Day 21. The Infada Stone
A bigger temple lies ahead, presumably with the Infada artifact, but Lara just cannot enter directly to it. She spots an opening above, and climbs the temple walls into the crevice. A sly cobra surprises her at the crevice, which Lara avoids. Then the cave she's in starts collapsing, so she rushes into the other end of the cave, and manages to enter into the temple.
In silence and motionless, stands a big warrior… an obsidian-black, six-armed swordsman, with red eyes, a robotic glance, and gold accessories, and an idolish expression. A temple protector of sorts. Yet the swordsman is not alone. "Shiva…" Lara thinks, while preparing to draw her weapons out. She's an uninvited guest, and will be sacked by the gigantic guards.
A sound of clashing swords gives Lara the cue to start shooting. With each stomp, the guardians manage to have Lara lose its standing, so she has to roll in order not to slip and fall. Lara's worrying she'll run out of ammo, and soon the warriors surround her. She makes a back roll to avoid the warriors in time, while the dull gigantic warriors stab each other. Lara catches a breath. "The bigger, the dumber," she thinks.
Lara advances in the exploration of the temple, only to find two men floating in the air, in the same fashion Kurtis did three years ago. "Are these Randy and Rory?" she thinks. "I may have arrived a minute late. Oh, no! A night late!" The floating explorers are fresh corpses with a big hole in their guts, and Lara a fool that let the artifact run away... "Meteorite rocks!" Lara thinks. "Here we go again..."
Lara rushes out of the temple to find the culprit of the explorers' murderer. And she does find him, running away in a precarious raft, while holding a meteorite rock in his chest, like a big pendant. Lara shoots Tony, the blond, rasta man in sunglasses, but the current draws him fast into the Ganges, and the bullets fail to reach him. Behind Lara, the temple ruins start collapsing, and debris of a falling column hits her in the head. That'll give Tony a bit of a head way.
Lara's adventure resumes in the sacred waters of the River Ganges, as she rushes to capture Tony, the explorer that left presumably two of his companions floating gutless. Weirdly enough, Lara's quad bike is on the path to wherever her new enemy might be heading. Engines roar, and she starts rallying in uneven terrain. Perhaps faster than a single raft can.
However, her path is dire, as she's forced to traverse through a cave with many ramps and pitfalls. A single mistake could be fatal for Lara. "Good thing I practised a bit at home," she thinks. Naturally, the nice garden at Manor Croft had been turned into a quad bike course.
After drifting and burning some tyres, Lara ends up on a cliff, where the quad bike can't advance. She manages to make a running jump to an adjacent cliff and grab it with her hands. Her adventures had given her a grip so firm that the axe would become necessary only for climbing uneven areas.
But danger awaits on this second cliff, as birds of prey surround Croft. She draws her weapons out and starts shooting at them. A piece of cake for her. Then she uses her binoculars to see where to head next. "There you are!" she says. Below a waterfall, lies the explorer's raft - all broken. It's likely that behind the waterfall there should be a cave. The abyss is deep, but below, the river rests in a deep basin. She swan-dives into it, and then emerges from the deep. She takes a deep breath, and follows loon Tony's steps.
The caves behind the waterfall have been shaped by the Infada into a deadly maze. At each turn, Lara rushes to dodge boulder traps. After exploring for a while, she finds herself in a dead end. So she rests over a wall in frustration, and it gives way a bit. "I can push this," she thinks. The movable wall leads to a hidden room, and to yet another maze. Whatever lies ahead, the Infada surely did their best to keep hidden.
The maze ends in a big dark pit… Lara enters it, and feels them… snakes around her. She dashes out of the pit in an attempt not to get caught by them, which leads her into a final room, where Tony stands at the center. He lets the artifact possess him, and thus becomes a big human torch, capable of shooting fireballs at a rather low speed. Lara simply draws her weapons and shoots him until he explodes. Tony was simply unable to withstand the pressure of the artifact that remains intact at the center. "At last!" Lara says, while picking the Infada Stone.
And then the night arrives, and in the River Ganges, a boat approaches with the big boss… Lara hijacks the boat. Dr. Willard, the boat owner, introduces himself. A Scottish scientist with fancy equipment, capable of proving Lara's theory right. The Infada Stone is carved out of a meteorite rock, and one of four of its kind crafted a long, long time ago in Antarctica. A bunch of explorers from the HMS Beagle found them, and then the sole survivor of the expedition sold them: India, London, the South Pacific, and Nevada. "Sounds good to me," Lara says. She then returns Dr. Willard a journal of one of the failed explorers, for she is a successful one.