Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

Archie's arms drooped at his sides, drenched in sweat, his hair stuck to his forehead in wild tufts, and breathing heavily. His fingers twitched in exhaustion before he clenched his fingers shut, focusing his gaze on the gnarled stump about ten feet in front of him.

Alright… again.

He took a deep breath, quieted everything else, and pushed.

Blink Step.

The world didn't lurch, split, or crackle like the fantasy novels and movies had led him to expect. There was no dramatic shattering of space in front of him, no sparkling portal or anything of the sort - just a sudden, extreme feeling of disorientation. Like missing a step on a staircase in the dark while carrying a bottle of soda and a box of pizza, only to slam your head into the floorboards a moment later, covered in fizzy drink and pizza.

And then with a pop, his eyes opened, and he was... three inches ahead of where he was before.

…Damnit. He groaned, rubbing the side of his face. Still – progress. That was something.

He turned slightly and tried again, his boots grinding into the grass, followed up by another thin shroud of spatial mana. Blink Step.

Another three inches.

He managed to do it again.

And again.

And again.

Until finally, on his fifth try, he blinked directly in front of Volos and Arsenic, who had been lying on their backs in the grass, sunning themselves after an hour of elemental practice.

Snap!

Archie appeared in front of them with a low hum and a sharp crack of air displacement. The two baby centipedes shrieked in their chirping way, recoiling violently and flipping backward. Tiny puffs of venom and pebbles shot out in pure panic, flying in uneven arcs.

Ow! Hey! Archie staggered back, ducking from a pebble.

Realizing it was just him, the two centipedes clicked their mandibles furiously in protest, their tiny legs skittering to reorient themselves. Volos launched another pebble, larger this time, while Arsenic spat a surprisingly accurate line of greenish poison that barely missed Archie's right boot.

Archie dropped to the grass with a wheezing laugh, holding his stomach.

He rolled on his side, shoulders shaking with laughter, trying to breathe air through gasps. The centipedes, clearly offended, began chittering to each other in quick pulses of sound and then, with vengeful intent, crawled toward one another. Their forms shimmered faintly with the sheen of light and merged into a single, slightly larger centipede colored in black and green.

Where there once had been two, there was now one.

Soft, thin, and earthy green vines began to shout out from beneath their many legs, darting through the grass toward the bellowing Archie. He didn't notice them until they had already coiled around his limbs, locking him in place.

The vines slithered up toward his face. One reached his jaw.

Uh, this is…

Another vine whipped toward his mouth like a gag but only managed a feeble wrap around his chin. Volos and Arsenic were clearly struggling – partly due to their drained mana, mostly because wrangling someone over five hundred times their size with vines was, frankly, absurd.

Their toughest opponent so far, the Barkback Badger, was the size of a football, and even then, they barely could take it down with their magic.

With a casual raise of his body, Archie snapped the green tendrils apart with a teasing grin.

He gave the merged Volos and Arsenic a mock-applauding clap, then pointed to the vines and made an exaggerated muscle flexing motion – not strong enough yet.

The merged Volos and Arsenic twitched their antennae indignantly.

That's adorable, Archie softly smiled as he stared at their merged form before taking notice of the weirdly colored vines that they manipulated.

He crouched beside them, studying the thin roots now curling limply in the grass. Patting their heads absentmindedly, washing away their fury as quickly as it appeared, caused Volos and Arsenic's merged form to glow for a moment before they once more became two.

They leaned into his head pats for a while before eventually pulling away. Volos immediately began dragging stones into a crude little stack a few inches away from where Archie crouched, while Arsenic grew and curled up in a nest of half-grown vines and began absorbing the fumes that came off of them.

So, you can add properties within the vines. I wonder why I hadn't thought of doing that? Archie mused, squeezing a bright green liquid from the vines with his hands, vines that the merged Volos and Arsenic had grown from the ground below. He watched in fascination as, after a few seconds, the blades curled inward and began to wilt. Or maybe it was just Arsenic. Poison was as much a part of him as his Nature Affinity.

He lifted his hand and gave the dying patch of grass a curious sniff, not minding at all as a citrus-metallic scent tingled his nose. Arsenic flicked a glance at his way, clearly proud, and nestled deeper into his misty, poisonous bedding before realizing that Archie remained unaffected by his poison and frowned.

Volos, meanwhile, chirped once and dropped another stone onto his growing tower, which promptly collapsed under its own clumsy structure.

Archie silently laughed, shoulders rising and falling with gentle wheezing, and leaned back onto his hands to enjoy the moment.

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Then a spark lit in his eyes.

Flooding the surface of his body with the last remains of spatial mana within him, he cast Blink Step.

The world disoriented itself, just like before.

However, unlike before, he blinked a quarter of an inch further than before.

The moment Archie reappeared in front of Volos and Arsenic, both infant centipedes jolted in surprise. Volos let out a squeaky hiss and shot a tiny stone at Archie's knee, while Arsenic reared up and puffed a small, bitter green cloud in his direction. The attacks bounced harmlessly off his skin, but Archie rolled backward, wheezing with silent laughter as he successfully startled them twice in a row.

The two spirit beasts flailed, clearly offended. Arsenic curled his top half and launched himself at Archie's chest, and snapped his mandibles down on his stomach as hard as he could. Volos leapt on top of Archie's stomach and tried to pummel him with his little front legs.

Their combined assault only made Archie laugh harder, his bellowing echoing throughout the forest and waking its slumbering inhabitants.

Archie clutched his sides, his face twisted in a grin so wide it hurt. The centipedes couldn't help but join in – their aggression fading into clicks and flutters as they began crawling around his torso and shoulders.

He stretched his arms and popped the joints in his back before brushing grass from his Plated Legguards of Fortitude and lifting himself upright.

The shadows had begun to stretch – sunlight fading just enough to cast a golden-orange wash over the forest floor. Fireflies blinked lazily between thick ferns, and the distant sounds of other creatures stirred in the brush.

With a soft exhale, Archie waved toward the centipedes. Volos clicked and raised his front legs in a kind of salute. Arsenic hissed quietly but didn't follow.

Archie looked at them thoughtfully for a moment before shaking his head in exasperation and picking them up one by one, ignoring their hissing chitters, and placed them within his hair, turned and began the short trek toward their base.

They were less than a week old… Their bedtime was less than twenty minutes from now.

The hill wasn't far – just beyond a grove of thick-barked trees and a dip in the terrain where water pooled after heavy rain. Mossy rocks lined the incline, leading to the shadowed entrance that had long since become his home. He'd remembered to turn off the crystal lanterns Aoife and Tim had gifted him.

The cave was quiet when he arrived. Small pebbles littered the ground along with various splotches of green, decorating the floor along with the tens of steel sheets etched with runes and runic scripts.

He stepped inside, rolled his shoulders, and dropped both slumbering centipedes into their pile of cloaks he'd fashioned into beds.

The moment Archie finished laying the softly snoring Volos and Arsenic into their cloak-nest, he turned and made his way toward the back corner of the cave, both where the stone walls were covered in soot and where his desk was.

He didn't bother lighting the crystal lanterns, he didn't want to risk waking Volos and Arsenic. His Perception stat was more than high enough to see clearly in the dark.

Gently pulling out his chair and settling into it, Archie took in the state of his desk. The surface was cluttered with tools, rune-covered rods, thin coils of silver, and scattered steel sheets etched with runes and runic scripts.

Carefully brushing them aside, Archie took out his Runic Scriber from his spatial storage along with the last pile of steel sheets within it.

With a practiced hand, he rotated the sheet horizontally and began drawing the Space Runic Base. Then, slowly, he began branching out the mana pathways.

He paused, visualizing the motion he needed the array to mimic Blink Step, and activated Gaze of the Forgefather.

He etched in the first pair of flow resistors along the mana pathway, then connected them to a Water Runic Base. It would act as the limiter, regulating how quickly the mana reached the spatial base. Branching out beside the resistor, he added in a series of transistors that were meant to control the initial burst of mana that would go through the teleporter from the Power Core in his Nature-Attuned Runic Mana Engine with as little feedback as possible.

After thirty minutes of etching resistors, transistors, capacitors, and enough mana pathways that had caused him to refill his Runic Scriber twice, he finished the runic script.

Activating the rune, he watched as they glowed a soft blue.

Archie leaned in, holding his breath. Did I just wing a runic script and get it right? He thought excitedly.

The glow intensified – then flickered.

A tiny crack formed along the edge of the spatial rune.

Fssshhhht!

The lines flared, and the plate hissed sharply. Smoke curled upward, and the steel sheet shuddered once before falling dark.

Acting quickly, Archie grabbed the hissing and smoking steel sheet and tossed it out of the cave before looking back at the sleeping forms of Volos and Arsenic and letting out a sigh of relief.

Turning back to his desk, he reached for another sheet of steel.

Too much mana in the initial surge, he noted mentally as he etched a new Space Runic Base into the metal with his Runic Scriber. Capacitors need to be able to hold a lot for and the resistance needs to be lowered.

He lost track of time, cycling through mockups – shifting resistor placement, changing channel widths, altering the runic bases' activation to see how it would affect the runic script as a whole.

The morning air was crispier and colder than usual this far north, near the Kingdom of George, carrying the scent of damp earth and chimney smoke. Frost clung to the edges of the stone windowsill, catching the sunlight like scattered shards of glass.

Aurius stood at the cobbled path leading away from his house and towards the sidewalk – his coat draped heavily over his shoulders, crowbar enhanced and retracted back inside his quarter-cast cybernetic arm, and a satchel of runes and potions slung over his shoulder.

This was the first quest he'd taken since that night.

Behind him, a soft tapping broke the stillness – tiny, excited hands against glass.

He turned.

There they were.

Little Mica stood tall – well, as tall as her seven-year-old legs allowed – one hand waving energetically from the window while the other kept her little brother from climbing onto the sill beside her. Tomas giggled, mouth filled with half-chewed bread, sticky fingers smearing the bottom edge of the pane. His tufts of brown hair stuck up in every direction, revealing the cybernetic socket on his right temple, exactly like he and his brother had when they were boys his age.

Behind them, the contract maid bowed her head, eyes cast low in reverence. She had been one of those he and his old team had saved from a bandit raid months prior to him killing his ex-wife and brother. When she'd learned that he was struggling to take care of Mica and Tomas, she'd volunteered to be their maid the very same day.

Aurius raised his hand, fingers spread.

He waved.

He smiled, gently.

Even if they aren't mine… biologically. That doesn't matter.

He watched their grins widen, felt Mica's lips shape the word "Papa!" through the glass, even though he couldn't hear it through the silencing arrays cast within the stone brick walls. Tomas pressed both palms to the window, beaming.

They only have me.

The thought settled in his chest with both weight and warmth. He'd raised them. Loved them. Gave them toys when they were sick, stayed up reading stories by lantern light, taught Mica how to stabilize her first spell rune, and showed Tomas how to whistle even if he just covered both himself and the furniture in spit instead.

Seral is dead. Sam is dead.

The ones who betrayed me are already gone.

But they?

They did not deserve his hatred and ire; they were kids. His kids.

Aurius gave them one last wave, then turned on his heel. His boots crunched over the frost-laced path, each step steady, driven.

The job was in the southern outskirts of the Yndros Empire. A village there had been facing beast hordes every fortnight and was in desperate need of a healer and outside assistance, mercenaries and the like, just enough to help them gather their belongings and flee to the nearest city, nearly ninety kilometers away.

Was it dangerous? Yes. But three gold is three gold, and kids are expensive to raise.