Adventure without chaos is like skinny dipping with clothes on—boring!
~Balor, The Primordial God of Chaos
The moment they stepped onto the shore, a large group of contenders came running over.
“Mara!” The leader of the group demanded, and Crow winced.
“Oh, you are bringing a pirate’s tithe?” Mara asked with a smile and glittering eyes.
“You!” The boy was shaking in anger. “Give our stuff back.”
“Is this how a man behaves?” Mara tsk’d a few times. “I can’t even take you seriously when you are running around in your underpants. Have some pride, fellow sailor.”
“Besides,” Song Xue said. “Does it look like we carry useless trash around with us? Most of it was dumped in the sea.”
“K-kill them,” the leader bellowed, refusing to negotiate with pirates.
Clothes started flying around as they tried to charge Crow and his crew. Some landed on heads, some tripped people, and others just rushed in to grab some clothes, all of which created a mass amount of confusion. While they were trying to unentangle themselves, Crow and his three companions were already halfway across the beach and nearing the stairs.
“Make sure you clean those!” Mara shouted at her victims. “I’ll take them back soon enough.”
The more agile contenders had dodged most of the people falling, and they were gaining on them.
Mara picked Crow up like a damsel and pumped her legs as fast as they’d go. She cradled him to her ample bosom, and Crow tried to struggle free.
“Sit still, you are too slow, and they were gaining on us. Let’s see them catch up now.”
“This… isn’t too appropriate, right?”
“You swam with me naked. How is this worse?”
“T-that didn’t happen,” Crow stuttered and then went silent, but couldn’t decide which was worse, Mara’s mocking laugh or Song Xue’s silent stare.
They didn’t even stop when they reached the stairs, but Crow felt this ascent was definitely built for dragons. Each stair was several hundred meters long and a meter high. Mara put Crow down. The four of them proceeded to climb and jump up the stairs as fast as they could. They’d gained enough of a lead that they paced their climb to climb as efficiently as they could.
After the hundredth step, Crow felt an ominous pressure weighing down on them. It definitely wasn’t his imagination because even the other three had slowed slightly. The more stairs they climbed, the more pressure was placed on them.
“What… is happening?” Song Xue asked.
Crow couldn’t even be bothered to reply, but Mara used her Source to resist it. Soon the others were doing the same. It wasn’t that it was a significant strain on their bodies. It was more like the air was heavy, and it made it harder to breathe.
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After that, their steady pace pushed them to the two-hundredth step, and in the center of it was a stone pylon or totem. There were twenty-five symbols etched onto it.
“Is this really a test of intelligence?” Crow asked.
“What do you mean?” Mara replied.
“Fire,” Crow said and touched the rune. A reddish transparent barrier formed around him and shrunk down until it looked like his flesh was shimmering with red light. On his right hand’s middle finger, a ring appeared, and he could feel a slight trickle from his Source empowering it. “See? Easy.”
“Little Bird, you’re an idiot.” Song Xue sighed.
“Why is that?” Crow asked her while the others touched the symbol too.
“She’s right. You’re so smart that you are an idiot.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You think ninety-nine percent of these people would be able to figure out that the temple layouts were runes. Or better yet, you think they have Sage’s Mind and can memorize the layout and recreate the rune? This isn’t easy,” Mara sighed and took a step forward. Her barrier shimmered as a jet of fire smashed into her. “Holy shit sticks!”
Crow was the first to react and ran toward her, but before he could grab and pull her, she started laughing.
“That was awesome. Let’s climb!” Mara said and ran forward again. Trigger tons of fire traps. It’d be possible to make it through without the ring, but it would take forever. The fires couldn’t touch them, but that didn’t mean the heat wasn’t bothersome.
“Oh, my turn,” Mara said after they reached the four-hundredth step. She ran up and tapped Wood Rune, and the ring on her finger transformed into a torch. Or maybe a scepter might be more accurate. There was a ball of fire on one end, but it was shaped into a nearly perfect sphere and didn’t behave like fire at all. That was until Song Xue stabbed forward with hers, and it shot out a lance of fire that shot about three meters before disappearing.
The fire barrier still surrounded them, as long as they held the torch, but Crow worried about why they were now wielding the fire. Almost unanimously, they decided Otto should go first.
Nothing happened, and the big guy kept walking forward, so the others followed. A few steps later, they saw the burnt remains of something and knew others had passed before them. Look at all this damage; they became even more alert. The signs all pointed toward a fierce enemy, but sending out his Mana Sense as far as it would go, he still couldn’t locate the danger.
“Did they kill—?” Crow’s question terminated as soon as a vine shot forward so fast that he couldn’t even react. The fibrous tentacle wrapped around his throat and dragged him from out of the middle of his crew. Looking forward, he saw the left side of the stairs quickly approaching. It was the side that had a sheer drop-off into a black pit of nothingness.
Scrambling to grab onto something, so it couldn’t pull Crow away, he knew it was a vain effort. The stair’s surface was so smooth that even its tiny imperfections looked as if they were part of the polished stone. Mara and Song Xue shot lances of fire into the vine, which caused it to shriek and shrivel but it wasn’t letting go.
Focusing on his Source, Crow remembered what it was like to form that water spell against Munro and tried to create the fire pattern in his mind. The world around him distorted as he felt his Source deplete by nearly half and a ball of black fire appeared.
Raising his hand, the ball of fire was held aloft. Crow couldn’t even look directly at the flames because its dark-purplish coloring toyed with his mind. He flung his arm forward, not wanting to risk burning the vines around his throat. Instead, the sphere of black fire shot forward and hit the vine at its thick base as it rose above the edge of the drop-off.
The vine withered and died where those flames touched, but he had made a miscalculation. As the fire cut the vine in half, the part that was still tightly wound around his neck dropped most of its bulk over the edge. The pile of vine that pooled on the stairs was unraveling faster and faster as the weight pulled the vine tight once more.
“Oh, shit,” Crow muttered under his breath, trying to disentangle the vine around his neck. He decided to grip the vine tightly at the last minute as the slack was almost all gone. A powerful jerk nearly pulled his arms out of his socket, but that was better than getting his head severed. This time he knew he couldn’t stop the inexorably slide over the side of the stairs, especially when he felt his legs were dangling over the side.
It was too late.