There had to be a hundred of the obsidian goblins, all just milling about. Even still, the lethality of the original Siege Bolts hadn’t faded one bit from my mind, and given that these had the same explosives, just packaged in a slightly different form factor, I was backpedaling the moment I threw it. I hunkered down behind a cog cart, with Aerion joining me a split-second later.

  Then we waited, and kept waiting, but all I heard was the screeching and child-like gibberish of the goblins.

  Peeking around the cart, I saw the goblins holding the bolt core, arguing with one another.

  It was a little hard to tell what was going on—understanding their language made things even worse. I heard snippets of ‘kill’, ‘toy’, and ‘bash’... I supposed that was about the level of what could be expected from these creatures.

  “Why hasn’t it exploded?” I whispered.

  Aerion shook her head. “Without the shock absorbing material, it ought to be far less stable—”

  She was interrupted by a deafening, otherworldly wail, followed by the sounds of balloons popping. An awfully familiar screech that sent chills down my spine.

  Jagged shards flew past us in a cloud of projectiles not unlike my own rock barrage. Except, these weren't rocks. They were the glass remains of the goblins.

  I peeked around the cart to find, surprisingly, a pond of gore. The vast majority of the goblins were just… gone, their bodies having shattered into a million pieces. Just that there had also been a whole lot of organic boar-like animals that I hadn't noticed earlier. They must've been at the center of the group. Of the hundred or so goblins, only a handful remained—the ones who’d been on the very outer edge of the horde. All dyed red from the gore. They stared on in silent disbelief as the remaining boar-things shivered in shock.

  I also stared, but for a different reason. Had it always been this powerful? Not just in force, but in range as well.

  “It's not just my imagination, right?” I said. “That felt bigger than the normal ones. Right?”

  “It was,” Aerion said, frowning. “It could be that the dampening mechanism was somehow also attenuating the power. The Status description did refer to them as volatile. Perhaps this is what it meant?”

  Well, damn. That was something. If I hadn't lobbed it as far as I did, Aerion and I would be mincemeat.

  But then, if they were so powerful and volatile, why hadn’t the impact made them go off, considering that very mechanism had been removed? Was there some time-delay? Or was the chance of it exploding really that random?

  “I will deal with the rest.” Aerion started to stand up, but I grabbed her arm.

  “Wait. Let me try one more thing.”

  The siege bolt cores weren’t actually that different in size and weight from the darts I’d had Rogar make me. They lacked the fins and the pointy tip that stabilized the darts, but at least in this case, I wasn’t trying to hurl them very far.

  Standing up, I took aim at the stragglers that had been on the periphery. There honestly weren't many left after that first explosion, so I aimed for the ground in between the ones who were left, then activated [Launch].

  The bolt core blurred out of my inventory, and I barely caught sight of the thing before the screech assaulted my ears. This time, I got to see the devastation firsthand. Goblins’ pulverized. Streams of red boar arced through the air, flying every direction—including at me.

  There wasn’t a whole lot I could do to avoid the blast. I looked at Aerion, who’d gotten the same treatment.

  “Well,” I said, cracking a bloody smile. “At least there’s a Sanctuary nearby.”

  Aerion was… well, let’s just say she was decidedly not happy.

  The miracle water fountain was an incredible thing. Not only did it heal us and clean us, it burned away all of the gore that covered our bodies.

  Luckily, the others were all resting when we entered, or we’d have had a whole lot of explaining to do.

  As it was, by the time everyone woke, they found Aerion and I serious-faced and ready, and nobody questioned a thing.

  Rogar and Philip worked together to set up the Bloomery furnace, and to my surprise, the process went pretty much exactly like last time. With Aerion and I working the bellows, and a bit of lava to get things going, they were able to get the furnace up to temperature pretty quickly. We threw in the ore we’d gathered and sealed up the furnace.

  All that was left was to wait several hours for it all to melt down.

  “Alright, so we’ve accomplished just about everything we set out to do,” I said after a bit. “With the exception of getting you two Boons or Blessings, of course.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Philip and Rogar nodded, glancing only briefly at Richard. No doubt, they thought he’d joined for the prospect of getting a boon as well, but if they had any questions, they kept it to themselves.

  “Problem is, we ran into the Trial Guardian on floor five, and I’d feel pretty comfortable betting against there being no guardian up on 7.”

  “Agreed,” Philip said. “I believe we should prepare for another Guardian.”

  “Right,” I said. “The issue is that we have no idea what it might be. Aerion, any ideas?”

  She shook her head. “Back when I first researched the Trial, I had to pay quite the sum to gather what information I did. I only obtained what I felt was necessary at the time. If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve asked around at Basecrest.”

  “No use beating ourselves up over it. I think everyone assumed we’d be fighting the same dragon again. Anyway, I think the chances are good that it’s aquatic.”

  “Aquatic?” Rogar asked, looking visibly concerned. “How’d you know?”

  “I agree with Greg,” Aerion said. “We passed an enormous monster on our way up last time. It could very well be that, or something similar.”

  “Floor seven is mostly water, so it fits. Of course, I could be wrong, too. We really don’t know. Thing is, we need to make a decision. We can avoid the water entirely, but we’ve got six more castles to traverse—seven, if we count the one we just returned from. Each one is going to be harder and larger than the last, and to put it bluntly, Aerion and I just don’t have the time. Sinclair will be expecting us to attend his parade, and past that, we’ve got to protect a caravan heading out from Basecrest. We only have a couple of days left.”

  “So, we’ll be using those submersible contraptions, then?” Rogar asked.

  “Think it’s really our only bet. Question is, what can we do to give ourselves the best shot we have, assuming the Guardian is aquatic?”

  “Quite the pickle, that,” Richard said, stroking his chin with a frown on his face. “The way I see it, only I’ve got anything capable of attacking from inside a sub…”

  “The submersibles have tubes for firing the Aural Siege Bolts,” Aerion said. “We weren’t equipped to reload them last time, but with some practice, I suspect we could grow quite efficient at using them.”

  “So that’s why you left a few boxes untouched,” Richard said with a nod. “Had wondered about that.”

  I nodded. “Would be idiotic not to arm ourselves to the teeth on the way up.”

  If I was honest, the harrowing ascent from last time still haunted me. To think we’d have to do it again, but with a possible monster of the deep lurking out there? Not my idea of a good time.

  “The Siege Bolts are well and good, but I want more,” I said. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with something.”

  Sometimes, not everything went the way I wanted. Rarely did, now that I thought about it. In the end, there wasn’t a whole lot more we were able to come up with, other than drilling contingencies and scenarios. Instead of idling by and waiting for the furnace to do its thing, we used the time to train Rogar and Philip to pilot the subs. Richard and Philip would be with me, while Rogar would ride in Aerion’s sub.

  That way, we could switch pilots if Aerion and I had to focus on scanning for threats and operating the bilge pumps. This time around, we had them out and armed, so if the subs’ hulls did get punctured, the pumps would activate automatically. That was honestly something we should have done the first time around, but neither of us had any experience back then. Now, we knew better.

  Our strategy was simple— hug the bottom of the ocean in the direction of the island—which we could deduce by simply following the cog railway tunnels that ran on the ocean floor. Just that we’d be on the outside, this time, rather than in them. The tunnels were all well-lit, and by hugging the ocean floor, we hoped that we’d avoid the attention of whatever megafauna happened to be nearby.

  If that did happen, we’d dump the ballast and perform an emergency ascent to the surface as fast as possible. That way, even if the monster targeted us, we’d be on the surface before it had a chance to act. This was, of course, not great for the stress it would put on the subs, but Aerion was confident they could handle such an emergency ascent… Well, once, anyway.

  Once on the surface, we’d have a lot more options with respect to maneuverability. I would normally put Aerion in my inventory for this, since that would be one less life at risk, but there was no one I trusted more in the pilot’s seat than Aerion. Myself included.

  On the other hand, four people was one too many to fit in a single sub. It would mess with our ability to maneuver, and in the worst case, we’d be unable to ascend at all. Having a second sub doubled the number of Siege Bolt torpedoes we had, too.

  Thankfully, there wasn’t any need to modify the ballast system like we’d done last time; my inventory was a far superior storage medium than an empty ballast. That meant we were ready to go once Rogar, Richard, and Philip learned the controls, which took only a couple of hours—first with static instruction, then with them doing practice runs outside the castle under our supervision.

  They all proved to be quick learners, with Rogar beating the other two in natural aptitude, though not nearly as much as Aerion. I doubted anyone could match her terrifying learning speed.

  In the meantime, our furnace had finished its job, and we returned to the Sanctuary to remove the bloom—the metal chunk at the bottom—and pound it on the ground into an ingot.

  We then reconfigured the furnace into a forge, for heating the bloom up whenever it got cold, and continued hammering, purging the impurities and slag from the bloom until we were left with a relatively pure ingot of regular steel, Voidsteel and Aurorium.

  “Gotta say, I’m surprised we were able to work these metals with such basic tools,” I said, having just finished a session on bellows.

  “We’re not, really,” Philip said. “The exotic metals haven’t really been forged, so much as incorporated into the lump. We’ll need a hotter forge for that. It’s about the upper limit of what Rogar’s workshop’s capable of.”

  “On a good day, anyway,” Rogar grunted. “Doesn’t matter, for now. Just need to get this made into enough of a weapon shape to carry out of here.”

  That process was easier said than done, considering the size of the bloom. After over a dozen reheating cycles, we managed to hammer it into something that looked like an extra wide, extra thick greathammer before the System acknowledged it as a weapon. It looked more like something an orc would wield, than anything exotic. It was as rough and ugly as a weapon could get. The crude hammer barely fit in my inventory.

  “Well, guess there’s only one thing left to do,” I said, trying and failing to stop myself from grinning.

  “And what would that be?” Richard asked.

  I pointed to the siege launcher. “Why, blowing up some huge whales, of course.”