This chapter marks the start of the Mountain's Heart Dungeon! I've done a big art-dump on garden-eel-draws, all of it under the "dungeon 5" tag. Pics include pixel art of the dungeon rooms in this chapter, an illustrated mini-boss, and a new item!
In other news, map art is probably going to become more scarce after this update. The overworld and levels in the Light World are going to either be based on the BOTW map or otherwise designed in a 3D style that I have difficulty drawing and that doesn't translate well to 2D Zelda graphics. Mini-bosses, bosses, items, fashion, notable NPCS, and new enemies will still get art if I have time to make it, but I won't be able to give you visuals on the actual levels as often, sorry ಥ⁔ಥ
Para Mewdyn Zoldyck: Soy muy malo para responder a las reseñas, solo porque nunca siento que pueda decir algo productivo en respuesta a cumplidos y compromisos tan agradables, pero sé que he visto lo que escribes y realmente lo aprecio, incluso si puede parecer que estás lanzando palabras a una pared. Solo soy una pared muy tímida que no está acostumbrada a las palabras bonitas.
Finally, in order of increasing severity, a content warning: Harry's A+ handling of his mental health, dissociation, violence, a head injury, blood, an arrow wound, and someone getting eaten.
Harry came to a sharp halt as soon as his brain registered how dark the room was. Red collided with him from behind, while Yellow side-stepped out of the way.
Soft orange light radiated from the inactive lines of Bluestone tracing the edges of the room and sunlight streamed in through the open door behind him, but it wasn't enough. He could see the stars again, shining on the unseen walls. It wasn't enough!
Harry turned toward the doorway and took several deep breaths. He was fine. There was no reason for him to freak out. Sunlight was right there. His brothers were with him. He wasn't in the caves again. If he needed to, he could walk right back outside—
The metal doors on either side of the exit pulsed with violet light, then slammed shut. Suddenly the sunlight was gone, reduced to a quickly-fading afterimage.
Harry screamed.
"Green!"
Three points of reddish orange firelight popped into the room. The heavily shadowed faces of Harry's brothers hovered over the swirling flames of their Magic Lamps. He shrank under their startled stares.
"I'm fine!" Harry squeaked, conjuring his own lamp. He wasn't scared of the dark! What could the dark do to him, other than make him see things sometimes? Hallucinations were harmless!
Harry flashed his siblings a smile while he waited for his heart to climb down from his throat. The stars were still there, hovering in his peripheral vision, but he could deal with that. So long as the stars didn't get in his way, he was okay. He closed his eyes and started breathing in controlled counts to fight the breathless feeling building in his lungs. If he felt like he was low on air, it would only make his imaginings worse.
"I'll find a way to turn on the lights," Blue said. "Red, help me out. Yellow, stay with Green."
Yellow was instantly at Harry's elbow. "You don't have to say you're fine when you're not," he said as he clasped Harry's hand in his. "You're not one person anymore—you're four. Do you think we wouldn't want to help you?"
Harry hung his head. "I'm supposed to be the leader," he protested. "I can't just lean on you all the time."
"If leaders didn't have people to lean on, they'd just be random blokes instead of leaders."
Harry shook his head. "Leaning on people makes you dead weight instead of a leader."
His brother gave him a slow blink. "Wow, who would have thought that the opposite of Malfoy-logic is still stupid?" he remarked.
"Wh-What?" Harry stammered, taken aback.
"I can be blunt when I want to." Yellow stuck out his tongue. "Malfoy always wants people to wait on him, but you just keep wanting to wait on people. Both are bad if you do only one constantly."
"But you wait on people all the time! You don't tell us when you need help!"
Yellow blinked, looking just a little too innocently doe-eyed and "who, me?" to not know what he was doing. "I'm not the leader, though, am I?"
"Found the light switch!" Red announced from the back of the room.
"Or maybe something we're really not supposed to flip," Blue amended. "Brace yourselves!"
Blue and Red gripped the handle of a large iron switch with the same utilitarian orange lines as the rest of the room and heaved it upward with twin grunts of effort.
With a low hum that buzzed in Harry's bones, power flooded into the dull orange tracery. Ceiling-mounted domes that resembled the Bluestone jets of Hylian trains flickered to a strong blue-white, suffusing the room with even illumination. Luminous floor strips flared a lively electric blue underfoot and then settled into a steady glow. They formed smooth lines pointing toward the three doors bordering the room, including the exit. Inset stala and Bluestone circles in the iron floor marked each door with a symbol that Harry assumed related to what the room beyond was for. The walls were polished and square, carved straight into the volcano's red stone and braced with stala. Despite this, they didn't give off any heat; in fact, the room felt like it was only a few degrees warmer than the heavily air-conditioned Blue House back in town. While the mix of red stone, black metal, and bronze was intimidating, the square corners and minimal decoration gave the place a flat, utilitarian appearance.
In the back of the lobby lay what was unmistakably a computer. It resembled one of those blocky, tape-spitting behemoths that showed up in old 60s movies, even down to its segmented paneling. The iron-clad beast was four meters wide and over two meters tall. Constellations of blinking lights studded the wall of technology, leading to an embedded screen, keyboard, and download port.
'Hyrule is more futuristic than I thought, if this is fifty-year-old hardware,' Harry thought as he stepped up to the terminal. This was much closer to something he was familiar with than the touch-screen, all-in-one laptop he could now summon at will. He conjured his Navi Slate and eyeballed the older computer's data port. Since this place was really industrial-looking, it stood to reason that they'd have a terminal for visitors and workers to download maps from. It wasn't safe to have people wandering lost around a foundry, after all.
The raised rectangle of blue-black stone at the back of the computer's download port looked the same size as the rectangular opening at the bottom of his Navi Slate, even if the slot to insert the tablet was a bit too big. He carefully slid the stone rectangle in, wiggled it around until the port lined up, and then pushed it onto the receiver. It settled in with a click.
Harry cracked his knuckles and went to the terminal, whose screen had lit up to show a friendly greeting. With a soft gonging sound, a pulse of pale blue washed across the dark background and left a menu in its wake. It didn't look too different from the monochrome display of modern Sheikah computer terminals and slates, just blockier. "Okay, time to figure out how to work a normal computer," he muttered to himself as he inspected the terminal. At this point, he had more experience with a touch screen than a standard keyboard and mouse. Where was the mouse, anyway?
"Green, I've encountered an issue," Blue said behind him.
Harry experimentally rolled the polished stala ball in the middle of the keyboard. The circular white cursor onscreen moved upward. Oh, so that's where the mouse was!
"What issue?" he asked absently, now navigating the display. There were "login options" listed in pixelated turquoise font on the navy blue screen. Harry rolled over to the "visitor" option, which hopefully wouldn't have a password. The text lit up white under the cursor. Now, how to click on it…? He poked around until discovering that the mouse ball also served as a button when he pressed it. A progress bar appeared onscreen.
"When we used the blank scroll on our Magic Rods and Navi Slate, they became like our conjured weapons."
Harry turned around. "What?"
Red, standing next to Blue, conjured his Magic Rod, then the Lenses of Truth, then the Navi Slate. Each item appeared only when the one before it had vanished. "They got added to our tools list, so we can only summon one thing at a time!"
Blue nodded grimly. "It's better than having our new necklaces or Zora Earrings disappear when we call up our maps, but I bet we're going to trip over this rule at some point."
Harry considered that. Eliminating the risk of dropping and losing his Magic Rod while he was in Hyrule was incredibly reassuring. The staff was more replaceable than an Ollivander wand, but it was still a magical tool that had taken his brother a lot of effort to make. "Maybe," he allowed. "Or it could just mean we have fewer things to drop while we're flying on our brooms or dodging monsters."
"What if we need the Lenses of Truth to see something and our Magic Rods to blast it?" Blue pointed out. "I can always make more Magic Rods if we need spares not connected to our conjuring ability, but we need to be careful in the future about what we use that scroll on."
Harry frowned at him. Yellow turned away from his inspection of the computer's blinking lights to do the same. "You were planning on being careful with it already, weren't you?" Harry prompted.
Blue's cheeks turned pink. "Y-yes, of course! I was just, erm…"
Red grinned and laid an arm over Blue's shoulders. "He was having a million and one ideas about what things he wanted to conjure," he said, making Blue's blush deepen. "Going on about what was most 'tactical' and all that."
"You were, too!" Blue accused.
"Yeah, but just for fun. I knew Green and Yellow were going to be in charge of that kinda thing. You are not tactical when it comes to things you think are cool, bro."
Harry waited to see whether it would turn into a proper argument before turning his attention back to the computer. Okay, he was logged in as a visitor now. Thank goodness he didn't have to guess at a decades-old password! All he could do from there was either see a map or download one, so he clicked "download" and left the computer to do its work. If he knew anything from Dudley's complaints about his computer, it was that they required a lot of patience.
Or…not. The progress bar was already at 10%. Harry stared incredulously at the number as it steadily ticked up. Fifty years old, at the youngest, and the machine was this fast?
Yellow leaned against the wall next to the screen to watch the progress bar fill in. "If parts of the facility are flooded, how do you think we'll get through?" he asked. "Even with Goron clothes on, there's no swimming through lava to find hidden passageways."
Harry waved his hands at the doors that had closed behind them. Each was marked by the Wind Mage's distinctive eye. Red was pacing in front of the exit to make them follow him around. "Since Vaati's clearly gotten into this place, I wouldn't be surprised if he undid some of the damage," he said. "Like, remember that temple of bones we were in?"
A full-body shudder went through Yellow. "I don't think I'll ever forget it!"
"Well, I think it was a mix of things from ancient Lorule and Old Hyrule. I can't speak for the Lorule bits, since the sword didn't recognize those, but the sections from Hyrule ought to have been flooded with seawater and covered in barnacles and other sea-stuff. Vaati restored the Hylian areas—or time-snatched them from before the flood—when he wove them into his puzzle-box."
Yellow pursed his lips in thought. "Wouldn't it have been better for him to leave all the water there, though? There would've been no way for us to get through if it were totally flooded."
"Yeah, but it wouldn't have been Vaati's style." The download finished and he reclaimed his slate. "He doesn't like leaving things ugly and unfinished, I don't think. All those places we've been through so far were pretty well built for patchwork deathtraps. I don't see why he wouldn't have fixed this place up for that thing Shadow Harry called a 'beloved experiment' if he was willing to do the same for all his spell anchors."
"I dunno, he might've learned that was a bad idea by now."
"If he were smart, he would've figured out that trying to take over the world just gets him put back in time-out for thousands of years."
Harry scrolled past the province maps saved on his Navi Slate—he'd paid a little extra to have some cheap, basic ones pre-downloaded—and then tapped on the facility floorplan he'd just acquired. Time to see what he was dealing with.
Hoo boy. There were seven pages to this map—one for each floor. In total, the Death Mountain Lightware Facility consisted of four aboveground floors and three basements. The three upper floors were for Bluestone mining, while the underground levels were where all the refinement took place using the volcanic heat. Each of the basements took advantage of being built into Death Mountain's massive lava tube system, with plenty of processing rooms sprawling under the mountain and venting gases through pipes under the lava lakes. The Hero of Lights had set out to light a nation, and she'd established a place big enough to keep up with her ambition.
The map for the lowest floor of the facility made a note that, while it was technically possible for them to delve farther into Death Mountain, the facility was kept at its current depth out of spiritual respect. Harry didn't see anything directly indicating a temple, but he was willing to bet that was why they'd built the facility farther out and up instead of farther down. While the New Kingdom didn't have the same amount of history behind it as the Old Kingdom yet, there were likely a few sacred places nestled in and around Death Mountain already.
Harry flicked his way back up to the first floor and matched the symbols he saw by the doors to the ones on his map. "The floor we're on is for cooling, cleaning, and shipping," he told his brothers. "If we want to find the temple under this place, we're going to have to go to the hottest section of furnaces on the lowest floor."
There were grimaces all around at that news.
"Do you think that temple under the foundry might be the place one of those maidens hid her magic rock?" Red asked. "Because if we could slay this dragon and fix our sword a little at the same time, that would be brill."
That…was a really good question. Harry clapped a hand to his face. "Augh, I should've remembered to ask Shadow Harry!"
"I guess we'll just find out when we get down there, then," Red said with a shrug. He walked over to the left door and tried to find a handle. "Er, how do we open these?"
Harry walked over, inspected the nearby marble of Bluestone embedded in the wall, and held his Navi Slate to it. The orange light sputtered and the door stayed shut.
"Out-of-order, maybe?" Harry muttered to himself. He took his tablet over to the other door. This time, the orange marble blinked blue and the thick factory doors slid open.
Blazing light and hot sulfuric wind blasted Harry backward. He staggered away from the open doors, coughing.
Yellow peeked more cautiously around the corner. He paled and quickly withdrew. "Someone died in there!"
Harry collected himself and approached the doors again. When they started to close, he flashed his slate again to keep them open. What had formerly been a shipping bay was now a monster-infested fever-dream of warped proportions. The conveyor belts were cartoonishly large, host to multiple lanes of giant blue-black marbles that flowed right-to-left from nonsensical ports in the shuttered hangar door to openings in the opposite wall. Fire Keese fluttered around walkways that had been turned into chaotic catwalks snaking under the ceiling. Oversized metal shipping crates lay in partially-melted towers, serving as perches for blue and red Bokoblin archers. A pool of violet-tinted lava covered the back two thirds of the room. Harry could see it oozing through the doors leading to the next shipping bay; even if the Harrys' water-conjuring trick worked well enough to let them walk across the lava pool, there was no going through that door unless they wanted to cook to death when the lava behind it flowed in. They'd have to find another way to make progress.
Belatedly, he noticed a blackened Goron skeleton propped upright against the wall in the lava pool, revealing it to be about a meter deep. He wondered whether the superheated hazard around the bones had been created by Vaati, or if it was the reason those particular remains had never been retrieved.
He switched out the Navi Slate for the Magic Rod and untied his shield from his belt. "Prepare to get shot at," he warned his brothers before stepping into the next room.
The Bokoblin nearest the door perked up when it noticed him and put a trumpet made out of an animal horn to its lips. With one deep breath, it sounded an alarm that had the other three Bokoblins raising their bows.
Harry cursed and raised his shield. He hadn't been expecting that! After months of fighting the dumbed-down monsters that had appeared back home, he kept underestimating them in their native dimension.
Tucking himself behind a metal crate that had become one with the metal floor, Harry fired off conjured arrows at a furious rate. He had to dodge back and forth between corners of the cube to avoid return fire from the door-watcher and the archer to his left. Arrows sparked off of the metal flooring far too close for comfort. One hit him in the metal shoulder-plate of his Goron work clothes, knocking him out from behind the box. There was a lot of force behind those things!
"Gah!" Another arrow, this time fired from the other Bokoblin, pierced his double layers of clothes and buried its head in the upper left side of his ribcage, where only one of the leather straps for the chest armor he had on under his Goron tunic managed to reach. It stuck a few centimeters into the meat under his collarbone, feathers quivering. Harry gaped at it in shock. There was…an arrow…in his chest.
With a scream, Harry ripped it out. Agony lashed through his chest as the arrow's barbed, bloodied head tore free. Breathing hard, Harry threw it aside, pressed himself against his cover, and aimed carefully at the Bokoblin that had shot him—as carefully as the Arrow-Shooting Spell and his shaking arm allowed for, anyway. "Sagitta Creo!"
Five arrows flew at the monster and three knocked it down from its perch. The Bokoblin fell sideways into the lava that filled the space between conveyor belts and died, screaming, on impact. Good—that was one out of four monsters taken care of. He peeked out from behind his cover to see that Red and Yellow had shot down the Bokoblins by the back of the room while he'd been distracted by his arrow wound. Blue was doing his best to defeat the monster by the door, which was taking advantage of the fact that its tower was wedged between two walls. It hugged the corner to keep from getting shot down whenever Blue landed a hit. Noticing Harry leaning out from his cover, the blue Bokoblin fired off an arrow that the boy wasn't quite quick enough to avoid. Hot pain lanced across Harry's face.
For a moment, Harry was terrified he'd gone half-blind. Then he realized it was just blood in his eye from the furrow carved across his upper cheek. "Oh, screw you!" Harry snarled, switching out his Magic Rod for his Magic Lamp. He ran closer to the Bokoblin's stack of metal boxes, wound his arm back, and pitched the lantern up at the archer. Liquid fire sprayed through the air, sizzling on Harry's clothes where it spattered him. More importantly, though, the bulk of the flaming oil spilled across the top of the box the monster was standing on.
Shrieking in pain, the Bokoblin leapt off of the platform and ran around on flaming feet. Blue clotheslined the creature with his sword as it sped by and ripped the bow out of its hands before Harry descended on it with vicious fury. "You…suck! Just…die!" Harry said with each sword swing. Unarmed and previously injured by Blue's arrows, it didn't take much to finish the Bokoblin off.
It was only after he'd stood there for several seconds, staring blankly at the monster's dropped quiver and horn, that Harry realized he was in a significant amount of pain. His left arm was almost paralyzed by the fire radiating through his chest; it must have been pure adrenaline that had kept him from noticing. Harry rubbed the gluey red muck out of his right eye and peered down at his arrow wound, which was bleeding with great enthusiasm. He felt dizzy just looking at the stain spreading through two layers of tunics. With great care, he lifted the fabric and leather away. The wound was bigger than he expected and ragged, like a mix of a stab and a cut. Maybe tearing out arrows was a bad idea.
'We really need to find a way to heal ourselves without burning through potions constantly,' Harry thought. There had to be some magical Hylian version of a plaster, right? Something that could do a little healing without wasting a resource better suited for life-or-death emergencies? "Sorry, Blue, you're going to have to sit down and brew more potions soon," Harry said before pulling a Red Potion out of his bag.
Blue raised an eyebrow. "You don't honestly think I mind you healing up an arrow wound to the chest, do you?"
"Guess not." Harry downed the potion, cast charms to repair and clean his clothes, tied his shield back onto his belt, and lined up next to Yellow and Red at the edge of the lava pool. "I see a lot of hazards, but nowhere to go," he remarked, switching out his glasses for the Lenses of Truth to cut through the purplish haze.
The oozing door was definitely a no-go, so Harry inspected the conveyor belts taking up most of the room. The marbles kept rolling from one wall to the other instead of just vanishing, so surely there were actual openings they were traveling through? The first two conveyors ended in black voids, but the last of the three square ports showed a sliver of another room through it.
Harry sighed. They had to cross three moving conveyor belts with three lanes of Marbles of Doom each. Of course. At least there didn't seem to be any giant, all-lanes-wide marbles coming out of those dark doorways. Harry had no wish to see how lethal those were when not weakened by Hogwarts's magic.
"That last nook in the wall—do you see it?" he pointed out. Red nodded first, Yellow and Blue confirming after a bit of squinting. "We're trying to get over there."
"Do you think there might be anything hidden up in the catwalks, though?" Blue asked, looking up. "They seem like a good place to hide a treasure chest."
"This isn't a temple, because that's what we're trying to find, and Shadow Harry hasn't been in to hide goodies," Red pointed out. "I doubt we'll be finding much more than dead people and monsters until we get down there."
Blue hummed in thought. "Maybe there wouldn't be many ancient treasures up here, but we could probably find some interesting loot regardless. If everyone had to leave in a hurry, they probably left a lot behind."
"You want to steal from dead people?" Yellow asked, aghast. "That's awful!"
"They're dead, Yellow. A skeleton can't lift a sledgehammer. And the survivors from fifty years ago are hardly going to monkey over the lava pools and their deceased coworkers to fetch their tools," Blue huffed.
"So if someone looted your house after you died, you'd think that was fine?"
"It's not like I'm going to have any use for those things, am I? Better the thieves get them than the Dursleys."
Red looked to Harry. "So, are we looting the place or not?"
Harry made a face at the wording. "I mean, we've been re-killing dead people and taking artifacts from ancient places for months, so aren't we already in for a pound?" he said. "Remember we're here on a mission, but if you find something interesting, you can take it. Sakari said no one would ever come back here if they could help it. Besides, we're adventurers now; finding cool old stuff is what we do."
Since the conveyors were raised up on stilts and the nearest of the three was several running steps into the lava, they were going to have to find another way up. Vaati probably didn't work under the same idea of "fairness" as Shadow Harry, but there was a good chance he'd want his monsters to be able to navigate the room, so…There! Harry spied a crooked metal ladder hanging from the far end of the first giant treadmill. Harry sidled around one of the looming, mutated warehouse shelves forming skeletal "walls" by the lava pool. Hopping up on the wall, he clambered over the lava creeping under the racks. Getting to the ladder was a simple matter of leaping a short distance from one set of bars to another. 'Like a monkey jumping between trees,' Harry mused.
After pulling himself up the awkwardly-spaced rungs of the crude ladder, Harry waited for an opening and jumped onto the segmented iron belt loudly clattering over the conveyor's massive rollers. He jogged up the treadmill, weaving around marbles as he did. One marble, then two took up all three lanes in a staggered fashion. Harry stepped around the first and wobbled a little when he came up to the edge of the conveyor. For a moment he stared wide-eyed at the white-violet lava below. Then he managed to fling himself back onto safer footing.
"Okay, so…How do I get across?" he murmured as he estimated the gap. Two meters was a considerable jump for him. He'd need some extra oomph.
Harry kept jogging up the conveyor, threading the needle through marbles, until he was at the port the menaces kept spouting from. 'Alright, here goes,' he thought as he started letting the metal belt carry him along. Harry stuck to the left side, where there was a relatively good-sized open space, and ran in the same direction of the marbles. When he came up to the edge of the short runway space, he angled to the right, coiled his lead leg, and pushed off with all the power and forward motion he could muster.
Because he'd forgotten to make sure that both his take-off and landing were clear, Harry barely avoided jumping straight into a metal sphere rolling down the next conveyor. He banged his knee against it instead. There wasn't any time to nurse the fresh bruise, though, because he immediately had to start dodging hazards of risk being squashed. His knee complained with a painful throb every time he took a step with his left foot.
"I hate these things," he groused as he wove his way up the rattling road. Out of all the traps that had appeared around Hogwarts, from monster ambushes to push-block mazes to pitfalls, Harry's least favorite were the hallways full of marbles. At least pitfalls and ambushes were easy to avoid using his sword-senses and didn't appear right in the middle of major corridors. These accursed bowling lanes were unavoidable if your destination happened to be anywhere in that hallway.
He ran down the tread and sprang for the next, glad that his bruised knee wasn't the one he needed for these jumps. It took a bit of awkward hurdling over marbles for him to keep from being run over after landing, but he managed just fine.
Then he heard chittering.
"No!" Harry reached up and snatched one of the descending Fire Keese out of the air with one gloved hand. The Keese in Hyrule were less like flying shadows and more like winged eyeballs, but they were no less annoying than the ones that had hassled him back home. He glared at the struggling creature in his fist. "You've almost pushed me into lava once today! It's not happening again!" He threw the Keese in his hand at a passing marble, which crushed it into smoke, then drew his sword. As he sprinted down the conveyor to the opening at the end, he swung his weapon wildly at the air to ward off the pests.
'I swear I need to buy a bloody net to fight these things,' he thought with aggravation. The stupid eyeballs were so hard to hit!
As it turned out, the conveyor came to a sudden stop at the wall between rooms instead of going through. Harry didn't see the marbles seeming to disappear at the end, so focused was he on slaying the Keese swooping at his vulnerable head. Startled by a sudden mental klaxon from the Four Sword, Harry only just managed to avoid getting dumped in the lava alongside the marbles with a reflexive jump. The conveyor on the other side of the wall, which moved in double-time compared to what he'd just gotten used to, cruelly snatched his feet out from under him.
Harry fell flat on his back and slammed his head into the unforgiving iron of the speeding tread. White sparks blinked in his eyes.
"Green, get up! There's spikes!" Hands hooked under his arms and started pulling upward. "You're too heavy for me to lift! Run!"
Harry's eyes snapped open. When had he knocked himself out? Following the motion of the hands, he climbed to his feet and started running.
Letting his legs carry his body while his mind caught up, Harry shook his head to clear it and looked around. There were even more conveyors in here, packed close enough to comfortably jump from one to another and not full of marbles, which was a plus. Less of a plus was the fact that the walls were lined with spikes and the belts were rolling fast enough that the only way to make headway against them was to go into a full sprint. Also, each belt rolled in the opposite direction of the ones next to it, just to make landings extra nerve-wracking. Harry thanked his mornings of exercise and cursed his short legs. He'd be able to keep up the pace for a little while, but they needed to get out of there before they ran out of steam.
"Blue and Yellow?" he asked Red.
"Blue tripped and got run over when you knocked yourself out. None of his bones broke, though, so that's good," Red answered. "He and Yellow should be in right…now."
Yellow leapt onto the conveyor they were on and ran at a controlled speed until he was closer to Red and Harry. As with Harry, the sudden change in pace caught Blue by surprise. Luckily he escaped repeating the same pratfall. He staggered, spun around, and went into a steady jog.
"Ooh, is that a gold Rupee? Those have to be super rare, right?" Red asked, looking off to the side.
Harry followed his gaze. A shimmering golden Rupee stood on a section of strange, twisted shelving that sat at the end of a conveyor at the end of the room, revolving slowly on its bottom point. Harry didn't like the look of the short distance between the shiny bait and the line of spikes right next to it. That was a trap, for sure. And the fact that it wasn't in a treasure chest, like most Hylian treasures tended to be? That couldn't not be sketchy.
"Yeah, but Vaati probably put it there as a—"
Red was already jumping for the next line of spinning treads. "Don't wait for me! I'll catch up to you!"
"But it's a trap!" Harry cried. "Don't you see those spikes?"
"I just have to be quick enough not to hit them!" Red dashed full-tilt up the next conveyor and then jumped down another lane. He was already breathing hard; while the Harrys had greatly improved their stamina since the start of the year, they were currently bogged down by several kilograms of heavy leather and iron protective equipment. Their iron-plated boots alone weighed at least a couple of kilos each.
"I'd like to leave the idiot to it, but unfortunately we're related," Blue huffed. "Who's staying to save him if he screws up?"
"I will!" Yellow volunteered. He held his Magic Rod at the ready and chased after Red.
Harry sighed. If Vaati had set up more bait like this, he was sure that Red would be enthusiastically getting lured in every single time. Blue could even wind up doing the same if the prize intrigued him enough.
His breaths started coming harder and faster as he searched for an exit. Just lifting his weighed-down feet was becoming a real strain. He might have to trade up foot protection for speed if these conveyor belts turned out to be a common theme.
A door lay on the other side of the room, beyond a stretch of lava with no visible way to traverse it. There was only a door sitting level with the blazing lake consuming the entirety of the floor. Wasn't that just peachy?
Harry switched out the Lenses of Truth for his charity-bin spectacles so he could use his Magic Rod—and okay, he could see why Blue had said that might be a problem. He'd have to buy himself some better eyeglasses sometime soon.
Hopping to the next treadmill, he stopped for a moment to adjust his momentum, then started jogging in the opposite direction with his Magic Rod aimed at the lava a little ways behind him. "Aguamenti!" He beamed victoriously when the spell only added to his speed instead of pushing him over. A black patch interrupted by lines of violet appeared on the surface of the lava lake.
Blue took his lead, adding to the section of cooled stone. "Here's hoping it's stable enough to stand on," he said before dropping down. The layer of black rock wobbled precariously, the violet cracks widening, but held solid. "Probably best to move fast and reinforce as needed," Blue said. He braced himself to fire off another Water-Conjuring Spell and made his way toward the door.
Harry glanced over his shoulder at Red, who was now on the farthest conveyor and dangerously close to the spikes as he tried to get the timing just right. 'Please don't impale yourself,' he thought, forcibly turning himself back to the door. Was this how Yellow felt all the time when they threw themselves into risky situations? It really wasn't fun.
Jogging in a half-crouch, Harry cast a focused water jet across a long, straight swathe of the lava. When he dropped onto it, a shiver of unease went through his spine. The rock that Blue had created was already breaking apart and disappearing into the lava pool. "Okay, danger, danger, I get it," he muttered to the sword. Like that wasn't obvious already! "Aguamenti!"
He stepped carefully across the stone—as fast as he could without focusing too much of his weight in one spot. The sense of instability that came with every wobble made his stomach twist. Harry made his way over to Blue, who was pacing in circles on a small platform that he continually reinforced while he waited for Harry.
"Apparently the doors are waiting for tablets with map data," Blue explained sourly when Harry caught up. "We ought to have all downloaded a map, even if it would have had us standing around the lobby for longer."
"On the bright side, at least this way I can be sure none of you will wander off," Harry said. He summoned his slate and held it to the door's reader. For a brief moment, he bit his lip, hoping this door wasn't also out-of-order. The marble blinked white and the door opened. Harry let out his held breath.
"Red might do that, but I have common sense," Blue sniffed before stepping through the door.
'Sometimes,' Harry thought.
The next room was a perfect cube with half-functioning lights. Some were orange, others were fully powered, and a good third were dead blue-black. It made for a weird lighting situation that reminded Harry of a street at dusk. As he observed this, he bumped into a guide rail that startled him into looking down.
A layer of sand that Harry couldn't guess at the depth of covered the floor. It looked like several lorries had pulled in and turned the place into a beach. Harry shared a baffled look with Blue. A rainbow of sand in gray, white, black, red, and green swirled toward a shallow depression in the center of the room. The dark iron housings of several giant machines stuck out of the silky, glittering dirt like angular boulders.
"What does sand have to do with a foundry?" Harry asked. "I thought this place was basically a big furnace."
Blue looked no less confused than he. "I've done a lot of reading about a lot of things since we split up, but nothing about industrial metal processing. Maybe they used the sand to, er…you mentioned this floor was for cooling?"
"You can put out hot metal with sand?"
"I guess?"
"Did you think…they'd have big ole water tanks…in the middle of Death Mountain?" asked their voice between wheezes. Red stumbled into the room, pink-faced from exertion and pushing back the sweaty hair plastered to his forehead. Yellow, appearing as exasperated as Red did exhausted, followed him in and leaned against the doorway.
Blue frowned at the state of Red. "You look like hell," he declared. "And for what, an odd Rupee? You don't even know what it's worth!"
"I'm sure it's worth more than…any of the colors Green's sword knows…and that's enough for me," Red panted. He leaned over and braced his hands on his knees. "Merlin, that was a lot of running."
A hideous metallic squeal rent the air. The platform under their feet began to tilt. Before the Harrys could react, the rickety lookout point collapsed and dumped them four meters into the sand pit.
Harry landed hard on his side, burying an elbow in the dirt. Fortunately, the softness of the sand saved him from a broken arm. Dust invaded his mouth and nose just as he was thanking his lucky stars. Coughing, he adjusted the bandana still tied over his face. While the sand made for an easier landing, it was fine enough to be easily kicked up and reeked of rust. Harry knew very little about what the colors of dirt meant, but he didn't think it unlikely that this stuff was contaminated by whatever processes it had be used for.
Just as the brothers were picking themselves back up from the sudden drop, the sand started moving. The rainbow began muddling into a confused shade of dark grayish brown as the grains slithered toward the center of the room. Harry yelped when he found himself sliding toward whatever was drawing in the sand, held fast by his heavy boots. He sat down in the slow whirlpool and fought to yank them off.
A long gray snout emerged from the center of the pit and split open like a flower, showing a worm-like blue tongue. Each side of the mouth was a bit longer than Harry was tall, full of pulpy, toothless pink flesh. The way the two halves fell out to the sides was disturbing; were there even any bones in there?
Harry shoved his Goron boots in his bag and scrambled to his feet. He had no idea what this thing was, other than much bigger than him and probably man-eating. The Four Sword showed him a confused collection of memories involving mostly centipede-like things popping out of pale desert sand. Apparently this was another one of those New Kingdom monsters it had no information on.
The floppy maw turned sideways and stretched for him. Harry struggled to escape the steepening slope drawing him toward the approaching mouth. The sand sucked at his feet and dragged him back with every step. Harry poured on as much speed as he could, his eyes trained on one of the machine housings sticking out of the monster's domain.
With a heavy clap of flesh hitting flesh and a burst of wind that made Harry squeal in fright, the jaws snapped shut behind him. Harry only dared look back once he'd scurried the rest of the way up to his goal. From the relative safety of solid ground, he watched the monster's extended scaly body sink back into its den, leaving only the open mouth and waving tongue sticking out.
It was Red's turn to work his way free of the sliding ground as it dragged him toward the waiting predator. He cursed and pulled at his legs to haul them up the swirl of sand. Harry conjured his Magic Rod; he could see that Red wasn't going to win that fight with his legs as tired as they were. The monster turned toward Red and started reaching out, its body slithering out of its hole to increase its reach—
"Wingardium Leviosa!" Harry's spell made Red shoot straight up out of the sand pit. With a surprised yelp, Red went pin-wheeling toward the ceiling while the monster's lips slammed together beneath him. Yellow caught him with a mild Hover Charm and reeled him in toward the machine he and Blue were huddled on top of.
"Sorry about that!" Harry called over.
Red gave him a thumbs-up. "No harm done! You saved my arse!"
The monster produced a shrill, ugly noise similar to a donkey's laugh at being denied its meal. It pulled back into its hole and for a moment, the constant hiss of shifting sand went quiet. Then, with an explosion of dust that had all the boys hacking and wheezing, the monster flew into the air. Its blue eyes swiveled in the direction of the largest concentration of Harrys and it swooped with its toothless, boneless jaws clapping at the air. Blue, Red, and Yellow scattered into the sand, pressing flat against it as the huge scaly worm—easily as big as two Knight Buses put end to end—skimmed right over their heads. The room rumbled as the monster plunged back into the ground. The sand settled flat, the grains dancing uniformly as the monster tunneled through it. Harry crouched low on the machine casing and held out his hand to Yellow as his brother ran over. A subtle mound worming across the dirt marked where the creature was, but it was difficult to keep track of in the spotty lighting. Harry couldn't quite tell where it was go—
The monster launched out of the ground from off to the side. Harry, who had been looking in the wrong direction, whipped his head to the right at the creature's horrid braying. He only had time to jerk his arms up in a useless defense before the worm's maw closed around him with the sound of thunder.
Dark, dark, DARK! Harry barely registered the acid slicking his skin as panic made his brain misfire. He had to escape! There was no air! There was no light! The stars were practically blinding.
He was bound straight by the undulating cylinder around him, his arms trapped over his head. Harry struggled against the burning, constricting flesh around him and muscled his arms into folding. With strength born of adrenaline, he wrenched his sword free. It got stuck as soon as he'd managed to unsheathe it. 'OUT!' he mentally screamed, jabbing his sword furiously into whatever it could reach.
Suddenly he was free of the slimy hellhole and tumbling across the sand. He took a deep, desperate breath and gagged on the foul stench and bitter liquid that invaded his nose and mouth.
He heard running footsteps. "Oh god, oh my god, holy sh—oh, sorry, that must hurt! Scourgify!"
In a sweep of harsh, magical scrubbing, Harry's burning skin was rendered dry and raw instead of wet and slowly dissolving. Arms hooked under his and started dragging him across the ground. Harry's next gasp of air stank of iron and sulfur, which was welcome after the nauseating odor he'd been covered in before. He cautiously opened his eyes, now that they were no longer coated in acid.
Yellow lunged forward to hug him. "You got swallowed right in front of me!" he bawled. "I'm sososo sorry, it should have been me—"
"No it shouldn't," Harry told him. He mentally clawed at the Spellotape that had been stretched over his brain sometime between getting spat out and opening his eyes.
"What do you mean, 'it shouldn't'?! I was useless!" Yellow cried. His tears created dark tracks in the dust stuck to his face.
"That thing's the size of an airplane, Yellow," Harry said matter-of-factly. He swayed, blinking green stars out of his eyes. The thought "I was eaten today" circled his brain like a Moblin on a unicycle, simultaneously hilarious and menacing. "Oh. We should be helping, shouldn't we?" Behind Yellow, Red and Blue were firing Stinging Hexes and Severing Charms at the worm's tongue, making it nip at them in irritation. They didn't appear to be doing much damage to it.
"No, definitely not. You're staying right here."
"I got eaten while I was off the sand, remember?"
Yellow looked ill. "…I can't get it out of my head. You got eaten."
"Yeah, I did." Harry climbed to his feet. His legs were shaking, so he leaned against the wall for support until they stopped. Once again, he punched at the faint sense of numbness clouding his thoughts. He needed his head back in the game! Harry closed his eyes and wrestled down the nausea that rose up at the thought of being anywhere near that monster's mouth again. Screaming and crying and contemplating his mortality would come later. Or never, if he managed to suppress those feelings hard enough.
Opening his eyes, he took advantage of Red's and Blue's distraction efforts to figure out a plan. The monster had three little blue eyes on each side of its split-open head and a luminous tongue. Generally, glowing bits on a bigger monster meant weak points. Since the tongue drew more attention, Harry was inclined to assume that was what they should attack. Or perhaps he was just incredibly bitter about having shared a space with it a minute ago. Either way, he wanted to rip that thing out of the worm's nasty mouth.
He summoned his Vine Whip. If it could steal weapons, it could seize tongues.
"Get your whip out and let's go," he said.
Yellow stared at him in shock. "What?"
"We're cutting the bastard's tongue out. Get your whip." Harry leapt down from the machine casing and sprinted across the sand. A red haze lined the edges of Harry's vision. He focused on the waving blue appendage with single-minded hatred.
Skidding to a stop next to Blue, Harry snapped his whip at the worm's tongue and hauled it back with a furious growl. The monster squawked in surprise as it involuntarily leaned in his direction. Harry maintained his grip with a mental command to his whip in his left hand and hacked away at the squirming blue appendage with the sword in his right. The monster squealed with every slash, its flinching tongue dragging him forward through the sand.
"Dammit," Harry cursed, realizing how close he'd gotten to the monster's open mouth. As much as he'd like to continue, Harry wasn't going to trade in a few more licks for getting eaten again. He vanished his whip and dashed out of range.
The huge jaws slammed shut behind him, sending up a cloud of sand at his back. Another choking cloud followed as the monster took to the air with a bray of displeasure. Harry staggered in the shifting sand and then spun around with a mirthless laugh. "Ha, how'd you like that?" he jeered at the beast circling in the air. It answered with another donkey noise and a sharp swoop toward Red.
After a forward dive and a tumble across the sand, Red popped up and asked, "Green, are you okay?"
"Yeah," Harry lied.
Blue put a hand on Harry's shoulder. "Are you sure—?"
"That I want to kill it? Super sure!" Harry declared with hysterical enthusiasm. He threw himself to the side when the worm turned around to swoop at him and shook sand out of his gloves and mask once he got back to his feet. "You wanna have another go? Do you?!" he cried, tracking the worm as it flew around toward Yellow. He ran toward it, ignoring Blue's surprised shout behind him.
When he was a few meters from the lunging monster, Harry conjured his whip and flung its claws toward the worm's reaching tongue. The wooden hand caught flesh, and Harry yanked.
While Harry was a mere weedy teenager up against the weight of a massive flying beastie, that tongue apparently had a lot of nerve endings in it. The worm turned sharply in the air, lost altitude, and hit the sand like a crashed plane. Harry let go of his whip to avoid having his arm yanked off and re-summoned it as he ran up alongside the downed beast's scaly length. Cackling, he seized the creature's tongue again and slashed at it with gusto. Instead of joining in on his attacks, his brothers lined up behind him and started hauling back on his waist to keep him from getting yanked in by the target of his ire. Their combined weight wasn't enough to overpower the tongue's muscle, however, and Harry was forced to release his grip before long.
Rather than fly up again, the monster instead pulled its head under the sand. The gradual whirlpool suddenly became a lot faster and less subtle. Sand poured toward the center of the room. The Harrys ran, huffing and puffing, toward the closest section of machinery. It was like fighting gravity; no matter how hard Harry fought to move forward, his feet kept sliding back! He felt something brush his arm and threw a fearful glance over his shoulder.
The worm's waiting mouth had risen up behind him and turned in his direction. He was within its jaws.
"NO!" Harry grabbed the acid-coated tongue with his gloved hand and hit it with rapid, desperate stabs. Terror fueled his speed now, not fury. "Die, die, die—" Arms wrapped around his waist and pulled as the worm's lips started closing. Arrows and Severing Charms peppered its tongue—his other brothers joining in on the attack from afar. "DIE!" Harry screamed, putting all his weight behind one final stab. His sword went through the blue meat. Smoke poured from either side of the wound.
The shadows of the beast's closing jaws fell away as the creature jerked upward into desperate flight. It writhed, filling the room with bloodcurdling shrieks as its body seemed to petrify. With a boom that shook the air, it exploded in a cloud of purplish ash that dissolved in the air. A rain of random objects fell in its wake. Hammers and wrenches of varying sizes, a plethora of bones, and a big steel bucket landed with high sprays of glittering sand.
Hsssshhhhh.
A grayish smokescreen rose from the ground as it began sinking dramatically under their feet. Harry squinted his itching eyes and pressed his hand over his mask as the room drained. When only a few dregs of muddled brown sand were left, they were left on a floor of stala grating with a second floor full of iron ports underneath it. The holes in the under-floor were left open, showing another level of the factory below.
Harry was stunned by the amount of machinery now exposed to the air. Tons of conveyor belts—big, but not bizarrely gigantic—fed into giant iron boxes, some with viewing windows that showed bunch of complicated doohickeys inside. Despite the factory having been partially re-powered, the machines remained inactive. Blue walked up to the jungle of stone conduits linking the iron behemoths to the walls and each other with Zelda's book in hand. He soon disappeared behind a bank of housings that cartoonishly dwarfed him. Yellow sighed and followed him.
"Ooh, look at this cool hammer!" Red exclaimed. He pushed aside some of the Goron and Hylian bones the worm had left behind to lift up an unusual sledgehammer. Its head was themed after a dragon's, with a scale-engraved red and bronze snout on one end and a squarish set of spiraling ram's horns on the other side. The dragon had "eyes", too, in the form of an orange Bluestone crystal set into each side of the head. Harry scrutinized the unusual shape of the piece of equipment. He supposed it was less a sledgehammer and more like an oversized claw-hammer. In a Goron's hands it would have been a delicate instrument, but Red was having a little trouble handling it.
"I think it's around four kilos," he grunted as he put it into a two-handed overhead swing, then forced it to a stop in midair. It took a visible amount of strain to keep him from tipping over. "I bet I could brain a Bokoblin pretty good with this," Red said with a grin.
Harry walked over, curious. All the sculpted detail and polished stala screamed "expensive", and if he'd learned anything while window-shopping in Castle Town, expensive things in Hyrule were usually enchanted. That Bluestone in the eyes was definitely a clue. Something this striking wasn't just a common piece of equipment; someone had gotten it made custom for sure. Maybe even a Hylian employee of the foundry, given the tool's relatively small size.
Red lifted the hammer overhead, sent a mischievous glance at the machines that Yellow and Blue had disappeared behind, and swung. Partway through the hammer's arc, the dragon's orange eyes flashed turquoise. The fanged mouth on the back of the tool opened and spat a focused jet of blue-white energy. Red's head snapped up in surprise as the hammer shot down. "Whuh?!"
BONNNNG!
The rocket-powered hammer met the grating underfoot with a deafening, bell-like clang, sending anything not bolted to the floor briefly airborne. Harry landed from his unexpected flight with only a small stumble. Meanwhile there was an echoing shout from Blue, followed by a series of thumps and the transmitted feeling of several new bumps and scrapes. "WHAT THE HELL, RED?" Blue hollered from the unseen crevice he'd fallen deeper into. "YOU MADE ME DROP ZELDA!"
"I thought it'd be loud, not big!" Red shouted back. "How was I supposed to know someone stuck a train jet on it?"
"Okay, this thing was definitely custom," Harry said, taking the tool from Red before he could cause any more trouble with it. Letting him handle a rocket-boosted sledgehammer was only marginally safer than giving him free reign with Bomb Flowers. The hammer rested comfortably, if heavily, in Harry's grip. He supposed that meant it was "balanced", or something; that was one of the terms in Ravio's sword journal that he didn't have much understanding of. "I bet this thing was left behind because it was confiscated for being too dangerous. Or maybe it was the 'big trouble' hammer and they only brought it out for emergencies," Harry remarked, putting the tool through a few slowed-down sword maneuvers. Its weight would make for great muscle training; he'd definitely have to add it to his morning exercise routine. "I can't imagine everyone here swinging around something like this. They would've been causing cave-ins all over the place!"
"Who has the blank scroll?" Red asked.
"I do!" Yellow called out. "But hang on a second, please—I'm working Blue free."
After a couple minutes of instructions and pulling from Yellow, Blue emerged, grease-stained and mutinous, from under a conveyor belt. "If you add that hammer to our weapons list, you are not allowed to use it," he growled at Red as he stomped over. He freed himself from most of the grease with a Scouring Charm and used a few spaced-apart Episkeys from his wand to fix his bruises somewhat. "Do you know how many layers of wiring you knocked me down?"
"Why were you climbing around the wiring in the first place?" Red asked. "I thought you were just looking at it. You know, like a normal person. Is Zelda's book still back there?"
Yellow held up the Hylian Bestiary. "Seeing a web of magic-channeling stone conduits from the inside was certainly a new experience," Zelda wrote cheerfully. "It's a shame they've lost functionality. I would have liked to see the power in these futuristic machines."
"Well, if you want to see power, we've just found a hammer with a train rocket on it!" Red declared, snatching the tool back from Harry. He held its shining head up to the book. "It hits so hard, I bet I could use it to break rocks and walls without blowing any of us up!"
Blue grabbed the hammer. "Or you could collapse the room by recklessly swinging it around. You need to be careful with something like this in a place known for cave-ins!"
Red winced and nodded in consideration. "Right, I forgot about that."
"Because you have the memory of a—"
"Blue." Yellow put a hand on his brother's shoulder and squeezed. Blue went quiet. "I know we're all very tense because Green just got eaten and we're in a scary place, but picking fights isn't going to help," Yellow said patiently. He reached for the hammer and plucked it from Blue's slack grip. "Now why don't we pick up the other things the worm dropped, learn how this neat hammer works, and then have a nice snack break?"
Item get: Dragon Hammer. Crafted by a Hylian who went on to become a well-known locomotive rocket engineer, this weapon features a pulse jet at the center of its head to give hard swings some extra oomph. Though much lighter than it looks, it isn't an agile weapon for most humans at a weight of 4kg/8.8lbs. As a trade-off for that heft, though, every strike hits just as hard as a precisely-placed Bomb!
Notes:
-Hallucinations may be physically harmless on their own, but they have a very real psychological and emotional effect that can drive people to harm themselves in many different ways. If you start seeing things, please don't pull a Harry and brush it off.
-The visual aesthetic of the old-timey computer in this chapter is blue-tinted MS-DOS and its booting-up noise is the same gonging sound that Guardians in BOTW make when they come online. If you're scratching your head over Harry's interaction with said 50+ year old computer, remember this story is set in 1993 and those "tape-spitting behemoths" he was comparing it to are only 30 years old from his perspective. Also, downloading ANYTHING would have taken for-freaking-ever on a 1993 computer (going by my personal experience circa 1999), so it taking less than a minute to download a large, complicated map is lightning-quick for this time period.
-A Maiden's power crystal is in this dungeon, don't worry! It fully slipped the boys' minds to ask about it because stopping Death Mountain's eruptions and helping people took first priority.
-You wouldn't believe the amount of research I had to do on foundries behind the scenes because, like an idiot, I decided to set this level in an industrial environment that I knew nothing about other than "looks cool and melts metal, I guess?" Foundries have so much sand, guys. They've got special flavors of sand that come in different colors and sand-grinding machines and everything. The sand is for casting parts! It's either compacted wet or baked into the shape of a mold that liquid metal is then poured into.
-The Molgera the Harrys fought in this chapter was a juvenile, right in between the larval and adult stages.