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

by James Osiris Baldwin

  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. 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! 250/480 HP remaining!]

  "Fucking hell," she grumbled. "The bomb didn't even go off."

  "It's... uhh..." I trailed off, watc
hing 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.

  “Stahhp it, momma! I’ll be a good boy!” I hollered down the corridor. “Rin! She’s beating me up!”

  That was apparently what did it for her, because Suri’s scowl cracked. For only the second time since I’d met her, she busted up laughing. So did I, until she friendly-punched me in the arm and drove one of the nails in deeper. I yowled again.

  “Hector, are you...? Oh.” Rin drew close enough to us to see what was going on. “Umm. Did you guys know you’re bleeding?”

  For some reason, that only made Suri laugh harder.

  “Okay, seriously now,” I said, once I’d recovered my normal speaking voice. “There was a door down where the slime axed that guy. We should go check that out.”

  “I wonder what he was doing down here?” Rin joined us, and offered us herbal potions. “Here: I can’t use these. Mercurions have to use Silicone Gel and mana for healing and stuff...”

  They were only Mint Potions, the weakest kind of healing tincture, but 10 HP a pop was better than nothing.

  Five minutes later, we limped down the corridor and surveyed what remained. We were able to pick up the dead man’s loot - Iron Scraps, 2x Moss Potions, 1x Iron Dagger blade, Lockpicks, Locksmith’s Tools (Shoddy), 35 silver Rubles and a gold ring with the face of a cat - which Suri took from my hand without asking. She held it up to look at it more closely by torchlight, and grunted.

  “Syndicate member,” she said, handing it back. “That’s a membership band. Interesting.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, searching around for anything we might have missed.

  “I just know of this particular syndicate,” she replied. “The Nightstalkers. Their boss calls himself the King of Cats, so he’s probably a Meewfolk. They run most of the organized crime in this city.”

  Rin hung back, chewing nervously on one of her bangs.

  “There’s two locks on this door,” Suri said. “One mechanical, one magical.”

  “You any good with locks, Rin?” I turned to her.

  She nodded, and silently came up to take the lockpicks from me. She got to work, and after barely ten seconds, the mechanism in the door clunked.

  “This is definitely one of Kanzo’s locks,” she said grimly. “Give me the necklace with the key.”

  She held a hand back. I passed it over, and she inserted it into the mage-lock. There was a second clunk, and the door swung open. An odd smell filtered out: clean, earthy, and electric. The smell of mana.

  “Don’t think this leads outside,” Suri said. “You first, Rin.”

  “You’re resistant to Stranging, aren’t you?” I asked Suri aside.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’m Fireblooded. Are you?”

  “Dragon Knight, sort of. I’ve got some heavy-duty mutations. You could dip me in mana and I’d live.”

  “See, you say that now, but one day some... I dunno, a fuckin’ mountain lion or something’s gonna body-slam you into a river of mana and you’ll...” Suri trailed off as Rin opened the door. “Wow. What the fuck?”

  Chapter 18

  I felt like we’d entered some android’s nightmare. Or wet dream – I actually wasn’t sure.

  The nude husks of six unanimated Mercurions hung from the ceiling suspended on body hooks. A couple of them were covered in sheets, like spoopy ghosts. The others were just buck-ass naked, and very not-alive. Their eyes were nothing but empty sockets. Their mouths were slack, hanging open to show toothless gums. None of them had hair, or any kind of detailing beyond their basic features. They were sexless and indeterminate, but finely sculpted.

  Further in the laboratory were big hourglass-shaped distillers, and tanks of liquid mana that glowed with pulsating light. They were empty. There was a workbench with a partially finished, mounted skull made of metal, and a surgery table, currently empty. Mercurion body parts were everywhere. Some of them were obviously being worked on. Some of them had obviously been cut off the bodies of other Mercurions and were being used as models.

  “No... No!” Rin ran to the desk, frantically searching through the scattered papers on top of it. “No, Kanzo! No!”

  “Eww. I feel like we just walked in on someone’s porn collection.” I took a step forward. “What the hell is this?”

  Suri found a switch on the wall. Magelights came to life when she toggled it, illuminating the suite of rooms. The light should have made it better, but only served to make the scene more macabre. There were an awful lot of smaller body parts pinned to felt boards that we hadn’t been able to see in the dark.

  “This is...” Suri dropped her voice to barely a whisper. “This explains a lot.”

  Rin was shaking. She shuddered her way to the desk and dropped onto the stool, put her face on her arms, and wept.

  “I get that this is creepy, but I don’t think I get the implications.” I looked around, not entirely comprehending the gravity of what I was seeing. “What was he doing? Experimenting on his own kind?”

  “How much do you know about Mercurions?”

  “Nada.”

  Suri rolled her shoulders, grimacing. “Mercurions have some real strict social rules. Firstly, marriage. Marriage is real important. They usually marry in threes, and the trio gets hitched in this big ceremony. Two partners from one clan, one partner from another. Part of the ceremony is that the dominant clan gives the three newlyweds the instructions on how to craft the next generation of Mercurions. They get special blueprints for their honeymoon, basically, so that they can have kids.”

  “Right.” I wandered over to look at one of the hanging bodies, alert to the fact that this was an RPG, and thus a good chance they were Zombie Sexbots who’d come to life and attack us.

  “Animating someone and giving them life is... hard.” Suri kept her voice low, glancing at Rin as she cried herself out. “Real hard. And dangerous. Doing it alone, without some tried-and-tested blueprints, is usually a recipe for disaster. Mercurions shun anyone who tries to create a child using a new blueprint, especially if that person is doing it by themselves out of wedlock. Double the outrage if that person is desecrating the dead to learn how to create a child. What we’re seeing here is...”

  “Juch’ik’haxi!” Rin slammed her fist down onto the desk and pushed up to her feet. “This is... I can’t believe you, Kanzo!”

  Rin kicked the stool over, and I ran to her before she flipped the desk. “Wait! Don’t destroy the evidence!”

  The junior Artificer turned on me, eyes wide and furious and distraught. I had a brief impulse to hug her, which I brushed aside. She wasn’t a kid, though I had to remind myself sometimes.

  After several seconds, Rin backed up, swallowed, and picked up the stool.

  “I’ll start over there,” Suri said, pointing to the tanks. “Try not to wreck anything. Look for stuff we can take to the Volod. No offense, kid, but the more evidence we find to paint this guy as a psycho and an aberration, the less likely Andrik is to shut down the Tanners’ Distric
t.”

  “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” Rin began to sort through the papers on the desk with trembling hands. Her jaw was clenched so tight I could hear her teeth creaking, and she was fumbling with small, spasmodic ticcing motions. “He was supposed to follow the rules!”

  I ducked my head to catch her eye and get her to look at me. “What rules? The Mercurion laws?”

  Rin rubbed her hands, shaking her head. “No. I mean… yes, those too. When I-I came here, I’d just lost my dad to HEX. I was scared to be alone, so th-they gave me a craftmaster who could… who I would feel safe with. I didn’t have anyone else but Dad. I still lived at home with him and went to work every day at Ryuko…”

  At mention of Ryuko, Suri looked up from across the room and frowned.

  “Hey.” I dared to catch Rin by the wrist, and she looked up at me sharply. “It’s gonna be alright.”

  “I’m sorry. I sound like a child.” Rin shook her head, but didn’t pull away from me. “I wasn’t… I just…”

  “You’ll be okay.” I dropped my voice, gently releasing her wrist. “You’re on the spectrum, right?”

  For a moment, I saw something in her face that I hadn’t expected to see: shame. She nodded, cheeks burning blue.

  “It’s okay.” I nodded back. “I had a friend offline who was Aspie as hell. That man was more my brother than my brother was. I’ll watch out for you.”

  Mercurions didn’t cry tears or get red-rimmed eyes, but Rin’s expression said it all. Before I could stop her, she grabbed around my waist and pulled me into a hug. She buried her face against my chest and shook.

  “She alright?” Suri asked over P.M. “Looks like she’s short-circuiting.”

  “Sort of. She’s autistic, I think, and kind of fragile,” I replied. “Don’t worry, the reactors will be back online shortly.”

  Suri raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and continued pillaging her side of the lab.

  “Hey, I have to go look for evidence, okay?” I patted Rin on the shoulder in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “You just take a seat and work it off.”