Rin nodded apprehensively. “He never really talked to me about money, but, yeah, I guess he is.”
“You’re his Number One Apprentice, and he never told you how much he earns?” I let Rin take the lead.
“I... uh... kind of panic if I have to deal with money.”
“Meaning that Kanzo is your mana-crystal daddy?” Suri called from the back.
“No! It’s not like that at all!” Rin threw open another door into a warm room at the end of the hall. It wasn’t an especially large basement. Pipes fed down from the ceiling into a boiler, and the rest was cleaning and storage, as she’d told us.
“Here,” she said sullenly. “Like I said. It’s just the boiler and some storage.”
“Did this guy Kanzo spend a lot of time down here?” Suri asked. “Or like... out of the house?”
“Of course he spent a lot of time out of the shop. He traveled to all these different estates and factories and things. I never saw him down here, though.”
“But he was absent for long periods?” Suri looked up and over the walls.
“Yeah... but...”
“What about strange noises? Rumblings, things like that?”
“The boiler makes a sound when it’s heating up. That’s all.”
“Any rituals he held to real strongly?”
“Uhh… well, he’s an Artificer and very disciplined, so he had all kinds of rituals. None of them involved this room.”
I scanned the room, wishing more than ever that Karalti were here. Her senses were even keener than mine. Frowning, I looked over the visible walls, but couldn’t see anything interesting until I wandered over to the boiler and looked behind it. There was a span of stone wall that was whiter than the rest, but when I knocked on it, it sounded just like the wall to either side. But as I was moving back, my eyes caught on something out of place. The machine had multiple pipes coming off it. Most of them went up through the floors to power the furnace bellows. Others were connected to the water pipes that fed the boiler. But, one set of pipes went down into the floor, and beside them was a small spigot set with five tiny green stones that only someone with inhumanly sharp vision could have spotted. It was hidden by another mechanism.
While Suri grilled Rin, I crouched down to get a better look at it. Sure enough, there was a small hole in the center of the spigot that was the size and shape of the bee’s stinger. I tried turning the spigot, but it didn’t budge.
“Hey,” I called back. “I found something. Maybe move back into the hallway, in case it’s a trap or something.”
After hearing them move away from the center of the room, I inserted the key into the lock. But it still didn’t turn. Instead, a thin trail of light shot out and connected the stones in a pentagram. I turned the spigot slowly, pausing as the boiler groaned and then creaked. Water gurgled in the intake pipes, and the machine came to life as I stepped back and looked around, just in time to see a section of floor depress, then slide back with hardly any sound at all, just the wet rasp of smooth oiled stone. A damp, moldy smell rolled up from the dark narrow staircase that led down.
Rin’s eyes widened. “I... uh...”
“You know about this?” I jerked my head towards the entrance.
She shook her head hard. “No! I-I’ve never seen this before, I swear!”
“Time to go see what old Kanzo was up to, then,” I replied, pulling the Spear of Nine Spheres off my back.
[Warning! Your primary weapon is badly damaged! Durability 17/100]
[Using badly damaged weapons in combat may destroy them!]
“Aww, shit.” I dismissed the notification, and after a moment of consideration, equipped the Steel Militia Spear I’d made the other night. It did about the same damage as the artifact, but didn’t have any bonus effects or stat increases. At least it wouldn’t break in the middle of combat.
“What?” Suri drew up. “Jeez. You’ve been fighting with that cruddy old piece of shit all this time?”
“That ‘cruddy old piece of shit’ is an orange-tier lazula artifact,” Rin retorted.
“Doesn’t change the fact that it’s about to turn into matchsticks,” Suri replied.
I folded the Spear of Nine Spheres into my Inventory, and it vanished from my hand. “Nothing I can do about it. The only person able to repair it is Kanzo, apparently.”
“That’d be right.” Suri jerked her head toward the hole. “Let’s get moving. We need to dig up something more substantial than a necklace.”
I went first. There were no lights down here, only the stench of mold and the relentless dripping of water. The stairs led down into a narrow limestone corridor, where a channel carried away the condensation that trickled from the ceiling.
“This is so weird,” Rin whispered. She was following up the rear with Lovelace. Hopper had joined me at the front of the line. “I don’t know why Kanzo would have a key for down here. This is part of the Lethos Cellars.”
“The who in the what now?” Suri asked.
“Taltos is built on the ruins of an old dragon city, Kalla Kulesi. That city was flattened during the Drachan Wars, and when humans moved in, they started tunnelling,” Rin said. “The limestone that was mined from down here is what most of the city is built from. There are all these old mine tunnels under the city. Around the tenth century, the mines were closed. Some of the network was sealed off. Most of those old mine tunnels were repurposed as catacombs where a lot of bones and dead bodies are stored. Some parts of the mine were turned into a network of cellars underneath buildings. The Lethos Cellar complex is mostly a grinding area for low-level players who don’t want to leave the city. Maybe... maybe Kanzo had this key in case the Tanner’s District was ever locked down, and we needed to escape?”
“Mines underneath a city? That doesn’t sound very stable.” I eyed the ceiling nervously.
“It’s not exactly comforting, is it? We modeled Vlachia off Bohemia in the 1700s - Budapest and Prague, mostly. Rome, Paris, London, and most other old European cities actually all had tunnels like this,” Rin chirped back. “Mining was done locally because there was no easy way to transport stone from distant quarries. It’s sort of convenient from a Dev standpoint. Cities with catacombs are prone to sinkholes and stuff so… literal plot holes.”
“Bad-dum tsch. Rimshot.” From ahead, I heard an odd sound - a kind of squelching, gooey noise. “Shh... hang on. There’s something ahead.”
“I can’t hear anything,” Suri hissed back.
“I can. Trust me. Hang back and let me stealth down there.”
The wet sucking grew louder the further we went into the musty cellar system, a rhythmic, lewd sound that honestly made me wonder if we were about to catch a guy getting a blowjob from some toothless under-city hooker.
I dropped into a low cross-step and slunk to the end of the hall, blinking to clear my eyes as I left the circle of torchlight. When I turned the corner and saw what was making the sound, my stomach climbed up into my throat.
It was a slime. And not a cute jello-drop slime, either. No, this was a [Sulphuric Acid Slime], a misshapen yellow blob about ten feet around. It had engulfed the corpse of a man, oozing acid that bubbled on the wet stone. The slurping sound was the monster sucking at the corpse’s torso, defleshing it and absorbing the blood and entrails into its mass. The man’s legs hung out from the side of the monster, twitching and jerking. His sword had fallen from nerveless hands, along with a roll-up bag of tools. His torch lay on the ground, still burning. Eww. What a way to go.
Because we hadn’t actually engaged with the slime, I didn’t know what level it was – but I knew the little red skull symbol that hung beside it’s grayed-out HP bar. It was a monster that was several levels higher than me. My guess was around Level 15.
“Karalti,” I thought out as I stealthed back to where Suri and Rin waited. “Where are you, Tidbit?”
There was no answer from Karalti, but I knew she was flying and hunting. I had a flash of her twin hearts pumping
as she dived down from the sky.
“What’ve we got slurping down there?” Suri asked softly once I had rejoined them. “I can hear something now.”
“Some kind of man-eating slime. It just caught a guy, so its busy right now,” I said. “We’re not equipped for this. Between us all, we only have piercing and slashing weapons. We need fire.”
“Oh!” Rin said brightly. “I can go get the flamethrower!”
We both looked at her in disbelief.
“Why didn’t you bring that down with you?” Suri asked flatly. “Or like... any weapon other than Tweedledee and Tweedledum?”
“Their names are Lovelace and Hopper,” Rin replied testily. “And I thought we were just going to stick our heads in. I didn’t know there’d be slimes!”
“Wait.” I held a hand up. “You know, I have a better idea than a flamethrower. Rin, in the boiler room, you said you store cleaning products. Do you have any lye?”
“Sure we do,” she replied. “We use it for all sorts of things.”
I rubbed my hands together. “Time to murder this thing... with science.”
Chapter 17
“There’s no way this is going to work,” Suri said, looking down from over my shoulder.
“That’s the attitude of a loser,” I replied, as I slopped water from a bucket into a pair of large, thin-walled jars that had recently held flour. “We manifest what we believe in, Suri. Give me winning thoughts. These negative vibes are killing me.”
She rolled her eyes. “At this point, ‘winning’ would me be chucking your arse into the slime.”
“Do you dare mock my cunning plan?” I replied, pouring a box of nails into the jars. I split it roughly fifty-fifty.
“I think your ‘cunning plan’s gonna get us killed.”
“’Killed’ is a state of mind,” I said sagely, as I poured a large quantity of lye into each one of the jars. “Don’t worry: we respawn.”
“That’s all you have to say? ‘We respawn?” Her voice heated.
“What? Afraid of a little dying?”
“I don’t want to die again. Ever.”
I paused to look at her. “But you’re a berserker.”
“So?”
“So berserking is literally the opposite of being concerned about whether you live or die, isn’t it?”
“It’s a skill-set, not a fuckin’ religion. Now shut up and build your bloody bomb.”
Ahh… another layer of mystery added to the furious enigma that was Suri Ba’hadir. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said that she was afraid to die. I didn’t exactly look forward to death, but I’d done it twice already – once IRL and once in Archemi – and it didn’t really scare me anymore. Unlike some games I’d played, this one didn’t penalize death in any substantial way. The worst thing that happened was that you either failed a quest or had to restart it, and you risked losing your non-soulbound items if you couldn’t make a corpse run.
“Be one with the IED, Suri,” I said. “And be careful, because this shit is about to get really hot, really fast.”
“I know what lye does when it hits water, genius,” she snapped back.
“Ah yes. But do you know what aluminum foil does to lye?”
“It’s alu-mini-yum,” she said sourly. “Not ‘aloo-mi-num’. And I assume it makes this mixture explode.”
I held up a couple of handfuls of crumpled aluminum leaf: the detonator to the bomb I was about to shove into the slime. The predatory goop was still sucking on the sagging meat popsicle it had made of the unfortunate explorer. “Aluminum goes in and reacts with the lye, producing a lot of hydrogen gas in about ten seconds. Jar expands and explodes. Lye also explodes on contact with sulfuric acid. It goes boom, and we exit one Sulfuric Acid Slime, stage left.”
Rin balled her hands against her face. “How do you even know this!?”
“I used to bounce at a biker bar where all these scarred up, paranoid old Millennials and Gen Z Vets of the Second Civil War hung out.” I shrugged. “They taught me this stuff in case I needed to blow up the government.”
“Great,” Suri replied.
“Here. You know what you’re doing, somehow.” I handed Suri some of the aluminum leaf.
She sighed, and accepted the foil.
The plan was simple: I would sneak up on the slime and get as close as I could without being suction-cupped by a pseudopod, shove the foil in the jar, screw the lid on, and either bodily push it into the slime or put it on the ground so that it would mindlessly engulf it. From my extensive experience of being a stupid teenager who liked to blow things up, there was a short delay between adding al-foil to the lye and the jar exploding. That depended, however, on exactly how realistic Archemi’s physics was. Thus far, it had been difficult to distinguish Archemi’s physics from Earth’s most of the time, with a few notable exceptions. I was hoping that realism extended into improvised explosives.
The first challenge was picking up the jar. The nails wouldn’t melt in the caustic solution – bases didn’t dissolve iron – but the jar was approximately the same temperature as the water now boiling inside of it.
“Okay. Let’s do this.” I held the hot jar away from me, with the foil held between my lips and the lid in the other hand. This made speech difficult, so I communicated via PM. “Get ready to cover me if shit gets hairy.”
“Please don’t blow yourself up.” Rin had a crossbow and her Mercurion mask back on. The mask let her see in pitch darkness, which was just as well, because we really didn’t want any open flames down here.
“I’ll do my best.” I waggled the tin foil at her, and then padded down the corridor with Lacy and Hopper trundling after me. As the sucking sounds of the jelly consuming its meal became more audible, I dropped into a careful, slow crouch, and came up on the corner to peer around and see where it was.
The man’s torso was basically gone: his bones, daggers, coins, and other metal pieces were suspended in the jelly’s mass, dissolving much more slowly than the flesh had. The monster was now half black, half yellow, and was chowing down on his lower half. The only body parts sticking out now were the man’s feet. Mercifully, they were no longer moving.
“Okay,” I P.M’d to Rin. “On the count of three, have them step out and fire. One... two... three.”
On three, Hopper and Lovelace both jumped out into the corridor and let loose on the jelly. The crossbow bolts punctured its quivering mass without resistance. The thing reared up, gyrating violently.
[Sulfuric Acid Slime takes 12 reduced piercing damage!]
[Sulfuric Acid Slime takes 8 reduced piercing damage!]
The slime didn’t turn: the closest side of it just surged right at us, a wave of snot-colored ooze traveling much faster than I’d expected. As the slime rushed forward, I jammed the thin-beaten aluminum into the glass jar, screwed the lid on, and ran out into the open with it.
“Get some!” I shook the jar a couple of times, and lobbed it.
The jar hit the slime and stuck to it, and for a breathless moment, I thought the monster was going to spit it back at me. But the moment passed and its mass enfolded around the payload as it kept shambling towards us, except now it was a [Sulfuric Acid Slime] with a nailbomb stuck in it.
“It worked!” I cried, pumping my fist in the air. Then I noticed how close it was, and began backpedaling away. “Oh fuck, it worked! Run, RUN, RUN!”
I heard Rin squeal, and rounded the corner to see her running, but Suri standing firm with the second jar ready to go. The jelly undulated after me around the corner and down the corridor.
“Watch out!” Suri yelled. “It’s about to throw-!”
I turned just in time to see the slime spit out one of the daggers it had absorbed. It flew at me, end over end, and hit me square in the neck.
[Sulfuric Acid Slime uses Mindless Luck!]
[Sulfuric Acid Slime lands a Devastating blow! X5 Damage]
[You take 220 damage!]
[You are Hemorrhaging! Stop
the bleeding before you run out!]
[Congratulations! Karalti has reached Level 5!]
The notifications were a meaningless blur. I croaked something unintelligible and reached up to clasp the knife in my neck to pull it out. It came free with a pumping wash of blood. The damage wasn’t too bad yet, but I was losing about five HP a second. I tried to pull up a potion from my Inventory, only to remember something important. I was out of healing items.
Suri ran forward and grabbed me by the front of my armor. She spun me around and threw me back so hard that I tripped. From the ground, I watched as she poured the steaming lye mixture onto the ground.
“You bloody idiot!” Suri ran back, away from where the jelly was shying back from the spill. She grabbed me under the arm and hauled me to my feet, one-handed, half-dragging me back into the corridor. When we were a safe distance away, she poured a light green potion over my neck. The Bleed debuff stopped.
[Warning! You are Hemorrhaging! 250/482 HP remaining!]
"Fucking hell," she grumbled. "The bomb didn't even go off."
"It's... uhh..." I trailed off, watching as the slime froze in place. The monster got an odd, confused look about it.
“Duck!” I grabbed Suri by the arm and pulled her down.
The jar inside the slime went off like a stack of C-4. Nails and broken glass tore from its body, spraying the walls and us. Suri yelped as something hit her; I took a couple of nails to my arms as I shielded my face.
[You take 20 piercing damage!]
[You destroyed Sulfuric Acid Slime!]
[You get 88 EXP!]
[Rin reaches Level 10!]
[You earned a new Feat: Combat Alchemist]
“Yeah, bitch!” I wheezed down the goo-spattered hallway. “Science!”
“Ow, ow, ow, ow.” Suri reached back, and pulled a shard of glass out of her butt. Then she threw it at me.
“Hey, what?! Wait! We killed the slime!” I shielded myself as she removed and flung more shrapnel at me.
“You numbnuts!” She pitched another bloody bit of glass at me, and then reached over and yanked one of the nails from my arm. I let out a piercing girly squeal.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 51
