As the last of the murklings fell, a lasher taken from behind by one of Ravs’ knives, Jason allowed himself to finally sink down to the ground. Getting hit with the inkgill’s spell had taken a fair bit out of him.

Aldin started to move in his direction, a concerned look on his face, but Jason waved him off with a simple, “I’m fine, just exhausted.”

Jason wasn’t the only one to take a breather, either. Kera’s two summons abruptly dissipated as she dug her hind legs into the ground and flopped over with a final exertion, exposing her croc-belly to the air, before suddenly shrinking back into her ordinary, unaugmented changeling form. Jason chuckled to himself as he watched her blow a plume of wispy hair away from mouth, too tired to even bother moving her arms.

After a minute or two, the bodies of the dungeon’s minions evaporated, and Jason hauled himself to his feet. He left the others to pick up the scattered bags of minor coins left behind by the ordinary murklings, and instead chose to first see if the inkgills or lashers had left anything interesting. Sure enough, one of the casters had left behind a small vial of fine, black powder.

As he called up his [Arcane Sight], Jason reflected how odd it was that they basically got free containers along with the loot, at least from dungeonspawn anyway. Convenient, certainly, and at least it meant you didn’t always need to carry around spare jars for some as disgusting as bogri slime. Still, he felt it was a little strange that somehow the Voice provided free sacks and jars and vials, and yet somehow here was no game-like inventory system.

[Vial of Arcane Powder - Shadow] - A rare variety of arcane powder contaminated by shadow aspect mana. Usable only in the creation of shadow-aspect items, with a slight chance of creating additional effects. Traits Discovered: Mana, Shadow.

Then again, maybe it was a dungeon-loot thing. It wasn’t like he got free containers when harvesting local flowers and herbs, nor did he receive any such thing when manually harvesting the bodies of slain frogoids… assuming they lasted long enough before despawning. And yet, if he let it happen naturally though, he didn’t always get any meat, but what he did get came in small packages.

Jason snorted, laughing at himself trying to make sense of everything again. Lumi was right; it was a thing he did almost automatically, never letting things just be. Of course, that kind of thinking is what led him to his current fortune, so he had trouble seeing where the problem was…

“Oi, Jason, stop daydreaming!” Lumi called out to him. “Come and look at this.”

Shaking himself, he located Lumi standing on the edge of the three spawning pools. With a start, he realized that the entire village had been somehow arranged around them. First, the three, perfectly circular pools of filthy, reddish water, arranged in a triangle formation, but with space between them so you could walk into a fourth circle in the center, this one made of dry land. Beyond each pool was located one of the major structures of the ‘room’ - one for each evolved form of murkling, if Jason was guessing things correctly. The open-faced hut that looked very much like some kind of twisted stables, complete with small ponds in each stall, probably belonged to the lashers. The barracks-like log cabin was probably for the bladefins, which to Jason meant that in turn, the large enclosed stone hut belonged to the inkgills.

Between the three primary buildings was where the ordinary murklings had made their homes: more of the small, stilted mud and wood huts they’d seen quite a number of so far.

It was the pools, however, that Lumi had called Jason over to, because there, in the center of the entire formation, was a wide, circular mound of earth topped with a collection of small chests clearly covered in some kind of arcane energy.

Lumi pointed towards a long line of runescript that was running along the ground in front of her, cutting straight across one of the paths that thread between the pools and into the center.

“Tread carefully.” she warned him, also giving a significant look towards Sylvia, who’d mysteriously reappeared at some point and was now quietly following along, watching and listening.

Jason quickly flicked through his helmet’s sensor enchantments, activating the zoom feature along with the nightvision to examine the several treasure chests piled amidst the center of the encampment.

“Yeah looks like Aldin called it for sure,” he confirmed after a moment. “There are definitely runes all over those chests. There’s also some kind of pedestal in the center, maybe for some kind activation or spell. I’d need to get closer to read them properly, but its definitely some kind of trap.”

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Sylvia smiled faintly to herself, as if making some kind of mental note. Jason couldn’t decide if that meant he’d made a mistake or just done something right.

Just to make sure, he went ahead and switched to his life sensor, planning to check the pools for any surprises, and his heart leapt into his throat as the pools positively burst into brilliance. He jumped backwards with a loud curse, bringing up his shield barrier reflexively before it registered on him that whatever it was he was looking at, it wasn’t moving. Yet.

Lumi was backing as well, taking his alarm as a warning, but he quickly forced himself to relax and waved her back forward.

“Sorry, false alarm,” he apologized. “Those pools are absolutely teeming with life. There’s so many signatures there I can’t even make out what it actually is. But they’re…in stasis or something? Completely, utterly still, at any rate.”

“Related to the… challenge, do you think?” Lumi asked.

Jason squeezed his eyes against the glare before switching off his sensors. “Probably. Lemme get a look at these runes.”

Jason activated his [Arcane Sight] while he carefully looked over the runes inscribed across he ground. They didn’t seem like much; mostly a large chain of linking runes that appeared to run along together, kind of like when Kera—

“Aha.” he said out loud as the realization clicked. “These are actually the border of a ritual circle.” He drew Lumi’s attention to where the runes passed into the water. “Look there. It’s hard to see, but these actually keep going just along the shore under the water. If we follow it along…”

Jason motioned Lumi to follow, and slowly walked along the edge until he found what he was looking for, right where the lodge lined up with the triangle formation of the pools.

“Annnnd yep, look… there’s your trap sequence right there,” he confirmed to Lumi, pointing.

He motioned her back a moment before kneeling down to get a better look, careful not to come anywhere near touching the rune sequence. It was hellishly complex, but Jason had had a certain degree of experience with that lately. His hard work studying paid off with a quiet chime as he received a system notice.

Critical Success! Thanks to your recent efforts studying how simple runes can be made into more complex variations of themselves, you have been able to identify the basic structures of the Ritual of Awakening! You have been awarded knowledge of the following runes: Awaken, Cleanse, Sleep.

Knowledge of the ritual blossomed into his mind, and Jason made the realization that he had to be looking more than one ritual, because this one was designed to slowly woke up everything that was within the pools.

Scanning across the water with [Arcane Sight], he found what he’d missed before, under the water’s surface. While he couldn’t accurately see the whole circle, Jason’s zoom feature let him see enough, causing him blanch and back away from the water’s edge slightly.

“Whatever you do, don’t touch the water,” he emphasized to the two women. “There’s more than one ritual here. Get so much as a toe wet, and you’ll be pulled in and put to sleep. Permanently, until someone triggers the event.”

“Damn, so it’s just a trap then?” Lumi asked, disappointed. “I guess we’ll have to leave—”

Jason held up his hand to interrupt. “No. It’s an event for sure. The trap is if you try and avoid crossing the runes on the ground by going through the water. I think crossing the circle on land is perfectly fine. A red herring. I need to double check first, but gather everyone up in case I’m wrong?”

Lumi nodded and turned away, calling for the others. Meanwhile, Jason took his time, pacing around the edges of the circle, looking for any kind of trigger mechanism that might hint that stepping into the circle at all would be a poor idea. When he failed to find anything, he took a deep breath, checked behind him to make sure everyone else had gathered together, and stepped over the line onto the path.

He breathed a quiet sigh of relief when nothing blew up in his face, and cautiously made his way towards the interior.

Now that he was up close, he could see that there were close to a dozen small, plain wooden chests. They were uniform in construction; unadorned, and perhaps no more than two handspans in size apiece. A slightly shimmering field of arcane energy flowed over them, and Jason didn’t even need to active his [Arcane Sight] to know that the field would prevent you from opening them until it was dispelled.

Which of course, led him to the small pedestal with an ornate stone book lying on top of it, which had a single activation rune carved into its ‘pages’.

After very brief moment’s study of the entire area using [Arcane Sight], and Jason began to laugh quietly to himself before returning to the others.

Lumi gave him an odd look, so he guessed his amusement must have shown on his face.

“Well, I definitely know that this challenge is,” he announced. “In fact, barring some kind of mini-boss, which I’ll admit I won’t rule out as a possibility, I’m about… oh, call it 95% sure I know we can take this.”

“Oh?” Ravs asked, raising an eyebrow at him with a smirk.

“It’s a Horde Mode event.” he declared.

Lumi let a laugh slip before she recovered. “What, really?”

“Pretty damn sure,” Jason replied. “That pool is full of a ton of mobs, all in some kind of sleep-stasis. The ‘rewards’ is locked behind a timed system that both slowly unlocks access to the chests while at the same time pulsing the awakening runes on the edges of the pools. Activate the ritual, and you have to fight of steady waves of monsters, and once you’ve killed them all, the treasure’s yours.”

“If I had to guess,” he added, “given the pool is ‘corrupted’ we’ll be facing a whole mess of those swarmling types we saw back at the well, probably with a variety of other stuff mixed in here and there.”

Lumi looked out at the central ‘island’ dubiously. “I don’t really like the idea of being surrounded….”

Jason grinned at his friends. “Oh no, no need to do that at all. Look, here’s what we’ll do….”