Chapter Thirty-Four
Skulls collapsed in an expanding pit that began with the Talisman of Death.
The moment they saw the stones begin falling into the growing hole, Kora pulled Vester back and away. The sound, a deafening clack-clack of tumbling rocks, echoed all through the courtyard while they tumbled down the staircase.
“You’re not going alone,” Skylar abruptly said.
Her blue hand closed around the arm that Kora wasn’t holding, and she turned Vester until they were staring into each other’s eyes.
“You get that, right? You’re not going to push through every facet of this challenge by yourself.
We’re not going to let you end up like Jack: unable to die and buried under so much stone you don’t have a hope of finding the surface again. ”
Vester was tempted to argue, but the truth was that she had a good point. Just because he couldn’t die didn’t mean he couldn’t be incapacitated or trapped. There was a reason the Party moved together. He simply took a deep breath, then offered her a small smile.
“No problem,” he said. “We’ll treat this like any other high-challenge delve. We move slow and careful… but if we see anything that does resemble a trap, we’ll have to make decisions based on survivability.”
Resolved hardened every face, and one by one his lovers nodded to acknowledge his point.
Vester watched Krysta climb down off Dent’s back, then Skylar motioned the iron golem forward.
“Dent’s our most expendable member,” Skylar said with a grim look on her face.
“If there are traps that can affect the body outside of diseases and plagues, let Dent trigger them.”
The golem’s footsteps were like falling anvils as it began its descent along the newly revealed stairwell. Kora wasn’t far behind the puppet, and Li Ra and Reve moved after the kitsune. Krysta had Woody guarding her, and Skylar formed the rearguard with Ripper.
That left Vester toward the back with Krysta, which wasn’t unusual, but it still frustrated him. He understood why his lovers hated seeing him suffer, and truthfully, he wasn’t a fan of magical torture himself either. He just saw no reason to waste more resources than they had to.
And his ladies were the one chip he’d never willingly spend, no matter what he might gain.
Though at the moment there didn’t seem to be any particular sacrifices needed. Dent tromped down the stairs, occasionally taking a spear, some arrows, or in one instance an entire hurricane of poison-tipped darts to the chassis, but otherwise ignoring the obstacles.
What the golem didn’t trigger Li Ra spotted and Kora blocked. Krysta confirmed the presence of poisons and disease on all the projectiles, so the nature of the obstacle seemed clear: they were dealing with continual attacks meant to inflict them with plagues of some sort.
Vester, perhaps out of paranoia, kept generating a sphere of fresh air around them. It was a constant drain on his mana, and by the time they’d reached the bottom of the stairs he had a raging headache, but the air he was creating synergized with Kora’s Elemental Wall and added to her own winds.
Vindication flashed through him when Dent stepped on the final step and a deafening hiss echoed down the spiral staircase while crimson gas flooded the entire chamber. Visibility immediately dropped to zero as the five-story stairwell they were in was completely enveloped by the trap.
But between the fresh air Vester was creating and the swirling winds of Kora’s defense, none of the gas actually reached the Party.
Dent, unfortunately, was standing outside Kora’s barrier, and they watched the iron golem slowly start rusting.
The oxidation spread across Dent’s frame, and then its lower arms fell off.
Skylar made a sound of distress, biting her bottom lip, but she made no move to try and rescue the puppet. By the time the mist cleared, Dent had turned into a pile of crumbled rusty flakes; Krysta had to cleanse the entire thing of flesh-eating diseases before Skylar could claim the golem core.
“This floor sucks,” Skylar muttered bitterly. She stored Dent’s core in her inventory, shaking her head. “It’ll take weeks, months, to build a new body… and by then I’ll need to upgrade Ripper too.”
“It’ll be okay,” Krysta said, rubbing Skylar’s back. “At least you can rebuild Dent stronger, so that’ll be good, right?”
While the two conversed, Vester moved forward to examine the doorway that Kora, Li Ra, and Reve were studying. He didn’t think Krysta or Skylar had even seen it—he’d been distracted watching Dent fall apart himself before he’d realized what the others were doing.
The thing was… twisted.
Literally.
The door appeared to be made of bone and flesh, horribly braided and woven together, with cancerous nodules forming knots in its grainy surface.
The red and off-white material had a slightly softer appearance than wood, but looked far too solid to be squishy.
Vester was tempted to poke it, but he truly had no desire to touch the thing.
He banished the intrusive thought and looked at the others. “How bad do we think this trap will be?” he asked. He took a deep breath, and under the meaty scent of the doorway he could smell a faint, acrid stink. “Some kind of acid?”
“We think there’s lake water somewhere near,” Reve said. “Li Ra was just saying she smelled the same scent before the lake started dissolving our raft. We were trying to determine how to open the door and shield against a possible flood.”
“Problem is I can’t spot the release mechanism,” Li said softly.
She had knelt down on the ground, examining the skulls that still made up the floor.
“Could be any of these eyes or nostrils. Could be all of them. Might be hidden spouts in the walls and ceiling. The trap might even flood the entire chamber, same way the gas did.”
“We’ll need to create a layered barrier that completely surrounds us,” Kora decided. “It’ll have to be waterproof, yet we need to see through it. Reve, can you hold a telekinetic barrier and move us?”
“Possibly,” the Avatar of Life replied, giving a slow nod of her head.
“Against a spray of water, even a powerful jet, then I can hold a shield and levitate us within it. But if we’re completely submerged, then it depends on how much force the water exerts trying to crush us.
The more energy I supply to prevent the shield from collapsing, the less I have to move us…
and when I run out, so does our protection. ”
“What if we’re inside a big glass ball?” Vester asked.
When everyone stared at him, he shrugged.
“Look, if we take a moment and I go slow, I can create a big globe around us, and if it’s got no openings the water can’t get in.
Glass is sterile, mostly immune to acid, and we can see through it.
If all Reve has to do is move us, she can move us faster. ”
“Do you have the energy for that?” Kora wondered. “You’ve kept fresh air moving around us, and… well… you look like you’re in pain.”
“Your ear is bleeding again,” Li added bluntly. “And you’re pale.”
“It’ll suck,” Vester replied truthfully.
“The cost of creating real things is a lot higher than it was with Fantastic Reality. But the stuff I make now is permanent, so that tracks. It would help if Krysta could set up her Sanctuary so I could get the regeneration bonus, but even without it I think I can do it if I use a mana potion or two.”
“You’ll have to keep supplying us with air at the same time,” Reve mused, “since we’d be blocked from the outside atmosphere.
” When the others looked at her, the tall, bat-winged woman blushed.
“I once knocked myself unconscious when I created a perfect telekinetic sphere around myself. I didn’t realize air could go bad, so I lost consciousness.
It’s the kind of mistake you only make once. ”
“I can help with that,” Kora said. “Aligning my weapons with the Air element will let them produce fresh air when I move them. That should reduce some of the drain on Vester.” The kitsune’s five tails lashed and her ears went flat, but she seemed confident in her statement.
Vester wasn’t about to question her on how her skill worked.
“Then I think that plan would be our best approach,” Reve agreed after a moment.
“Same,” Li added, straightening up. “I definitely think the water is going to be like that corrosive gas. The smell is the same everywhere around us. I think the minute we open the door, this whole place floods with lake water.”
“Alright, then let’s take a second, reset, and create our defenses,” Vester decided. With that, the group moved back to Skylar and Krysta. It didn’t take long to explain the plan, and Krysta made a swift snack for Vester to eat.
He wasn’t particularly hungry, so eating was actually a chore, but the boost combined with the mana potion he chugged restored a good portion of his mana. He settled cross-legged on the ground with the rest of the Party around him.
Skylar pulled Woody and Ripper into her inventory, and Kora positioned everyone where they could be within the sphere, but not on top of each other. Vester contemplated how thick to make the glass, and since he had no real frame of reference, he decided that he’d need at least six inches.
He wrapped his hands around the shaft of Trickster’s Cane and kept the focus across his knees.
With his eyes closed, he started by building the bottom of the dome a short distance away from them.
The glass bowl was perfectly clear, and Vester gradually thickened it while focusing on mundane strength.
He worked hard to keep his thoughts strictly to non-magical materials.
Not magic. Absolutely no magic glass. Just clear, thick, beautiful… normal glass. I am not killing myself for this.
Since Reve was seven feet tall, Vester aimed for a sphere with a diameter of fifteen feet.
Despite never being gifted at math or spatial imagination, Vester had no problem at all guiding the bottom of the globe into existence, and in the process he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, it would be a perfect sphere.
Once it was prepared, the Party moved until they were gathered on top of it. Amusingly, it took a moment to settle because Vester had forgotten to put any kind of bracing under the edges of the bowl, so it had begun rocking the moment they’d stepped onto it.
Li Ra solved that problem with some of the most-common leather from her inventory; she rolled it into tubes and settled it around the outside of the glass. When everyone stared at her, she shrugged. “The water will rot it away, so there won’t be anything left for us to get stuck on.”
Since there was no real argument to that, the group got back into position and Vester resumed his meditative trance. Once more he found he could sense where everyone was, and this allowed him to guide the glass up and around everyone without any issues.
“Why a sphere?” Skylar asked Krysta, speaking softly in an effort not to disturb Vester. He could hear her, but fortunately it didn’t disrupt his concentration. “Wouldn’t a box be easier?”
“Yes, technically,” Krysta admitted. “But if we end up underwater, then a globe will move easier. The flat surfaces of a box would act like walls against the water, while the round shape of the ball will let us slide through. Technically, a disk shape with sharper edges would let us go even faster… but then it would be harder to see through. Being sphere shaped gives us maximum space inside, easiest movement, and greatest clarity.”
“Spheres are also very strong, structurally,” Reve added. “While flat barriers are good for deflection and blocking, the surface of a globe absorbs the impacts better.”
“You all think way too much about shapes,” Li Ra muttered while taking out her pistols and her cleaning equipment. The scent of the weapon oil reached Vester’s nose, and he found it strangely soothing.
“The study of barrier magic is a well-researched one,” Kora countered.
“Though while Krysta’s arguments have merits, she’s not quite right.
” When the others shifted to look at her, Kora offered them a small smile.
“The strongest barrier shape is a three-sided pyramid. One formed of perfectly divided sides and angles produces reinforcement no other shape can match.”
“Okay, so why don’t you use triangle walls?” Skylar asked.
At this point Vester had to fall deeper into his trance to block them out.
It wasn’t that forming the glass around them was hard.
Mostly it was mind-numbing and simply gave him a headache.
No, the issue was that Vester was getting flashbacks to high-school geometry, where the only part of that class he’d enjoyed was the twenty-year-old student-teacher they’d had for a week.
She hadn’t been the friendliest, but her idea of suitable attire was appreciated by the entire female-enjoying side of the class.
Finally, Vester was done. The glass above them sealed up. He’d fallen so deeply into his meditation that he had no idea how much time had gone by. He’d been vaguely aware of someone wiping blood off his cheeks at some point.
Despite the toll it had taken on his mana and his head, Vester hadn’t died and he hadn’t blacked out. He opened his eyes and groaned. “Okay, it’s finished. Think this is thick enough?” he asked. Six inches of glass seemed like a lot to him.
“How thick is it?” Krysta asked. She poked a finger against the glass and a flat tonk sounded, far duller than Vester had expected. “It’s so clear I can’t actually tell.”
“I made it pretty thick,” Vester admitted. “But I can also increase the depth of glass if it starts cracking.”
“No thickening anything until after you’ve rested,” Krysta insisted.
She turned away from the side of the globe and came over to fuss at him.
“You just used a lot of power, and we don’t want you collapsing on us.
” Since Vester didn’t have anything else to do, he settled in to let her take care of him.
He knew she’d feel better if she got to fuss over him for a spell, and nobody seemed to mind the twenty-minute wait.
“We’re ready to try and open the door, then?” he finally asked the others. Kora charged her shield with winds and a faint green glow coated it. Air blew off the face of the tower shield, and Vester could tell it was meant to push back anything that got too close.
“I’m ready,” Kora confirmed. The kitsune turned her attention to Reve and the bat-winged woman nodded her own head. Reve didn’t bother to answer—she just lifted her metal hand and gestured at the door.
A deep boom echoed as the entire frame flexed. Three more impacts hit it, and the meat-and-bone-meshed portal came apart in a detonation of disgusting splinters that shot out into the corridor behind it.
Or should have.
The projectiles reversed course and came back at them, riding the wave of water that exploded into the tunnel.