Awaken Online- Flame

by Travis Bagwell

  And why she had endured it…

  “Shit,” Julia muttered, interrupting Finn’s thoughts. He looked up to see that she was swiping at the air. “We’re at the bottom of this hellhole.”

  Finn assumed she must have been looking at her map. Although, he didn’t really need to pull up the screen to see the truth of her words. He only needed to look up to see the open sky shining far above them – a tiny yellow-white circle of light. He had been so concerned about surviving that he had briefly forgotten about the competition.

  His eyes skimmed the area around them, taking in the massive columns of glass that littered the area along with their blood and piles of glass fragments that were sprinkled across the ground. Altair’s words were fresh in his mind.

  The bottom levels are the worst – where the mana pooled and collected, Altair’s words echoed through Finn’s mind.

  He also hadn’t missed the notification that he had seen during their free fall.

  This place was a dungeon, and their respawn point had been reset.

  Now that he had more time to think about it, a glimmer of hope flickered through Finn’s thoughts. Could that be a way back up the Abyss? Could they simply kill themselves? Maybe all of that pain they had just endured had been for nothing…

  Yet he immediately hesitated. It wasn’t clear where they would respawn. The prompt had indicated that there were multiple respawn locations inside the dungeon. If they killed themselves, they could end up anywhere – including somewhere much worse than here. They also couldn’t risk testing the respawn. What if they didn’t all end up in the same place? That would just leave them separated and scattered throughout this massive dungeon.

  There were simply too many unknown variables.

  All of this passed through Finn’s mind in an instant – the conclusion inevitable and causing a sinking feeling to settle in his stomach.

  They couldn’t risk dying down here.

  Finn met his daughter’s eyes, seeing the same realization reflected there. They might have escaped the sand wraiths, the ambush by the other champions, and survived the fall, but it looked like their problems had only just begun.

  Chapter 15 - Elemental

  Bilel’s Journal – Entry 65

  After my encounter with the injured mage, I conducted additional experiments involving the man’s damaged Najima. In general, these nodes appear to be another type of bodily system, much like our arteries or organs. Minor damage will heal over time, and the destruction of a Najima requires a permanent physical obstruction within the node.

  When a Najima is damaged, this reduces a mage’s total mana pool and their regeneration. Although, as I first noted, this does not appear to have any impact on the mage’s physical body. If anything, the damaged limb demonstrates surprising strength and endurance. This is certainly a counterintuitive result, as I initially suspected that there was a positive correlation between the body’s mana and its physical properties.

  However, this single mage may be an outlier, and the results have not been corroborated. More troublesome is the lack of available test subjects. Few mages have experienced the unique physical trauma necessary to damage their Najima; our healers are tasked with addressing such injuries promptly. Renquist has scheduled a meeting with the guild leadership within the next few days to discuss the possibility of conscripting several novices for this research. I am confident they will see the importance of my studies.

  ***

  “Hey man, you need to get up,” Finn said quietly, shaking Kyyle awake.

  Meanwhile, Finn eyed the nearby chasm, his fingers never hovering far from a blade. The top of the ridge loomed a few thousand feet above them, light cascading down the ravine and bouncing off the glassy surface. The result was that the bottom of the pit was surprisingly well lit. Between the noise and light, it was also safe to assume that they might attract whatever the hell lived down here.

  They needed to get to cover – fast.

  The earth mage groaned, his eyes fluttering open. “The hell is going on?” he croaked. His brow furrowed as his eyes focused on Finn. “I had the strangest dream. You and Julia pushed me off a…”

  Kyyle hesitated as he saw the glimmering glass walls hovering behind Finn. Julia shot him an amused look as she continued gathering up their equipment.

  “Shit… that was real?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Finn offered with a sympathetic shrug. “The choices were all awful. Die to the other champions. Die to those strange sand ghosts—”

  “Or jump off a fucking cliff?” Kyyle interjected, shaking his head. “How the hell was that a better option?”

  “We lived, didn’t we?” Julia offered in rebuttal.

  “I’m not sure I’d call that a victory.” The earth mage groaned as he pushed himself upright. He held a hand to his side as he retook his feet. Wobbling slightly, Kyyle leaned against a nearby glass pillar. His wounds had closed under the effects of the healing potions, but they didn’t have the supplies to heal him fully.

  Kyyle followed Finn’s gaze to an empty vial resting on the ground, its brothers lingering nearby. The earth mage winced. “How many potions did we use?”

  Finn ran a hand through his hair. “Too many. Pretty much the entire stockpile that Abbad provided. Julia and I were in a much worse state than you.” A hesitant pause. “You wouldn’t happen to have picked up a few healing spells during your classes, would you?” he asked hopefully.

  Kyyle shook his head, his hand swiping at the air, presumably to pull up his in-game console. He then began tapping at an invisible keyboard. “Unfortunately, no. Healers are usually tapped early, typically as novices, and then pushed into their own separate training. After seeing how… realistic the game can be, I decided I’d rather focus on a different field of study.”

  “What are you doing?” Julia asked, waving at his hands.

  “Updating my inventory of our equipment,” the earth mage said in a distracted voice. “We’re out of healing potions, and we need to keep a close eye on our equipment and resources.” He glanced at the chasm, his eyes peering at the small circle of light far above them. “I suspect we’re going to be down here for a while.”

  Finn grimaced, Kyyle’s words echoing his own worried thoughts. Without knowing where they would respawn, a single death was risky – especially since it might separate their group, and they didn’t know where they would end up. Add in the fact that they had no way to heal, and… well, they were going to need to be extremely careful going forward. It seemed luck just wasn’t on their side lately.

  “Well, hurry up and gather whatever you can. We need to move out of the bottom of this chasm. We don’t know what the hell lives down here, and we just made a lot of noise,” Finn offered, gesturing at the two long furrows that Julia had carved into the side of the chasm.

  Kyyle’s eyes widened, and he swiped aside his system console. “Uh, yeah, I think I see your point.”

  “You good to walk?” Julia asked, hefting her pack, and handing Kyyle his equipment.

  “I can manage,” he replied with a nod. Kyyle took an unsteady step forward. Although, Finn still noticed the poorly concealed grimace of pain and the limp that entered his step as soon as Julia turned around.

  Ahh, to be young and stupid again.

  “Good, then let’s head into that tunnel,” Finn said, pointing at a small entrance carved into the side of the ravine. “If we can at least get out of the open, we can plan our next steps.”

  His companions nodded, and they started off in that direction. Moving quietly, they made certain to stay under cover, flitting between the glass pillars. As soon as they cleared the mouth of the tunnel, they all felt the ground rumble below them, shaking and listing to the side. They immediately shrank against the walls of the tunnel, expecting something big to come ambling into the bottom of the chasm.

  Instead, they stared in shock.

  The columns and ramps of glass crisscrossing the central shaft shifted and moved befo
re their eyes: rotating and spinning, colliding and diverging. Fragments of glass rained down and bounced against the walls of the pit. The entire bottom of the chasm was being terraformed. The shifting glass caused the light to reflect erratically, as though someone had dropped a massive disco ball down into the center of the chasm. Despite the raw power involved in the process, it was almost beautiful.

  Curious, Finn squeezed his eyes shut and activated his Mana Sight. The entire bottom of the chasm became awash in a brilliant emerald light. This was more than just the ambient earth mana in the glass. The green energy seemed to permeate the air itself, pulsing and throbbing like a living thing. Each time the glass shifted and moved, the mana flickered erratically.

  Finn saw another telltale flash of green, this time from below his feet. Acting quickly, he dropped the sight and grabbed Julia and Kyyle, diving further into the tunnel.

  He wasn’t a moment too early.

  Even as they hit the ground, a sharp edge of shimmering glass rocketed out of the floor like a guillotine, slicing through the air before slamming into the ceiling. A shower of glass fragments exploded outward from the impact, letting out the tinkling sound of broken china as they struck the ground.

  “What the hell was that?” Kyyle choked out.

  “Ambient mana. This must have been what Altair was warning us about,” Finn replied, looking back at the barrier that now blocked the tunnel entrance. The glass was still shifting behind the translucent wall, more and more panes erupting from the ground. At a guess, the material was already a few yards thick.

  At least that solves the problem of being out in the open… but going backward isn’t going to be easy unless we get Kyyle to dissolve a path through the glass.

  “Great. As though being trapped at the bottom of this hellhole with no healing supplies wasn’t bad enough, there’s also a chance we’ll get cut in half by massive panes of glass. We’re really on a roll here.” Kyyle grunted, retaking his feet again.

  “It’s worse than that,” Julia spoke up.

  The pair glanced at her, noting the way her hands were waving at the air as she fiddled with her own UI. With a flick of her fingers, a map materialized in the air, projecting a glowing three-dimensional layout of the chasm.

  “So, we’re right here,” Julia said, pointing at three tiny green dots at the very bottom edge of the roughly cylindrical shaft. Her finger moved to a glowing yellow point about halfway up the chasm. “And this is the rough location of the vault that Altair provided. That puts at least a thousand feet between us and our target.”

  Silence hovered in the air as they all stared at the map.

  “Sounds like we’ve got a long hike ahead of us,” Finn offered, rubbing at his eyes. He was desperately trying not to give in to the despair creeping at the edges of his mind. That was quite a hike, even putting aside the strange ambient mana or whatever the hell lived down here.

  Julia grimaced. “It gets worse – if that’s possible. You see these map fragments they gave us,” Julia said, gesturing at the adjoining tunnels and passages that connected to the main chasm.

  “Yeah, they’re incomplete,” Kyyle replied. “Altair said that was because their explorers kept dying.”

  Julia shook her head. “That’s been bugging me since he said it. Wouldn’t it be much more efficient to drop something like Kalisha’s drones down the chasm to map it?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, that does make more sense,” Kyyle replied hesitantly.

  “Exactly. Those Mechanids are disposable, and it doesn’t seem like a stretch that they could be equipped to fly. So why waste people on that sort of thing? Unless, of course, Altair wasn’t being candid with us.”

  The group hesitated, staring at the map. Then Julia continued in a soft voice, “I don’t think the partial data is from dead explorers. I believe it’s a result of the natural terraforming we just saw.”

  Finn’s mind was racing. Her logic was sound, but that also had other implications. “Which means Altair lied to us,” he murmured.

  “That or he’s been kept in the dark too,” Julia said.

  “What would he even stand to gain by lying about the layout and nature of the abyss?” Kyyle asked. “It seems like he’d be eager to get the hell out of here.”

  Finn and Julia both just shook their heads. “I have no idea,” Finn said finally. “Maybe he’s also rooting for one of the champions. Or maybe the Emir instructed him to be circumspect about what he told us. Or, like Julia said, maybe he really doesn’t know. Although, it doesn’t matter. We should assume that everything he told us is potentially bullshit.

  “For example,” Finn continued, “how do we know the vault is really here.” As he spoke, he tapped at the glowing yellow icon on the map. “Even if Altair didn’t believe he was lying, the location could have moved when the ambient mana shifted.”

  Tension lingered in the dark tunnel, the group drifting into silence. The conclusions were obvious. They were trapped at the bottom of a really deep hole, the vault holding the relic could be anywhere, there was no clear path back to the surface, the terrain was likely to keep shifting and changing, and they didn’t know what sort of creatures lived down here. To top it all off, they were still in a three-way race with the other champions – assuming the others had survived the assault by the sand wraiths.

  “Okay, so let’s simplify,” Finn said finally, breaking the tension. “Our primary goal is still to recover the relic.” The pair stared at him skeptically. “However, even if we assume the vault is where Altair indicated, it will likely take us days to get there. The good news is that the other champions have the same problem since they’re roughly the same distance away, plus they’ll probably need to recover from the attack – if they survived.”

  Finn took a deep breath. “So, we have some time.

  “Which means we’re going to be down here for a while, and we can’t afford to die. What we need right now is more information. We need a better understanding of the layout of this bottom level and what lives down here.”

  “And we also need to find a way up to the higher levels,” Julia observed.

  “I mean, I could carve us a path upward,” Kyyle offered hesitantly, glancing at the walls. “My Dissolve can handle most types of rock as well as less dense substances like the glass. The only thing it struggles with is hyper-dense materials – so metals and some types of rock. Although, it would be pretty time-consuming waiting for my mana regeneration.”

  “If we get trapped in a tight passage, we also run the risk of getting cut in half,” Finn noted, gesturing at the wall of glass behind them. “And it’s going to make running away from any of the wildlife awfully difficult. Do you really want to be trapped in a narrow dead-end tunnel?”

  “Okay, fair point,” the earth mage said, eyeing the glass nervously. “Tunneling is out then…”

  “So, our best bet right now is to explore on foot and find a natural tunnel leading further up the chasm,” Julia summarized. The other two nodded in agreement.

  “Well, it looks like we’ve only got one path forward then,” Kyyle observed, pointing further down the darkened tunnel that lay before them.

  Finn ran an anxious hand through his hair. Maybe they could find a safe spot to set up camp and begin exploring. They needed to find a ramp up and then relocate their base camp gradually. Of course, that was assuming they didn’t encounter whatever the hell lived down here. Altair had been awfully clear about mutated wildlife, assuming that was true. If Finn had to choose, he’d take getting smashed apart by ambient mana over being eaten alive.

  Or hell, maybe they would get lucky. Considering what they had been through already, they had to have some sort of karmic break coming soon…

  Didn’t they?

  Chapter 16 - Molten

  Bilel’s Journal – Entry 68

  After a week of deliberation, guild leadership has refused to facilitate my studies or provide additional test subjects to examine the interaction between the
Najima and a mage’s physical body. They claimed that my proposal was “inhumane” and forbidden by our faith. Apparently, acolytes from the six temples caught wind of my research and intervened. An emissary of the Seer was even present during the meeting – compelling evidence that the temples are now meddling directly in the guild’s administration!

  I fear that the leadership and faculty have let their religious convictions cloud their judgment. Certainly, they appear unable to appreciate the irony of their own reasoning. They speak of “inhumanity” while refusing to address the infighting among the students or update the safety protocols in the crafting ward – both of which have resulted in at least a dozen deaths in the last few months alone. Hypocrites and religious zealots, the lot of them.

  I cannot – or rather, I will not – allow their fear to hold me back. I am close to a breakthrough; I can feel it. If they will not help me, then I will find another way.

  ***

  Julia abruptly dropped from Sneak, startling both Finn and Kyyle where they lingered in the darkened tunnel. Within an instant, two flaming blades rose into the air, and streamers of earth mana wound across the floor.

  “Hey, it’s just me,” Julia grunted, breathing heavily as she leaned a hand against the nearby wall. The pair dropped their guard, the mana dissipating harmlessly.

  “I take it you didn’t find a way out?” Kyyle offered with a small smile. “Maybe a magical stone escalator? Or a vent of hot air that would shoot us to the surface? I’m really not picky.”

  “Actually, I found the bottomless pit valet, except I forgot my ticket,” Julia shot back at him, grinning despite the sweat sticking to her skin.

  “You’re both a riot. Is it safe to move forward?” Finn interjected before they could get too off track. Out of an abundance of caution – and, more importantly, since she was the only one who could go invisible – they had sent Julia ahead to scout. After waiting nearly half an hour, he was impatient to get moving.