Artificial 7: Genesis Requiem

Chapter 19: Orichalcum Mines

(Artwork is done by AI. It is Lily, the eldest of Chase's quintuplets. But who's the mother?)

Male Terra's POV:

The conscious members of the team enter the orichalcum mines.
That being me, Ventus, Selena, Himiko, Alexander, Jeffrey,
and Female Terra.
We take the rocky hallway, and the further we went in,
the more intense the room temperature got.
The quintuplets are just nonstop jabbering about how they've explored these mines before and that they'll be our guide.

When we got out of the long hallway,
we were greeted by lava and intense heat.
It was so bad we had to put on our helmets on,
and the AI turned on the cooling function to not boil us alive,
kept track of our heartbeats,
blood pressure,
you name it,
and the helmet likely has it.

We all followed Chase's quintuplets as we jumped down onto a long broken piece of rock,
and the areas ahead split off to smaller pieces of rock,
like when you're a kid and you're jumping onto a single thing and trying to keep your balance.
On the other side was a metal hallway with a chicken fence you'd find at any hardware store for a wall.
The blonde twin flips a switch,
and these pipes shut off the fire,
being spewed down the rest of the hallway.

The quintuplets hurry and flip another switch,
which turns off a bigger one on the passage way above the hallway,
and we turn the corner,
balance ourselves on 3 steel beams used as a bridge,
climb the latter up,
and get on the roof of the hallway, walking across a chicken fence.
At the midway,
we jumped off the cieling to a giant rock pillar in the center of the trail and then jumped to a ledge that was clearly meant to be used as a perch for breaks. The black haired one flies over to a switch on the perch and unlocks the door to the next room for us.

Unfortunately,
that means we have to balance ourselves and walk across a very small ledge with our backs to the wall and facing without a doubt,
certain death in the form of a red and yellow liquid.
"Ya know, we could have carried you all."

The black haired one says,
and we all just look at her like,
you didn't ask,
or why didn't you just do that.
Moving on.
So the next room was where all the actual construction equipment was as we moved across the bridge to a large area under a magnet.

The large platform branched to a lower and higher route,
so we took the lower route,
which led to a workshop and a pair of keeys nailed into the wall.

The red-haired twin took the key and led us up the other route going up,
which was a bunch of zig zags that kept turning in different directions before coming across a bridge that rotates, which kinda reminded me of an escalator.

We took two of those things before unlocking the door to the next room, which had magma/lava jumping straight up like a water geyser!
We followed the quintuplets down the metal bridge,
turned the curb,
and waited out the lava geyser,
jumped across some rocks that spread out into two different directions.

This time,
the green haired twin solves the problem before us by grabbing a chain and pulling with all her might to open up a door down the other path like a gate system.
We double back to the split and take the second route through the single opening rock gate,
and the next room had no lava/magma. It was a room filled with nothing but pure water and tools to harvest the ore in the room.

"One of the many mining rooms, don't take any of this metal without the elder's permission. Dad, I'm looking at you."
The red-haired twin says.
"I don't go stealing stuff all willy nilly. That's not me. I just steal things that catch my interest."
Himiko looks at Selena through her helmet,
and I imagine Selena kept her usual poker face as she didn't say anything.