Steamforged Sorcery - Chapter 36 (Patreon)

Stone rained down around him. A large piece clipped his shoulder, knocking his travel pack free and sending it sailing into the darkness just as he reached the lip of the floor. Cowl grabbed Angel and pulled him onto the ground.

“Move!” Cowl roared, his metallic voice crackling. “Why are you just sitting there?”

Angel stared at the hole. His artifacts. His canisters. His relic. He pressed his lips thin.  The Seeker grabbed a canister and slammed it into the slot in his arm, firing a bolt of lightning into the hole. It illuminated it for a moment, revealing walls at the far side. 

His mind churned into overdrive. Walls meant there was a way down - even if it wasn't the safest. The board couldn't stop a freefall, but it could slow it. There wasn't much time to decide, as the more the room fell apart, the more likely that his belongings would get buried and he'd never see them again.

“Ashwind, Cowl. Don’t betray me.”

“What are you–”

Angel dove forward, throwing himself into the hole. The wind howling past his face drowned out any response Cowl might have given him, but the Seeker had no doubt that the Hunter’s self-preservation would force him to run with Vanessa through the room.

He felt a brief moment of guilt for abandoning them, but he was not going to leave the catacomb without his relic. There was no point doing such a dangerous quest without the reward. Whatever Cowl’s goals were, Angel was pretty sure that the Hunter needed either him or Vanessa for something. The Hunter would protect her until that time came. Probably.

As Angel tumbled through the darkness, he twisted, trying to right himself. He flicked his eyepiece down and the surroundings lit up with dim orange lines of light. He was unsurprisingly surrounded by falling rubble, but he spotted the walls a short distance away from him. 

Angel grimaced, reaching back and grabbing the board. The artifact hummed to life, desperately trying to slow the speed of his fall. It grew hot beneath his feet. His artifact highlighted the floor far beneath him as it finally came into view. Angel gritted his teeth as the board whined.

He started to slow, but at an excruciatingly slow rate. The ground was approaching too quickly, and he could feel the board straining beneath him. Angel gritted his teeth and raised his arm. His fall had slowed at least a little, but this was still going to hurt.

The grappling hook sailed out of his palm and thudded into the wall. The line let out a whirr as it extended as long as it could before abruptly yanking to a halt. Angel gritted his teeth and wrapped his hand around the line, ignoring the rending shrieks his metal arm was letting out.

The points along his chest and nape where the arm was connected to his body burned in pain, but he ignored them. As painful as it was, the maneuver worked. The grappling hook tore free of the wall as Angel hit the ground in a roll, garnering half a dozen painful bruises.

Stone and metal bit into his skin. He hissed in pain, finally sliding to a stop against a large rock. He laid there for a few moments, just breathing and finding out what was still functional. His board rested at his feet.

A few rocks pattered to the ground beside him, but most of them had already fallen. He groaned, repressing the pain and forcing himself upright. A spark danced out of his arm. Angel wearily raised his left hand and brought a spark of magic forth, lighting up his surroundings.

He was, unsurprisingly, surrounded by rubble. There were several massive boulders that could have easily crushed him peppering the ground in the surrounding area amongst thousands of smaller rocks and sheets of metal that ranged from the size of a fist to a dinner plate.

There were walls around him, but he hesitated to think of it as a room. It was more of a cavern, with a tall, sloping ceiling. However, it was clearly no natural cave either. The walls and floor were made of a strange metal mesh. The dim lighting and large area made it difficult to see far from where he’d landed.

Angel carefully ran his good hand along his body, feeling to see if anything was out of place. Everything fleshy seemed to be in order, but one glance at his arm brought a grimace to his face.

“Buried gods,” Angel cursed.

Several of the pistons on its underside had snapped from the force of trying to slow his fall. One or two looked salvageable, but the remainder wouldn’t be much use other than scrap. The wire of his grappling hook spooled at his side, the retraction mechanism also broken.

He tried moving it. The arm sputtered, a small shower of sparks flying out of it as it shifted with a worrying grinding noise. Angel sighed and let it fall back at his side. It was thoroughly damaged – but not beyond repair. Probably.

Angel raised the light higher and squinted at the floor. He grabbed his board and slung it back over his back. Then he walked around the boulders carefully, keeping an eye out for any white lines as he scoured the ground. As much as the lost arm distressed him, it wasn’t the first thing on his mind.

As it turned out, Angel had used up enough bad luck that whoever was watching him decided to offer a boon. He caught a flash of brown nestled amongst a pile of rocks. After a few minutes of digging through them desperately with one hand, Angel grabbed his travel pack and pulled it free with a victorious smile.

He flipped it open and peered inside, wincing. The empty cannisters didn’t look good. There hadn’t been many left before, but now they were almost all completely ruined. However, the wooden box housing the relic had survived.

Angel sat down with his back against the rock and popped open the wooden box. Warm red light flooded the room and he snapped it shut. The relic was okay. That was all that mattered. Well – most of what mattered. Now that he had the priceless object back in his possession, he needed to figure out how to escape the strange cavern.

He rubbed his chin with his good hand as he considered his options. Going back the way he’d come was incredibly unlikely. Even if there was a way to scale the walls, he doubted that the dungeon would be particularly willing to let him traipse out with the artifact.

With any luck, it had already started rushing Cowl and Vanessa towards the exit before they could do any more damage. After all, its true goal was almost certainly in the little wooden box located in Angel’s hand.

The Seeker set the box down in his lap and dug through his travel pack to see what was salvageable. The clamshell artifact that he’d used to open the locket had miraculously survived the fall, as had one of the glass tubes that he’d ripped from a wall.

Of the canisters, only five remained. The others had all been damaged, and trying to force magic into a damaged canister was a fast track to the afterlife. Angel set everything aside from the glass tube aside. When it had been in the wall, it seemed to be some sort of energy converter. Either that or a fancy light, but he was hoping it was the former.

Angel inspected the wires protruding from each end. He wasn’t entirely sure what each one correlated to, but they seemed to be color coded. Some of them were black, some were red, and some were white.

“Alright then. Let’s see what secrets you’ve got to share with me,” Angel said, grinning. He pulled out a worn tool that Vanessa would have recognized as a Scribe and got to work, carefully prodding at it with magic and inspecting the tube’s responses.

Time passed slowly. Hours – days, Angel wasn’t sure. The underground air was stale and cold, and Angel was all to aware of the clock ticking down. The longer he spent beneath the earth, the less likely it was for him to ever escape. His resources were limited, and who knew how much oxygen was trapped in the strange cavern. He’d already eaten just under a quarter of his food.

A few times, he briefly wondered if anything else was down here. If he was really still in the catacomb, it probably would have sent something to attack him. He didn’t entertain the thoughts for long, however. He had work to do.

His work revealed two major problems with his arm. The first was that the pistons had been seriously damaged and several of the gears were broken. The second was that the energy source he’d been using had burnt itself out. Of course, the annoying purple energy had somehow avoided destruction. It also didn’t seem to be particularly willing to offer any energy back up to his arm, making it completely worthless as a power source.

Angel shook his head and pressed a small ball of energy against the red wires of the tube. It sparked to life with dim pinkish-red energy and Angel barely restrained himself from cheering. It was an energy converter all right and, for whatever reason, the Star Fragment didn’t seem to have any interest in it.

Angel moved his hand away from the red wires, taking the small ball of magic with it. The light blinked out. It turned magical energy to electricity, which would do perfectly for his arm.