The problem was simple, in the same manner that moving a pond from one place to another could be. We had a bunch of water over here, and needed to move it over there. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what needed to be done, and in theory all we needed to do was to knock down a wall. It was work so simple and blunt it could be done with a bulldozer… if we had one. Yet while the work might be simple, that did not mean it would be easy. As someone with first-hand experience in the mountain-removal industry, I knew that scale could provide its own difficulty. Adding a literal deadline into the mix was our main problem that turned a simple goal into a potentially impossible task.

  While the representatives and their backup kept debating solutions in the center of the room, many of us witnesses had retreated to our own territories through the five evenly spaced tunnels. There was an air of urgency that hung over us all, but no one was rushing around or panicking.

  Sallis and I stopped next to Kikkelin and Jozoic, who were waiting behind a low mound that had been built up from large stone blocks around the entrance to our own territory. Jozoic looked almost smug, with a lingering air of anger about him. His mouth twitched in a grin for a second before he greeted us.

  “What an example of discussion and debate, the elders will be proud,” he said.

  Sallis scoffed and shoved his shoulder as she continued past him and down the tunnel. “Like you would have had any more luck. The fighting’s done, there's nothing to smash over the head anymore so let’s get on with it.”

  Jozoic grunted and frowned, but turned to follow her down the tunnel. Kikkelin and I looked at each other, she raised her eyebrows in a questioning look and I shrugged in reply. We went after them back into our stronghold.

  “I didn’t know you were so good at math.” She commented as we followed the other two.

  I frowned and kept looking forward, not able to meet her gaze as I bent the truth. “Oh, you know. I just plugged the numbers into a calculator.”

  Some more messages between Rin, Ali, and Max scrolled by next to his little streamer cam in the corner of my vision. I glanced over them to escape the uncomfortable silence. They were talking about what was happening back in Nubranagain and how it might effect the rest of Arktria.

  According to their conversation, the news was announcing estimated casualty numbers, damage costs, and calling for the dissolution of the final religious organizations the council still allowed. Ali seemed indifferent, while Rin was arguing with both of them that it would only make things worse by alienating the few remaining believers that had not already signed up with the anti-link factions. Max was playing the contrarian and prodding the argument along by digging up classified records and covered-up scandals involving any of the media personalities and council spokespeople who were involved with the reporting and political discussion.

  I sighed and stopped focusing on their conversion, which was somehow even worse than the debacle of a debate I had just walked away from. Sallis was still stomping along a ways ahead of us with Jozoic just behind her, while Kikkelin walked along next to me. She seemed to sense that I didn’t want to talk about my surprise math skills, but also kept glancing over at me and scrunching up her mouth like she wanted to say something but was holding herself back.

  I sighed again after we caught eyes for a moment. “Alright, what is it?” I asked.

  “Um, just… I don’t think we’ll be able to get that tunnel cleared before what you said will happen, uh, happens.”

  I glanced over at her again, nodding for her to continue. Out of all of us, she was the one who understood the dwarven method of bonding and altering stone the best. Bomilik was good, but he was more focused on big-picture operations of structural integrity, layout, and reading the geological layers and how they should be taken into account. Kikk was the one who could tell you the best method to stick two different types of stone together or what chemical compound would best achieve the finished look you were after.

  “Well… it’s hard to say without actually seeing how blocked the tunnel is, but I don't think that acid and pressure will be fast enough. They likely used hammered copper or some softer metal to form the seal around whatever plug they created to speed up the curing process, which still takes time. They’ll have to remove the seal every meter or so to remove the stones and scrape the broken down mortar out. Especially with the upper tunnels being made of porous basalt.”

  She spoke hesitantly, taking a few lengthy pauses between her statements as she explained her thoughts. By the time she had finished, we had made it into our temporary storage room and found Lokralda on her knees frantically scraping up a loose pile of dusty chunks of saltpeter we had scraped from the walls and floor of the squam room.

  “It’s like trying to pressurize a room made out of sponge, it’ll just leak out in every direction,” She finished.

  I frowned, glancing around at the material and supplies we had brought with us from the abandoned forge. I pushed a general questioning ‘what do you make of this?’ thought at Max.

  “I think she’s likely right. It’s impossible for me to predict, really. There’s some RNG involved when it comes to pushing liquid through a solid on such a scale.”

  Max’s attention shifted away from me and back to his conversation with Rin and Ali, and for a half a second I felt a little miffed. I could use his help right now but he was too busy focusing on my other friends. Shaking my head, I dropped that line of thinking and reminded myself that’s exactly why I introduced him to them in the first place.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “If we can’t tear the blockage down, then…” I let the thought hang in the air and looked across the remains of my row. The four dwarves all looked over at me with expectation tinged with defeat written on their faces. There was a few seconds of silence while they stared at me, and I turned away and closed my eyes, rubbing at the bridge of my nose as a sharp headache surfaced and throbbed like an ice-pick in my temple.

  My stomach chose that exact moment to rumble loudly, and got a mix of reactions from the others. I opened my eyes again and glanced over the group. Sallis looked slightly grossed out, while Lokralda and Jozoic looked more surprised and curious. Kikkelin just laughed and pulled a palm-sized bit of stone from her inventory. She licked a finger and unconsciously began turning the rock over in her hands, spreading the spittle and working it into the chunk of soft white stone while slowly shaping it into some four-legged figurine without even looking.

  I turned away again and tried to think of a way out of this. At the base level, what we needed was to equalize the pressure on the tar chamber from all angles. We only had maybe an hour to move a couple of swimming pools worth of water from one cavern through another. I thought about the map Max had projected for me earlier, trying to remember how far we needed to move the water and what the upper levels were like. Maybe we could just bucket-brigade the water over to the other side.

  The hazy mental image sharpened and snapped into perfect focus after a few seconds, and the streamer-cam Max gave me another thumbs-up before cracking a joke about Councilor Herschal’s notoriously bad hair-piece. At first I was almost annoyed as I hadn’t realized his little camera window was still in view even when I closed my eyes, but I shook that thought away as soon as I had it. I was just tired, hungry, and grumpy. Max was always going to be there until we somehow got him a body, and closing my eyes wouldn’t hide me from my problems.

  Instead of letting myself settle back into the Wallow of Self Pity, I refocused on the clear mental map Max was assisting me with. I turned it around and flipped it over, zoomed in and tried to recall what stone types I’d seen where. I considered where the stone seemed more worked or less worked, what places it was more broken and conglomerated versus the smooth and solid regions, and threw more questions at Max for estimates and other data that he could add to the map.

  After a minute, I had transformed the map from a line-work blueprint to something that more resembled a detailed and rendered game level that I could fly around with no-clip dev commands.

  “Are you having a medical emergency, Kaninak?” Jozoic asked, his voice flat.

  I shook my head and waved a hand at him, keeping my eyes closed and the map I’d just constructed in my head focused. “No, just thinking. Give me a minute.”

  I could sense their eyes on me, but the sound of their work picked back up after another moment. I zoomed the map in until the problem section between the Hammerting and Brightenjaw territories filled my view, and I just stared at it for a long moment. The two cavern networks were mostly symmetrical, and only connected at the top and bottom just like all of the others. Something new occurred to me as I panned the map around into a purely top down view.

  The wedge-shape of each territory brought the caverns and chambers closer together as you moved towards the center of the field. The whole map was messy and crowded the closer to the middle you looked, so I zoomed in on two of the rooms on either side of the dividing expanse of stone between the two sides. Keeping the two rooms centered, I panned to a horizontal view and discovered that the rooms were mostly level with each other on that plane as well and looked to be pretty close to each other. They were dead-end branches about a third of the way up from the bottom of the entire network, and well below the predicted water-line.

  If you traveled through the tunnels and caverns, it would likely take a half-hour to walk from one of the rooms to the other. But if you measured as-the-crow flies and punched straight through the stone, it looked like they were only separated by 20 feet. It was obvious once I was zoomed in and looking right at it, we just had to break through with a brand new connecting tunnel there. The only problem was how I could explain that to the dwarves. As far as I knew, I was the only one with access to a map of the entire complex and had no way to explain away that level of knowledge.

  I opened my eyes and found Kikkelin and Jozoic were still watching me. Jozoic tilted his head forward and gave me a questioning look, while Kikk’s eyes just widened slightly as I looked back at her. “We need to build a new map. A new map of everything!” I blurted out, before turning around and running down the tunnel towards the still debating leadership group-council-thing.

  Footsteps chased after me, but no one spoke as we ran back to the middle chamber. I spent the short sprint trying to come up with a solid argument to convince the ornery leaders to take the time to build a model after having just convinced them of the need to hurry.

  The inner ring was still occupied by the debating leaders, but now only one of each family stood on the center ring. They were loudly arguing but not quite yelling when I burst into the room, the rest of my row spread out behind me to either side as they filed in after me. I glanced over each shoulder at them and saw that they had all followed me, then spotted Bomilik as he walked through the hastily built archway into the Brightenjaw territory on the far side of the cavern.

  I grimaced and looked over my group, wondering who would be the most likely to follow my lead and not delay by asking questions. After a half-second, I made my choice.

  “Sallis, go stop Bomilik before he gets too far, we need him.” I said, then took a couple of deep breaths and coughed once or twice as I realized how much the run had winded me. Sallis looked at me and narrowed her eyes, but called out to Bo and ran off without asking any questions. I shook my head and gasped out a couple of more wheezy breaths before walking towards the crude bridge that led out to the ring.

  When I reached the edge, Cerrik caught eyes with me and raised a hand before I could yell to catch their attention. He nodded at me and raised his hand to get the attention of the others. “Brothers, I believe we have some new expert testimony from Galidurns math genius.”

  Fedrick threw his hands in the air and let out a loud frustrated huff, but the dwarves all quieted and turned to face me. Kazek gave me a tight grin and waved for me to join him on the ring once more.

  “What is it this time?” Kazek asked.

  “No time!” I yelled back, not bothering to waste time walking out. “We need to share our intel! Have you both mapped out your territories? There might be a thin spot!”