Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

The stairwell on the 9th floor, previously chipped and cracked by the lack of maintenance, was now replaced with smooth, reinforced dirt and stone as Aoife approached the doorframe that led down to the 10th and 11th sublevels.

With a curt nod to his team, Archie surged forward, his body wreathed in flame. He shoulder tackled the rusted metal – steel, he corrected himself, beam that had been wedged into the doorframe. It snapped free with a shriek and crashed against the reinforced stairwell wall.

Without pausing, Archie rolled onto the landing between the 9th and 10th sublevels, then vaulted over its rusted iron railing. He hit the 11th sublevel's floor with a loud thud that echoed within the stairwell before launching himself forward once more.

His flame-wreathed leg struck the steel beam barring the entrance to the 11th sublevel. The impact launched it like a cannon, crashing into a group of unsuspecting corrupted miners and molerats. The sound of crunching bodies, cracking bones, and shattering glass echoed throughout the sublevel.

Muffled groaning, screeching, and other noises erupted in the distance, but to Archie, they were barely audible.

Embers flaked off of Archie as he shot from the entrance to the 11th sublevel and toward the small horde of Reanimated Corrupted Miners and molerats, his eyes glowing crimson in the dark and dusty corridor just behind the entrance to the 11th sublevel.

Behind him, Tim lingered at the top of the stairwell, keeping a steady eye on Aoife as she steadily descended. Her Deepiron Lance's tip faced the reinforced ceiling, its length marred by flaked flesh and dried, darkened blood. Her Scutum shield bore similar colored smears of dried, darkened blood.

Throughout the muffled screams and screeches around him, Archie could faintly hear Tim's shout: "You didn't have to throw yourself down there," Tim teased.

Archie smirked at Tim's muffled teasing as he flicked Vital Sight back to 80% opacity, taking in the current situation of the 11th sublevel before he would start popping heads and breaking bones.

Soft, muffled snarls and screeching were heard through his earplugs, which echoed throughout the cracked and ruined appearance of the 11th sublevel, looking like an identical copy of the 6th sublevel when they explored it briefly.

His eyes flicked from body to body.

Through the flickering haze of Vital Sight, now dialed to 80% opacity, red vital energy outlines lit up the pitch-black room like neon nights at the bottom of the ocean.

[Molerat Lv 77]

Their hunched-over and grotesque-looking bodies twitched and lurched through the darkness that covered the 11th sublevel, their barbed tails dragging behind them as their teeth kept chittering as they attacked their home's invaders.

Archie released a sigh of annoyance. With Vital Sight active, he could make out the grotesque and pulsing outlines of the molerats – creatures that looked as if a rat and a monkey had an offspring; a skittering creature of raw instinct and gnashing teeth.

However, the Reanimated Corrupted Human Miners within the sublevel remained absent from Vital Sight, due to their undead status.

The corrupted miners moved in jerky, unnatural lurches, their flesh rotting and gray. Shards of glowing dark purple glass jutted out of their limbs and torsos like grotesque crystalline tumors.

The number of crystal growths on their bodies is increasing with every floor we clear, Archie noticed. Two floors up, the most crystals a Reanimated Corrupted Human Miner had were three – these ones here have five… I wonder what they're gonna look like at sublevel 42.

In the darkness of the sublevel, it wasn't Vital Sight but the sickly, pulsing glow of the veins threading through their bodies that gave them outlines that he could make out even in the darkness of the room.

Their respirators were cracked and hissing, sending out high-pitched whines with every jolt of their body. The way their heads jerked around, spasming in random directions, made his own neck hurt at the sight of them.

To be honest, they reminded him of something – an old horror-survival game he used to play as a kid, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember its name. To say that it somewhat annoyed him that he couldn't recall its name would be an understatement.

Archie took a deep breath, stoking the flames that wreathed his body – manifestations of Spirit Bond, linked to an Emberlash Eudromaeosaur Beastcore. He had handed the core over to Aoife for safekeeping just before charging into the 9th sublevel.

The stench of rotting flesh, oil, and must hit the back of his throat like acid as he saw one of the corrupted miners get torn to shreds by a pack of molerats, sending its corrupted flesh and blood into the air.

He launched forward with a burst that created spiderweb-like cracks atop the stone underfoot. The cracked ground barely had time to settle before Aoife's reinforcement skill pulsed through the sublevel, knitting the damage back together with a shimmer of mana.

Thorn-wreathed vines manifested atop Archie's flame-shrouded armor, the jagged, twisting vines vibrantly pulsed with nature mana even beneath the flames that wreathed his body.

Just as they fully materialized, his fist collided with the first creature in his path – a molerat. The impact turned the molerat into a charred smear of flesh and cracked metal against the far wall, the sound of bones and exoskeletal plating breaking echoed through the corridor.

A molerat reacted instantly to the attack on its packmate by lunging at Archie's head, fangs bared and eyes burning with hatred and hunger.

He leaned back, avoiding the snap of its teeth by inches. His right foot came down hard, crushing the crystal-covered skull of a fallen miner in an explosion of blood, bone, and glass. Simultaneously, he lifted his left arm. The thorned vines lashed outward, spearing the airborne molerat through its gut.

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Flames surged through the vines, igniting the creature midair. Its shrieks of pain were silenced as Archie slammed it into the floor. Then, without hesitation, he flung the now-charred and aflame corpse into the center of the horde, where molerats and corrupted miners were already tearing into each other.

Then he activated Savage Charge.

The cracking of the floor echoed within the sublevel as he shot forward, leaving behind spider-web-like cracks that spanned three meters in diameter.

He crashed into the outer edge of the gorey mosh pit like a wrecking ball, sending a large chunk of corrupted miners and molerats flying into the air and crashing into each other.

Archie didn't stop.

He grabbed a fallen corrupted miner by the collar of its torn tracksuit with one hand and grabbed onto its hip with the other and tore it in half. Another tried to grab his leg, to which he responded by stomping its head into paste before grabbing the nearest molerat and ripping its head off its neck.

He had yet to even activate Adrenaline Rush.

Aoife stepped past the doorway into the 11th sublevel with Tim hovering above her, his wings beating in short, controlled bursts. Both his hands were holding up the camcorder, now zooming in to get a clearer shot, and recording the scene of Archie slaughtering through the horde of corrupted miners and molerats.

Hearing a faint squeal off to his right, Tim barely gave the molerat a look before an arc of flame sliced through its body in half. Almost immediately, the corrupted miners snapped towards the charred and still aflame bisected molerat.

Uh, oh, Tim thought as they all began to rush towards the flame.

Archie quickly dropped the lower half of one of the corrupted miners and stomped on its leg as his right arm speared through its back, ripping through its destroyed cybernetic weave and tearing out its spine.

"Oi! A little help here!" Tim shouted as he flitted forward with a blur of speed, wings thrumming as he zoomed past Aoife and now hovered in the middle of the 11th sublevel's hub area.

A blazing sphere of condensed solar flame, Sunspike, gathered in his maw. Once the sphere could no longer grow in size, his maw snapped shut for a moment before it snapped open, releasing a glowing yellow spike that launched itself downwards into the cluster of corrupted miners that were charging towards the flamed corpse a few meters away from Aoife.

As the Sunspike struck the middle of the cluster of charging corrupted miners, it erupted, sending a wave of yellow flame that seared and killed half a dozen of them almost instantly and sent several more scattering, scorched and screaming.

Archie, who was now knee-deep in torn corpses, took advantage of the afraid and screeching molerats who attempted to scamper away from the flames, and activated Earthen Grasp.

Gnarled roots erupted from the stone and dirt flooring, pulsing with nature mana, snapping around the legs and tails of the fleeing molerats and the corrupted miners that remained close by.

Their screeches turned even more frantic as the roots tightened like iron coils, locking them in place mid-scramble. They thrashed, trying to chew or claw their way free, but it only caused the roots to grow and wrap around their torsos and constrict them even further.

Archie surged forward, a trail of darkened blood, metal chippings, and flickering embers left in his wake.

The first molerat didn't even see him as he brought his knee up into its snout with bone-shattering force, sending its skull rocketing off its neck and crashing into the ceiling with a wet crunch before it dropped to the floor.

Another tried to twist its head toward him, but before it could so much as open its maw, Archie slammed left fist down onto its spine like a hammer, breaking its body into a crumpled heap of shattered bones and convulsing limbs to which he let the roots that entrapped it vanish before he threw it like a disc towards one of the corrupted miners that hadn't been bound nor set aflame by Tim and was currently stumbling toward Aoife.

Just as the corpse collided with the corrupted miner, a sharp hiss behind him caught his ear. His brows rose in surprise as Sixth Sense erupted for a moment before it disappeared, and the figure rushed right past him.

One of the Reanimated Corrupted Miners had broken free of the chaos of flame and gore – its limbs twitching violently, the glass shards in its legs and head pulsing with sickly purple light as it shot towards Aoife. Its respirator hissed and spat with every breath, and its head snapped in jerking, unnatural motions.

Aoife was already moving, lowering her center of gravity as she slid her shield into a forward stance. But before the corrupted miner could even close the distance –

Flicker Lance.

A thin streak of yellow flame seared through the corridor like a whip, carving a glowing line across the corrupted miner's torso.

What was that? Archie thought along with the rest of his team. Some sort of variant?

The creature let out a guttural rasp as its upper body twisted unnaturally from the impact. The glass embedded in its body cracked, and the flesh around it blackened and blistered instantly before it exploded.

Tim zipped across the hub, his wings glowing yellowish-orange as fire trailed behind his form. He looped in the air and came to hover just a bit away from Aoife, to ensure that his flames wouldn't reach her.

He really needed to remember to stick close to Aoife and not get too far away from her.

Another group of corrupted miners burst from three of the many tunnels that decorated the left side of the hub – their eyes wild, and cybernetic pickaxes sparking dark purple as they lunged straight towards the both of them.

Tim dove forward. A focused stream of fire erupted from his open maw mid-dive, catching the first corrupted miner square in the face and the other miners he flew past in the chest and arms. The lead miner's faceplate cracked with a sickening pop as fire poured into the opening, melting the flesh beneath and searing through muscle and bone in seconds.

The next two screeched as the fire licked across their torsos. One staggered, clutching at the shards embedded in its chest as they began to glow and pulse—too fast, too hot. The other, still ablaze, dropped to one knee, spasming as its cybernetic limbs sparked and short-circuited before it then collapsed to the ground – dead.

Tim banked sharply upward just as another lunged at him – its pickaxe raised high, already mid-swing. The corrupted miner barely had time to register the streak of flame curling back toward it.

Sunlash.

A whip-like arc of fire surged back around from Tim's tail as he looped in mid-air, slamming into the charging miner's torso and hurling it backward in a trail of embers. It crashed against the tunnel wall with a heavy thunk, the sound of bones cracking beneath crystal shards echoing through the hub.

"Back off, you undead crystalized zombie knockoffs!" Tim shouted, breath hissing, wings pumping hard as he shot back to Aoife's flank. "Aoife, I counted five – where's the last one?!"

Before she could answer, a streak of movement blurred along the far wall. The fifth corrupted miner, somehow unscathed by the flames and faster than the others, had broken into a low sprint – a kind of warped and uncanny twitching gallop that sent the crystal claws that grew out of its boots clacking against the stone floor.

Aiming straight for Tim.

With its pickaxe raised and its breathing a high-pitched rasp through a broken valve, the miner lunged at the Dragon Sprite.

As its feet left the ground and it was halfway towards Tim, it was caught mid-lunge by a burst of Earthen Grasp from the ground beneath it, roots snapping tight around its arms and legs, halting its charge in place with a whip crack-like noise.

Aoife stepped forward, her lance leveled as she continued to reinforce the ground that Archie and Tim kept destroying.

She lunged and drove her Deepiron Lance clear through the middle of its torso, the top erupting from its back in a spray of blackened blood and shattered crystal. It twitched on the lance's shaft once before it went still.

Just as she yanked her lance forward, she looked back at Archie, her calm expression turning shocked as she stared at the enormous figure that began to emerge from the ground just behind Archie. "Archie!"

[Corrupted Silicon Elemental Lv 112]