The upside of having landed so close to the portal hub was that they had a pretty strong route already planned out. Everyone knew the door was in an area known as the Stalking Depths, and that the quickest way to get there from the portal hub was to head straight south into the Mortuary, then through that to Black Walls and Blood Thorn Garden.
The good news was that they could power through that in a day or two. The bad news was that it was the most commonly run route to the Stalking Depths, which meant it was the most likely path to encounter climbers-turned-bandits sniffing after legendary treasures. However, Sorin was a lot less worried about that now that he knew no one above rank 24—apart from Samael himself—was likely to present themselves.
It would still be better to avoid a fight if possible. Killing other climbers does nothing but risk our lives to enrich Morlin Telpike’s coffers, and he’s already profiting enough from this arrangement.
It turned out that the Quarry, while one of the most likely places to run into other climbers, was not free of monsters. There was a reason Yoru had mistaken it for the Grinding Vault, as the two areas had a lot in common. The Quarry was ringed by a small maze of passages full of traps, and old bloodstains were as much a clue as they were a distraction.
“Hold up,” Sorin said as they came to a T-intersection in a hall. “This thing is rigged.”
It wasn’t obvious just by looking at it. Nemari and Rue were scouring the seemingly empty floor with their eyes, but there was nothing there to see. Odric and Yoru, however, both had Earth Shaping, which functioned as a rudimentary sensory soulprint to help them feel out what exactly they were trying to change.
“Weighted ceiling,” Odric said softly to Yoru and getting a nod in return.
“Where’s the trigger mechanism, though?” the other asked.
That was the problem with Earth Shaping. It wasn’t showing them the metal gearworks. To be fair, Living Earth wasn’t giving Sorin a clear picture of where exactly all that iron was going, but he understood enough simply by knowing where the stone wasn’t.
“Pressure plates in the floor,” Sorin said, pointing at a spot right in the center of the intersection. “With multiple backup plates scattered on each side in case we try to skirt around the edge.”
They could walk through it easily enough so long as Sorin helped coach them on where to step and where to avoid. For anyone who wasn’t aware of the trap, though, they’d likely be crushed under several tons of stone. The only clue he could see without some sort of earth sensing soulprint was a lone scuff mark up near the ceiling, and even that could be easily dismissed on its own.
The tower really doesn’t play fair. This is why it’s so important to get those utility soulprints in the build and not just pile on more and more offense.
Sorin used Living Earth to rip a chunk of granite out of the wall and pulverize it. Then he cast the dust out to coat the floor and walked across the trapped area, leaving clear footprints showing where it was safe to step. The rest of the team followed closely, doing their best to place their feet exactly where his own footprints were. In that way, they quickly navigated the trap without triggering it.
“If only they were all so easy,” Sorin said. “There weren’t even any monsters to ambush us in the middle.”
“Don’t say it too loud, or the tower is going to get ideas,” Nemari told him.
“Oh, trust me, it already knows that play.”
“Best not to remind it, though.”
“I didn’t think you were superstitious.”
“Who’s superstitious? You’ve literally talked to the tower. It’s alive and interested in us specifically. We kind of have to expect it to dick us around on occasion, you know? So maybe don’t tempt fate when its agent could be actively watching us at any given moment.”
Sorin held his hands up in surrender. “Alright, alright. You’ve made your point.”
* * *
“I told you!” Nemari practically screamed as her fire blast exploded, killing a few dozen fist-sized bats.
They were in the middle of a minefield; only the magical explosives were practically invisible even to Sorin’s Living Earth. After leaving the Quarry behind, they’d cut across the Dueling Grounds, which were well-known for two things: explosive traps buried in the soft ground, and elite monsters powerful enough to wipe out whole teams on their own.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
The bats, admittedly, were an unexpected hazard.
It wasn’t that they were dangerous on their own. Even at rank 1, they would have been easy enough to kill. It was that the mines were so sensitive that knocking a bat out of the air often meant an explosion went off when it hit the ground on top of a mine.
That put the burden of killing them on someone with wide-spreading ranged abilities, which in their group meant Nemari or Sorin. Sorin was busy with an armored centaur wielding a spear that was easily twelve feet long and who didn’t seem to care if it set off mines as it charged across the dueling ring.
Fire was the ideal weapon to rid them of the bats. Nemari’s burned hot enough to reduce them to ash before they ever hit the ground, preventing the corpses from triggering more of the mines and negating that aspect of the fight. That was good, because as it turned out, the mines regrew shortly after detonating. There was no way to clear out an area to safely work in.
Sorin triggered Speed Burst just as the centaur was about to skewer him, blurring to the side and unleashing a net of force wires for the monster to crash into. It thrashed through the spell, bleeding where its armor plates had failed to save it, but not slowing down. It swept its spear around, the prodigious length alone giving it the reach it needed to reach Sorin despite his dodge, and his parry lifted him off his feet to throw him from the ring.
“Now!” he ordered even as he tumbled through the air, using Horizon Walker to keep perspective on the battle. The centaur had taken the bait, and that put it in the perfect position to lay down some punishment.
Rue appeared out of her cloak of pseudo-invisibility, both blades flashing as they cut through the straps holding the centaur’s barding in place. It was a risky maneuver, and Sorin was not confident she could have pulled it off without him distracting the monster, but the gambit had paid off, and in a matter of seconds, she’d managed to slice through the ties holding the barding in place.
It didn’t fly off immediately, but with each jostling step the centaur took, it shook and slid farther away from where it was supposed to sit. Perhaps recognizing its vulnerability, it twisted and desperately grabbed at the heavy blanket of steel plates to hold it on.
Or maybe it’s just trying to kill Rue, Sorin silently noted when the monster grabbed at her instead of the barding.
He free cast Air Step just before he landed and pivoted to avoid coming down on a mine. Immediately, another swarm of bats appeared out of the dark sky overhead to descend on him, but they didn’t even get close before he threw a copy of Nemari’s fire blast and incinerated them.
With the centaur’s legs finally vulnerable, Yoru and Odric got to work creating spikes of stone to drive up into its underside. So powerful was the creature that its hooves crashed right through the worked stone, but it didn’t escape uninjured, and once they had it bleeding, it slowed down considerably.
Perhaps aware that stepping on a mine would have far more of an effect on it now, the centaur was also more cautious about where it trotted. It slowed to a halt and laid about with its spear, effectively keeping Rue away from it and disrupting Odric’s attacks.
Jagged stone teeth erupted out of the ground and ripped out the centaur’s belly. It faltered, staggering and only upright by the ground clamped into its guts. Slowly straightening, it raised its spear in salute, then it hurled the weapon right into the mine near Rue.
Her eyes widened as she figured out what its plan was. All around her, calls were going out from the rest of the team—some just panicked renditions of her name, others pleas for her to move. Sorin was less worried about her getting caught in the explosion than he was that she’d dodge one mine, only to land on another.
She practically vanished as she triggered her own Speed Burst. The spear struck near where she’d been standing, and the mine promptly exploded, obliterating the weapon. And then Rue reappeared, climbing Odric’s back to make sure she was safe from a misstep.
The centaur died, and anima flooded out of it. It wasn’t until it hit that Sorin realized they had a problem. Several people on their team were on the brink, and fighting such a powerful monster was enough to push them over.
Nemari dropped in place, her breath coming in ragged gasps as she wrestled with the pain. That forced Sorin to take over her role of preventing the suicidal bats from triggering more explosions, which would have been fine if Vendis and Odric hadn’t also ranked up to 11.
Vendis got lucky. He fell over and landed between two mines, and Yoru was already rushing toward him to ensure that he didn’t roll over onto one. He’d be fine, as would Nemari. Odric was a different story.
Rue tried to save him, but she had no leverage to pull him back upright. He staggered forward two steps, off balance from the extra weight on his back and clutching at his chest with a grimace on his face. When Rue leaned back, all that happened was Odric losing control completely and sprawling out across the ground.
That explosion caught both of them and threw them into the air, where, if they were lucky, they’d land somewhere safe. It turned out that Rue was in fact lucky. Odric had absorbed the brunt of the blast, leaving her minimally hurt and more or less in control of her limbs as she came back down.
“Od!” she screamed.
Her brother was unconscious though, or close enough to it that he didn’t even attempt to save himself. Their other healer was also on the ground and would be out of commission for the next crucial few seconds. Sorin was covering for Nemari to keep the bats at bay so they didn’t all get blown into the sky.
That left no one to save Odric when he hit the second mine. Sorin flinched as the explosion went off, throwing up a plume of dirt and obscuring everything from sight with a rolling cloud of dust. Horizon Walker told Sorin that Odric was still there, laying utterly motionless on the ground. The fact that the explosion had merely rolled him sideways a bit instead of hurtling him into the air again was the only good part of the whole situation.
Don’t you be dead, Sorin mentally told the man. Rue would never forgive you if you died. Come on, wake up. Heal yourself. You’re the only one who can.
Odric wasn’t dead yet. Sorin knew that much. What he wasn’t sure about was how long the former healer actually had left. But then something caught his attention. It wasn’t Horizon Walker that showed it to him. It was Living Earth.
And Sorin couldn’t stop a fierce grin from spreading across his face. Well done, you tricky bastard!
Comments