Sara sat in Trollin’s town square, listening to the soothing bubble of the public fountain and the calming chatter of people as she wrote her letter to Kyritus.
-
Dear Kye,
The time has come: this is the last letter I’ll be able to write this week. I’ll be entering the Sayon Crypt, which cuts off access to the outer world. “It’s to prevent cheating,” say people living three centuries later. But from personal experience, I’ll tell you what it really is: sadism. I bet she got called a hag one day and was like, “Oh yeah? Now you gotta haul around your shit if you enter. Say it again and I’ll up the traps.”
Fuck. Her.
Okay, I know… I’m being dramatic. But look, Kye. I’d rather face a demon battalion than go a single day without a letter from you. Call me desperate, but they’re the best part of my day….
Anyway, I should be back in six days from the latest. I’ll write you every night and send them as a group at the end.
Thinking about you,
Delina
-
Sara closed her eyes, praying that she’d get letters tomorrow morning. [I should get some sleep….] She walked back to the inn and fell asleep, ignoring the fact that Emma (who enjoyed boarding with her in the nights to ease her PTSD) was conspicuously missing. She also pretended not to notice when Emma crept into the room long past midnight.
2
Sara tried her best to ignore the obvious but Emma turned bright red every time she looked at her, and Raul had an adult day-after glow. It was getting awkward, so she said, “You’re twenty-two,” before taking a drink of water at breakfast. “Get over it.”
Raul smirked when Emma suffered a severe case of sunburn on that cool, crisp morning in the Elcalore Kingdom.
“In other news, make sure to hit the bathroom before we go,” Sara said. “It’s gonna be a shit show this late.”
“Late?” Emma asked, glancing at Raul and back. “It’s seven. Is that… late?”
“Five is late,” Sara sighed. “There’s a sea of people tryin’ to get in, and the people running the show don’t give a fuck who you are. Last time, Jason declared he was the ‘Hero’ to skip the line and got sent packing. You shoulda seen his face… tragic.”
Raul let out a morbid chuckle, pinching Emma’s leg when her smile turned rueful.
“Okay. Hoods up.” Sara paid and threw on her cloak’s hood, starting her walk down a smooth stone street. Raul and Emma followed behind.
“Where are we going?” Emma asked, noting that they were moving away from the monta staples.
“To the crypt,” Sara replied.
“Wait. What?” Raul looked around. “It’s here?”
Sara smirked at him. “How do you think this city got so rich?”
They pestered her for answers, but it wasn’t five minutes until they exited a certain street, only to be met with gardens filled with thousands of flowers leading to the rockface the city used as a natural wall. There, carved in the rock like the presidents in Mount Rushmore, they saw a 100-foot sculpture of Telia Sayon’s face. It wasn’t exactly the same. There was nothing choppy or geometric about the sculpture. Telia carved it herself with magic, creating a beautiful Greek statue-grade sculpture of her face. Yet what was interesting was that she didn’t capture a vanity shot of a youthful mage. Instead, Telia captured her face in her late forties—facial creases, drooping eyes, and all. Yet Telia’s eyes were sharp, determination burning within them, knowing that once she finished with the crypt she’d go to war with Agronus. All of that created a message Sara cherished: “I’m badass at 48, you worms.” It was so defiant. She loved it—until it came between her and Kye.
“How didn’t we see this?” Raul asked with his mouth wide open.
“We took a path where the castle hid it.” Sara pointed at a massive line of 200-foot cylinders that he just realized was a [castle].
“Why?” Emma whispered.
“To see your faces,” Sara grinned. Come on.” She led them forward until they saw a sea of people outside the crypt. There, as promised, they waited. And waited. And waited. For hours and hours, they waited until the sun rose to its peak, hiding their shadows and then sending their shaded doppelgangers behind them.
Now, Sara would consider herself a patient person. By that, she meant that she could sit down for six hours and circulate mana, practice her drills, and keep silent. So whenever she found herself in a position of waiting, she felt perfectly content—especially when Kyritus and Tiber sent her letters for her to read. Yet she had forgotten how obnoxious, circular, and depraved the line to Sayon Crypt was. People who scoffed and jeered at those complaining about the trial got to the front, saw the trial, took the trial, and then repeated the cycle.
“Give it back!” a woman yelled in the distance.
“Are you deaf, lady? There’s no refunds.”
“That ‘trial’ is impossible!”
Sara’s eyebrow twitched. This woman’s voice was particularly grating, like the sound of dripping water if water bitched, pissed, and moaned about the floor it landed on.
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“How hard’s the trial?” Emma asked, tugging her collar to let air into her cloak. It was summer and they looked like assassins. It was hot as hell.
“A person passed this morning,” a man said in the distance.
“Yeah. One of yours!” the woman screamed.
Sara’s eyes deadened, and she took a deep breath. “Hard for most,” she said to Emma.
“But for us?” Raul asked.
Sara smiled mockingly. “What do you think?”
“Listen to me, lady!” the man yelled. “If you can’t get beyond the traum, you ain’t gonna last five minutes in the crypt. So fuck off.”
“I can get ‘beyond’ the traum!” Suddenly, the crowd let out a collective cry as a massive fireball the size of a Hollywood rolling boulder formed in the sky.
[They’re gonna shut it down,] Sara thought before blitzing through the crowd, pushing her way to the front against the people trying to push back.
“See this?” the brunette bitch screaming in noble gowns asked. “This is magic! If you allowed it in your trial, that brute would be toast and I’d be doin’ that trial!”
Sara had to admit—for an unranked noble, the fireball was impressive. It was abnormally large and if it crashed into the crowd, it would kill dozens of people and spread fire for twenty meters, so no one wanted to fuck with her. That was only natural. It was the equivalent of someone pulling out a machine gun in a parade just to prove they could get a gun into the crowd. That level of idiocy was criminal. Luckily, for Sara, it was elementary to fix the situation.
“You can use magic, and unless you didn’t read the guide, you should know that the crypt tests ingenuity, not force,” Sara said coldly, reaching her hand toward the fireball symbolically and shutting her hand. The fireball snuffed out. “And it does that with traps. If you can’t get past a sweaty man who’s blocked a hundred people already, you’re useless.”
“U-Useless?” the noble asked in disbelief. She was furious, primal, and unreasonable, carried away in the moment.
“Yeah. Useless.”
“Oh yeah? Let’s see you do it!”
Sara pulled out a golden griffin (the cost of admission) and turned to the man running the show. “Can I?”
He shivered, still shocked by the fireball—or perhaps by Sara putting it out. But he didn’t refuse. He just nodded and said. “S-Sure.”
Sara put the coin down and set up an amplification circle as he faced a man in a monta mask half a football field away. He was a massive ox of a man, fast, and capable of using magic. “The goal of this trial is to get past the traum,” Sara yelled. “You can’t attack him because there’s nothing to attack in the crypt! And if you want to outrun a trap with brute force, you better be damn fast. If you can’t do either of those things, you shouldn’t be here.”
With those words, she started walking toward the traum with the crowd buzzing behind her. Then, a hundred feet before the man, she started walking on raw mana like an invisible staircase, taking uniform steps with absolute confidence as she ascended toward the sky. The crowd went wild when they saw her walking straight to Telia’s left eye—the entrance of the labyrinth. Getting there was the second part of the trial, as the staircase led up to her head—and then people had to descend to the eye without falling to their death from the hundred-foot drop. Many failed.
The traum roared as she approached him (already walking 30 feet in the air) he lifted his burly hand and shot a wind gust at her. Sara activated a standard spherical barrier around her, deflecting the wind without slowing her steps. The action sent the crowd into a frenzy, making them whoop, whistle, and holler as Sara imagined the sanguine flush on the woman’s cheeks. It was vibrant and energetic, a far cry from where it was only a moment before, and it only got more intense when Sara was eighty feet up—eye level with Telia Sayon—and just started walking on an invisible bridge of mana.
God, she wished she could see that woman’s humiliation.
Suddenly, there was a fresh round of laughter and Sara stopped mid-air and turned to see what was happening. It was Emma. She had run after Sara, but she was afraid of heights. So instead of walking up a staircase, Emma trapped the man in her favorite pink barrier, and the man kept trying to attack her, only for his arms to sink into the membrane. It was pretty hilarious.
“Sorry!” Emma yelled as she passed by, earning more cheers. “I’ll release it!” She released it once she was 50 feet past him. Once free, the man roared and raised his hands in gratitude simply for being free, only for Raul to charge at him. The two men were about the same size, so the traum dug his feet into the ground, preparing for a collision. But to his surprise, Raul created a ramp with earth magic, ran 20 feet to the top, and jumped 50 feet over the man. Sara watched with a slight smile. In retrospect, the entire thing had been worth it. After all—
—the people recording the event didn’t even see their papers.
She was also proud of her friends. The barrier, in particular, was very creative and was much more unique than Emma’s original solution, which was to create a rock wall to block him in. Raul used brute force last time as well. It seemed they were far stronger this time around.
Sara continued walking to Telia Sayon’s eye. The door was wide open, leading to a deceptively inviting lounge area with ward-activated fountains of clear water, cups, and stone seats. Yet it was anything but. In the center, there was a pillar with an array. Once she activated it, dust in the room swirled to the pillar, and it created a soft piece of rock chalk, a touch that Sara found more magnificent at her age.
She yawned, feeling drowsy as she returned to her seat. She wondered how many people sat down, relaxing before the “upcoming” array exam—only to fall asleep forever. Sara didn’t think too much about it. She immediately walked to a chair, drew a mana negation array, and activated it. Then she sat down, feeling her energy return in droves.
“I wish I could just sleep,” she groaned. Emma was afraid of heights, so it took forever to get her to the eye. Thankfully, she had Raul but…
… fuck. Sara tried activating her spatial ring once for good measure—nothing. That was amazing considering that the wall next to her (the iris) was wide open. So there was nothing to do for the next three to six hours as Emma and Raul climbed the staircase around the head, got to the top, and then descended to the eye somehow.
“You were something else,” Sara said to Telia’s ghost. She looked to the ceiling. “If only you had our cores. Then you’d be a god, and we’d be… making potato salad right now. Or something.” She pondered it for a while—
—and naturally fell asleep.
3
Sara’s eyes snapped open when she felt an intense pulse of mana. It was suddenly dark out, and Raul and Emma were yelling as the ceiling was closing down on them. Telia was [blinking]. “Didn’t I teach you the array?” Sara yelled.
“It wasn’t us!” Emma yelled
“Then who?”
“Him!” Raul pointed at a random sleeping man. “He was the guy who passed this morning. He must’ve got in while we were dozing.”
“Fuck!” Sara put up a barrier. “Just run out of the damn room!” She ignored the man as the ceiling crashed down on her. It was fast, only slowed by the barriers Sara and Emma immediately put up. They all charged into the next room’s hallway as the ceiling touched the floor in the lounge. A moment later, Telia stopped [blinking], a barrier activated separating the lounge from the hallway, and water flooded into the lounge, washing the man’s corpse away. From the outside, Sara could hear a rowdy cheering crowd as Telia blinked and shed tears of blood.
That’s how their experience in the Sayon Crypt began.
4
Andy rushed past Helen as he ran into his room.
“What’s going on?” she asked frantically.
“No time.”
“Andy, tell—“
“I said there’s no time!” Andy fumbled around the desk for a pen as Helen started crying. He had never screamed at her, and women who got screamed at for the first time started crying. And he wanted to comfort her and say sorry, but there was no fucking time! Those were his thoughts as he dipped his pen into the inkwell and started writing a simple message as fast as he could:
“Daniel’s gone. Guards dead. Erased array.”
Then he opened a spatial ring and threw it in there, praying that he made it in time.