Adrenaline Junkie [Book 2 Complete]

Archie's steps were slow and dragging. One leg was stiff and barely mobile, making the other shoulder bear most of his weight. Shoulder hunched forward where a shard still pressed too deep to pull without proper tools, tools he no longer had the clarity, time, or will to give a damn about. Blood crusted along his temple and dried across his jaw in smears. His face was pale, almost grey. Eyes half-lidded and distant.

It had been a long six days since the explosion of his teleporter.

But still, he moved.

His bare hands, though raw and torn, retained the instinct of precision. One by one, he slotted the final parts of the Teleporter into place. Not with grace like he'd done before, but with grim, mechanical motions that allowed him to conserve as much mental energy as he could.

There, the last tapering spire.

And above it, he raised the surprisingly intact Spatial Gem.

The crack running across its surface was jagged but shallow. Its glow had dimmed to a syrupy flicker, faint pulses of spatial mana still trapped inside. A wisp of smoke curled from the fractured edge. Archie lowered it gently into the housing mount, locking it into place with a dull click that echoed too loudly in the stillness.

He did not look to admire it like he had previously.

He didn't have the energy to do so.

Across the clearing, by the forge, the last of the Meteoric Iron waited, warped and scorched from the explosion's heat, but salvageable.

Archie moved toward it.

As he passed the scattered remnants of tools and discarded materials, something crunched beneath his heel. A small Fatigue Relief Vial, crushed into the dirt. The used glass injector, now snapped, lay a pace away, its last drops of clear, viscous fluid glistening like morning dew.

He'd used it after dragging himself off the ruined teleportation site, hoping it would give him the mental clarity and energy to get back to normal. But to his dismay, it barely jump-started his system, barely giving him just enough to clear his head and the clarity he needed to pull himself together and start picking up the ruined scraps of Meteoric Iron.

He reached the forge, dragging his battered body forward with the stubborn refusal of a man unwilling to die before the job was done. His left arm barely moved. His right flinched every time it rose. But he lifted his Reinforced Steel Hammer anyway.

As he glanced at the inside of the Inchoate Titansteel Forge, the forge's flame, created by Forgesmith's Flame, remained just as strong as normal. If he were more awake and aware, he would have noticed that the flame looked to be far denser and brighter.

Instead, he simply placed the warped piece of Meteoric Iron Plating into the forge and raised the intensity of the flames as his embered eyes blankly stared at the heating metal.

The warped Meteoric Iron plating slowly turned orange, then white-hot within the cradle of the forge, heat lines rippling through the air above it. The unnatural density of the flame, fed by a still-persistent Forgesmith's Flame, licked the plating with a hungering intensity that should have caught Archie's attention.

But his focus was shot, hovering somewhere between lucidity and the sharp edge of collapse. It felt as though he was walking on a tightrope, where the moment he lost balance, his body would shut down.

He stood like a statue before it, body trembling under the weight of effort.

He waited until the metal was just pliable enough to work with.

Then he moved.

Archie pulled the plating free with his Steel Tongs, the tool's leather grip barely holding in his hand as his palm clenched too late. The plating slipped slightly before he corrected, forcing his fingers closed with a grunt.

Onto the anvil.

The first strike rang out like a cracked bell.

The Reinforced Hammer's weight jolted his shoulder, forcing pain to bloom white behind his eyes for a moment before he shook away the pain. Echoing Pain still hadn't left him.

Another strike.

Again.

The rhythm was off, a fractured cadence born of exhaustion. But still, each mana-infused blow landed exactly where it needed to, guided by repetition etched deep into his bones.

He needed to reforge the housing brace.

The edges had buckled inward from the blast, twisted from heat exposure and shrapnel impact. If he didn't fix the orientation line for the Spatial Gem's cradle, the focusing pattern would fail, and the gem would shatter, and he would have no way to generate enough spatial mana for his teleporter to work.

A fourth strike.

Tenth.

Twentieth.

Sparks flew, a few catching and searing against his bare chest and arms, just as he intended. Riding the spikes of adrenaline from each flare of pain, Archie channeled them into Echoing Pain, using every jolt to keep himself awake, pushing forward on sheer will alone.

Molten sweat beaded at his brow. One drop fell and sizzled as it struck the anvil beside the brace.

His breath rasped through his throat, and for a moment, his vision tilted. His grip on the brace slackened. The world spun at the edges of his sight.

Keep going.

The thought didn't even feel like his own, even though he knew that it was.

He blinked once. Slowly. Then attempted to tighten his grip on the cradle once more with trembling fingers.

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It slipped from his grip and clanged to the stone ground.

He stared at it, unmoving.

Somewhere deep in his Soulspace, there was a stirring, a faint ripple of mana. It felt familiar. Volos, maybe. Or Arsenic. Possibly even both, watching him and trying to cheer him on.

He bent to retrieve the piece.

His knees cracked. One gave slightly. But he caught himself on the edge of the anvil, pulled himself upright with a grunt, and resumed his work.

The final strike fell with a dull, ringing crack.

Archie didn't wait to see if the reshaped cradle cooled properly. Didn't pause to admire his handiwork or even confirm if the alignment was correct.

Such thoughts took too much mental energy, so he simply moved forward.

Each step he took away from his anvil and toward the teleporter felt like bearing the weight of the world, like Atlas, the Titan of Endurance from Greek mythology. His legs had long gone numb, yet every movement sent waves of agony through them, like thousands of needles driving into flesh. Still, his grip on the cradle never faltered.

The twin suns had long since dipped behind the tree line. Or maybe it hadn't. He wasn't really sure; night and day began to look the same to him after the teleporter exploded.

He moved past the cluttered table, stepping over scattered screws, bolts, and jagged shrapnel, and past the smear of dried blood that still marked the small crater where he'd landed.

His body was swaying, eyes flickering in and out of clarity.

Still, he reached the teleporter's base.

The shattered dish had been swept clear. The runes and runic scripts were re-etched. The focusing spires reforged and upright. The cracked but functional Spatial Gem sat in its tri-armed cradle once again, waiting. Everything that could be rebuilt had been.

Archie knelt to install the cradle around the Spatial Gem.

His hands trembled as he secured them into place, tightening the final clamps with uneven force. The runes flared once. Held steady. Then dimmed to a stable hum.

It was done.

He was done.

Archie collapsed backward, half-kneeling, half-falling, one hand braced against the edge of the Teleporter's ring. His vision pulsed dark at the corners. Breathing was no longer automatic. Each inhale felt like it had to be earned.

Then, through the encroaching fog of unconsciousness, something surfaced.

Last Stand (Rare):
When health is critically low, a rush of adrenaline floods your body, allowing you to recover quickly from exhaustion and fight with renewed vigor. Increases damage and grants a health regeneration boost when health falls below 15%.

Archie's eyes widened slightly. Just a sliver.

He had that skill.

His lips rose ever so slightly as an electric charge ran through his neurons.

…Fuck it.

He reached into his spatial storage and drew out his Steel Dagger.

There was no hesitation. No dramatic buildup. He simply shifted the blade, angled it below his ribs, and stabbed it into his own side, specifically in his liver.

His breath caught in his throat at the pain that erupted from his side, further enhanced by Echoing Pain.

He twisted the blade slightly, then pulled it free. Blood welled instantly, hot and thick, pouring out of him and soaking into his Plated Legguards of Fortitude and seeping into the dirt beneath him.

He could feel Vital Metabolism instinctively reaching toward the injury to heal it.

Using what last bits of mental clarity he had, he seized the mana that surged forward and held it back. His body screamed, but his will clamped down harder.

The world blurred. Tilted.

The dagger fell from his hands and hit the dirt with a dull thud, swallowed up by the pool of blood beneath him.

He collapsed onto one knee, blood still dripping from his side, and his own blood splattering on him.

His heart slowed. His body numbed. The mana in his chest fluttered like a dying flame.

Then, a jolt.

Sudden, sharp, electric. It punched through his chest like a lightning bolt through wet copper.

The surge of adrenaline hit him with such an intensity that his body arched.

Every nerve lit up. Every beat of his heart thundered like it was trying to punch through his ribs. The dizziness was gone, but not cured, just drowned in the flood of adrenaline.

There was no time to think. No time to savor the rush. This adrenaline that was coursing through him was temporary.

He staggered to his feet.

He forced himself forward, boots squelching through blood-slick dirt as he half-limped, half-charged toward the generator tucked beside the base of the Teleporter ring, releasing his hold on Vital Metabolism to heal his self-inflicted wound.

One hand slammed against the runes etched into the housing. The other twisted the ignition crank.

A low thrum shook the air.

The hum swelled into a howl as the generated mana reached the Spatial Gem, transmuting into spatial energy. The array beneath the ring flared to life, runes and scripts etched along the outer rim igniting one by one, syncing in rhythm with the power now surging through the platform.

Archie immediately turned to the small container beside the spatial gem and took out the Livingwood roots from his spatial storage.

They had been thoroughly cleaned of any blood, dirt, or moisture. He'd learned his lesson.

He then slid them into the container, locking it in place with a final click. The container hissed shut, lines of mana branching through the lines like veins through leaves.

With the Livingwood roots in place, the array immediately flared. A pulse of spatial mana blasted upward from the ring's center, rising like a column of light before it began to shape itself into a rift.

The Spatial Gem began to spin slowly in its cradle, stabilized now by the calibrated rune-anchors he'd re-set during his fevered repairs.

Everything was aligning.

It had to.

Archie stumbled onto the platform, pressing his clean hand against the activation rune etched into the central pedestal to transmit the signal the Livingwood roots produced via its Resonance Wayfinder (Twin) effect.

It lit beneath his palm.

He could feel his body wavering again, even through the effects of Last Stand. The rush of adrenaline was being pushed by the effects of Hollow Slumber.

The rune beneath Archie's palm flared, flooding his hand with blinding light as the Resonance Wayfinder (Twin) linked. Within the compartment, the Livingwood roots pulsed back in harmonic rhythm.

It had received a signal back from its twin.

Rings of spatial mana flared outward from the platform in rhythmic surges, the rift at its center warping and tightening as it received the coordinates from its twin from beyond the planet.

The portal was stabilizing and nearly complete.

But Archie was far from stable.

As the dimensional rift tore open before him, the C-Grade Quadra-Curse leaching onto his soul surged back to life. It had sensed his nearness to death, the spike in ambient mana, it was a perfect moment to reassert its weight and reclaim its original goal.

It felt like dying in slow motion.

But his body rebelled. His spirit faltered. His soul shook.

Archie felt his knees buckle. His hand slid from the rune pad. The adrenaline from Last Stand sputtered. The haze of Hollow Slumber began to creep back in, tugging at his vision with phantom hands of velvet darkness.

His heart visibly pounded a savage rhythm against his chest before suddenly it stopped.

It was too much.

The blood loss, the exhaustion, the pain, the despair. It was simply too much for his heart to handle.

He was falling.

The world tilted.

The rift flickered for a moment before it stabilized fully.

And through it, he could see a futuristic chamber on the other side, deliriously reminding him of various SciFi shows he'd watched prior to the System Integration. Smooth panels lined the walls, floating monitors pulsed with unreadable data, and a sleek sofa sat amid a host of strange devices, none of which he could make heads or tails of.

A faint barrage of dings mutely echoed within his mind.

The moment stretched like eternity as his vision grew dark, and a familiar figure suddenly appeared within view of the spatial rift in front of him.

Then, a spark.

A single neuron fired inside his brain.

Then another.

Then hundreds, cascading into a storm of thousands of sparks of bioelectricity. His nervous system overloaded itself, not from sheer primal refusal to die, or anything cheesy such as that, but from the sheer adrenaline of his realization that he was about to die.

Signals misfired, muscles clenched at random, and mana flared inside his core in jagged, uncontrolled bursts.

A final flood of adrenaline slammed into his bloodstream as his knees almost touched the base of the teleporter.

Savage Charge activated.

His body snapped forward before thought could catch up.

He roared silently, blood flecking from his lips as his body lunged forward.

And in a single brutal instant, he launched himself through the spatial rift.