Chapter 74

 

 

 

Asakura has to hug me to stay warm. While we talk about it, but doing so makes me overly conscientious of how close we are. I’m worried about the pheromones kicking in too. Sunghee and Fox only had to touch my hands to get it to spark and she’s hugging my full body.

When you get this cold you stop worrying about who is seeing you too.

But she’s shivering. Right now her mind is on the cold while our teeth are chattering so badly that wonder if they’ll crack like glass.

“Do you h-have a p-pl-l-plan?” she asks.

I turn away from the dwarves in the dark and suddenly pull open the demon item box. Of course they wouldn’t be able to tell it from a normal item box.

There I’d tucked away the energy sword that Fox had given me. I have to get it out now because I don’t know what will happen if I try to open the demon box underwater. If I did would it also make the orc training room underwater too? That could make Fox and Sunghee have a lot of problems. I’m not sure if it would be that extreme, but why take the chance.

Yep, getting the energy sword out now is the best thing to do.

I’ll use it to carve a way in for the water ladder to be worked out. Plus, it’ll help me avoid freezing to death. But I’ll have to be careful about it moving differently in the water.

I recalled during the dream state when I’d poured energy into it without even trying to and it’d melted the sand of the training room floor into thick clear but a wild looking miniature sea of glass. Back then, my accident was now turning into something useful! Of course when that had happened I’d been lucky none of us had gotten burned, since it was so hard to control.

Now that trick would for sure help out. How ingenious! I should have thought of it before!

It’s perfect for this. I can use it as a drill and then set the spike into the hardening molten sand. I just hope the dwarves aren’t set on getting their iron spikes back. It might make getting them back impossible or difficult if they are trying to salvage them.

Heh, we can do this! The water ladder will get finished and then we won’t be trapped in here like rats!

But I have to be careful. It will be really easy to get burned by both the burning energy sword and the molten sand or water heating up fast. And we’ll have to be by the molten sand to set the spike. Moving while carrying this thing will be dangerous.

Asakura won’t understand either since she wasn’t in the training room dream state.

I still haven’t told her about that stuff yet…when the time is right I will right? Of course I’d have to figure out how to even describe it.

By the way I’ve got all these other women on the side…but don’t worry because you are all being influenced to accept it calmly.

Yeah that will be fun to tell her.

We’re almost ready to go down.

“Hey that looks cool, can I see it?” Asakura asks.

I snatch her hand away just in time. “Be careful that thing will burn your hand if you touch anywhere other than the grip,” I warned. Even the grip is hotter than it should be actually.

“Eh?!” she’s shocked. She pulls back.

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to touch it after all,” she hurriedly added.

“Sorry.”

“No it’s cool. I’m glad you are protecting me. Thank you,” she gave a small head bow and nod.

Still, she’s excited we have a plan and says so.

But then as I channeled more mana into the sword we both start to feel the heat coming off it in waves. I end up having to wrap the handle with some extra clothing to help from having the heat make my palms raw and aching. I think part of why the heat is channeled and seeping out is the two mana sources from two different mana pools and casters, namely Fox and myself; flowing and hitting each other much like how a stove burner works. The heat coils from a stove that get hot are the currents hitting each other or something like that, though I’m not a rocket scientist in explaining it. This is pretty much the same thing.

But does that also mean I shouldn’t get the energy ‘coil’ sword too hot? I wonder what would happen if I did? I probably should get this done fast and turn it off quickly.

“Ah I get it now. You will use the sword to burn a hole and melt the stake into place?” she asks.

“Wow, you understand already?” I asked.

“Well it took me a minute to realize why you’d have a molten energy sword out in the middle of water, but then it hit me what you planned to do. It’s a good plan!” she added cheerfully. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek.

“Thanks.”

The dwarves around us can see something is up because they see our emotional state is suddenly happy and excited. They also can see and feel the heat from the heated energy sword. Some of them I can tell are curious about it.

I see a lot of them giving us thumbs up signals for good luck and renewed hope.

But then we have to figure out how to swim while carrying the sword. I can’t let it hang free since if I do I’ll get burned. Actually swimming to the point we’re working at will be the hard part.

“I’m most worried about how to carry this heavy thing without getting burned or drowning from lack of air,” I frowned voicing my biggest worry.

“I have an idea,” Asakura says suddenly.

“What?”

“I want you to just hold my ankle and leg with one hand and with your other hand hold the energy sword. Then I’ll pull us down the water ladder,” she says with bright eyes.

“You think you can do that without us being to slow or me causing you problems?” I asked.

“As long as the water ladder is in place I think it will work. And it’ll help to conserve your stamina,” she said.

“Ah that might could work,” I think about it.

But I’m worried what will happen if I touch Asakura for too long? She’s also been touching me almost all day intermittently. That has to have affected her on a small level even if the water around us lessened the effect right?

She can see I’m worried about something. “What? What is it? Did we miss something?” She asks innocently. She’s unexpected very loyal. I’m really grateful for it. Loyalty is better than gold anytime and anywhere. But she can tell something was bothering me. She has a sort of big eyed look like she’s anxious to please me.

I hesitate to bring it up so I deflect instead, “actually I’m thinking if I’m not careful and this energy sword clips any parts of the rope then we’ll end up cutting the rope very easily,” I said voicing my fear.

“Ah that’s true too. But you are good and being careful if any can do this it’s you,” she said.

“But can you cool down the sword first and then heat it up there?” she asks after that suddenly having another inspiration.

I frown, “unfortunately no. It will be too unstable if I do it there and the cold water may throw off giving it the right energy feed. It will end up with either too much or too little. Too little and we don’t get the job done and too much means we’ll end up cooking ourselves in boiling water probably,” I added.

“Th-that’s not good,” she said.

“Hmm, then you’ll just have to hang onto my leg and ankle and have me pull you through the rope ladder carefully,” she said finally.

Before I can object again, she says, “Let’s go, and hurry. We can’t stay in the cold water forever.”

So we find ourselves submerging under the water and moving again.

I she begins pulling my quickly while trying to keep her legs straight. I am able to easily hold her ankle but it does take a lot of concentration to keep the energy sword away from the rope, since so much energy and the nature of the sword makes it feel heavy. That was partly because the rope anchors were put wherever the dwarves could get them to be secure too so I sometimes had to readjust my balance as I was pulled along. That wasn’t always in the same position and so sometimes the angle and position of the rope in the tunnel would change according to what was available.

Then I had to avoid staring up Asakura’s panties where I had a perfect view from below. It didn’t help that she swam with frog leg kicks pushing her legs outwards and good muscle tone on her legs and hip. At least they were black lace. If they’d been a lighter color they’d have become see through.

A certain mound keeps opening up to be seen as she pulls us forward.

Unexpectedly I find I’m trying to keep my mind on the job but it’s difficult. I’m beginning to feel sexually excited while holding onto her ankle.

I keep a count of the seconds in my head. Whenever we hit about thirty seconds or so we have to go back and because it takes a good ten to fifteen seconds just to get there. That means only about twenty seconds to work if we’re at our best. We have to also account for some things taking longer than we think they will. I’ll also have to have her ‘tow’ me back to ‘land’ when we’re done I realized, which will be more pressure on her.

Still the energy sword makes the water feel less cold. I’m sure she can feel it too. But the problem is its not efficient at distributing the heat effectively, and so sometimes we have a warm spell and then a cold current pushes it away and then it repeats itself.

We finally arrive, and instantly I stab and pour the energy sword into the bottom of the tunnel. I have to also starting pouring in a strong mana pulse to keep it steady. It’s working but not heating up as fast as I want it too. Then after it starts to heat up, we have to spread our legs against the sides of the narrow tunnel in order to avoid burning our feet on the molten sandy bottom.

While this is happening we can actually see tons of bubbles in the water tunnel seeping from the point of contact between the energy sword and the sandy bottom where we’re working. We try to avoid the bubbles, unsure of how much steam there will be.

Finally we get the spike into place at about twenty two seconds, which is slightly over the deadline to leave. It took about twelve to make the hole and then we had to pull back and let the heat settle. Then I had to use a dwarven wrench to hold the spike and push into the molten tunnel floor without getting burned.

The only part that was lucky is that the molten rock surrounding the spike is cooling and hardening very quickly thanks to the cold water of the current. We can see it will hold well.

It wasn’t easy. But somehow we’ve gotten the spike into place. Then there’s steam clouds in the water too, to avoid making it hard to see during the whole process.

Not good.

We’re two seconds past what we needed to go for air. I’m pretty scared that we’ve stayed too long. Both of us gesture frantically to leave.

My life is in Asakura’s hands. If I swim myself I’ll be trapped and either drown or accidentally burn up our only escape route. It’s scary. the dwarves probably only have a limited amount of rope to use. They probably budgeted the rope very carefully, so we can’t mess up the ropes by thrashing our way through desperately.

I feel scared. The fear of no air and suffocation is a terrible way to go.

Asakura is pulling me through the tunnel but it feels like my lungs are on fire. She’s trying to go as quick as she can too.

She panics on the last ten feet. Her legs jerk about and she almost kicks me off of her. We’re both straining for air and I’m starting to see black spots. My vision gets hazy and her feet sometimes unconsciously kick out.

Then we burst through to the air pocket where the pool opens up into the cavern. For a few seconds my vision is seeing black spots still. Then we somehow rejoice that we’re still alive. I’m glad I didn’t cut my own arm off with the energy sword too, since the last ten feet I wasn’t entirely sure of everything I was doing.

It takes us a long minute to catch our breath. I can vaguely feel my arm and hand holding the heavy energy sword is hanging to the right still, and not touching either of us or anything important.

“I don’t ever want to do that again,” I gasped.

“I second that motion,” Asakura says right after.

But it gives me the idea also of heating up and regulating the cold cavern temperature again outside the water in the normal camping space by using the energy sword to heat up and melt some of the rocks around where our tents are set up. This is OK, because the others had a chance to warm up before going back in too. They are letting us have a rest while we warm up the cavern too.

The dwarves like this idea as we climb out of the pool to make the idea of molten rock ovens to happen.

Of course it’s not without problems. I learned quickly that if the rocks get too hot too fast they can explode. I’m lucky a few of the dwarves already knew of this trick so they spotted the problem quickly before it happened and used some kind of metal tongs to throw the bad rock into the pool right before it exploded.

We had a couple of close calls after that; the dwarves just didn’t have a way of heating a lot of rocks this hot away from their home town forges, since their away from home even though they had the knowledge. Their campfire also didn’t have a lot of fuel to use earlier and lacked the strength to properly do this concept.

Thankfully we got it right and now everyone is awake and has new energy to get things done since we’re seeing this is working out, including Rina.

But now something else comes up.

Asakura is suddenly excited. “Hey I’ve got another idea,” she says with her hands up gesturing. “We can either continue like we have been and melt the spikes into the cavern floor under the water, or we can melt the spike into a big heavy rock before it’s put into the water and then have the dwarves just move it over slowly in a couple of trips with each spike pre-anchored into small boulders.”

“Wouldn’t it have to be pretty big rock, so it won’t move while being pulled on?” I asked.

“Yes. And you’d still have to space out ‘true anchored’ spikes also,” she warned.

“Ah, that’s a good idea,” I said.

“Well which do you think would be better?” she asked, anxious for my opinion. I can’t help but notice her feet are touching mine near where we’re warming ourselves up.

I’m worried about it affecting her, but our relationship is still very new. What if she perceives my pulling back as rejection? She’s an adult and already a very timid person. I risk losing her if I pull away from her.

“Actually I’m not sure. I can’t give the dwarves the energy sword. It’s a mage item that’s being fed by my mana, so if I give it to them the heat will be cut off. So if we get too tired we can anchor the spikes in pre-set rocks that are heavier and they could move them. But maybe we can do a one or two more molten spikes first?”

After a few more minutes of warming up we decide to go try go get a couple more anchors set.

Like before I have to hold onto Asakura so I don’t accidentally have the sword touch anything while I swim. She insists on it and seems more cheerful now.

“OK,” I agreed quickly.

“Now make sure you stay close,” she warns.

We both get a big gulp of air.

This time because we’re refreshed and warmed up, with lots of excitement from seeing progress we get there pretty fast. It took nine seconds to reach the new end of the rope anchors. This is good though considering we’d just added about twenty more feet. But it also means we’ll really have a tough time of things getting back since it’s much further.

This time we tie the rope into place against our previous anchor. Asakura does this part. She has me check the anchor for problems. Everything looks secure. Because our lives are going to be on the line and dependent on this water ladder we have to make sure it has no defects, no matter how small they are.

She ties it back into place.

Then we go for air.

It’s become a pain with having to only have about ten seconds to work but I force myself to be patient. The others are anxious and hopeful for progress. We signal we have to go back. Either way, we still would have had to check our work and make sure it’s stable. Other people’s lives are on the line because of it, so the quality must be good.

I noticed Hrogin is studying us carefully later on.

It’s a good sign I hope.

Asakura is really careful and pulls us through as fast as she can. We work quickly but then suddenly we had to stop.

Halfway to where we should have been one of the spikes has come loose. It means we have to stop and fix it. We lose more time but we have to do it right. We’re both getting really cold. Asakura’s lips are turning blue.

We’re both lucky that this water has been clean enough that we can see through it pretty good.

I use the sword to melt through the sand but because of the narrowness of the space in the water here, Asakura has to be right behind me for me to be able to work and not get her burned. I can feel her warmth pushing into my back and her arms are wrapped around me for warmth.

The cavern floor here is especially hard. We have to try really hard to get the spike melted into the flooring but it finally works.

Then we go for air again.

In spite of getting everything fixed again, things don’t always go smoothly. We had to stop and retie a rope that I’d accidentally brushed the sword against. That took two trips. Then we had to go back to the original place we were trying to fix in the first place.

I’m surprised it’s working but the progress feels very slow.

It took three tries to melt that spike into place for the last position. It wasn’t because of any special problems, except just not having enough air and already having to travel so far to hold our breath. By the time we got it into place we are both totally exhausted and near hypothermia.

We’re clutching each other for warmth while the dwarves wrap a blanket around us.

We’re so cold we’re tempted to get burned to warm up as we get by the molten rock oven.

But the dwarves are pleased. What we did in a half hour had taken them almost five hours without our help. We’ve also sped up their whole process now for later with the others also.

We can’t get in the water anymore now though because too long in water that cold will make us sick. Even though we were willing to go again Hrogin forbids it. He’s also happy with the progress. That’s good though, it shows he’s a kind leader and doesn’t think of people being expendable.

We then show the dwarves our idea of securing the iron spike anchors into heavy rocks before they are put into the water. Overall this way of doing it does require more effort but it’s vastly much more consistent, though a bit slower than going directly with the energy sword.

We find out from watching them that before we’d done our part the dwarves had sometimes taken up to ten trips just to secure one spike. So this way of working it out they do like even though the rock is really heavy…heavy enough that the ones they want to use for this part of the project are heavier than I can lift. Even with that many trips they probably had to have some people with intense strength to manage it.

Dwarves can be a bit too obsessive about quality it seems. This is one time where it gets in the way.

I suppose they are right about wanting anchors that are heavy enough that the swimmers on the water ladder won’t move them over time, but they don’t have to have a hundred pound rocks for every anchor.

But still I have another worry. It seems that we’ll have to figure out something else to help the project move along.

The dwarves have a clear map now of where we’re trying to go. They show it to us, using hand gestures and stick figure drawings. So we know the water tunnel connects to another chamber with air. We also knew that from how the goblins were getting into this chamber.

The problem is the current is working against us.

We also aren’t sure how the goblins were able to swim such a long distance without some kind of device for air. It turns out the distance is so big that I have concerns if both Rina and Asakura can make it. I’m worried about me making it too.

If we get separated or off track we will surely drown. It turns out its many hundred feet across to the other tunnel. Because of the language barrier I can’t understand that part very well on the exact figure. But it’s clear that even though we have a good escape plan there will be a lot of risk here.

That’s also not counting the fact that the other chamber is going to be full of goblins on the other side. There patrol times have also become less predictable time wise recently too. That also worries me. What if they come across while someone is down here working?