Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

Archie came to a skidding halt in the cave where he'd been forging less than fifteen minutes ago. His heart was still pumping full of adrenaline as he looked over his shoulder with Vital Sight still active to scour for any more signs of vital energy outlines.

His shitty luck had reared its head once again during the final stretch of his sprint back to the cave.

He tossed the last Dinomyrmex Gigas corpse out of the forest and into the twenty-kilometer-wide clearing between the wall and the Greenpatch forest, uncaring if the guards who patrolled would see him as they would soon have something more pressing to deal with.

He immediately began sprinting back to the cave, constantly glancing over his shoulder to witness an enormous swarm of Dinomyrmex Gigas stretching far beyond his line of sight.

With Vital Sight still active, they looked like a sea of neon red, tearing through the forest and rushing towards the wall.

Within seconds after he'd tossed the final Dinomyrmex Gigas corpse, the swarm had already converged on the spot where he had thrown one of their fallen kin, channeling their fury and frustration, born from their queen's distress, toward the one they assumed was responsible. The deafening noise that had shaken her had driven her into a frenzy, causing her to slaughter many of the children she had been incubating over the past week.

The many guards hidden beneath the earth burst from their concealed positions, launching themselves toward the thousands of ants swarming toward the wall. Skin-tight, sand-colored masks obscured their faces, each emblazoned with the insignia of a High Noon Sun rising above a wall - the symbol of the Netharim Sovereignty's Border Guards.

Their cybernetic limbs transformed, deploying a myriad of massive weapons, clashing against the Dinomyrmex Gigasi's exoskeletons for a moment before crushing them into paste and ripping through the sea of ants in front of them.

Alarms blared around the wall, alerting all within the wall of an attack behind them. Hundreds of Netharim guards, previously lying around, resting, and performing a variety of other acts, immediately acted without hesitation, donning their Netharim Sovereignty's Border Guard Masks.

"A massive swarm of Dinomyrmex Gigasi has emerged from the Greenpatch forest and is heading toward the Wall of Netharim!" shouted an older-looking human man from atop the wall, staring down at the hundreds of stoic guards in front of him with his mask in hand.

He stood on no platform, nor stool, yet he towered over even the tallest of trolls.

"We had an agreement with the Twin Dinomyrmex Mothers! We allowed them to live in the Greenpatch Forest without fear of harm, and in return, they swore to fight alongside us in future wars!" he shouted, his stark white brows furrowing as his full-cast cybernetic arms clenched into fists. His voice trembled with fury.

"But they betrayed that trust the moment their spawn emerged from the Greenpatch Forest and trespassed onto government land!" he spat, veins bulging across his wrinkled forehead as his rage boiled over.

The guards before him stood in a diverse array of races - varying in skin tones, scales, horns, sizes, and shapes - however, they were united by the unmistakable masks of the Netharim Sovereignty's Border Guard they'd donned upon their faces. Beneath their uniforms, the glow of their Cybernetic Sockets pulsed to the rhythm of their heartbeats.

"They dare to destroy the very thing protecting our loved ones from the disgusting filth of the Yndros Empire!" he bellowed, his voice thundering from atop the wall. His words carried across the battlefield below, heard by the hundreds of guards already stationed at the base of the wall, carving a path of destruction through the endless swarm of Dinomyrmex Gigas.

"Your seniors lay below, protecting both you and your families from the dogs in the South and the ants below!" He bellowed, staring at each of their eyes, hidden behind their masks, acknowledging their anger and desire to prove themselves that they were more than trainees by the clenching of their fists and the rising bloodlust he felt tickle his body.

"You want to prove you're no longer trainees?" he shouted, vital energy humming beneath the confines of his wrinkled skin.

"Yes, sir!" They shouted back, resolutely. Their spines ramrod straight as they saluted once more.

"Do you want to become the bastion that protects your loved ones from the filth from outside the border?" He shouted back at them as pressure erupted from his form and descended upon the guards who stood stalwart in front of him.

"Yes, sir!" They shouted back once more, their bloodlust rising in anticipation, creating a heated visage of steam that rose above them all.

"Then go!" he roared, his cybernetic arms shifting and deploying dual colossal warhammers in his Tunisium palms, each the size of tree trunks. He hoisted them over his shoulders, as the mask he carried within his palms suddenly appeared over his scarred face. "Slaughter them all until there are none left!"

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Yes, sir!" they shouted in unison before charging past him, vaulting over the edge of the wall, their uniforms gaining an iridescent veil as they descended into the swarm of thousands upon thousands of Dinomyrmex Gigasi that their seniors were protecting them from.

"For the Sovereignty!" They shouted as they plummeted like meteors into the seemingly endless swarm of Dinomyrmex Gigasi.

The long-range Classes cast their spells and took aim before releasing a relentless downpour of magic, bolts, arrows, and a myriad of other attacks upon the swarm below. As they descended, their iridescent uniforms shimmered, slowing their fall once they were a kilometer above the ground and forming glowing platforms beneath their feet as they were a hundred meters above the swarm.

The close-range classes were not interested in slowing their descent or fighting from a distance. As they reached a kilometer above the ground, their iridescent uniforms flickered with a dull purple glow before their speed doubled, turning them into meteors, that crashed into the swarm of Dinomyrmex Gigasi that had begun to push their seniors who'd been holding the line for the past hour and a half on their lonesome.

They were the bastion of the Netharim Sovereignty - the unwavering shield of the Netharim Sovereignty's Border Guards.

Archie pushed aside the boulder Aoife had placed over the tunnel's entrance and slipped inside, stepping on the second foothold and dragging the boulder back on top of the entrance.

After the boulder was put back in place, Archie swiftly descended down the two-and-a-half-kilometer drop before landing at the bottom of the tunnel in a crouch, kicking up a cloud of dust and finely ground stone.

Not paying any heed to the cloud of finely grounded debris swirling in the already pitch-black tunnel, Archie surged forward, his eyes locked on a faint glimmer of reflected light ahead, and there, outlined in neon red figure mining - Aoife.

Along the way, Archie glanced at the roof of the tunnel above him, not paying any heed to the schist and gneiss above him, only the ocean of vital energy above him.

An ocean of vital energy was the perfect descriptor for what he was looking at, because what he'd seen before, on the surface, was only the tip of the iceberg. He hadn't expected this much of a response from the Dinomyrmex Gigasi colony, but he was grateful for it, nonetheless.

His eyes then shifted to the humanoid-shaped vital energy outlines standing resolute against the vast ocean of life forces before them. Their vital sparks, far more unique and vibrant compared to the swarm of Dinomyrmex Gigasi, which made sense now that he thought about it.

From what he learned using the power of social media osmosis and an incurable small attention span, ants in a colony were pretty much the same - except for the queen, who laid eggs; the workers, who did…labor; the soldiers, who had oversized heads like living battle tanks; and the males, whose only job was to mate before promptly dying.

Oh, and some workers were tiny nurses, some were foragers, and some were beefy defenders. Actually… now that he thought about it, humans and ants weren't that different from one another.

Other than their blood, exoskeleton, multiple legs, and their copy-pasted sparks of Vitality, of course.

Unlike every other creature he'd seen with Vital Sight active, the Dinomyrmex Gigasi's sparks of Vitality looked like exact copies of one another, with only a few minor differences between them, which he'd correlated to their roles in their colony.

Now, you would think that it's because of their Classes just being the same, but that wouldn't be the case.

When he first gained even a modicum of control over Vital Sight, he spent hours lingering around Michael's camp, observing everyone he saw with it active. He experimented, trying to discern whether it could reveal more than just neon-red stick figures with shifting, screensaver-like patterns bouncing within them.

But he never truly found an answer to his questions - until just a few hours ago. As he observed the hundreds of guards, ranging from low E-Grades to high-level D-Grades, his vastly expanded sample size, combined with his much higher Perception stat, allowed him to pick up details that now seemed glaringly obvious in hindsight.

It wasn't just in terms of fighting and being aware of your surroundings, even while forging, he had begun noticing far more than before.

Looking back at his previous crafts, he now saw them riddled with thin fractures, bubbling, and a variety of imperfections - flaws that were blatantly obvious that he couldn't believe he'd overlooked them. Yet, for some reason, the System still deemed them usable.

Perception was far more useful than he previously gave it credit for.

And what he found out after a few hours of people watching, no one's sparks of Vitality were the same.

Out of every F-Grade Warrior he saw in Michael's camp, not a single one had the exact same sparks of Vitality. Even those who had the same Class and Profession, down to the very same name, had different looming sparks of Vitality.

It was why the sparks belonging to the Dinomyrmex Gigasi looked and felt so…uncanny.

But trying to figure out why they looked and behaved that way was something to do later, preferably once he'd evolved into D-Grade and a far enough distance away from the Hounds.

Lowering the intensity of Vital Sight, Archie turned his gaze away from the tunnel roof and back toward the tunnel itself and its creator, Aoife, fifty meters in front of him, mining away at a large chunk of Deepiron that happened to be in the same direction and place where they were tunneling.

Needless to say, Archie quickly picked up the chunks that Aoife had left behind before entering the empowered Obscuring Field and being greeted with the sound of metal cracking into ore.

Aoife briefly looked over her shoulder as she continued to mine forward, acknowledging Archie's presence for a moment before turning back to face the Deepiron ore. "We have five and a half hours or so left before we reach under the wall."

Archie nodded before kneeling beside the pile of dirt and stone behind Aoife and began compressing it. After a few seconds of pressing and rolling it on his palms, the meter-high pile of dirt and stone was reduced to a brownish-grey orb the size of a marble.

Tossing the dirt-stone orb into his spatial storage, Archie looked up to see two more piles of dirt and stone in front of him, with chunks of Deepiron ore scattered in front of him. Aoife seemed to have also picked up speed, seeing that Archie was now here and she no longer needed to slow her mining speed.

Whelp, Archie thought as he quickly moved to the next pile of dirt and stone, compressing it while using mana strings to pick up the scattered chunks of Deepiron and send them into his spatial storage. At the very least, we won't be down here for long.