I tried to run after Kona and Jozoic but ended up coughing and stumbling, barely able to manage a jog after them. I still felt absolutely drained from the whole ordeal with the flooded tunnel, and an unbidden spike of fear flared to life within me when I felt the cold layer of rippling water under my feet after a few moments. It wasn't like the water was rushing into the hallway, but it steadily inched towards our workspace with each soft wave.

  I forgot to check the clock to get a solid read on the timing of everything, but could hear Hodak's rapid sprinting footsteps approaching me from behind by the time I turned a corner and caught up to Kona. They were also jogging steadily, but their shorter legs let me catch up despite my hampered state. We still had to make it a few dozen meters and around a second corner to make it into the green zone Max was highlighting. I pushed the dwarves to move faster.

  “We need to run!” I whisper shouted, putting a hand on Kona's shoulder and pushing her forward. She in turn caught herself with a hand on Jozoic's shoulder in front of her, and half turned to give me a glare.

  “You can go ahead then,” she snapped.

  I made a frustrated noise, starting to dislike this girl despite her willingness to join us on this mission. “Pressure waves in caves like this are more dangerous than the bugs, but fine,” I replied.

  Jozoic looked back and frowned, but stopped his steady shield-up advance and broke into a sprint. Kona huffed and looked like she was going to argue some more with me, but I pushed past her and chased behind Jozoic. I heard her yell something that was overridden by my own shouting at Jozoic ahead telling him to take the next turn.

  “Turn here!”

  He rounded the corner, and I slid after him. My bare feet slipped across the wet floor as we approached the highlighted safe zone. I bounced a shoulder off the wall and kept running, my focus locked on my minimap and breathing ragged as I pushed myself to just make it across the line.

  I was maybe two steps from making it into the green marked section when a blast of air ripped around me and threw me forward mid-stride. The world went quiet again after a split second of roaring explosion before the deafened debuff appeared in the corner next to my broken nose debuff at the top of my HUD, which was also now outlined in flashing red and bleeding once more from its second surprise meeting with the unyielding stone.

  I spat to the side and pushed myself up onto my knees like I was doing a partial pushup. “Is everyone okay?” I could feel the way my voice rasped but still couldn't hear myself. When I looked up from the floor Jozoic was right in front of me. He laid down his pry bar and offered me a hand to help me stand as his mouth moved and live subtitles reappeared next to him.

  “Get up, we must—” I watched as a long spiky-legged form appeared and dropped down from the ceiling onto his back, long mandibles wrapping around his neck and causing him to fall forward into me.

  Our foreheads cracked against each other and caused a burst of red and yellow stars and sparks that winked in and out of existence in my vision. I shook it off and pressed forward without thinking, grappling the beast with armored hands around each of its jaws.

  Kona stepped up right behind me and jabbed the chisel end of her makeshift spear right into the thing's face, piercing through its carapace and causing it to flail around wildly. The thing’s legs scratched against Jozoic’s back before he managed to roll around and kick the thing off of himself to the side. Kona pressed forward with her long straight pry bar and pinned it to the ground, forcing the length of iron deeper into it and wrenching the handle back and forth until the dull point broke through the other side and scraped into the stone.

  Hodak jumped in at that point, slipping past me while I struggled with the thing's jaws and dragging Jozoic away from the beast. I managed to rise into a kneel and took up Jozoic’s dropped makeshift spear and jabbed it into the monster as well. My blow was weak, scraping along the things belly as it writhed around before it caught between two of the smooth plates. I used the anchored point as leverage to gain my feet and pushed forward with my bodyweight, finally forcing the end through the armor and into its guts.

  The scolovian clacked its jaws a few times, but made no other noise as I pushed further. Its back end slid across the stone floor until its back was pressed into the corner where the wall met the floor, and I felt the length of the makeshift spear hit the inside of its hardened back-plates. I yelled a wordless battlecry that I still couldn’t hear, and both Jozoic and Hodak came back into the fight between Kona and myself as we pinned the thing into the corner. Hodak used his pick-head to jab between its belly plates and pry one up enough for Jozoic to get his bare fingers underneath. He placed one bare foot against another of the plates and strained for a moment, his shoulders bunching up as he wrenched the plate off of it.

  The fight was over a moment later. With the giant centipede unable to move or defend itself, we made quick work of dispatching the beast. Kona gave it a few more jabs with her pry bar to make sure, while I just let mine fall from my hands before collapsing into a sitting position against the wall on the other side of the tunnel.

  I glanced over my debuffs, and saw I had another 18 seconds of deafness and my broken nose timer had doubled. With a grimace, I placed a finger on either side of my nose and reset it. It stung, but was nothing compared to the pain I had already been through today. I took a moment to look myself over, and saw my mostly bare arms were covered in fresh scars, scabs, and coated with patches of dried tar and worse.

  Hodak grabbed one of my raised hands and hauled me to my feet, saying something about going back for a second blast with a grin. I nodded, not really paying attention to him as I decided to open up my inventory screen to get a better look at myself in the preview window. I followed at the rear of the group as we jogged back in the direction we had just come from.

  The screen popped open, semi-transparent other than the window that showed a life-like version of myself standing in a neutral pose on a small platform that I could rotate around to look at myself.

  I looked bad, like real bad. Scars and wounds crisscrossed every patch of exposed skin between the dirty rags I had tied around myself as clothes. I had dark bruised bags under my eyes. My hair was a matted tar-filled mess splattered with ocre scolovian blood. Max quickly corrected me that insects did not have blood and it was called hemolymph, but I was too busy worrying over my ragged state to pay him much mind.

  I looked worse than many of the desperate Transients that I’d looked down on and pitied as I walked past them on the streets of Nubranagain. They were all probably dead, starving, or braving the dangerous and often lawless lands between cities in search of somewhere else to exist. Last I had heard, they were going to drop orbital strikes on my old home, which hurt to think about. My mind recoiled from the thought and I focused on a surprising notification at the bottom of my almost entirely empty gear section.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  My yearly free character report was available, and I could finally check my stats and skills. I strongly considered clicking it, it would make a wonderful distraction from the mess my life had become. Plus, I’d been looking forward to getting a chance to check my progress for months now. I’d only ever gotten a glimpse at the numbers twice in the whole time I’d been “playing” for my wages in this fucking horror show. As tempting as it was, now wasn't the time. I closed the window when we neared the small remaining patch of dry floor and got to work.

  The blast had shattered and pulverized a chunk of wall about four feet deep and a little wider and taller, scattering some of it along the floor but leaving most of it in a pile still inside the brand new drift. It also filled the whole tunnel with sulfurous smoke and stone dust that sent me into another coughing fit and forced me to stay low to avoid it. I tied a wet rag around my face and got to work. As a group, we began mucking the pile of jagged stones from the floor, tossing them behind us until there was enough room for the three dwarves to begin clawing new blastholes into the striped rock face.

  Almost as soon as we cleared enough space for the dwarves to cram themselves into place, another blast from the far side shook the tunnel and dropped a fresh layer of loose rocks from the ceiling and walls. I sent Kikkelin a message asking her how it was going on her end, and got a short reply a moment later letting me know they had things under control. I was a little doubtful, and was tempted to send her some of the information that Max had provided, but resisted the urge to micromanage and decided to trust the other team to do their part.

  Once we got back to it, the rest of the grunt-work fell to me. I wasn’t much use without the precursor chemicals to use my gauntlets for mining, so I busied myself by shifting the pile of rocks from around the feet of the working dwarves.

  “Watch your feelers, ya maniac,” Kona chided Hodak as they got in each other's way in the tight space. “You too, softshell,” she said to me as she kicked a stone back where I was crouching down behind her and trying to drag a large chunk of stone out from between her feet.

  “Quiet. Just work,” Jozoic barked.

  I nearly quipped back at her, but bit my tongue and focused on a different portion of the shattered tailings from the growing tunnel. Some back and forth could have been nice, but for once in my life I just wasn’t in the mood for it.

  I ignored her and focused on dragging the rocks out of the bottom of the tunnel. My gauntlets might not have been all that useful for their abilities through the trial, but they served as good protection from the sharp edges of the broken rocks as I scooped them out like a bored dog tied up in the yard. Their sharp edges that had caused me so much trouble with my nervous habits of touching my face now assisted my work by catching against the edges of the rocks and helping me drag the bits and shards out of the way.

  I forgot to check the clock before we started, again, but once we had finished the second round of excavation and left Hodak to pack the second charge I noted we had a half-hour left. What was more worrying was that the water had now reached us where we stood, the soft waves flooding between the scattered stones and swirling with trails of dust in the dim light near the work site.

  We went through with the second blast, and this time made it safely into the green-zone without getting attacked. The smoke was even thicker and had filled the whole tunnel all the way up to the area where we were taking refuge when we returned for the third. I had to take a short break, laying on the floor to catch my breath in the semi-clear air at the lowest point of the tunnel. My debuffs had disappeared and my breathing had evened out though the air stank and fouled the rag I was wearing over my face.

  Max was, of course, joining in on the “fun.” He was now wearing a comically large cowboy hat that barely fit into frame and had a red bandana tied over his pallid gray face that he kept having to adjust due to his lack of a nose. At some point between my fleeting glances at his window, he fixed the issue by growing himself a nose that finally pushed his face into creepy uncanny valley territory. I wasn’t sure why he had to go that route, rather than adjusting the physics of the digital feature, but I wasn’t going to take the time to question it.

  I paid him little mind. His slow transformation from his original nearly featureless crosswalk sign stick-figure was the least of my concerns. I was happy enough he was staying out of my way and had found an outlet for his fooling around while still helping me out when I needed it.

  With him and the scolo staying out of the way and our team finding our rhythm, our times between blasts shortened. While we were wading away through knee-high water as a group for our fourth charge, trusting Hodak to set the charge and catch up to us again, another message from Kikk pinged into my inbox. I opened it as quickly as possible.

  Kikkelin: We’ve made a depth of nearly two head, the going has been slow. How far have you carved out so far? We should coordinate as we near each other.

  I knew the answer, having used my forearm as a rough gauge. We had made it roughly 10 feet, which meant there should only be a foot or two of stone between the two tunnels. A sudden thought occurred to me, both exciting and terrible at the same time.

  Exciting because that meant we had nearly done it, and we still had 7 minutes until the deadline Max had given us. With this last blast, we should open the tunnel and be done with this mess. Yet the three feet deep blastholes we had been digging should have broken through to their side before packing the last charge. Had we messed up by digging in different places, or made some miscalculation when planning everything?

  I started to form a reply message to her as we rounded the first corner and Hodak's sloshing footsteps approached us from behind. What felt like a truck rammed into me from behind, once again flattening me and pushing me into the water. More debuffs flared, and a second fizzling rumble rang through the water as I drifted, temporarily stunned from the blast

  I recovered after a second, and thrashed around until I got my head back into the air. I hacked out another series of raw coughs while feeling around for the rag that had been washed from my face and tried to blink the dirty water from my eyes as I stood. There was almost no light, but Max’s darkvision allowed me to orient myself through the dark swirling dust and smoke.

  The water was rushing around me, pulling at my legs in the direction of the excavation site. I turned and looked back, seeing a dwarv shaped outline laying face down and mostly submerged. I rushed over in deafened silence, and rolled them over so I could pull them out of the water.

  Hodak didn’t fight me, but was far heavier than he had any right to be at his size. I got him onto his back and drew his head and shoulders out of the water. I found him with open eyes, a scorched face, and a bright steel-toothed grin clogged with little specks of stone. His mouth moved, and subtitles typed themselves out next to his head. I didn’t know how to read lips, but I probably could have worked out what he said without the transcription.

  “Boom! Job’s done.” He grinned again, but made no effort to stand or help me pull him out of the rapidly draining water.

  I sighed and dropped him, letting him sink back down. He released some bubbles and lay still for a moment before floundering and righting himself. While he struggled to his feet, I pushed past him towards the blast site where Max’s cheater-vision allowed me to see the pile of rubble was already shifting.

  A familiar head and shoulders pushed through a small gap that was quickly growing as dwarven hands and rushing water ate away at the barrier.

  “Gah-rah, Nick, this is why we don't rush!” Kikkelin said, before crawling through while more dwarves began dragging shattered stones from the new opening.