Displaced

Chapter 5 - Rewrite

The next morning, Blake found himself in thebest mood he'd been in since he'd been in since he'd left the bunker. Though his current situation had only marginally improved—having a fake hand was much better than no hand, but even having two real hands didn't magically make him meaningfully safer; he was still being hunted, as far as he knew—this morning was the first morning where he felt a smidgen of hope again. He wasn't out of the woods just yet, literally or figuratively, but his discoveries gave him new tools to use towards his goals. Now all he had to do to make meaningful progress towards those goals was to put in the necessary work.

In order to do that work, however, he needed resources. The metal he'd carried with him these days was barely enough to make an arm and a small jug of water, while the single small crystal he'd taken from the bunker barely had enough juice to run his arm for fifteen minutes of constant movement before needing a while to recharge. That was alright, though, because he didn't intend to use that crystal for his arm, anyway—that had just been what he'd used for testing. Now that the testing and experimentation were done for the time being, he could shift his focus to resource acquisition, starting with what was available right in his cave.

Blake had found that he had a bad tendency to tunnel in on the object of study while in Hyper Mode, but not even that myopic focus could keep him from noticing the sparkling shimmers emanating from somewhere deeper into the cave. He'd forced himself to ignore those signals for two days, but he knew what they signified, as well as the meaning behind the large grorange presence shining from deep below the cave floor. All he had to do was go get it if he could.

Slowly and cautiously, Blake delved deeper into the cave. Quickly, the ambient light faded into darkness, and Blake found himself groping in the darkness. He stopped after a moment and mentally smacked himself upside the head before heading back into the light. Leaving the cave, he scrounged up some fallen branches, started a tiny fire, and then used that to light a larger branch for use as a makeshift torch. He vaguely recalled something about flame in underground caves being a bad idea for some reason, but he decided to run that risk in the interest of not blindly tripping and breaking his head open against a rock.

Returning to the darkness, Blake made his way further into the cave, occasionally dipping into Hyper Mode to track his targets. He encountered the first one only about a hundred and fifty feet past where he'd been sleeping and experimenting, on the other end of a tight, winding corridor that left down and to the left. The crystal jutted out about halfway from the surrounding rock from what he could tell. How was he to get it out without breaking it?

Grasping the shaft of the crystal with his good hand wrapped in a bit of his shirt, he gave it a heavy tug. After a few moments of resistance, the long, hexagonal crystal slid from the surrounding rock with a rough scraping sound. Blake inspected his prize with satisfaction. While not approaching the size of the main crystals back in the bunker, at about an inch and a half in diameter and around a foot long, this crystal easily dwarfed the tiny sliver he'd been using for his experiments so far. He could feel the energy thrumming inside it, an order of magnitude greater than what he'd had to work with until now, just waiting to be used.

Proceeding deeper, Blake soon found another crystal, though this one was not so easily acquired. Visible only in Hyper Mode, it lay perhaps a foot deep into the solid stone below his feet. Blake pondered the best way to get to it. He could disassemble his left arm and make a hammer or a pickaxe, but something inside him rebelled at the idea of giving up his fake hand so soon after getting it, even if temporarily. Besides, right now, his metal limb was busy serving as an amazing torch holder. He didn't even have to worry about the fire getting too close; it wasn't like it could get burned.

Then, Blake had an idea and looked all around him to confirm, spreading his uncanny metal sense outward as best he could. Indeed, perhaps twenty feet away up and to his left, he found the grorange glow he'd noticed earlier—more of the same metal that his arm was made from! A lot more!