Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

Archie swiftly ripped out the fourth and furthest Obscuring Stake from the tunnel walls with a string of mana and stabbed it into the tunnel roof just above Aoife's head. All around him were tens of mana strings constantly in motion, like a cog in a machine, where each string had its purpose.

Four mana strings were dedicated to charging the Obscuring Stakes and maneuvering them closer to Aoife as she continued to mine and dig, her body remaining coated in a sheen of dull grey mana.

Meanwhile, thirty or so denser mana strings wove together, forming glowing greenish-blue arms that grasped the meter-tall piles of dirt and rock, compressing them to the size of a volleyball before passing them to Archie's open hands. who compressed it into the size of a marble before dropping it onto the floor.

The final ten mana strings swept across the ground, either collecting chunks of ore and compacted dirt-stone orbs to send into his spatial storage or gathering excess debris into piles that the mana arms he'd created compressed.

It was after the second hour or maybe the third, it was hard to tell how much time had passed, when in a tunnel, that he decided to make the most of the situation to practice his mana control and manipulation.

Within the empowered Obscuring Field, he couldn't detect even a sliver of mana from Aoife as she tore through stone and dirt at record speed. Taking advantage of the field's concealment, he used only the bare minimum amount of mana needed to form a single mana string to assist him.

Any traces of mana down here are ignored if they can even feel it from this far down, cause who cares what's below you when ten others in front of you want you dead, Archie mused.

As he grew more comfortable with manipulating multiple mana strings simultaneously, he gradually increased their number. Now, he had reached the point where he could actively control around 45 at a time - all while walking.

Compared to a couple of weeks ago, when he struggled to handle more than ten mana strings while sitting in place, this was decent progress. But far from his goals of what he wanted to be able to accomplish with mana manipulation and control.

Honestly, he blamed the greatest franchise of all time for one of his goals with mana manipulation and control. How could they show a manchild like himself, a man in armor, stopping an entire spacecraft from flying away with just a wave of his hand, and not expect him to want to replicate that?

While he would never admit it, he'd performed the same hand movements the man made for longer than he should have before moving on and awkwardly picking up his pizza slice and root beer before turning off his TV and opening his PC.

He went 1 and 4 that night before calling it quits, flopping onto his sofa and passing out while cursing his teams and junglers.

Either way, he was making good progress towards accomplishing one of the major goals he set for himself.

Looking back at Aoife, Archie faintly smiled as he saw her reflection in another vein of ore she'd found her eyes glimmering with joy and a faint smile growing on her face. Her excitement and joy from mining were obvious, even while she was covered in sweat and dirt.

She did say she found mining enjoyable, Archie mused. He wasn't sure why; it looked very monotonous and boring, but then again many could say the same thing about his own Profession. All that matters is that she finds it enjoyable.

It was the same back on Earth; if you weren't doing something you found enjoyable or worth investing your time in, you wouldn't care about it and would likely end up hating it.

He remembered back in high school during the second term of his second year, he was forced into taking biology 101. It was single-handedly the worst term of his life, just because he was forced to take something he had zero interest in, and it reflected as such in his grades from that class.

He was still pissed about it to this day. It had lowered his GPA by 0.12, and it took him an entire term and a half to bring it back to where it used to be. The experience caused him needless stress and anger, ultimately driving him to do something he regretted and cursed himself for ever getting into.

Playing a MOBA.

Fuck that stupid character, Archie thought in annoyance. Why would the devs even give a single character the health of a tank, the abilities of a dps and the damage to rival a fucking nuke.

Moving his thoughts away from MOBA developers and their inherent need to ruin the balance of their game, his eyes once more traced around the tunnel-shaped bubble that Aoife created around them both.

One of her skills allowed her to create a field around her that boosted her mining speed and efficiency by enriching the air and mana around her, and by extension, anyone around her.

Until she mentioned the field's ability to enrich the air, he honestly hadn't noticed how thin the air was when he ran down the tunnel to catch up to Aoife. Both his Vitality and Endurance stats were high enough to disregard the thin air, making it feel as if he were breathing normally.

Similarly, Aoife didn't find the thin air within the tunnel to be an issue, she'd only activated it for its boosts towards her mining speed and efficiency, as the Obscuring Stakes were more than enough to mask its minor mana usage.

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But a skill that could create a field around you to boost your abilities, one that could apparently stack multiplicatively with another boosting skill, similar to Adrenaline Rush, sounded like something he'd very much like to have.

Albeit it only boosted her mining speed and efficiency, and couldn't be used when fighting.

When asked how it worked, Aoife couldn't explain it. She said she'd never really thought about how it functioned and had only selected it from one of her skill options back in E-Grade, after almost dying from gas inhalation caused by one of the other miners while mining.

Its initial effects were to convert any gas around her that wasn't air into air, and over time, it upgraded and evolved into what it is now.

Looking up at the reinforced tunnel ceiling, Archie reactivated Vital Sight.

The war between the Dinomyrmex Gigasi colony and the Netharim Sovereignty Border Guards looked like it was still going on in full, if not, it was just starting to ramp up in intensity.

Thousands of Dinomyrmex Gigasi were rushing out of the Greenpatch Forest and into the valley, ripping through and overwhelming many of the border guards with weaker vital energy outlines. However, for every border guard they killed, twenty to thirty of their own died in the process.

And while the overwhelming numbers of the Dinomyrmex Gigasi should have been enough to wipe out the Netharim Sovereignty Border Guards, they were not; in fact, the Dinomyrmex Gigasi were the ones being pushed back.

The sheer number of them being killed with every passing second further cemented his belief that digging a tunnel under the wall and using the ants as a distraction was the smartest option both he and Aoife had at the time.

As he continued to watch the vital energy outlines of the ants and the guards slaughter each other, his eyes widened as even stronger vital energy outlines came into his view, each one far denser and more potent than his own.

These were well above any he'd seen in either the colony or the wall. Reinforcements on both sides had arrived.

They needed to hurry before they got caught up in what was about to happen.

As he turned to face Aoife, a chill ran down his spine. In front of them, less than five meters away from where Aoife was mining, were two humanoid vital energy outlines.

Shit.

Archie kicked off the ground and grabbed Aoife's raised right arm, stopping her from digging into the hardened dirt in front of her with her shovel. His mana strings vanished from his loss of concentration, causing everything they carried to drop onto the tunnel floor.

"Wha-" Aoife said before being interrupted by Archie, who held up his index finger to his lips and slowly let go of her cybernetic wrist.

'In front of us, less than five meters away from where we are now, are two people,' Archie informed her, pointing at the hardened dirt she was about to dig through.

Aoife's eyes widened before she gave a terse nod, deactivating her active skills and reactivating the one that silenced her tools. The same skill that dulled her tools far quicker than the norm and heavily hindered the effects of the Self-Repair enchantment on them, requiring her to sharpen them manually.

Angling her arms, Aoife carefully scraped at the hardened dirt wall in front of her, to reveal slightly loose dirt. Aoife's eyes narrowed slightly in realization before using her left hand to pull out the dirt and letting it pour down, revealing bleach white sandstone brick.

Both Archie and Aoife turned to look at one another before turning back to the brick wall in front of them. They had gone two and a half kilometers deep into the ground before tunneling, just in case the wall was deeper than what Archie had seen with Vital Sight. But apparently, it wasn't deep enough.

If I saw them any later than I had… Archie thought to himself in shock.

However, just as they stared at the bleach-white sandstone brick wall, the ground around them began to violently rumble and shake. Both of them pushed against the sides of the tunnel to keep themselves upright as thin trails of dirt fell from the ceiling, though the walls remained intact thanks to her reinforcement skill.

Archie's eyes shot upwards as he saw the humanoid and giant ant figures, the ones with far stronger vital energy outlines than anyone he'd ever seen with Vital Sight active.

Each attack they exchanged sent shockwaves through the battlefield, shaking both the other ants and the guards. Every vibration rippled through the tunnel, making it harder for Archie and Aoife to stay upright as the violent tremors continued.

Larger chunks of dirt broke free from the ceiling behind them, spilling loose dirt and stone into the tunnel.

Archie's eyes widened as one of the giant ants suddenly sprouted four large appendages from its back, seized one of the stronger humanoids by the neck, and shot into the air.

A shiver crawled up Archie's back as an inkling about what was about to happen next appeared in his head.

Archie's eyes shot toward the bleach-white sandstone brick Aoife had revealed and to the two humanoid figures who shakily got up from atop one another and started to pick up items from off the floor and onto themselves.

They were going to get buried alive from the shockwaves of the battle above them.

From the shockwaves.

The adrenaline that had been lulled by the monotonous task of moving stakes and compressing dirt and stone now shifted out of second gear and into third.

Archie flooded his body with mana and stamina, uncaring about keeping hidden from the wards placed around the wall and the detection of the guards.

Archie ducked under Aoife's right arm and gritted his teeth before immediately activating Adrenaline Rush to 50% without wasting a second of time and punching at the hardened dirt and sandstone brick wall in front of them.

His body became enshrouded in dark red steam as the muscles across his body burned, bulging beneath his armor. His fists were now wrapped in large vines covered in sharp thorns, courtesy of Thornscourge Expansion.

Aoife, seeing that Archie had given up on stealth and feeling her reinforcements she'd placed on the tunnel start to shatter, she flooded herself with mana and stamina and activated her own boosting skill while redeploying her pickaxe in her left arm.

Both of them struck one after the other, perfectly matching the other's increasing tempo, easily destroying the hardened dirt wall and cracking against the brick wall in front of them.

Archie and Aoife stopped their attacks and stared through the dust that covered their vision and at the bleach-white sandstone brick wall, blackened from the middle from Archie's Embergrasp Gauntlets' punches and Aoife's immediate follow-ups.

Suddenly, Archie's Sixth Sense erupted in alarm mere fractions of a second before a massive explosion thundered from above, rippling across the battlefield, killing hundreds around them.

The blast shook everything within a forty-kilometer radius, severely destabilizing and destroying most of the tunnel Aoife had created two and a half kilometers below the battlefield.

Archie's body went on autopilot within those few moments; his eyes glancing behind him and seeing the tunnel collapsing, his arm yanking Aoife's shocked form down, and his body moving to cover her before he funneled as much mana as he could into Earthen Grasp.

What a fucking cliché, were the words that rummaged through his head before everything went dark.