“What will happen to us when the dungeon explodes?” Lapis asked with some worry on her face.

I looked up at her and grimaced. “It will be bad. All lore will be torn up and destroyed. Everyone would die. However, I won’t allow that. If you guys go now, I’ll hold out for as long as I can…”

“Are you talking about staying behind?” Terra asked.

“Terra, someone needs to activate it…”

I had seen the lore, so I understood the consequences of activating the lore better than anyone. This was something that had to be done by hand.

“No!” Terra declared.

“Terra… don’t force me to make an order…”

“Master, you misunderstand!” Terra cried out. “I mean, I have an idea where we can all escape.”

“You do?”

“Master… can you bring our Alysia again, and have her turn into that thing from before.”

“Thing? Ah, the drill? Alysia?”

“Yes!”

I held out my hand, and Alysia appeared in my hands again in her drill form. “It’s nothing special. She uses her will to turn herself rapidly, and these blades dig into the earth…”

As I was describing it, the dwarves all became noisy. Gabbro and a few others moved close and started looking over Alysia carefully.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“This is fascinating!” Gabbro declared. “Such ingenuity…”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had taken the plans from Earth. This was Earth’s ingenuity, not my own. I wondered how he’d react to some of the engineering books I had brought back with me.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand what this has to do with anything.”

“You were able to use that to drill directly up through Hell’s Inferno,” Terra explained. “I was also able to build something that protected my imager and I sent it up a vent to get to the surface.”

“Twilight had allowed you to send that. She was trying to get me down here.” I sighed.

“Even so, it made it in one piece far beyond her reach! What if we built a device like that, but enough to hold everyone.”

“You mean… like a rocket?”

“Like a drill! There is a thermal vent directly behind this room. I can feel it. With all of the dwarf’s help, I’m sure we can make a deep-to-surface drill. We can build up the pressure in the vent under it, and once Master activates the spell, then we all jump in, launch it off, and go woosh up as the deep explodes beneath us!” Terra spoke more animatedly than usual, which spoke to her passion for building such a thing.

“It is possible…” Gabbro nodded after a second, giving Sapphire a look. “No… we’ll make it happen. We just need a few hours.”

“If we run, there is no guarantee we get out of the weapon’s reach. However, this guy will bring us to the surface in hours if not minutes. It’ll save us a ton of time.”

“Terra…” I started uncertainly.

“So, what does Master think?” Terra asked, causing the rest of the dwarves to also look in my direction.

I thought about it for a second, and then I smiled and reached out a patted her head. “I think it’s great.”

Everyone cheered and then started to race back to the furnaces to heat them again. There would be one last order before we left. However, we were already acting on borrowed time, and it’d only get worse. However, behind my smile was a more distant expression.

“You can hide it from me,” Alysia whispered in my ear. “This won’t work.”

“There is no activating it and then leaving.” I sighed. “The weapon requires a powerful soul to ignite it. That’s why King Diorite planned to use mine from the beginning.”