“…thanks,” Rinnie muttered sullenly in Layla’s direction. “Y’know, for not waiting until after it hit me to jump in.”
“I was certain it already had,” Layla replied stiffly.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“How’s it looking?” Cadenza asked Vivi further down the hallway. Vivi was holding Rinnie’s severed limb and trying to determine if it could be reattached.
“Strange. Her arm seems to be sustaining itself. It’s still alive, almost like…”
“Like a cutting from a plant?” Rinnie chimed in, returning from speaking to Layla. “That’s because it is. I’m a dryad- a type of mimic.”
“A mimic? I thought those were weird tentacle monsters that live in treasure chests,” Sera couldn’t help but comment.
“That’s what most people remember, but the majority of mimics are actually treants- it’s pretty rare for a baby mimic to choose anything other than a tree to copy, and they almost always pick something made of wood instinctively. Very rarely one will choose a person instead, and that’s how you get a dryad like me,” Rinnie explained, seemingly unbothered by her missing appendage. It had already stopped dripping fluid, Sera noticed.
“I…didn’t know treants were intelligent. Or mimics, for that matter,” Tiriana said, surprise on her face.
“Oh, they’re not. At least, not in a way you’d understand. Only treants are smart enough for dryads to talk to, and without one of us around to tell them not to, they’ll ambush just about anything that gets too close. Usually we watch over a grove of treants and keep them from pissing off anyone that might want to chop them down,” Rinnie elaborated with a single-shoulder shrug.
“Does that not…hurt?” Vivi asked, staring at Rinnie’s stump arm.
“Not really. Sure messes with my sense of balance, though,” the scout replied nonchalantly.
“Well…I think I can reattach it, fortunately. I’m not strong enough to reattach a limb normally, but since this one is alive independently of your body, channeling a flesh-mending miracle should work. It’ll take a while though. Normally those are used for cuts,” Vivi said as she carefully examined both the severed arm and Rinnie’s stump, comparing the ends of each.
“That’d be great. I don’t think I’m getting that dagger back, and I can’t really draw my bow with one hand.” Rinnie’s gaze wandered over to the fallen golem-knight. One of its legs was twisted around her misericord and the pommel and grip were deformed from Layla’s punch.
“If it doesn’t hurt, then let’s hold off on that until we’re in the core room. That way we only have one direction to keep watch in and a door to defend,” Cadenza decided. “Rinnie, is that injury going to keep you from disarming traps?”
“Probably, but I can still spot them just fine, and we can always trigger them from a safe distance,” Rinnie confirmed.
“In that case, I apologize, but we’ll need you to take the lead for just a bit longer. Tiriana, you know what to do.”
With that, the party continued onward into the depths of the dungeon. Sera wondered what it would have been like had they tackled this place the proper way- by actually clearing the entire thing out instead of making a beeline for the core. By her understanding normal dungeons didn’t have a device pumping more mana into them constantly, so it might have been possible to do that without simply having more monsters appear behind them. It would probably have to be done anyway once the core was shut off- they needed access to this section and having it full of monsters all the time would be the opposite of helpful.
The final hallway leading into the core section was as riddled with traps as the one that had led to the primary core, except this time all the magical traps were added in. Every stone for most of its length was a pressure plate and magical traps were set up to catch anyone that somehow avoided those. Unlike in the movies, it wasn’t a network of trip lasers someone could jump through; the coverage was total.
As a test, Tiriana tossed a loose stone produced when Cadenza’s first sword strike was deflected previously. It crumbled to dust the instant it crossed into detection range.
“Well, that’s going to be a problem,” the elven mage groaned. “There’s no gaps here, just dozens of triggers all lined up. I can’t block this many at once.”
“And this section is still properly hooked up to the core, so they’ll just activate continuously,” Cadenza added. “But we have to get past them one way or another. Options?”
“Dig around?” Sera proposed. She hadn’t forgotten that the stone was reinforced, but digging through it would at least be less dangerous than this.
“Too time consuming. We could bring more mages down here and brute force blocking the triggers, maybe,” Tiriana followed up.
“If we have to do that every time we pass through here it would be untenable. We need something that gets us through consistently, not just once,” Cadenza clarified.
Don’t suppose you have a trap deactivating miracle?” Rinnie asked, turning to Vivi, who waved her hands in denial. Rather, she waved one of her hands, and with the other she waved Rinnie’s.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Nothing that would work on that scale! Well, not quickly anyway…I’m not sure how many there are but it would probably take days or even weeks,” the cleric denied.
“Wait, the spells are embedded in the walls, right?” Sera asked after a few moments of silence.
“Yes. They’re in the stonework,” Tiriana confirmed, not sure where Sera was going.
“But not the rock. So, what if you just…break the walls,” she suggested. Tiriana slapped a hand to her forehead.
“Of course. Normally that would bring the whole place down on us, but the walls are just a façade, so ripping them out wouldn’t destabilize anything!” the eleven mage exclaimed, gesturing wildly. “If we just launch something into the space the traps cover it’ll only trigger them, but if we tear down the walls ahead of where the traps start and go in from the side…”
“Then there’s nothing to stop us, because a contingency like that would have activated on the bricks themselves. And most of the mana runs through the ceiling anyway, so we’ll only be cutting off power to other traps.” Cadenza finished. “Neither of us is an earth mage, though, and I’m not sure how many railguns I have left in me right now.”
“The bricks are probably shielded from anything direct anyway. But I can inject water into the space between the bricks and the rock and then freeze it. Back up, this will probably trigger all the traps one last time,” Tiriana said, placing her hand on one of the walls and reinforcing her barriers.
Sera backed up to a safe distance along with the others and waited. First Tiriana conjured a large ball of water, then she used a pressurize stream to cut a line into the wall from floor to ceiling. Once she had that done, she started conjuring more and more water into the space behind, not allowing it to seep back out. The gap was narrow, but there was plenty of space to fill between the irregular surface of the bare rock and the bumpy texture of the brickwork.
When the area behind the wall was saturated, Tiriana backed up, concentrated for a moment, and clenched her fist. She started by sealing the gap with solid ice, reinforcing it with her magic, then flash-froze every last drop remaining. One moment the hallway way empty, and the next Sera bore witness to possibly the greatest pyrotechnic display she’d ever seen as dozens of spells went off at once amidst a flurry of falling bricks. The enchanted blocks shrugged off the spells but were launched in every which direction by the impacts, with some even bouncing off Tiriana’s barrier.
Several seconds passed as the aftermath of the chaos died down. An entire wall was now bare, bricks strewn across the hall in tiny pieces. Whatever protected them from magic hadn’t done anything to save them from physics. Damaged by the flying brickwork, some parts of the opposite wall fell away as well, though most of it stayed in place. Even many of the physical traps on the floor had gone off, judging by the twisted and broken spears, spikes, and assorted other contraptions littering the ground.
“I have never been so glad to have that elf around,” Rinnie whispered. At some point she’d hidden behind Sera, using her as a shield. “If we didn’t have a mage with us…” Although Rinnie trailed off, Sera didn’t need her to finish the sentence to understand the sentiment. Just activating one column of those spells would have been instantly lethal.
“Can someone check to make sure my shoes are dry? I’m too scared to look,” Vivi said, eyes wide.
“You’re fine,” Cadenza assured her, patting the cleric on the back.
“Huh, that was pretty cool. Time to do it again!” Tiriana declared with entirely too much enthusiasm.
“I think we’re witnessing first hand what happens when a water mage learns how fun explosions are,” Sera commented as Tiriana started filling up the other wall with water. The gaps made it harder, but her control over the liquid was precise.
“Didn’t she use explosions to launch things at the nachzehrer?” Vivi asked while Tiriana gleefully went about her task.
“Those were a lot smaller,” Sera responded.
The second demolition was less spectacular than the first after the damage that one had caused, but it was spectacular all the same. By the time it had died down, so many pressure plates were disabled that the group was able to just walk right to the other side without having to bother disarming any of them. Finally they were able to enter the secondary core room.
In the center was the magic core as expected, a gargantuan crystal on the scale of a house shaped into a perfect sphere and housed within a cage of metal. It thrummed with barely-contained power and a slight mist hovered over its surface, but its energy was kept in check by the device that enclosed it. Physical conduits connected to the walls, where presumably they made contact with the magical pathways burned into the stone. Several spots on the ceiling were shrouded in mist, but nothing was coming out of it, fortunately.
“Can you deactivate it, or will we need to bring some specialists from the airship down?” Cadenza asked Tiriana as they headed for the controls. Sized for larger beings as they were, Tiriana was forced to hop up on a chair to look them over. Sera could barely see them from her level, but there were a lot of new displays and indicators than the previous ones had had, many of which were projected by magic.
“I don’t see why not, but…I can’t predict how long I’ll need. The displays should help, since Vivi’s translation miracle would allow me to get a lot more information than the controls can give a lone, but they’re no substitute for a manual,” Tiriana answered as she examined a small section of the control surfaces. They were designed to be operated by a team, not one person, and there seemed to be a few other consoles scattered around the room near additional devices.
“I think you’ll be waiting a while on that,” Rinnie said. She was sitting on the ground now with Vivi holding her arm in place and praying, unable to join in on the conversation.
“In the meantime, I might be able to learn some things by just examining this core. Like those spots on the ceiling- see them?” Tiriana asked as she hopped down, pointing out the mist for Cadenza.
“Hm…I see, so that’s how they’re getting mana to the core. It’s flowing in through those vents and the core is absorbing it,” Cadenza observed, pinching her chin between her index finger and thumb.
“I don’t think they’re just ducts- they’ve somehow made stable portals to somewhere outside and bypassed the stone entirely. I was wondering how the primary core would have gotten any mana where it was, but there wasn’t much left to investigate,” Tiriana corrected the other mage.
“Portals? Every experiment with teleportation or portals I’ve heard of ended with monsters,” Cadenza replied skeptically.
“Maybe it didn’t work that way in their world. Although…the flow of mana looks very consistent. The constant throughput could be the answer, but I don’t know how they’d achieve it…”
“Hold that thought,” Cadenza said as her pocket started to vibrate. Reaching in, she retrieved a small device. When she activated it, a male elf’s head appeared in midair, projected by the object. “Dalian?”
“Cadenza, I’m sorry to interrupt your delve, but we have a situation. There’s a nachzehrer here…and it’s asking to speak to you.”