Trial by Fire: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (Archemi Online Chronicles Book 2)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “I know, girl. I know... but...” I gestured to the doorway. “Don’t worry, alright? You can watch from there and keep an eye out for Rin. I’ll make sure that when we bed down, we get a space we can share. Okay?”

  “No! I don’t want to be out here while she’s in there! It’s not fair! It’s not!” Karalti bellowed this time, napalm dribbling from her jaws. She got to her feet and turned, clumsily smacking the doorframe with her wing edge as she ran back down the alley. “It’s not FAIR!”’

  “Karalti!” I jogged to the door in time to see her shove past Cutthroat, who halfheartedly snapped at her on the way past. When she reached the street, she launched into the air at a sprint and a wave of boiling heat, sending pedestrians scattering with angry, frightened, and then wonderous cries.

  “Let her work it off,” Suri said from behind me. “She’s... what? What level now?”

  “Four,” I said. “I think that’s about twelve in dragon years.”

  “Girls are all like that at her age.” Suri smiled ruefully. “Don’t worry, mate. She’ll come back.”

  I watched as Karalti spiraled up into the sky, roaring and flaming. When I reached out along our telepathic link, I heard only angry white noise. “It’s not that easy. What if someone tries to capture her? What if-?”

  “No one’s gonna capture her. There’s not a quazi in Archemi that can fly like that. Just let her work off some steam. She’s been up your ass and in your business since she hatched, and now she’s suddenly being left out. Even if it wasn’t anyone’s fault, I’d be pissed off. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I dug my fingers into the edge of the door. “Guess we better find whatever this key opens. Rin’s already going to be furious when she gets back... I don’t want her to think we’re stealing.”

  The forge and furnace were down to a simmer, and Rin was nowhere to be seen. Neither were her automatons. I found myself feeling oddly guilty as we began to search around, looking for chests or doors that would fit a key as tiny as the one hidden in the bee pendant.

  “You have any idea what a mage lock looks like?” I lifted a small lockbox and tried to match the key to it, but no luck.

  “Usually like a round... Christ, what did they call them IRL?” Suri frowned. She was walking along the walls, knocking every few inches to check for false panels. “Dead... bolts? Deadbolts? But with a crystal face and conduits for mana. You insert the key and the mana flows into the dots and along those designs.”

  “Really? Those designs are tiny. He must have sat there with a magnifying glass to do that etching.”

  “Probably did. That’s what separates Mastercrafting from amateur though, right? The better you are at crafting, the less mana you need.” Suri stood back and sighed when she reached the end of the wall.

  I wandered to the back of the shop, scanning the walls, ceiling, and floor until supernaturally sharpened vision snagged on something in the far corner of the workshop: a break in the pattern of an old rug on the floor. I strolled over, crouched down, and lifted the rug up. Yup.

  “Here,” I called back. “Found a trap door.”

  Suri joined me, and looked down, hands on hips. The door I’d spotted was closely fit into the floor, with a thin wire handle to lift it. I pulled it up and to the side, revealing a ladder going down into a musty basement corridor.

  “Can you see in the dark?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she replied. “Can you?”

  “Sure can.” I hung my legs into the hole and caught the ladder.

  “Gentlemen first, I guess.”

  Then a high girlish voice pierced the air. “Hector?! What are you doing here!?”

  There was the sound of items crashing to the floor, and Suri and I both looked over to see Rin standing inside her doorway. She was wearing the smooth metal mask I associated with Mercurions over her face, but there was no masking her sense of shock - or betrayal.

  Chapter 16

  “Why did you break in here?” Rin stood among her dropped packages, fists balled. Her automata crowded in behind and around her, crossbows swiveling to point at us. “This... this…this!”

  Suri stepped forward, drawing her axes and flipping them over in her hands.

  “Wait! Both of you, wait!” I scrambled back out of the trapdoor. “No murdering!”

  “I welcomed you into my home! I t-trusted you!” Rin shouted. “Why did you break in like this!?”

  “Because your master’s killed four men in cold blood,” Suri replied. She watched Rin cautiously. “And we’re the investigators hired by the Volod to find out who and why.”

  “We haven’t spoken to Andrik about Kanzo yet,” I added quickly, “But we HAVE to investigate. You weren’t home... and...”

  “So you destroyed my door?! I should... I should... UUUGH!” Rin shook her head, waving her fists close to her face. Then she sunk down into a crouch and began to sob.

  “Jeez,” Suri muttered. Her aggressive stance faltered.

  “You didn’t have to b-b-break in!” Rin stuttered, burying her head against her knees. “I would have... I’d have...”

  ‘Jeez’ was about right. Deflated, I went over to Rin, doing my best to ignore the way Lovelace and Hopper turned to track my movements, and knelt beside Rin to awkwardly pat her on the back. “Hey, kid. I’m sorry, alright?”

  “Its... its... its...” She couldn’t seem to say anything other than the one word as she began to rock back and forward.

  At a loss, I took Kanzo’s honeybee necklace from my pocket. “Hey, look. Kanzo dropped this the other night. Did you know this necklace was a key?”

  “K-k-key?” She looked up. The smooth bowl-like surface of her mask seethed with hairline runes, the mana flowing under a layer of fine glass.

  “Yeah, look.” I fiddled with the bee until the stinger popped out. “Bee boner.”

  “T-That’s... what? M-m-my necklace can’t d-d-do that.” Rin didn’t sniffle as she sobbed – Mercurions didn’t exactly make mucus or saliva or anything – but her voice was tight and thin. “Kanzo d-d-dropped that?”

  “Yeah. And I figured that might be the case. That’s why we came here, alright?” I rubbed her back soothingly. “I get that this is your house, but we don’t have much time. I’m really sorry we broke in instead of waiting for you.”

  Across the room, Suri sighed and hung her axes back on her belt.

  Rin reached up with a slim hand, and took her mask off, revealing her face. She looked between us. “I-I want to know why Kanzo hurt those men too. But I-I don’t think you’re going to find anything here.”

  “That trapdoor over there. Do you know what’s downstairs? There might be something this key opens.”

  She shook her head. “J-Just the boiler room, and cleaning stuff.”

  “We’re still going down there.” Suri joined us, keeping a wary eye on Hopper and Lovelace. “You want to know why we broke in? Because either we can search this place top to bottom, or the Volod’s soldiers will. Hector figured you’d prefer it was us.”

  “I get it, okay?” Rin looked up fiercely. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “This is Suri. She was looking into the murders before I joined in,” I replied.

  “Yep,” Suri crossed her arms. “And all roads lead here, kiddo.”

  “I’m not a kid!” Rin climbed to her feet, an impressive five-foot nothing, and scowled up at her.

  “You come up to my sternum,” Suri drawled back. “Anything below tit-height is a kid or a dwarf.”

  Rin got to her feet. “Well... from here you... you look like a… like a pair of angry walking boobs!”

  Suri and I busted up laughing at the same time.

  “It’s not funny!” Rin shrilled.

  “Glad you noticed,” Suri said.

  Rin’s cheeks flushed blue. “That’s not what I meant!”

  “Then what did you mean?” Suri leered down at her.

  “That’s not… I wasn’t-!” the Mercurion spluttered.

  “You
want a better look, little girl?” Suri arched both eyebrows, bent forward at the waist, and pulled her collar down to flash her half-mile of clevage. Rin squealed and covered her eyes.

  “Okay, okay… that’s enough mirth for today.” I waved them on. “Let’s go and get this over with.”

  I went down into the basement first again, dropping from the ladder into a dim hallway. Rin followed behind, muttering to herself. Something about boobs and forced entry.

  “Are there any lights down here?” I called back.

  Rin stopped grumbling, and paused for a moment. “Oh, yeah. Orisel.”

  When she spoke the word, torches came to life on the walls: glass spheres sparkling with mana. Suri whistled appreciatively.

  “Your boss must be rich as hell if he can afford bluecrystal lighting,” she remarked.

  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.”