Chapter 73: Ex Machina

  Alex approached the pedestal in the center of the middle-tunnel room once again. The circular door still shone at the far end. The glyphs shone faintly but Alex read them easily enough as “Boss Behind Here”.

  Setting his hand on the port and activating it was just as easier as all the others. By now, Alex could read a bit of the complex holograms, and he didn’t need Obby to parse the basic information it showed.

  Yep, end of the second floor here. It’ll seal the door behind me. The room is… the Crucible? Huh. Alex shrugged at this. It didn’t really matter what the facility named the room, it wouldn’t change that fact it would try to kill him.

  “We ready?”

  “I’m ready. I don’t know about you though. Fix that squishy flesh problem maybe?”

  “ Love you too, Obby.”

  He activated the door. The glyph flashed and spun, the whole thing moved like a bank vault until Alex heard a loud click . It swing open, revealing a dark passage beyond. He didn’t waste anymore time and started towards the opening.

  The moment he stepped into the Crucible chamber, the vibes changed. A tension settled into his shoulders, thick and oppressive. Like stepping into the lungs of a dying beast still clinging to life, a step between death and life.

  The door slammed shut behind him with a final clang that echoed through the vaulted stone chamber. Ahead, the room opened wide into a circular basin, cracked with age but pulsing faintly with power. At its heart loomed a ruined glyph ring, its lines were scorched, broken, and humming with unstable aether. Alex stepped across the threshold, boots thudding against black stone. A massive construct waiting at the center dominated the space in his vision, a fractured colossus of crystal, copper conduits, metal plates and rusty rings, among other things. Thin filaments of failed glyphs flickered faintly off it’s surface, like the last breaths of a dying star.

  All around the perimeter, tiles etched with glyphs shifted in slow patterns, glowing faintly. Each one seemed dormant... for now.

  A projection flickered into view above the shattered ring. It was a glowing schematic of what the glyph below was supposed to be. It hung in the air above his head, lines and sigils burning brightly in his vision, and then vanished. Alex blinked, trying to hold the image in his mind. But the glyph had been a complex sequence, with rings surrounding rings. There was no way he could remember it all.

  He barely managed to swipe away the message when things started going out of control. Aether licked the edges of the broken ring like static over raw nerves. One wrong rune and it would lash out at him . Floor tiles shuddered underfoot like waiting rattlesnakes prepared to bite. He knelt beside the fractured lines, sweat already gathering under his collar.

  “I don’t like how twitchy the floor glyphs are,” he muttered.

  “They’re linked, ” Obby whispered. “ Each mistake will feed instability. And the floor is built to increase the severity of that instability as time goes on. ”

  Alex took a slow breath. The memory of the glyph schematic was even more blurry now, but some of the key strokes lingered. He started with the center where he saw three curves etched into the old frame, one was fractured halfway through. He began to etch using the tip of his aether stylus like a fine thread. With delicate and controlled movements, he carved the first stroke. A flash of light occurred, then stability followed.

  “Good.”

  He made a second stroke. Curved inward, mirrored—

  Fzzzzak !

  A burst of blue-white light erupted from the glyph ring. Alex flew backward, hitting the stone floor hard. Something popped in his shoulder and pain shot up his neck as he rolled down to the floor, teeth barred. “That, fucking hurt.”

  “Oops, strike one, ” the Obby chirped, almost cheerfully.

  The floor lurched underfoot. Glyph tiles around the edge shifted suddenly, locking into strange angles. One of the tiles began to glow blood red instead of soft blue.

  “Step on that and you’ll break every bone in your leg, ” Obby warned.

  “Red means bad, I got it,” he quipped, staggering to his feet, shoulder throbbing. He glanced at the broken containment ring again. The incorrect stroke was still flickering and half active, buzzing with unstable energy. He knelt once more and carefully burned it out, then replaced it with a smoother spiral stroke that matched the symmetry of the glyph’s design. This time, the energy calmed.

  “Two down.”

  He worked quickly but deliberately. Connecting lines here, and redrawing half burnt sigils there. With each success, the aether field grew brighter. With each completed portion the intensity grew, the ambient pressure in the room increased. By the time he reached the sixth rune, his ears were ringing and static crawled over his skin. He slipped again, barely, but he was off just enough. A diagonal line traced too sharply.

  Snap!

  Aether lashed out and struck his thigh like a whip of lightning. Alex screamed, collapsing to one knee. His leg seized, muscles spasming, the taste of blood rising into his mouth.

  “Strike two. ”

  More tiles shifted about on the floor. This time, two tiles nearby lit up red, while a third began to crack from within, glowing like it was slowly preparing to explode.

  “Shit,” Alex muttered, dragging himself back toward the final corner of the glyph ring. His vision blurred from the pain. His shoulder was still out of its socket, his thigh throbbed, but he couldn’t stop.

  He knelt awkwardly at the final spot that needed to be filled in. It was burnt out completely, and Alex couldn’t remember what the complete glyph looked like when it was projected above him earlier, but that was okay. All of the surrounding lines and glyphs were drawn in, and Alex knew what the purpose of the rings were. Context told him everything he needed to finish the inner ring. His stylus trembled as he traced along the final arc. His hands shook. He was out of second chances. He inhaled… exhaled… and etched.

  The glyph hummed just once then flared fully, locking into place with a burst of green-blue light. The containment ring snapped closed, whole again. The aether in the room surged upward, rushing through the channels like breath into newly opened lungs. Then silence.

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  Alex slumped against the ring, panting, sweat poured from every pore.

  Obby nudged his mind “ You okay? ”

  “No,” Alex rasped

  He wouldn’t be given any time to rest, as the large engine contraption began to shake with a few panels shifting open. Within a few seconds there were five large rods extending out of the aether engine, holograms came to life under each of the cylindrical rods showing readings and inputs.

  He groaned and pulled a healing potion from his storage bracelet and downed its contents. His shoulder popped into place as he tossed the vial away. His thigh no longer ached, and his ribs settled back into alignment. It was painful for a moment, then soothing relief washed over him.

  Only three healing potions left. He kept mental note of his inventory, knowing that if this trial continues as is, he would run out of potions and be beaten down mistake after mistake.

  Obby shouted in his mind. “ Head in the game Alex! Each of those are element containment rods. Its like the element balance room, go!”

  He quickly looked over the five cylinders. Sure enough, there was one for fire, water, earth and air. The fifth seemed to simply be a master control for raw aether. He sprinted forward to the closest rod; fire.

  The hologram showed a pressure gauge, dampener levels, bypass sigils and more. He knew what he needed to do, but it was a delicate procedure and once he started tampering with the controls the danger would begin. If he did nothing, the elemental pressure would build and cause the entire engine to explode.

  “Let’s reduce the pressure by lowering the output level,” he tapped on a few glyphs, and slid one down slowly. The pressure indicator began to lower, but he quickly discovered he had chosen poorly.

  Water aether surged forward in its place from the opposite elemental cylinder. A jet of steam ejected itself from the side of the engine shooting right over Alex’s shoulder. The sheer heat singed his hair and burned at his lungs. Alex immediately slammed a hand on the bypass sigil, rerouting the fire aether from the main containment tank lines to the outer ones. The steam died.

  “Fuck,” Alex ran to the water section next. His hands flew across the controls, activating a dampener rune and changing the order of a few controls. The entire engine rumbled and bucked as a result.

  A razor sharp gust of wind shot from a panel at the top of the machine, rocketing into, and cutting huge furrows out of, the stone ceiling. Rocks and dust rained on Alex, but he ignored it to focus on matching the fire element output on the water side. He coughed and hacked up the dust as he worked, knowing the internal containment was still building up pressure that he had to prevent.

  Earth was next.

  He dove to the elemental rod, sliding across the ground and jumping up to the controls in a mad dash. His fingers danced, sliding, removing, adding, he worked even as the seems around the earth aether rod began to glow in response to his meddling. It was only a second later that Alex tapped a bypass and the rod roared at him return, earth aether pouring from the seems in a halo of energy.

  “What the hell,” he felt the gravity around him skyrocket from the earth energy warping space around him. His bones groaned, his organs screamed, blood began to leak from his nose. “Don’t. Fucking. Quit.” He yelled at himself, barely able to hear his own thoughts, let alone the strained voice that managed to escape his lungs.

  “Alex,” Obby voice wavered, worried.

  “I got it!” He yelled again.

  He spun a rune on the panel, aligning it with another which he pulled over from the left side, and set them in place. The pressure snapped off instantly, the seems of the cylinder no longer ejecting aether.

  “Air, go, go ,go. ” Obby’s encouragement was moot as Alex was already running, sloppily. He was certain something in his right leg was broken. Pain shot up and down the limb, something that he also ignored.

  The air cylinder was the easiest, but held even more danger. Alex knew he only had to throttle the aether quantity and simply increase the aether pressure of the other three as a result. But it would mean an initial pulse from all three other main elements, potentially lethal pulses.

  He gritted his teeth and began forming his aether in a spell pattern, reading himself. Then he activated the output dampener.

  Fire, water, and earth aether burst from random spots on the engine in almost every direction. Jets of water cut into the floor and walls. Tiles bent and cracked under the earth energy. A stream of fire slam tried to slam directly into Alex’s chest.

  He activated his [Shield], pouring as much aether into the spell pattern as he could manage. It wasn’t even close to enough.

  His [Shield] shattered, and a condensed battering ram of fire slammed into his body, flinging him into the far wall with a sickening Crunch!, before sliding to the floor in a heap. He spat blood and tried to get to his knees but he couldn’t. His skin was burned away around his neck and collarbones. His left shoulder had popped out its socket again—something he hoped wouldn’t be a recurring problem—and he had some sort of internal bleeding.

  “Goddammit,” blood still leaked from his nose and dribbled from his mouth. “This is a fucking rigged puzzle, how can one person do all this?”

  “One person shouldn’t,” Obby gave him a mental poke. “ This is a team dungeon, you were just forced in here alone, remember? Now get the fuck up. You need to activate the engine already. The elements are balanced, but its filling up the containment tank and will eventually explode the whole thing. If you think that last explosion was big… well…”

  “ Okay, okay,” he popped the cork to another healing potion and poured it into his mouth. Relief ran through him slowly, and he was able to return to his feet. He shuffle stepped to the main aether panel as quickly as his healing body would allow. Meanwhile, the tiles and seems of the aether engine pulsed, growing in intensity with each passing second.

  He slumped against the glyph panel once he reached it, looking over the display in front of him. His vision still danced with stars and the potion hadn’t fully healed every injury, but it was enough for now.

  “Activation sequence, lets get to it, go. ”

  Alex didn’t say anything, he just nodded. A trembling hand tapped the needed sigils, his stylus appeared in his hand as he made a change to a couple runes that had been damaged. The pressure display had begun to enter the orange, climbing towards the red.

  “Fingers crossed, buddy” Alex whispered. The sentient pebble pulsed through their bond. Then Alex activated the engine.

  A series of panels flashed, the engine shook, and then went still. Light twinkled faintly over the enchantments on its surface, but it seemed content. The damn thing had been fixed.

  A crackling portal came to life at the back of the chamber at the same time he got the system message. It swam with dark energy that called to Alex, promising more. More power, more adventure…

  ...more death.