A Diamond in the Rough

“Alright, you little shit. Here’s how this is going to work.”

Mercury peered into the tiny cage that she’d just set down on a tall boulder. Her expression was a devious and not entirely friendly smirk at the small monkey that glared up at her through the bars. “I’m here for one thing and one thing only. Thanks to my good buddy Theo, I know all your little tricks and schemes. Unlike him, however, I’m not so easily distracted by mountains of treasure and gold, and I very easily have the means of keeping you locked up where you won’t get into trouble.”

The irritable little creature screeched at her, grabbing hold of the black metal bars of the prison that Mercury had hand crafted for him out of her magic and shaking it in a rage, demanding his freedom. “Ah ah ah,” she told him with a patient little waggle of her finger. “You are here to be my guide, and nothing more. By all means, feel free to test me on this once we’re inside, but I don’t recommend it.” The monkey continued to scream in protest, but Mercury ignored the sound.

Using her magic, she manipulated the cage so that it could float in the air without her having to hold it and then turned to face her destination. Only a few steps away was the entrance to a supposed cave of wonders that her fellow ace had asked for help with. Inside was supposedly some kind of stone that encased a bomb of nuclear proportions, which the other Silver Wolf mage had tasked himself with retrieving. Unfortunately, Theo had a some kind of kink for all things wealthy, which was a problem because apparently this cave was piled to the ceiling with unimaginable treasure that would cause the whole place to fall down around his ears if he touched it.

It was a problem that Mercury didn’t have, so from that particular danger she felt safe. But according to Theo, it seemed the cave had other surprises in store, including a gorilla made of gold that might pop out to try and kill her at some point. Frankly, that one just sounded like a challenge. But, she only had ten minutes to get in, get the bomb, and get out before the whole cave would apparently try to trap her inside or something.

Unholstering Mercy from her hip, Mercury kept the weapon in pistol form as she entered the cavern. Once she stepped foot inside, she started a timer in her head so she could keep track of her time. Pulling out a few drones, she tossed them into the air where they hovered for a moment before shooting off ahead of her into the cavern, examining everything with their laser sensors and building a map that fed back to the tablet in Mercury’s free hand.

There certainly was an impressive amount of treasure in the place. It took a minute or so before she came across any significant amounts of the stuff, but soon she was bearing witness to mountains of gold and jewels that made the haul from her first job with Vandrad look like pittance in comparison. While the lavender haired woman didn’t really have much interest in the valuables themselves -- after all, Vandrad had let her have the entirety of the treasure from that mission, and she was now sitting on quite the fortune -- she had to admit that her more competitive nature wondered if she should take the risk of trying to steal some of it anyway at the end of the mission, just to say she’d successfully done so.

She was sorely tempted, but for now remained focused on the mission at hand. Making sure to watch where she stepped, Mercury navigated her way through the piles with careful precision so as to keep herself from walking across a wayward coin or necklace or something. Stars forbid that she keep herself from being tempted by the unholy amount of loot just to trigger the cave’s failsafe defenses anyway with a careless stride.

As she passed through the seemingly endless cavernous hallways, skirting the cursed goodies, she kept her eyes both on her tablet and on the monkey. His eyes did indeed seem to keep flicking toward the same direction, which was good because he didn’t seem to want to give her any directions at all, whether right or wrong, since she’d so rudely locked him up. He continued to screech and tug on the bars to no avail, furious about being imprisoned and even more furious at how casually and easily she seemed to ignore his protests.

Things were going fine until he suddenly went silent for a moment. Glancing at him out of the corner of her eyes, Mercury noticed that he had his hand behind his back, specifically beneath his ass. It seemed his strategy of poop flinging was about to commence. With a smirk, Mercury let him get far enough to get the excrement in his hand and rear back before the cage suddenly burst into a frenzy of black lightning. It wasn’t enough to kill him or do any real damage, at least for the moment, but the creature still shrieked in surprise and pain, dropping the fecal matter from his hand before falling on top of the mess himself.

“Now, what did I tell you?” she asked him without turning to look at him. “Testing me is not the smart choice, little man. I am here for one thing, and nothing is going to stop me from getting it. Not even you. So, are you going to behave or am I going to have to turn up the heat?” The bars around the cage crackled with a bit more of the lightning, close enough to be a threat but contained enough that he wasn’t brought to any actual harm yet. He shrieked again and shied away from the bars, but made no more attempts to slug fecal matter at her.

Based off of the readings on her tablet, Mercury’s drones had located the stone artifact she’d been sent to find. It wasn’t much further inside, and between her drone and the monkey’s betraying gaze, she was actually making pretty good time. When she finally got to the large cavern that the artifact resided in, there was still a whole five minutes left for her venture. “Ah, yes. Excellent,” she remarked with a smile.

The stone itself was a sandy grey color with a series of ancient looking runes carved into it. Set into the face of it was a small stone that she theorized was the supposed nuke that she was looking for. Approaching the thing, she let the drones scan it as the monkey was left in the hovering cage, doing his best to reach out for a bit of treasure that was just beyond his grasp. The reading her drones came back with assured her that this stone was definitely what she was looking for, as it seemed to be charged with enough energy that it could very reasonably wipe several miles of the surrounding area off the map, and her along with it.

Deciding it was best to not touch the stone until she’d had enough time to examine it properly for safety, Mercury punched a few commands into her tablet. The drones arranged themselves around the artifact and began to carve out the rock around it in a circle with a series of red lasers. Once they had completed a circuit and cut a clean sphere around the artifact, they pulled the whole piece out of the rest of the stone with blue rays of light that had a gravitational pull to them. Once the artifact was out, it hovered delicately between the three devices.

“Well, that was easier than I expected,” she told herself. “I didn’t even see the…” As Mercury turned, she found herself face to face with a much bigger monkey whose body was, in fact, made of pure gold. It had bright red rubies for eyes and when it roared in her face a set of sharp diamond teeth revealed themselves. “Gorilla,” she said, finishing her sentence.

The creature reared up its arms swung at her with both hands. Out of pure instinct, Mercury tapped into the part of her magic that gave her control over metal and, without touching him, threw him back several meters where he crashed into a wall with a smack that shook the whole cavern. It was time to go. Punching a quick code into her tablet, she sent her drones racing ahead of her toward the exit and took off running in the same direction. The cage of the smaller monkey dropped to the ground, forgotten, as Mercury had no care or interest in taking the little pest out of the cave with her.

Pulling another device out of her pocket, she threw it in front of her. It expanded into a disk that hovered in the air, and immediately took flight as soon as she stepped on it. The gorilla had already nearly caught up to her, its great arms reaching out in an attempt to swipe her and instead cutting through air as she barely dodged past its reach. It leaped up to try and grab her again, but she was hovering too far over him. For now, at least. She still had to pass through the rest of the cavern to get back out, and not all of it had a vaulted ceiling as this room did.

She also only had about two minutes left to get out. Zipping through the caverns, crouched low on her device to allow herself to be more aerodynamic, she made a mad dash toward the exit of the cave, but the gorilla was gaining on her quickly. Reaching her magic out to the gold littered about the room, caring less about potential consequences now that her objective was, in a manner of speaking, in her hands, she formed a large, thick wall that the gorilla slammed face first into. She could hear the creature booming with unbridled fury before it charged the wall again, this time easily managing to break right through it and send gold flying everywhere.

Her other risky challenge teased at the back of her head, and the smug part of her caved to its wishes. Floating around the caves until her drones had made it safely outside, Mercury kept her eyes and sensored peeled for another thing she’d decided to try and look for. The gorilla continued to race behind her, leaping and swinging at her in animalistic rage as she continued to dodge it. “Ah, there you are!”

She finally had found the pile where a throne was half buried at the top of it, a single and ridiculously adorned crown resting on the back of its seat. Mercury steered her hovercraft toward it and snatched it up. The second her fingers touched it, the entire cavern yawned and pitched violently, the entire space seeming to reach down to swallow her up. Mercury pushed her disc for every ounce of speed that it had, careening toward the exit which was quickly starting to constrict.

Right when she was starting to think she might not make it, Mercury burst out of the entrance of the cave, having to quite literally throw herself from the disc to dive through the small hole that was left. She rolled violently along the ground, her momentum only coming to a stop after she’d skidded a solid fifty yards from where she’d lost control. As her equilibrium came back down from all the dizziness, she looked up to see her drones hovering above her with the prize she’d come for. Lifting a hand, she confirmed that she’d also managed to leave with one of the prizes Theo had come for.

The woman burst into laughter, practically delirious from the adrenaline, and just laid there for a bit to collect herself and calm down. When she finally was able to, she stood and searched for her disc. It had been smashed to pieces by the closure of the entrance. Oh well. A small price to pay for a completed job, and she kept spares on hand for just this reason. Pulling out another, she made her way back to the guildhall, twirling the crown around her finger with a pleased and smug grin on her face.