12 Miles Below: The Frozen Realm: (A Progression Fantasy Epic), page 1
12 MILES BELOW
©2023 Mark Arrows
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CONTENTS
1. Only a Nightmare
2. Prelude to Violence
3. You Should Have Left It Closed, Dumbass
4. Father
5. A Knife to a Dream
6. The Deathless
7. A Monument to the Gods
8. The Tomb of the Stars
9. Never Challenge a Winterscar
10. つや
11. The First Mile
12. You Don’t Belong Here
13. A Test of Might and Mite
14. The Face of Death
15. Fight Like You Live
16. Pyrrhic Victory
17. The Way Home
18. A Harsh Lesson to Learn
19. Maw of the Drake
20. They Can Talk?
21. The Meadow Underground
22. The Goat
23. Things of Metal and Pride
24. Gift of the Sun
25. Journey
26. Root Administrator
27. Predictive Modeling
28. Reunion
29. The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way
30. No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy
31. Redemption
32. Three’s a Crowd
33. Nothing Personal
34. Crucible
35. Son
36. Darkest Before Dawn
37. Back Into the Frying Pan
38. Too Shallow a Grave
39. A Warning Written In the Deep
40. The Mission We Came For
41. The Secret Left Behind
42. Solaris Imperium
43. Relinquished Sends Her Regards
44. One Last Act of Service
45. Demi-gods
46. The Final Mile
Epilogue
Thank you for reading 12 Miles Below
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LitRPG
CHAPTER ONE
ONLY A NIGHTMARE
“You have about three minutes to live if you fuck up and get your suit punctured.”
The old engineer fussed over a few metal toolboxes on his bench, pulling out the contents, explaining as he went. “First few seconds, frostbite sets into the local puncture area. After that, the freezing temperature leaks in and overpowers the suit’s rebreather, usually around the one-minute mark. Better be holding your breath by that point. You die the moment you can’t.”
It was hard to see what he’d been doing since the workbench was made for grown-ups. I craned my head over the lip of the table to get a better view.
He pushed the toolbox away. “Most adults can hold their breath for about two minutes while under stress. Factor that in and that’s why it’s roughly three minutes before lights out.”
He brought his elbows onto the table, lowering his head so he was more at eye level with me. “See why folks beat around the snow telling you kids what’s out there? You’re ten. They’d rather you go be a brat and play with your friends. Leave the worrying to the adults.”
Everyone said it was really bad if something happened outside the heated clan bunker. And then they’d shoo me away when I’d ask them how bad.
Anarii was, as he put it, “too old to care about keeping secrets”—he’d tell me about whatever I asked. So, ever since I found him, I’d been sneaking past the house guards and making my way to his workstation, deep in the bowels of the colony.
Anarii grinned. “Now, here’s a challenge for you. How would you patch up the environmental suit fast enough to beat the timer?”
I frowned as I thought. A couple of ideas floated to my head, but none of them seemed to fit. So I did what I do best: I looked for a way to cheat and get an edge.
I’m betting he’d pulled everything out for a reason. The answer was probably on his workbench.
A square piece of suit fabric caught my attention. “A patch?” That didn’t seem right; sewing took a long time. Also, I didn’t see any needles or thread anywhere on that table. “A patch with a sticky surface?”
“You’re close, but there are some issues with that answer.” His hand picked up that piece of fabric, along with a spare knife. “Imagine you’re having a nice stroll outside and your suit gets a rip—like this.” The tough material took him a good moment of struggling to tear through with the knife. “Now, in most cases, you’ll be panicking and not thinking clearly. A patch needs too many steps for your groggy mind to handle. We need something faster and easier.”
He set down the knife and picked up a strange fat gun off the table, flipping a switch on it. “That’s where this comes in. Catch.”
I caught the heavy gun-thing with a slight fumble. Welding lines held together different parts, and string tied a circuit chip to the side. The barrel was way too fat compared to sidearms and rifles.
“Looks weird. Does it really shoot bullets?”
“Nope. It’s been modified to fire out superheated glue. It’s a hot glue gun!” He cackled as if this was the world’s funniest joke.
“You’re going to glue the suit back together?” I said, stunned. “That’s stupid!”
He ruffled my hair with a wide smile and took the weird gun back from my hands. “Well, if it’s stupid but it works, then it’s not stupid. And boy does it work.” Fast on his feet, he turned on his chair and fired a snotful of glue at the rip, almost point-blank.
“All done.” He patted the cloth where the glue had sunk into the tear; it had already hardened over. “Easy, see? That’ll hold off the environment for a few hours—more than enough time to limp back somewhere safe.”
While I poked the strangely repaired rip, Anarii got out of his chair and reached for something large on the top of the shelf.
A spare environmental helmet. It had been built oddly—a glass dome acted as the faceplate for the massive helmet. Normally helmets were made with goggles instead, making them harder to break than a massive glass dome. I think he kept that defunct model because it looked weird.
When he lifted the helmet off the shelf, the bulky thing knocked down a small avalanche of tools. “Ahh, ratshit... eh, I’ll clean this later.”
Then he paused as if an idea crossed his mind. “Actually,” he said, rubbing the white whiskers of his beard like a villain might, “I think I’ll apply my gods-given privilege again as the only adult here and have you clean this mess for me.” He chuckled darkly.
Last time, that lazy adult had tricked me into cleaning up the workstation for him in “exchange” for lessons on welding. But I’d had a lot of time to stew in my bed and prepare. A well-designed plan was put into action.
“Wait, wait!” I turned and scrambled on top of a stack of crates. Once stable, I positioned my hands imperiously at my waist, my back straight and regal like the captains of the clan did when they wanted someone to pay attention. And standing up on these boxes let me properly lord over him. I took a deep breath and puffed out my chest. “I am Keith Winterscar, of House Winterscar! By the authority invested in my caste as a knight Retainer, I shan’t do your bidding!”
The engineer stopped in his tracks and gawked up at me.
Yes, take a good look and tremble. House Winterscar only had a few hundred members, but we were still an entire rank above engineers and scientists. From my boxy throne with the full authority of my venerable house behind me, I must have been a terrifying sight.
Anarii broke down laughing, which was absolutely nowhere in my design document.
“Ah, but there’s one flaw in your clever little plan: who’s going to enforce it?” He lifted up his hands and grabbed me off the stack of crates, slowly bringing me back down on the ground, next to the helmet he’d pulled down from the shelf.
“The guards would back me up! I on
“And if you tell them, you’d be admitting that you snuck out to an engineering bay again. They’re not gonna like that, I’d be betting. Scandalous for a noble knight Retainer of House Winterscar to be visiting little old me.” That brought out another fit of chuckling from the old man, especially when he watched me squirm around trying to think of a counterpoint.
Before I could come up with another way to escape clean-up duty, the helmet was plunked on top of my shoulders.
“What’s this for?” my voice echoed inside the helmet.
“Well, what about other problems besides hard punctures? Like suit failures or leaks you don’t know about? You’ll have to deal with those too when you’re out there.” The glass muffled his voice.
A few button presses later from him and a banshee-like wail rang out in the helmet. The high-pitched alarm hammered frantically in my ears. The air instantly started getting chilly at the same time.
“This, little man, is the emergency warning. If you ever hear this, you need to move fast.”
“I get it! I get it! Can you turn it off now?” I yelled at him, the siren almost drowning out my voice. It had gotten uncomfortably cold. A leak? My breath came out as mist.
“I already did.” Anarii frowned. “You’re still hearing it?”
“Yeah! And it’s getting really cold too!”
He glanced over at his instruments, puzzled. “Oh! Can’t believe I forgot about that detail.” His hand loomed over the glass dome and tapped on it loudly. “You’re going to have to fix this one all on your own, just like a real grown-up.”
I nodded back at him, a bit worried now.
“Don’t worry, it’s easy.” He smiled and drew closer to the glass. “You just need to wake up.”
Frost bloomed on the outside, coating the glass. The temperature continued to drop, and danger flared in my heart in response. I screamed and clawed at the straps. It didn’t budge. Too heavy.
The weight dragged me onto the floor, my hands still unable to pry the thing off. Everything was getting so cold. The alarm continued to ring in my ears, louder than my cries. The ice expanded over the instruments, breaking system after system in bursts of shattered glass. Needles and gauges froze in place instantly.
“Wake up, Keith. Or you’re gonna die.” Anarii’s features blurred from the rime. Now, only unfocused blotches of color diffused through the ice.
The helmet’s protective faceplate finally started to give in, massive cracks appearing on the dome, small pieces of glass snapping off and falling onto my cheek. The cold squeezed through those cracks, reaching for me.
Reaching to kill me.
“Wake up,” Anarii said. “Wake up or die, boy.”
The dome shattered. Ice lunged for my throat.
I woke with a gasp and my eyes flared open, hyperventilating. I was back in my full adult-sized environmental suit complete with intact goggles—Anarii was nowhere to be seen, no glass dome helmet, no workbench. No more memories of my childhood.
Cold reality again.
The shrill alarm in my suit’s helmet continued to beat into my ear, refusing to let me drift back to sleep. Something’s wrong... with the suit. I need to… I need to move fast.
My chest constricted when I tried moving. The cause was easy to spot: someone had applied glue in half a dozen places. And still my teeth clattered and shivered. My skin—ice cold. There was’s a leak that I’d missed. I was freezing to death.
It was a struggle to lift my numb arm. Somehow, I got a visual on my wrist’s instruments despite the shaking. The gauges were still working, the nightmare frost nowhere to be seen. The reading on the needles snapped a spike of adrenaline through my heart that finally shook me fully awake.
The rebreather read as offline. No one could live without reheated air on the surface. I should be dead. How was I breathing?
I shut my eyes and on a leap of faith... inhaled.
No uncontrollable coughing. A dull, dry pain flashed through my throat, the cold creeping in with each breath. The air wasn’t frozen enough to kill with any real speed, unless I overstayed my welcome. How long had I been out that I’d lost enough heat to trigger the alarms? Where were my heating systems?
I checked for the setting on my arm and got an answer. Someone had turned off my suit’s heating systems, likely to keep me from burning up. The suit would quickly overheat anyone in less extreme temperatures, so if those systems had been turned off...
This couldn’t be the surface. My goggles restricted my field of view, but what little I could see didn’t look like the clan colony. Nothing around me looked like home. The only other place that wasn’t frozen over...
The one place no lone scavenger ever returned from. The underground. I was underground.
No. Panic later. I needed to plug the leak. I could worry about exactly where I was later.
An analog switch on my arm controlled the emergency temperature, and with a flick the backpack hummed to life. Lukewarm air flowed through the entire suit from tubing under the cloth like a second set of veins. It burned everywhere it touched.
Everywhere except for my left lower rib, where the heat was being sucked away.
Found you.
My scavenger kit clicked open at a touch, still on the side of my belt. The field repair gun inside looked to be in working condition. It took me three tries and twenty wasted seconds before my frozen hand finally wrapped around the handle and lifted it out. The charge switch was large, like everything I owned, made to be used by thick gloves. It started humming in my hand the moment the flip was switched.
The leak was a five-inch rip in the cloth, hidden away on the left side. No wonder it’d been missed.
Pain seared my skin as the glue sunk inside the open tear. It hardened instantly, doing its job as expected, holding fast to flesh and fabric alike. I slumped back down, too cold to care about anything else.
Soon enough, the suit’s basic sensors hit nominal, the warning siren promptly shut down along with the heater. Everything was suddenly quiet again.
That let me hear what I hadn’t been able to before.
Sounds of metal clinked softly nearby. The source of the noise came from a man sitting nearby on a concrete block, tending carefully to an old rifle. Armored in plate with a single blood-red sigil on the shoulder pad. A faceless helmet turned in my direction.
The last time I’d seen that armor, it had been falling down into an abyss.
Father.
CHAPTER TWO
PRELUDE TO VIOLENCE
- Seven Hours Ago -
I turned the power off.
The environmental suit objected, of course. Loudly. Full of opinions. Effects were immediate with each breath colder than the last. The chill wrapped around my throat, tenderly squeezing it shut.
Today it was twenty-two breaths. Twenty-two breaths before the cold breached the suit’s system and it was too painful to keep breathing. Yesterday was twenty—a slight improvement.
I flicked the power back on. The internal air re-heated to tolerable levels while I held my breath. Anarii had been right, of course—just about one minute each time I tested it. The siren shut down soon after, sulking away.
She’ll have noticed my suit flatlining for a moment. All I needed to do now was wait until she came to check up on me.
“All scavengers, half-hour until expedition departure. Wrap it up, people, we’re on a clock!” a voice crackled in over the wide-area comms. That was a little earlier than I’d expected. It might not be enough time for my plan to get done.
