by John L. Monk
Thank goodness we’d buckled up because we were literally weightless during the terrifying fall. After leveling out, we twisted a series of corkscrews through the earth a dizzying number of times, bleeding off our speed.
Rita elbowed me hard in the ribs. I stopped screaming.
A minute later, the train pulled to a stop with a loud hiss of steam, and everyone piled out.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We were following a level-323 ranger named Chuck down one of the long, winding tunnels, of which there were about forty. He didn’t mind us tagging along and in fact seemed to enjoy the company. A former chef before retirement, he wanted to build a big enough pile of gold to open his own restaurant in Heroes’ Landing.
“How much do you need?” Rita said as we ambled along.
Chuck sighed. “About twenty million gold.”
Rita gasped. “What?”
“And that’s for something cheap,” Chuck said. “Not even a prime location, like one of the towers, or off Martyr’s Square.”
“How much do you have?” I said.
“Less than half that,” Chuck said bitterly. “There’s no bank in Eureka, so I have to travel to Heroes’ Reach twice a year.”
“You’ll make it,” Rita said confidently.
“Five years of mining,” Chuck said. “Sometimes I wonder if I should go back to dungeon diving. But…”
“But what?” I said.
Chuck gave an embarrassed laugh. “Monsters. Scared to death of them. Always have been. Leveled up mining and stuck all my class points in ranger. That way I could see them before they saw me, if you know what I mean.”
I resisted the obvious question: If you’re so afraid of monsters, why the heck did you come to a retirement world full of them?
“But there are monsters down here,” I said. “Someone was talking about it before we got on the train. And the skill book hinted at it.”
Chuck nodded. “Yeah. Some real terrors, too. That’s why we built the town around a binding stone. You all got bound, right?”
“Yep,” Rita said.
“I can fight if I have to,” he said. “But there’s way fewer monsters here than if you go looking for them.”
After that, we walked mostly in silence until the tunnel ended in a wall pitted and scarred from mining tools.
“What do we do now?” I said, staring dubiously at my mining pick.
Chuck hefted his own like a pro. “Easier than in real life, but still work. Just swing at the wall and don’t miss. Doesn’t matter how strong you are, either, if you have the mining skill.” He actually swore. “Makes it too easy for competition, you ask me. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said.
Chuck pointed back a ways. “You two work there, either side so you don’t hit each other. I’ll work here. If we go in three directions, it’s more efficient.”
“How do we know if we find gold?” I said, then immediately felt stupid.
Chuck grinned, making me feel stupider.
“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll know.”
He turned his back on us and chopped into the tunnel. To me, it didn’t seem like he’d hit all that hard, but a roughly eight-inch diameter chunk broke free and fell to the ground.
I was about to ask what we should do with the rocks, but he kept hitting the wall, like a machine. With every hit, a shower of rocks fell around his feet.
“When it gets too high,” Chuck said, pausing, “we’ll put it in a bottomless bucket.” He set his pick aside, unfolded a bag from one of his pockets, then pulled out three buckets. Each was about a foot in diameter. He also removed several short-handled shovels. “I always carry extra in case we get newbies. No offense again.”
Rita smiled. “None taken again. What do we do if there’s a monster?”
Chuck laughed. “Easy—you run, and yell while you’re running. That way I’ll know to run too.”
It took about thirty minutes to grow my would-be tunnel about ten feet deep, after much chopping and shoveling. That’s when I finally found gold. Unlike every other time I’d sent my pick thwacking into the wall, this time the chunk burst into a shower of Everlife coins.
PROFESSION: Mining, 10,000 EXPERIENCE POINTS
“What the…,” I said, staring at the scattered pile of coins in surprise. Then I started to laugh. Next, I was howling. I laughed so hard my sides ached, and still I laughed, wheezing now and trying to breathe.
“What’s so funny?” Rita said, coming to look. Upon seeing the gold, she turned back the other way and yelled, “Hey, Chuck—Ethan found something!”
Chuck arrived a moment later with a wild, frightened look on his face. When he saw it was just gold, he let out a shuddering sigh.
“What the heck’s wrong with him?” he said.
Rita shrugged.
Still laughing, I pointed at the coins lying everywhere. “Gold mining!”
“Would you grow up?” Rita said. “Here, I’ll put them in my purse. That okay?”
I waved her ahead. My coin purse was long gone, back with the hruuk magi.
Rita waved her purse over the coins and they disappeared inside.
“A thousand gold,” she said happily.
“You guys only have one purse?” Chuck said.
Having caught my breath, I said, “I didn’t know there’d be actual coins. I thought there’d be nuggets, or gold veins. That sort of thing. Sorry to laugh, but … I mean, I know this is your thing and all…”
Chuck snorted. “If I had to do this realistic-like, I’d shoot myself. You see what I mean, though? Mining’s easy. Just time-consuming.”
Soon after my discovery, Rita found her first pocket. Pockets, it seemed, came in various sizes, ranging from a few hundred coins to as high as several thousand. And the points we received for finding them amounted to 10 per gold piece.
Because we only had the one coin purse, Rita and I worked out a system where whoever found gold would run back and get the purse, then keep it until the other person needed it. The distance between us, even after a few hours, wasn’t so great that it became burdensome, and the pockets didn’t appear all that quickly.
It was near the end of an eight-hour shift—which is all Chuck said he was staying for—that I found a gem. A blue diamond, easily ten carats. It was also faceted. Which didn’t come as a surprise at all, what with the beautifully minted coins right out of the earth.
When Chuck saw the diamond, he seemed envious.
“Wow,” he said. “It’s been weeks since I found a diamond. Usually it’s just garnets. Though one time—a year ago—I found a piece of mythereum. That sucker brought in half a million gold.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Just between us, if you find any mythereum, you keep it to yourself. Then you hightail it to Heroes’ Reach. And I wouldn’t go showing off any diamonds, either. If you follow me. Safer that way.”
Rita and I nodded, then followed Chuck back to the train.
Chapter Twenty-Six
We made it safely back to the train richer by more than 17,000 gold and a gem that could summon several types of guardian and attack demons.
Not everyone was so fortunate. Our train to the surface was lighter by six out of the thirty or so miners that had come with us. They’d run into a monster, and it had killed them. The good news was whatever they’d uncovered hadn’t come out looking for more blood.
Upon discovering what had happened, the other miners set about caving in the tunnel, so as to keep it contained.
“If it could kill six of ours,” Chuck told us quietly, “we need it closed off tight. These things can’t get out once they’re locked in stone. One of the rules. But it makes for some damned spaghetti-like tunnels, lemme tell you.”
The miners who’d died met us alive-and-kicking back at the inn that night. They regaled us with a story of a slime creature who’d seeped into their tunnel through a crack and dissolved them alive.
“Hurt like the dickens,” one of them said in a haunted to
ne. The others had replacement gear on, but he was still in his noob tunic. “How the hell are we supposed to fight slime? It’s not fair.”
His question stuck with me. I had an idea on how to fight it, but stayed quiet.
Later, after he’d had a few drinks, I did ask one question. “These monsters … You do kill them sometimes, right?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, “if they’re not made of damned slime or something. Great loot if you do. Insane loot, sometimes. The more dangerous the monster, the better it is. Some of them guard big pockets of gold and gems. Some have special minerals used in professions. Mousetraps for people, I say. I’m fine with just mining. Damned sick of dying all the time.”
A chorus of me too and yep and damned straight carried around the inn, and after that I kept my mouth shut.
Later, though, I pulled Rita aside.
“I wanna kill the slime thing,” I said.
Blinking in surprise, she said, “Who are you, and what have you done with Ethan Crane?”
“I’m serious. You and I are stronger than any solitary monster Ward 2 has to offer. I’m convinced of it. If it’d been you and me against the hruuk that chased me, it wouldn’t have stood a chance. And you said they were tough.”
“They are tough,” Rita said. “What’s your plan? I mean … how do we kill slime?”
I smiled the way geniuses smile when they say smart things. “We don’t kill slime. We just have to get rid of it. After that, we can grab whatever it’s guarding. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.”
I wasn’t greedy for treasure, but I was warming to Rita’s position: we needed provisions. Potions for her, gems for me. That said, mining was far too slow. I didn’t want to spend a month here in the hopes of finding another diamond, or enough gold to buy one.
I’d checked Aushiel’s status every night since Heroes’ Reach. Each time I looked, I dreaded the results. Part of me regretted not compelling her to stay in the city. Sure, it would have ruined any future we had together, but at least she’d be safe. Or safe enough. In a twisted way, not compelling her was selfish on my part—that by preserving our love, I was endangering her life.
Thank goodness for Cipher and his plan. Mythian was awful, but at least we had a way out.
Early the next morning, Rita and I visited a local magic shop and purchased three healing potions. After that, we stopped at a mining shop for five additional items, and that wiped out nearly all our gold.
“I gotta meet the madman who made that rollercoaster,” Rita said after our second hair-raising ride.
While the miners hurried to their various tunnels for the day, eager to get in as much mining as possible, Rita and I tarried near the train and pretended to sort through our gear. When the coast was clear, we found the caved-in tunnel with the sign reading: “WARNING: SLIME MONSTER! KILLED 6!”
“You’re sure about this?” Rita said.
No, I wasn’t sure. We were risking both our lives, and we didn’t have all that many left.
“Sure, I’m sure,” I said, then pulled out my mining pick. “Stand back … or actually, no, help me. Quicker that way.”
Rita laughed nervously, and together we set about clearing the cave-in.
Thanks to our mining skill, which let us easily chop through stone, we broke through in about half an hour.
“See any slime?” Rita said when I poked my head through.
“Not yet—too dark. Let’s clear a little more.”
We kept digging, scooping the rocks into our bottomless buckets as we went, and a few minutes later we crawled through.
“Light Rune!” I said, and the end of my staff flared to life.
“Me too,” Rita said, holding out her fighting batons.
“Are those the same ones?”
She’d purchase a set months ago, back in Heroes’ Landing.
“Nope. Jaddow gave me these. They’re good.”
I gaped in surprise. “Jaddow? He actually gave you something?”
“Don’t pretend he didn’t give you gold.”
“He did,” I said. “After murdering me twice. Light Rune. Light Rune.”
The ends of her batons lit up, and she swished them through the air experimentally.
“It lasts twenty-four hours,” I said, “or until you scrub them off.”
Rita nodded. “Great. Let’s go slime hunting.”
Today’s tunnel was wider than yesterday’s, as if dug by multiple miners at the same time. Easily a mile long, but probably longer.
“My neck hurts,” I said, rubbing it. We’d been staring at the ceiling the whole way in search of slime cracks.
Rita didn’t reply.
When we eventually stumbled across the crack, it seemed much smaller than I’d imagined. More of a seam, really. The tunnel floor was free of slime, but littered with six bleached skeletons still wearing the gear they’d died in. By unspoken agreement, we left it for the miners to recover.
“What do you think?” Rita said, staring at the crack.
“It’s a slime crack, all right.”
Rita smiled nervously.
According to plan, we placed five bottomless rock buckets beneath it. What slime they missed, I’d blast with spells.
“You ready?” I said.
“Uh-huh … Maybe …. Guess we’ll see.”
Swallowing, hoping we actually were ready, I began banging the ceiling with the shaft-end of my pick.
Rita grabbed hers and joined me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You hear that?” Rita said after maybe five minutes of pounding.
“Hear what?”
“Sounds. Try not talking.”
I bit back a retort and listened. At first, all I heard was the echo of our elevated breathing.
“Tapping?” I said.
“Yep. Something’s up there. Let’s tap back.”
Gingerly, Rita and I tapped the ceiling with the tips of our picks. In response, the tapping on the other side got louder and more frequent, like popcorn slowly building to a full reaction.
“Slime!” Rita shouted, throwing down the pick and pulling her batons. “Get back!”
I leaped for the far wall, putting as much distance between me and the buckets as possible. What if the buckets themselves dissolved? The magic items I’d seen always recovered after damage, but if they took too much too fast…
The slime was green, gooey, and sizzling. Where it hit the rims of the buckets, it spilled over, but the magic metal endured. The buckets also didn’t overflow, suggesting they were designed to hold more than just rocks.
Overhead, the tapping turned to pounding, then long gouging sounds as if someone were digging with a metal spike.
“Something wants in,” Rita said.
“Yeah. I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
Rita stared at me, incredulous. “Now you’re telling me? Seriously?”
We needed more light.
“Light Rune! Light Rune! Light Rune! Light Rune!”
Over and over, I singled out chunks of stone and applied a magic rune, brightening the tunnel to near-daylight levels.
“What are you doing?” Rita said.
“We need to bust open the ceiling,” I said. “The slime isn’t the monster. Whatever’s up there, we need to see it.”
“Put some on the walls, too. The chunks are just gonna get covered.”
I applied a line of runes on both walls. The tunnel was beyond daylight levels now, such that we had to squint to see. Meanwhile, the banging and scratching above us never let up. I felt relatively safe because the miners said these creatures couldn’t get out if they were trapped in stone.
“You’re gonna give me a suntan,” she said.
Gazing at the ceiling, I said, “We have to get up there.”
Rita hesitated. “I could try caving it in. What do you think?”
Buried alive, is what I thought.
“Let’s back up a little,” I said. “I have an idea.”
Carefully,
we stepped around the slime buckets. They were still collecting slime, though the flow had dropped to a trickle. After walking about thirty feet down the tunnel, I pulled out yesterday’s diamond.
“Are you sure?” Rita said, eyeing it curiously.
I shrugged. “We don’t want to get trapped, do we?”
I browsed my catalog of demon names, searching for something powerful that only needed a single diamond. Many of the really strong ones—the attack demons—needed multiple gems. It was mainly the guardians that took diamonds.
Eventually, I settled on one that took a single diamond and an additional non-gem component.
“Ethan, no!” Rita said when I told her what it was.
“It’s just a finger,” I said, then paused at a bizarre realization: I was acting tough. Showing off for Rita. And it felt good.
“Got a knife?” I said.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“It’s the toughest demon I can cast right now. Just give me a knife. Please.”
Shaking her head, Rita reached in her bag and pulled out one of our cooking knives.
“Probably better if it’s quick,” I said. I sat down against the wall. “Can you get me a rock? Not too big. About five pounds.”
“This is stupid,” Rita said. She did get me one, though.
“It’ll grow back,” I said. “We’re like frogs.”
Staring between the rock and the knife, I realized I’d need three hands to do this.
“I’m not cutting off your finger, moron,” she said when I asked her.
“I’ll hold the knife,” I said. “You hit it with a rock. Otherwise I gotta slice it off slow and painful.”
“Or we could just go back. Find some other way.”
“Slow and painful it is,” I said, raising the knife with telegraphed reluctance.
“All right, fine!” she said. “God, you’re an asshole sometimes.”