Moving through the airlock, with Blood close on her heels, she exited into a long hallway that looked like it ran the beam of the ship. It was a more utilitarian section, with a tile floor and metal walls that were polished to a mirror sheen. The lighting was comprised of strips along the ceiling, embedded in the corners where the ceiling and walls met. Beth followed the hallway towards the rear of the ship where she found a lift that connected the different floors. With the height of the ship, the rear section had three floors that could be moved between, and she selected to head up to the top floor.
This floor had a shorter hallway with several rooms branching off from it and a large room at the end. The room at the end was clearly the bridge or command center, with several consoles that could monitor the status of the ship and the surroundings. Every chair on the bridge was a large unit upholstered in some kind of red leather with a ton of features and functions including in-seat heating. Beth moved up and sat in the central chair, which she presumed to be the captain's chair based on shows she'd watched, and set her arms on the armrests. As soon as she was fully seated and comfortable, another window popped up in her vision.
Bind as owner?
The prompt was pretty simple, and Beth accepted as soon as she saw it. She felt a momentary sense of dislocation before feeling a very small, but still noticeable, connection form in the back of her mind. It was much weaker and more muted than her connection with Blood, but it was still an obvious link to something else. Upon sending a probing thought at the connection, she was able to get back a very limited, mechanical-feeling response that indicated the position and deployment status of the ship.
"Something good?" asked Blood, seeing Beth's blank look.
"It just let me register as owner of the ship," she replied with a nod.
"So, what about testing this thing out?" Blood then asked.
"Well, let's see how the controls work at least before we start pressing buttons," Beth replied.
"You being the voice of reason is odd," Blood muttered, sitting in one of the forward chairs.
Beth looked over the controls available to her at her station, as well as what was on the other stations, before she decided to try anything. Fortunately, the ship practically flew itself, with simplified commands for everything from takeoff and landing to steering and guidance. Beth first started with the takeoff sequence, the ship rising from the ground so smoothly that she wasn't even able to sense its movement. It was only through looking out the large windows on the bridge and the gauges indicating that they were hovering a hundred feet up that she knew they had taken off. As Beth was reviewing the systems to see what to do next, Blood took control of the vessel from her station, piloting it forward and slightly gaining some altitude.
"You have it?" Beth asked, a touch of anxiety in her voice.
"I have it," Blood said, far too confident considering she didn't really have any idea what she was doing.
They flew away from the capital, paralleling the mountain range as they headed north. The level of mana density of the world meant a lot of danger, which meant a lot of places were either unexplored, or hadn't been visited recently enough that there were good notes on what was there. Things changed quickly in a high mana environment, particularly one where people were constantly interfering with and altering the ecological balance. The airship was a perfect tool to allow them to safely chart vast swathes of territory, hopefully discovering new and interesting things.
It was only a few minutes into this flight that a series of beeps rang out on the bridge, with Beth and Blood sharing a very concerned look. After the beeps stopped, the ship set itself to autopilot, which Beth figured out after scanning through the control system. The airship moved in a northeasterly direction, tracking to something that Beth wasn't able to determine thanks to her still trying to figure out what all the controls and systems meant. She spent the time that the ship was in transit, flying for over an hour at a quite appreciable speed, studying the systems to try to figure out what was happening and what all the controls and dials and gauges and interfaces meant.
Their journey ended when the ship landed in what appeared to be a random, empty clearing in the middle of a small forest. Beth and Blood shared another look, not seeing anything out of the ordinary in the rather plain clearing, before deciding to get up and check exactly what was going on. They made their way out of the bridge, down the elevator, and out of the airlock before starting to look around. Beth really didn't see why the ship would have brought them here, as it really was just a pretty simple clearing in the woods, but there might be something incredibly well-hidden nearby.
Blood's nose for treasure, or just ability to find anything even slightly odd if given even a minute of time, came in clutch again. She signaled Beth that she had found something strange while she proceeded to investigate. On walking over, Beth found that Blood was carefully digging at an opening under a tall tree, where there was a small pass that might have just barely been big enough to crawl through…if they weren't both over six feet and wearing thick armor. Beth would have just thought it was an animal or beast den if she had seen it without Blood, but the wolf was insistent that it was more than that.
Luckily, they made a great team, as with over a thousand STR, Beth was able to tear through the ground even on a high mana density world fairly quickly. Blood moved up and pushed against the tree as Beth started, but she needn't have bothered, as even Beth's excavation wasn't enough to rock the sturdy, weathered ancient. A minute of grunting and punching and scrabbling had produced a sizeable pile of rocks and soil and had led to something that was a bit more regular. A few more minutes after that and Beth was cleaning rocks and debris out of a clearly artificially constructed tunnel. Blood joined her then, helping to cut apart the debris and carry it out of the tunnel, allowing them to quickly progress to a point where they encountered a door.
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The door was made of some kind of shiny black metal, Beth thinking it might be black iron, but she still wasn't familiar enough with all the various strange metals that were available, not to mention the near-infinite number of alloys and weird magical materials that resembled metal but weren't. The face of the large door was carved or molded with some kind of relief that showed a man walking, but the more Beth studied it, the more she realized the man was walking through different places, and all in the span of a moment. It was strange, but the detail was just enough to show that space was no boundary to the man, as he teleported or shifted or warped between different areas without any effort; simply by moving normally, he moved abnormally.
After studying the relief a moment more, Beth put a hand to the door and pushed. Despite this place having been lost beneath the forest for centuries or, more likely, millennia, the door swung open smoothly and easily, as if the hinges had been oiled the day before. A bit of cold air blew out of the doorway, smelling very faintly of some kind of oil and cold stone; not much to go on, even for Blood, who just shrugged when Beth gave her a questioning look. With that helpful bit of encouragement, Beth led the way down the hallway, taking note that the cut stones forming the hallway were sliced so precisely that the lines of their joins were barely visible.
The hallway seemed to stretch endlessly, the girls walking for twenty minutes without anything changing, when suddenly Beth felt something shift. She stopped dead in the middle of the hall, causing Blood to turn and give her a quizzical look. She held up a hand for a second to the wolf, trying to feel what had just changed, but it was elusive, as if she were trying to grab a slick piece of cloth that was being pulled away from her. It felt like there was a some kind of alteration of what was there, not in the air, but there was a subtle movement of power that Beth could feel in the space around them.
"You didn't feel that?" Beth asked Blood.
"Hmm? Feel what?" the lupine woman asked in response, her right ear flicking.
"That small movement of mana. It felt like the space around us changed. You didn't sense anything?" Beth asked.
"Nope," Blood shrugged. "I rely on my primary senses a lot, and I don't smell or hear anything different. In fact, this hallway is almost eerie in how uniform everything is."
"Well, maybe not entirely uniform. Something just changed, I swear. Keep your eyes peeled," Beth said.
"Sure," Blood said before continuing forward. However, just a moment later, she slashed her claws forward, Beth hearing a crisp ringing sound as Blood deflected some kind of attack. The wolf leapt back at the same time and landed in a ready stance, waiting for another attack to lance forward out of the dark. When no attack came, she straightened up and looked at Beth, who was glaring at her with her arms crossed.
"I just said what?" Beth asked.
"What?" Blood replied nonplussed.
"I just said to be careful!" Beth growled, punching Blood on the shoulder.
"I was careful! Didn't you see my awesome deflection of the attack?" Blood grumbled back.
"I'm going to ignore that," Beth said. "I think you stepped on a trap."
"Nothing moved," Blood said.
"Except that…what was that, exactly?" Beth said, looking around. She unclipped her lightstone from her chest armor and searched until she found a small wedge of stone that was clearly out of place in the otherwise pristine hallway. It was like an arrowhead in shape but narrower, more pyramidal than the elongated shapes many arrowheads had.
"Guess it was this," Beth said, holding it up so they could both inspect it.
"Not exactly the most aerodynamic shape," Blood commented.
"Doesn’t really need to be, considering it's not flying more than a couple dozen feet at most," Beth responded. "Though, it would be nice to know what activated it."
"Maybe just proximity?" Blood asked.
"Let's see," Beth said, reattaching her lightstone before walking forward.
As soon as she crossed the same invisible line that Blood had walked across a minute before, she was attacked in the same manner. A barely detectable piece of stone shot towards her and Beth punched it away, noting that the piece had a decent amount of force in it. As she was noting where the piece had come from and the angle it had flown, another piece shot at her from slightly further down the hallway. She blocked that piece as well, waiting for a moment and watching the tunnel. She was pretty sure the attacks were on some kind of timer, which proved true when the third attack happened at just the interval she would expect based on the time between attack one and two.
"Is this supposed to be a trap?" Beth asked dubiously as she punched away another arrowhead.
"It seems like a bad one," Blood commented.
"Well, maybe it's just supposed to get people not paying attention?" Beth said a bit hesitantly.
"Only one way to find out," Blood answered, leaning against the right wall of the tunnel with her arms crossed.
"I notice you're quite confident while volunteering other people," Beth said caustically.
"You're tough enough a moon falling on you would only piss you off; stop whining," Blood said with an eyeroll.
"I don't need commentary from the peanut gallery while I do this," Beth grumbled, starting to walk further down the hallway.
As she walked, she was quickly shot at by two arrowheads, which was followed on a slightly quicker interval by another two arrowheads. Beth had to focus to deflect these two shots, but she was still able to continue moving forward. However, once she had gone another half dozen steps or so, she was suddenly targeted by four arrowheads. Two of these arrowheads came from oblique angles, and all carried enough power that she would get some serious bruising if she missed a block or deflection. This also greatly slowed down her progress, as dealing with the four simultaneous attacks was not easy.
After several minutes, she managed to walk forward somewhere between fifteen and twenty steps, at which point eight arrowheads shot at her. These all carried a high level of force and she wasn't prepared for eight at once, several of them getting through her defenses and knocking her back. Beth was knocked off her feet and, as if pre-coordinated, got hit by four arrowheads while in the air, throwing her hurtling down the hallway. She was able to recover just inside the one-arrow zone, but leaped back out of it to give herself time to recover.
"So, that went well," Blood commented, still leaning against the wall.
"The peanut gallery stuff really isn't helpful," Beth replied, shaking the aftereffects of the hits off and stretching out.
"Why don't you just teleport through it?" Blood asked with a raised brow.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll try," Beth replied, turning back to the hallway. She took a step forward and stopped…a step from where she had been.
"Well?" asked Blood.
"Uh, I guess teleportation isn't allowed here?" Beth replied, tilting her head slightly and tapping her chin.
"What, you mean it didn't work?" Blood asked.
"Try for yourself if you don't believe me," Beth scoffed.
"No, that's fine. But what are we supposed to do, then?" Blood asked.
"Uh, just beat the trap, dummy," Beth said.
"Please," Blood said in a slightly sarcastic tone, gesturing at the hallway.
Beth indulged her, walking back into the line of fire again to challenge the trap, trying to deflect all the missiles shot at her. She made it the same distance again, making it back into the area where the eight arrowheads shot at her. She lasted rather longer this time, making it three full steps into that zone before she was knocked down and sent hurtling away. It felt like the arrowheads all instantly hit harder whenever she was knocked down, propelling her out of the area of the trap right away.
"So, that went well," Blood repeated her earlier comment.
"You don't really do much as a broken record," Beth replied with some snark.
"Just pointing out the obvious," Blood said. "Maybe this trap isn't worth it."
"It's not a trap," Beth replied after a second of stretching her bruised muscles.
"What? What does that mean?" Blood asked.
"It means what I said. It's not a trap; it's a test," Beth explained.
"What?" Blood asked.
"It's testing a person's comprehension with weaponskills and fighting. Only someone with sufficient skills can make it down the hallway," Beth further elucidated.
"And we fail?" Blood raised a brow.
"No, because it's not just a test. It's also a training device; the arrowheads fly in specific patterns at specific intervals. It's training someone to block, deflect, and dodge, elevating their combat skills," Beth said.
"So, what does that all mean?" Blood asked with a sinking feeling.
"It's time to train."
"Oh, no."