The lizard reared up and delivered a powerful blow to the rock, shattering a few big boulders. Apparently, that was the response — the lix was showing what would happen if the fences decided to go rogue.
“Commander, I’m ready to go. Just give me the word.” Bolar peeked over the edge and saw the children pressed against the stone wall. Clearly unsure what to do, they’d put all their hope in their magic. They were just children, after all.
“Do it!”
A long lasso appeared in the mercenary’s hand, a favorite weapon of crystal fences. While it wasn’t named, he used it with such dexterity that the thing was practically alive, responding instantly to each move its master made. Bolar had to lean out a little farther to make sure he could see his target. The loop whirled around his head and went flying.
Valia was pushing herself against the wall with no idea what to do. Fences, lixes, the adults dying, the trap they were in — everything had gone south for her and Tailyn. Suddenly, a pebble dropped from above them, grabbing her attention. Pebbles didn’t just fall on their own. Looking up, Valia noticed some kind of swirl and a snake rushing toward Tailyn. The boy had picked the worst possible time to step away from the wall in order to get a better view of the lix.
The girl’s response was instantaneous. Ignoring the fact that she was putting herself in danger, she leaped over to the boy and shoved him out of the way. The snake changed form, turning into a large loop that wrapped itself around her and suddenly yanked her off her feet. But Bolar didn’t try to pull his target all the way up to where he was — mages were dangerous even when they were tied up. Instead, he left the girl hanging about twenty meters off the ground. If she managed to cut the rope, she would just be earning herself a painful death. Not many people were capable of surviving a fall from that height. Even wearing Vargot.
“Valia!” Tailyn yelled, suddenly realizing his girl was no longer at his side.
Head into the crack. Don’t let them take you! Surprisingly, Valia wasn’t panicking. She knew they weren’t going to kill her right away, and the god wasn’t going to let them do anything untoward to her body. So long as Tailyn was alive, she would be, too.
I’m not letting them have you! The boy’s perception had already found a way up to where he could grab the rope and pull Valia closer to the wall.
Tailyn, sweetie, please. You’re the only one who knows how to resurrect people! Even if they kill me, you can bring me back. Save yourself! He’s already getting another lasso ready. Head for the crack!
The boy didn’t know what made him listen to Valia. Maybe, it was her tone and the words she chose. Maybe, it was the shadow of the bandit reflected in the flames as he got closer. Maybe, it was that he wanted to save himself. But whatever the case, he did what she asked him to do. A second snake whistled through the air only to snap closed where the boy was no longer standing. Having hit Vargot’s emergency release button and dumped the suit in his inventory, he squeezed his way into the crack, ribs crunching under the pressure of his personal shield.
“Where is he?!” someone yelled angrily.
“He jumped into this hole. Hold on, I’ll get him!” came the answer, and the same mercenary who’d made his way through the fire stuck his hand into the crack. But he was just twenty or thirty centimeters short of reaching Tailyn.
“Ah, you little rat!” Ostro yelled when he caught a shot of dark matter to the back. His protection had held up, only his personal shield had taken quite the dip. Even as she hung from the rope, the girl was in no hurry to give up. Soon, a charge of electricity was followed up by a fireball. Valia’s arsenal was expansive, though she didn’t get to use the whole thing before the advisor astride his lizard blew into what looked like a simple tube. The small dart fired from his personal weapon ignored the level three Vargot the girl was wearing, burying itself in her body and releasing a poison that blocked all movement. Valia twitched a few times before going limp. She was going to be unconscious for the next twenty-four hours.
“Where’s Tailyn?” The lizard leaped off the wall and landed right next to Osto. The mercenary frowned — the last fireball the girl had sent in his direction had finished off his protection and scorched his back. Apparently, he was in for a trip to the healer.
“He crawled into that hole.” Osto nodded at the crack, and those were the last articulate words he spoke in his life. One snap of the lizard’s jaws later, the human let out a scream as he was devoured alive.
“What are you doing?!” Berad yelled.
“Someone had to bear the punishment for your willfulness, Berad. And better him than you,” Halas’ advisor replied implacably. The lizard clawed at the crack, dislodging huge hunks of rock. But as he looked at the result, the lix scowled — the little mage had gotten too deep for him to reach. None of his warriors or the humans who had showed up were going to be able to squeeze in after him, either. He needed to try something else. He needed to know where the boy was going.
“Berad, I saw you have a scanner. Come here — I need you.”
“Commander, are we okay with this?” Bolar’s tense voice asked in the group’s communication channel. “Or...?”
“There’s no or,” Berad replied. “The team is more important than the boy. We can’t take the lixes on right now, but I won’t forget what he did to Osto. Never. The advisor will answer for that, just not yet. Let the girl down so we can tie her up. Team, everyone into the gully! Let’s see where the little bastard ran off to.”
The scanner turned out to be useless. It worked across several hundred meters of open space, only it dug just three or four meters deep into stone. And the boy was already deeper than that. The advisor made Berad check the entire gully to see if there were any secret passageways, but it was useless. The crack Tailyn had crawled into was the only way out.
“We’re not leaving until he dies or crawls back out,” the advisor said. “Halas won’t accept anything else. I want the crack watched at all times, day and night. If the boy gets away, no crystal fence will ever again work with the black lixes. I’m telling my master what happened right now.”
Leaping onto his lizard, the advisor headed back to the camp.
“What are we going to do, Commander? Just ignore all this? The way the lizard ate Osto?” asked one of the fighters. Another gave him a shove in the back, telling him to shut up, but the opinion had been voiced. The mercenaries didn’t like how the lixes were treating them.
“Bolar, you’re taking over as my right hand. Get snares and nets ready — we have to close off the passage. We’ll catch the boy if it takes a week. Just remember, if the lixes stop working with fences, we might as well hang ourselves from the nearest tree. The rest won’t forgive us. So, shut up and do what that damn Halas wants us to do...”
Tailyn pressed onward with maniacal resolution. All he had was a direction — the crack headed lower, getting smaller and smaller. And the echoes reaching him from the conversation between the killers and the lix just spurred him on. Valia wasn’t responding. Even when the boy jumped into his virtual smithy, all he saw was the girl sleeping peacefully in her hall. She was even closed off to him by an invisible field. No matter what Tailyn tried, he couldn’t get through — Valia was alive if unconscious.
Suddenly, the boy felt empty space beneath his feet. Using Raptor was out of the question, so the boy was going by feel, doing his best to get as far away from the crystal fences as possible. If it occurred to any of them to use magic and fill the crack with fire... Tailyn wouldn’t even have had time to drink a salamander potion. It would have taken some doing to get the hand with the flask up to his mouth.
But the empty space was there, and the boy had to pick up a few bruises on his chest and back to hold the arm with his accessory up to his eyes. And there it was. The crack changed direction suddenly, heading almost straight down. It was even wide enough for the boy to fit wearing Vargot. Wedging his arms and legs against opposite walls, he headed down, Raptor only showing him the bottom a couple
minutes later. The shaft was more than fifty meters deep.
Tailyn stopped one more time to try to break through to Valia. But it was no good — the girl was asleep. Checking to make sure he could climb just as easily as he was getting down, the boy got to the bottom of the shaft. The crack changed direction once again, heading back toward the gully, and it was again wide enough for Tailyn to put Vargot on and head on much more confidently. His scanner built a picture of his surroundings for him.
But suddenly, Raptor lost it. Or broke. It showed that ahead of the boy, right under the gully, there was an enormous empty space. Tailyn picked up his pace, though he was going to have to fight for the last meter. It wasn’t that the crack narrowed off again; it disappeared altogether. And since he didn’t feel like pulling his pick out in that small space, he decided to go with a much more radical solution. Three Alron potions found new homes along the edge of the wall, and Tailyn tied ropes around their corks before getting as far away as he could. It was a terrible idea, and he knew that, but he couldn’t think of anything else. Obviously, he had to get through. Empty spaces inside mountains were there for a reason. Just to take one example, there was the City of the Dead. And that meant Tailyn needed to explore it. He had to find a way to save Valia.
The ropes tightened, and three corks popped out all at once. Just in case, Tailyn shut his eyes, and three seconds later there was a powerful gust of air that grabbed the boy and threw him against the wall. And no matter how advanced Vargot was, it wasn’t strong enough to withstand the shock wave that followed three bombs exploding at the same time. Pebbles began to rain down on Tailyn. Fire flashed by on its way upward in search of open space. Finally, everything having calmed down, Tailyn pulled himself away from the wall and stepped forward, worried that the passageway would be completely filled in. But it turned out to be okay — Raptor told him he’d broken through the wall. Of course, he was going to have to dig through a pile of rocks to get past the hole he’d made, but that was nothing compared to what was on the other side. Driving away clouds of dust and ancient darkness, a pleasant blue light peeked through a small crevice.
Tailyn began digging, an hour later finally pushing through into the enormous space. It was as light as day inside. And that was no surprise — crystals were growing right out of the stone floor. Lots of crystals. Tailyn counted four straight lines with ten crystals in each, which matched the number of cavities above him exactly. But besides the crystals, the only things in the room were strange square frames set around each of them. The frames were ten centimeters high and formed little pools of a sort.
The boy kept pushing, finally popping through the hole he’d made and tumbling across the floor. As soon as he pulled himself to his feet, the System told him where he was.
You found a Server Room, a place where the Game’s servers were located before the Exodus.
Level +1 (28).
You used a free attribute point.
Marksmanship +1 (5).
Updated mission: Ancient History. Description: you learned a new word: server. That was what the ancients called the brains of the god that appeared on the planet. During the Exodus, the servers were removed, control of the world being handed over directly to the System. Everything that remains of what were once epochal machines are the foundations they sat on as well as the cooling cavities one level higher.
Glancing one more time at the crystal deposits, Tailyn reached for Matilda again. It looked like he’d found a way to get Valia back.
Chapter 20
TAILYN STARED SADLY at the two piles of crystals from his spot on the ground. There were twenty in one, with all the rest in the other. For the moment, that was 187 of them. But nothing was happening, and certainly nothing like the fusion process Olsen had talked about to get concentrated noa. The crystals just laid there, filling the space with blue light and doing nothing else whatsoever. All Tailyn could do was curse the Shurvan. Even on his deathbed, the creature had wiggled out of saying what was most important — how to fuse the crystals together.
The first thing the boy had done to come away with his incredible haul had been to spend eight of the fifteen crystals he had in his inventory on getting crystal miner from seventeen to twenty-five. That meant he got five crystals from each deposit. After spending a good hour collecting them, he found himself unsure of what to do as he sat there staring at them. His plan had been simple, as he’d just been looking to resurrect his mentors as well as Ka-Do-Gir so the four could go liberate Valia together. But that idea was out. Nobody was in any hurry to resurrect and come running with open arms. Instead, Tailyn just wasted time moving the crystals from one pile to another, pressing them, tying them together, and even sticking them into a container he bought expressly for that purpose. Nothing.
The concentrated noa, whatever it was, absolutely refused to show up.
Part of Tailyn’s consciousness stayed in virtual reality, keeping a close eye on Valia. The girl was still sleeping soundly. Dressed in his rough furs, Tailyn leaned up against the invisible barrier and pounded against it. Oh, how he needed the girl’s advice. She was always able to find the words to cheer him up and put him on the right path. And he wasn’t — that was something you were born either with or without. But all he could do was sit there, hands clasped on his lap, and watch the girl sleep. She was going to be taken to Halas, and his personal enemy was going to torture and then kill her. Meanwhile, Tailyn was just sitting there in the server room going on about how unlucky he was and what a bastard Olsen was.
Never!
Even if his plan with his mentors and Ka-Do-Gir hadn’t worked, that didn’t mean the crystals were useless. The fences and lixes wanted war? Then, war was what they were going to get. Forty-two lixes, six of which were mages and the advisor, and twenty-eight humans including Berad. Although, no — Valanil had taken out two, and Dur-Sha-Gun’s lizard had taken out a third. That meant there were just twenty-five humans left. A worthy army for a twelve-year-old boy.
Tailyn didn’t even have to check his table. He knew exactly what needed to be boosted to make sure he could live without Valia’s buff and get access to the dangerous weapon in his inventory.
Device Control +15 (20).
Marksmanship + 15 (20).
Enhancement +1 (20).
Intellect +1 (20).
…
It took Tailyn ninety crystals, almost half of what he’d harvested, to get all his attributes up to level twenty. But he didn’t have a choice — the buff was going to run out in a couple hours, and that would have left him without his named items. He had to make sure that didn’t happen.
Valkyrie flashed green to show it was ready for business. The boy picked it up off the rocks and stared at the new message:
Would you like to integrate Valkyrie with Vargot?
If you do, you’ll have to find another place to store your companion.
That unexpected suggestion struck Tailyn as a good one despite the fact that he was going to have to wake his dragon up. After agreeing to the changes, he watched as Raptor leaped over to his left arm, pushing Li-Ho-Dun off. The annoyed companion circled the boy, looking around nervously — it clearly didn’t like being underground. Then, the armor on the boy’s right arm kicked into action as an odd mount appeared. Something similar opened up on his right hip, which was where Valkyrie spread out while still letting Tailyn walk and run without a problem. He made sure of that right away. After checking and finding out that the crossbow activated the same way Matilda did, he imagined it in his hand. Valkyrie leaped into action like a trained puppy. All Tailyn had to do was grip the handle and pull the trigger — the crossbow was mounted on his wrist, making it impossible to knock it away from him. And it was even hard to believe how light it felt when he swept his arm back and forth.
Selecting a target — the hole he’d gotten in through — Tailyn pulled the trigger. The armor-piercing bolt shot forward, easily cutting through the stone, and Valkyrie immediately began the automatic reload pro
cess. At level seven, it took less than ten seconds for Tailyn to be ready for his next target.
It took a while longer to figure out how the grenades fit into the overall picture. As it turned out, the boy had to load bombs into a quick access slot and link it to Valkyrie for that bit of functionality to work. He quickly bought himself ten Alron potions. Twenty thousand coins later, he had one more deadly argument to bring to bear in the coming battle.
But the worst surprise was the additional clips. At the level it was at, Valkyrie could fit thirty-five bolts in a single drum. And that meant the boy needed spares, though he was speechless when he saw how much they cost — four thousand coins. Just one drum with thirty-five shots cost the same as two full grenades. It took him a while, but he eventually picked up five spare drums of armor-piercing bolts. Deciding to use the other types sparingly, the boy hoped his named equipment would level-up soon and boost the number of shots in each clip.
The clock showed the late hour. Presumably, everyone up above Tailyn was hiding from the night creatures that didn’t like showing their faces to the hot southern sun. One final look around the server room led to an interesting discovery when the boy found a squared-off passageway up near the ceiling that disappeared into the mountain. It was a ventilation system. And while the boy could have crawled through it easily, the problem was getting five meters in the air. Tailyn wasn’t able to jump that high.
Tears of Alron (The Alchemist Book #3): LitRPG Series Page 28