Time Limit: 10 Hours, Forty-Eight Minutes
By the time we got back to Lake Station, Tori and I were both exhausted and covered in dust and dried blood. We’d been walking along the tracks for the better part of two hours, and we’d also re-checked Chicago and Grand for rugs. There were a few. Without the Weed Whacker, I couldn’t solo them, but Torrey needed the levels, and we figured out a strategy that used her Shockwave to buy us time while I set them up for self-tearing like the one I’d killed.
She was Level Twelve now. I hadn’t asked, but she’d told me anyway. And her Body and Awareness weren’t at her baseline anymore. But she was still a kid, and I didn’t want to include her in the upcoming fight more than I had to.
I’d have to, though. She’d learned a new spell, and that spell had immediately become a core part of my plan. I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, but the whole plan’s shape was still in my head, and if I slept on it, I was afraid it’d be gone.
Magic was like an engine—sort of. I’d been close to that revelation with the weed whacker, but with my Awareness skyrocketing, I could almost see the circuits in my mind even without thinking about them. The design was simple, really. At least, it was in theory.
I grabbed Calvin and Tori, then stepped into the mostly empty hardware store. “We’re going after the Redline Worm in eight hours. It’ll take me three or four to build my weapon for the fight. Calvin, you’re sitting the boss fight out.”
“Thank god,” he said. Then he glanced around the store. “Why am I here, then?”
“Because I need a third set of hands. I’m going to be holding the whole design together, and Tori’s going to help me manage the magic. You’re going to hang around and grab whatever I decide we need.”
He nodded. I stuck my unbroken earbud in my ear, and we got to work.
The next hour was a blur. Force magic operated completely differently from my lightning, and also differently from the air-shocks and trunk-lifts I was used to at the auto shop. We had something that could almost work after thirty minutes, but against the thing’s armor, it wouldn’t punch hard enough.
That was okay, though; that idea had been proof of concept and building an understanding of how my design interacted with Tori’s spells. My second idea was the one I was banking on. The one that had to work.
It also used Tori’s force magic. In fact, I didn’t see any way around using it. But this device was a lot simpler. It didn’t need to throw anything hard enough to punch through a train door. All it had to do was lift a ramp a couple of inches and then lower it slowly under a ton—or twenty—of weight.
In the end, the thing looked a lot like a skateboard ramp. It was about three feet long and made of solid steel with a gap in the middle. Two of the heaviest bolts Tori could find held it tight to a platform that rested on Lake’s concrete concourse.
I’d lashed two landscaping irrigation tubes to the sides and put every joint we could scavenge onto it, forming a maze of connections that branched and connected to a pair of plastic tanks under the ramp. Calvin had spent almost an hour carrying tank after tank of compressed air, propane, and anything else that looked like it was full of something over. The branching tubes led to the tanks; besides the propane, they all had basically no pressure, but that was okay. We didn’t need pressure. We had Tori.
The whole thing looked like a real mess, but, in theory, it’d do what it was supposed to.
In practice, it’d only work once, and it’d have to work perfectly. We wouldn’t get a test fire, and we definitely wouldn’t get a second shot.
I spent the next hour or two working on my own weapon. I had no illusions about whether Lightning Bolt could so much as scrape the Redline Wyrm’s scales, and the Weed Whacker wouldn’t stand up to its armor even if it hadn’t torn itself apart.
I’d beaten enough dents out of cars to know how to punch through the train’s body, though. Latent electrical magic flowed up and down wires as I wrapped them around a solid piece of steel pipe I’d lined with electrical tape. They led to a pair of ratchet wheels, one to each side of a table saw’s motor.
The blade was useless to me. So was the table. But the motor ran on electricity, and even though the station didn’t have any, I did. The tests had worked; the motor spun the ratchet wheels for about three seconds per Power Surge.
I’d bolted a sledgehammer to each ratchet wheel, then used my Lightning Bolt to ‘weld’ the hammerheads to claws from some nail hammers to their heads. They both hung down on either side of the pipe handle. It looked no better than the weed whacker had, but I felt confident it would do the job.
When the thing was done, I poured electricity into it with Power Surge. The second the lightning ripped into the motor, it started whining and revving. A split second later, both ratchet wheels clicked, and the hammers spun one hundred and eighty degrees before jerking to a stop and ripping the whole hammer out of my grip. It clattered on the ground as the hammers kept spinning.
I picked it up, looking at Tori. “Let’s see what it can do.”
She nodded and pointed at the nearest shelf. “Rock’s pretty tough.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Calvin and Tori stepped back as I hefted the thing over my shoulder. It was horribly unbalanced and weighed way more than I’d have been able to swing around a couple of weeks ago. Now, though, the weight was almost nothing. I poured another Power Surge into it, and the hammers spun back down to firing position, jerking my arms again.
I went into my inventory and equipped the Lock-Grip Gloves; I needed the extra grip more than the point of emergency Body for healing. Then I swung the hammer. It hit the limestone shelf, shaking it, but not knocking it to pieces. The ratchet let go, and both hammers turned into blurs.
The two claws hit the stone like a Mike Tyson punch, and the whole shelf exploded in a cloud of dust, gravel, and force. Tori jumped at the cracking sound. I didn’t. Even with the Lock-Grip Gloves and the extra point in Body, my arms shook and tingled. Without them, the whole hammer would have thrown itself back into my face. It hurt to lose my emergency heal from the point in Body, but it’d been worth it.
It did the job I wanted it to do. “Trip-Hammer,” I said, holding it up.
New Creation: Trip-Hammer, by Hal Riley
The Trip-Hammer uses electrical energy and salvaged parts from woodworking and landscaping tools to apply massive force to a small area. First created by Hal Riley of Earth.
I blinked the System message away. Was I the first person to think about using lightning magic like this? And if I was, why hadn’t the Weed Whacker gotten a System message? I didn’t have the answers, but I did have a hammer and a boss to fight.
“Okay, we’ve got a few hours. Rest up as far from the tracks as you can. I’ll wake you up when it’s time,” I said, shouldering the Trip-Hammer again and walking back toward Calvin’s cave.
“Amen to the rest,” Tori said, yawning.
----------------------------------------
Despite the mad dash around the whole Red Line circuit and my dead-tired arms and legs, sleep wouldn’t come. I tossed and turned on the cave floor for a couple of hours, then got up quietly. Calvin was a dead-silent sleeper, but Tori snored. I didn’t want to wake either of them, so I crept toward the door and sat down, watching the tracks.
The last few battery bombs were still in my inventory; I dumped them on the floor next to the Trip-Hammer and our mess of a wyrm-slaying contraption. A few hours ago, it had seemed like enough.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
The whole plan was riding on those tracks, and on the fact that they were still there even though the Redline Wyrm had expanded the tunnels out a dozen feet to either side as it grew. If the tracks were still there, it needed them. And that was our line of attack.
But what if I was wrong? What if the ramp didn’t fire correctly? Too many things could go wrong, and with only one shot at this, we were gambling on whether my theory was right.
I was right a lot when it came to machines—that was one of the big reasons Cindy kept me on her staff even though I wasn’t a certified mechanic. But I wasn’t always right. That damn Ford Explorer was probably still up there with its transmission torn apart because I hadn’t been able to figure it out.
It had only been a matter of time before I’d solved it, but I’d run out of time. Now, we were running out of time to deal with the Redline Wyrm.
“Hal?”
I glanced at the door. Tori stood there in her beat-up black pants and band shirt. “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
“No.” She sat on the wreckage next to me. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom. About whether she’s still out there or whether she’s going to pass her Tutorial.”
Tori hadn’t called her Jessica or step-mom. I raised an eyebrow questioningly.
“Yeah, I’m talking about Jessica,” she said. “This time.”
“She will. She didn’t pick Hardcore like us. She’s probably already out there, looking for you,” I replied. My parents weren’t. They’d be in Nebraska, and I was hundreds of miles away. They were probably trying to hold the farm together—if it still existed.
I tried to push them out of my head. I couldn’t get to them right now, and if there was anyone who could survive the end of the world, it was Mom. Dad was tough, but Mom? Surviving with her wouldn’t be fun, but she’d get anyone willing to toe the line through this or die trying.
“So…” Tori trailed off.
I recognized that one, too. “Subject change, huh? That was fast.”
“Yeah. We’re really going to do this, huh?”
“I don’t see what choice we have.”
She went quiet for a minute, and the Redline Wyrm rumbled past again. I resisted the urge to reach for the Trip-Hammer. Tori fidgeted on her seat until the shaking stopped, then brushed dust off her face. “Are we going to win?”
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t tell her that we didn’t have a choice, even though that was the truth. We both sat there on the hardware store’s cold stone floor and waited as our timers ticked down until, eventually, she stood up.
“Alright, I’m going to try to sleep again.”
“Good luck,” I said absent-mindedly. The Trip-Hammer looked right, but as I stared at it, places where the mana flowed poorly stood out in a blue-black glow.
But she didn’t leave right away. I could feel her standing at the door for almost a minute before she turned around. “Hal, you’re not gonna tell Jessica I stayed up worrying, right?”
I shook my head. “I already forgot you said anything. Get some rest.” I listened to her walk away, and to the tell-tale rumbling getting closer.
The answer hit me as one of the Redline Wyrm’s passing collapsed the turnstilagmites. The problem with the Ford Explorer’s transmission wasn’t its transmission at all. It’d been so sooty in there, and I couldn’t figure out why, but I’d be just about willing to bet my job it was a fuel system issue. The inflow probably wasn’t matching the gear’s needs, so it felt like the transmission was messed up.
That didn’t help me or the woman who’d been trying to reach Wyoming now, of course, but it did confirm what I already knew. If I had the time to work on a problem, I could solve it.
I fished my music player out of my pocket.
The screen was shattered. It didn’t turn on, but that wasn’t a surprise. But the buttons clicked right. That was a start. I set it and the headphones out on the concrete and got to work.
The problem wasn’t the damage; I couldn’t fix that. The real problem was the lack of power. I pulled the Imbuing Rod out, looked at it, and tried to find a switch or something—anything that might turn it down. If I fried the iPod’s electronics, that’d be the end.
I found it eventually and slid it down to the minimum power. Then I put the unbroken earbud in my right ear, plugged it into the bottom of the iPod, and carefully put the smallest Power Surge I could into the rod.
The tip of the rod touched the iPod, and for about five seconds, I heard Motley Crue’s ‘Kickstart My Heart.’ I couldn’t help it—a shit-eating grin plastered itself across my face. I spent the next half-hour pouring every ounce of my energy into the iPod, blasting through a dozen or so songs. Finally, as the last notes of ‘We Will Rock You’ faded and the next song began, I couldn’t keep it up anymore.
I’d been working on the Hardcore Tutorial problem for over two solid days—longer than I’d worked on a single machine since the station wagon. This was going to work. It had to, because I’d seen the whole dungeon, and with our skill sets, this was the only solution.
The next song was ‘We Are the Champions,’ but that’d have to wait until tomorrow.