Three days pass uneventfully. Each of the new rooms we find turn out to be smaller versions of the first one, and they all eventually turn into dead ends. The first day we explored one new room. The second three. And at the end of the third–technically fourth–day, we rush through seven vendigator and sunflower cannonade filled rooms like people possessed. Leading us to one last dead end that’s seriously confusing, since we aren’t any closer to finding what we’re here for.
Meaning my skill didn’t work. Or that of the two options I gave it, neither was ever going to lead us where we actually wanted to go.
“Well, this is some bullshit.” Ursula mutters as she smacks the butt of her fist against a giant chunk of salt. “Vendigator after vendigator, sunflower after sunflower, and we’re nowhere closer to finding the damn coins. How the hell could that first room be so much more dangerous than any of the others?”
I shrug, but I agree with everything she just said. “Probably has to do with the fact that we’ve killed all the vendigators before they could get purified. Except for this one, I guess.”
My toe nudges a mound of see-through salt that’s currently in the progress of murdering a vendigator. Just like before, all the sunflowers stopped shooting when the vendigator appeared. And just like before, the salt is taking it over like a parasite. A horrifically purifying parasite.
“Still think this is going to be pointless.” Ursula grumbles, but backs away nonetheless. “I’ll keep it locked in place. You blow away the entirety of its body ‘cept for the tail and the head. Promise you’ve got good enough control for that? Because I don’t think we’re getting a… thirteenth chance at this.”
“Well, we should’ve done this thirteen times, then.” I cross my arms and ready a projectile as the salt crystal starts to vibrate. “But someone insisted that they needed a bunch of easy apocalypse-touched monster samples.”
Ursula nods once. “Yeah, Architect. What’re you going to do with nine of these damn things anyway?”
“Research how the krarig cloned an apocalypse touched monster.” March replies easily. “There definitely weren’t thirteen missing vending machines in the cafeteria break room. And after looking through all the requisitions and plans, there were only eleven of them in the entire rig. You’ve seen more than that already, and they’re nearly perfect clones of each other, down to the snack scraps hanging off their body.”
“And only a psychopath would stock every single vending machine with the exact same stuff.” Ursula finishes. “Alright, yeah, that makes sense. But why nine? Couldn’t we have let the salt take a few of ‘em?”
“I have my plans.” March giggles cryptically. “I wanted ten, but you guys had to destroy too many of them. So we’re all unhappy right now.”
I roll my eyes at March’s giggles, but yeah, she’s right. I have almost a hundred Worth and a new shellraiser glass blueprint to show for the three vendigators that don’t exist any more, but no body parts. At all. They all ate panic-thrown projectiles that weren’t really meant to do as much damage as they did.
The salt purified vendigator bursts free of its shell with a screeching bellow. Ursula grabs it by the neck and slams it hard to the ground, shattering clover in a good five foot radius from the shockwave alone. In the moment the thing is stunned and surprised she wrenches its jaws open with hands protected by magical gloves, and I dash in with a regular ghost quarter filled with a projectile that I eyeballed to de-torso this monster.
I nod at her. She nods back, releases the vendigator, and rolls away to a safe distance. It shakes the shock off, tenses its back legs in preparation, and dies. Metal shears away in a controlled burst, scrapping but not fully destroying it in an explosion that’s a little smaller than it needed to be.
“Man, why were we even scared of this thing in the first place?” Ursula asks as she leans down to pick up the head and about three inches of neck. “One well placed grenade or projectile in its belly and it’s done. I–HEY!”
The head snaps at her, and she smacks it on the tip of the nose. I watch as she fights it a little, eventually unlatching her belt to tie it’s jaws together after she gets a few scrapes of her own.
“Guess it doesn’t need the rest of the body to live.” I point out helpfully.
“Gee, you think?” Ursula grimaces down at her arms. “Damn thing almost bit my hand clean off. And it looks like it’s going to try again the second the salt works away at the belt. Well, news for you, buddy–that’s a magic belt. You’re not going to break through that no matter how hard you try.”
I raise an eyebrow as I carefully lean down to pick up the tail. Which contains a good four inches of ass that I didn’t intend to be carrying right now. “You think your magic belt’s going to stand up to the debuff that took your mana away?”
“Yes. My stuff is way stronger than I am.” Ursula summons another belt and straps the vendigator head onto her back. “Architect–you sure there’s not any hidden passageways we’re missing? Or have you made any progress on revealing the hidden bonuses on the debuff?”
“Yes and… a little?” March shifts audibly in her seat. “I looked through your Class Card, Mercenary, and there’s a bunch of empty spaces that should have stuff in them. So they’re definitely listed in your Class Card, I just don’t have any way to find out what they actually are.”
Now that’s news to me. I hold up a finger for Ursula to wait and pull up my own Class Card, swipe over to my buffs and debuffs, and stare intently at the space underneath horrendous purification. …If I had more than one debuff right now, then maybe I’d be able to determine anything from–
No, wait. Horrendous purification might be the last thing listed, but there’s a little space between it and the top of the list. Just enough space for another buff or debuff to be listed.
“Hey.” I tap my Class Card and nod at Ursula. “How much space is between the top of your Class Card and your first buff?”
Ursula raises an eyebrow and opens her own Card. “Pretty much nothing. And if I scroll down quite… a… bit… yup, there’s Horrendous Purification in the list. With an empty space right before it, which is probably where one of those ‘positive effects’ should go. Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.” I mutter to myself as I play with my Class Card a little more. “How do you have your buffs sorted? Chronologically?”
“Yeah?”
I nod to myself and fiddle with the description at the top of my Class Card. There’s got to be some way to make this sort another way–alphabetically, inverse chronology, time remaining–anything, really. If I can get it to do that, then we should be able to use Ursula’s buff list to narrow down at least a little info on the extra effects.
“It just doesn’t make sense why it’s coming in two parts.” I muse in frustration at the immutability of my Class Card. “The debuff itself says we’ve got positive effects–there’s no reason to show them anywhere but the debuff. But they’re being listed as an individual thing. Why?”
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“Multiple things, actually.” March corrects me. “Mercenery’s Class Card has one space before it, one after it, and another two placed in between buffs she got later on.”
“So the debuff’s constantly adding new shit to us?” Ursual says with a grimace as she shifts uncomfortably. “That’s not a low-level debuff. Hell, it’s probably one of the stronger ones we’ve ever come across.”
“Yeah, and if this thing wasn’t annoying to work with, we might be able to find something out.” I sigh and send my Class Card away with no success. “But apparently we can’t change how this thing sorts. Which is going to be a real pain in the ass if I ever get more than ten buffs at once.”
Ursula pulls her lips into a tight line and hums in agreement. “You don’t know how many times I’ve tried exactly what you just did. At least a hundred, but probably getting close to a thousand. You want to bring these vendigator parts back up before we try to find another way?”
I mime pulling the pin on a grenade. “Might as well kill two birds with one stone, no?”
“Might as well, yeah.” Ursula agrees, reaches into one of her shoulder bags, and hands me a bunch of weird-looking explosives. They almost look like cartoon drills strapped onto bundles of plastic explosives. “Spare some Worth to spare us the walk back?”
I tuck them under one arm and the vendigator tail under the other. “Nope. It’s a half hour walk–you’ll survive it.”
She groans theatrically. “You’re the enemy of feet everywhere.”
“From what I’ve seen on the internet, I’ll take that title.” I heft the tail onto my shoulder and gesture through the field of salt clover. “When I’m a millionaire, I’ll relocate you for something as little as going out for ice cream. But not now.”
“Thresholds and spells, I gotcha. Doesn’t mean I want to walk with this thing trying to bite my head off.” Ursula smacks the vendigator’s struggling head with the back of her palm, then shakes it with a hiss. “Ow. Why’s it still got to be sharp? And alive?”
----------------------------------------
“Alright,, when you’ve got them all packed in there, press your fingertip to the little black square and spin it around completely.”
I press my fingertip to the first black square and spin it around once. The explosive clearly beeps one time, and the square turns from black to blue. That seems right, so I repeat it until all of them are brilliant blue and look back at Ursula for confirmation.
She stares down from the top of the hole and gestures for me to move away a little. I shift my torso to give her a better look, and after a second, she gives the thumbs-up.
“Perfect-o. Now that they’re armed, you’ll want to get the hell out of there. Yeah, they’re burrowing charges, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe to stand on top of the holes they’re going to make.”
I swallow hard and look down at the field of explosives at my feet. Ursula extends a hand to help me out, and I take it without a second of hesitation. Once I clamber out of the hole I glance back at the explosives, then take a few generous steps back before my awareness lets me start feeling slightly safe.
“Warn a girl the next time you want her to arm a bunch of explosives.”
“...What else did you think you were doing? Planting flowers to replace the clover you blew up?”
Okay, sure. Maybe it’s obvious in hindsight, but in my brain, ‘arming explosives’ is synonymous with valiant sacrifices and accidental deaths. That could just be because of all the action movies I watched as a kid, but still–does she not have a remote detonator?
The woman in question looks down into the pit one last time, then nods to herself and starts walking towards me. And keeps walking with a gesture for me to follow her even further away from the hole. Completely rationalizing my discomfort with unknowingly arming the things we apparently need to stand extremely far away from.
“You might want to relocate us the hell out of here.” She warns as she pulls something that looks like a staple gun from one shoulder bag. “Just in case this entire floor collapses from the chain explosions.”
“I thought you said it wouldn’t be that bad.”
She knits her eyebrows together in confusion as she taps her earpiece three times. “Never said anything like that.”
The lever on the detonator clicks softly. A cacophonous whir like the keening grind of a hundred cement saws in unison fills the silence all at once, and I have to stifle the surprised scream that threatens to rip from my throat. Pearl’s isn’t stifled at all, which would be a huge problem if March wasn’t super sensitive to sudden, loud sounds. My awareness flares as the first ringing explosion sends echoes through the salt floor, and almost completely by instinct, I pull on both strings connecting me and Ursula to the coins back at basecamp.
It… takes a second to work. Shards of salt burst into the air on currents of compressed magical shockwaves. Cracks shoot through the carpet of clover, spreading from the hole and forking out like unmaking lightning. My awareness winces and flinches away as the suffocating presence of something else lands on us–something huge, otherworldly, and completely indescribable. Almost like gravity.
And within it, something much smaller. Like a flicker of static during a song I’ve heard a thousand times before. It’s so much less dangerous than the primal force, but there’s something distinctly human about it.
Nothing good can come from that.
Then we’re both standing in the little office like nothing completely weird just happened. I sniff once, then double over in a coughing fit as salt assaults and burns my sinuses. Ursula says a few things I can’t hear over my own misery, and March replies a second later. A hand pats on my back, and I look up through teary eyes to see a slightly perturbed look in place of Ursula’s usual effortless confidence.
“I figured we’d draw some attention, but that was way faster than it had any right to be.” She sighs and hands me a bottle of water that I cradle like a precious gemstone. “They must’ve been way closer than we gave ‘em credit for–probably caught on to the fact that a krarig’s about to be born in just a few short days.”
“The preservation?”
Ursula nods. “Architect, where’d that blip come from?”
“I’m checking that out right now. Oh, that’s weird.” March muses along to the sound of her tapping fingers. “It’s coming from sea level. They must be on a… just a second, I’m getting a better look at it right now.”
“On a boat?” Ursula finishes, then turns to look at me. “How’s that possible? The waters around here are terrible.”
“Yes, they are. But they’re on a really weird boat. It looks like a yacht sized speedboat, and it’s cutting through the waves like an icebreaker.” March relays with an upturn of confusion in her voice. “Definitely magic, that’s for sure. It almost looks like something I could make.”
“Then it’s going to make it here, no doubt about it.” Ursula sighs in annoyance and drops the vendigator head down on a table. I curl the tail up next to it. “How long until we can expect visitors?”
March hums deep in her throat. “For just the distance, I think it’ll take about eight hours. Maybe more if they need to stop the boat for any reason. There’s a dock and an elevator on the northwest side of the rig, which is where they’ll come in from. Destroy that and they’ll be stuck finding some other way onto the rig.”
Ursula grabs a rocket launcher and hefts it over her shoulders. “I’ll get on that. Gambler, give it fifteen minutes and then go back into the depths. See if the explosion uncovered anything important, and if it did, relocate me down with you. We’ll talk strategy for the inevitable meetup later.”
All I can get out is a thumbs-up before Ursula throws the door open, walks past the elemental that’s still floating right there, whipping up salt like a mild dust storm, and slams it shut before it can try to get back in. I glance down at everything we’ve got–without magic, there’s no way we can keep all this safe and hidden from the preservation. Then there’s the giant ‘people are here’ landmark that is the helicopter–so there’s no point in trying to hide much of anything.
I open my Class Card and stare at my inventory. The plain white stone mask stares back at me–quite possibly an answer to one of our problems, but definitely not to all of them. A plan starts to brew in the corners of my mind, but I put it on the backburner until Ursula’s here to talk it over.
Two pre-made relocation-filled coins spill onto the table, and I latch onto the one in the depths with newfound fervor. There’s no way the preservation’s just here to deal with the krarig–not on a speedboat without any visible weapons.
They’re here for some other reason. Maybe the same one we are.