Chương 73: Chapter 74: The Metal Bullet

The mouth of the fissure swallowed the valley light. Ethan slipped through the vertical limestone seam sideways, his rawhide scout pack scraping a line of white chalk dust against the raw rock face as he descended. The hot, dry glare of the Via Maris vanished instantly, replaced by a damp, stagnant chill that smelled of ancient soot and calcified mineral water. He halted in the absolute dark, his bare feet sinking into a cold, wet bed of alluvial silt.

The silence of the deep earth pressed against his eardrums until a sharp, high-frequency electronic chime pinged across his line of sight. [SYSTEM NOTIFICATION - DUNGEON DISCOVERY!] New Dungeon Discovered! The Descent of Athtar. Location: Wadi Ara Karstic Fault Congratulations! First Discovery Bonus: +50% Exploration Experience Point Modifier Active. Ethan didn't move. He closed his eyes, letting his 85 Perception listen to the dark.

Deep within the subterranean trench, a rhythmic, guttural panting echoed off the walls—the slow, heavy breathing of a pack. He struck a flint flake against the back of his trowel. Sparks showered down, catching a dry cedar-shaving wick, and a sudden orange torch-flare flooded the corridor. The geography was a suffocating, narrow choke point.

The limestone walls bulged inward, narrowing the path to barely two meters across, while the ceiling hung low in a jagged, oppressive canopy of dripping stalactites and sharp corbelled joints. Ethan stepped fifty paces down the slick path to test the clearances.

A standard human-shaped clay golem would be a disaster here; its high shoulders would violently smash against the stone spurs, and its lumbering mass would completely block the two-meter corridor, trapping Ethan's own nimble movements in a dead-end bottleneck. He backed up to a dry rock recess, dropped his pack, and went to work on his knees. His trowel drove deep into the floorboards, cutting into a massive, heavy vein of dark-red Terra Rossa mud.

Leveraging his 300% material extraction speed, his hands became a blur of motion, scooping, packing, and slapping the heavy, iron-saturated clay into a singular, massive mound. He poured all three of his active construct slots into the pile. He didn't shape limbs or a face. Moving with brutal, physical intent, he molded the clay into a low-slung, segmented Scarab Beetle Frame.

The construct rose barely one meter off the ground but stretched wide, its curved, bulbous carapace perfectly matching the circular contour of the lower tunnel walls. Its six thick, squat mud legs were set low and wide, anchored to the dirt like hydraulic blocks. Ethan reached into his pack, pulling out a heavy handful of black charcoal ash and high-carbon slag residue left over from his flash-fired sling stones.

He threw the black powder over the red clay shell, his calloused palms forcefully rubbing and massaging the carbon dust deep into the wet, iron-rich skin of the scarab's carapace. He pulled a blazing ember from his torch, pressing the raw heat directly against the carbon-smeared clay. He blew onto the coal, triggering a blistering, concentrated thermal flare-up across the shell. The red clay hissed. Under the direct kinetic heat, the iron oxide particles inside the Terra Rossa violently bonded with the carbon ash.

Before his eyes, the wet mud underwent a rapid, brittle transformation, vitrifying into a dark, rigid, metallic crust of high-carbon slag and brittle cast-iron plating across the beetle's forward wedge. Ethan stood up, wiping the red grease from his forearms onto his white kilt. The heavy, faceless scarab sat dormant in the corridor, a dense, un-blinking shield of brittle iron and mud. It was the perfect mechanical anvil.

It sealed the bottom half of the narrow pass completely, acting as an immovable tank to absorb the pack's kinetic lunges, while the top half of the tunnel remained entirely open. Ethan could stand securely behind its low, cast-iron back, using the upper clearance to look ahead, launch his heavy sling shot, or lean over to strike with his mace without ever losing his sight-line.

He drew the loop of his sling tight around his wrist, gripped his glass-toothed club, and nudged the heavy iron beetle forward into the dark.