Awaken Online- Flame

by Travis Bagwell

  Finn’s blade smashed against the last crystals, a massive cluster embedded along the ant’s backside, and the gems gave way with one final blast of flame. The force of the explosion slammed the ant forward, and its head crashed into the wall below Finn’s feet with incredible force. The ant’s impact sent a massive wave of dust and debris rocketing up and out of the pit, entirely obscuring the tunnel from sight.

  As the floor listed, Finn was thrown into the nearby wall, his head striking the stone and sending his vision swimming. He glanced up, blinking rapidly to try to clear his sight. He saw that Kyyle was slumped against the wall beside him, bleeding from several cuts, but still conscious and breathing.

  Then Finn felt a sense of dread.

  Julia!

  She had been inside the pit when the last of the crystals exploded.

  Finn pushed himself to his feet, despite the warning notifications in the corner of his vision and the blood running down his cheek. His UI stuttered, and he was having difficulty focusing on it, the game kindly reminding him that he was suffering from a status debuff. Probably a concussion.

  Please be alive!

  He stumbled forward, searching through the cloud of debris. He could no longer feel the ground tremble, and the constant thumps had ceased. A sudden stillness lingered in the tunnel, but that didn’t necessarily mean the ant was dead.

  Or that Julia was still alive.

  Finn stopped dead in his tracks as he saw a faint silhouette emerge from the dust. It shambled forward with a limp, and his daughter soon came into focus. Her armor was in tatters, and she was bleeding from several small chunks of rock and glass that were embedded in her arms and chest. Burns littered the exposed skin along her hands and face, leaving gruesome red welts that were already beginning to heal under the effects of her regeneration.

  But she was alive.

  “Hey dad,” Julia croaked as she looked up and caught sight of him. “I think we killed it.”

  Chapter 18 - Artificial

  Bilel’s Journal – Entry 75

  After multiple attempts, I finally managed to duplicate the injury experienced by my lone test subject. Although, I will admit that the procedure was quite painful. I was ultimately forced to have a fire mage melt down a small ingot of metal, effectively fusing it to the bone near the Najima in my left arm. I suspect I may be able to reverse this process – albeit not without considerable discomfort.

  More fascinating was the effect. Unlike my original test subject, I was able to test the pre-damaged state of the limb in order to provide a direct comparison. Not only did the limb retain its strength, it actually “improved” after the procedure. On average, I have observed a 20% increase in total strength, speed, and endurance localized to the damaged extremity.

  I have no hypothesis for why this is happening, but the result is intriguing. I will need to undertake further investigation of the damaged limb and find additional corroborating evidence of my findings. Renquist has suggested that I might convince some of the novices to participate voluntarily if I offer to teach them new spells. What they choose to do with their own bodies is of no concern to the guild leadership… or the temples.

  ***

  Finn rushed toward Julia and managed to grab her before she could collapse, easing her against the nearby wall. While gruesome-looking, he soon discovered that her injuries were rather superficial – more shallow cuts than serious wounds. Her natural regeneration would take care of the injuries soon. He knew that. And yet watching her bleeding and bloodied face and her ravaged body was a trying task. In just the last 24 hours, Finn had seen Julia come back from the brink of death twice.

  For just a second, he wavered in his resolve. A mixture of doubt and guilt lingered at the edges of his mind, a small voice that questioned whether this was all worth it.

  “Would Rachael have wanted this?” that voice asked.

  Finn didn’t have a good answer.

  Or rather, that was a question he didn’t want to answer.

  He grimaced, gritted his teeth, and pushed back the doubt at the edges of his mind. This was worth it if it gave him – gave them – a second chance. Surely, Julia would want to see her mother returned to her as well…

  Although, that rationalization did little to ease the sense of guilt. It was one thing for Finn to pay the price for his decisions, but Julia didn’t even know what her sacrifices were for, only that Finn was intent on completing this competition. She followed him on faith alone, and this was what it had cost her – time and time again.

  Even worse? He would likely have to ask her to keep making that sacrifice.

  “I guess it worked,” Kyyle observed, interrupting Finn’s dark thoughts.

  The young mage had managed to stumble back to his feet, maneuvering through the debris and faint cloud of dust that still drifted through the tunnel. He must have struck his head against the wall during the blast. There was a matted patch of hair along his scalp and blood dripped down his forehead.

  “Barely,” Finn replied.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Julia croaked, a grin on her bloodied and dirt-covered face as she noted their skeptical reactions.

  “Uh-huh, well, why don’t you say that when you can stand up again,” Finn retorted. He shifted his attention back to Kyyle. “In the meantime, let’s go see if we can get a better look at this creature.”

  Kyyle nodded, and the pair pushed farther down the tunnel, soon dropping down into the pit where Kyyle had trapped the ant. The square and symmetric walls of the enclosure were now in ruins. They found a massive circular crater in the rock where the insect had continued to smash its head against the stone and dirt. The edges of the pit weren’t in much better shape, crumbling and blown apart by the explosions as the crystals along the ant’s back had detonated.

  And yet, the creature’s body was still intact.

  “What the hell is this thing made of?” Kyyle whispered in awe as he circled the corpse. He rapped his knuckles against the metallic shell. “Even the explosions barely made a dent.”

  Finn just nodded. “Daniel, can you identify the killing blow?” Finn asked.

  “Yes, sir. Just a moment,” the AI replied. Then its fiery form spun around the corpse, a thin beam of orange light scanning up and down the ant’s body.

  A moment later, a dagger was highlighted in blue. Finn stooped beneath the creature’s head to get a better look. Julia had somehow managed to get up and under the ant’s head and ram one of her daggers through the chitin along its neck, stabbing straight into the creature’s brainstem. Even so, the heat of the ant’s body and the explosions had melted the blade. It was now lodged permanently in the ant’s neck.

  She’s not going to be happy about losing another dagger, Finn thought ruefully. More distressing was the fact that their supply of weapons wasn’t endless. Even with as many blades as Julia typically carried, there was a limit to how many times they could pull this off. And that was putting aside how risky that fight had been. One wrong move and his daughter could have been smashed against the wall of the pit or been blown apart by the explosions as they detonated the crystals.

  Finn’s fingers traced the chitin near the half-melted blade. It felt different, more fragile perhaps. Now that he was up close, he could also see that the coloring was off. While the armor on the ant’s back was a solid black, the chitin along its underside was a dark, muddy orange. His brow furrowed as he looked back at the ant’s armor. It seemed that Daniel had been right.

  “The chitin here seems weaker,” Finn noted.

  “Yeah, but this stuff along its back is almost indestructible,” Kyyle replied, walking around to the back of the ant. “Like, look at this.”

  Finn walked around to stand next to the earth mage. He could see where his blades had destroyed the crystals. The blasts had been hot and intense, and yet the energy had barely melted the surrounding armor. Instead, there were small indentations where the crystals had once stood. Finn’s blade, however, was destroyed, fused into
the darker armor along the ant’s back.

  He rubbed at his eyes. Forget Julia’s reaction… he’d lost one of his own weapons, and his supply was much smaller. The loss of one of his new daggers struck hard. His equipment hadn’t been that great to begin with.

  Kyyle murmured to himself as he circled the ant. “Nearly indestructible armor along its back. Confirmed weak point along the base of its neck… maybe the joints on its legs too – although, that likely wouldn’t kill it, just slow it down,” he noted, observing the black substance along the ant’s legs. “It’s weakened by extinguishing its natural flames, but that doesn’t kill it. Oh, and the crystals embedded in its body are explosive. Looks like most of our guesses were correct.”

  “But I don’t see how we’re going to keep killing these things,” Finn finished for him.

  The earth mage grimaced, glancing at Finn. “And there are likely more. A lot more,” he added. “Have you ever seen a single ant before?”

  Finn rubbed at his eyes. “It’s worse than that. I think you’re right, and this is their nest,” he offered, glancing at the nearby tunnel wall above them and waving at it. “We saw this one mining some sort of metal ore in the cave up ahead. I think they carved out these tunnels. They use their mouths as a combination of blowtorch and shovel.”

  He hesitated for a second. “And this was just a worker. There may be other types of ants somewhere down here.”

  Kyyle let out a snort. “Perfect. Because this was feeling too easy.”

  Finn couldn’t help the amused huff that escaped his lips.

  “So, what do we do now?” Julia said. As her wounds healed, she had managed to rejoin them, and now sat on the small ledge above the pit.

  Finn glanced around, observing the destruction they had caused. “First, we need to get the hell out of this tunnel. We don’t know if the ant sent a warning to the colony, and we certainly made enough noise to alert any other creatures that might live down here.”

  He rubbed at his temple for a second, trying to think. “The fact that this ant was out here alone seems to point to this being the fringe of the nest. A scout for the main group, maybe? If we’re at the edge of the colony, we could possibly move to the room up ahead and fortify that location.”

  “By fortify, you mean…?” Kyyle trailed off.

  “There are a few adjoining tunnels. We could have you block them off and create more pit traps. Then we can go ahead and seal this one too. I doubt it’ll hold off the ants for long – especially if more than one comes calling – but it should buy us some time to get away. Plus, we’ve learned that they aren’t exactly quiet. I’m sure we’ll hear it trying to beat down your barriers long before it reaches us.”

  The earth mage nodded.

  Finn’s attention turned back to the corpse in front of him. “We should take this with us. We could study it further – cut it apart and test the chitin for more weak points. We might be able to figure out a better way to kill these things.” He hesitated a moment, sizing up the insect’s massive body. “Although, the thing looks damn heavy.”

  Finn heaved his shoulder against the ant’s body, his legs and arms straining. It didn’t move at all. He didn’t have any way to measure its actual weight, but he was guessing it weighed at least a ton – what with the super dense armor along its back.

  Kyyle nodded and stared at the body skeptically. “Maybe we could cut it up into pieces and drag them?”

  Finn just shook his head. He wasn’t sure they had something that could cut through the chitin and armor. He heard a soft thump behind him and soon saw that Julia had jumped down into the pit. She paced toward the creature and braced her shoulder against it, setting her feet firmly. With a deep breath, she heaved, her arms and back straining. For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. But then the ant shifted forward a few inches.

  Julia pushed off the ant, wiping her hands together. “I think I can manage it if Kyyle builds me a shallow ramp back up to the base of the tunnel floor,” she offered.

  The pair just stared at her in surprise.

  “What?” she demanded. “Let’s get to work.”

  ***

  Nearly an hour later, the group had gathered in the lava-filled cavern, which they were now calling the Sauna – a name that Kyyle had invented. The earth mage had quickly retreated after they arrived, wandering down the adjacent tunnels to start constructing barriers of rock and dirt and escape the oppressive heat. They planned to fill the tunnels with a dozen or so yards of stone. That would make leaving a pain, but for now, they just needed a safe place to rest and regroup.

  Julia had also managed to push and drag the corpse into the room, using an amount of strength that left both Finn and Kyyle astounded. Finn could only assume that she must have spent most of her time during the beta focusing on physical training – or dumped a truly extraordinary number of points into Strength.

  Now Finn sat on a small boulder, glaring at the dead ant and trying to ignore the oppressive heat that lingered in the room.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Julia quipped, sitting down on a nearby rock.

  “We have some problems,” Finn said quietly.

  “Well, that’s the understatement of the year. We’re trapped down here in this ant nest, these creatures are clearly much higher levels than us, and our destination is at least a thousand feet above us.”

  Finn nodded. “Exactly. We’re eventually going to have to leave this cave to search the tunnels. We need to find a way up to the vault, not to mention a way to get out of the Abyss entirely. But before we do that, we need a way to kill these things.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Julia said, rolling her eyes. “We’ll just trap each one in a stone pit, seal it off, wait a few minutes for its flames to burn out, then try to stab it in the brain without blowing ourselves up or getting crushed to death. And then maybe repeat that a few hundred times…”

  “Smartass,” Finn grunted, earning him a smile from his daughter.

  “It’s this armor that’s bugging me,” Finn said, rising to his feet to tap at the creature’s shell. He’d already tested his daggers, coating the weapons in the flames of his Imbue Fire. They had barely scratched the surface of the ant’s armor. “It’s basically impossible for me to help right now. I could target the fire crystals, but I can’t predict the resulting explosions. And we can’t risk caving in a tunnel or injuring you.”

  He turned and pointed at the cluster of spherical metal balls near the edge of the lava lake. “I also can’t help but think that the dark ore the ant was mining looks awfully similar to this stuff coating the top of its shell.

  “See this right here,” he offered, crouching beside the ant and pointing at the edge of its armor, just where the creature’s back and underbelly merged. “There is a rough, uneven line here, and the coloring changes abruptly.”

  “You’re suggesting that the ants coat each other in this metal that they’re mining?” Julia asked, glancing at the metal balls skeptically.

  Finn nodded. “I think so. After examining the insect’s mandibles, they seem to be formed from something similar to diamond. So, they heat up the mandibles in these molten lakes, harvest materials – natural ores and metals – and then use them to reinforce their own exoskeleton. I’m guessing they do the same thing with these chunks of crystal.”

  “Okay, but what can we do with that?”

  Finn cocked his head. There was really only one takeaway. “I think we’re going to need to create our own weapons,” he replied softly, his voice distant.

  He could feel an idea teasing at the edges of his mind. Julia’s joking aside, it was clear that attrition wasn’t a viable tactic here. They needed a way to break through the ant’s armor immediately. They just didn’t have any weapons that were up to the task. But the ant did… Its mandibles seem to be hard enough to cut through anything, and they had plenty of the dark metal coating the ant’s back – the mineral vein still visible through the nearby wall. There might be a way to use t
he ant’s own defenses against it.

  His eyes flitted to the crystals embedded in the wall. The glowing clusters were dangerous, but maybe they could also use them against the ants somehow?

  “You’ve got that look on your face. You know, that one where you peace out for a few weeks at a time tinkering in your lab,” Julia offered, a trace of bitterness creeping into her voice. “We don’t exactly have a ton of time.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Finn thought.

  He shrugged. “We also have no way to get out of here or kill these things, so it’s not like we have much choice.”

  “We could die and roll the dice on the respawn,” Julia offered. “That might get us a little closer to the surface.”

  Finn glanced at her, raising an eyebrow. “We’ve been over this. We fell for about thirty seconds, which puts our depth at a couple thousand feet? That means this place is huge, and the dungeon prompt said it has multiple respawn locations. How do we know we’ll all end up in the same place? Besides, even if we respawned somewhere closer to the top, how do we know that it would be any safer than here? We could come back to find ourselves completely surrounded.”

  She grimaced. “Okay, fine. I hate your reasoning, but it makes sense. So, we go with your experimenting plan. What exactly do you need for me to do?” Julia asked.

  Finn gestured at the glowing red fire crystals around them. “Find a way to mine that stuff or collect smaller clusters without blowing us all up. Maybe we can find a use for it.”

  “Cool, so Kyyle gets to build stone sandcastles, and I get to fumble around with volatile explosives. Sounds like you gave me the hard job,” Julia grumbled, although he noted a flicker of amused hope shining in her eyes.

  “Not exactly,” Finn retorted as he stepped forward toward the wall where the ant had been mining. He stooped and picked up a fist-sized clump of the dark metal. It was incredibly heavy, his hand drooping slightly as he strained to hold it upright. If the material was this dense, what was its melting point? It must be quite high if the ants projected an aura of flame around themselves without melting down the metal.