The team spread out to take measurements in the room, placing down several divination devices to take readings on ambient mana levels and energy types. As the two arcanists channeled mana into them to activate them, Gomaer went up to one of the walls and started moving stone tiles around. When he was done, there was a heavy sounding clunk and one of the stone pillars in the middle of the room opened up like a flower. Mirian had no idea how something like ‘stone’ was bending so flexibly.

Each of the petals of stone contained hieroglyphs that vaguely resembled myrvites. There were also channels carved into the base that led to the center. “Do these take specific magichemicals?” she asked.

“Got it in one,” Aelius said, already getting the vials out from his pack. “The magichemical matches the myrvite spell organ it’s distilled from. Costs two drachms to open this up each time.”

The magichemicals mixed in the center of the stone flower, then there was a brief flare of arcane energy and the substance took on a yellow glow and began oozing like honey. Mirian knew for a fact that what usually happened when you mixed them was a rapid exomagical reaction that usually ended in a fireball, and the resulting substance was a pile of black tar and a lot of smoke. Professor Seneca would have had a conniption.

“You’ve analyzed the properties of this substance?”

“As best we can. It becomes inert if you take it out of the Vault.” Aelius looked to his other arcanists. “Got the measurements?”

There were nods all around.

Aelius scooped up the glowing yellow substance with a bare hand and unceremoniously chucked it at the north door. There was a plorp sound as it hit, then started dripping down the stone. Then, the substance rapidly spread across the door as if it had a life of its own, and the whole door glowed yellow. With another clunk, the door rumbled open, splitting apart into six segments that retracted into the wall.

“Doesn’t work on any of the other doors,” Gomaer said. “Just that one. No clue how to open the others in this room.”

The next room was encircled by strange growths, something like a cross between muscles stripped of all flesh and fungal hyphae. Here and there, the organic growths bloomed into something between a blossom and a mushroom cap.

As before, the arcanists spread out to place down their measuring devices, while Aelius opened up his journal again. Hidden under the mushroom caps were ‘spores’—which took the form of tiny stone hexagons each with a hieroglyph on them. There were slots by each door, each one representing an ecosystem. To solve these puzzles, they just had to cluster the hieroglyphs representing plants and animals that existed together.

“Strange. They really are like trials,” Mirian said.

This time, all three doors rumbled open.

“Readings are good,” the sorcerer said, marking down the results in his notebook.

They proceeded like this. All in all, the team had nine rooms unlocked. All of them seemed to involve some sort of puzzle. Sometimes, they only knew how to open one door. Sometimes, several. Mirian had already noticed that the layout of the Vault seemed to defy physics. If they opened a northern door, then an eastern door, then a southern door, then circled back through a western door to what should have been the same room they started in, they instead found a completely different room. Another sure sign of the Elder Gods at work.

I wonder what Respected Jei would make of it, Mirian thought. At no point while she walked through the rooms had she realized she was moving through another spatial dimension—and yet, she must have been. She resolved to sketch out some ideas on the math behind that later. For now, she was too interested in the magical results.

Ambient magic had grown as they descended to third level, then risen again once they got in the Vault. Beyond that, there were pinpoint spikes of arcane energy occurring—as best she could tell—dozens of times per second. The only thing that did anything comparable was a spell engine, and even a train’s spell engine did so on a much smaller scale.

The teams had long ago looted what they could from the Vault, bringing back several samples that Elsadorra was still helping them study, but there were plenty of ‘easy’ rooms, as Aelius termed it, they could still attempt to open.

“So what does a ‘hard’ room look like?” Mirian asked.

“Well, let’s just say there’s a reason we’re staying in the outer rooms,” Aelius replied. He walked over to another door they hadn’t opened and pressed his hand against it.

No puzzle for this one. It just split open revealing a large corridor, a few hundred feet long with a very high ceiling.

The corridor went for about ten feet, then led to a sheer drop. “Goes down fifty feet,” said Aelius. “So you’ve got to have about a ten foot horizontal leap, and don’t mess up. Then there’s that next part,” he said, gesturing. Silently, the walls in that section began to close, until they were touching. Then just as silently, they moved open again and repeated the process. That section of crushing wall had no way around it, and was twenty feet long. “So you can’t just carefully set up some ropes and anchors to ferry everyone across. After the crushing corridor, there’s all those tiles. We threw some rocks in there, and there’s certain tiles that, when touched, send out a column of superheated fire. Beyond those—took Gomaer’s arm to hit that far—gravity in the corridor reverses. Amazing bit of magic, no clue how they accomplished it. So that nasty looking ceiling there with islands of stone surrounded by ceiling spikes? You essentially fall up into that, then have to make perfect jumps from platform to platform until you get to the end.”

“That’s quite the death trap,” Mirian said. “But couldn’t a quick levitation spell get you across all of that?”

“Oh, that’s the best part,” Aelius said. “The entire corridor has an antimagic field. Just a suppression field, but no spell is going to work in there, and it also deadens any of the devices we put in until they’re back out.”

Fascinating, Mirian thought. “Have you tried to locate the antimagic glyphs?”

He chuckled. “They’re not near the entrance, I’ll tell you that much. Also, fair warning, if you start drilling into the walls to remove anything here, Scrappy is gonna come looking. So that’s why we don’t go any further.”

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“Fair enough,” Mirian said, though in her mind she was already thinking about how she’d tackle it. In preparatory school, the dueling instructor had made them run obstacle courses for agility, and this reminded her of those. She was trying to trace the route she would take.

Maybe she could practice at the end of the cycle. Except, if she waited that long, she’d have to get through the entropic antimagic field, and probably reopen all the puzzles because of the Labyrinth shift. To even attempt this room, how much of a cycle would she have to give up?

“Do entropic antimagic fields nullify mana elixirs?” she asked.

“No,” said Aelius. “Though that’s a suppression field in there. If it was entropic, I don’t think it would be humanly possible.”

“Right, just a stray thought. What a fascinatingly deadly place.”

They went back to the puzzle in the room that the group was working on.

This room had more of the strange muscular-looking fungi, but there were no glyph tiles under the caps. Instead, there were tendrils dripping down from the caps like they were some sort of jellyfish. If you put something in the tendrils, they gently grabbed it and brought it up until it touched the top of the cap. Inevitably, they then dropped whatever they’d been given to the floor.

Everyone had basically figured out that, like the magichemicals that went on the flower petals, there was a specific thing the mushrooms were looking for. What that thing was, no one had figured out.

Mirian sat cross-legged on the floor and thought. There seemed to be a theme to the puzzles along this wing of the Vault. Another puzzle had involved lining up the life cycles of different myrvites. There seemed to be a theme of ecology.

Professor Viridian might know, she thought. The other thing she needed to check was how soul magic interacted with an antimagic suppression field.

“Gonna test something,” she said, and stepped into the corridor.

Immediately, it felt like a wall had come down between herself and her aura. The arcane catalyst failed to have any effect. But she could still access her focus and her soul. She siphoned a small amount of her soul so she could reach out with the celestial equivalent of raw magic and touch the walls. The tendril immediately dissolved in the field.

Interesting. It seemed soul magic still worked, it was just blocked as soon as it tried to do anything. Her disguise was safe, as well as any other internal soul magic. She had some theories as to how that might be useful.

She stepped back out. “Well, that didn’t work,” she said.

Aelius snorted.

That was when they heard the alarm ward going off.

“Shit!” the sorcerer said. “It’s here.”

Aelius turned to look at the door they’d come through. “Alright, everyone. You know the drill. Equipment stowed, in formation, get those illusions ready.”

The team scrambled to pick up the measuring devices, then quickly formed two columns. Mirian took her place in the back.

They walked quickly back towards the entrance, stopping a moment in the center of each room while Aelius used divination to track Scrappy’s progress. They were two rooms away when the Elder automaton finally made its appearance.

Mirian wasn’t sure what she expected. Maybe a humanoid looking figure made of metal? Certainly something with a definitive form.

Scrappy was like six metal snakes swirling around each other in constant flux, with long needle-like protrusions that split open to act like legs, or stabbed at some part of the Labyrinth like a surgeon suturing a wound. They seemed to surround a core of some type, a red glowing orb that was encircled by three overlapping rings, each studded with what looked to be violet crystals. It was at least eight feet tall—at least, most of the time. Its pieces never stopped moving.

Aside from the clack clack clack of its weird needle-feet, its movement was disturbingly silent.

“Illusions!” snapped Aelius, and the team immediately cast three greater illusionary figure spells, each a replica of one of them. Aelius had mentioned earlier that Scrappy wouldn’t be deceived by a regular illusion; it needed to have visible light, infrared light, and create vibrations when its feet hit the floor, or the golem would just ignore it.

The team scattered in every direction, leaving the illusions to fight it, then reformed around its back. The illusions dodged about, but within moments Scrappy had swept its needle-arms through them, realized they were fake, and was in pursuit.

“Double time!” Aelius called. Then, seeing that it was gaining on them, said, “Fighting retreat.”

The sorcerer spun, unsheathing a wand, then let out a force blast. If the automaton had been anything normal, it would have been sent flying backward. Instead, it paused momentarily.

Gomaer followed up by bringing his warhammer down in a powerful strike. It let out a loud brang! as the steel head bounced off one of the coils of metal. A human skull would have shattered. Scrappy just paused, then came forward again.

Gomaer leapt back to avoid getting impaled by two of the golem’s arms as they swung out, while the sorcerer put up a shield that deflected a fiery ray that burst out of its center. Aelius and the other mage went after it next, again using force blasts to keep it stunned while the group backpedaled.

Mirian waited for an opening, then unleashed a greater lightning. The bolt roared out, blazing bright.

Scrappy’s central glowing ‘eye’ of the golem turned to look at her. It hadn’t been damaged at all; the gaze on her looked more that of a curious animal. Her spell had smacked into it like a feather hitting a brick wall. Mythril, she realized. Mana-impregnated titanium. Like the orichalcum, it would convey incredible spell resistance, and anything made out of metal that thick wasn’t going to flinch at anything short of an artillery shell.

Unless…

As the other arcanists continued to harass it with spells and the two heavies worked to swat at the needle arms that it brought forward, Mirian siphoned another small portion of her soul. She then structured that soul energy so it was in a thin layer on the outside of her aura. As the next greater lightning bolt formed, that veil of soulstuff would wrap around the spell. That would make the spell pierce any resistance. She’d practiced it on myrvites with Arenthia to deal with auramancers and people like Specter, because in theory it should work against anything that resisted magic, from souls to mythril.

She again felt her spell smashing against the metallic form of the golem, but this time, it was like drilling into a wall. The resistance was still there, but the mana fueling stayed concentrated instead of scattering. This time, arcs of electricity jumped about throughout the automaton, and it let out a metallic howl.

“What in the fuck!” shouted the arcanist.

“It’s never done that before! Run!” shouted Aelius.

The group broke off, sprinting for the exit. Scrappy let out another screech, the sound echoing throughout the Vault, then continued after them.

Mirian was the first to make it out, sprinting past the rest until she made it to the ropes. Then she turned, ready to shield the others. Gomaer was the last one out. He let out a wheeze as he crossed the threshold.

Scrappy stopped at the door, red eye bright as fire.

Mirian got ready to cast again, but the other mage held up a hand. “It won’t exit the Vault. It will go undo all the things we just did, but we’re safe.”

She nodded, sheathing her wand, and got ready to climb.