City of Opportunities 9 – Pushing On

Two days.

They spent two full days wandering around the darkness, stumbling across barely touched veins of copper and tin. Veins that they did not touch either. Avari insisted it wouldn’t be worth the labour until they truly found nothing else. In ready agreement, seeking something extraordinary, Eldred ignored such simple veins.

For two days.

There was nothing to do but walk and think. The short breaks they spent killing the Slackmoles on their path meant nothing. Eldred’s part of it always remained limited to walking at them. Nothing exciting. Nothing to refuel the fire that had burned inside.

Eldred attempted to not contemplate it all too much, to hold onto that flame. Grasping it was futile and the more he tried, the more he felt his spiritual flailing draw from the flame. He could not force it to stay. He could not ignore the situation either.

First signs of regret arose in him, of doubt. What was he doing there? Did he not belong in a tiny, dusty apartment? He could have been on his ass on a comfortable cushion, watching movies. He had never realized just how soft even his improvised seat had been until he had spent several days sleeping on naked stone. At the start of the third day, his clothes were stuffy, his hair greasy, and his inner flame reduced to embers.

‘Not yet,’ he willed against the encroaching darkness of his own mind. ‘I am not done trying yet. Thrive or die. Thrive or die. Thrive or die, Eldred.’

“I have found a dwarven construction.”

Nyx’s words were like rays of the summer sun piercing through a long thunderstorm. Avari, herself slightly worse off for the prolonged boredom, snapped to attention. “Seriously?!” she asked.

The banshee nodded solemnly. She was the only one of the three unchanged by the passage of time, lacking the bodily functions that made one greasy over passing days. When she did get any dirt directly onto her, she could just flicker her corporeal state off and on.

That convenience paled in comparison to her wall shifting finally paying off.

The limitation of three metres had been an issue. Eldred had been hugging walls most of the time, trying to give his banshee every bit of range he could. Despite that, most of the time she had not been able to go far enough to leave solid rock. The porous consistency that this chunk of once-molten planet had formed a complicated cave system. On a planetary scale three metre thick walls between individual tunnels could be very well defined as ‘thin’.

And now she had finally found something.

Nyx disappeared into the wall again, re-emerging a couple of times as she searched for the thinnest spot. “Here.”

Avari and Eldred stepped up to the cave wall. It was different from the rest in the same way everything else was different. The melting of the planet had not created a singular mass of brown but a slurry of swirling colours. In it, this bit of black could have been easily missed.

“Looks brittle enough,” Avari said. “Let’s use the power pick.”

The backpack glided off Eldred’s shoulders. Despite his attempts to put it down gingerly, the pieces of metal inside rattled. Unlatching the top revealed the tight packing of several plastic boxes, separated with bits of cloth to minimise scratching.

Eldred pulled out the newly bought power pick. Calling it an automated hand chisel would perhaps have been more accurate, but it did not roll off the tongue as well. They had not needed to use it so far, saving its limited battery life for as long as they could. “Know which one is the best?” Eldred asked, looking at the multitude of metal attachments for the head.

“Nope,” Avari responded.

“Then I will just go with biggest is best.”

“Very male way of thinking.”

“So you disagree?”

“Nope,” Avari reiterated. “I also like big things.”

Eldred snorted in amusement. The base of the attachment slotted into the tip of the machine with a click. Scarcely had he used an electronic screwdriver in his life, much less a drill and certainly never this specialised machine. All the same, he put it against the wall and pulled down the trigger. ‘Something interesting should come of this,’ he hoped. The flames of ambition eagerly burned through the fresh fuel.

The device hammered against the wall with the sound of heavy construction. Metal slammed over and over against the wall. Pieces of stone splintered off, dropping to the ground in sheets of sleet. The vibrations from the engine within made Eldred’s hands numb. He braced the device against his shoulder to keep going.

It took him only five minutes to get a breakthrough. Almost half an hour later, the hole was big enough that they could squeeze through. Eldred went first, then helped Avari onto the other side. Though she was vertically compact, when it came to circumference she had several, thankfully pliable, assets.

“…Could you not have made it a bit larger?!” the gremlin complained.

“I can once you are through. I was conserving battery.”

“Conserving battery, my ass! Or my lack of ass, in this case!” Avari said, just before their combined efforts managed to move her stuck hips through the gap. She lurched forwards, her face meeting his chest plate. Eldred had the presence of mind to back away in equal measure so that contact was not too harsh on her. “Well, that was a- woaaaaaah.”

The gremlin’s bratty remarks were silenced by her wonder. Now that she was through, Eldred turned around to take a look at what they had found.

It was the remnant of a dwarven hold or, at least, a piece of one. Even after all this time, blue crystals attached to the ceiling still lent enough light to let them see the scope of it all unassisted. Painted in the cold twilight were several multi-storey complexes, worked right into the multi-coloured stone walls. All were interconnected with vast bridges of marble.

The damage from the shattering of the planet was also plain to see. Vast cracks ran through the heavily decorated walls, filled with black, porous rock – lava that had poured in and cooled. These molten foundations created obstacles and additions to the mighty dwarven architecture.

Scattered about the place laid the corpses of Slackmoles. “Wonder what happened to them,” Eldred remarked, poking one with his foot. They were barely damaged, most of them left in the same, cleanly executed state as they had left their prey.

Avari scanned it and sighed. “Probably means that some other group was here before… well, still good chances we can make out like bandits.”

They did not have to walk far to get confirmation for this fact. The first building they poked their head into had a multitude of jewellery just…lying about. Well, it was lying about between the long rotted corpses of dwarven families holding one another in their final moments. Mummified skin and skeletons alike were covered in the marks of extreme heat.

Eldred stared at the skeleton for a little while. In the back of his mind, he knew that this was an objectively horrid reminder of mortality. ‘They must have been boiled to death together. Father, mother, child,’ he thought.

“First time?” Avari asked.

“Yes,” Eldred responded. “Admittedly, I thought I’d feel worse about it. Maybe it's because they’re so desiccated it's difficult to even consider them people anymore.”

Nyx hovered by his side, her warm hand on his shoulder. She said nothing, just remained right there while her bonded man considered what he was feeling.

In the end, he simply turned away from the corpses. He could do nothing for them. Even if he could, he wasn’t sure if he would have. What energy did he owe people that had died several hundred years before he had been born?

The three of them gathered up the scattered jewellery. The gold had partially melted, ruining the integrity of many pieces and even fusing several together. All the same, pure dwarven gold would fetch a pretty price. Avari did not even need to check it. She did it all the same. Eldred did not need to ask her opinion. The shiver of delight that went through her after she touched it with her tail was more than enough.

They went into another house, then another and another. It was almost always the same. Sometimes it was just one dwarven corpse, sometimes there was none. Always, there was at least something valuable, a silver ring or a golden pendant. They put it all into a burlap sack that they had brought along exactly for this purpose.

After almost two hours of making bank, they entered what must have been a beer hall, with almost a hundred dwarves cooked to death inside.

“Wonder if they knew what was coming and chose to drink or were so drunk they barely realized it,” Avari remarked. It was grave humour, very little mirth swinging in her voice.

Eldred met it with a dry chuckle. He was already desensitised. No, it was more accurate that another kind of numbness was growing within him.

“You doing fine?” Avari asked while inspecting a clump of molten metal that once had been individual pieces of tableware. When she realized that it was just iron, not silver, she threw it aside. “You’re looking like you’re about to crumple up and die. This is a huge success! Good job, boss!”

Eldred hummed, his voice a deep rumble in his throat.

“It’s fine if the corpses weird you out,” the gremlin assured. “First time and all of that. If you want to take a break–“

“It’s not that,” Eldred softly interrupted her. “This feels… dull.”

“Dull?” Avari tilted her head, her lack of understanding plain on her face. She pulled an ornate ring off a dead dwarf’s finger and tossed it in with the rest. “We are making a lot of money right now, how could that be dull?”

He scratched the back of his head, trying to make that shamelessness he had found drag better words to the forefront of his mind. “It’s unearned.”

A different angle that had Avari confused all the same. “We walked two and a half days to get here and you’re suffering the pain of keeping the sexy ghost lady around, how is that not earned?”

“I concur,” Nyx said. “We have earned this.”

“You’re cool with me taking the rings off these corpses, right?” Avari asked the banshee.

“You are not desecrating the resting dead. I sense no fellow undead nearby anyhow.”

“Good to know!” Avari declared and returned to greedily grabbing everything she could find.

Eldred followed her around, aiding her in gathering up the valuables in silence. Nyx observed him but did not comment. Avari was entirely absorbed in babbling and giggling to herself, her mood elevated beyond good by the prospect of all this wealth.

Was this what he wanted? Grabbing gold off corpses? He was looking inside himself to find what irked him. It wasn’t that he was taking value from dead people on a dead planet. What good would it be to them? Squeamishness could be reserved for actual graverobbing, not opportunistic collections like this.

So, what was rubbing him the wrong way? What caused the fire inside him to dwindle as fast as the news had reignited him? He was missing… something. He was missing the difference. This wasn’t so different to picking up his welfare package from the charity every month. In either case, people that he had never known were providing for him, knowing or not. The circumstances were different, the level of effort greater, but ultimately it felt… so dull.

Eldred continued to drag himself after Avari. Perhaps he had just expected too much? At a minimum, this path he had started had him bonded to a hot banshee and the equally hot gremlin seemed quite happy with him at this moment. Certainly, he could continue this path for that alone?

‘No, I can’t,’ the words echoed from the void in his soul. ‘I can’t pretend to be happy again. I need something. I need–‘

A fist of red stone rushed through his field of view. It happened suddenly, the limb snapping forwards from a corner just as Avari began to turn it. The metal-reinforced knuckles slammed into the gremlin’s upper arm. A wet crunch, like a twig getting stomped into dirt, filled the air. Time seemed to slow. Adrenaline immediately rushed in Eldred’s bloodstream.

Fearlessly, he snapped forwards, grabbing Avari by the waist and dragging her back before the scream of surprise left her lungs. He saved her from a follow-up swing, the creature that had attacked them fully coming around the corner.

It was a golem, a dwarven golem whose original design had been thoroughly compromised. Though it retained the dimensions of its design, a stout, humanoid being of stone, it had changed in ways that were incongruent with the surrounding design philosophy. Its body had a deep red tinge to it. Artistic carvings of armour and muscles had been sanded away by time, leaving it oddly smooth and cracked. Those cracks glowed with crimson light.

Most telling of the changes, however, was the maw of the golem. It began where the nose ought to be, then vertically continued all the way to the middle of the chest. The mouth was lined with blunt teeth, reminiscent of a crocodile.

“That’s a fucking Cannibal Golem,” Avari hissed, clutching her right arm. It rested at a slightly off angle, the bone clearly broken. “Just great!”

The corrupted construct analysed them for a moment, then charged.