Bomilik: We are secure. Do not approach forge room, enemy forces blocking path. Very glad to have you back, you are just in time. Kazek and Lokra are comatose, repairing injuries. Six left, you make seven. Need intel, have been pinned for hours. Be careful.

A loud crack hit me, followed by a rumbling blast of force–deeper than any thunder I had ever heard–that tousled my hair and shook a layer of dust from the ceiling and walls as it rocked through the undermountain.

“He sounds busy.” I thought towards Max. “The fuck was that though?”

“They’re tossing these crude grenade kinda things to hold them back. They’re using them about as fast as they can make them.”

I brought the map back to the center of my HUD, and saw that there were a half dozen of the rival dwarven markers retreating from the vertical shaft Jozoic and Sallis were defending. I made it to the central room of our portion of the maze, with the staircase we had descended from and the original partial map we had scrawled into the floor before moving to the vent room.

Glancing around and acting lost and confused gave me cover to mentally direct some more questions at Max. “Now we have an excuse to do… something. What though, I’m not sure yet.” I wanted to ask for advice; to have Max, or Bomilik, or even Rin give me something to work with.

“You could just like… no, that won't work. Maybe we…” Max’s voice faded to silence. “Well… fiddlesticks. They really… have us between a rock and a hard place, heh.”

I closed my eyes and let out a sigh, now was not the time for puns. “What’s the rest of the map look like?”

“Um, actually, the Bassaldourn bastard's territory is right next door and connected by that huge ravine. Plus, they only left 3 people behind. I’m just not sure we're supposed to get across the 30 foot ravine though.”

“That’s a good idea. Right… has no one built a bridge or anything?” My mind cast backwards, seeking out the memories of clearing the final rooms with Sallis. It had only been a day, but I’d spent around 22 non-stop hours dealing with everything that had happened back in reality, and It had been the longest damn day of my life. The longest day so far, anyway.

“Nah, both groups have pretty much decided to ignore the gorge. Prevailing wisdom must be that it’s not worth the resources when you’re not sure where it leads to and there’s a fight at hand. It’s obvious to us because we have the whole map, but it's less so to them.”

I turned around and dashed back off in the direction of the tar room. Realizing that if I had step one of the plan, I could use another of our signature moves. An ancient technique passed down generation after generation and spanning the whole of humanity. A move we call… winging it.

“Can you see anything we can grab to make a bridge out of? Or even like… some rope, or chain, I guess.” I mused as I retraced my steps.

“Not really? The row from Hammerting is making planks out of the sportrell trunks from the tar room, but they’re not 30 freaking feet long. No rope or chain either, cloth and fiber is hard to come by and chains are labor intensive.”

I reached out and grabbed a small outcropping on the rough hewn corner I was taking, using my hold on the wall to make a fast 90 degree turn and maintain my momentum. The metal plates of my gauntlets scratched along the surface before catching and digging into the stone. I kept running down the tunnel as I wracked my brain for a solution for crossing the gap, then nearly took a nose dive when I missed a leaping step over a puddle of mystery fluid in the middle of the corridor.

Whatever it was created a long smear from where I landed at the edge of the puddle, sticking to my heel. I stumbled with my next step, and then the coating of whatever it was that was still on my foot sent me into a tumble on the third. I managed to turn the fall into something resembling a roll and got back up on my feet as soon as I came to a halt.

I stood, grabbing my foot and holding it with one hand so I could see the cold liquid I could feel soaking through the crude foot-wraps my avatar still wore. I clipped my lamp to my chest and used my free hand to scrape the goop off of my heel. I brought it up to the light and discovered it was a patch of tar. Taking a second to look around revealed shattered bits of a stone bowl on one end of the puddle, and a clear trajectory of the spill as it widened out from the broken bits of stone.

I flicked my wrist and threw the handful on the ground, then tried to wipe the rest of it off onto the wall without much success. I pinched my fingers, watching as the dark sticky substance stretched out between my armored fingers, and an idea began to form in my mind that might work. My mind made up, I began to jog down the tunnel again.

“Oh…Ooooh. I think I see where you’re going.” Max answered my thought before I could even fully form it. “I think I can refine that and get you a formula, you’re going to need to gather up some of that tar, and some sportrell branches. Plus find a place to go through a couple of other steps to refine it all. We’ll need some of the remnants of that enzyme mix we saw around there too.”

“Epic,” I replied, “I have another idea too. That tar should burn pretty good even if we don’t alter it, right?”

“Totally.”

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After a harrowing quick trip back to the tar room, and about an hour of tinkering and testing in the old–hard to reach–squam room, our work was interrupted by a new message that pinged into my inbox. I read it out; first smiling, then feeling guilty, and finally a little self conscious.

Sallis: You're back! Yet you couldn’t deign to tell us plebeians on the frontline, ay? Good luck out there, try not to catch that outcropping you call a nose on the ceiling, stalactite scraper

I resisted the urge to touch my nose, and shook off some of the mix of gunk that was clinging to my gauntlets from the past hour’s work. My nose was fine, wasn't it? I’d never given it much thought, but her comment made me second guess my indifference, and I found myself unable to not notice it on the edge of my vision. My nose had always been with me, always unseen, yet never noticed.

With a shake of my head, I pushed the self conscious thoughts forcibly away and refocused. Sneaking into the tar room had been easy enough, it seemed the houses that had not chosen to attack were content to station a couple of guards to defend the entrance of their territories. I’d made it in and out of there in only minutes with a crude sack made from torn initiate's robe cloth full of tar and a couple of broken sportrell branches safely stashed in my inventory.

I needed to keep moving, but felt bad enough about not letting everyone else know that I asked Max to send the rest of the row a message for me.

Kaninak: I made it back. Sorry I missed so much, some real crazy stuff happened in the real world over here. I’ll tell you all about it when we get through this mess. I’m going to try to come to you through the chasm room on the far side, wish me luck.

I’d used the mix of ingredients I had on hand to mix up a couple of things. First using my gauntlets to crush up a couple of different minerals into powders and pastes, inside of a couple of small bowl-like depressions I’d carved into the stone floor. I cracked some of the tar’s hydrocarbons with my gauntlets by cranking up the pressure to a ridiculous degree and using the needle of high-pressure liquid to gouge out a vat and filling it partially with the altered mix of steaming chemicals.

It had been a messy, smelly, and dangerous process to cook up the mix of polymers from the tar and proteins from the fungus tree. Yet I still needed to make vessels for the mixes that I could carry in my bag because of the stipulation on my gauntlets that did not allow for them to pull directly from my inventory.

With Max providing the technical knowhow to refine my base ideas with his eidetic memory and vast knowledge base, we came up with a thick and quickly drying quartz compound that would crystalize with exposure to air, a slight alteration to a formula that the dwarves used themselves. I spent another half hour struggling to use my gauntlet’s fingertip to freehand 3D print out an array of ugly and misshapen bottles, which I then filled with the crudely mixed compounds I had created and sealed shut with more of the thick quartz paste.

What I was left with were 10 rough ampoules mostly about the size of my fist, filled with the chemicals I needed to enact the cobbled together plan for my mad-dash through the enemy territory to reach my row. Six of them were filled with a mix of polymers or protein heavy solutions, while the last slightly larger four were simply filled with tar and left open on the top so I could light them with the bright white flame of my lamp.

I stashed the six that contained my plan to get across the gorge in my tar-covered satchel, pulled the larger tar filled bottles into my inventory, and stepped back from my work space. I gave it a final look over, making sure I had grabbed everything I needed.

“Is the route through Bassal’s territory still looking clear?” I thought towards Max, turning my mind back to the vague step three of our plan.

“Bassal’s? Hah, they’re gonna love that, the Bassal-terds. To answer your question though, it’s not exactly clear, but I think it's do-able. With the fighting at a standstill, they’re sending a few raiders back and forth from their home bases with whatever useful loot they can get their grubby feelers wrapped around from our turf. However, they’re pretty disorganized. I think we can slip through if we’re careful, but we will have to break past a sentry and through their base team.”

That did sound do-able. I’d already proven I could bowl over one of the dwarves at a run when I stiff armed one of them at a sprint, and with a little luck the base team would be engrossed in whatever project they were working on and not be able to react in time before I crossed the room. On the map, the Bassaldourn sentry was posted right at the entrance to the circular forge room, rather than deployed some distance away like Jozoic and Sallis were with our own base. That was an oversight, and something we could exploit with a blitz to blow past them all.

A message pinged into my inbox, and reminded me that I had received and ignored another during my work with the chemicals. I’d been too busy at the time, managing multiple reactions and following complex instructions from Max that I only had a basic grasp of myself. I opened the newest one first.

Kikkelin: Glad you’re back, Nick! We were all worried when you just glitched out like that, with no portal or warning or anything. We thought something horrible had happened. Be careful!

Her message evoked some conflicted thoughts within myself, causing another pang of guilt that I had barely thought about my dwarven friends, yet painted with a note of warm acceptance for having been missed and worried over. I opened the next message, not having the time to think over my feelings.

Bomilik: Do you need anything setup on our side of the gorge? Sounds like a risky maneuver, but now is the time for such blind excavation. If you’re going to make a run through the divide, you need to make it quick. We expect trouble to start with the beginning of the final day.

I replied to Bomilik, telling him that I hoped to not need their help and that I would do my best to hurry. His ominous warning about the final day worried me, but there were so many worrying things going on that it faded into the buzzing backdrop of anxiety that had always been with me, but was particularly loud over the past month. Of course more trouble was on the way, that was my life.

To my shame, I delayed answering Kikkelin’s message. My thoughts were too focused on what I needed to do to make it through Bassal territory to sort through that mess right now. I was glad we seemed to be patching up our friendship, but now was not the time to finish the conversation we had started earlier, let alone explain how I had managed to not die when Max yanked me out of the game.

Unlike the mad-dash from the city I had just gone through, or even the previous escape from the tar pit, this time I felt calm. Intellectually, I knew that this was just as important. We absolutely needed the lifeline that the dwarves would be while we scratched a living outside of Arktria as countryless orphans. However, I just couldn’t make myself feel the same level of urgency and terror at the situation that I had felt during the battle with the rebels, or the escape from the city, or even watching Ali and Rin handle the pickup in Green’s Ash.

It was like a part of me knew that this was all a game, and no matter how vital it was that I succeed it just didn’t have the immediately fatal consequences that real world combat and danger held. Now that I had been exposed to actual war, fled from armies, and torn a victorious path though multiple groups determined to actually kill me, this all felt… different. Somehow lesser.

With a relatively cool and level head, I adjusted the strap of my satchel and the lamp clipped to it before I jumped down the chute and left the squam room behind.