10th Spring, Year One.

Okay, for real though. Today is the day. It kinda has to be.

I’ve been staring at the open mouth of the mine entrance for the better part of a week at this point, and as Victor has made all too clear, if I don’t go to them, they’re going to eventually come to me.

The problem is, I don’t really feel ready.

Yeah, my aim has been getting better since I set up the makeshift shooting range with the refuse that I found while I was trying out the fishing rod. But shooting a waterlogged boot is one thing, shooting a fiend, something living, is quite another.

To say nothing of whatever happens If I miss.

A tree falling on me only took 20 out of my 200 HP. Hopefully, I can survive a few bites or scrapes from whatever there is down in that mine. But if I can't? Are some copper bars worth dying over? Hell, at this point I've got myself half convinced that if I do die, I’ll just end up at a continue screen.

This town is messed up.

Really, though, I have to try. My crops are coming up, which means I need the Essence Maker, which means I need that copper. Messed up or not, this town has all the patterns of a game. If they're giving me the blueprint for an Essence Maker, then I'm going to need it.

I've stocked up on ammo, and I've got a bunch of 'munchables' to keep me fed and healthy.

Let's hope I don't need those.

Alex.

The lowering winch of the ancient elevator screamed in protest as the car slid to a stop. Above Alexander, the first floor light gleamed with an angry golden glow, as though the elevator itself were furious that he had brought it back to the depths it had long since escaped. To his left, only two of the nine buttons were highlighted, the M that would take him back to the main floor, and the same number 1 that he had used to get this far.

Each of the other unavailable floors was incremented by ten. Eleven, Twenty-one, Thirty-one, and so forth. Victor told him that the floors had been disabled, but that once he reached the appropriate floor, a single flip of a switch would be all that it would take to allow him access once more.

Because, of course. A seventy-seven-floor dungeon had to have waypoints, after all.

Alexander laughed darkly as he stepped from the elevator, his Beretta held in a nervous, too-tight grip.

As Victor had promised, the Fiendhome was surprisingly well lit for a series of abandoned tunnels. A phosphorescent green glow permeated every surface, mingling with an occasional bit of red or blue as other seams of colorful stone emerged from the walls. The lighting was part and parcel of the font that existed deep underground, its energies flowing through stone itself, throwing off light even as they mutated the creatures and plants of the mine into unnatural forms.

"Feel like I ought to be wearing a lead-lined suit," Alexander grumbled as he took his first few tentative steps away from the elevator. Victor had assured him that he was immune, that no human had ever experienced any sort of corruption or disease as a result of proximity to a font. But bathing in a light that reminded him of an old article on Cherenkov radiation did not exactly inspire confidence.

A sudden harsh clang of metal at his rear forced Alexander to spin on his heel, pistol upraised, finger on the trigger. He’d very nearly shot off a pair of rounds at the closing elevator door.

No, he wasn’t jumpy at all. What gave anyone that idea.

“Oh, just calm the hell down.” He ordered himself, thinking back to what Victor had told him. The further one got from the source of the font itself, the weaker the fiends became. With such an enormous distance between the top layers of the mine, and the font itself, the monsters should be weak. He’d be facing particularly large insects, vermin, and other such critters rather than frightening monsters of fiction and legend.

So long as he kept to the top few floors, he’d be fine.

That wouldn’t be hard. When he’d asked Victor for a map of the mines, the younger man had laughed in his face. Fiendhomes couldn't be mapped, he'd told Alexander, at least not for any length of time. The same natural energies that lit them, that fed the creatures that dwelled within, were in constant flux. Each floor of the mine would always contain at least one exit to the next one in line, but beyond that, each individual floor existed for weeks at best, with days or even sometimes hours being a far more likely timeframe.

He'd almost laughed at that. In some ways, Blue Hills felt like it was a sick joke, one to which only he apparently knew the punch line.

In time, perhaps he’d explore the fiendhome with the intention of delving deep within its depths. For the time being at least, Alexander was there with a purpose. Copper. Victor had shown him a handful of samples back at his workshop, so he knew what he was looking for. Now all he had to do was find it.

His steps felt muted with each step along the surprisingly smooth stone floor of the mine corridor. It was a hard sensation to explain, but Alexander felt like there should have been an echo as he walked, as though his every action should have resounded down into what felt like the infinite depth of the caverns.

The initial narrow passageway opened up into a large chamber, perhaps a few hundred feet across. The left side of it was dominated by broken crates and barrels, objects that appeared to have dated back as far as the guardian ruins above. More interestingly, the right side of the chamber held over a dozen visible seams of the dully-gleaming metal he’d come for.

It would have been all too easy, if not for the clusters of two-foot-tall ants that dominated the interior of the chamber.

“Oh hell no.” Alexander murmured.

In his youth, Alex had been terrified of spiders. It was the way they moved, the fluid skittering of limbs that had so unnerved him. His mother had eventually managed to break him of the crippling phobia, reassuring him over and over that for all their creepiness, the sort of spiders he was likely to run into in the city could only just barely hurt a fly, let alone him. Even years later, his preferred method of dealing with them was to throw a phone book at the offending creature and to leave it there for a few days until he was sure his weapon of choice had done the job.

They might be missing a few legs, but the way the nearest few creatures swiveled in his direction pushed down hard on the same button that spiders had pressed so long ago.

Fortunately, for once he had something better than a phonebook.

Alexander leveled his firearm in the direction of the nearest creature as it took a few tentative steps in his direction. Victor had made it abundantly clear that Fiends were not friendly, that the creatures were territorial and carnivorous to a fault. Even so, Alexander had thought it would be hard to pull the trigger when faced with a living, breathing creature, rather than a rusty tin can.

He’d been wrong.

Having an ant the size of a dog charging in his direction was a fantastic motivator.

The first squeeze of the trigger snapped off a round that buried deep into the soil as the creature passed, while the second struck a more solid obstruction in the floor, ricocheting off deeper into the cavern.

The third took the creature in whatever bit of its anatomy passed for a torso.

To his surprise, no blood accompanied the wound. He'd struck it cleanly, the bullet passing through the top of the ant's body to exit the bottom at a sharp angle, but instead of blood, there was only light, a sputtering of the same green light that glowed in the walls around them.

“Tough sucker, aren’t you?” Alexander grumbled, drawing a deep breath to steady himself against the recoil and the encroaching ants as he fired off two more shots.

Its survival wasn’t entirely unexpected. One of the first things Alexander had done upon receiving the weapon was to check its stats in his Status Book:

M84F

Damage: 10

Range: 51

Accuracy: 95%

Capacity: 13

Upgrade Slots: 1

Admittedly, Alexander's experience with firearms was limited to a weekend in Vegas, but ten damage didn't seem like a lot to him. Apparently, his attacker agreed, the wounded ant enduring two clean shots through the midsection before the third finally dropped it to the ground, its glowing wounds suddenly leaking considerably more light than before.

He didn’t have time to watch the light show, not with two more of the creature’s companions careening in his direction, heedless of their fellow’s demise.

Alexander turned his weapon to the next target in line, steadied his breath, and opened up once more. It had taken five shots to down the first target, a number he lowered to four with his second, with only one of his bullets going awry in the process.

By then the third target was upon him, its skittering body rushing headlong into danger as Alexander swung his weapon into line. Mandibles thrashed open and closed, the razor-sharp point of one drawing a sharp line of pain across one thigh as Alexander retorted with a bullet to the top of the creature's head.

It dropped in an instant, a puppet whose strings had been violently severed. Apparently, critical hits were a thing.

Cognizant of the possibility of further danger, Alexander took a few moments to scan the room, studying the behavior of the three other groups of ants. Each milled about as they had upon his entry, seemingly oblivious to the combat that had gone on in their vicinity, or even the presence of an outsider.

Satisfied that he was, for the moment, safe, Alexander released the magazine from his weapon, tossing it into the small satchel he wore at his waist, before removing a second, fully loaded duplicate from his hip. Reload early, reload often had been one of Victor's ‘helpful' tips, one that had only started to make any sort of sense to Alexander once he realized that a magazine stored in a satchel with ammunition would reload itself at the rate of approximately one bullet every five seconds. A handy little way to keep himself moving without carrying dozens of magazines, or reloading by hand during his downtime.

The increasingly vibrant glow of the deceased Ants finally drew Alexander’s attention as the first of them exploded into a shower of light. Concerned, Alexander put several steps of distance between himself and the remaining two, watching as the open wounds on each glowed with progressively more light, until the bodies could not contain the energy any further and evaporated in a sudden burst of glowing particulate.

In the aftermath of the small detonations, the light flowed like a stream towards the nearest glowing surface, pouring into vibrant stone that resonated with new energy. Within only a few seconds, nothing was left, save for a handful of crystals of small, emerald crystals at the former location of each dead body.

Victor hadn’t mentioned anything about crystals.

Alexander scooped up the handful of loot, then retreated into the corridor from which he'd come. Once he was certain that he was safe, he fished into the satchel at his side, retrieving both his reloaded magazine, which he stored at his hip, and his Status Book.

"Let's see what you are," Alexander said with a smirk. He flipped the book open to his inventory page, selected the crystals, then flipped through to find something entirely unhelpful:

Cryptictext (Mysterious Green Crystal)

This crystal is very mysterious. Perhaps someone in town could tell you more?

Source: Combat

Found in: CrypticText, CrypticText, Cryptic Text.

Season: All

Effect When Consumed: CrypticText (I wouldn’t)

Sell Price: CrypticText

Other Uses: Cryptictext

Special:

Loved: Cryptictext

Liked: Cryptictext

Neutral: Cryptictext

Disliked: Cryptictext

Hated: Cryptictext

Despised: Cryptictext

“Really?” He asked with considerable annoyance. Bad enough he had no idea what the things were, or how they might be useful to him. He could do without the snark as well.

Still irritated, Alexander flipped back several pages to find a series of new notifications:

Damage Dealt (Great Ant [Yellow]) -10 (x3)

Great Ant [Yellow] – Has been killed.

Damage Dealt (Great Ant [Yellow]) -10 (x3)

Great Ant [Yellow] – Has been killed.

Minor Injury (Great Ant [Yellow]) -7 HP

Damage Dealt (Great Ant [Yellow]) -30 [Weak Point!]

Great Ant [Yellow] – Has been killed.

“So little damage?” Alexander mused. Considering the sharp pain of the attack he’d expected more, but he supposed it had made sense. The tree that fell on him should probably have killed him outright, but this had been a comparative scratch. While the ant probably would have hurt him severely back home, if giant ants had indeed been a real thing back home, it wouldn’t have killed him.

Either way, it felt like a weight had been lifted. He still had to be cautious, the things down here could indeed still hurt him, but it was nothing nearly so bad as he’d feared. He could take a few hits, which mean that copper mining at least, wasn’t out of the question.

Once my aim improves, even that won’t be a threat. Alexander smiled to himself. Three shots to kill an ant, or one to the head, he shouldn’t have any trouble clearing out a room of that size.

Nor did he.

He’d have to experiment further in the future, to see if there were any circumstances in which one group could chain to another, but over the course of several minutes, Alexander took his time dismantling one small pocket of Ants after the other. The creatures seemed oblivious to anything that occurred more than forty feet away, which allowed him to skirt the edges of the room, engaging one group after another, rather than all at once.

In truth, he probably didn't need to. Once he'd gotten over the initial jitters of real combat, Alexander found it to be remarkably easy. He missed only three more shots clearing the entirety of the room and took no less than four of the creatures out with a single shot to their ‘weak spot.' They were too predictable and straightforward in their behavior. It just wasn't that hard to shoot something that ran straight towards you.

“I wonder if they have a phrase here for that.” Alexander mused as he collected the last of the green crystals that littered the ground. “Like shooting ants in a Fiendhome perhaps?”

With the creatures out of the way, Alexander exchanged one tool for another, swapping the loaded firearm for the large pickaxe that he had strapped to his back for fear of how difficult it would have been to remove from his satchel if he needed it in a hurry. It was his backup, in the event that things somehow went so wrong that he ran out of ammunition, though that would need to change.

It’d take two whacks to the head to kill even a single ant, which in his opinion, was one whack too many.

Of course, the primary purpose of the pick was not as a combat weapon. He'd come to mine, after all, and with the critters out of the way, he set himself up in the empty corner of the room, hefted his ax, and began to dig.

He found the procedure to be markedly similar to woodcutting, just with slightly different angles and results. Lift the pick, swing, lift the pick, swing. After the first few blows, he’d stop to study the area he’d been working on, searching for a weak part of the seam where he could concentrate his blows.

Even the number of swings turned out to be the same. It took ten blows to shear off part of a vein for collection, but it took five rotations to clear the entirety of the vein from the wall before he was able to move on to the next section.

That made him smile. Blue Hills was becoming predictable, but it was at least becoming predictable in a way he enjoyed.

It took the better part of an hour for Alexander to clear out the remainder of the copper ore. Thankfully, the rewards were commensurate with the effort used to obtain them. Each section of the vein dropped between two to four pieces of copper ore, averaging sixteen throughout a single vein, and over ninety by the time he had finished tearing through the remainder.

He had his copper, now all he needed was a bit of coal. Should be easy enough.