around down here for the rest of time. Let’s go.”

Just as my Shaping had told me, the wire ended about ten minutes or so of walking in our direction of travel. It wasn’t connected to anything other than the stone, which Sissa appreciated.

What had cut the wire, however, wasn’t what we expected. Geddon held up a hand for us to halt and called us all up to have a look at what he saw.

Our hallway, level and mostly straight, solid and dry, ceased to be all of those things right where Geddon crouched. It was as if a giant had stepped on our little tube we’d been using to travel and snapped it like a twig. The hallway continued on, but… lower. The route had been severed, the way forward several feet down from the one we currently used. Broken stones and loose earth packed in around the sides of the tunnel here, and the archway above our heads had crumbled until it resembled a cave ceiling rather than something built.

Sissa had to crouch to enter the new, broken version of the hallway, and her feet hit the ground with a splash.

After a quick look around, she turned back to us, only her upper torso and head visible. “Looks like a collapse. Judging by the water, we’ve either gone North or are in a tunnel connected to one that goes that way.”

“Is that good?”

She shrugged. “Are you a good swimmer?”

No. No I wasn’t, but I compensated for it in other ways.

“Rest up, everyone,” Sissa commanded with a grin. She finally had something in front of her she could assess. “This will be the last time we’ll be dry for a while.”

—--------------------

“You have the look of a man at the end of a bender,” Samila commented the next “morning” as she strapped her shield to her back. “Should I assume you built something last night, and that’s why you never woke any of us for the next watch?”

I rubbed my face tiredly then shook my head. “It’s complicated. You’ll all need to hear this.” My voice sounded raspy and my mouth was dry. It had been a long night.

The first thing I’d done once everyone was bedding down was go looking for the severed ends of the wire and Shaping a manageable amount of it out of its hole, having to take time to smooth the barbs out and thin the wire enough so it could be pulled.

It cost me a fair bit of scrap furniture wood to keep Engine going, but in the end, I got about eighty pounds of Weird Cobalt Alloy (my working name for it) from my work and an F grade affinity for the stuff.

Then Detect Cobalt found me half a dozen more strands, some leading down into the next part of our hallway.

That’s where things got interesting.

“See here?” I asked, pointing to a particular strand of metal. “It’s another one of those wires, probably the continuation of the one we found.”

“How far does it go?” Sissa questioned.

I shook my head. “Don’t know. I can’t saturate it.”

“I don’t know what that means. Is that normal?”

“If something is too big or if it’s a material I can’t Shape, yes, but this is metal. I can definitely work with the stuff. The problem is that I can’t even connect with it. Here,” I said, reaching out and putting a finger on the end of the wire. I let my mana flow out of me, pooling at the tip of the metal and pressing at the barrier of the matter, but that’s as far as I got.

The wire… recoiled.

Like a living thing, it shrank away from me and curled in on itself.

Geddon was the first to comment. “That’s new. It doesn’t seem to like you.”

“He’s an acquired taste,” Samila chirped from behind me.

Sissa just rolled her eyes.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably and rushed to explain more of what I found.

“Not just that.” I grabbed the wire and attempted to hold it still for the Shaping. This time, the metal tendril reacted violently. It whipped back like a snake while several tiny barbs appeared down its length. I let go before it could do more than superficial harm.

I turned to the rest of the group. “Something else is in there,” I declared.

The metal was alive. I couldn’t really explain it. When I’d used Devouring grasp on it last night it almost looked like it was in pain the way it writhed and retreated. Meanwhile, I couldn’t for the life of me saturate it or get it to accept my mana in any way.

“Someone or something with a similar domain perhaps?” Trix asked. “A member of the Order?”

I blinked.

“Uh. No. Probably not,” I answered.

If it was someone with powers like mine, they’d have to be controlling the metal constantly and, considering there were lots of these wires, expending an ocean of mana every second they did so.

Sissa nodded and stood up to address everyone. “This tunnel is the best lead we’ve had so far. Let’s move quietly and keep an eye out for markings. No one touches any creepy living metal until I say so.”

—------------------------------------

We saw our first yellow arrow a little farther down the partially flooded tunnel. The water was up to our shins, but it never got higher than that, though the floor was more uneven now, and turned ankles were more a danger with every passing moment. Trix spent most of his time riding on my shoulder again, but he was largely silent and brooding.

I could sympathize. We all needed real rest and some natural light. Every problem we solved seemed to turn into another one, and that beat our morale down until it was in the mud.

That changed with the spotting of our first yellow arrow. Sort of.

It was on the left side of a four way intersection, pointing in that direction. However, it was old and faded, and someone had made another, only slightly more recent slash through the middle of it. That wasn’t what we wanted to see.

“I say we follow it anyway,” Geddon opined, one hand on his chin and staring at the yellowed brick. “Even if the mark means that the way is no longer safe, the fact that it is here means this passage at least leads somewhere the smugglers wanted to go.”

“I don’t think they would have given up on a route easily if it were profitable to them. They likely saw something they couldn’t handle and cut their losses,” Sissa rebutted.

Geddon looked unconvinced. “Thieves and crooks are generally cowards. What they saw might not be as much of a threat to us.”

“We’ve got civilians with us, big guy,” Samila said quietly, reaching up to pat his shoulder. “Maybe we could handle it, but if it’s a running fight we can’t keep them safe.”

“I’m leaning toward trying a different passage, we have a one in two chance of taking the route the smugglers took to get here. From there, we just follow the arrows back until we get to a safe passage,” Sissa mused.

I thought about the problem. We’d been down in this lower passage for hours now, and the tunnels seemed to be as big as the city itself. Only the shopkeeper and Samila carried packs, and they were getting lighter by the hour. I still had a bit of food in my spatial storage, but clean water was a problem. I scooped up a handful of the water down at my feet and smelled it.

Nope.

Dysentery would be a hell of a way to die.

We wouldn’t be able to run around down here without direction, and the physical activity was sucking our supplies away.

The kid was listening with rapt attention. His grandmother simply looked tired. She leaned heavily on the boy now, her aging body unable to keep up this kind of stress over such an extended time.

I felt around in my storage. I had a good bit Weird Cobalt Alloy, a dwindling pile of scrapped furniture, food, and some of my weird loot from the mockvine. I could do something here.

“We should make camp,” I declared as authoritatively as I could.

The church guards turned around as one to stare at me, Geddon with a frustrated grimace and the two sisters with looks of equal parts curiosity and incredulity.

I cleared my throat. “People are worn out, and this is a decision that needs time.”

“Time isn’t something we have in abundance,” Sissa replied. “What’s more, we shouldn’t sleep in this muck. One or more of us will catch our death. Brother Trix should only use his dom-”

“It is not my dominion,” Trix corrected with a hiss.

“Okay, sorry. He shouldn’t use his healing magic-” Sissa paused to see if there was an objection to that one, but Trix simply looked sullen.

She continued. “If he does, our dwindling supplies will be depleted further.”

I nodded. “I get that. I have a stack of wood in my storage that we can use to keep fairly dry, and I have a plan for the water situation.”

“That’s not all, is it, Brother Ryan?” Trix asked in my ear. His little black eyes were hard.

“Yeah. I’m going to scout ahead,” I replied, attempting to sound sure.

Sissa’s refusal was a given. “No. We stay together, and we’ll get out together.”

“We have a choice of three ways,” I explained, turning to speak to everyone. “Two of them lead to our deaths, one by the mystery monster, the other starvation or dehydration. We need to be damned sure of the way we take. I can eliminate one of them, removing the ambiguity.”

“It’s still time wasted,” Sissa argued.

“Hold on, sis. He’s got that look in his eye. He’s going to build something,” Samila said with a little smirk. “Right?”

I couldn’t keep myself from grinning. “I’m going to build something.”