Trenn stood in the center of the swaying, bioluminescent mushrooms, eyes closed, every ounce of his focus turned inward. His entire world was the sensation of Lady Yradone’s cool, dry hand resting gently on his forehead.

  “You’re chasing it,” her melodic voice instructed, a steady anchor in the sea of his own chaotic energy. “Don’t chase. Invite. The frequency is already there. You need to match its pitch.”

  He took a slow breath. The hum in his bones was a wild, untempered thing. Yradone wanted him to shape it into a crystalline note. The energy was a fluid torrent, offering nothing solid for his mind to grip.

  “Higher now,” Yradone murmured, her thumb tracing a slow circle on his temple. “Raise the tempo, but gently. You’re pushing too hard. Don't force it into shape; get there naturally.”

  He adjusted, straining with the strange, new muscle in his mind. He pulled back on the raw power, focusing instead on the texture, the vibration.

  For a heartbeat, the world fractured into pure sound. A beetle’s leg scraped bark. Liquid pulsed within a mushroom’s gills. His own blood was a deep, thrumming river.

  Lady Yradone’s eyes lit up with a flash of brilliant pride. But the effort was like holding a strenuous pose for too long. The harmony wavered, the crystalline note fractured, and the connection dissolved into dissonant noise.

  Trenn crumbled, dropping to one knee with a ragged gasp. He braced himself on the soft earth, his mind feeling like a plucked string vibrating painfully. His breath came in shuddering heaves. A thin sheen of sweat pasted his hair to his brow.

  “You succeeded,” Yradone said, her voice warm with encouragement as she removed her hand. “For the first time, you truly attuned your Mana Radiation. How did it feel?”

  “It was… clear. For a moment, all the noise resolved into a single note.”

  She paused, her ancient, wise eyes studying his weary posture. “Your focus is fractured. Tell me what is on your mind, Trenn.”

  He looked up, meeting her gaze, the sting of his failure quickly overshadowed by the guilt that had been pressing on him for days. He pushed himself to his feet. “Where to start. I was hunted. I… a friend died. And then… The Stomper,” he said, the words coming out slowly. “Ezy’s invention.”

  “What about it?” Yradone asked, her expression patient.

  “It’s a mistake not to produce them,” he said.

  “I’ve seen how their numbers can overwhelm a single fighter. The Stomper countered that advantage decisively. The council rejected it based on a single spell I cast in a controlled demonstration. That wasn't a battlefield, and it wasn't a fair test of its capabilities.”

  Lady Yradone listened with a calm, patient stillness, her hands clasped before her in their customary poise. When he was finished, a long, quiet moment passed.

  “You are right about one thing. You defeated the Stomper with one spell. That’s what everyone saw,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Besides, it is not the regent’s place to dictate which projects the guilds choose to promote or reject,” she said, her voice gentle but firm.

  “There are other projects, other designs, all competing for the same resources, many with this same goal: to protect from the Goblins. My duty is to trust the wisdom of the guilds, abide by the Schedule, and utilize the resources they provide for the betterment of the Hive.”

  “What I see,” he argued. “Is binary. Had she won, her Stompers would be in production. Because she lost, they are not.”

  Lady Yradone’s expression softened with a flicker of genuine sympathy. She gave a slow, sad shake of her silver-and-gold head.

  Trenn needed to find a different way to assuage his guilt.

  The clearing outside the lodge was a blur of motion. Trenn channeled the toxic soup of his mind into his fists. The ghosts—Tyndral’s breaking bones, the beatings he endured, Ezy’s betrayed face—he pushed them all down, funneling the turmoil into pure, punishing work.

  He threw a right punch. THWUMP.

  Skate, thrumming with glee, shot from his fist and slammed into the thick, copper-barked trunk of a massive tree. CRACK. The rock slime rebounded, a grey blur of kinetic fury returning at full speed.

  Trenn was already moving, his left jab snapping out to meet it. THWUMP. He drove the creature right back into the tree. CRACK. It rebounded back as he was already winding up his right.

  The sequence evolved into a percussive rhythm, a violent exchange of force that required timing and focus. Right fist, tree, left fist, tree, right fist…

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Ezy approached, her steps slowing as she watched the display. The six-foot giant moved in a blur of violence, his fists creating thunderous cracks as a grey sphere ricocheted between his knuckles and a copper-barked tree.

  “Mom said you were looking for me,” Ezy said, her chin lifted a fraction too high, her arms crossed in a posture of forced defiance.

  Trenn stopped mid-punch, his right fist hovering in the air. The rhythm shattered. Skate completed its final rebound, and Trenn caught it reflexively, its familiar, solid weight settling in his palms as he turned, sweaty, his breath coming in heaving gasps.

  Ezy stood at the edge of the clearing, arms crossed, her expression a calculated mixture of defiance and curiosity.

  She was a darker-skinned copy of her mother, right down to the dark hair pulled into two tight pigtails that defied gravity. He grabbed a towel from a nearby stump and dabbed at his forehead, trying to regain some composure.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I stopped by your house, but—”

  Ezy held up a hand, her impatience a clear signal to cut to the chase.

  “It’s not important,” Trenn finished, letting out a heavy sigh. The guilt he’d been trying to punch into oblivion washed over him.

  “Look, I shouldn’t have used that spell. Your Stomper was winning, and I reacted as if my life were in danger. I’m sorry.”

  The defiance on Ezy’s face faltered. For an instant, a flicker of surprise cracked her armor, revealing the hurt inventor beneath. Her crossed arms loosened slightly, her gaze dropping to the dirt floor for a moment as she processed the sincerity.

  "It... wasn't your fault," she finally mumbled, shaking her head as if arguing with herself. "Not really. It was my fault for not having a counter for... whatever that was." She looked back up, the pragmatic ambition returning to her eyes like a shutter snapping back into place, seizing the new opportunity his apology presented.

  “But your apology doesn’t change the council’s mind,” she said, her voice hardening with purpose. “So, are you sorry enough to help me?”

  “Are you sorry enough to help me?”

  Trenn, surprised, lowered his towel from his face. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m leaving the Hive,” she said bluntly. “There’s no future for me here. The guilds have rejected my life’s work,” she paused.

  “I’m taking my prototype, and I’m going to find someone who appreciates real innovation. But the internal charge won’t last more than a few hours, and its current battery can be charged at the Hive.”

  “So you need a new power source?” Trenn asked.

  “Yes,” Ezy confirmed... “There are a few theoretical options. Star-forged crystals from the mainland, a captured lightning-spirit, a phoenix egg... but those are fantasies." She took a small scroll out of her backpack and unrolled it on the ground. It was a geological survey.

  "But this..." she said, her finger tracing a faint line deep below the established levels of the Burrow.

  "This could work. I’ve cross-referenced the last century of geological surveys. This deep fissure in the rock. They can’t explore it because it’s flowing with lava." Her eyes met his, full of a desperate fire. "There are no guarantees. It could have gone cold a long time ago, in the last few years. But if it's active... where there's lava, there are Fire Elementals."

  The freight elevator groaned, a chorus of shrieking metal protesting the weight of the Stomper as it plunged them into darkness. They had left the last crystal-lit level of the Burrow far above. Now, there was only the slow, inexorable descent into the black, silent heart of the mountain.

  The air grew thick and hot, tasting of sulfur and ancient, undisturbed stone. Trenn touched the amulet at his chest, grateful for the way it transformed the suffocating darkness into a world of silver and grey. Through its lens, he saw Mara braced against the far wall.

  Her hunter’s poise evaporated in the crushing dark. Her grip on the handhold was so tight that her claws dug into the metal, and she kept flexing them, a quiet, repetitive motion that conveyed profound unease.

  “I can’t believe how deep this mountain goes,” she said, her voice a low growl that was swallowed by the immense pressure. “The air feels… wrong.”

  “These aren’t part of the mountain. They’re the foundations of the world,” Ezy said.

  “Why go through all that trouble?” Trenn asked, his gaze tracing the faint, fossilized outlines of colossal sea creatures embedded in the rock walls. “Why dig so deep?”

  “We didn’t ‘dig so deep’. We dug up. From here, to the surface,” she paused.

  “You lived down here?”

  “No, our ancestors came from the mainland. Dug underneath the ocean, creating the Old Path, to reach this island. The Old Path’s main corridor took centuries to make, and it is standing to this day,” she pauses, remembering gnomish history.

  “But we collapsed all the corridors that lead to the Old Path. Abandoned underground tunnels are breeding grounds for monsters. However, some have quite a while to go before reaching the collapsed part. Some lead to lava pits. And where there’s lava, there are Fire Elementals.”

  The elevator passed a massive, sealed archway, constructed of a seamless black stone. Set into its surface were the fossilized outlines of colossal sea creatures—trilobites the size of cartwheels and the skeletal remains of serpentine leviathans.

  “Why would your ancestors go through all the trouble? Were they hunted from their homes?” Trenn asked.

  “No. Nothing like that. They did it for the Mana Source. The mushroom ring. Our most valuable natural resource. Without it, we would have no Hedge Mages.”

  The elevator gave a violent lurch, dropping several feet before catching itself with a deafening screech of protesting metal. Mara let out an involuntary hiss, her fur bristling. From the darkness below, a low, guttural rumble echoed up the shaft.

  “Rock shifts,” Ezy’s voice crackled, a strained edge creeping into her usual confidence. “The lower levels are… unstable.”

  “That didn’t sound like rock,” Mara growled, her head cocked, ears twitching.

  The heat was becoming oppressive now, baking the inside of the metal box. “How exactly do you fight a fire elemental?” Trenn asked.

  It was Mara who answered, her voice steady even as her claws continued their nervous rhythm against the wall. “You change the battlefield. It’s weakest when it’s cut off from its source. It has to be lured away from the lava, away from anything it can use as fuel.”

  “And how do we do that?” Trenn pressed.

  “With a better meal,” Ezy answered, gesturing with her chin toward the cart piled high with sulfur-rich coal and resin-soaked logs. “We offer it a feast it can’t refuse, and lead it into a trap.”

  The elevator gave a final shudder and halted, its ancient motor groaning in protest. Before them lay a vast cavern where silence pressed in like a physical weight.

  The light was a faint, ominous red glow pulsing from a tunnel deep within.

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