Maria looked around for Alexa and Raiju but she couldn’t see anything else besides the endless veil of fog. She had completely lost the two in the fog. When she tried calling out to them, she didn’t get any responses. Maria continued trying before finally realizing that her voice was only audible to herself because the fog not only obstructed her vision, but it also prevented any sound from traveling too far away from her location.
No matter how many times she called out, she wouldn’t be able to find Alexa and Raiju that way, so she stopped and decided to walk back from where she came from, hoping that she could walk back out of the fog. The only problem with that, however, was that the fog disoriented her sense of direction, which was already pretty bad, so instead of turning back, she actually went forward in a random direction.
“Tsk, just what the heck is this fog? It was clear just a second ago but now it’s all foggy!” Maria complained.
She kept on walking in the direction she thought would lead out of the fog, but after a few minutes, she didn’t make any sort of progress at all and instead of thinning, the fog was beginning to grow even thicker as she continued walking.
“This definitely isn’t normal…did I fall into someone’s trap?”
This fog was naturally part of Zhuge Lan’s trap formation and she, along with Alexa and Raiju, cluelessly walked right into it. If they knew that Zhuge Lan, a Formation Master, was targeting them, then they would have been more careful on their journey. Unfortunately, they didn’t know, so they unknowingly walked into his formation array and got trapped inside of it.
Zhuge Lan had calculated and accurately predicted Maria and her group’s trajectory and had been preparing this formation array for the past few days until they finally arrived. It was a large-scale bewildering formation and since it was prepared extremely well, Zhuge Lan believed that Maria–and even his Master–would have a hard time escaping it.
“I prepared this formation especially for you, Empress Maria. Until my Master gets here, I’ll have you roam around inside my formation until you tire out,” Zhuge Lan said with a smile as he watched from a nearby hill.
To effectively use his formation, Zhuge Lan had to be nearby or else the effectiveness of his formation array would decrease by 50%. It was dangerous since he was rather close to his target, but Zhuge Lan was confident that his formation array could protect him from Maria.
Maria continued to get lost inside of Zhuge Lan’s formation array until, finally, she had had enough clowning around. She partially transformed herself into her Nephalem form and spread open her wings before trying to fly out. However, what happened next completely shocked her. No matter how fast and how long she flew upwards, the fog continued to stick with her like an annoying leech.
She felt like she was getting nowhere and, after finally growing tired of the unchanging scenery, she flew back down but was once again shocked by what happened. She believed that she had flown many kilometers into the air, but when she flew down, it only took her a few seconds before she landed back on the ground.
“What the hell...it looks like I really am stuck in some kind of trap…”
This was the first time Maria had experienced being trapped inside of a Formation Master’s formation array, so she didn’t know what to do. It was obviously not an ordinary trap, but even if it was one, she didn’t have the skill set or knowledge to break out of it. Without knowing what to do, Maria did what she did best and started winging it.
“If it’s a trap, then I’ll just destroy it!” Maria yelled as she began conjuring multiple [Fire] spells around her.
She then started firing those magic spells in every direction around her in an attempt to push back the fog around her. Her plan did work for a while, but unfortunately, the fog quickly rolled back in and filled in the void that was created, so all of it was just wasted effort. Maria’s frustration began piling up and she couldn’t help screaming in frustration.
“Stupid fog!!!”
She stomped her foot on the ground and heard something snap.
“Eh?”
When she looked down, she noticed that she had broken some kind of metal object that was embedded into the earth. She picked it up and noticed that it had a very unique design and quickly inspected it.
“[Inspect]!”
Item Name: High-grade Formation Ring (Broken) Type: Unique Class Item Durability: 0/100 Description: An item used by Formation Masters to create, control, and sustain formation arrays. This item can be used to set up high-tier formation arrays. Restriction: Usable only by a Formation Master
Maria raised an eyebrow after seeing the broken item’s description. She then started frowning after realizing something and crushed the item in her hand.
“So I was right. Some bastard is playing tricks on me!”
She didn’t know what a Formation Master was and what these formation arrays were, but at the very least, she knew that she was stuck inside of a trap that someone created using some weird items, so Maria knew what she had to do now.
“This trap will break once I find and destroy all of these things eventually. Let’s see how you like it when I start breaking your things!”
Although Maria didn’t know exactly where to look for the items that sustained the formation array, she did understand that they were likely buried in the ground like the one she found just now.
As luck would have it, Maria just happened to stumble on one of the formation array’s keys, which was the ring she found buried in the ground and accidentally broke.The keys came in many different shapes and they weren’t just rings. Some of them were flags, discs, poles, and other such things.
Maria didn’t know what they needed to look like, since she was going to destroy anything that looked suspicious in the fog. She began roaming around the fog while using [Terra] and overturning the ground along her way.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
If she saw a rock, she would immediately blast it open with a [Fire] spell just in case the Formation Master had embedded one of those formation items inside or under the rock. Not one rock or piece of land was left unturned while Maria moved around. She even began using a degraded version of her [Sword Grave] aura skill which blew up the area around her even more efficiently than her spells did.
Zhuge Lan was laughing as he saw what Maria was doing as he believed that she had finally cracked under her own frustrations. However, he soon noticed that something was wrong.
Her actions weren’t random and she was moving around ‘coincidentally’ in the precise directions that he had laid down all of the formation array keys that he had prepared for the large bewildering formation he had prepared for her.
“This definitely isn’t a coincidence! Although it’s a bit early, I’ll activate the formation’s second layer and stop her from causing any more trouble!”
Zhuge Lan immediately activated his formation’s second layer and, in the next instance, the fog around Maria began changing and was tinted with an ominous red hue. Upon seeing the change, Maria stopped what she was doing and began to closely observe the change.
“What’s going on?”
“AHHHH!!!”
Maria then heard a familiar cry in the distance and, without any hesitation, dashed towards the location where the cry was coming from. When she got there, Maria saw that the fog had thinned out a little and she could see someone’s silhouette.
The silhouette was familiar and so was the cry from earlier as it came from Alexa. Maria didn’t know what her little vampire sister had encountered that would make her scream like that, but she quickly dashed over to see what was wrong.
“Alexa, what’s wro–”
When Maria arrived behind Alexa and grabbed onto her shoulder, she finally noticed that the person she thought was Alexa turned out to be a straw dummy wearing her clothes with a smiley face picture nailed onto its head with a message on it.
[Sorry]
She then noticed a subtle ticking coming from the dummy’s body that was speeding up and just before she was able to get away, the dummy suddenly exploded.
“Gahhh!”
The explosion caused some damage to her, but it didn’t end there. Maria heard the ticking noises suddenly coming from everywhere around her and, in the next instant, the area where Maria was standing exploded. She had already transformed into her Nephalem Form and wrapped her body up in an aura as her wings folded around her body protectively.
When the explosions subsided, Maria looked a little worse for wear but not injured in the slightest. The area around her was completely destroyed by the previous explosion and she noticed that there were remains of numerous dummies in the area. The rest of those exploding dummies had been buried underground so she didn’t notice them at all until she began hearing the ticking bomb noises.
“...”
Maria was silent but she was clenching her fist and gritting her teeth in anger. This was the first time she had experienced such humiliation. She was being toyed around one-sidedly and she couldn’t even retaliate.
The trap she was in had suddenly changed and now, it was trying to harm her. If she continued moving around recklessly like this again, then she might fall into a deathtrap just like now.
If she was an ordinary player, Maria would’ve undoubtedly been killed earlier, but she instead only lost a little bit of health after being caught in the middle of the explosion. Probably because the formation array had changed, the fog obstructing her vision had thinned out a little, so Maria was able to see even farther into the distance, but this didn’t help her out at all. Instead, it might even plunge her into a similar situation as earlier because she was careless or thought she had finally found one of her companions.
“Dammit…”
Maria flew out of the crater that she was in which had been created by the massive explosion trap from earlier, but right when she took a step forward to walk away from the place, she heard a clicking sound from underneath her and when she looked down, the ground began to glow before it suddenly exploded right in her face.
“Argh!”
That explosion caused another series of explosions to ensue and Maria was caught in it once again. She transformed midway through and protected herself from the blasts as she kept herself suspended in midair.
Once the explosions died away, Maria opened her wings and silently stared into the distance as she began reassessing her situation without moving. She was certain now that the secret to destroying this trap was hidden in the ground because, after the fog had changed, the ground had suddenly become rigged with explosions.
It was as if the mastermind was now daring her to start destroying everything like earlier. She did want to keep doing that, but with there being explosives in the ground, Maria reckoned that it wouldn’t be safe for her to do that anymore.
One of those massive chain explosions depleted her HP by around 5-10 percent, which was pretty substantial in Maria’s opinion. If she was caught in even more of those explosive deathtraps, then she’d eventually die at some point.
Of course, she could always heal herself, but Maria noticed that the explosions inflicted an [Unhealable] debuff. This meant that she couldn’t use any recovery items or skills on herself and her natural recovery had been negated. Unless she dispelled the debuff, Maria wouldn’t be able to heal herself for a certain period of time. Thankfully, she was previously a Dark Priestess, a class that was obviously in the Priestess-class category, so she had the [Dispel] spell so she didn’t have to worry about it.
However, things have certainly become extremely annoying now. She didn’t know if the ground around her had been rigged with explosives or not, but she believed that it might well have. Maria wasn’t willing to suffer the humiliation of being a ragdoll again, so she levitated in the air without touching the ground and concentrated on her hearing. She was able to hear the ticking sounds again and knew immediately that there were explosives situated all around her.
“...When I find out whoever’s behind this, I’m going to tear their limbs apart from their bodies and toss them into a minefield, then we’ll see how they like it!”