Someone clapped a hand hard against my back, and I coughed up another blast of fetid water all over the already wet floor. The pain alternated between bright flashes of tense contraction and sweet moments of relief as I finally got some stale cavern air into my lungs. I blinked my eyes rapidly and tried to stand, but felt so weak I nearly collapsed back to the floor when my companions stopped supporting me.

  I caught a few snippets of conversation between the three dwarves, and it seemed they were arguing about how to move forward. Jozoic and Kona were doing most of the talking, while Hodak chimed in occasionally with his rumbling mhmms.

  All I could do was keep coughing up water, but my mind was finally starting to clear up enough for me to form coherent thoughts. First and foremost, why was this so painful? I’d set my pain-sim sliders relatively low after crushing my foot under a rolling stone on Rosso’s mountain. There was an alleged XP boost if you turned them up, but I didn’t know anyone who played with them cranked up like that. I didn’t see much point in it with the way the skill system worked anyways as the levels seemed to hardly matter.

  “Hmm, that was a close one buddy.” Max’s voice cut into my thoughts. “The levels do kind of matter, by the way. You just haven’t gotten any of them high enough to bear fruit. You are correct in thinking that they matter less than your gear and engrams though. The Suk-ers wouldn’t have as much of a market to sell power if it wasn't possible to earn at least a measure of it through hard work and training, but the balance is heavily skewed to the pay-to-win demographic.”

  I hacked out another cough, and then thought back at Max. “What about the pain? Why the fuck was that so awful?”

  His avatar shrugged in his little streamer cam window, but his mouth was moving as if he were already speaking. It caught me off guard as he spoke again and I focused on him. It was like a badly dubbed movie where his mouth seemed to be saying something completely different from the words that reached me.

  “Oh, the drowning thing? Yeah, that's a known bug, it's been around since the Suk started inviting new factions to the game. The Lel’s have been petitioning about it forever, but the crab-bastard Tella are too afraid of their overlords’ habit of shooting the messenger to actually pass it up the chain. I doubt they’d patch it anyway, even if they knew. Their problems are all solved and they’re too lazy to actually work on the sim anymore.”

  Finally having recovered some strength while I listened to Max, I pushed myself up into a kneel and looked at the dwarves around me. Jozoic nodded at me and was the first to speak.

  “You said two minutes, yet half the time nearly sent you to respawn. Are you ready to move?”

  I gasped in another rough breath and tried to speak, but only coughed again. Nodding through my coughing instead, I grabbed his shoulder and used it to haul myself to my unsteady feet. I’d rather have writhed around on the floor and continued coughing, but I knew we had to move quickly and did not want them to leave me behind.

  Jozoic stood firm and seemed unfazed by my weight as I stood, but shrugged me off and gestured for Hodak to assist me instead.

  “Good, we must move. I will range in front with Kona to clear the way, you two will… you can follow.” He cut himself off from issuing orders, which might have upset me three minutes ago, but I was too beat to care about the petty feeling from earlier anymore. Who gave the orders didn’t matter, all that mattered was that I could finally breathe again and our mission.

  Hodak wedged himself under my arm, and the other two turned to lead us further into the tunnel. The floor was a shallow sheet of flowing water underfoot, causing light splashes and trickling that might have made me need to take a leak in another situation. Like a softly trickling fountain, it flowed along and pooled behind us.

  I continued to cough and hack as I hobbled along with Hodak’s support. He stayed mostly silent as he hauled me along, other than grumbling some barely audible dwarven curses when I coughed full force right in his face at some point. The fire in my chest had lessened, and I began to have moments of easy breathing before something shook loose in my lungs and sent me into another fit of sputtering coughing.

  My sense of time must have taken a beating as well, because before I knew it Hodak helped me down into a sitting position and propped me up against a wall. Jozoic and Kona were a ways ahead, smearing their bulbs of glow-goo against the walls before the familiar scent of acrid melting stone washed down the tunnel. There was a distant boom, and the stone against my back vibrated as dust fell from the ceiling and walls.

  Kona jumped back from the wall and gasped at the noise. All three of them looked up at the ceiling as if they anticipated the whole thing to collapse while I pulled my gauntlets off and poured water out of them.

  “That’s just the explosives.” Something caught in my throat and made me pause to cough a few more times before I continued. “If you’re worried about collapse, we can build up some support. We call ‘em timbers, but we might need a new name for it since we don't have any wood.”

  Hodak turned around to give me a heavy frown, but also nodded at me. Kona began to remove and pile up scraps and planks fashioned from the sportrell tree-shroom things of various thickness and length from her inventory, while Jozoic went back to melting a hole the size of my fist into the stone wall.

  I remained seated on the ground, my muscles twitching and cramping. I needed a few more minutes to recover before I could be of any use, so I focused on my breathing and tried to flex and stretch against the cramps. At least the floor was dry here, but I could see the distorted and rippling reflections of the glow-lights on the sheet of water slowly creeping towards us along the floor at the far end of the tunnel.

  “How deep must these holes be made?” Jozoic called over his shoulder as he scooped a handful of melted stone out from the divet he had started.

  I coughed one more time and spat to the side. “I don’t know, as deep as you can reach?”

  He muttered something back, but not loudly enough for me to hear. I stretched my shoulders, and wished I could get a drink of something to wash the foul taste of the centipede stew out of my mouth. What purpose did being able to taste it even serve if I wasn't able to eat or drink anything with the cheap portable link I was using, anyway?

  “The holes should really only be a couple of inches wide, and you should probably have them carve out some relief spaces too if you wanna keep it under control. The rocks have to have some place to move to when the shockwave cracks everything apart,” Max chimed in.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  I shook my head and blinked a couple of times, sent a thankful thought Max’s way, then relayed his information. The three dwarves gave me a mix of nods and grunts as they continued busily melting and scooping small holes out of the stone. After another moment, I pulled my gauntlets back on and managed to get to my feet. I felt like absolute garbage, but pushed through it and wedged some of the planks into place along the walls a few feet back from the rock face in the rather small room.

  The gneiss stone was black and white with stripes that went from the top left to the bottom right at an almost a 45 degree angle, and everyone had chosen to excavate through wider portions of the white bands of the zebra striped stones. They were making quick work of it, carving out about a half inch or so with each handful which they smeared against the sidewalls of the tunnel over the rougher patches and cracks. It left something like a plastered or daubed finish that cracked with spiderwebbed hairline fractures as the solvent evaporated out of it and it dried.

  After only a few minutes, the dwarves were reaching in all the way to their shoulders to scrape their fingertips against the back wall. Jozoic finally shook his hand out and wiped it back and forth against his chest, leaving streaks of grayish residue.

  “What is next?” he asked.

  I handed him one of the stone-bound grenades that I had spent the last few minutes carefully opening between coughing fits. “Pour this into the center one, let’s try just half of the powder for now. Then we embed a fuse into it and…”

  I trailed off, prompting Max for a little more help as I realized I wasn't all that sure about what we needed to do to pull this off successfully.

  “It says to use clay to cap it off around the fuse, and the powder should be kept dry, tamped down, and compressed as much as possible without setting it off before that. Explosives work better under pressure and contained, it’s like those videos of people lighting off firecrackers on their palm and laughing it off. It’s all fun and games until someone closes their fingers around it and loses a hand.”

  A thought gave me pause before I passed the information along, despite both Jozoic and Hodak turning around and looking at me impatiently while I stalled. Where was he even getting this stuff? He phrased it like he was reading me a manual or something. The desync between his image in the stream-cam window and badly dubbed voice still bothered me too, leading me to hesitate even longer.

  “And…?” Jozoic questioned.

  I sighed and tried to focus on the task at hand, there was just never enough time to actually think about anything lately. Hopefully I’d remember what all I needed to worry about once I got a chance to spend a few hours actually hashing it out. I’d probably forgotten more problems than I could remember at this point, and I was unsure how helpful Max might be at helping me keep track of that kind of thing.

  Jozoic crossed his arms and tapped his toe twice. Hodak just sat down and looked up at me, his frown from earlier still in place. Kona leaned over and tapped her elbow against Jozoic’s, gesturing towards me.

  “Is this some sort of trance they do? What’s happening?” she said.

  That snapped me back into the moment, again. I took a deep breath, did my best to rein in my meandering mind, and just started talking.

  “We need to make sure the powder stays dry, then tamp and pack it in place with something that won't make a spark. Normally we’d use clay or something similar to seal it once it’s packed, but I think we can just smoosh in some of the stone around it to seal it since we don't have any clay… you know… I guess you all probably don't care too much about clay, why bother having to fire it and all that when you can just shape a chunk of granite with your hands?”

  “Mhmm”

  I paused as Hodak interjected while I had been taking in a breath, and was about to go on when I noticed Kona giving Jozoic another skeptical look.

  “Perhaps being underwater for so long has addled him. He's… not normally this bad. He’s pretty quiet, but decisive and generally reliable,” Jozoic said. His tone started off steeped in secondhand embarrassment, but gradually morphed to something almost threatening as he gave me a pointed look.

  Max was laughing it up in my peripheral vision, losing his shit in his little gaming chair while GIF’s and stupid logos swarmed over his screen. I brought my hands up to run them through my hair out of frustration, forgetting once more that I still had my damned gauntlets on until their somewhat jagged articulations scraped along my forehead and pinched into my hair.

  I just stopped moving my hands, trying not to think about how I looked like I was literally hiding my face out of embarrassment.

  “We’re going to need to move a fair ways down the tunnel-”

  “-you're also going to want to move upwards, not down into the water. I recommend… here.”

  One of the chambers flashed green on my map, and I continued after the short pause from Max’s interruption. “-and, we need to go to an upper chamber.”

  “You will-” Jozoic started but cut himself off, making a sort of growly noise before continuing. “Will you handle the powder? I do not wish to do this by my own hand.”

  “I’ll do it.” Hodak was back on his feet in a split second, his hands outstretched. His voice was even, and his face was still set into his stern frown, but there was a certain exuberance in his eyes. Jozoic gave me a look, then handed the cracked vessel to Hodak.

  I wiggled my fingers and carefully extracted them from my hair, only ripping out dozens of strands as opposed to whole patches. I’d have to buy some new hair cosmetic if I ruined this one, or pay for one of the untradeable repair potions that you could buy through the Core’s store page as long as you were in the Hub. Gear and items could be repaired by other people, and you could pay for a craftsman's license to see durability bars, but everything to do with changing your avatar was only available through the HUD.

  Hodak busied himself by scooping handfuls of the black powder into the central hole that Jozoic had bored out. Kona had turned to watch him, but Jozoic was still watching me. I shrugged, his shoulders slumped a little and he gave me a tired look.

  It did not take long for Hodak to pack the charge, or to seal it with molded stone. After another couple of minutes he stepped back and waved us over. “Done.”

  We crowded around, Kona elbowing me out of the way to take the best angle. I pushed back, but was unable to shove her out of the way thanks to her stocky build and low center of gravity. So I just leaned down and rested my elbow onto her shoulder, using her as a support and my height as an advantage for once.

  With our positions settled, we all peered into the hole to check his work. I’m not sure why we bothered. It looked fine? None of us really knew what we were doing and had no idea what it should look like, but it did look well sealed and dry with the fuse poking out from the center of the finger-traced and smoothed stone.

  “So, now we light it and run?” Kona asked.

  I beat out Hodak with an “Mhmm” of my own as I stood and turned to face him. The frumpy dwarv flashed me a rare grin.

  “It might be smart to make sure the way is clear to run before we light it…” I said as I looked into the darkness behind us, little flashes of light shimmered off the water coming closer as it pooled up into the second level.

  Jozoic grunted, pulling his shield into his hand, and nudged Kona who produced her pry-bar spear. “We will go now to clear the way, give us thirty seconds before you light it and follow if you do not hear battle.”

  He then jogged off, passing from the pool of light then fading back in as a wire-frame silhouette while Kona raced to catch up to him.

  I looked over at Hodak, then back to the advancing pair, then back to Hodak. “Do you have a way to set it off?”

  “Oh yeah, mhmm.” Hodak replied, pulling a tiny metal fragment from his inventory no larger than a fingernail cutting before quickly popping it away.

  That sounded almost too eager, but I was more concerned about guiding the hasty warriors to the chamber that still glowed green on my map.

  “Alright, I’m going with them. Light it like he said and then come after us as quick as you can, okay?” I said, then instead of waiting for an answer I dashed off after the two, urgently shout-whispering. “First left, first right!”