Chapter 281: Wake Up Call

A few minutes before Sol escaped the hallucination, Torben was on the top floor of the castle, working on a large machine. It was a simple yet practical design with a cylindrical body, 10 meters long, and a set of large wheels wrapped in rubber belts capable of supporting its massive weight. At first glance, its purpose might be unclear to the average person, until they saw the giant spiral drill attached to the front. It was an industrial tunnel borer, once used to dig the tunnels surrounding the ancient dwarven city.

Torben was making extensive modifications to this ancient contraption, with the most notable being the two elemental cannons he had salvaged from the Chosen Slayer. Of course, he didn't carry those cannons himself; the puppets brought them to him while he made other adjustments to the tunnel borer.

As he wrapped up the modifications, he heard Sol's voice coming through the PAL.

<Torben! I don't know how long can hold it back! Hurry up!>

"I'm working on it! Give me 5 minutes!" Torben replied, puncturing a hole in the tunnel borer to pass a mana cable through it, powering the cannons. His metallic joints clanked as he tried to hurry despite his body's current state.

As he finished the connection, Sol's voice came through the PAL again.

<Sorry to disappoint, but I don't plan on dying—and especially not while hallucinating. Torben is sending the Chosen Slayer here right now. The one who's in trouble you, me.>

"What are you talking about?" Torben was initially confused, especially since the Chosen Slayer had already been destroyed. He quickly realized that Sol was likely either hallucinating or speaking directly to the creature. 

"He's bluffing… shit, I gotta hurry."

For someone to resort to bluffs, it likely meant they were in a dire situation. Torben felt even more pressure to finish, pushing himself to complete the adjustments sooner than expected.

"Alright! I'm done, I just need to launch it." Torben informed Sol through the PAL, but he remembered that Sol probably couldn't hear him. Instead, he overheard Sol's response, seemingly directed at the Bliss Spider.

<Oh yeah? Then why am I still alive? don't think it's as easy you say it is.>

Torben ignored the comment directed at the spider and gave the modified tunnel borer a hesitant look. 'No time to test it, just gotta hope it works. If only the Heat Inverter could be lowered normally…'

He lamented that the easy solution wasn't possible, forcing him to go through the trouble of modifying the tunnel borer. He commanded one of the puppets to get inside the machine and turn it on, causing it to roar to life as he pulled a lever, parting one of the walls open.

The wall split, revealing a view of the entire city, where Torben could still see the battle between Sol and the Bliss Spider unfolding below.

Seeing Sol still fighting relieved Torben.

'Good, he's still ali–'

He couldn't finish his thought as he saw Sol land in a pit of the creature's gas. Urgently, he asked through the PAL, "Hey?! Are you okay?!"

Torben asked a few more times but got no response.

It became clear to him that Sol was now out of commission, either trapped in a hallucination or possibly even dead. He could see that the spider was watching over the pit, as if waiting for its prey to be fully enveloped in its gas.

Torben knew that the others would be next soon, so he commanded the puppet to start the tunnel borer. The belt wheels began to roll forward with surprising momentum for their size. The machine quickly gathered speed as it rolled out of the opening in the wall, sending itself into freefall.

It wobbled as it fell, but the cannons on the back sparked and unleashed a powerful blast of fire, propelling it upwards with incredible speed toward the large crystal at the roof of the underground city.

The Bliss Spider, which had been watching its prey succumb to the gas, turned upon hearing the sound of the cannons propelling the tunnel borer upward. It tilted its head, confused as to whether this was an attack that had simply missed. It briefly considered intercepting the machine but, seeing it head directly upward, saw no reason to intervene. After all, it wasn't like it would cause the entire underground to collapse on it. It knew that the roof above was covered in the near indestructible alloy.

So it watched as the tunnel borer shot toward the roof, and the moment the spinning drill collided with the Heat Inverter, it began boring into it. The machine drilled deeper and deeper into the massive crystal until it could no longer be seen.

'And now, the wake up call.'

Torben sent one final command to the puppet inside the machine. 

The puppet turned to the back of the tunnel borer, where it was packed with containers of dark crystalline dust. With no time to set up a proper trigger mechanism, the puppet silently took out a match and tossed it into the open containers.

BOOOOOOOM!

The moment the flame touched the blue dust, it triggered a violent explosion that obliterated the tunnel borer and continued to expand outward. The crystal was engulfed in a massive blue explosion, shattering it from the inside out. Chunks of crystal covered in blue flames rained down upon the city, destroying many of the few remaining buildings.

Even after landing, the blue flames did not subside. They burned even stronger, consuming everything around them and slowly expanding outward.

The dark crystalline dust that caused this was known to the dwarves as the Blue Death, a powerful alchemical compound that was not only highly explosive but consumed something other than air and fuel to maintain its flames: mana. By consuming mana, its flames became much stronger and expand endlessly. The only feasible way to quench the blue fire was to remove all the mana in its vicinity or bombard the area with an opposing element like water or ice.

Releasing such a fire in the city would, in most cases, be considered an extremely reckless act. But Torben had already planned how to deal with it. The only issue was that it relied on a certain someone's intervention.

'Hopefully, this catches his attention…'

Not a single piece of the Heat Inverter on the roof of the underground city was spared, revealing what it had covered. The dome of Azrem Alloy that encased the city was now exposed, and at its center, where the crystal used to be, lay a massive, shiny blue root. Blue flames surrounded the root, trying to burn it alongside everything nearby.