Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

Archie crouched once more at the edge of the southern arc, fingers moving with deliberate care as he began to etch the outer runic script into the Meteoric Iron tiling. The chalky white residue of his Runic Scriber over the silver alloy that had been grafted onto the arc shimmered under its touch.

The design of the teleporter had taken weeks of planning and designing – scrawled sketches, abandoned failures, salvaged ideas. The outer ring stood nearly four meters wide in diameter, segmented into four anchor quadrants: North, South, East, and West, with stabilizer slots and mana channeling lines connecting each quadrant like a spider's web of radiant silver and dull grey.

The stabilizers themselves were silver-etched rods of Meteoric Iron that protruded slightly above the tiling, forming a raised, braced crescent at each cardinal point.

Along the outer ring's perimeter, Archie now carved looping rune-script that had been shrunk down with the use of Elastic Sizing to properly fit onto each rod.

The stabilizers were etched with runic scripts that managed mana that would run through the teleporter in various faucets: containment, flow control, alignment, and grounding.

Each one etched into the surfaces of the stabilizer that, when all together, anchored the Teleporter's resonance pattern to the ambient mana lines that bled faintly through this section of the forest.

By the time he reached the third quadrant, sweat beaded at his brow despite the shade. He paused briefly, wiping a dried oil rag across his face before rising to his feet.

His gaze drifted over to the flat metal crate resting a few paces away from where he had the repurposed combustion engine he'd salvaged from the Savoris Mine wreckage. The engine was damaged by what he realized only in hindsight was by a corrupted silicon elemental, but after fiddling around with its components and replacing the alternator and battery, it was now fully functional.

Archie reached behind him, tugging a small clamp beneath the side of the seat of his Mana Bike. With a quiet click, the insides of his mana bike were revealed to him.

Carefully disconnecting the tubes and wiring from his Nature-Attuned Runic Mana Engine, he quickly linked them together, sealing the flow to prevent any mana leakage. He knew himself well enough to realize that, sooner or later, he'd forget and power on his mana bike, only for it to then dump all the nature attuned mana stored inside the Starforged Steel as he drove and would inevitably leave him stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

With his Nature-Attuned Runic Mana Engine now fully detached from the rest of his mana bike, its engraved casing still pulsing faintly with a greenish hue. It had carried him through so much.

… Damn why does it feel like I'm losing it? Archie wondered to himself as he attempted to wipe away the exhaustion he felt with his hands. When this all works, I can just ask Bralmir if he has something I can substitute it with.

Archie set it down on the table and began disassembling it, separating the focus array from the core, unspooling the containment rings, and gently removing the stabilizer brick he made out of Silver and Steel from its housing.

Carefully taking out the Power Core from its confines and disconnecting the tubes and wiring connected to it, he then placed it to his right, before he began to sort, connect, and organize the internal wiring and tubing of the Nature-Attuned Runic Mana Engine.

Once properly sorted and adjusted, Archie placed the Nature-Attuned Runic Mana Engine back inside his mana bike and reconnected the tubing and wiring to it and clasped it back together, and carried it back to the entrance of his base. He then took out his Totem of Spring's Ascent and placed it beside it.

He turned back to the repaired engine casing from the Salvoris Mine. It was bulkier and heavier than what he would have liked, but it had the necessary conduits and reinforced bracing to contain the Power Core. Archie placed the Power Core within the new engine's housing and began to reconnect the bindings.

Each was fused and fixed into place with a quick application of Forgesmith's Flame. The engine casing gave a soft pulse as the Power Core synchronized itself with the reset of the engine, producing a low, resonant hum that buzzed faintly atop his wooden desk.

Satisfied, Archie stepped back. His fingers flashed in quick sequence. 'Time for you two to go and hide.'

Volos, perched on a nearby stone and still proudly reconstructing his now twice-toppled pebble dome, paused mid-placement. He clicked once in acknowledgment. Arsenic, who had returned to gnawing on a dried piece of jerky, flicked his antennae and rolled back onto his one hundred and two feet, where he then slowly made his way toward Archie.

Archie held out both hands for both Volos and Arsenic to climb onto, which they did. A shimmer pulsed outward from his chest, and in the next moment, both centipedes dissolved into translucent blue light, pulled gently into his Soulspace with a ripple of mana.

The clearing fell quiet again.

Alone now, Archie focused back onto the teleporter – his tired eyes slowly tracing over its form.

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With the power core now secured and humming inside the salvaged engine housing, Archie turned his attention to the upper components of the teleporter – the layers that would potentially send him careening into space and into a sun if he messed up.

At the heart of the platform, just above the embedded core housing, he began placing the first of the focusing spires.

There were six of them in total: thin, tapering pillars of Meteoric Iron, each capped with Deepiron. Each spire slotted neatly into anchor grooves set within the central ring, arranged equidistantly in a tight hexagon. As Archie secured the final one, a low resonance passed between them, a faint vibration in the air like plucked strings slowly falling into tune.

Above those, he affixed the Spatial Gem (Uncommon) he'd received from Paleos for completing his second quest. It rested like a crown atop the innermost junction of the teleporter, suspended slightly above the core housing by three adjustable arms he'd crafted from Meteoric Iron.

The Spatial Gem caught the ambient mana and began to shimmer faintly in the late afternoon sun's rays.

Looks like cola in this light, Archie mused to himself.

Archie knelt again and checked the conduit clamps at each junction, tightening the fixtures one by one with the slow precision of someone who knew exactly how many times they'd rattled loose in past tests. He applied a final coating of Forgesmith's Flame along the base of the spires.

The components were in place.

Every clamp was tightened. Every line of etched runes glowed with the faint thrum of flowing mana. The Spatial Gem above shimmered like syrupy glass, casting little dancing specks of refracted light across the inner surface of the teleporter's ring.

Archie moved with deliberate care, retrieving the power cable, a thick, braided channel of treated copper-thread and coated with tree resin that Arsenic collected from god knows where, and locked its head into the rear socket of the salvaged mana engine. A low hum rolled through the air, vibrating in his bones as the Teleporter's lights began to turn on.

The thrumming grew.

Inside the engine, the Power Core pulsed in a steady rhythm as with the help of the Spatial Gem, it converted the energy it generated into spatial mana.

Archie stepped back and watched as the ambient field began to swell around the device. The Spatial Gem glowed brighter, the etched channels along the teleporter lighted up like veins under skin. Sparks of white-blue flickered between the six spires.

The large Spatial Dish he'd connected to the base of the teleporter began to siphon mana as it spun slowly, still not emitting a signal.

He was almost there.

He flexed his fingers from the clammy sensation they had.

Archie took a breath, unbuckled his right sleeve, and tucked it into one of his Spatial Rings, where he'd also stored everything previously housed in his Livingwood Propagator.

His fingertips traced the Livingwood roots that had been embedded in his arm for almost two months now.

Then his fingers dug into his flesh.

The pain reached him only dully, muffled by the exhaustion dragging at his limbs as he pried the roots loose, three strands of coiled Livingwood, slick with his own blood. They twitched faintly in the air, reacting to the sudden absence of the warmth and mana his body had been feeding them.

He winced, breath held through his gritted teeth, and staggered to the left, where a small containment chamber waited, fixed into a bracket just under the Spatial Gem, attached by a thin Meteoric Iron tubing to the signal dish.

As Archie was about to place the Livingwood roots into the container, he stopped himself for a moment to calm the shakiness of his arm. Once his arm was steady, he placed it inside the container.

The signal conduit lit instantly, a pulse firing downward through the line and flaring out through the dish like a beacon.

The spatial field responded in kind.

The air above the Spatial Gem shimmered, then warped, then began to ripple as a spatial rift was being created.

The ripple above the Spatial Gem widened, thin lines of blue-white light dancing across the inner section of the teleportation ring. Like a lid being peeled off the world, space itself flexed, cracked, then shimmered with a deep, unnatural clarity.

Archie stood a few paces back, chest heaving, watching intently.

Then–

BUZZ!

Not from the teleporter.

A low, vibrating hum tickled the edge of his thoughts like a headache trying to form behind his right eye.

Everything around him seemingly began to flow in slow motion.

Until his gaze caught on the containment chamber.

The Livingwood roots.

They were still moving, twitching, but not in reaction to the spatial mana that coursed through it.

The crimson sheen of his blood still clung to them in thin rivulets, pooling faintly inside the glass chamber. A thick, pulsing smear ran down the central root, mixed with the spatial mana that traveled to the Spatial Dish.

He hadn't accounted for his blood being a catalyst for the spatial rift opening.

His heart dropped, and his eyes widened, he traced the implications faster than what his exhausted mind should have been able to.

With his blood still soaked in its fibers…

The spatial dish flared.

A connection was made. But the signal it received was not one from a different dish, but from its own.

Archie's eyes went wide, expression changing in a staccato of emotions: realization, calculative, and then horror.

Through the muddiness of everything around him, he began to pivot on his heel, away from the teleporter.

However, he was not fast enough.

A sound like splitting glass and shrieking metal exploded behind him as the dish overloaded itself, a shattering crack ripping through the forge clearing. Debris detonated outward in a cone of splinters, warped mana, and metal shrapnel.

The blast hit him and sent him careening away.

Metal seared his skin, shards driving deep into his shoulder and back. He hit the dirt with a heavy thud, rolling many times before he came to a halt facedown; dirt, metal, and blood covered his unmoving body.

Silence overtook the forest.

…

…

Then, the faint crunch of leaves and soil echoed around the debris.

Volos burst from Archie's Soulspace in a blur, antennae whipping wildly. Arsenic blinked into the world a half-second later, carapace rattling from the sudden shift. Both of them rushed to his side, their small, insectile forms pushing against his still body.

Volos chirped loudly, scraping one limb against Archie's side, chittering a series of short, frantic signals.

Arsenic slammed both front claws against Archie's shoulder once, twice, trying to wake him, his clicking panic filling the clearing.

Archie didn't move from his position.

But his fists that lay atop the dirt dug into it tightly, to the point where his blood began to drench both the dirt on his palms as well as the dirt surrounding him.

Blood soaked the soil around him. Smoke still curled from the ruined dish. The Spatial Gem above flickered, cracked, but was still intact, its light dimmed to a trembling pulse.

Over a month and a half of work, practice, theorizing… all of it lay in ruin.