The base of the undermountain was a flurry of activity, trucks loaded with neatly stacked and netted piles of blocks streamed towards the surface, while huge barge-sized dump trucks carried ores and minerals on wide roadways towards the undermountain. We skimmed over it all on our way to our final training assignment.
Chane had loaded us all into a long and somewhat narrow grav-tech bus and taken us to the outskirts of the city for what he called “field experience.” The craft dodged around the few massive support pillars that helped hold the mountainous facade that served as sky for the expansive cavern, which grew more dense the farther we traveled from the mountain home.
We had been assigned into teams of three, and everyone paid close attention as we made our first stop. Chane stood up at the front and called the first team to their assignment.
“Team five, this is your site. Scans and drone scouting indicate a sizable PGE percentage within this cavern. You are to perform manual scouting and mapping of this cavern, and obtain samples from promising deposits.”
The long vehicle settled down on dozens of pointed insect-like legs that unfolded from the sides of the craft to grip the ground. Lurbolg and two dwarves I had not gotten to know very well stood from their places on the bus and filed their way down the narrow aisle between the seats. Sallis, our Rows aspiring pilot, flexed her knowledge of the craft and commented that the legs had enough strength to park the vehicle sideways on a near vertical wall if necessary.
We watched through the windows as the trio of dwarves exited the bus and started to examine the cracked hole in the floor that was the entrance to their cavern. Before the three could even reach the entrance, our tunnel runner bus released its grip on the ground and we soared off through the network of support pillars and honeycombed excavations of the outskirts and onwards to the next stop.
I had been placed into team 2 along with Sallis and Jozoic, and half an hour later our group had been dropped off at the bottom of a freshly scraped out fracture in a massive section of gabbro bedrock. Part of the reason the dwarves had picked this location was its abundance and variety of minerals and stone types bordering the granite and basalt mix of the underhome.
Chane stood again and dragged my attention away from the window and my wandering thoughts. “Let's go team two! Scans indicate this patch is high in titanium, and has a high chance of gold. Get in there and get us some samples and scrape up what you can.”
Being at the front of the bus, I was the first off and the first to see the scree clogged entrance to the cavern we had been assigned to, and the bus took off as soon as Jozoic’s armored boots hit the angled and stone floor leaving us in near complete darkness. I glanced back at my team, but continued towards the entrance and turned on a small flashlight that was clipped to one of the straps of my climbing harness. Still feeling like I had to prove my value as the least experienced person in the Row, I got to work immediately.
The cave was stuffed full of small rocks and conglomerate build-up, but someone had excavated enough of a hole through it already to feed a small drone. I pulled some of the loose stones from the top of the stack and tossed them off to the side as the other two caught up to me.
The other two jumped right in beside me and started pulling stones from the blockage as well. Occasionally one of the dwarves would reach in and rub their finger on a portion of pressure fused stone and then bring it to their mouth to taste it, then they would lick their finger and smear it on the stone, then go back to prying on the stuck rock as the softer binding material melted away.
We worked in silence for about a minute, my sore muscles complaining at first but loosening up as we worked to move the stones, before Sallis broke the quiet after heaving a bread loaf sized rock down to the bottom of the pile. “So, who’s on point? Any plans, ideas?”
Jozoic did not look up or stop working as he answered. “I will anchor, you can go first if you wish. Kaninak, what do you say?”
I grunted and shook the huge rock I was attempting to roll out of the middle of the pile back and forth another time, “Works for me, I probably shouldn’t go first.” I pushed on the rock again, straining my legs against one rock and pushing against the other with my shoulders causing them to shift to each side, and a number of small stones to clatter down the face of the clog.
The dwarves looked at eachother, surprised by my display of strength, or possibly just my application of it. The mass of rock cracked along a significant portion of it and we continued dismantling the top of the blocked off passage.
When we had pulled enough away to create a small opening onto the other side of the crevice, Jozoic handed me a rope that I worked through a heavy loop on my belt and then handed over to Sallis who tied it to her own. I pulled some slack through my loop and clamped it in place with a pressure fitting and then followed after Sallis as she crawled head first through the small opening we had made.
I followed a few feet after her into the downward sloping tunnel. The floor was rough and nobby and the ceiling was scraped and shattered with sharp edges in places. I was grateful for my covered elbows and the sallet style helmet I had made, even if it still lacked its face guard, yet wished I had taken the time to make greaves like some of the others to protect my knees and shins as I pushed myself forward on my belly.
Luckily, the crawl was not far before the blockage ended and we dropped down into a steeply sloping chamber about 5 feet high. I checked the slack in my line and held myself in place somewhat above Sallis as Jozoic wriggled out of the opening above me.
Sallis grunted and spat a glowing blue blob down into the opening beneath us which splattered onto a more level looking floor about 30 feet below. I looked between the two more experienced cavers and wanted to ask what we should do, but the hush of the cramped tunnel made me hesitant to break the silence.
Jozoic pulled a lump of clay-like material from his inventory and pressed it into a crack in the wall, then pushed a small metallic square into it that caused an immediate reaction. The dark gray clay-like blob started to let out a soft hissing sound and ejecting a foamy material from a hole cut into the center of the piece of metal. It stank horribly as it spewed out a centimeter thick cylinder of whatever the foam was, and Jozoic pulled on the stream of ropey foam from the rapidly lightening in color blob. The dwarv coiled it around and around in a practiced motion as the reaction progressed, and when it had stopped hissing and steaming he tugged on each end of the coil in his hands and nodded, and then dropped the coil of “rope” down into the hole.
Sallis grabbed the cord and tugged on the now hardened anchor, then looped one foot into the new rope and started to lower herself down into the next chamber. I followed after her, and Jozoic quickly slid down as soon as my mag-boots touched the floor. We adjusted our group line and I swept my flashlight around to examine the small cavern.
There was only one direction to travel in, moving horizontally between the slab of gabbro above us and the diorite floor. The floor showed signs of water erosion as it flowed down, it was smooth and clear of smaller stones, yet coated in a layer of ancient dust that must have formed after the area was sealed off by the blockage we had cut our way through.
Our lead did not give me much time to gawk at the cavern. She moved over to a patch of slightly differently colored gabbro along one wall and pried a loose piece of rock out from the wall, while Jozoic did the same for the opposite wall. I looked around on the ceiling but could not find a loose rock to pull for a sample from there, so I just watched as each of them logged the samples into their mobile-coms and pulled them into their inventory.
After we gathered up our samples and Jozoic took some readings with a handheld scanner, we moved deeper down the twisting tunnel. The ceiling was just high enough for the dwarves to comfortably walk along, only occasionally scraping their helmets against the jagged stones above, while I had to crouch walk or occasionally crawl on hands and knees.
We followed the passage down for a few hundred feet before squeezing through a tall and narrow gully that the dwarves barely were able to cram their barrel chests through sideways. The gully dropped off into what I imagined would have once been an impressive waterfall, the water-cut path ending in a sheer cliff that looked out into a massive fissure. I caught up behind Sallis as she stopped at the edge and leaned out to look into the abyss that stretched in every direction.
Standing a few feet taller than Sallis, I angled my light out over her head and into the darkness to reveal the far side of the huge crack about 30 ft distant. I spotted a matching blemish against the far cliff in the form of a small cave that would have matched our own entryway to the underground canyon, like a worm-bit apple split in half to reveal its route.
Sallis finally broke the silence we had kept through our journey so far, but kept her voice hushed out of respect for the reverberant chasm. “Hruhpm. Far side looks clogged with chalk still, drones must have found something in the ravine.”
She gurgled and spat another glowing blue blob of snot out into the ravine, we watched it arc away and down and hit with a ringing smack at the narrow bottom nearly a hundred feet below. Glowing blue speckles spattered across the sheer walls and dimly lit the rubble strewn floor.
“What's ahead, why have we stopped?” Jozoic asked from behind me.
“We’re looking out the side of a ravine.” I explained, and tried to shine my little flashlight upwards to see how much higher the crack traveled, but the light was too weak and dissipated before it could reach the ceiling. “No idea how tall, straight down about a hundred feet.”
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Sallis grumbled under her breath. “Meters, inches, feet, centimeters. Can’t ya’ just pick a system? It's about 25 head, at a guess.” She translated my estimate for Jozoic into the dwarven structural measurement, which was a few hairs shy of four and a half feet.
I chuckled at her complaint, understanding the frustration as someone who had grown up in a culture that for some reason used multiple systems of measurement.
Jozoic thought for a moment before proposing a plan. “I think we set a spike and run a loop to the floor. We have enough rope to leave it for the extraction team, maybe we could earn some rep from the next team if we tie a line to the other side too.”
Sallis and I nodded in agreement and she untied herself from the group line, before pulling out a thicker bundle of premade rope while I retrieved a self-boring spike from my own inventory and worked it into the sheer face of the cliff around head-height. The spike was difficult to push into the wall and I had to lean into it, but it slowly melted into the stone as I pushed before giving off a flash and the small crack of an explosion as it solidified the quartz in the surrounding stone into a bonded support structure.
We looped the long rope through the anchor's eye and Jozoic and I lowered Sallis as she repelled down to the bottom of the ravine. She secured the other end with a second anchor and tied it off, allowing us to use our self-climbers to carry us down the taut line.
Once all three of us had safely lowered ourselves to the floor of the tall cavern, we tied back into our groupline and explored the bottom. After a half an hour of scrambling over the broken and jumbled shards of stone that lined the bottom, we had not found another entrance to the area and learned it was nearly a kilometer in length. The cave we had crawled in through was closer to one end, and there were obvious veins of quartz and other minerals and metals scattered across the walls. A greasy black pool of water lay at the far end of the ravine, and we stopped to make a plan at its broken edge.
Jozoic untied his end of the group rope and handed it to me. “Looks like this is the main chamber, should be safe to split and gather samples. Everyone remember to keep your logs in order and name your samples in your inventory tab, it's a pain to sort out afterward.”
Bluurp. A large bubble rose to the surface of the pond and popped, just before something tried to crawl out of the pool towards us. The edge of the shore writhed into action as a line of shoebox sized crab-like creatures started to break the surface of the water.
All three of us scrambled back from the edge, drawing sidearms and preparing for combat. Yet as we pulled our weapons, myself having only just managed to draw the pistol Tevin had given me, we watched as the crabs were somehow unable to break the surface tension of the pool and were falling over themselves at the edge of the rippling pond. Only, the water was not just rippling, but also bunching up, the greasy black coating sliding away from the far edges as the surface wrinkled and thickened to envelope the charging crustaceans in a lump of dark gelatinous ooze.
“It’s a black jelly, back up!” Jozoic called out.
We retreated back about 20 feet and watched the creatures writhe around at the edge of the pool. The crabs were strong and well armored, and occasionally one of their legs would pierce through the layer of dark goop that restrained them, but they fought against each other in their frenzy to escape the slime that had enveloped the whole group. One crab nearly made it completely free from the goop, only to have its leg pinched by another two crabs who then dragged it back into the mess. The whole thing smelled super funky as well, there was a faint steam that rose from the combat and filled the ravine with the stink of vomit and bad eggs.
I was captivated by the brawl between the creatures. I had heard stories of wild creatures that the game seeded every new world with, but had not encountered many of them in my time on Rosso’s island. I looked over at Jozoic, who had called out the name of one of them and asked to see if he had any more info.
“What the hell are those things?”
All eyes were glued to the combat at the edge of the pool as he answered. “Rock crabs, and a nasty slime mold, a real dangerous one. They’ll split if damaged, and you can’t really hurt them with physical attacks. Need fire, or a few tons of salt.” He pulled out his scanner and directed its laser towards the crab-filled ooze, and commented on the readout, “Looks like this one is alkaline, so acid would probably do the trick too.”
I glanced over at him and nodded in thanks for the information, and my gaze had half turned back to the brawl when my brain registered the faint red outline of something long and spikey on the wall above and behind Jozoic. I turned back to face him and started to shout a warning, but the thing rushed forwards out of the darkness and was on the dwarv’s back before I could get a word out.
“Jo, Look out!” I yelled, already too late as a fanged centipede the size of a speedbump charged, it slammed into him and bit down on his arm and its body just kept coming and piling onto the dwarv, close to 15 feet of spikey legged coils wrapping him up as quick as a snake bite. The dwarv dropped the scanner and fell forward, his armored hands already pushing and straining to peel the huge insect away from his body.
I think I yelled something, and waved my pistol in their direction before thinking better of it. I hesitated for a split second as a rapidfire list of options flew through my mind. I couldn’t shoot it while it was wrapped around Jozoic, and my plasma knife would be just as dangerous to my team member as the gun. Yet just standing there and doing nothing was just not in me, so I dropped my sidearm and jumped on the wrestling pair; punching, kicking, and pulling on the huge insect as it bit, scraped, and clawed back.
“Bones of the mountain!” Sallis cursed and stepped closer to the pile, caught between two fights happening on either side of her. She pulled a collapsible baton from her belt and flicked it open, then started whacking the centipede with it as she darted around to the other side of the fight.
I rolled over, now partially wrapped up by the centipede as well, and the three of us flipped as a group, sliding down the shallow slope that led to the pool of water and closer to the still struggling crab-filled jelly.
When we had flipped over, I landed on the bottom of the pile this time, and the horned back end of the centipede broke free and started to flail around with its twin spikes, forcing Sallis to back off for a moment. I felt a sharp sting in my side and a debuff popped up in my HUD, but I was too busy wrestling the things tail to read the tooltip.
It thrashed around, its powerful body scraping me against the sharp stones that littered the floor and slammed its tail into my shoulder. The spike glanced off of my pauldron but the blunt force of it still did some damage. I managed to get my arms around the tail as it smacked me and held it tight against my chest, allowing Sallis to step back in and start beating on it again.
She rained a half dozen quick blows down on its segmented body and it tried to roll us all over again, but this time Jozoic and I had more control and managed to keep it held in place. I felt another sting in my side, and my arms started to feel a little weak. I felt a wave of lightheadedness hit me as the air started to feel a little thin.
I twisted around and managed to get a grip on one of the things horns with my gauntlet, and it writhed back and forth quickly by way of thanks, pulling me up before smashing my shoulder back down against the stone in a staccato 1-2-3 rhythm. I had a brief moment of clear thought as I regretted not coming up with a better plan before wading into combat.
“You have weapons on you, use your gauntlets. You have about 15 seconds before the venom immobilizes you, so you better be quick.” Max chimed in.
I would have kicked myself for not thinking of that, but I was wrapped up in 8 feet of thigh-thick centipede so I kicked it instead and opened the UI of my chemical spraying gauntlets. I thought back to the first thing I had ever tried, tert-Butyllithium, which had created a gout of flames.
It took a second to find in the menu, and I pushed the pressure slider all the way up after I had selected the flammable option. A jet of fire poured from my hand and washed over the thing's body, hardly doing any damage but causing it to thrash harder and roll us over again.
One step closer to where the crabs were slowly losing the fight to the black-jelly, we landed on our sides this time and I had a clear view of Jozoic as he bit into the monster's side with his steel teeth. He ripped off one of its armor plates and spat it aside. His scruffy face pale and smeared with blood that ran freely from a puncture wound on his shoulder.
Without thinking, I reached over and jammed my gauntlet into the unarmored patch of monster meat, worming my hand into the goopy interior of the monster as the fire still poured out of my index finger. The plating quickly started to buckle and the wriggling interior of the insect inflated like a balloon as I pumped high pressure flaming gas into the creature's body.
The centipede let out a high pitched screech and thrashed even harder before the inflated section exploded in a smokey and wet chunky blast. The flame continued to pour from my fingertip for a moment longer before the HUD flashed a red “Lithium Reserve Empty.”
Even blown into two pieces, the beast continued to fight, its longer tail section curling tight around my waist and upper body while its head section had wrapped around Jozoics back and shoulders. Long sharp legs scratched for purchase and left deep gouges in exposed skin while its head, now pinned beneath me, bit into my side again.
Jozoic managed to slip free from the things grasp as its separated back-half began to slow its movements, and Sallis grabbed my booted foot with her free hand and started to drag me away from the roaming splatters of tiny and newly independent black-jellies that littered the area.
I felt the sting in my side again, and the strength drained out of me. Once I had completely relaxed, I could finally feel the thing chewing on my unarmored side with sharp jaws and repeatedly stinging me and filling the wound with venom.
I rolled over with the last of my strength, and both of my companions jumped in and grabbed the things head, one of them controlling the 4 feet of body that was still attached while the other grabbed its jaws and pried them out of my waist.
“It's actually a pretty mild toxin, but man did that thing inject a ton of it. I could totally neutralize it for you of course, but that would take a few hours and most likely be detectable by the system. So, good luck buddy!”
I looked around for who had spoken, unsure what was happening as I became more woozy, maybe even loopy. Damage in-game was straight forward, it stung most of the time, a bright pain that quickly faded into a dull pressure. I had never been poisoned or even intoxicated through the Link before though, and it was a weird experience. I could still feel everything, and my heart pounded in my chest with adrenaline, but the edges of my vision darkened and I lost control of my limbs. I rolled my head around to see Sallis next to me, jamming a knife through the things head again and again. I tried to speak but was unable to move my mouth, then the darkness closed in and what sounded like a roaring river washed away my consciousness.