A couple years after the giant crab incident Aiko and her friends were once again challenging the dungeon. Their group had become fairly famous because they had gotten deeper into the dungeon than any other group. The maps they brought back were vital to the survival of many other groups that ventured into the dungeon.
Aiko noticed early on that there were strings hanging from the ceiling in the dungeon at various points. Between her and brass they had figured out rather quickly that this was the location of traps set in the dungeon. Zeyn told them that the reason for these strings hanging from the ceiling was to mark the location of known traps and that it was a method that had just caught on recently.
A stick could be used to push a pin or a wad of sticky gum against the ceiling to hold the string up. They decided unanimously not to use the sticky gum after finding a couple of fallen strings on the floor with gum on the end of them and they told other adventurers not to use it as well when they got back to town.
A few weeks later they made their way down one of the well-known paths and Aiko pointed out a path leading off in another direction that it seemed most people had missed. The path in question was actually rather hard to spot since it was in a turn in the tunnel and faced the other direction. Aiko would have missed the tunnel just the same as anyone else but something told her to turn around and look back the way they were coming from.
The path they encountered didn’t look like it had been used at all or at least like it hadn’t been scouted by anyone from the guild. Aiko, Brass, and Zeyn had a quick conference and decided that the risk was worth it but they had to be much more alert and on guard scouting an unknown tunnel like this.
Their notion that they were the first ones to take that path was proven correct not terribly far down the tunnel. Brass scouted ahead and was looking high and low or at least at every floor tile and all the walls. Aiko was checking on a bit of fungus that tended to grow in the cracks in the walls and especially at floor level. This particular fungus could be very dangerous if somebody breathed it in and her and Zenya were always careful to keep an eye out for this particularly nasty mushroom.
It was only due to Aiko being off to the side that she was the first one to discover a particularly nasty trap. She had been searching along the wall and not paying as much attention to the flooring and it was because of that that she felt the floor give out from under her slightly.
With an immediate panicked yelp Aiko signaled everybody to stop and then began explaining that she had just triggered some kind of trap. Brass, hearing her explanation, had run back but stopped short about 20 paces from her. She watched with a certain amount of curiosity and an abundance of fear as he made his way to the opposite wall from her and began walking forward.
At first Aiko thought that he was being so overly cautious that he didn’t want to get anywhere near her but then suddenly she heard and felt a shift in the floor beneath her. Looking back over at brass he signaled her to move back down the tunnel and she carefully did. He then casually strode up the middle of the tunnel and asked her to turn and look where she had been standing.
Aiko was dumbfounded by the complexity of the trap that she had narrowly avoided. As she watched on brass put a bit of pressure on the opposite wall from her and the entire floor of the tunnel began to tilt and pivot on the central axis of the tunnel. An area of the floor at least 15 paces long was set to flip over if any weight was put on it. It was only by dumb luck that Aiko, the second-lightest member of the party, was the one to step on this particular trap.
They discussed it amongst themselves and realized that they had the perfect solution to this trap. It would require a party of four to bypass this trap. Shumai and Menk stepped up to the edges of the platform and put one foot on the platform while holding the wall and used their other foot to balance it and hold it in place. After that, everybody else hurried across and Merrill and Zeyn held the edges of the platform for the other two to get across. Then they marked the trap so that nobody else would fall through.
Brass and Aiko began a competition to see who could spot the most traps after that. Both of them had Greater Spatial Awareness by that point And both of them had earned it through the use of their earlier skill set.
Zenya realized that the floor tilting trap had given her a bit of an opportunity. As she was going across, she realized that there was a slight gap in the fore next to that trap and checked the next pressure plate that brass marked to find that it had the same kind of gap. She then began participating in the little competition to find the most traps by using her observation against the other two with their better perception skill.
Meanwhile, Zeyn, Merrill, Shumai, and Meng were left speechless as one trap after another was uncovered by the hyperactive trio. They began having to Set roles in the application of trap markers where Menk would hold all of the nails, Merrill would loop the thread over the nails, shumai would run the ready to use markers up to Zeyn and he would place them.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
At one point as they were scurrying about looking for traps and monsters Aiko got that strange feeling that she had come to realize was a sixth sense or the like and began searching the ceiling as it had told her. Brass on the other side of the tunnel from her and Zenya just a short ways back noticed her movements and took up the same vigil. Suddenly, Aiko spotted a movement amongst the bricks of the ceiling and there was a slight flicker of a shape that perfectly matched the color of the bricks.
Aiko and Brass both having spotted the same movement signaled to Zenya who ran back to warn the party. Moments later the slight telltale glitter in the air gave them both warning to shut their eyes. The next moment an immense wash of fire bathed the ceiling of the tunnel and numerous screeches could be heard along with the running footsteps of the rest of the party.
When Aiko and brass opened their eyes, it was to the sight of multiple large predatory monsters thrashing about on the ground around them. Aiko and brass wasted no time stabbing and slashing the distracted monsters and soon the entire party was in amongst them. The monsters weren’t particularly hard to kill but after some discussion it was decided that the party as a whole would move a little slower to give their scouts more time to pick out any similar hidden enemies. And encounter them they did, in droves!
After encountering the fifteenth or twentieth batch of these strange monsters the party was exhausted and decided to make their way back to town. Of course they took several of the monsters back with them and it was discovered that their skin had a natural magic property imbued in it. They made a bundle of money ferrying the corpses of the creatures they had killed back to town to create cloaks that would give hunters a natural camouflage ability. Of course it wasn’t perfect because everyone of the hides had certain splotches on them where they had been burned or stabbed and the magic effect faded after a couple weeks but they were still highly popular.
The next time they entered the dungeon, Zenya happened to be a little ahead of the rest of the party when she spotted something odd. A little above her head was a thin string that seemed to be made of metal. She had only noticed it in the dark of the tunnel because her spear tapped it as she walked under it. When she pointed it out to Zeyn, he asked Brass and Aiko to look at it and see what they thought. Sure enough, it turned out to be another way to trigger traps. Zenya grumbled that it was almost like the dungeon was trying to kill them and everyone had a good laugh.
A couple weeks later, the party was deeper in the dungeon still. By Zeyn’s estimate the last time they had taken a rest, they were more than thirty-five floors down from the entrance.
Aiko was scouting a little ahead since Brass was pointing out a trap to Zeyn. Aiko noticed there was a dip in the floor of the tunnel ahead and approached cautiously along one side because almost anything could be hiding just past the edge of the dip. She noticed as she got a little closer that there was a slight downward bulge in the ceiling above the dip that would make a person duck if the floor continued at the same height but nothing else.
As she got closer, she noticed that the tunnel rose and continued on the other side about a hundred and fifty paces away as if nothing happened. When she first spotted the decline, she had been hoping that it would be a set of stairs or a ramp leading down to the next level of the dungeon, but no.
Aiko had decided to just proceed on but something about the whole thing tickled the back of her mind. As she cautiously inched down the incline, she thought for a moment that she felt something on her fur and paused but nothing happened so she continued to inch forward.
Aiko heard the faint sounds of the party approaching and paused till she could see them. Once she was sure that they would see her she held up her hand to get their attention and that’s when it hit her. Suddenly her nose was burning with a scent that was so bad it set her to coughing immediately. Aiko bolted out of the depression in a panic and warned everyone away from it.
After the party discussed the depression for a bit, Brass inched closer and carefully held a torch down into the depression. Before the flame spluttered out, he saw hundreds of dead things at the bottom of the depression and warned everyone about the deadly trap.
A few moments later, the party was crossing the pit on Aiko’s Air Walk spell. Near the middle, they could all hear bubbling water nearby and could faintly make out the signs of small holes in the low-hanging ceiling. Merrill held a torch under a hole and everyone was stunned when it began spluttering but it didn’t go out. Aiko decided that was the scariest trap she had seen in all her years of delving into the dungeon.
Not much later, they found another interesting but single-use trap that hadn’t been sprung because they were the first party to make it that deep. Brass noticed that all of the floor tiles were too neat as if they were laid for some precise purpose other than walking on.
Brass had been studying the floor and walls for several minutes without figuring out what the trap was so Menk stepped up. He readied the shield he had recently bought and stepped partially on one of the tiles Brass suspected. He almost fell forward to his death as the tile immediately fell from under him.
As Menk and Zeyn who had caught him were busy cursing the floor and the dungeon in general, Shumai stepped forward. The whole original party had been feeling increasingly useless because there were fewer and fewer monsters as the dungeon progressed downwards.
Shumai was thankful for a chance to show her worth a bit and began channeling a wind spell into the hole left by the fallen tile. Moments later the spell went off and suddenly almost every tile for as far as the party could see down the tunnel jumped into the air and fell into a dark abyss below. The resounding crash of tiles hitting below was music to everyone’s ears.
Moments later, the party was hopping from column to column over the pit that they could barely see the bottom of. A scant few monsters and a half dozen traps later, they were at the bottom of the dungeon. Waiting for them was a vault containing three chests of coins, jewels, fine accessories, and three books of apparently lost knowledge. Finally, they had defeated the dungeon! Now, they just had to survive the trek back up to the surface on what remained of their rations.