Fizzy sat cross legged atop a pile of junk. Her eyes were closed and she was leaning forward with her hands pressing against the scrap beneath her. The radioactive waste she had foolishly smeared all over the walls bathed her in a soft blue light, a constant reminder of why she should not tamper with things she did not understand. She honestly felt like it was a small miracle she hadn’t been slapped with Zephyra’s Taboo yet, but there was no telling what might happen in the future. Even if the damage was already done, it definitely had the potential to get worse, and the golem had not made a single effort to contain or clean up the contamination.
Truthfully speaking though, what could she really do? It had already seeped into the rocks to a degree that it was impossible to wash off. And even if she somehow did that, she had nowhere to store the bright blue goop. This crisis was already well beyond a single golem’s abilities to rectify it, even though she was more or less solely responsible for it. Therefore, Fizzy had decided to stop mess around with something that was beyond her comprehension before she made it any worse. She would instead focus her attention on getting herself out of this damned hole.
At least that was an issue she might actually succeed in resolving.
“There it is!”
Having located what she was looking for with Metallopathy, the golem began digging through the mountain of scrap. She rifled through it for a few minutes, being careful not to damage any potential salvage even further. Eventually she managed to get the thing she was looking for - an iron sprocket that was about the size of her head. She promptly healed the corroded metal with her magic, but even that wasn’t enough to restore it to prime condition. The ravages of time had robbed the cogwheel of a few of its many teeth, which rendered them beyond the Paladin’s ability to repair.
That was fine though. Even if it wasn’t ideal, it was the best she could hope to get out of the Original Artificer’s century-old junkyard. She’d spent the past eight hours or so looking for one of these, and was loathe to keep searching for more. Finding a specific part amidst this scrap heap was like looking for a needle in a nailstack, so she decided to just make do with what she had.
Clutching her new find in her shiny fist, Fizzy climbed out of the pit she’d made. She walked down and then away from the massive junk pile at a rapid pace, arriving at her makeshift workshop shortly after. Here she was using a large steel plate she had dredged up as a workbench. On top of it lay a myriad of salvaged parts and tools, all scattered around a curious cylindrical contraption that was almost as big as she was.
Having been cobbled together from various bits and pieces gave Fizzy’s new project a rather dissonant appearance. The welded plates that made up its outer shell were all mismatched and made out of different metals. The panel that was opened up and allowed a glance at its inner workings revealed a haphazard mess of cogs, springs, coils and wires that were clearly never meant to be part of the same mechanism. Objectively looking at it, this whole thing looked like it was being held together by spit and wishful thinking. Which, considering the fact that golems couldn’t salivate, was something of a testiment to Fizzy’s ingenuity.
As for the Artificer herself, she wasted no time in getting to work. She grabbed a screwdriver and began taking apart the device’s innards. After a short while, she pulled out a sprocket similar to the one she had just found, except that this one was a size smaller. She replaced it with the slightly bigger one and deftly reassembled the rest of it.
Once she was done, she reached over and spun a metal drum inside the contraption with her hand. Its innards began clicking and clanking in response as the mechanism was put through a quick dry run. Its clockwork heart skipped a few beats due to several of its components being flawed, but it worked for the most part.
Satisfied with the outcome, Fizzy tightened the last few bolts and screws into place and closed up the panel. She walked around to one side of it where there was a circular opening and shoved a meter long metal pole into it. She then went to the butt-end of the cannon-shaped device and used some cables to hook it up to the electric charge pack she brought with her from the surface.
With her preparations complete, the golem turned on the portable power generator, and her creation began spooling up. It rattled and vibrated as if trying to shake itself apart, but remained intact until the humming and buzzing noises coming from it reached their peak. Fizzy then pulled a lever sticking out of the side, causing the metal pole she’d inserted earlier to shoot out of the barrel with a heavy thud. It flew across the underground cavern and made impact with its wall some thirty meters away.
The golem powered down her makeshift railgun and went to inspect what had become of her projectile. She had aimed it at a two meter wide metal plate she had leaned against the wall earlier, but the results were far from what she expected. The steel rod had veered so far to the right that it had completely missed not only the bullseye, but the target itself, causing it to become embedded halfway into the rock wall.
“Damn, too much lateral divergence, huh?” she lamented out loud.
“It was still a lot better than the last time we tried,” commented Plus.
“That’s an understatement. At least the power behind it was adequate. I’ll try recalibrating it a bit to see if I can compensate for all the shaking.”
“You sure this is a simple matter of recalibration? I mean, I know this is your design and all, but still…”
“It’s not really mine though,” argued the golem. “Most of it is based on the mag-rail’s drive core. I’m just trying to replicate it on a smaller scale.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Fizzy. You did all this in a cave with a box of scraps. Even if it’s not wholly original, that’s gotta count for something!”
“I suppose you have a point there. I guess I’ll see about getting a patent for the launching mechanism once we get back topside, but right now I need to see if I can get those parts to properly work together.”
With that said, the Artificer resumed tinkering with and fine-tuning her creation. After about three more hours she had improved the accuracy to a point where she was consistently hitting the target. Getting a shot onto the bullseye was more or less impossible without a good deal of luck, though.
“Hmm… What’d you think, Plus? Good enough?”
“More than enough, if you ask me. I say we load her up and move out!”
“Yeah, might as well.”
Having made up both of her minds, Fizzy lifted the rail launcher onto her shoulder and walked off towards one of the many tunnels leading out of the cavern. The glow from the irradiated trash pit at her back began to fade rapidly once she headed down the passage in question. Yet at the same time she didn’t have difficulty seeing where she was going since she had unintentionally become her own light source. Fizzy’s mithril frame had soaked up so much radiation over the past ten days that she was currently glowing with a ghostly white light. She wasn’t sure when it had happened or what sort of consequences this stuff might have, but as Plus put it, it was better than falling down a hole because she couldn’t see it.
After about half an hour of walking she reached an old iron cart track with a pair of plain mining carts on it. She loaded her newest creation into the rear cart, as the one in front was already full with bits and pieces she’d prepared earlier. With her luggage safely secured, the golem began pushing both carts forward. The wheels squealed and groaned as they went, which was mostly because Fizzy didn’t have grease or oil for them. Even if her magic restored these rust buckets to serviceable condition, reapplying the lubricants was beyond her means.
As the golem train made its way down the passage, Fizzy began to pick up on skittering and crumbling noises both in front and behind. The fact she could pick those up over the racket the carts were making was a testament to how loud those foreign sounds were, which in turn implied there were lots of things making them.
However, nothing would dare charge out of the darkness at the glowing golem.
Stolen story; please report.
Past experiences had made the arachnid shardlings that made their home in this part of the tunnels quite wary of attacking the shiny stranger. They tried the first time she passed through here, but were soundly beaten up by Fizzy and her Iron Teeth. The ones that escaped the battle passed away several hours later due to the lethal dose of radiation they had exposed themselves to. Hence why this particular swarm of crystalline scorpions were actively avoiding engaging her in battle. Even if they somehow won, they’d all end up dying from radiation poisoning anyway.
At least for the most part. There were some individuals among the shardlings that had somehow grown resistant to the radiation after being exposed to it, though it had also mutated them. Not the useful kind of mutation where they grow extra limbs or become larger, either, but the type that left them with grotesque tumors. These lumps of anomalous flesh would spill out from beneath their gem-like carapace, resulting either in limited range of movement, general sluggishness, higher vulnerability to attack, or all three at the same time.
The bottom line was that even the ones that would survive just being in Fizzy’s presence would be far too weak to actually pose a threat to her. Under such circumstances, the shardlings had tacitly agreed to stay out of her way. Things might have been different if this were a dungeon, but the lack of a dungeon core egging them on meant the monsters were quite happy to obey their survival instincts.
Which was decidedly a good thing from Fizzy’s perspective. Sure, killing these gigantic scorpions was good XP, but they might damage her equipment if a fight broke out here and now. Although her mithril hide was resistant to it, those things had a corrosive breath that played havoc on non-magical metals. For instance, the tracks she was pushing the carts along were already covered in rust even though she had fixed them up just a few days ago. True, it wasn’t too big of a deal since she could just use her magic on them again, but it was still an annoying diversion.
After spending the better part of a day crossing a distance of about sixty to seventy kilometers, Fizzy finally arrived at her destination. The straight and narrow tunnel she had been following suddenly gave way to a massive cavern that had a literal river of lava running through it. This magma flow was actually the root of the golem’s current problem, as it left a gaping chasm at least twenty meters wide that impeded her progress.
“Well… here we are again, I suppose,” she mused aloud.
“Y’know, I was kind of hoping the lava would get bored and leave while we were gone. I don’t suppose just waiting around until it cooled down is an option?”
“Uh, no. Well, I guess it kinda is, but I’d probably go senile before this stuff cools down.”
“… Can golems even go senile?”
“I’d rather not find out down here, thank you very much. Besides, it’s important to hang onto what little reputation I have up there.”
Even though things had gone horribly awry, Fizzy still wanted to get admitted into the Ritz and pursue her goals as an Artificer. To that end, she had to actually leave this accursed underground, and this tunnel was her best bet. It was the only one that had been dug out by people rather than monsters, as evidenced by the presence of actual mining equipment.
She just wished she had realized earlier that heading down the sole square tunnel was probably better than wasting her time with all the circular ones. At the very least the environmental disaster she unleashed had boosted her Metal Golem Job all the way up to Level 43, so it was by no means a total waste. She still got the odd message of things dying from the poisonous goop once or twice a day, but for the most part there appeared to be no more survivors left in its wake.
Then there was the matter of whether her poisonous presence was permanent or not, but that was a problem she could address once she got out of here. Her biggest concern right now was getting safely across that molten chasm. She could clearly see more mining cart tracks on the other side of it, which disappeared down a tunnel on the opposite side. There were also some remains of a collapsed bridge on either side of the chasm, so it was quite obvious the tracks passed over the lava flow at some point. She couldn’t be sure whether they led to the surface or not, but she was definitely bound to find something on the other side there.
Which was where her latest creation came into play.
Fizzy wasted no time and pushed the two mine carts closer to the red-hot crevasse. She reached into the leading one and pulled out numerous steel rods of varying length and thickness. She then hastily assembled a sort of tri-legged scaffold like an artist’s easel, although its legs had been hammered into the rocky ground to provide stability. Next, she carefully lifted the makeshift rail cannon out of the rear cart and affixed it to the tripod platform.
After confirming everything was securely bolted in place, she returned to the first mine cart and took out a heavy-duty roller chain, which had links about the size of her fist. She had retrieved this particular article from the wreckage of that iron giant that fell with her. It seemed like that colossus’s fists were designed to be launched as projectiles and this thing would then be used to reel them back in. Frankly speaking, it was a bit of a ludicrous design idea, but if any chain could stand the sort of strain involved, it would be this one. Fizzy had already personally confirmed its toughness and deemed it more than suitable enough for her purposes.
She dragged the absurdly long string of metal links over to her cannon and fed it into the special compartment at the back until it spilled out of the front. She then returned to her improvised parts wagon and retrieved the final piece - a meter-long grappling hook of her own design. She connected the butt end of it to the chain and then armed the cannon with it, thus completing her preparations.
“So… moment of truth?” asked Fizzy with a smirk on her face.
“Hell yeah!” cheered Plus. “Let’s show this lava who’s boss!”
A flip of the switch and a spool of the coils later, the prototype Insta-Bridger™ fired its payload. The grappling hook flew beautifully through the air while dragging the heavy chain with it. It crossed the twenty meter gap with little to no difficulty even with the added weight, landing squarely in the middle of an outcropping of rocks.
“Alright! Direct hit!”
Fizzy grasped the chain and pulled on it with a celebratory shout. The grappling hook successfully got caught on the rocks, causing the chain to go taut. The golem then unbolted the Insta-Bridger™ from its tripod and disassembled the stand. She then drove the freshly liberated steel rods through the chain’s links, effectively nailing it to the ground. She pushed the rail cannon forward towards the ridge until half of it dangled over the lava. The golem completed her preparations for stage two by turning her portable power pack back on and putting the rail cannon’s firing mechanism in reverse.
Then, in a move that would normally be considered pure madness, Fizzy straddled the Insta-Bridger™ and pulled the trigger. With both ends of the metal tether securely locked in place, the device ended up pushing itself and its passenger across the chasm at high speeds while using the chain as a guideline. It only took about a second for it to reach the other side, whereupon it crashed into the cliff edge, throwing the mentally unstable Artificer onto the rocky ground.
Fizzy picked herself up and dusted herself off, then glanced towards her creation. The Insta-Bridger™ had adopted an appearance that was closer to a Insta-Crushed-Can™. The abused device hung on for a few more seconds before it split apart, fell off the chain, and plummeted into the lava below where it would become Insta-Molten-Scrap™.
“Well,” she said after a short pause, “that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
The chain that held up the device and herself had sagged way more than she intended. If it wasn’t for that, she would’ve had enough height to clear the ridge safely.
“I guess this supersteel stuff has more give to it than I thought.”
The material she was referring to was the strange metal that made up the chain that carried her. It was the same material that the Vault’s doors and a lot of the Original Artificer’s stuff was forged out of. It looked like steel but was better than the stuff in almost every way, so ‘supersteel’ definitely seemed like an apt label for it.
“Uh, Fizzy? Not for nothing, but even if we didn’t hit the ledge, wouldn’t we have just smacked head-first into the rocks where the grappling hook is?”
“Yeah, that was the original plan.”
“So… you went through this knowing full well that thing you worked so hard on would be Insta-Smashed-Beyond-Repair™?”
“Stop that.”
“Sorry.”
“And yeah, I did.”
“So… how is this outcome any worse from the one you expected?”
“We were supposed to have solid ground under our feet when it happened. Not a river of molten rock.”
“Right. Good point.”
The mithril golem and her alter ego continued to watch silently as the heavy-duty chain rattled quietly over the river of lava.
“We’re not going back there again, are we?”
“Nope.”
“And we just lost our trusty electric charge pack.”
“Yup.”
“Well… poop.”
“Quite.”
The pair fell silent again as they continued to stare at the metal chain. The way it swayed gently in the hot air current drifting up from underneath had an almost hypnotic quality to it.
“At least we still have our fancy new wrench, right?”
“Yeah. The Iron Teeth is in the Bag of Holding strapped to my back.”
“That’s good, because I think we’re going to need it in the next few seconds.”
“Funny. I was just thinking the same thing.”
After all, what were the odds that the rhythmic thumping noise coming out of the tunnel behind her was being made by something friendly?