by Han Yang
Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.
I reached out and prodded the device, then jumped back an instant later…
Nothing happened.
Not trapped. Good.
I avoided Duke’s glimmering eyes as I continued my investigations. Though my actions might make me look like a mad man, there was no way I would just take such an obvious treasure without at least checking the surroundings.
But whatever I tried, no traps or other such theft deterrent measures activated. The compass rested against the wall and, from the few times I had prodded and poked it, I could tell that it wouldn’t be too hard to rip it free.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I waited for a beat and scanned the area, but nothing popped up. No vibrations, no light shows, no sudden release of steam piranhas or augmented crocs.
Nothing.
In a way, I almost felt let down as I stuffed the golden compass into a pocket and forced the zipper up to keep it in place. If only SOMETHING had happened, maybe it wouldn’t have been so-
BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRR!
The ground beneath our feet shuddered for a moment before it suddenly tilted back, sending me stumbling away from the wall until Duke stomped down and caught me mid fall.
I couldn’t see what had happened, but it wasn’t too hard to guess the floor kept tilting further and further away.
The entire damn aquarium was draining out.
“MMMFFFPPH.” I rapped a knuckle on Duke’s shoulder and pointed back at the window in the distance. Only a faint glimmer showed the spot where we had entered the underground lake, and we needed to reach it.
Fast.
Duke nodded and, after a few seconds of thought, he grabbed my arm and swung a large bag from his back. For a moment I didn’t understand what his plan was but, as he pulled a clunky mess of pipes and gauges, I realized just how insane it was.
He wanted to use the remote escalator… underwater.
I had left mine behind, but Duke always came prepared. He shoved the device onto his back, and I helped him secure the straps before he once more tightened his grip on my arm-
And pressed the button.
BBBWWWOOOSSHHH!
Even though I had clenched my eye tight, the sheer pressure of the water as we blasted forward felt like it was pushing it back into my skull. My augmented eye wasn’t much better as the dust and debris we blew by clogged it up constantly. As soon as it cleared, we met another burst that shut it down again.
When we reached the half-way point, I felt the suction from below. I glanced down to see a huge black abyss in the center of an enormous whirlpool. It was so big my entire manor could have fit inside its maw without even touching the sides.
Fucking hell!
Duke ignored that threat as he activated the second stage of the remote escalator, boosting us forward and out of the pull of the drain trap. The window loomed in my view as we surged forward, but the hole…
It was way too high. There was no way we would make it up to that exit point.
And that was the point, moments before the impact when I realized what Duke’s plan had been all along.
He twisted around at the last moment, forcing himself between me and the rapidly approaching sheet of glass. I barely had time to register what had happened before we slammed into the pane. It slowed us for a brief instant before we blasted through into the hall once more.
Duke’s grip loosened as we flew through the shattered glass. Without water to keep us up, our flight rapidly turned to a fall as we plunged back down toward the ground.
Before we could slam back into the cold, unyielding floor, another wave of water washed underneath us, absorbing some of the impact before we skidded along to the back of the hall.
“Fuck.” I coughed out what felt like several lung-fulls of a horrible silty water mix before I managed to push myself to my feet. The glass pane, now shattered entirely, lay in pieces all around as the last remnants of water drained from what had once been a lively, thriving ecosystem.
I couldn’t bring myself to worry about that too much as I turned to Duke, who had yet to stand after our mad escape.
“Hey, buddy. You okay!?” I stumbled over to the bot, who had come to rest up against one of the supporting pillars in the hall. His eyes, normally a glimmering light show, had faded to a dull shimmer as his hand opened and closed repeatedly.
“Damn. His processor is damaged!” Leon dashed past me as he pulled a toolkit from one of his satchels. “I’ll repair it, but it’ll only be a temporary fix. We need to get him back to Norn to finish the job.”
The diagnosis wasn’t good, but the fact my plan hadn’t killed one of my best friends lifted a slight weight from my shoulders. It was true he had been hurt, though, and that changed my priorities significantly.
The treasure and loot were still needed for our return trip, but I didn’t much care about the thought of looting the whole damn place. Sure, it might be cathartic to rip out everything of value, but that could wait until Duke was no longer in danger of being shut down permanently.
Of, well, dying.
This temple had almost taken someone from me, and the whole thing had seemed like a joke to its creator. As if a god created something humorous for them to laugh at in whatever hell they had ended up in.
And I didn’t appreciate that, not one bit.
“Don’t worry, Duke.” I kneeled beside the stricken bot and laid a palm on his dented shoulder. “I’ll get some good revenge for you. Just you wait.”
Chapter 29
Leon completed Duke’s repairs in around ten minutes, but it was clear the advanced venturebot wasn’t out of the woods yet.
His body had dents and scrapes all over from our fall, though the worst of them was a huge gash on his back from when he slammed into the support pillar.
If he hadn’t pushed me into the center of the hall, maybe he wouldn’t have taken so much damage.
Still, his condition had been stabilized. Without further work, he wouldn’t be able to activate any of his higher functions. Steam still pumped through his pipes, and the central processor buried in his chest still whirred and clicked away as its various gears and ratchets continued their work to keep Duke alive.
It would be tricky to carry him back out onto the lake shore, but the others were using some of their bags to create a makeshift stretcher. When the time came, we would load him up and carry him all the way back to dry land.
Unfortunately, I had yet to figure out a way to get him up to the Moonlit Goddess again.
His remote escalator pack had been smashed by the impact with the glass sheet, and then the support pillar had finished the job, leaving the intricate device little more than a sorry mess of gears, gauges, and pipes.
Scrap metal, basically.
There wasn’t much else I could do about his situation though, so I turned my attention back to the very thing that had caused our current predicament.
The golden compass sat heavy in my hand as I inspected its intricately designed surface. There was a small Hydrox port on the bottom but, no matter what I tried, it wouldn’t accept any size or shape of H container.
It was as though it didn’t even WANT to work.
As I was investigating the seemingly useless lump of metal, Leon strode over and clapped a palm down on my shoulder, breaking my focused inspection with a jerk.
“This it, then?”
“No. It is a clue, though.” I turned the gadget over so Leon could see the design carved on the bottom and the port set in the side. “It’s not powered up, but it won’t accept any Hydrox.”
“Tried those broken containers?” Leon gestured to the bag at my feet then over to the entrance door to the hall itself. “Could be like those lamps, maybe?”
“No dice.” I tightened my grip on the golden compass’s unyielding surface, as though the pressure of my fingers would be enough to force it to comply with my demands. “This seems like a waste of -”
I cut
myself off as a new thought popped up into my head. The ports for Hydrox all matched one another. Larger devices had bigger openings, sure, but the design of each was an exact copy.
But that wasn’t the only place that input was used.
After a moment, I pulled a checker from my waterproof bag and held it up against the compass. It took a few seconds to get them lined up but, once they were perfectly side by side, my assumptions were verified with a single glance.
The Hydrox input ports and the connection port on the checker were of the exact same design.
”Wait, are you sure about this?” Leon watched on with a worried frown as I tugged the connection wire from the bottom of the checker and slotted it into the golden compass. “You don’t know what it will do.”
“We need to move on. Duke can’t stay like he is forever, and this is our only clue.” I lifted my pant leg up to expose the port just above my foot. Before I slotted the wire in, I looked up at Leon and gave him a cheery thumbs up. “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”
Pain.
Agonizing bursts of pure power rocketed through my body the instant I pushed the wire into my connection port. It was as though the compass was trying to drain my Hydrox reserves dry, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
But then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pressure faded away.
Leon dashed forward to pull the wire from my leg, but I quickly held up a hand to stop him before he could yank it clear. I didn’t want to go through the connection process again, and there was no way to know if I would even survive the next attempt.
The golden compass had tumbled from my hand to the floor as the pain locked up my muscles, so I picked it up again and turned it over so I could see the face.
Its needle danced back and forth as I twisted it to get some sort of bearing. After it settled down a little, I finally realized where it was pointing.
It wanted us to go down into the hole which had formed in the underground aquarium.
Before I could say anything else, the compass shuddered and shot out a small blast of steam before it turned inert once more. Whatever energy it had taken from me had been used up in the small period it had been active, and it didn’t respond any further, no matter what I tried.
“Oh, for the love of -” I fought the urge to toss the thing aside as I tugged the connector wire from my leg. After I had stored it away once more, along with the checker and its wire, I turned back to Leon who had been watching on in silent disapproval. “Did you see that too?”
“If you mean an idiot almost killing himself to be told something we could have guessed ourselves, sure.” He grunted as he helped me to my feet again. “I won’t tell Joanna this time, but if you try to pull anything like that again…”
“Noted.”
The rest of the squad formed up around us as I glanced out across the dark abyss that had formed in the bottom of the cavern outside, and then over at the various tunnels lining the side of the room. Without much information to go off, it was difficult to decide exactly where to go next on our messed-up expedition.
“I think we should -”
A subtle skittering noise, like a knife being dragged across a stone, echoed out from one of the nearby tunnels before I could speak my mind. I fell silent as I, and the rest of the group, turned to cautiously survey the area.
For several seconds nothing happened, lulling us into a false sense of security before it happened again. And then again. The sound soon filled the air as we all lifted our various weapons and took up defensive stances.
And then another tunnel started to echo with a new sound.
A low-pitched growl rang out from its dark depths, followed a moment later by a guttural screech. It wasn’t long before the roars and yells overlapped, creating an overwhelming cacophony of noise across the area.
“Get ready!” I lifted Darcy Sr. up toward the nearest tunnel. “Spaced shots, pick your targets-”
SSSCCREEEEEEE!
A large croc rushed out into the open from one of the side tunnels, only to be met by several carefully aimed shots. Its body crumpled to the floor in a bloody mess as the team shifted around to more efficiently cover each entrance.
And then another beast, this time an adolescent augmented Gorilla type, burst out into the open from a tunnel on the other side of the hall.
That one took a few more hits to go down, but we didn’t have the time to celebrate before a swarm of steam crabbots rushed out of one of the other darkened hallways with their claws held high.
A set of venturebot warriors strode out of another, followed by a small swarm of undead from the other side, before another set of-
I stopped keeping track as the surge of steam powered machines and vicious monsters increased in intensity and variety. No boss level creatures appeared, thankfully, but our combined firepower only just managed to keep the horde from reaching our position.
Leon bellowed orders to the squad as he let off his own carefully aimed shots into the crowd. The bullets from his long rifle rarely missed, and usually, he managed to take down multiple foes with a single, well aimed blast.
Still, we were going to be overwhelmed eventually, even if we didn’t end up running through the Hydrox reserves we had brought with us into the temple.
“Leon!” I moved near the old man as I used Darcy Sr. to destroy an entire row of flying buzzbees and the huge steam queen they had been trying to defend. “You need to retreat into the tunnel!”
Leon glanced away for a moment as he planted a bullet between the eyes of an undead hulk that had just lumbered out of a tunnel. The dead were creating bottlenecks at some of the entrances, though the sheer mass of monsters and steam powered creatures were still pushing their way out into the hall as we cut down their brethren in scores.
“You!? Don’t you mean we!?”
“I’ll join you later!” I flipped Darcy Sr. onto my back and pulled out my dual steam pistols.
After checking they were both overcharged to the maximum capacity, I lowered my stance and gave the guild master one last apologetic look. “I won’t keep you waiting!”
Before he could say anything else, I leaped forward like a sprinter from the stocks toward the dark abyss in the distance.
Bluish balls of energy shot around me as the squad picked off stragglers from the crowd who turned their attention to me while I used my dual pistols to clear off the rest who stood in my way.
Accuracy wasn’t of great importance, but my high aim stat still helped to correct my wild shots a little as I dodged past the last small group and made it to the edge of the underground cavern.
The dark pit had taken up a good half of the floor, but the rest seemed stable. After quickly reloading my pistols and checking my blunderbuss was still secure, I hopped down onto the messy surface and prepared myself for what was to come.
The monsters behind me, both flesh beasts and steam powered, didn’t move to follow me out into the open. They did want to, though, so the fact I had led a good portion of them away hopefully gave the rest of my team the time they needed to make a tactical retreat.
If I’d known they… shit.
I shook off those thoughts as I quickly checked over my equipment.
Two steam pistols, both venting energy due to how overcharged they were. Darcy Sr. fully charged and ready for combat, along with my steam blade, and the bag containing the remaining cracked Hydrox containers.
I was as ready as I could ever be.
Before I could step forward, a whisper of sound caught my attention. Faint, but noticeable, it wormed its way into my ear as I strained to figure out what it was.
“- here- good- do best- careful- dangerous- head.”
“Hello!?” I lifted my steam pistols as I stared down into the abyss before me. Its dark maw gaped wide, making it seem like an endless pit into the depths of the world itself.
The voice didn’t speak again, though what I had heard enhanced my worry significantly. Someone, or somethi
ng, had tried to warn me, though they clearly also wanted me to pass whatever trial was ahead.
But what did it mean?
Careful? Dangerous? Head?
“Screw it.” I pushed the warning away as I squared my shoulders again. Waiting around trying to decipher the odd message would only waste time I likely didn’t have.
I needed to act, and I needed to do it fast.
So, without any further hesitation, I stepped forward-
Only to see the ground before my feet vanish as I tumbled forward into the dark unknown.
Chapter 30
A steady, thumping echo awoke me from my slumber, like a kind mother slowly stroking her child’s brow to wake them up in the morning.
Unfortunately, the scene I opened my eyes to was nowhere near as picturesque as that.
My back ached as I pushed myself up from the oddly shaped wall behind me. Darkness overwhelmed the area, though there were some faint glints of light dancing in the air above my head, but those specks vanished the moment I tried to track them.
But the pitch-black darkness around me didn’t cause too many issues once I activated the night vision component of my augmented eye.
I was in… a pipe?
Several outlets showed at seemingly random intervals along its length, and the whole thing was slightly hot to the touch. That meant only one thing.
“Steam pipe, and a big one at that.” I paused as a new, more worrying thought entered my mind. “And it’s been used recently. That means...”
Steam powered every major innovation on Gearnix, but that didn’t mean it was our friend. At its core, the engines and bots were driven by super-heated water, and the human body didn’t respond well if such a thing impacted its frail defenses.
If I stayed in the pipe for too much longer, I’d be boiled alive.
With that thought in mind, I quickly checked over my equipment to make sure it wasn’t damaged. Luckily my fall, which I barely remembered at all, hadn’t left any visible wear and tear on my weaponry and other assorted gadgets, including the bag holding the cracked Hydrox containers, along with all of the spare cubes I had for my own usage.
