by Andrew Rowe
That may have actually been the first time since I’d come to Kaldwyn that I’d found and identified a trap before triggering it. I felt very proud of my accomplishment.
I pointed at it. “Trap ahead. Watch out for it.”
“Ooh, I see it! Good call.”
I nodded, then cautiously slipped around the trap.
As soon as I reached the opposite side of it and stepped down onto the seemingly normal ground ahead, I heard a click.
Oh, come on!
There was a loud rumbling sound coming from the hallway ahead of me.
“Eep!” Reika exclaimed.
At this point, I wasn’t afraid. I was many things — frustrated, irritated, and maybe even a little bit angry.
Most of all, I was absolutely done with tricks and traps.
So, rather than fleeing for my life down the hall to the safety of the previous area like I was probably intended to do, I pushed forward.
I saw the boulder rolling down the hall, tens of thousands of pounds and rushing at me with crushing force.
Body of Stone.
Stone mana flooded through my body. I dropped my sword. Cutting the boulder in half might have worked, but that wasn’t my plan.
I braced myself, calling on the power of fire and destruction and forming them into my left arm.
I slammed my fist forward into the approaching boulder, pushing my aura outward as I made contact.
My arm tore right into it, then the mixture of fire and raw destructive power rippled outward. The boulder exploded, shards flying outward in all directions. The splinters that hit me disintegrated on contact with my aura before they could deal any damage.
I paused, took a breath, and pulled my sword out of the ground. The area around me was devastated. The pieces of the boulder had wrecked the nearest walls.
I turned around to check on Reika. She was uninjured, holding one of the larger shards of stone that had slipped past me in her hand.
“Warn me before you explode something next time.” She tossed the chunk of rock aside, and I felt a pang of guilt. If she’d been some ordinary civilian, that explosion might have hurt her. Then, after a moment, she added, “...Also, Dawn says you murdered another rock.”
I sighed. I’d hoped to impress her with that one, too. But in fairness, Reika probably could have punched out a boulder pretty easily herself.
Still, I didn’t have any regrets about my approach. I kicked a piece of the boulder on the ground, and said, “This one deserved it.”
I turned around, picked my sword back up, then continued down the hall.
The hallway continued for another dozen meters before I reached a ramp that went up toward the ceiling. Upon inspection, the area the ramp led up to didn’t seem to be another path; there was just a small section in the ceiling area where the boulder appeared to have been stored until the trap was triggered.
I passed the ramp, coming to another junction in the path.
This one had three possible directions. There were big, silvery doors on the left and right side of the hall, as well as directly in front of me.
The doors ahead of me were the largest, and they also had two huge keyholes in them. I immediately presumed that I was probably supposed to go through each of the other two paths, obtain a key, and then come back to this door.
But my right arm was still numb from the poison, I was exhausted, and I was reaching the limit of how much sorcery I could safely use without taking a break. Maybe I should have taken a break, but I also didn’t know if the tests were timed, or if they’d simply activate more traps if I took longer.
I walked up to the door, leveled the sheathed Sae’kes, and began to cut holes in it.
“I’m not sure that’s how you’re supposed to do that,” Reika objected.
I turned back to her. “Just making a short cut....get it?”
Reika snorted. “Dawn says that was an awful pun and you should be ashamed, but she laughed, so I think she secretly liked it.” She paused. “Also she says I am a traitor for selling her out, and now she is pouting.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to finishing my work on cutting through the door. I planned to lever it open just like I’d done on the last one.
“Dawn says you’re allowed to skip the other rooms, but she wants to see if they have anything exciting inside first.”
I rolled my eyes in exasperation, but I acquiesced. I was doing this whole thing to make her happy in the first place, so doing it halfway wasn’t really meeting my own objectives.
I moved toward the door on the left. It occurred to me that I might have triggered something inside the central room by cutting through the door, but I didn’t worry about it too much.
I repeated the cutting process on the left door. It probably could have opened easily without it, but I wasn’t risking any more poisoned handles if it was avoidable. After that, I used my sword to lever it open.
The door led into a long hallway with another door on the opposite side. Aside from that, I saw absolutely nothing of interest. No monsters, no obvious square tiles cut out in the floor.
I stepped away. “Well, that was exciting. I’ll go check the other door.”
“Dawn says she wants you to go down the hall and check the door on the other side.”
I sighed. “Of course she does. Should I also deliberately step on all the traps, so she can see what they do?”
“She says yes, that would be ideal.” Reika gave me an apologetic look. “And she thanks you for asking.”
I slumped my shoulders. “Fine. But if this kills me, I’m going to haunt you both.”
“I eat ghosts, remember?”
I frowned. “I was pretty sure you weren’t serious when you said that.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.” She smiled wide, exposing teeth that seemed somewhat sharper than I remembered.
“Right. Hallway it is.”
I walked into the obviously trapped hallway, once again proving that I have no sense of self-preservation at all.
Reika waited outside. I glanced back at her questioningly. “Not coming?”
“I can see just fine from here.”
“It’s almost like you know there’s something awful in there.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “You can’t prove anything.”
I groaned and kept walking down the hall.
When I heard the loud cranking noise and the walls began to move inward, I was hardly surprised. More resigned, really.
I didn’t even slow down.
Wide destruction aura.
My aura stretched across my scabbard again, then extended outward into a broader shape, like a shovel.
I swung as I advanced, left and right, obliterating stone as the hallway continued to narrow.
The walls kept closing in, but it didn’t matter. They met just above me, but I’d disintegrate a whole area, more than wide enough to stand in.
My slicing through the rock hadn’t cleared a path behind me, however. The walls had slammed entirely shut behind me, barring the way back to Reika — and her view of the area.
The main disadvantage of this was that the hallway was unlit. The aura of destructive essence around the Sae’kes was my only light source, and it wasn’t nearly as bright as Dawnbringer. Especially while it was sheathed.
I briefly considered conjuring a ball of flame to provide additional light, but I decided against it. The poison and my injuries had weakened me too much to use up any more of my strength on something unnecessary.
I pushed forward rather than cutting my way backward. I could return later.
I cut the next door open, then pulled my aura back around my body. After that, I pushed the door aside with my scabbard like usual.
The next room was filled nearly from wall to wall with glittering treasure.
Piles of coins made up the bulk of it, covering the room nearly from floor to ceiling. Mixed in were hundreds of other objects — everything from candlesticks to hel
mets to brilliantly gilded swords.
That was what my sight told me.
My metal sense, however, painted a very different picture. I felt only the slightest hint of metal in the room — about the size of a single key, if I had to guess.
I didn’t know if the treasure was purely illusionary, or maybe it was just painted wood or some other non-metal material. I wasn’t going to bother finding out, either.
I stood just outside the room, closing my eyes. I reached out with my metal sense toward the single metal object, concentrated, and tried to picture it in my mind.
Then I added a strong metallic magnetic pull to my scabbard.
What followed next would best be described as cacophonous. My clever “solution” had triggered about a hundred traps at once.
Arrows flew from a dozen holes on opposite sides of the chamber. If I’d been inside, I’d have been pincushioned. Then all those gold pieces started to explode. They weren’t large explosions, of course, but tiny pieces of their actual material — wood — were scattered throughout the chamber. Some of it even managed to escape the open doorway, but I stepped behind the door and shielded myself from the worst of it.
From behind the door, I couldn’t even see all of the traps. I felt the heat, though, as flames ripped throughout the room and incinerated some of the remaining fake treasure.
Then the snakes woke up. I don’t even know where they’d been hiding before, but yeah, there were snakes. Very large snakes, and the kind that apparently weren’t harmed by fire.
I heard them hiss and rear up — I counted six of them. One of them took a spike to the head as another trap triggered, but the other five started slithering toward me.
It was only at that point that the key finally reached me. I saw it flying through the doorway just in time to deactivate the magnetism on my sword, causing it to drop to the floor.
I kicked the closest snake as it tried to slither out and bite me, then swept my foot downward to move the key back in the direction I’d come from.
Another snake started to inhale, which I didn’t like the look of, so I kicked the door shut. A blast of flame hit the door, with a fraction of it slipping through the hole I’d created when I’d cut it open. Fortunately, I wasn’t directly in line with it.
Reshape.
I commanded the metal of the door to flatten, both covering the hole and then stretching to tighten in the frame. It wasn’t the same as locking it, but it would hold as long as whatever was on the other side wasn’t particularly strong.
Something slammed into the door a moment later, shaking it and denting the metal.
Apparently one of the snakes — or worse, something else inside I hadn’t seen — was pretty strong.
I knelt down, grabbed the key, and began cutting my way back toward Reika.
The door burst off its hinges, a single huge snake stared at me from the other side.
I turned around to look back at it. I couldn’t even manage to be incredulous at this point. Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe snakes just had some way of turning into a single giant snake here. That seemed to make about as much sense as anything else on this continent.
While I was busy wondering how any ordinary people could possibly survive in a land like Kaldwyn, the snake lunged forward into the hallway. It was so large that it could barely fit its head and neck down the hall.
I hurled a blast of flame at its eyes on instinct, momentarily blinding it.
Belatedly, I remembered my morals. “Uh, you’re not a friendly and intelligent serpent by any chance, are you?”
The snake hissed and stretched forward, jaws wide. It couldn’t quite reach me yet, but it lashed out with a huge tongue, which was barbed. Because sure, if snakes can merge and breathe fire, why not have barbed tongues, too?
I stepped to the side, swinging upward.
Then it didn’t have a barbed tongue. Or not an entire one, at least.
It pulled back instantly, letting out an enraged hiss and slamming its head against one of the sides of the hall in the process.
I felt the stone begin to shift above me.
That was not a good sign.
I threw another blast of flame at it as a distraction, then went back to cutting my way out of the hall.
It only took a few more moments. I was practically running forward as I was cutting, and I barely stopped myself from cutting straight into Reika as I rushed outward in a panic.
“Snake snake snake!” I managed, brilliant and articulate as usual.
“What did you call me?!” Reika replied indignantly, folding her arms and ignoring how close I’d come to slashing her.
I ran right past her.
The snake’s gigantic head was right behind me, its maw opening wide.
“Oh.”
As funny as it might have been, it didn’t eat Reika. Instead, it kept following me as far as it could...and then stopped.
When I was cutting my way through that hallway, I wasn’t exactly cutting it perfectly evenly. That was fine for me, since I was human-sized and it wasn’t difficult to tunnel through material while rapidly swinging a sword that disintegrated everything in the path of its aura.
For a giant snake, though, it was vastly less convenient.
Apparently, at least some part of the snake was a bit wider than the head. Maybe it also had a spiked tail, or some ridges further down on the back.
Whatever the cause, though, the result was the same — the snake got stuck tight.
“Snake!” Reika shouted excitedly.
The snake growled — which I’m not sure snakes are supposed to do, but hey, this one had all sorts of weird abilities — and turned its head toward Reika.
“Ahh!” At first, I thought that sound meant Reika was afraid, until she clasped her hands together. “It’s so adorable!”
The snake snapped its jaws at us angrily, struggling, but it couldn’t get any closer.
Reika turned toward me. “Can we keep it? Please?”
I stared at her. “You want to keep the giant death snake.”
“Yeah! I’ve never had a pet before. I mean, I tried to take one of those razor bat things as a pet once, but it kept escaping.” She frowned. “But this seems perfect! It’s even got scales like me!”
“And how are we going to feed it? It’s the size of a wagon.”
Reika folded her arms. “It’s smaller than my dragon form. And don’t make Snakey feel self-conscious about his weight, it’s rude. He’s a big boy, but I can tell that—”
The snake somehow managed to worm a bit closer to us, snapping again. We both absently stepped out of the way of the creature’s jaws, continuing the discussion.
“We’re barely able to keep ourselves fed, Reika. We can’t support a giant death snake.”
Reika sighed. “But I want one.”
I turned back toward the snake. “Is it even real? Aren’t most of the things in here magical constructs? Wouldn’t it just disappear when we leave?”
“...Oh. I guess that might be true.” Her shoulders slumped. “I guess we’re just going to have to find a real one outside.”
We’d been ignoring the snake for long enough that I’d forgotten it still had a way of hurting us.
It started taking a deep breath, which I knew by now was probably a signal that it was about to exhale a blast of fire.
I realized what it was doing at the last moment and shifted to throw myself in the way of the blast, hoping to deflect the fire away from Reika. It wasn’t necessarily a wise move — I was in a lot worse shape than she was — but I acted on instinct.
Fortunately, my decision wasn’t a fatal one. The snake stopped halfway into inhaling, breaking into a cough accompanied by a breath of lukewarm and harmless air.
After that, it coughed a few more moments, then laid still on the ground.
“...Did Snakey just die?” Reika asked.
We both stared at it, uncertain. It wasn’t moving.
I turned to Reika, then sighe
d and sheathed my sword. “I’m going to push it back into the hall.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if it’s alive, slowly suffocating because it’s being crushed by rubble is an awful way to go?”
“Oh. I guess so. I’ll miss you, Snakey!”
I sighed. She’s going to ask me for a giant snake later, isn’t she?
I reached out to push on the snake’s head. As my hand got close, however, the snake vanished. “Oh. Illusion, I guess.”
Reika shook her head. “No, not the typical variety, at least. It was displacing rocks. And I felt heat when it tried to use its breath. It was solid. Maybe a summoned monster or a solid illusion construct, like what a Shadow can make.”
I blinked at Reika. It was easy to forget that she probably knew a lot more about the local magic than I did. “How’d it vanish, then?” I glanced around. “Does that mean there’s someone that summoned it deliberately, and just dismissed it?”
“Maybe, or it just ran out of the mana that was keeping it here. Either because the damage it sustained was causing a mana leak, or because it simply ran out of time.”
“Hm.” I shook my head. “I guess it doesn’t matter right now. Gone is gone.”
“I’ll miss you, Snakey...” Reika mumbled.
I ignored her.
Her explanation did tell me a little more about what other potential threats I could run into later on in the shrine. The possibility of summoned monsters added another whole type of challenge I could face.
“What else did you see in there?”
“Oh, you know. Thousands of pounds of treasure. Nothing important.”
“What, really?”
“Fake treasure, obviously.”
“Aww.”
I tossed her the key. “But I did find that.”
She caught it deftly. “Ooh, nice work! Guess that’s one hallway down. Were there any more doors beyond that one?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t see any.”
Reika glanced down at the Dawnbringer, then looked back up to me. “Okay. Dawn is satisfied.”
