I gave myself space to wallow, letting the pain of my body and my heart unite. There was no real place that my heart’s pain came from, if anything it was derived from an absence rather than a presence. Yet, while I could feel the ragged edges of the hole, I couldn’t truly understand its shape. Maybe it was just exhaustion, fatigue wearing down on my mental resilience, and letting that unyielding, unending pain surge from where I had struggled to keep it contained. Perhaps this pain was a healing thing, a cathartic release that would free me now and absolutely.

Probably not.

I would probably return to this place of pain, again and again, because this pain was a part of me, an indelible part that couldn’t be healed with something so simple as magic, or whatever it was that this system ran on. Instead, I would continue to ache, continue to doubt, continue to reflect poorly on my decisions. All I could truly do was to come to a kind of detente with this pain. I couldn’t feel pain if I was dead, after all. I didn’t want to die, I really didn’t. I wanted to continue, but I just wanted it all to be easier, though I knew it would never be again. Part of growing up.

The crying actually helped, as weird as that might sound. Unlike the pain itself, the crying was a release of tension, a coming to acknowledgement that the pain was real, was something that was actually affecting my body. As the crying faded, I slowly sat up and opened my eyes once again. I could spot the fire ore in the walls, but more pressing was the still bleeding wound on my arm. I didn’t have anything like gauze, so I did the next best thing and whipped up an armor plate to replace the one that had been shattered by my drill’s explosion. At the very least, this would keep my blood on the inside, where it belonged.

That basic maintenance of my body tended to, I got to the repetitive work of mining. While I lacked my drill, I had made a pickaxe as a backup tool, and while the mining was more intense using the pickaxe, it was still as emotionally clearing.

As soon as I got enough ore, I started two combination ingots, one with fire and water, one with fire and earth. I could have tried one with the unattuned ore that I had in abundance, but I could tell according to my system instincts that doing so would only weaken the attunement of the elemental ore. It would be a viable option if I needed to stretch out my supply, but that wasn’t a concern as of yet.

The fire and water ores combined into a steam ingot. While I wasn’t able to see any ways that I could use steam directly with my current schema, it gave me way too many ideas for what I could do with it once I had the research lab open. Steam engines were largely inefficient, thus them getting phased out for internal combustion engines that operated on fossil fuels. However, with this ergonic method of generating steam, it might well be able to fulfill those tasks more easily than fossil fuels could.

The engines in my drill functioned off of pure erg, which was significantly more efficient, clean, and cheap than any other kind of power source that had been discovered on this or any other world. The librarian had shown me the math, and only anti-matter could match the efficiency, and was excessively expensive to manufacture, even with system help. The downside to erg, though, is that it required connection with a living erg source in order to function properly. Anything I made with a schema would have an innate connection to me, but I was limited by my perks and skills in what I could make with schema.

If I could make a schema for a steam engine, probably with the help of an automation perk, then I could use that steam engine as a power source for non-system related machinery. This in turn would allow me to expand my repertoire of tools beyond what the system determined that I should be able to use.

In short, I would need a lot of fire and water ore.

Meanwhile, the earth and fire ores combined to make a magma ingot and I knew exactly how I could use that immediately. I mined out a few more fire ores and got to turning them into magma ingots, which I then forged into screw joiners. These would serve as the head of my new and improved drill, while the casing for the engine I made from earth ingots. For the more delicate internals of the engine, I realized that I needed something that could absorb a lot more heat, to prevent a catastrophic explosion, so I made those components out of water ingots.

I also queued up a stack of steam and a stack of magma spikes. I had a pretty good idea of how those would work in battle, and the extra firepower would pack the punch that I would need moving forward. With those queued up, I opened up the perk store and acquired Advanced Combat Tools. Again, the sudden swell of information pried its way into my brain, but that was countered with my knowledge of Spikethrowers transferring from being a Phantom Skill into a proper one.

It seemed that the system did some of the work of holding the knowledge associated with skills, which might explain the rapid rate at which I was able to advance in them. Phantom Skills, according to the librarian, were held more in the brain of the user, thus why they were far more limited in number. By putting that burden back onto the system, I felt relief from a headache that I didn’t know that I had.

I pulled up the crafting menu after that and scanned for the new additions. Mostly, there was nothing new to the existing sections, though an intriguingly titled “grapple spike” was added under spikethrowers, probably due to the addition of Mobility Boosters to my skill list. I went ahead and queued one of those up as well, requiring one of my planks and an ingot; I just used an unattuned ingot for now, air probably would be the best here and I still didn’t have access to that element.

Scrolling down further, I reached helmets. Here, there was just a basic helmet, which I immediately queued with earth ingots, and an air purifier. I had no idea what combination of skills led to me knowing that schema, but I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouse and set that to be made with unattuned ingots. Finally, all that remained was mobility boosters, which at the moment was limited to climbing gear and a bicycle. Useful things, for sure, but I didn’t see their power as advanced combat tools. This was another place where I’d need to do some experimentations back at base.

I still queued up one of each, using more of my unattuned ingots.

By the time I had finished sorting all of that, my drill was complete. I removed it from my inventory and took a moment to marvel at the beauty that I had built to my exacting demands. The casing was the same grey and black coloring as my armor, making it match a lot better as I bolted it back into place on my arm. Meanwhile, the drill bit glowed faintly, speaking to the enormous power that it could bring to bear, and through all of that, the engine remained cool and frosty inside.

With this new and improved war drill, the task of mining out the remaining fire ore proceeded swiftly and without incident. As I made my preparations to move to the next chamber, I gave the spider’s corpse a long look, wondering again at the nature of this “Great Game” that turned people into killers, all for the sake of survival according to the whim of some program created by a long extinct species. It was a cruelty.

I strapped my helmet into place, a simple WWII looking one, and then examined my air purifier, which resembled a gas mask more than anything else. The next chamber was almost certainly air-themed, and while that might mean shearing winds or lightning bolts, it might also mean something messing with the air. I slipped the mask on, checking its seals, before heading forward into the tunnel to the next chamber.

This tunnel widened out far earlier than the previous ones, making the transit far simpler. The chamber it opened up into was truly mammoth, though, outsizing all of the others by a magnitude. I suddenly felt swallowed up into that enormity, this grand voice that surrounded me, engulfed me. My erg sight at least got vision of the floor, so at least I didn’t feel like I was going to fall at any moment.

Carefully, I strode towards the center of the chamber, or at least directly across from the entrance, until the entrance fell out of the range of my erg sight and I was left without any markers of my progress, save for the quiet padding of my feet on the cave floor. Then I saw the ground rising up out of the darkness and crouched down a bit to continue my approach, seeing that rise come up to a flat top, and on that flat top….

A fucking bear, but one that was the size of a bus. And wrapped around its throat was that damn spirit that had been making this process far more complicated than necessary. I wasn’t entirely sure where the air theming fit into the bear, but I knew that I’d be in for the fight of my life. This was almost certainly the final boss of the dungeon, though, and after this, I would be able to get out free.

I slowly crept forward, wanting to get in a surprise attack, maybe even finish off the fight with one blow of my new war drill. Inch by inch I drew closer, stilling even my breath to keep from awakening the massive beast, and until I got a few steps away.

There, the bear opened its eyes.