34 – Renegading

The Ring was a chain of incredibly tall mountains that coiled around the Habitat, dividing it in two almost equal halves. At their summit, above the snow layer, they breached the atmosphere and their bare rock was exposed to the vast emptiness of space, where the solar radiation cooked it with its deadly rays. Nothing lived up there, not even monsters.

That was where the Renegade core was supposed to be. Julian and Cal’Eer climbed up the treacherous rock, battled the monsters that hid in the snow and eventually entered inside the mountains from a hidden tunnel at the bottom of a glacier. They kept climbing up to where the air was rarefied, above the atmosphere where only the thick rock separated the uncomfortable yet still livable conditions of the inside from the certain death of the outside. It was when they were almost at the summit of the mountain that Cal received a disturbing update.

“I failed the quests…” he said.

Julian stopped walking and looked at him for a moment. Then it occurred to him that his friend was talking about the system quests that he had going: one was a world quest and another was an adventurer quest and both of them were about the Core.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The quests. They are both marked as failed now.”

“Does this mean that the Core isn’t there anymore?” Julian mulled. “Did the fuckers just snatch it? Or did the system just now update the quests for you because we got closer?

Cal shook his head helplessly. “I have no idea.”

They decided to go check anyway. They were close, and Julian wanted to know if the Core had been removed recently or a long time ago, and then he would decide what to do. In any case, it was evident that the culprits were the Oor brothers, as they were the only ones left on the asteroid beside Julian and Cal who were going after the Core. Maybe some other adventurers had gotten the quest after they left the village, but none of them would have had the time to reach here before them. Even considering Julian’s… death and the subsequent waste of time. Reaching the Core chamber took the good part of the day, and the result was as expected.

“The renegade core isn’t there.” Julian’s voice echoed in the crystal cave as he looked at the pedestal in the middle. “And there’s nothing. Nothing we can work on to figure out when it was taken. This room is cleaner than a fucking temple.”

He plopped down on the ground. “Well, what a waste of time.”

Deciding that he needed a mood shift, he materialized some wood and flammable material from his ring to make a fire. Cal provided the Fireball to set it on fire, and they sat in silence.

“Alright. Need a distraction. Status.” Julian’s eyes read through the few lines of text that determined how powerful he was in a matter of seconds. “Oh, yeah, I can level up. Let’s go!”

One Arcane for good luck and one Endurance for more SP.

Do I do skills? Let’s do one skill, yeah.

He selected the Appraisal level 3, which added the ability to see the HP bar of the enemies. He wasn’t sure if it worked on every enemy and even people, and a quick check on Cal told him that no, it didn’t. it must only work on monsters, then.

“What do we do now?” Cal asked.

Julian saw that he was leaning on a large crystal protruding from a wall of the cave, his Staff abandoned to itself a few paces to the side. The crystal had a large crack going through its length, almost perfectly aligned with where the staff’s tip was touching it.

“We have to fix the Habitat?” Julian said.

“I mean after that. What do we even do?”

“Come on. I know you’re depressed but… It wasn’t a complete waste of time. I got plenty of Crystals to study from the cave.”

Cal sighed. “Yeah, sure. And now what? We go and find the elevator up? There is going to be an army waiting for us there, and you know that.”

“Well, yes,” Julian left the pedestal behind him and walked over to Cal, “you told me multiple times, yeah. And I see your reasoning: there is only one way up from this Habitat, the Oor brothers are very influent, they hate you very much and we killed their team. But… what do you want me to do? Build a nuclear weapon with the uranium I have, send it up with the elevator, detonate it and kill everyone who is waiting to ambush us, then wait a month here for the radiation to clear up and then we go?”

Cal’s eyes brightened. “You can do that?”

“That would also kill everyone in a ten-kilometer radius.”

Cal deflated. “Oh.”

“Alright, tell you what. Let’s fix the habitat first, shall we?”

They left, and Cal was visibly calmer on the way down the mountain. By the time the two were back on the plains, walking through the swaying fields of golden grass that danced in the wind, he was completely relaxed. It was as if a huge weight had been lifted off his chest, and he was now able to breathe for the first time in days. Julian, meanwhile, thought about the nuclear weapon. He wasn’t sure a normal nuclear weapon was going to do the trick, nor was he confident in his ability to build one with the limited tools he had at his disposal. However, he didn’t need to go the conventional route, and his experiments with explosives told him that he could just cram Crystal Cores together in a tight space alongside the actual explosive and the resulting blast would be orders of magnitude stronger. He didn’t see why the same wouldn’t apply to a nuclear weapon. It even fixed the issue of the first detonation, the one required to set off the chain reaction in the uranium, since the Crystal Cores could provide more than enough energy to do just that. A couple of tweaks here and there, and they would have their bomb.

As for the Habitat, they decided to follow the empty bed of the Noctilucent river to see why it had no water, where it came from and where was it going now. The terrain was hard to navigate: the once lush forest had long since turned completely brown and the dead trees and branches were no longer soft bushes dripping with verdant vines but hard brambles of knotty wood and spikes. On the ground, stacks of leaves blown by the wind covered the dried cracked dirt like a moving carpet.

“This place looks like the dead forest of the Plateau floor, near the Mesa.”

Cal hummed. “It’s so sad. To think that this place was so full of life barely a week ago!”

Eventually the two had to climb down into the bed of the river. On one side the forest was too dense, and it was becoming hard to navigate it. One wrong step and they could fall down the chasm where the river once flowed, or they would have to take long detours to go around impenetrable sections that would take too long to clear with their inadequate weapons. On the other side the river was coasting the Ring now, and a steep drop meant that unless they were willing to climb up and down and face the challenging terrain, the only other option was to go in the riverbed.

One thing was quite clear however: they were not the cause of this drought. This had nothing to do with what they had done in the tunnels below the vent they explored, even though it looked like it did at the time. At this point they had walked for hours and there was not a trace of water visible anywhere, and the forest was just as dead as it was close to the elven village. Julian was about to call it a day when the steep slopes of the chasm finally opened up to a huge flat plain. It was completely dry, and the soil was cracked and baked by the sun. All around, in the distance, the ground gently sloped upwards until it vanished at the horizon.

“This is the ocean we were talking about. A huge freshwater sea that acted as a reservoir for this whole section of the asteroid. Except it’s empty.”

Julian looked around. Even though most of the depression they were in was completely dry, a trickle of water coming from the melting snow of the mountains had formed a small river that disappeared into a hole in the rocks. There, the duo saw that the hole opened up into a man-made tunnel leading deep into the earth.

“Once again we find ourselves underground,” Julian said as he walked through the tunnel.

This one was different, but at this point it was clear that they all were different, in a way, as if made by different people. The tunnel was wide, dug into the rock without care for its looks, and beside a single line of wire and electric lights there was nothing on the walls. Roughly fifty meters in, the wire disappeared into the wall right before a huge set of blast doors, capable of closing down the whole tunnel. Julian passed his torch to Cal and went to examine the steel doors. They were halfway open, leaving a wide space in the middle where the rushing water flowed rapidly before disappearing into a waterfall of mist. At the bottom of the waterfall was no doubt the flooded central cave of the asteroid, where most of the surface water was trapped.

There was a tiny, at least compared to the blast doors, maintenance door to one side. The was a sign on it, but it was rusted to the point it was unreadable. Julian yanked hard on the handle and the door groaned as it slowly opened, revealing a dusty room full of levers, dials and analog screens. A quick analysis and a set of Appraisals told Julian that none of the consoles were electronic in nature, instead working on fluidic processors. The electricity was only for the lights and the screens, but they were all dead, dark and lifeless. On the far side of the room beside a metal cabinet full of wires, was a huge red lever. Once again the sign was not readable anymore, but the engravings on the walls were.

Cal examined it closely while Julian was taking a look at the rest of the devices.

“One… zero. The lever is set to zero. What does it mean?”

Julian appraised it but the skill refused to work on it. It didn’t consider the lever to be a single item. Julian shrugged.

“Set to zero means that whatever system this lever activates is off. Try to pull it up.”

Cal did. “Oh. Something happened.” He said, staring at a status window.

“Yeah, no shit.” Julian instead went to the door and looked outside. “Something happened alright!”

A tremor shook the ground as the heavy doors began to move.