This, in turn, spawned slightly more specific design principles: 1) creating the longest path for the attacker while creating the shortest path for the defender, and 2) maximizing the number of angles from which defenders could shoot projectiles and magic.
Initially, murderholes and spiraling staircases were the norm, but that was already a long time ago. With advances in magical architecture came devious applications in maximizing the number of people killed per second.
At first, Jon and Alyssa skirted along the sides of a narrow hallway, leapfrogging from column to column — and then there weren’t any columns left. They had only managed to enjoy the protection of a total of three columns, with the rest of the hallway being smooth-walled; they had zero cover.
So, they moved along the center, instead. If the enemy flooded the hall with attacks, then they’d be screwed either way; if the enemy just fired a single shot, at least they could dodge left or right. Were they to hug the wall, they would only have one direction to dodge to, allowing the enemy to anticipate their movement.
The end of the hall was already ahead of them, and they could tell it opened up to some kind of cavernous space.
Luckily for them, the interior guards hadn’t been alerted to their presence, and so they weren’t met by a wall of lead and magic. This was thanks to Wiz, who had sabotaged the mages’ alert bracelets; the two mages who had put up destructive resistance outside, despite activating their bracelets, had died with futile hope for reinforcements.
Before they reached the end of the hall, Alyssa stopped. She grabbed Jon’s shoulder to stop him, too. “Flying stairs ahead,” she said.
The words couldn’t quite conjure up the right image in Jon’s mind. Escalators? Elevators? Elevating escalators? Escalating elevators?
“Flying stairs?” was all he could ask.
Alyssa quietly chuckled. “Yes. Stairs. We get on, and they fly. By the time we get to the top, we’re on a different floor.”
Jon’s mental image clarified a little more, but it wasn’t complete. Still, it was a working definition good enough for him.
“They won’t spot us?” Jon asked.
“They will.” Alyssa smirked. “I’ll take care of it.” She had an air of smugness in saying those words. They were heading into a target-rich environment, and between her and Jon, she was the one with the ability to point and fire several guns in every conceivable spherical direction, though she’ll have to use a bit of magic to ward off the occasional shot that would hit her. This wasn’t her first time, after all.
Jon eyed Alyssa, looking for any glint of doubt, but there was none. Satisfied, he nodded, and they both moved forward.
The cavernous space, as it turned out, was actually a 10-story cylindrical maw, forty meters in diameter, extending from underground all the way up to just before the topmost levels of the castle.
It was dark. Barely any light came in from the glowing oculus of the ceiling far above. Their night goggles strained to make out anything on the other side of the maw, giving them only specks and pixels that could barely be said to be a wall.
Jon, however, realized what it was Alyssa had talked about. “Flying stairs” were as literal as their name. There were unsupported staircases suspended in mid-air here and there, and there was one moving around far above them, near the ceiling; he could only tell because it was close enough to the oculus to be lit up as if under the soft glow of moonlight on a cloudy night.
“Worst case,” Alyssa whispered, “they’ll drop the stairs as soon as we get on” —
Well, they’d be finished in that case.
— “Best case, they won’t even notice us.”
“How do we get on?”
Alyssa pointed at the ascending stairs right ahead of them. It was too short to bridge the whole gap; Jon guessed it was meant to detach and reattach to other ports, docks — whatever they were called — along different floors.
“Prepare yourself,” Alyssa said. “The stairs will move as soon as we take a step, but we must continue ascending the steps to keep it moving along.”
“We need to reach the top?”
“The faster we move, the faster it will move.” Alyssa turned to face the steps — then back at Jon. “Don’t run up the steps. The stairs will accelerate faster than we can manage.”
So the steps themselves are the control mechanism. Under peaceful circumstances, it was a convenient feature; as a person walked up the steps, the staircase also moved at the same pace; at the same moment the person reached the top of the steps, the stairs would have arrived at its next port.
In combat, however, it would be a P.I.T.A., not to mention possible magical sabotage. They’d just have to take their chances on that one.
Seeing Jon pause in calculation, Alyssa called out. “Jon?”
He met eyes with Alyssa. “Ready.”
They stepped on, and the stairs shuddered. They only had thin handrails to hold onto as they climbed up; thin handrails made for no cover at all.
If there were guards, they weren’t alerted yet. In this darkness, it was just as likely that the guards were using night goggles … with shitty image resolution. There was no such thing as visual friend-or-foe identification when all you had were glitters to go on. Perhaps the guards had assumed that one of their own were rotating out of their post.
Jon’s hypothesis couldn’t be more wrong. The guards of the maw had always been watching them.
They were also rather flustered.
The Four Witches were all daughters of an infamous noble clan known for their magic … and toying with their victims. They floated on saddled brooms in the dark, watching the target staircase continue to rise. Jon and Alyssa’s staircase should have dropped like a brick by now, but why wasn’t it?
One sister approached another, pulling up beside her. “What’s going on?”
“I-it’s not working.” The second sister impatiently cranked the handle of a small box: once, twice, five times. She would have killed them five times over by now!
“It doesn’t matter.” The first sister grabbed the wrist of the second, who complained about almost having been yanked off her broom and died. The first sister nevertheless continued, “We’ll strike them the usual way. Tell the others.”
“You tell the others!”
They ended up splitting left and right, informing their other sisters to use Formation L.
Two of them flew under the staircase itself, while the other two went higher, hiding themselves behind other flying staircases.
Meanwhile, Jon’s and Alyssa’s heads were on a swivel as they climbed the steps. Alyssa’s guns, in particular, orbited around them like quiet sentinel moons. Even though they could return fire at the snap of a finger, Jon still felt unusually uneasy, and it wasn’t from the fact that they didn’t have the privilege of the first shot.
The Order’s artillery barrage had stopped, and it was deathly quiet; only the soft whoosh of the wind as the stairs ascended could be heard. There should be the sound of activity as the mercenaries left their hidey holes, but there was none of that, not in here.
As their staircase ascended, they passed another. It was this grainy, hulking silhouette in Jon’s night goggles, being like an eclipse that obscured all his vision one moment, then passed him by the next, and all so slowly, at that.
Just as slowly, the dotty image of a person hanging upside down under the stairs came into view — and then a smile.
It took his mind a second too late to properly register it, and by the time he reflexively aimed and fired with a carbine — not even aligning his sights, but aiming purely on instinct — the figure had let gravity pull it down, evading Jon’s shot.
His shot signaled the start of a trade of spells and gunfire. Alyssa didn’t bother to turn around at Jon’s shot; nine times out of ten, something like that was a distraction to make everyone else turn towards the source of the shot, and she was right. Another figure swooped in from above, laughing with craze and the fun of bloodseeking. Alyssa pointed all her guns upwards and fired them all at once, but the figure’s approach had been too well-timed; Alyssa’s shots ended up hitting another passing staircase.
That was when she became aware of it: the fact that every staircase in the maw had been set in motion. They were sitting ducks in the center of a revolving kaleidoscope of flying staircases, where witches flew between them for cover, teasing her and Jon to be better shots than just this.
She didn’t have the time to formulate a plan, however, as she felt something tug on her ankle — causing her to tumble and fall, clawing at the stairs to try and slow her being dragged through the spaces between the handrail’s posts.
On Jon’s side, he also felt a tug on his ankle. It was in slow motion, however, so while he was still in the middle of being swept from his feet, he was able to adjust his feet with Perfect Motion to post against the handrail posts, keeping him from being dragged any further. With the quick draw of a pistol, he shot off the rope wrapped around his ankle — earning him a shriek of pain coming from someone under the staircase.
Quick on his feet, he glanced towards Alyssa, confirming that she was far worse off. He could only see her fingers still clasping the edge of the steps, but she wouldn’t last much longer.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He vaulted over the handrail, using his magic chain as a lifeline that wrapped around his waist, anchoring himself to the handrail.
Both witches under the stairs were surprised to find a man in their midst — and two pistols aimed at either of them. Jon shot the one who was dragging Alyssa down with some kind of appendage that was growing out of her hands; that one shrieked and fell into the darkness below. His other pistol only managed to graze the second witch, but it was enough to convince her to scram and try to save her falling sister, zooming down into the darkness after her.
Jon climbed back up to the staircase, frantically scrambling up the steps and throwing the magic chain towards Alyssa. Her fingers finally slipped — and the chain wrapped around a wrist. She screamed from the pain of having her body weight turn into a constrictive force around her wrist, nearly breaking it.
Even so, she gambled her wrist in exchange for her life, and she pulled herself up even more by her nearly breaking wrist, grabbing the chain with her other hand, relieving some of the pressure and pain.
Jon finally appeared to pull her up with human hands, and once she was over the steps, he gave her a look over, checking her wrist and everything else.
Jon poked her wrist, and Alyssa winced. Well... she definitely broke her wrist.
How the girl kept on injuring herself all the time, he didn’t know. “It’s not over,” he said, scrambling down the steps to pick up the carbine he’d dropped after being dragged off just a while ago.
A barrage of something came at them. He couldn’t actually see the projectiles, but he could hear them impacting around him. It sounded like hundreds of tempered steel needles embedding themselves in concrete.
That was probably what it was, and he had no clue how to evade that kind of thing. Just to rub it in, he felt several sharp pangs of pain shoot through his body — in one side, and out the other — around his gut and torso. If he was lucky, they didn’t hit any vitals, but if not, he had a couple of seconds to live before he blacked out.
In the case that he only had a few seconds, there was only one thing his life was good for now. He could die here, but not Alyssa. She was too young to die in his place, in this sort of place.
He scrambled up the steps as more and more needles cleanly passed through his body, ignoring the pain to just make his way to Alyssa. He was already just a few steps away, but the pain had become sufficiently annoying.
He wasn’t sure if this would work. It worked on bullets, but on far smaller projectiles? Fuck it. He raised his hand and invoked Force.
Force took the form of the object being used to channel it. In this case, the broad of his palm thus projected a broad, roughly panel-sectioned field of force.
It was enough to fend off more incoming needles — but then there was a blue light accumulating in the far off darkness, accented by arcs of electricity.
— The staircase was currently filled with thousands of steel needles.
Alyssa fired off a volley straight at the light, and she succeeded at doing … something. The lightning attack fired off towards the ceiling. She didn’t know if she’d succeeded at wounding the witch, but a hit was a hit, even if non-lethal.
“Hold on to me,” Jon said. Without question, she wrapped herself around Jon’s back, feeling his muscles tense up from the pain of having dozens of open wounds get squeezed.
Jon climbed over the handrail. “Help me out here,” he said.
“I only have two carbines left,” Alyssa said.
“Just keep up with me.”
Even in this situation, Alyssa chuckled. It was like she was being challenged.
She used her Guntalker Skill to turn her remaining guns into mid-air handholds and stairs, holding up Jon’s steps only by pure faith and magic.
They aimed for a staircase slightly lower than them, but coming in fast. That Jon could move as well as he could despite the dead weight on his back — herself — made Alyssa smile … for some reason. Was she finally becoming delusional in the heat of combat? It’s been a while.
A screeching witch zipped up past them, orbiting the staircase they were just on and whipping it with dozens of tendril-like appendages. Looked like she hadn’t noticed they’d switched to a different staircase.
In any case, that witch was bad news. Her screech just now couldn’t convey her boiling blood any better, and her magic, too, was some kind of Lovecraftian horror show shooting out of her arms.
Jon borrowed a carbine from Alyssa, taking aim at the witch. He had no space to miss; if he did, that witch would find them and flay them alive right here. “Don’t let go yet,” he told Alyssa.
Now was the best time to try his new magic. Tier 1 Fire and Ice Manipulation weren’t as powerful as the original users had used them, but he did figure out a few creative uses for them. Ice Manipulation was good enough for making small throwing daggers and knives, but that wasn’t useful here.
Fire Manipulation, on the other hand, was a little bit more firearm-related. He could just accelerate the muzzle velocity of any gun he touched, or …
He fired. The bullet that traveled across the expanse was aglow like a lantern. The witch who was its target moved inches out of the way, and the bullet was beside her face.
It exploded. There wasn’t even a scream as she, too, fell into the darkness, joining her sister.
“Do you see them?” Jon asked.
“We’re finishing this here!” one of the witches declared.
Again, needles came raining on Jon and Alyssa, but this time, Jon could tell roughly where the needles would come from. The witch’s accuracy was dismal, to say the least, and it was reasonable to assume that she wouldn’t risk accidentally hitting her lightning-wielding sister, lest the steel needles would somehow interfere with the electricity coursing through the lightning witch’s body.
That meant that the needles would come from above.
Jon shot a Force Wave skywards, warding off the incoming needles — just as predicted. Meanwhile, Alyssa tracked the telltale glow of the lightning witch as she flew around them, firing volleys in the hopes that at least one round would hit. None did.
She hit upon an idea. “Jon! Your Fire Manipulation — on my guns! Now!”
She reeled in her remaining pistols, and Jon reached out to course his new Skill into each of them as they flew by, setting alight the bullets within.
Alyssa fired them as soon as she could; there was no telling whether they’d explode while they were still in their barrels. Though she didn’t know the timing of the fuzes, it seemed that Jon did, because the bullets were exploding roughly in the space around the lightning witch. All Alyssa had to do now was to keep firing.
Jon, however, was still having trouble with fending off the steel needles. He had a carbine trained on the ceiling, but he couldn’t see jack shit through the night goggles; parts of the grainy image were moving suspiciously, but he couldn’t confirm a solid target. He couldn’t just shoot blindly, either; it took two hands to reload, but at least one was constantly preoccupied in making a force umbrella over himself and Alyssa, and every now and then, Alyssa would pass some pistols in front of him to cook for some ad hoc anti-air flak action, and he’d end up cradling his carbine instead of holding it.
Both his hands were too occupied, and his set of ranged offensive Skills — Force, Fire Manipulation, and Ice Manipulation — were all too limited and weak.
However, he had a third hand. The magic chain around his arm sprung to life and nabbed a grenade from his suit’s inner pockets. It passed his hand, letting him fuze it, then the chain rolled up and coiled like a snake around the grenade, on top of Jon’s shoulder.
In a blur, it sprung forwards, and smoke trailed as the grenade flew into the sky. The witch up there had been too preoccupied in her glee — feeling so lucky to be playing with such a durable and stubborn toy down there — to notice such a tiny object fly past her, then above her.
The explosion stole the wind from the witch’s lungs, which inflated then blew like balloons from the overpressure of the grenade that had exploded much too close to her.
For a moment, she thought she’d just laughed too hard — blown her sides off from laughing or some other. It wasn’t until she lost the sensation of gravity, watching the flying stairs get smaller far above her, that she realized she was falling. She didn’t even get to realize she was going to die before she hit the ground.
“Victoria!” her sister cried. Even as the lightning witch watched her favorite sister fall far below, she wasn’t allowed to stop and grieve. Alyssa’s shots were starting to zero in on her, and several times, specks of burning powder had already pricked her skin.
The lightning witch’s fury crackled out of her skin. No matter much she wanted to turn those two bastards into char and cinder, however, her left arm was out of commission, having been shot off by that bitch on the stairs, and she needed at least one hand on her broom at all times to keep herself from being flung off. As a result, she couldn’t stay still for even just a second to cast a single spell.
And Alyssa wouldn’t allow it, and neither would Jon.
With the pressure off of him, Jon’s hands were freed, and he took aim at the lightning witch; her electric anguish only marked her as a brighter target in the dark. He fired a shot, and after a small explosion downrange, the blue light fell —
— then stopped —
— then floated —
Roots of lightning sparked out of the witch’s feet, illuminating the entire chamber in a frenzied, unpredictable mess of sparks that poked at nearby walls and snaked around other flying stairs.
Alyssa opened fire, but her bullets were swatted away — instantly vaporized — by the lightning that caged the witch.
Jon joined in with his own aimed fire, but after firing just one round and watching it vaporize all the same, both he and Alyssa gave up on their bullets. Well, Alyssa was just about out of loaded guns, anyway.
The lightning witch summed up the rest of her life for a final attack, accumulating it into an unstable sphere of electricity. Coronal discharges whipped out from it, and auroras spontaneously danced above and below the witch, just like curious fairies who wanted to see the power of some silly human spending all her life on it. Life as the last of four sisters wasn’t worth a damn, anyway.
“Guess this is it,” Alyssa muttered. That attack looked like it was going to touch every single nook and cranny of the chamber.
Jon thought fast. Against an electricity-based attack … maybe he could do something similar to redirecting it? Fire and ice couldn’t do it. Asking Alyssa to make a Faraday cage of guns … they didn’t have enough guns for that. Maybe the witches he’d killed so far had a Skill he could take advantage of, though it better be useful at Tier 1.
***
[In a tight spot, are we? The twins Rubelia and Carrelin had quite the curious Skills. Oh, and Ferisia, too.]
| Skill Claims |
Aerial Lockbox (Unlocks Lvl. 15)
+ Blood Connection (Unlocks Lvl. 15)
+ Magnetic Manipulation (Unlocks Lvl. 10, READY)
***
The buzzing and crackling that echoed in the chamber stopped — and Jon made his choice faster than he could draw a pistol.
The chamber flashed into a pristine white. Neither Jon, nor Alyssa, nor the witch could see the stone walls crumble as pits were carved out of them by simultaneous lighting strikes. None of them could witness many of the flying stairs lose their magic and start to fall. None of them could hear anything above the concussive boom that incessantly bounced off the cylindrical chamber’s walls, pounding their bodies, reflecting, then pounding their bodies again.
It didn’t matter that Jon and Alyssa had closed their eyes. The blinding brightness penetrated the thin skin of their eyelids.
It took a whole painful minute for Jon’s senses to recover — but even during that minute, he was thankful. Magnetic Manipulation had worked better than he expected. This world’s physics fortunately still included the two-faced nature of electromagnetism; they were just the same thing, and creating a magnetic shell around himself and Alyssa, to let the lightning flow around them, had worked beautifully.
Pain was still pain, however, and he groaned as he realized that he was surrounded by darkness, not light. His night goggles weren’t working anymore, so he ripped those off his eyes. Alyssa’s arms were still faithfully wrapped around him, and they were moving. His eardrums were shot to hell, so if she was trying to say something, he couldn’t hear it.
Alyssa figured they were both deaf, so she just gave a light squeeze of acknowledgment — and also an annoyed pat, as a ‘Get going. Come on. Chop chop. Everything smells like ozone and we’ll probably die from the sheer amount of it at this rate.’
Jon got up with Alyssa still clinging to his back. They both scanned the area with their naked eyes, and as best as they could tell, that witch had essentially offed herself with a suicide spell. Worn, but alive, Jon took his first step going up the staircase — the last staircase still floating in the chamber — cuing it to shudder and move. They floated higher, towards the glowing oculus in the ceiling.
***
Name: Jon Fuze
Level: 10
Kills: 227 → 230
Kills to Next Level: 2 / 50 → 5 / 50
Skill Proofs: 5 (-1) → 4
| Skill Claims |
Aerial Lockbox (Unlocks Lvl. 15)
(-) Magnetic Manipulation (Tier 1)
+ Blood Connection (Unlocks Lvl. 15)
| Skills |
> Summon Scribetool (Tier 1/3)
> Perfect Motion (Tier 1/1)
> Hastened Sight (Tier 1/4)
> Force (Components: 1)
> Fire Manipulation (Tier 1)
> Ice Manipulation (Tier 1)
(+) Magnetic Manipulation (Tier 1)
***