(AS) B4 - Lesson 23: “Some People Just Can't Handle The Heat.” (working title, feel free to suggest better one)

Strom turned the corner and found a small group gathered outside of one apartment.

Two of them belonged to his expedition. The other three were goblins clad in the same strange black armor he’d seen throughout the city. Two stood at opposite ends of the hall, unfamiliar weapons held ready as they watched both approaches. The third, a woman, stood beside the adventurers with a notepad in hand, writing rapidly as they spoke.

One of the adventurers spotted Strom and Cindy approaching and straightened.

Jacques was a rail-thin scout with narrow shoulders, heavy bags beneath his eyes, and a wild mop of hair that only added to the restless look of a man who seemed perpetually exhausted.

“Boss! Finally,” he called.

The goblin woman stopped writing and turned toward them, her frown deepening.

“You’re the leader of the expedition team, correct?” she asked, looking Strom over once before narrowing her eyes.

Her tone was blunt, without any of the caution or ceremony he might have expected from someone addressing a cultivator nearly at Shackle Breaking, even a loose one like him.

Strom stopped a few feet away and nodded.

“I am.”

His gaze shifted from the goblin to Jacques and the second adventurer, Minato. Neither man seemed willing to meet his eyes.

“What happened?”

The goblin woman’s frown deepened another fraction.

“One of your mages happened,” she said. “Again.”

Strom paused.

Then sighed, his shoulders sagging as he dragged one hand down his face.

Of course.

He turned toward the two adventurers.

“Jacques. Minato. Would either of you kindly explain?”

The men exchanged a quick look. Jacques scratched the back of his head.

“Well… the two of us — Minato and me — were looking to scout another part of the city. See what was being built and all that.”

Strom rolled one hand, urging him to get on with it.

The city wasn’t openly hostile, but it changed too quickly for them to trust old reports. Information from the first expedition was already becoming outdated. Buildings appeared within days. New streets opened overnight. Areas that had stood empty during one pass might be active construction zones by the next.

For that reason, Strom had split the expedition into smaller teams and ordered them to survey as much of the city as they were permitted to explore. The goblins didn’t seem bothered by the scouting, but that didn’t make wandering alone through an unfamiliar Deep city any wiser.

Safe or not, this was still the Deep, and the city was stranger than most ruins Strom had explored.

“We’ve been keeping to teams of three, like you asked,” Jacques continued. “But our usual third had some other business to handle.”

Strom nodded once.

“And?”

Jacques coughed into his hand.

“And Minato said he knew a guy who might be willing to cover. So we went looking for the man, Stewart.”

Some of Jacques’s nervousness faded as he spoke. He glanced at Minato, whose expression tightened.

“When we started asking around, we found out no one had seen Stewart in two days.”

Strom’s eyes narrowed.

“You didn’t think to report that?”

Jacques flinched.

“We thought he might still be adjusting to the spirit pressure,” Minato added quickly.

Strom sighed.

Not everyone handled the Deep well.

The density of spirit energy increased the farther one traveled beneath the surface. For cultivators with weaker foundations, or those particularly sensitive to ambient energy, the change could cause headaches, nausea, fever, or disorientation. More severe exposure could lead to spiritual poisoning if someone descended too far, too quickly.

Most people recovered after a period of adjustment, though there was no reliable way to know how long that might take.

Strom folded his arms.

“So instead of informing a squad leader that one of our people had been missing for two days, you decided to investigate yourselves.”

It wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

Jacques’s shoulders sank.

“We asked around and found his apartment,” he said. “We didn’t want to cause trouble if he was only sick.”

Strom raised a brow.

“I assume that wasn’t the case.”

Jacques and Minato exchanged another look.

Before either could answer, the goblin woman tucked her notepad under one arm and moved toward the apartment.

“You should see it for yourself,” she said.

Strom glanced at Cindy.

She returned the look, her mouth tightening slightly, then followed as the goblin pushed the door open.

The smell reached them first.

Stale food and unwashed flesh rolled into the hallway, mixed with the bitter tang of ink and something faintly scorched.

Strom grimaced and pinched his nose as he stepped inside.

“Maker’s might,” he muttered.

His own apartment had been simple, spotless, and more comfortable than any lodging had a right to be.

This room looked as though a storm had torn through it.

A particularly foul one.

Once-white panels hung loose from holes in the ceiling and walls. Bundles of colored wire had been dragged out from behind them and stripped bare in places. Some twitched and sparked against the floor. Devices Strom couldn’t identify lay scattered throughout the apartment in various stages of disassembly.

Some had been arranged with obsessive care. Gears, screws, plates, and tiny metal components sat in neat rows, each labeled with a strip of paper covered in cramped writing.

Others had been abandoned wherever they fell. Broken housings had been tossed into corners. Coils of wire lay tangled beneath the table. A cracked black panel leaned against the wall beside a mound of bent brackets and snapped fasteners.

Strom stepped carefully through the debris.

Several pipes had been exposed along the far wall, and the steady rush of running water came from the open washroom. A shallow stream crossed the floor before draining into a dark opening cut through one of the lower panels.

The kitchen had suffered just as badly.

The smooth range and other built-in devices had been ripped from their fittings and stripped down to their internal parts. Yet far more components littered the apartment than could have come from the room alone.

Strom’s frown deepened.

What remained of the white walls had almost vanished beneath layers of writing. Nearly every clear surface was buried beneath rows of numbers, symbols, diagrams, and dense blocks of notation he couldn’t begin to interpret. Some had been written in careful columns. Others crossed at sharp angles, overlapped older calculations, or curved around them wherever space remained.

So much ink covered the room that it seemed to swallow what little light came from the few surviving panels flickering overhead.

Beyond the wreckage, against the far-right wall, sat a bed.

Its sheets were twisted, stained, and littered with scraps of paper. A ragged man in sweat-soaked robes sat hunched on the edge. The cloth might once have been light blue, but dirt and grime had darkened it almost beyond recognition.

His back remained turned to the door, and he didn’t react when it opened or show the slightest awareness of their presence.

Instead, he leaned closer to the device on the small table before him, muttering incoherently as his hands worked through a cluster of exposed parts.

His muttering grew harsher and more frustrated as he tried to force two pieces together just out of sight. When they failed to fit as he expected, he tore one free and hurled it across the room in a sudden burst of fury.

Without looking up, he reached blindly for another piece from the pile beside him.

Cindy gagged and clapped a hand over her mouth as Strom ventured deeper into the apartment.

“Stewart,” he called firmly.

The man on the bed didn’t respond. Strom wasn’t even sure he could hear him over his constant muttering.

He stepped around a tangled coil of wire and tried again.

“Stewart!”

Still nothing.

Strom’s jaw tightened. He crossed the remaining distance, stopped beside the bed, and seized the mage by one shoulder.

“Answer me, man.”

Stewart’s head snapped around.

Despite himself, Strom flinched.

The mage’s face was filthy, smeared with soot, oil, and several days’ worth of grime. Greasy, matted hair hung around a pair of cracked spectacles. Behind them, his eyes were bloodshot and wild, their pupils twitching as they struggled to focus.

Beneath the filth and exhaustion, Strom could barely recognize the arrogant young mage who had complained most of the way up the mountain outside Halirosa, then started again during the journey from the Nexus station to the goblin city.

“Celestials above,” Strom muttered.

He released Stewart and stepped back.

“When was the last time you slept?”

His nose wrinkled.

“Or bathed?”

Stewart surged to his feet, knocking the small table onto its side. Tools, metal plates, and carefully arranged components scattered across the floor, but the mage didn’t spare them so much as a glance.

“Slept?” he repeated.

His voice was raw, each word scraping past cracked lips.

A low giggle escaped him. It rose quickly, twisting into something sharp and manic.

“How could I sleep?” Stewart giggled.

He flung both arms wide, nearly losing his balance as he gestured toward the ruined apartment.

“How could anyone sleep surrounded by all this… madness?”

The final word emerged as a bitter hiss. His face tightened as his gaze swept across the stripped walls and scattered machinery.

Strom raised both hands, palms open.

“You’re not making much sense, lad. Let’s get some food into you and find somewhere quiet for you to rest. Then you can explain what’s troubling you.”

He kept his voice level and took one careful step forward.

Stewart stared at him.

Then another burst of laughter tore free.

“I’m not making sense?” he asked.

Stewart covered his face with one hand, his entire body shaking.

“I’m not making sense?” he repeated, louder now. “You don’t understand. None of you understands!”

He spun in place, throwing his arms toward the stripped walls, exposed pipes, and heaps of dismantled machinery.

“Don’t you see it?” he hissed. “None of this makes sense!”

Stewart whirled back toward Strom.

“How does any of it work?” he demanded.

For a moment, the anger cracked. Beneath it, Strom heard something closer to a strangled, desperate plea.

“None of it should work,” Stewart said, his voice breaking. Then his features twisted once more. “How can you not see that?”

Strom took another careful step closer.

“That’s a fair question. I’m sure the goblins would be willing to explain some of it.”

He reached for Stewart’s shoulder, intending to guide him back toward the bed.

“But that can wait until after—”

“DON’T TOUCH ME!”

Stewart slapped his hand aside, and mana erupted between them.

The force struck Strom squarely in the chest and drove him several steps backward. His boots scraped through scattered components before he caught his balance.

The last of his patience vanished.

Strom straightened and studied the mage properly, his expression hardening.

Stewart’s left eye twitched. His gaze darted from Strom to Cindy, then toward the goblins in the hall before snapping back again, never resting anywhere for more than a heartbeat.

“Goblins?” he spat.

Energy sputtered around his body, flickering somewhere between lightning and flame. Thin arcs snapped from his sleeves and scorched black lines across the polished floor.

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” he demanded. “Do you think I’m a fool?”

His body jerked with each word, accompanied by fresh arcs and violent spurts of chaotic mana.

Strom’s stomach dropped.

“Shit. Mana deviance!”

He flicked his wrist.

A massive tower shield burst from his storage ring and slammed into his waiting grip.

Behind him, Jacques and Minato froze in the doorway.

Their eyes widened at the sight of unstable mana crawling across Stewart’s body.

Then both men turned and ran.

Strom couldn’t blame them.

Spiritual deviance was dangerous enough in a cultivator. If the victim’s dantian cracked, spirit energy could tear through their channels, cripple their cultivation, or destroy their body from within.

For a mage, the danger was even worse.

A mage’s dantian had been remade into a mana furnace. Once that furnace slipped out of control, it didn’t simply leak power. It continued drawing in spiritual energy and converting it into mana, building pressure until the body could no longer contain it.

The result was an explosion proportional to the mage’s own power.

Stewart took a trembling step toward him.

More arcs burst from his shoulders and crawled down his arms. His entire body shook beneath the strain, and a thin line of blood leaked from the corner of one eye.

“You really think goblins could make any of this?” he snarled.

His face split into another wild grin, and he began to laugh again.

The sound rose with every breath, along with the mana pouring out of him. Light flashed across the room in uneven bursts, each one brighter and more violent than the last.

Strom lowered his stance behind the shield.

If he could get close enough, he might be able to use his own techniques to contain the blast, or at least reduce its effects.

His efforts were rendered moot in the next moment, however, as Cindy appeared behind Stewart in a blur of white cloth and auburn hair.

Her hand snapped forward. Three fingers struck separate points along his spine in rapid succession.

Stewart went rigid. The laughter died in his throat, and his eyes rolled back.

The storm of chaotic mana vanished within a heartbeat, leaving him frozen ramrod-straight.

Then he toppled forward and struck the floor with a heavy thud.

Strom dismissed the tower shield. His shoulders sagged as the tension drained from them, and he gave Cindy a grateful look.

She answered with a grin that stretched from ear to ear.

Before either of them could speak, the goblin guards rushed into the apartment.

The two armored men went straight to Stewart. One rolled the unconscious mage onto his back while the other drew a dark metal collar from his belt and secured it around Stewart’s neck. A faint light swept across its surface before both goblins hauled him upright between them.

The mage’s head lolled forward as they carried him into the hallway.

The goblin woman passed them on her way into the apartment. She stopped just beyond the doorway, her notepad still tucked beneath one arm, and surveyed the stripped walls, flooded floor, exposed wiring, and scattered machinery.

Then she turned to Strom and pushed her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose, pulled out her notepad, and frowned.

“We’ll be sending the Guild the repair bill.”

Strom sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.