Awaken Online: Armageddon, page 45
“Finn… where are—”
Eliza cut herself off as she saw Finn lying unconscious beside her, his body wrapped around her protectively. He’d clearly taken the brunt of the fall. He was covered in blood. A jagged gash had been ripped open along his forehead, but that wasn’t the worst of his injuries. A large shard of rock was embedded in his back and his breathing was shallow. Meanwhile, the buildings around them were cracking and crumbling, huge blocks of stone falling free and landing with a thunderous crash and a gust of dust.
Eliza didn’t have time to focus on that. She acted quickly, pulling another vial, and slotting it into her syringe with a click. She depressed the button on the side of the device and a needle soon jutted from one end. Then she slammed it into Finn’s shoulder and the contents flowed directly into his bloodstream.
This was a new prototype potion delivery system. She’d realized that it was difficult to administer potions when her patients were unconscious. Splashing them with the mixture or trying to pry open their mouth was incredibly inefficient and difficult. So, she’d built this.
The cartridge popped out a moment later with a flash of yellow energy and a hiss of air. Moving fast, she circled around Finn, ignoring the notifications that flared in her peripheral vision – all indicating she had a minor concussion. She pulled another green vial and splashed a few droplets around the wound where the rock was embedded in his back. That would help with clotting, which was important for what she planned to do next.
Then Eliza grabbed the stone spear with both hands, took a deep breath, and pulled.
The spear came free suddenly, Eliza toppling back into the wall behind her, the stone crumbling – weakened by the moss. She barely caught her balance before she careened over the ledge. Steadying herself, she turned back to Finn.
His health was still dropping in her UI. Possibly internal bleeding.
“C’mon, Finn. You can’t die here,” Eliza muttered, her hands clenched into fists.
Seconds ticked past before Finn slowly began to stabilize, his health nearly dropping to zero before starting to gradually tick upward. Eliza let out a relieved breath and looked around, finally able to take full stock of their surroundings while he healed.
They had landed inside a ruined building, wooden debris and trash littering the floor. Yet instead of the wall and sidewalk that once lingered on one side of the structure, there was now only open air – wind whistling passed. Eliza crept forward slowly, staying on her hands and knees. She peered out, seeing the world fall away, clouds floating far below her. She swallowed hard and looked to the right where she had originally spread the moss.
The terrace was gone. As were parts of several of the adjacent buildings. Now there was only jagged rock and glowing green moss, the plant continuing to eat into the stone, slowly spreading horizontally across the ring. Even as Eliza looked on, another building collapsed, the rocks tumbling away and disappearing into the clouds beneath them, leaving a jagged chasm that now cut through the club. That rift only continued to grow.
Eliza could feel a pit forming in her stomach. If the moss kept going… if it ate entirely through this section of the ring, would the club be able to stay aloft?
“Well… it looks like… it worked,” Finn suddenly wheezed from behind her.
Eliza spun to find him smiling at her, spots of blood drying on his cheeks. “Good work, team!” he ground out, raising a hand for a hi-five, his fingers trembling as his health slowly refilled.
She could only stare back, her words failing her once again.
Never mind, Finn might be even crazier than Jason.
Chapter 41 - Mastermind
Eliza held Finn’s arm gently and slid the needle forward, the metal piercing the skin, accompanied by a hissing breath from the avatar of flame… who refused to watch.
“Really? You can carve out your own eyes and take a stone spear to the back, but a needle bothers you?” Eliza asked with a small smile.
“Yeah, yeah. Everyone’s a critic,” Finn grumbled as he rubbed at his arm. He’d never loved needles. But he wasn’t about to explain why. The weeks he’d spent in that hospital room while they poked and prodded him… all while Rachael lay downstairs on a cool metal slab.
Finn shook off the thought, watching Eliza as she popped the vial with a hiss of air mana and cleaned the syringe with a short burst of Obscuring Mist and a coating of some sort of antiseptic, the chemical burn even making it through the game’s muted sense of smell. This wasn’t the time. He’d learned his lesson – the point driven home by a teenage girl of all things.
If he was going to save Rachael, he needed to focus and learn how to act as a team.
Not dwell on his anxiety, fear, and the dozen other problems he couldn’t control right now.
A welcome distraction appeared in the form of a new notification. The display popped up in front of Finn, glowing with a bright blue light.
System Notice: Potion Medley Imbibed
You are currently affected by the following status buffs:
+3 levels to all skills.
+1,000 health.
+1,000 mana.
+20 stamina regeneration/second.
+20% to all resistances.
Current Blood Toxicity: 36%
Potion Duration: 30 minutes
“Geez,” Finn muttered, waving away the prompt. Then, at Eliza’s questioning glance, he elaborated grudgingly. “I didn’t expect your potions to be that effective.”
“You mean you thought I was just a healing and mana potion fountain for Jason,” Eliza replied sourly, eyes on her equipment. “Just like you thought Brian was carrying me through every fight.” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of fact.
Finn winced – another reminder of how stupid he’d been acting lately.
He stayed quiet, watching Eliza as she inventoried her equipment, checking for any damaged gear or materials. She was thorough, inspecting every bag and vial. The girl had broken out of her shell gradually since they’d landed in this floating prison – a few near-death experiences and some instigating on his part was responsible for that, he supposed. Although, the image of the girl, her eyes a blazing sapphire, was still seared into his mind.
He probably shouldn’t repeat that experiment.
Finn let out a sigh. Speaking of which, it was time to get his wrinkly ass to work. He pushed himself up from a nearby boulder. “We need to get moving. It won’t be long until
Finn surveyed the destruction beside them, the club still slowly crumbling as the moss spread across the warded stone. The ravine was splitting the ring in two and growing with each passing second. With his Mana Sight active, Finn could see what was truly happening – the moss leeching the earth mana from the stone until it simply crumbled. That plant life now blazed with power. However, he noticed that it was only draining the earth mana.
Maybe he could take care of this problem. Drawing in a deep breath, Finn raised his crystalline left arm, pulling at the ambient heat in the air, the orange and red energy streaming toward him where it soon swirled within the depths of his arm, the limb beginning to glow softly.
“What are you doing?” Eliza asked, cinching the last of her bags in place and pulling her robes taut to ward off the cold.
“Making sure we don’t destroy the club while we’re still on it.”
Finn lifted his palm and fired. A Molten Beam sliced through the air, crashing against the stone in the distance. The flames seared swiftly through the moss, setting the surrounding plant life on fire. Finn was trying to use a delicate touch – just enough power to get rid of the moss without further damaging what was left of the warded rock.
Moments later, he was finished, smoke coiling into the air, only to be swiftly swept away by the winds that whistled across the club.
“Not bad,” Eliza murmured, eyeing his handiwork.
Finn just grunted in response. “You ready to move?”
Eliza nodded. “Yep.”
Finn cocked his head toward the fire elemental hovering at his shoulder. “Daniel? Can you give us a rough path to the generator?”
“I suppose,” the AI replied tersely, floating toward another exposed neurogem conduit, the moss having eaten away the rock. His form flashed as he downloaded the information from Finn’s eyes, integrating that information with his existing data and the new information he was collecting from the conduit.
“How are you, Daniel?” the elemental muttered as he worked. “Were you traumatized by yet another near-death experience of my own making? Should I have asked you first about the structural integrity of that terrace? Oh, I’m sorry, my name is Finn Harris. I don’t ask questions, I just yell at little girls…”
“You know I can hear you, right?” Finn demanded. It seemed everyone was on edge.
And then there was the more obvious conclusion: maybe the problem was him.
“Oh, can you?” Daniel chirped back in an overly cheery voice. “I was starting to think maybe I don’t exist. You know, since you don’t bother to use me effectively.”
“I thought it was a pretty good impression,” Eliza offered.
Daniel’s form flashed in acknowledgment. “Why, thank you.”
“This is cute. Are you two done because we may have a bunch of enemies coming for us soon,” Finn interjected with a huff.
“And whose fault is that exactly?” Daniel chirped back sweetly, Eliza hiding a smile behind her hand. Great, now the two of them were teaming up on him.
Finn ground his teeth. “Path. Now.”
Daniel just flashed once more and a yellow line of energy appeared before them, connecting to the waypoint marker in the distance. It was only a few hundred feet away. The glowing amber path stretched out across the ruined room they currently occupied and passed through an open doorway into the adjoining corridor.
“I also took the liberty of extrapolating a floorplan of the current building and pushing it to the group. It should be roughly 85% accurate,” Daniel added as Finn’s UI chimed. “Not that you asked me to do that, of course. But I thought that information would be helpful before venturing blindly into the unknown.”
“Thank you, Daniel,” Eliza said, the AI dipping and dancing before coming to rest at her shoulder, now ignoring Finn entirely.
“It was no trouble at all, really,” Daniel replied.
Finn just shook his head. Yep, just perfect. With a sigh, his fingers danced through the air and the metal cuffs along his arms flared to life, melting down and spinning away from him to form protective panels of solid black metal that floated around him and Eliza.
“Oh, look. Now he’s being cautious,” Daniel observed to Eliza’s subdued laughter.
“First time for everything,” Finn muttered, leaning into the teasing. “Now we need to focus. We don’t know what might be inside these buildings or if the club has other defensive systems.”
Eliza’s expression sobered, and she nodded, pulling closer and wrapping her fingers around one of her wands. They set off, padding forward quietly, and leaving a trail of footprints in the dust behind them. Although, they quickly discovered their caution was unnecessary. The building where they’d landed was deserted. Only broken furniture lined the vacant structure, rusted metal pipes crisscrossing overhead. Finn was guessing those pipes had once been used as a basic plumbing system, his sight picking up concentrations of water mana at regular intervals – some kind of pump or filter most likely.
They walked down the empty hallways, Finn carefully scanning each room with his sight as he passed. He didn’t detect any large fluctuations of mana inside, only the green glow of the walls. As they neared the waypoint marker, a slight tremor ran through the floor, and the group hesitated.
“That must be a result of your plant,” Finn muttered, frustration tinging his voice. “I’m guessing it weakened the structural integrity of this section of the club. We just have to hope this area doesn’t collapse entirely and take us with it.”
“I think you mean our plant,” Eliza reminded him, her eyes taking on a sapphire hue.
Finn grimaced. She wasn’t wrong.
“A scowling silence usually means you’re right,” Daniel chirped. “Congratulations. This is the quietest I’ve ever seen him.”
Finn just grimaced and kept going. Turning a corner, they arrived at a partially open stone door. As he examined the mechanism, Finn could see the doors were recessed into the walls. Whatever mechanism retracted them looked to be completely unpowered. Which meant he was going to have to brute force it.
His fingers twitched and his metal panels heated rapidly, melting down and reforming into thick, razor-edged discs. With another gesture, he set them to spinning and then inched them toward the doorway, holding up another of his metal panels to protect himself and the group behind him. The saws sent up a shower of sparks as they struck the stone, the heat soon helping to work their way through the reinforced stone.
Nearly a full minute later, the stone fell away in a chunk, the edges still glowing a bright red. However, Finn had carved a path forward. He stepped through the hole without hesitation and surveyed the new semi-circular room on the other side. His gaze was immediately riveted on the far end of the room where blazing globes of energy hung suspended; no doubt, the walls had obscured that mana from his sight. The light was almost painful, and Finn switched to Short-Sighted – the generator coming into better focus.
A series of mana crystals the size of his head hung there. Earth. Fire. Air. The remaining affinities were absent, but the spheres for the other three remained. It seemed likely that all six affinities had powered the club at one point. Large threads of neurogem were connected to the crystals, forming a translucent, glowing lattice around the globes. Those conduits disappeared into the ceiling, running through the structure’s walls and into the club.
Finn approached a stone panel that sat before the generator, inspecting the console carefully. He tapped at the air to pull up his UI, designs and images soon appearing in the air beside him. This console resembled the stone interfaces that were used back in Sandscrit – both taking many of their features from the technology Finn had discovered in that research complex buried deep within the mountains south of Sandscrit. Multicolor gems warded to provide commands were embedded in the surface, and the whole apparatus was connected to the generator with more of the neurogem material.
However, unlike the complex Finn had discovered, this generator wasn’t pulling the mana from the atmosphere. Instead, it looked as though it was meant to be powered a different way. Perhaps the club charged its customers a mana toll? Although, Finn hadn’t seen any of the pedestals that the mages in Vaerwald used to power their floating city.
The energy must have come from another source then.
“What… what is this thing?” Eliza murmured, interrupting his thoughts. “It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.”
“The generator,” Finn grunted back. It looked like the interface had been damaged. Several gems were fractured and broken like someone had struck the console with something. Had
He turned to look over his shoulder. For that matter, how was there still so much mana stored here? The crystal storage was highly efficient but some of the mana continued to leak from those gems. Over the course of decades and centuries, those generator crystals should have been fully depleted. Perhaps
But if they had entered this building, how had they gotten inside? The door hadn’t been functional and he saw no signs of forced entry… besides the still-smoldering block of stone and steel that rested in the hallway outside, of course.
Tombs, Finn realized suddenly. The earth mage had been absent from the duels. As had Blaze. The pair had likely been working on bringing the generators back online using Tombs’ phasing ability to help navigate the structures.
Finn felt the room shake again and glanced behind him in alarm… only to see that Eliza had been at work. Vines now skittered up the walls of the generator room and stretched out through the jagged hole cut in the door before snaking down the adjoining hallway, the water mage’s display open beside her and showing a map of the complex.
“What are you doing?” Finn demanded.
“Reinforcing this building in case the stone gives way,” she explained in a distracted voice. “And, as you mentioned,
“Moodily glaring at the console,” Daniel supplied.
Eliza smirked. “Sure. That.”
Finn stared for a moment. She was right.
“See what I mean?” Daniel chirped. “Dead quiet. What he meant to say was, you’re right! That’s a fantastic idea! Thank you so much, Eliza, for your foresight and contribution to our team’s survival. I really couldn’t do it without you.
“Or something like that,” the elemental muttered. “Not that I would know what Finn saying ‘thank you’ would actually sound like, of course.”
And now Finn was rubbing at his temple as he turned back to the console. “Good work. Go, team,” he added dryly. “I just need to focus on this. The console is damaged, but maybe…”
He trailed off as he inspected the generator with his sight. With a pulse of energy, Daniel shifted forward and took a more detailed scan, a three-dimensional model appearing in the air beside Finn. Destroying the console might have stopped most people. But Finn wasn’t most people. He was just going to have access the generator more directly.
Finn lifted his left arm, the crystal glimmering in the light cast by the generator. With a thought, the material transformed, the fingers splitting into many tendrils that slithered out toward the console and touched a specific combination of crystalline conduits that formed the lattice around the storage crystals. Flames swept down his arm and into that lattice as he drew on his mana, and a searing burn arched up from his forearm, sweeping into his bicep.
