New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

"Shut up, Terrance."

"Hey Don't call me by my real name, you idjit. It's Gravedigger here! Would you like me to call you Clarence?"

"Fine! Shut up, 'Gravedigger'!"

"Sure thing, Gnomestein! Bahaha!"

"Both of you shut up!" Phoenix shouted.

She was growing angrier by the second, with how the two of them ignored her presence.

"And stop digging into my walls!"

The gnome on the ground, Gnomestein, turned to face her.

"Ahh, I'm sorry. No can do. They ordered us to drill through the walls, and we will do just that."

"Yeah, lassy! Plus, I've never dug into rock this hard. This is challenging and I love challenges!"

"Then I guess you'll have to burn."

Phoenix started burning bright blue as she increased the heat of her flames. She shot out a torrent of fire, sending it at the barrier protecting the two buffoons.

But her fire washed upward, licking the barrier walls on their way up, but doing nothing more. Phoenix was taken aback.

There wasn't much she couldn't burn down, and she couldn't understand how such a thin energy barrier could withstand her attack. The cackling of the gnome in the golem snapped her out of her thoughts.

"That little flicker will not pass through my invention, lass. That there is a magic-repelling barrier. It could withstand a nuke, so long as it's magic."

The gnome never stopped drilling into the wall, and the confidence in his tone told Phoenix a lot. These two were not just any Dick and Jerry.

The golem was an intricate piece of robotics, and the gadget generating the barrier wasn't any less impressive. The level of moving pieces and carefully constructed parts belied their skill in mechanical engineering.

She understood that this was most likely skills transferred from real-world experience. They had only adapted them to what they had available here.

Phoenix tried burning the barrier again, but to no avail. It was like the heat of her fire wasn't even reaching the energy wall.

The two gnomes laughed at her futile efforts. This angered the woman even more.

She stopped for a second, examining the barrier, trying to detect a flaw of some sort. But she couldn't find anything.

She tried blasting away at the ground where the barrier stopped, but every time she made a dent in the dirt, the barrier filled it up, closing the gap.

But a thought occurred to her. The barrier was sealing gaps, but wasn't entirely closed up.

'What if I burn the ground?' she wondered.

Phoenix tested her theory. She blasted a non-stop stream of fire at the ground before the barrier.

The gnomes inside chuckled.

"Give up, lass. You won't get past the barrier."

Phoenix ignored him, focusing on her test. Soon enough, she started grinning, making her eyes slit a bit more.

Noticing the change, the gnome watching her could deduce the face she was making.

"Why are you suddenly grinning? Did you go mad? Did you know that insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result?"

Phoenix ignored him.

She kept up her stream of fire, always aiming it at the same place.

The gnome was offended that the woman ignored him. But when he looked at the ground where her flames had been licking for so long, his face turned pale.

"Terrance! Did you account for natural factors in your calculations for the barrier generator?!"

"Hey! It's Gravedigger!"

"Answer the question, Terrance!"

"No! Why would I? It's a barrier to block magic. Why would natural factors even matter?"

"Fuck! Then dig faster!"

"Why are you even — oh… Oh!"

Gravedigger spun around to tell his brother to simmer down, when he noticed why he was being hysterical in the first place. At the edge of the barrier, the ground that had been dirt and stone was now turning into magma.

And the magma was slowly expanding. Looking at the burning woman, Gravedigger and Gnomestein both thought they saw a manic glint in her eyes.

Phoenix suddenly intensified her flames, pushing every ounce of mana she could into them, making them glow almost a pure white. The result of that was that the molten lava suddenly expanded three times as fast.

It would be only a few seconds before it reached the gnomes. That's when they started moving again.

"Fuck it! Grave, get out of the digger golem. I'm taking over. You use your gadgets to buy me some time!"

"On it!"

Phoenix watched on while laughing as the two gnomes suddenly got serious. They swapped positions, and suddenly things changed pace.

Once the one called Gnomestein sat in the golem's chest, it suddenly started digging twice as fast. And the other gnome, Gravedigger, suddenly pulled out an arsenal of gadgets from his inventory.

He threw a few round things at the expanding lava. When they blew up, they formed a thin layer of ice over the magma, but it didn't last long before melting.

He pulled out many things, trying to stop the lava from reaching them before they were digging. Gadget after gadget was used.

He tried blowing up the ground to form a trench and slow down the expansion. He planted metallic barricades that dug themselves into the ground.

But this only slowed it down, never fully stopping it. But Phoenix looked worried.

The acceleration of the golem's digging speed, doubled with all the tools the brother used to slow down the magma's expansion, was getting to a critical point.

It was now a race against time. Who would win?

Would the gnomes succeed and bore a hole in the Bastion's defences? Or would Phoenix's plan work before they could go through, saving the situation?

To make matters worse, Violette was losing her own battle on top of the walls. More and more players she was guarding were taking damage.

Weariness could be seen in her gaze, as her multicasting slowed down progressively. She wouldn't be able to maintain this pace much longer.

"AARRGGHH!!"

Gravedigger was now standing in the lava, watching his health plummet. He turned his head to his brother's golem.

"COME ON! PIERCE THROUGH!"