The Dark Lord of Crafting

“That’s a big hole,” Kevin said, peering down into the cavern on his hands and knees. We’d done a quick sweep of the chamber for additional thermits, and it was clear, though more could always come parading out of the tunnels after hearing the explosion.

It was a hundred-foot drop to the bottom, a glassy black lake spotted with little spiky landmasses. Even from this height, the full extent of the space was too broad to be viewed at once, though I could see a wall on the left side studded with irregular shelves and cavities.

“Hold on,” I said, summoning a torch and dropping it through the opening.

“Hold on?” Kevin scoffed. “Did you think I was going to fly right down there?”

The torch fell at what seemed like the correct speed, a pool of light that descended until it hit the water and was swallowed. Why didn’t torches float? It wasn’t something I’d considered before, but they were mostly wood, so they should have been relatively buoyant. Maybe magic was heavy, or crafted wood was denser than natural wood. Regardless, I was looking for time distortion.

While I had no reason to believe that the presence of atreanum made time dilation more likely, it was something to be wary of, like things moving or falling faster or slower than they should have. I threw a few more torches to be relatively sure nothing wonky was going on in that department. In the other swamp, the kulu had been imprisoned in a region where time barely passed at all relative to the reality outside it. Before being trapped there myself, a torch had hit the barrier and appeared to stop moving.

The third torch fell, and one of the little landmasses moved. A broad mouth rose out of the water, and a long tongue snapped out, snatching the torch out of the air like a frog catching a fly. Then the head dropped again, disappearing with hardly a splash.

“Little” applied when I was thinking of them as landmasses, but not if they were monsters floating in the water. Each was ten to twenty feet across.

“Kevin,” I said slowly, “was that a Baresh? Those things you said never got big enough to be a problem?”

“Guess those are older,” Kevin sat back on his heels, then held out his hands as I continued to stare at him. “Hey! What do you want? I don’t have a Pokedex.”

It was deeply weird to be talking to someone that shared my frame of reference, and for that person to be Kevin. I waved the pick, and Durin’s Digger told me that the atreanum was roughly in the center of the lake.

“We can glide down to one of the ledges,” I said, “then work from there.”

“What are we going to do about the Bareshes? I’m not fighting in the water.”

“Try shooting one of them.”

With minimal grumbling, Kevin obliged, standing beside the hole and firing a few arrows into the lake. The Baresh that had eaten a torch was almost directly below us, allowing for a straight shot. The visible part of its body was armored with a spiky shell and the arrows bounced off without so much as disturbing the mob. I gave him a couple of enchanted arrows to test, and they were equally ineffective.

Shadowbane didn’t penetrate, and the Flaming arrow resulted in a brief flash that couldn’t catch in the wet environment.

Hssss…

The viridium blade was instantly in my hand, and I spun, sweeping it in a broad arc. A thermit, its fleshy, cylindrical body wobbling, had crept within a pace of us. The green-tinged edge of the blade passed through its form with ease, separating its legs from its body.

The top half deflated, hollow, and the bottom sagged, a bundle of ill-organized limbs. My pulse jumped up, it would have blasted us into the hole. The thermits were disturbingly silent and possessed almost no aetheric presence to sense.

Kevin’s first instinct was to scramble away, but the immediate danger had passed.

“I hate those!” He practically shrieked. “This is why I don’t come here!”

“Keep a lookout,” I said, scanning the chamber, ceiling included, to see if there were any more about to drop.

The entire thermit was harvestable, producing leather, tainted meat, and a new material.

<<<>>>

Volatile Sac

Some monsters are not long for this world. Rather than hunt and play with the other mobs, they would prefer to live on the edge, enjoying a brief, exciting existence that ends with a bang. Volatile Sacs can be used as an alchemic ingredient, or crafted directly as a source of gunpowder.

Not for use in games of catch.

<<<>>>

My supply chest included some gunpowder, but we needed a lot more than I’d brought for what I had in mind. Kevin and I moved to one side of the chamber clear of stalagmites and I dropped a worktable, then quickly set up a small perimeter of fencing.

A single Volatile Sac yielded three gunpowder coins, less than I needed for one block of TNT, but a start.

The thermits did seem to be attracted to noise. Up to this point, we hadn’t stayed in one place long enough for it to be an issue, but the previous explosion had echoed down the tunnels, a signal for every mob in the area. As I was placing the fencing, another thermit scuttled out of one of the entrances and Kevin shot it, resulting in another boom. The floor was thicker there, so it didn’t end up opening a hole, but it did attract yet more of the explosive mobs.

“Don’t shoot them unless there are too many for me to handle,” I said. “Otherwise, just keep pointing them out when you see them and make some noise.”

I sheathed the viridium blade in favor of the extra reach provided by the buster, and we proceeded to farm gunpowder.

The thermits didn’t travel in packs, thankfully, but the caverns had to be full of them, or else they were spawning somewhere nearby, because they kept coming. As long as they didn’t have a chance to sneak up on you, they weren’t hard to deal with. Single-minded, with only one trick up their sleeves, they charged as soon as they spotted us, and I bisected them when they came within reach of the oversized blade.

One decided to wall-crawl, its long body bouncing laterally as it approached, and Kevin shot it. The sound attracted even more, and one of them managed to kamikaze the fence. That crater was deep enough to open a small hole at its lowest point to the chamber below, and the sides were steep enough to make it difficult for me to get a good slice on any thermit approaching from that side.

I let Kevin fire at will while I shifted our defensive position to a new point along the wall, clearing a few stalagmites as I went to give me a killing field around the fencing. We kept it up for at least an hour, and the rate at which the thermits appeared slowed to a trickle before stopping entirely. The chamber was littered with dead thermits, and I harvested them all. Kevin kept watch as I generated enough gunpowder for a dozen blocks of TNT, though I saved a few Volatile Sacs for later use as potion ingredients, since the System had mentioned it was an option.

“You ready to go down?” I asked Kevin, shifting resources between the Storage Ring and the chest to make room for the TNT in my inventory.

“Not really,” he replied.

“Great, you go first.”

After fencing off the hole, we dropped down. The Elytrons made the glide down almost pleasant, and we landed on a ledge of bedlamite twenty feet above the water. Kevin shot a suspiciously wobbly shape along the wall to our right, and it exploded. Rock fragments disturbed the lake, and the nearest Baresh shifted its position, though it didn’t raise its head.

More thermits, how fantastic.

I provided him with a new supply of arrows before mining a set of stairs to get us closer to the water. How deep was this lake? The first stone blocks I dropped vanished, plop after plop, into its placid surface. After emptying half a stack of basalt from my inventory, the pile began to rise out of the water. This close to the edge, at least, it wasn’t that deep. The frog mobs could even be standing on the bottom, rather than floating.

A single Baresh drifted closer to investigate the disturbance, and I retreated further up to stay out of the reach of its tongue. Its broad head lifted, eyes like dim embers in the dark, and it quickly came to the conclusion that the heap of stones was of no interest, lowering once more. The shells covered their backs as well as the top of their heads, though they would be vulnerable if they were attacked from below.

When I tossed a torch out over the lake, the Baresh reacted instantly, its tongue zipping out to swallow the offending light source. Another thermit exploded, and I glanced up. Kevin was doing his job, at least.

A block of TNT, a torch, and flint and steel. Affixing the torch to the top of the block of dynamite, I lit it and heaved it out. True to form, the Baresh snagged it before it could splash into the lake, and the result was predictably effective.

A shockwave stirred the water as its shell came up, bits of Baresh still attached, and then dropped back down. Chunks of its flesh floated on the surface, and more of the frog mobs took this as an opportunity for a free meal. Their shells drifted closer, giving me ample opportunity to repeat the performance. Like the thermits, they didn’t learn from watching what happened to their fellows. Some mobs were clever, but these were not, and soon, the lake around my pile of rocks was nothing but uninhabited shells.

Kevin came down to admire the result.

“Nice,” he said, “that was easy.”

“Shhhh!” I glanced around, expecting a mother frog to pop out of the lake, or a rain of thermits from the ceiling a hundred feet above. “Flags, man. Flags.”

He laughed, a full-on “hyuck-hyuck” that was both awkward and annoying, but seemed genuine. “Right,” he said, “shouldn’t have said anything.”

Building a bridge to the center of the lake was a tall order, and I started by turning the pile of blocks into a flat platform attached at one end to the cave wall. A couple of torches, and a double layer of stacked fencing went up to prevent any thermits from sneaking up on us. Though they could still potentially drop from the ceiling, it was so high up that there wasn’t much we could do about that other than work faster.

Producing the supply chest once more, I picked out a cabochon of granite and split it into tokens between us. Kevin seemed happy to be a part of the project, humming tunelessly as we extended the platform. Thirty feet out, I made another rock pile to give the bridge support to rest on, and we continued that way until Durin’s Digger was once again pointing straight down.

“How much sand do you have?” Kevin asked.

In Maincraft, the quickest way to clear a body of water was to wall it off and soak it up section by section with sponges collected from Ocean Monuments. We didn’t have sponges, but I had enough material in the chest, most of it taken from Kevin’s storerooms on Mount Doom, to build a small island of stone blocks and sand at the center of the lake. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but when the mound was almost fifteen feet across, I stepped onto it and dug down.

Shoring up the sides of the hole with stone as I went, I crafted a five-by-five shaft straight down. The Fortune enchantment was telling me the deposit was close, and more than that, a familiar sense of wrongness was working its way up my spine. Atreanum created a disturbance in the Force. These were the droids I was looking for.

When I hit the lake bed, the vein was right there waiting. Atreanum ore, one block, then another, mixed in with the basalt. I kept mining, my excitement growing as the pull of the meta-material intensified. The substrate was solid, free of porous bedlamite, and dug out a tunnel beneath the lake, following the trail of atreanum.

“You okay down there?” Kevin’s voice echoed down the shaft.

“It’s here,” I called. Twenty, then thirty, blocks, and the pull diminished, but there was still more to be found. What had died here? Some ancient entity, a cosmic force? It didn’t matter. The resources it had left behind were all I needed to kill every demon on Plana.

“Hurry up!” Kevin shouted, “I’m getting antsy.”

When the pull of Fortune was gone, the sensation of wrongness vanished with it, and a nearly full stack of atreanum sat in my inventory. My heart was beating faster than it had when we were fending off wave after wave of thermits. This was what we had come for.

I rushed back to the shaft and placed a ladder to climb out. Kevin was waiting for me at the top, all but tapping his feet, and he shoved a handful of coins at my face as soon as I appeared.

“What are these?”

“Shells,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere to put them.”

“Thanks,” I stowed the coins. He was being helpful, a tendency I certainly wanted to foster, but it didn’t change who he was. The fact that our solo adventure was going well didn’t alter the nature of our relationship. “Let’s get the eff out of here.”

A trio of thermits was waiting for us behind the fencing, but we weren’t going out that way. Once a pair of fireworks were slotted into our Elytrons, we rocketed up to the opening in the ceiling. He was better at flying than I was, so only one of us bumped into the roof of the chamber when we got there. Kevin laughed at my awkward landing, clearly enjoying himself,

We followed the trail of torches out of the tunnels, shields up. A couple of thermits got in our way, but we soon returned to the surface of the swamp. I tried not to think about how smoothly this had gone. Even thinking about it could be a jinx.

It was a quick jet to get above the canopy, and the wyvern pen was still in place on the bedlamite formation when we landed.

Higher up, at the peak where I had laid Gastard to rest, a light flashed, and a bird appeared over the rise. As big as a harpy, its feathers were green and blue, gleaming like gems, and flames trailed from its wings as it descended.

I drew the viridium blade, readying my shield as Kevin attempted to hide behind me, but it didn’t attack, instead alighting atop the stone blocks of the wyvern pen, flames still dancing around its wings.

We stared at each other for a long moment. Its Presence was familiar, as were the bright feathers of its crown.

“Hello, Will,” the demon said, perfectly amiable.

“Astaroth?”