“That should be impossible. How could you even interpret it?” Tiriana asserted even as Rinnie waved her conjured token in front of the scanner. The crystal at the center changed from white to red. Sera would have assumed that was a bad thing were it a human-designed system, but the plants here were red instead of green. Assuming the native giants chose their colors the same way then that probably meant the token had been accepted.
“Lots of practice,” Rinnie replied smugly as the token vanished into thin air. Layla snorted.
“So you are not just a thief, but an experienced thief,” the warrior accused in disgust.
“Well, now you’re just making assumptions. But you know what isn’t one? The fact you’re so unpleasant and incompetent that you got blacklisted by every Amazonian sisterhood in Omichlódis,” Rinnie shot back venomously. Sera respected her bravery. She made a mental note to honor the little scout’s memory.
“How…?” Layla muttered, struck momentarily speechless. “You dare!?”
“Must I again remind the both of you that we are in a dungeon?” Cadenza barked, her swords swinging into place between Layla and Rinnie just as the former reached for her weapon. “Layla, keep your mouth shut if all you have to utter is insults and accusations. Rinnie, cease provoking her or prepare your last will. I’m not stepping in if this happens again.”
“Hmph,” Layla grunted before turning and leaving the room, stomping off to wait in the hallway. She kicked aside a broken golem on the way through.
“God I wish those two would just bone already and get it out of their systems,” Sera whispered to Vivi, who chortled before she could stop herself. Rinnie shot her a glare, clearly having heard what she said, but all she did in reply was throw a presumably rude gesture Sera’s way.
“Back to the topic at hand, how can we be sure that worked?” Cadenza asked as she indicated the red crystal. “That looks like ominous.”
“It worked. I’ve tested this technique on hundreds of security systems. It’s been a very long time since I misread the results,” Rinnie stated confidently, arms crossed.
“But that would be like…reverse engineering a jig-saw puzzle when the pieces are still in the box and all you can see is the negative space between them,” Tiriana replied, still unable to fathom what Rinnie had done.
“Is it that much different from what you do with the trap spells?” Vivi asked.
“Completely. I don’t have to do anything, I can just see them. Mana isn’t like language, an active spell formation is universal. It might be too complex to fully grasp or deconstruct, but as long as it’s not masked somehow, I can at least determine the basic function. The closest comparison I can think of would be seeing a spell in action and deciphering it without ever laying eyes on the spell circle that cast it,” Tiriana explained to Vivi. Sera didn’t yet know enough about magic to understand that directly, but maybe it was something like looking at a computer’s user interface and divining how it was programmed from the visual alone?
“It’s that first part that’s the important bit. Mana is universal. If you know how one system stores the key you know them all…at least, before the eggheads figured out how to encrypt it, but that’s outside my wheelhouse,” Rinnie said with a shrug. “Now, are we going to sit here and yap about how amazing I am all day, or are we going to go check out the other station?”
“We should examine the defenses first. Come,” Cadenza said as she walked back out of the guard room. Sera followed along with the others to find her kneeling over one of the golems- they were the size of nachzehrer but far more heavily armored. Even so, the mist-warped that attacked them had bent their metal limbs and crumpled their plating such that they could no longer move.
“Looking more closely, I think these are still active,” Tiriana observed as she joined Cadenza. “They’re just too damaged to move.”
“Yes…their cores are likely heavily protected. Mere mist-warped…no, even monsters would have to be fairly powerful to reach them. Ironic, then, that their least vital parts proved to be their greatest weakness,” Cadenza said as she ran her hand over the chest plate of one golem. “They are quite heavily charged with mana as well. I believe I could immobilize them for some time, but they would resist intrusion.”
“There’s no way we can break them the same way the monsters did. Unless…Layla can manage it, anyway,” Rinnie contributed, clearly struggling just to make herself use Layla’s actual name instead of an insult. Maybe the idea of being left to at Layla’s mercy while deep inside a dungeon at finally scared her into behaving.
“…you wish for me to bend pure metal with my bare hands?” the warrior asked grumpily from her position at the door.
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“Are you saying you can’t?” Rinnie asked in a much more even tone that was usual.
“I did not say that,” Layla disagreed. Given that she’d pried open a heavy elevator door the other week, Sera was unsurprised by the assertion.
“Looks like there were about half a dozen here. I think between Layla and I we should be able to destroy them, but we may need you to do some crowd control, Tiriana,” Cadenza said slowly. “That just leaves those…”
“The crystal things?” Rinnie asked, following Cadenza’s gaze towards the ceiling. “I’ll take care of them.”
“The soles of their feet are smooth metal,” Tiriana observed. “I could coat the ground in ice. They probably weren’t designed to be used outside in winter.”
“Oh! Then I could bestow a water-walking miracle, or maybe an anti-slip miracle, for Layla and Cadenza!” Vivi volunteered excitedly.
“And Sera, you’ll be doing the same thing as last time,” Cadenza added at the end. “I’m going to need some range to do what I have in mind, so we’ll need you to confuse them. Make it so they can’t be sure where Layla is.”
“Got it!” Sera agreed with a firm nod, feeling much more confident now having done it once before.
“Let’s go find out if there’s going to be a fight at all, then,” Cadenza said as she walked out of the room. Since the party already knew the hallway wasn’t going to be trapped, they were able to march through the one outside and right down the one opposite it without much fanfare. Just like in the last hall, the doors here were busted open and the contents of the rooms they guarded trashed. But unlike the last time, this hallway terminated in a closed door. As always, Rinnie was first to the door, carefully opening it just a bit to check the other side.
“Six golems. One looks busted. Five lined up along the walls,” she reported after closing the door.
“Better than it could have been,” Cadenza said. “Layla, wait for Sera’s illusion before entering. Everyone else, you know what to do.”
That said, no one actually moved yet. Sera began creating an image in her mind, again focusing on making it realistic as possible knowing that whatever she actually produced would be much less detailed than her mental image. Vivi began praying to the god of adventure, while Tiriana began readying a spell.
“Ready?” Tiriana asked when she finished preparing. Five nods answered and she cast open the door, throwing both hands forward and towards the ground. The floor of the room iced over in a flash, going from smooth stone to even smoother ice in seconds. The defensive emplacements on the ceiling reacted first by casting bolts of energy in her direction, but the elven mage hadn’t skimped on her barriers, which deflected the projectiles in to the walls.
Tiriana stepped to the side and Layla took the lead, cloaked in a shroud of indeterminate figures several feet in every direction. Even she herself was blurred. The first golem to step towards her slipped and fell onto the ice, sending spider webs of cracks in every direction. Another fell on the opposite side of the room, but in the process the two fallen golems had disturbed the slick surface enough for the rest to proceed- albeit slowly. Three golems stomped towards Layla, who even in her armor looked like a child before them.
Before the vanguard warrior even reached her opponents Rinnie darted in, arrow already nocked and ready. She flicked her bow upwards and loosed an arrow towards one of the crystals in the ceiling and a rain of shards followed soon after. One after another she sniped the fragile magic turrets, which were too preoccupied firing at Layla to notice. Some actually struck the warrior, but the damage, if any, was too little to halt her advance.
The lead golem plodded into range and launched a punch at Layla that would have flattened Rinnie like a bug, but it misjudged her location and struck only the ground. As its fist landed, Layla shot up from within the illusionary mass Sera had produced to strike it on the head with her poleaxe, leaving a sizeable dent in its forehead. A second golem approached and Layla redirected its strike away from her body, causing it to bump into the first before she faded into her covering illusion.
As Layla engaged the golems, Cadenza stepped into the room. She waved one hand upwards, drawing five swords, then dropped her hand forward and swept it to the side. The weapons under her control fanned out parallel to the ground with one pointing straight forward. To Sera’s eyes it looked remarkably like some kind of rotary loading mechanism- because it was. Cadenza’s hands settled to both sides of the sword in front of her and the air began to hum.
Meanwhile, Layla used Sera’s spell to great effect, nimbly striking out from within the cluster of her doubles and fading back in before her enemies could retaliate, lingering only long enough to deflect a blow or two and keep their attention on herself. Metal rang like a chorus of bells as her poleaxe landed hit after hit upon the armor of the golems in much the same way she had defeated the nachzehrer gunner. The damage seemed minor, but Layla was experienced. Every strike landed close to a joint, pinching the metal plating nearby and restricting the movement of her foes.
“Dodge left!” Cadenza barked, her magic reaching a crescendo and making the very air vibrate. Layla danced out of the way and a moment later there was a flash of light as Cadenza’s sword broke the sound barrier with a deafening crack. Sera could only assume she’d taken precautions to reduce the volume, otherwise that description may have been literal. Regardless, the magnetically accelerated sword punched its way through the chest plate of its target, transferring so much additional force that the massive figure skidded back several feet before falling to the ground, its core pierced.
A second pulse of ice flowed out over the room from Tiriana’s position, sending the golems slipping and sliding again as Layla moved back in to reengage. She concentrated her efforts on a single golem this time- it had already been beginning to slow, and her efforts exacerbated its mobility problems until it was moving in fits and starts comparable to a very rusty machine. When Cadenza was ready to fire her next shot, she didn’t even bother targeting that one, as it was clearly already as good as out of the fight.
Sera noticed Rinnie had pulled back to where she and Vivi were standing and was now watching the fight with a bored expression. That, in particular, drove home that this battle was as good as over. Now all they needed to do was wait.