The far side of the blocked tunnel was, unsurprisingly, more tunnel. Even if it sort of looked like it might be a larger cavern from my cramped viewpoint within the pile of blocks. There was a faint haze in the air that smelled of damp and mold that swirled around in the bright beam of my lamp, indicating there was a slight airflow coming from somewhere.
“What a way to start the day.” Max broke in, seizing the opportunity to talk to me while I was alone. “Just so you know, you’re not the first one into this area. Two other Row’s have made it into here already and are skirmishing up ahead.”
I narrowed my eyes in frustration as I crept forward through the slight fog, lowering my lamp to point at the floor. I whispered back at him, my voice barely audible in the muffled tunnel. “That would have been nice to know a few hours ago, Max.”
“I didn’t want you to give it away with your stupid human reactions. You’re scowling and complaining already, which are translated pretty clearly as pheromones to the bugs. Do you think you could have kept that emotive face of yours in check if I had told you earlier?”
I frowned, not wanting to admit he might have been right, and took another few cautious steps. “I guess we’ll never know.”
“Yeah, yeah. You keep telling yourself that. I knew, and I was right. You just have to take my word for it.”
Despite Max mostly existing as a voice in my head, I got the sense of him walking away from me and ending the conversation, somehow. I grumbled to myself and continued to cautiously advance into the misty tunnel as it started to level out and widen.
After a harrowing moment of losing track of both sides of the cave, I decided to stick to one side and keep one of the walls in sight. Getting lost in the stinky fog and wandering into one of the groups I’d been warned were already down here was near the bottom of the list of things I wanted to happen.
As I slowly pushed forward, I thought I heard some muffled movement, and maybe something like a harsh whisper coming through the fog. Weighing my options, I decided to extinguish my lamp and navigate by the darkvision Max was still providing me. To keep things plausible to anyone who might be watching, I trailed my fingers along the rough stone wall as I kept moving forward, focusing on the occasional muffled noises ahead of me in the dark.
It felt like half an hour, but after glancing at the clock in my HUD I had only been in the foggy tunnel for 10 minutes or so when I saw a sparking flash of light ahead of me. Dwarves cried out wordlessly, seemingly from all around me in the dark fog, and the sound of clashing metal and splashing footsteps started to bounce around the cave.
Multi-colored lights appeared, lighting up small sections of foggy cavern only enough to see fuzzy silhouettes as short squat bodies flung themselves at each other. I crouched down, watching the fights from a distance and hoping to not be noticed.
I opened my HUD and typed out a message to Bo, warning him of what I had discovered now that I had a valid reason to know that the room was already being fought over. He sent back a reply after only a few seconds.
Bomilik: Proceed with caution. Advance if you see an opportunity, try not to take large risks
I read the message, both appreciating the freedom his orders allowed for and resenting the lack of a clear directive. Such is the nature of orders, often making things both more difficult and simpler at the same time. Torn on if I should push forward while the fighting was ongoing and distracting the rival teams, or if it was better to wait and see how things played out, my fraying nerves pushed me towards action.
Leaving the comfort of the wall I had been following, I stayed low and ventured out into the fog. Marking my direction on my minimap and choosing a heading that I could easily retrace if I had to run for it, I moved towards the dim figures sporadically fighting ahead of me.
The room must have been quite large, as most of the lights seemed to be nearly a hundred feet distant, but the haze made it difficult to gauge just how far they were and caused the sound in the room to feel both near and far at the same time. Some clashes seeming to come from only a few feet away, while other shouts seemed to sweep in as if borne on the wind.
After a few dozen paces towards the center of the room, I noticed a change in texture and temperature beneath my feet. I felt a cold damp soak into my crude footwraps, and stooped low to wave the fog away from my feet to try to get a look.
It was nearly impossible to make any details out with the topographic darkvision Max was providing, so I reached down and touched the floor. The ground felt squishy, but was difficult to judge through the thick armor of my gauntlets.
Cautiously, I glanced around before pulling off one of my gauntlets and reaching down again. The floor felt weird; both squishy and lumpy, cold and wet, like watery mud mixed with rubbery lumps. I clamped down on the ‘eww, gross’ reaction that the feeling evoked within me and shook my hand as I pulled away, sending specks of whatever it was off into the darkness.
I pulled my gauntlet back on and used the scanning function to get a general idea of the chemical makeup of whatever it was.
It came back with a mixed readout, lots of organics as well as a large percentage of carbon and hydrocarbons. I studied the information box for a moment, confused as to what it meant, then copy-pasted it into my set of logs and closed my HUD.
The clashing continued, and I saw more lights start to pop up and be flung through the air to illuminate the room, one of which landed only a few paces ahead of me and splattered some of the glowing goo and whatever goopy mix was underfoot onto my face.
I flinched away as the cold specs splashed against me, and decided to not risk pushing forward into the obviously hostile rivals as they fought against each other. I scooped up a handful of the floor's gross coating and carefully slunk back into the dark outskirts of the cavern, retracing my steps back to the mound of blocks I had crawled through.
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The sounds of fighting were much more muffled as I waited by the pile of stones. The first thing I did was message Bomilik again, telling him what I had discovered and sending him a copy of the chemical readout I had taken. He had warned me to not crawl back through the crack, and that they expected to be breaking through soon. They had given up transporting the stones entirely out of the tunnel and instead were stacking them into defensive barriers within the corridor. They were moving much more quickly and without as much caution.
After what felt like an epoch of huddling in the dark, a whole twenty minutes, I started to hear the sounds of scraping tools and rolling stones on the far side of the pile of blocks. I sent Bo another message warning him that I could hear him on this side, and that the fighting seemed to be dying down in the far cavern. I also pestered him for his interpretation of what the readout of my gauntlets meant after he had failed to react to my earlier message.
Bomilik: We are nearly through. The readout you sent looks like a mix of fungus and crude oil, a strange addition to find this deep
I read his message, equally confused. As far as I knew, the Zk’aek did not use oil nearly as much as we humans had. It was much more rare in the natural habitat of their homeworld when compared with Eora, but there had to be something important enough to fight over in the cavern if the other Rows were risking being knocked out of the Trials for it.
“Want a hint?” Max teased, this time appearing in the darkness in his stick-man form. He was laying back on some long fold-up chair like you would find at a beach somewhere on a postcard, wearing a brightly colored and unbuttoned floral print shirt, and holding a bright pink drink with a little paper umbrella.
I scowled at him, to which he replied by turning his whole head into a laughing emoji for a moment. “Of course I want to know, quit messing around Max. Isn't this supposed to be important to our cause?” I hissed, my voice barely audible.
He took a sip from the drink and relaxed back into his chair, his face turning back to its normal impassive flat-mouthed line art. “Eh, sort of. It’s so boring though, I can barely stand it. You’re lucky you actually found a good way to keep me entertained elsewhere, I’m having tons of fun trolling some of the other monkeys. It’s hilarious how easy it is to piss some of them off, they get all red faced and gnash their teeth, sometimes they even break some of their own stuff. It nourishes whatever passes as my soul.”
I briefly worried over what he was getting up to with his trolling, but was too focused on the moment to pursue the distraction. “What’s this hint?” I questioned.
The corner of his flat line of a mouth pulled up slightly as he read my thoughts. He nodded and took another sip of his prop drink before replying. “Natural gas, first of all. Plus, when they built this whole maze they made sure this room was filled with all sorts of useful and dense deposits. It’s also the only place in the whole arena with sportrells. This room is intentional conflict bait.”
I heard a stone fall, and whipped my head around quick enough to see the tangled pile I was waiting near shift slightly as my Row continued to work their way through the blockage. I turned back to Max and tried to get some more information out of him.
“Sportrells? And can you see how the fighting is going?”
“They’re like big mushroom trees. The dwarves don’t really use them much here because they can gather lumber to use for the same purposes, but they’re like a traditional thing for them. The fighting has settled back down, Rocksturdy and Brightenjaw have both backed off after each losing one member and the rest giving eachother a mutual beating. All of the other Houses are in a similar position to your own, either in the process of breaking into the chamber or waiting on the sidelines for a good opportunity to appear.” He mimed another sip of his faux drink and crossed his legs as he lay back in his chair.
I wanted to smack him for his annoying display of relaxation, but pushed that thought away as useless. Getting under my skin was probably why he was doing it in the first place, and I couldn’t afford to let him drag me into his little game. “Do you think it's worth contesting this place?”
He tossed his drink over his shoulder and shrugged before pulling a pair of sunglasses out of nowhere, he put them onto his face and laid back as he answered. “It depends on how it all shakes out. You getting knocked out aint worth anything, so if there is any contesting to be done you should sit out of it. We’d have to rethink this whole situationship with the roaches if you wash out of the trials. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some deepfakes to post and bot into virality.”
With that said, and a dismissive wave of his nub, he disappeared from sight. I stared at the place he had winked out of existence from, surprised that he had dismissed me for once. Normally he was all too happy to eat up whatever scraps of my attention I could afford to give him. I was slightly curious about who he was messing with, but not enough to ask. Yet another thing to add to my ever expanding ‘when I have the time’ list.
I continued to wait, now alone in the pitch dark tunnel and listening to the faint noises of movement to both sides of me. Sitting still and hearing the muffled whispers coming in from the foggy battleground, interchanged with the shifting of rocks and faint clinks of pry bars on stone coming from the pile. It was torture. Being cornered into inaction was a nightmare that wore away at my resolve and forced my mind to spin in dark spirals around all of the bullshit I’d been through recently.
Why me? All I’d ever wanted was to be comfortable, to just live my life in peace. I didn’t want power and influence, or luxury and wealth. Yet here I was, stuffed into a dark dank hole with a bunch of aliens, harboring a fugitive a-hole that had hijacked my own damn body, being pressured into reaching for power and exploiting those placed under my care. It was unfair, infuriating, and there was no clear path out.
I was sick of it. I needed to do something, to make a difference somehow, to take charge of my own damn life. I hardly realized I had risen from my crouch near the pile of stones, or that I was leaving the wall behind and practically stomping into the middle of the hazy fog.
I saw the fuzzy blue outline of a tall motionless object, what must have been one of the sportrells Max was talking about. I reached up above my head and ripped a thick branch from the tree-like mushroom, it would have much better reach than the short handled hammer I had brought with me.
I think I heard some shouting, some more whispering and splashing footfalls in the dark as I cleared some smaller branches from the end. Quick moving silhouettes flashing over the faint blobs of light in the dark distance as I worked.
“What the hell do you think you're doing?!” Max yelled at me, appearing in front of me again. He pointed a nub at me. “Didn’t I tell you to leave the fighting to someone else? I look away for like two minutes and you start throwing a tantrum. You’re going to mess this whole- damn, too late, here they come.”
Max threw his arms up in the air in frustration and winked back out of sight. He was replaced by a red outline that flashed through the fog, blinking quicker and quicker as a highlighted dwarv ran towards me. Details were impossible to make out, but they held something long raised up above their shoulder as they quickly closed the distance.
Most of my anger washed out of me as my focus sharpened on my opponent. The truth was, I hadn’t been thinking, and never would have expected myself to make the decision I had just made. Jumping into reckless aggression without a plan, backup, or thought had burned me before and was something I’d resolved to never do again, yet was apparently doomed to repeat. All I knew is that I had to do something, to smash something, to not just sit there and wait for someone else to make the call. I’d done that far too often in my life, and wanted to be done with it.
At that moment, it was too late. I could beat myself up about it later. For now, I’d made a target of myself and it was time to shut up and dance.