by Andrew Rowe
I hoped Researcher was safe.
We headed to the blue room.
As soon as we were inside, I heard a loud ticking on the right side of the room. A clock had started, listing three hundred seconds.
There were no obvious traps, so we headed closer to the spheres, which were positioned about ten feet from the gap in the floor.
At that distance, I could see more details, and with that, more complications.
First, the wheel was surrounded by translucent crystal, similar to the walls I’d seen in the prison. There were gaps on the top side of the crystal, but only right around the outer ring of the wheel.
Second, the outer ring of the wheel was spinning faster than the central section, meaning that they were separate pieces. We couldn’t just throw the ball inside and expect it to roll directly down the nearest wedge in the funnel section — the momentum of the outer wheel would probably move it around a bit before it fell.
Third, there were tons of tiny runes on the walls of the room. I wanted to read them, but there wasn’t enough time. I could tell at a glance that several of them involved attack spells.
Fourth, I could now read the inner “wedges” that lead to the holes.
There were twelve in total. Some were more pleasant than others.
Monsters!
Traps!
Fabulous Prizes!
Bigger Traps!
Stairs Up!
Extremely Dangerous Traps!
I Forgot What This One Does!
Money!
Moderately Dangerous Traps!
Mystery!
Bigger Monsters!
Literally Nothing!
We had a moment of silence while we all processed the goddess’ terrible sense of humor.
Well, most of us. Patrick snickered a little.
“Aiming for the stairs is obvious, but we’ll also want to figure out which two other ones we want to aim for.” Sheridan noted.
I thought about that. “We could aim for the same spot more than once. Obviously if we miss the stairs on the first time we’ll retry that, but maybe we could trigger the ‘Fabulous Prizes’ one twice?”
Marissa knelt down and began to lift the spheres. She grunted with effort. “These are heavy.” She sat the last one back down. “And they’re not all the same weight.”
The latter part was actually even worse — it meant that the first throw wouldn’t necessarily dictate the behavior of future spheres.
I turned to Sheridan. “Think that timer is for the first sphere, or for all three of them?”
“Always assume the worst.”
“Fair. Okay. We need to get this moving. Patrick, can you levitate one?”
Patrick frowned. “I don’t know. If Mara was struggling with them, probably not. Mara, show me the lightest one?”
She pointed to the one in the center.
“Levitate.”
It floated off the ground just a few inches, then bobbed up and back down. That wasn’t how the spell normally behaved.
Patrick took a breath and focused on the sphere. It hovered upward a few more inches. “I can move it, but barely. Might need someone to give it a shove.”
And that means he probably won’t be able to move the heavier ones at all.
“Put it down a sec.”
Patrick dismissed the spell. The sphere dropped, cracking the stone floor below. “Oops.”
I glanced at the clock. Three minutes left.
I quickly explained my plan, and got a round of agreements.
One and a half minutes.
I drew my sword, then charged toward the gap and took a leap.
Jump.
The blast from my ring hurled me toward the wheel.
Blasts of fire shot out from the side walls. Fortunately, I was ready. I slashed in the air and sent shockwaves in both directions. Ice neutralized fire.
I landed atop the crystalline structure that encased the top of the wheel.
I sheathed my sword.
Patrick levitated the first sphere.
Marissa punched it.
It flew at me faster than expected, but I still managed to step in the way and catch it. The impact carried me back a few steps, but I managed to avoid falling into the abyss below.
Sheridan pointed and a pair of walls of bone appeared within the outer wheel.
I rolled the ball until it was at the edge of the crystal, then waited for the wheel to cycle around and dropped it into the section that Sheridan had walled off. It rolled right down into the “Stairs Up!” slot, because that was the only pathway that hadn’t been blocked.
A glowing doorway appeared in the wall next to the entrance, rather than a literal stairway. It had a symbol of an up arrow above the door, so it was still obvious we’d found our path.
The clock continued ticking down. We had two spheres left.
“Go!” I gestured to the others.
Patrick tried to levitate the next sphere, but it was too heavy, as expected.
As Marissa hefted it upward, Sheridan conjured a bone bridge across the gap.
Slowly, Marissa began to carry it across. Rolling it might have been faster, but it was more likely she’d roll the ball right into a pit that way.
I drew my sword just as Marissa began crossing the bridge. The fire traps activated on the sides of the room again, and Marissa wasn’t in any position to defend herself.
I managed to slash one of the fire blasts out of the air, while Patrick shaped the other flames out of the way.
Ten seconds.
I put my sword away, debating if I should try to jump across and do something with the third sphere.
Sheridan conjured another pair of walls inside the wheel, but Marissa lost her grip with her injured hand and dropped the ball a moment too soon.
It landed in the “Mystery!” slot.
Then all the light in the room was gone, and I was falling.
Marissa and I screamed at the same time.
That was nice. At least we had company while we fell rapidly into a seemingly endless abyss.
After a moment, I realized my falling had slowed down because of the ring.
Marissa had no such advantage. Her screaming told me that she was below me, now.
I needed to think fast in case there was a bottom here to hit.
I reached into my bag. “Retrieve: Lantern.”
The magic lantern appeared in my hand, and I activated it immediately.
We were falling down a cylindrical shaft. I still couldn’t see a bottom, but I could see Marissa below — barely.
I didn’t have much time to think about a perfect solution.
I pulled off the ring of jumping, and I began to fall faster. I kept a tight grip on it with one hand, while holding the lantern in my other.
Marissa was still far below me, but she’d flown toward a side wall and now she was trying to slow herself down by grabbing onto it. It wasn’t working.
I pointed my hand upward and focused, then unleashed a spherical burst of transference mana.
The explosion pushed me down.
Below, I thought I could finally start to see the ground, and Marissa was still edging closer to it rapidly.
The “ground” wasn’t a solid floor, of course. That would have been too simple. It was a green, bubbling liquid.
Almost certainly acid.
Possibly acid that was also on fire.
I pushed more mana out of my hand, blasting myself downward faster and faster.
Until I passed her.
I lost my grip on the lantern. Fortunately, it stayed on, even as it plummeted.
I slipped the ring back on.
My movement slowed as it reactivated. Fortunately, the pressure was evenly distributed throughout my body, and it felt more like an upward gust of wind than anything else.
Marissa crashed into me from above. That part hurt.
For a moment, we flailed ineffectively until we caught hold of each other.
T
he ring slowed us both. This was good, because I saw the lantern continue to drop past us, and then I heard the splash and fizzle as it hit the liquid.
It was dark again, except for a light far above us.
I couldn’t see the source, but at least it let me orient myself to be sure I was facing up.
“Hold on!”
A fall was almost certainly going to be fatal. I couldn’t let us down gradually and just try to climb after we’d rested.
My circlet was an option now that I was physically in contact with Mara, but I wasn’t going to give up this soon, and I wasn’t sure it would work.
Jump.
That took us upward a bit, but nowhere near enough.
I repeated it three more times before the ring ran out of mana and ceased to work.
But the ring was just using transference mana. Sure, it had special functions to make sure it emitted from below me, but I’d already proven I could guide myself downward with mana.
How hard could going upward be?
Pretty darn hard, it turned out.
I managed to blast us into the wall, rather than upward.
As we thudded against the wall, though, Marissa formed a blade around her good hand and slammed it into the wall. It made a hole.
She buried her arm in deeper as we began to slip back downward, then held us both in place with just that one arm. I had to cling to her, since she wasn’t in any position to hold onto me.
I was worried her arm was going to break — it certainly would have if she’d tried this on her way down. Fortunately, the ring’s slow falling function was still active, and she still had her own strength-enhancing ring on.
Still, holding us in place with one arm couldn’t have been comfortable.
“Don’t let go,” she instructed me.
“That’s pretty obvious, yeah.”
I’d like to say I came up with some kind of brilliant solution, but in reality, we huddled there against the wall for a solid ten minutes before Patrick finally managed to levitate himself all the way down to us, then made a gust of wind that lifted us back up the shaft.
“Sorry for taking so long. We had to fight the monsters that appeared up there.”
When we finally arrived back on solid ground, we found that the room was once again lit, and a dozen monster corpses were pinned to the walls with spears of bone.
A few of them also looked like they’d been burned.
One of them somehow had been crushed with the single remaining sphere. I wondered how they’d managed that one, but for the moment, Mara and I were both too busy recovering from our terror to say almost anything.
Marissa and I scrambled as quickly as possible away from the edge of the pit, then just sat down with our backs to the wall, next to each other. Breathing. Just breathing.
It took me another minute to realize that aside from the monsters, we had one new addition to the room — a human-sized cube with a question mark written on it, near the door. It had a crease in the middle and a keyhole.
Patrick lifted up a key which was also shaped like a question mark. “Want to see what’s in there?”
“No.” Marissa and I responded immediately.
“Aww.”
I sighed. “Give us five minutes.”
They gave us a good hour. With the clock stopped and the monsters dead, there were no further threats here. No obvious ones, anyway.
I still felt incredibly nervous about the box. I didn’t trust anything in this spire.
I drew my sword before Patrick moved to the keyhole, and Sheridan set up a cage of bone around most of the box — just in case it exploded.
Patrick insisted on being the one to open it. Sheridan left just enough room in her bone cage for him to stick his hand in and turn the key.
There was a click, then nothing. No traps.
Patrick extracted his hand, then pushed on the top half of the box. It fell open.
We couldn’t see through the bone wall, but Patrick could see through the hole he’d reached through.
His eyes widened.
“We’re going to be rich.”
***
Most of the contents of the box turned out to be coins. Gold, silver, and copper.
Money was always good, but the items inside interested all of us more.
There were six of them, presumably because the spire was designed for six people.
The first was a spear, leaned up against one of the walls of the box. It looked like a single piece of wood that had grown naturally into a spear shape, rather than cut. At the center, the bottom, and the tip of the spear, blue gleaming crystals were embedded in the wood, and light seemed to radiate outward from them like veins.
The second was a shirt of greenish metallic leaves. It proved to be both lightweight and extremely resilient. Also, shiny.
The third was a pair of completely ordinary looking boots. They looked a little small for me.
The fourth was a hatchet made out of polished blue stone with a leather grip.
The fifth was a classic longbow with a dozen golden runes etched into the wood.
The last was an unlabeled potion bottle filled with blue liquid.
All six of them glowed with Citrine-level auras.
“This might actually be worth almost dying.” Mara leaned forward, focusing on inspecting the weapons.
Sheridan looked at me. “Can you identify items yet?”
“Only a little. I can cast a Lesser Identify spell, but it doesn’t tell me much.”
After we confirmed there were no hidden traps in the box, we extracted the items and laid them down. I spent a few minutes inspecting the runes I could find on each, as well as casting the Lesser Identify spell on each of them.
Lesser Identify just told me the specific mana type of the strongest enchantment on each.
The axe and spear, as well as the armored shirt, had enhancement as their strongest magic type. That was unsurprising; enhancement was the standard mana type for both making items harder to break and for making weapons hit harder.
The bow and the boots had air.
The boots were almost definitely levitation boots, which would have saved us a tremendous amount of trouble if we’d had them a few minutes earlier. That was probably also an element of the goddess’ sense of humor.
The bow I was less sure about, but air magic to guide arrows or make them fly faster made sense.
I couldn’t get any results from the bottle, presumably because the liquid was the magical part.
I didn’t try casting Lesser Identify on the liquid because I knew some liquids — like the primer I’d taken from the fountain — reacted to magic being cast on them. I’d have to find a better way to figure out what it was for.
We decided we’d need to figure out what the items did in detail before we split them up permanently, but that we’d hand out some temporary assignments for the moment.
The boots only fit Marissa, so she took those and shoved them in her pack.
Patrick took the spear. He already had a magic weapon, but he said having one with more reach would be useful.
Sheridan took both the hatchet and the bow. As the only actual Citrine-level person there, it made sense for them to have a larger share of the spoils.
I threw on the shirt of leaves. It required moving my silver phoenix sigil to my pants and taking off my other shield sigil entirely to prevent them from overlapping, but it was a Citrine-level defensive item. Marissa didn’t want it — she was worried about it ruining her mobility — so I was the next best candidate.
I stored the potion in the Jaden Box.
We counted up the gold pieces — there were only twenty of those — and split them evenly. It was still a lot of money.
There were so many other coins that I just shoveled them all into the Jaden Box and stored them to distribute later.
When we were done and recovered, we headed to the doorway with the up arrow and opened it.
On the other side of the door,
there was a glowing portal, rather than a stairway.
I glanced at Sheridan.
“Not unusual. There’s usually only one physical stairway on each floor. You’re stepping in a teleporter any time you go into another part of the spire, anyway. This is just a fancier version.”
I nodded at that. “I’ll go in first.”
Mara stepped up next to me. “Right behind you.”
I stepped into the portal.
When my vision cleared, I was in the center of another room.
It was pure white, and mostly empty, save for a pair of regal-looking doors about twenty feet away from me.
I glanced behind me, finding another door of the more routine variety on the opposite side of the room. The ceiling was a high one, probably dozens of meters up.
I waited, but my friends didn’t appear next to me like they should have.
Instead, the doors across me opened, and someone stepped out from between them.
“Hello, little brother. I’ve been expecting you.”
Chapter XXIV – Scales of the Serpent
Five years had changed Tristan Cadence a great deal, but visually, he was much the same.
He was tall, with the athletic physique of a professional duelist, and the impeccable confidence to match. His brown hair was our mother’s, but it had grown much longer in his time away from home.
He may have had characteristics that mirrored our father as well, but I chose to ignore those.
Tristan wore a formal tunic that trailed to his feet, and a sword belted on his hip. He slowly shook his head. “I warned you not to come here, but I knew you wouldn’t listen.”
He opened his arms wide. “Welcome to my humble home.”
I glanced from side to side. “Where are my friends?”
Tristan chuckled. “They’re fine. They went straight to a safe room on the next floor. I made special arrangements for when you passed through that doorway.”
I nodded slowly, examining the area further. “Was this all a part of your plan, then? Telling me not to come here, just to encourage me to do it?”
“No, no. I was sincere about that. It really was dangerous for you to come here, and you shouldn’t stay long. We’re both in danger right now. But since you made it obvious you were too stubborn to leave from written instructions alone, I decided it would be wise to tell you directly.”
