Chapter 24 - 23 — The Gold Burrow I
**POV: Jace**
---
"You going in solo?"
"Yes."
He put the card down on the desk rather than handing it straight back.
"You understand what you’ve applied for. Yellow sits two above Green. There is a Blue tier in between that you have skipped entirely, and Yellow dungeons are worked by parties, not by one person with a permit and a good record."
"I read the listing."
"Everybody reads the listing." He tapped a line on his screen. "Standard advisory. Unsuitable for inexperienced Players. Your record shows one clear."
"An Orange one."
"Which is precisely why the permit went through, and it is also the only reason I am not refusing you at this desk."
He turned the terminal toward me.
"Solo entry waiver. If you sign it, the Bureau’s obligation is to log your entry and open the barrier. It is not to come in after you."
I read it and signed it.
He did not argue any further, and I did not make a speech at him about what my licence said. He had a job and I had a permit, and the rest was mine to carry.
---
It had been a week since the mine.
My father did not train me, and he did not appear at the courtyard at six in the morning, and I had not expected him to after what he said in the front hall.
What he did do was have the training ground repaired, and then leave it unlocked.
So I spent the week in it alone, working on the thing that had actually cost me a hand, which was never going to be power.
It was control. Learning how little Aten I could get away with, and keeping the fire where I put it instead of letting it run up my arms every time I got excited.
I also spent the six Attribute Points that had been sitting in my Status since the Manticore.
All six into Endurance, which took it from twenty-four to thirty and took my Health from 240 to 300.
The healer at the compound had told me exactly what was going to kill me, and it was never going to be a monster. It was my own output running through a body that could not carry it.
On the fourth day, my father came out to the courtyard while I was working and watched for about ten minutes without saying anything.
Then he said, "Your left heel is late," and went back inside.
That was the entire extent of it, and I fixed the heel.
On the sixth day, a case arrived in my room with no note on it.
Inside were a pair of close-combat gauntlets, black, plainer than the borrowed set from the armoury, and when I put them on they fit as though somebody had measured my hands, which somebody clearly had.
The mana channels in them run differently. The armoury pair carried whatever I pushed into them and let it pool wherever it wanted, which is how I ended up with burn lines across my fingers.
These spread it evenly from the wrist out, so a reinforced punch lands as one solid thing instead of a fist with hot spots in it.
They have no fire in them at all. They are not connected to Aten and they do not produce so much as a spark on their own.
They just mean that when I decide to hit something, all of me arrives at once.
I packed a space bag with water, medicine, extraction tools and enough empty capacity for whatever I brought out, and I went to a Yellow Gate.
The reason was not that I wanted something new. Green Gates were going to take me most of a year to reach a level worth having, and I do not have most of a year.
---
The portal put me down in warmth.
The burrow was hardened red soil packed against yellow stone, and thin metal veins ran through the walls and threw my light back at me.
Gold dust had gathered in the bends of every tunnel, deep enough in places to take a bootprint.
Underneath everything there was clicking.
Not one source. Hundreds, coming through the ground itself, arriving in my boots before it arrived in my ears.
The first one came out of the wall.
It tore straight through the packed soil three metres ahead of me, a copper-shelled thing the size of a large dog, six hooked legs and a pair of mandibles that could have closed around my forearm.
> **[Myrmekes Worker — Level 8]**
>
> **[HP: 400/400.]**
I did not open Androphagos.
One minute, then five minutes of nothing afterwards, and I was not spending it on the first monster inside the door.
I pushed mana through my body and into the gauntlets instead, felt it spread flat across both fists, and met the charge.
I hit it under the raised head.
The punch landed clean, and the shell did not care. It was like driving my knuckles into a car door, and the shock ran back up through my wrist while the thing kept coming.
Then it put its head down and threw me into the wall.
Soil came down over my shoulders. The mandibles came in after me, scissoring for my arm, and I got the gauntlet up and let them close on the plating instead of on me.
Which is when I saw it.
Around the neck, where the head plate met the thorax, the armour did not join flush. There were seams, narrow ones, soft-looking underneath.
I knocked the left mandible aside with my forearm, stepped inside where the head could not reach me, and put everything through that seam.
> **[Myrmekes Worker — Level 8]**
>
> **[HP: 400/400 → 0/400.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 40.]**
The crystal sat near the front of the thorax, small and warm when I dug it out.
> **[Myrmekes Mana Stone]**
>
> **[Rank: Yellow]**
>
> **[A crystal condensed from the mana inside a Myrmekes worker. It can be sold or used as a material in the production of mana-powered equipment.]**
Into the bag. Then I kept walking.
---
They came at me properly after that.
The burrow ran in intersecting tunnels, and the workers used all of it. Some came head-on down the passage while others clung to the walls and the ceiling and tried to drop behind me once I had committed forward.
So I stopped fighting in the open junctions.
I backed into the narrowest stretches I could find, where the ceiling was low enough that nothing could get above me and the walls were close enough that only two could reach me at once, and I made them come down a line.
Gauntlets on legs first, because a Myrmekes with three legs on one side cannot brace. Then the mandibles, knocked wide rather than blocked, because blocking a mandible is how you lose a forearm. Then the seams.
Four of them, one after another, and by the fourth my arms were shaking from the impact more than from anything else.
Then five came at once from two directions, and that was past what I could handle with mana and plating alone.
I lit Aten.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Output: Combat.]**
>
> **[Mana: 190/190.]**
Fire came up around both fists and stopped there.
That was the week. A fortnight ago it would have run to my elbows and set my sleeves going, and I would have spent twice the mana keeping it off my own skin.
Now it sat on the gauntlets in a tight sheath, doing what I asked and nothing else.
I put short bursts through the shells rather than trying to punch through them.
Fire does something to Myrmekes armour that pressure does not. It goes into the seams, and the shell splits along its own joins, and the second punch goes through a hole the first one opened.
Five of them, and I shut Aten down before the last body stopped moving.
> **[Ability Deactivated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 172/190.]**
I cut out five stones, put them in the bag, and went deeper.
---
The clicking changed lower down.
Slower, heavier, spaced further apart, and the things making it were not workers any more.
> **[Myrmekes Soldier — Level 12]**
>
> **[HP: 900/900.]**
Darker shells, almost black at the head. Front legs built thicker than a worker’s whole body. Mandibles with an actual edge on them rather than a grip.
The first one came up through the floor underneath me.
It had my leg before I understood there was a floor to come up through, mandibles closed above the knee, and it started dragging me down into its own hole.
I put Aten into the gauntlet and hammered fire into the joint of its jaw until the grip loosened enough to tear my leg free, and then I drove a burning fist straight into its open mouth.
The other two spat at me from opposite ends of the tunnel.
Acid, thin streams of it, crossing in the space where I had been standing.
It went into the stone and the stone hissed and started eating itself, and a few drops caught my left shoulder plate and burned through it in about two seconds.
I did not try to out-move both streams.
I burned a short blast off one heel, went along the wall under the left stream, and got inside its reach while it was still spitting.
Then I got both gauntlets on a mandible, braced my boot against its head, and tore the whole thing out of the joint.
The mandible was about as long as my forearm and had an edge on the inside curve.
So I used it. The last soldier came in and I put the broken mandible up under its head, into the softer plating beneath, and drove it in with the heel of my gauntlet before it could bring its own jaws around.
> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**
>
> **[EXP: 460/500.]**
Three soldiers, and my shoulder plate had a hole in it, and my leg was already bruising through the armour.
Then two more workers came down the tunnel behind them, and by the time they stopped moving the counter had rolled over.
> **[Level increased: 5 → 6.]**
>
> **[All attributes increased by 1.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 300 → 310.]**
>
> **[Maximum Mana: 190 → 200.]**
>
> **[Three Attribute Points acquired.]**
>
> **[EXP: 40/600.]**
I did not stop to spend them.
Standing in a tunnel with acid holes in the walls, working out my long-term build, is exactly the kind of thing that gets somebody killed between one decision and the next. The points would still be there afterwards.
I cut the stones out of all of them and kept going down.
Then the clicking stopped.
Not faded. Stopped, all of it, the way a room goes quiet when somebody walks in.
---
The tunnel opened into the nest.
Pillars of hardened soil ran floor to ceiling, thick as tree trunks, holding up a roof I could not see the top of. Translucent eggs filled cavities along both walls in clusters, and something moved inside a few of them.
Gold dust covered the floor of the whole chamber.
It also covered the other things on the floor. Broken weapons. A shield bent almost in half. Sections of armour with nothing in them and sections of armour with bones still inside, half-buried, going the same colour as the dust.
Other people had come in here.
The Matriarch was in the middle of it.
> **[Myrmekes Matriarch — Level 18]**
>
> **[Yellow Gate Boss]**
>
> **[HP: 2,400/2,400.]**
Her abdomen was longer than a car and armoured in overlapping bands. Six legs ended in hooked points that had sunk into the packed soil where she stood. The mandibles crossed past each other like shears, black, each one longer than I was tall.
Coarse hairs ran the length of her body, and every one of them moved when I moved.
She did not need to see me. She could feel me standing there.
I opened both.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
>
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 168/200.]**
There was no reason left to hold either back.