by Andrew Rowe
“Or not. We could wait for it come back around, or try the mirror thing and get it pointed to the other door.”
“Or we could just, you know, punch a hole in the pillar that’s blocking the way to the door we want open,” Mara suggested. “Seems faster than trying to tinker with mirror alignments, yeah?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s a very Keras solution.”
She glowed a little, apparently taking that as a compliment. “Well, I did learn from him, you know.”
“Well, if we’re going to keep chatting, we need to move. That one is going to blast us in a couple seconds if we don’t.”
We got back out of the doorway. As predicted, the golem rotated a few seconds later, blasting a beam straight through the open door, and then powered back down.
“...I bet I could reflect that,” Patrick noted.
I considered the solution. “Good if we want the golem broken. Bad if we want it to open doors for us.”
“Hm. I could probably just Bright Reflection a beam to hit the door we want?” Patrick offered.
“Okay, lots of options. This won’t be hard. Let’s check the other room before we commit to this one?” Sera suggested.
“Sounds good.” I replied. We all agreed, walking away from that door to check the one on the opposite side of the chamber.
The next room didn’t have any immediate spinny-killy-things, at least. It did have a lot of spinning involved, though. The room was circular, had three doors clustered on the opposite side, and it was filled with clocks. Some were wall-mounted, others were tall grandfather clocks.
Exactly twelve, I noted after a moment. Six of each type.
It only took me another moment to realize they were all showing a different time. “Oh, I hate it.”
“Your good cheer is a joy to us as always, brother.” Sera peered into the room for another moment, examining the walls, floors, and ceiling. “Looks straightforward. I’m going to assume we’re timed once we step inside.”
“That does seem obvious, yes.” I sighed.
“What do you think the goal is? Get all the clocks on the same hour?” Patrick asked.
“Not enough information to know yet,” Sera noted. “Each of the doors is in a clock position; maybe we set all the clocks to the position of the door we want open.”
I nodded. “Maybe. Since there are twelve, it’s also possible they need to be sequential – one on each hour. It’s probable there’s a clue inside somewhere.”
“Or we’re just supposed to experiment. What are you all thinking? Like this more than light golem?”
“No,” I replied immediately, then bit my lip. “But it’s a mental puzzle, whereas the other one has more of a physical component. If that sets the style of our route, I suppose this one might be safer overall.”
“Wouldn’t call that safer,” Mara noted. “Less fighty, maybe, but mental challenges can still have traps and consequences. Frankly speaking, I’d rather fight a threat I can see straight out.”
Couldn’t argue with that logic. “Patrick?” Sera asked.
“Fine either way, really, but I kinda wanna Bright Reflection the golem.”
The rest of us laughed, but honestly, I didn’t blame him. I kind of wanted to go through the golem room, too, but for other reasons.
“Golem, then?” Sera asked.
“Golem,” came a round of agreements.
We headed back to the golem room door. After some discussion, we had everyone aside from Mara step out of the way, since she could jump out of the way fastest if the golem happened to be firing the laser toward the doorway right when we opened it.
We didn’t need to be concerned. When the door opened, we saw that the golem was inert. It took a few moments to begin to move again. Presumably, it had stopped moving to save mana when the door had been closed.
That’s exploitable, I realized. If we close the door again, we could move into the room and around it before it fully reactivates.
I didn’t actually express this cunning stratagem to my group immediately, though, because I’m bad at things. Instead, we moved back to the doorway to watch it rotate again. Patrick drew Bright Reflection. “So, am I shining the beam somewhere specific? We going to try to open the blocked door, or maybe knock the golem out?”
“Actually, let’s try a different tactic first. Bright Reflection can fire a beam of light like the golem can, correct?”
“Yeah, but that’s not its main function. It’s nowhere near as strong as the real Dawnbringer.”
“Strong isn’t what we need. We need to know if the doors respond to any form of light magic, or just the golem’s light magic.”
“Oh!” Patrick blinked. “Got it. So, you want me to shoot the door?”
I jumped in. “It’s hard to see from here, but…” I pointed across the room, “I’ll bet there’s a rune right at the height of the golem’s chest on the doorway that detects the beam. You want to aim for that. You can move into the room and get right near it if you need to.”
“And if the door closes behind me?” Patrick asked.
“Good point. Let’s all get in.” We waited for the golem to rotate into the safest possible position, then filed into the room.
Patrick walked to the door in question. I spent a few moments while he moved to observe the pillars, noting the positions of the mirrors in case we actually had to use them.
My efforts were unneeded. “Radiant Dawn!” Patrick shouted, pointing his sword at a spot on the door. A beam of light lanced out from the tip of his sword, striking the door…and it opened. Just like that.
“Yeah!” He cheered.
The door closed.
“Oh no!” Patrick’s expression sank. “Guess it doesn’t last long.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sera noted. “Should be enough time to get us all through, provided you can manage a few blasts?”
“Yeah, it’s got enough mana for a couple more. We wanna head through now?”
“No. First, tell us what you saw through the door, I couldn’t see from my angle.” We rotated a little bit as the golem moved, harmlessly blasting another spot of the room.
“So, that one has a gigantic pile of stuff in it. Like, lots and lots of stuff.”
“Stuff?” I asked. “Can you be more specific?”
“I saw some other golem parts, and general bits of metal. Broken swords, shields, tools…” We walked around a bit as the golem continued blasting and Patrick continued going through a list of items he’d seen.
“So, basically a junkyard room.” Sera noted. “Maybe some half-functional golems in the pile, ready to attack. Key hidden amongst the other pieces. Sounds simple. Doors?”
“Two that I saw. Maybe there could be another one under the rubble pile?”
Sera nodded. “Good thinking. A trap door down there would make sense.”
Patrick stood a little straighter after Sera’s compliment. We waited for the rotating golem to blast open the other door, then briefly looked inside when it was open.
This one was triangular in shape, which was a little odd. There were no visible doors to other rooms, but there was a glowing rune circle in the center surrounded by bars. A portal to elsewhere in the spire, most likely. Maybe even one that could allow us to skip to a higher floor.
There were no obvious threats, but that only made me trust the room less. “Anyone see traps?” I asked.
“Tiny holes in the floors and walls. Can barely see ‘em. Gas traps, I’ll bet.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Anything else?”
The door shut before we could get an extended look at the room. “I think there was a discolored section on the back wall,” Patrick noted. “Might be a secret passage or something?”
“Plausible.” Sera noted. We moved again as the golem did, but…
“Is it going faster?” I asked. “I think it’s going faster, guys.”
“Okay, decisions, then.” Sera exhaled a breath. “Leanings?”
“Well, if I had to choose…” Patrick mused aloud without actually making a choice.
“Junk room.” I pointed toward it. “My magic sword looked like a rusty piece of junk. Could be valuables in there.”
“Seconded.” Mara surprised me with her agreement, but she explained quickly. “Not sure I like the idea of scavenging through the pile, but it’s better than taking a portal to a random spot, yeah?”
I couldn’t have agreed more.
“Any objections?” Sera asked. We walked faster. The golem was definitely spinning faster now, blasting the door where we’d entered only briefly before rotating to the next wall. After a moment without any concerns voiced. “Okay, let’s move. We’ll need to time this carefully.”
“Or…if you’ll indulge me for a moment…” I quickly explained a plan.
Sera snorted. “Fine, try it. Just don’t complain if you die.”
“How would I complain if I’m d—never mind. I’m doing it.”
I shifted so that I was right behind the spot the golem had just fired into, giving myself ample time, and then…
Haste.
I sped forward, right toward the golem.
As I expected, when I got within a few feet, lights flashed on the golem’s body and it swiveled toward me. “Intruder detected.”
The voice was a nice touch. I’d have to find the rune for that.
The golem’s chest glowed, preparing to fire a beam…but as I’d calculated, it wasn’t quick enough to stop me.
I snapped the Jaden Box open, pressing it against the crystal floating below the golem. “Store golem core.”
The crystal vanished.
The lights on the golem’s upper body faded instantly. I pulled my arms and the box backward as the golem’s upper half fell, the source of its levitation gone.
I was half-surprised that the golem turned off immediately; I’d assumed that taking the core would cause it to power down, but slowly, after bleeding through any remaining mana. Apparently, it must have been structured so that it was entirely reliant on the core. This was most likely a deliberate part of the challenge — one of the classic “attack the weak point for maximum damage” kind of things that the goddess loved putting into her easier challenges.
I was grateful for the weak point, as well as the newly-acquired and extremely expensive golem core.
If we had an ordinary climbing group, this might have been a bad approach, since the light from the golem was also the key to the doors. We could have gotten stuck — but we’d already confirmed that Patrick’s light beams worked as replacement keys. Thus, disabling the golem didn’t really have any downside, except for the risks involved.
I disabled my Haste spell. “So. Who wants to help me take this thing apart?”
***
It didn’t take long to separate the golem into small enough pieces that I could store them in the Jaden Box, largely because Meltlake decided to help. She had a spell that looked like a blowtorch extended from her finger, cutting through the metal with ease. This was both convenient and, frankly, absolutely terrifying.
With that all done, we moved over to the door to the junk room. Patrick reopened it with a beam of light, then we quickly stepped inside before it closed behind us.
The junk room was even messier than I’d expected from Patrick’s description. Just stepping into the room required stepping onto bits of strewn metal and debris. I was struck by the scent of an unpleasant mixture of rust, industrial chemicals, and something vaguely floral that somehow worried me more than the chemicals did.
The garbage formed something of a mountain shape, with a tall pile toward the center of the room and the rest of it strewn in a distribution pattern that made me suspect it had been dropped in from a chute above us. I didn’t see anything like that, nor any obvious secret doors above us in general, but that didn’t mean one didn’t exist.
The others shifted past me and deeper into the room. I took another step forward, feeling a crunch and something wet sinking into my boot.
I have regrets.
I turned toward Sera to express said regrets, but I didn’t have time.
Almost immediately, the first half-constructed golem began to climb out of the junk pile toward us, like something out of a two-bit horror novel. A blur of motion streaked past me, then Mara was airborne, landing a moment later on top of the golem’s head with a crunch.
“Hey, hey!” I ran after her, dodging as a gigantic golem fist flew out of the pile and missed me by a wide margin. “Don’t wreck them too much! Cores, Mara! Cores!”
“Right, right.” With a glowing aura blade, she sliced the golem’s head off. It didn’t fall inert; instead, it bucked like a horse, leaving Mara to fly off of it with a brief “eep”.
A blast of ice from Sera’s extended hand froze the broken golem in place a moment later. The floating golem hand wheeled around for another pass, only to be blasted out of the air by a well-placed burst of light from Bright Reflection.
I almost chastised Patrick for destroying the floating hand — I was curious how it had detected and attacked us without being attached to a golem body — but when it hit the floor, I realized he’d only shattered one crystal on the back of it. The rest of the hand was intact, runes and all.
I walked over to the giant hand. Out came the box. “And…in you go.”
Mara kicked the frozen half-golem, breaking off one of the frozen arms. “Mean golem. Don’t surprise me like that.”
Two more broken golems climbed out of the pile, but Sera pelted them with more ice blasts before they could get anywhere. With the golems immobilized, breaking them further and taking their more valuable bits was a trivial process.
“Not bad.” Meltlake noted. “Your teamwork could use some work, but your combat skills are much better than they were doing midterms.”
Patrick glowed at the compliment. “Th…thanks, professor. We’re trying our best!”
I was, in fact, trying my best — but mostly at looting. Looting absolutely everything.
I’m going to miss you so much, Jaden Box. I could never replace you.
I was, of course, already thinking about ways to replace the Jaden Box. I hadn’t managed to figure out exactly how its weird presumably Mythralian (or Artinian?) enchantments worked, but some of the properties were replicable…just at extreme costs, or with slightly different methods and downsides. I hadn’t quite decided on exactly what my replacement box was going to look like yet, but I was determined to have something before Keras demanded the box later on in the year to summon Wrynn.
In the meantime, I intended to exploit my near-limitless storage capacity for all it was worth.
“Detect Aura.” I scanned through the rubble pile, finding more magical auras than I expected. Most of said auras, unfortunately, weren’t from more items or golem parts — they were from some kind of disgusting goop that was smeared across much of the pile. That made finding anything of actual value much trickier, especially since I didn’t want to touch whatever that disgusting substance was. Belatedly, I told the others, “Don’t touch the gunk, it’s magic.”
Mara pulled a hand back cautiously. “What, like alchemical stuff?”
“Probably. Or just residue from a magical accident. Or…like, a dead slime that exploded, maybe?” I shrugged. I wasn’t really much of an alchemy expert. “Professor?”
“Not helping,” Meltlake insisted. “Sorry, nothing in there looks like it’s worth cheating and helping you this early.”
“It’s not cheating, Professor.” Sera shook her head. “This isn’t actually a spire test, and we’ve already defeated the risks of the room. It’s just about looting efficiency, and you do get a cut of what we’re bringing out of here.”
Meltlake seemed almost persuaded, but then a smile cracked her lips. “No. You’re not quite right on that first part.”
I processed that, then immediately panicked as I realized it meant we hadn’t handled the “risks” in the room yet. I spu
n around, searching for what I might have missed. Were there more golem hands? Deadlier, stealthier golem hands?
There were not.
I didn’t find anything amiss, in fact.
“Think she just means the gunk is itself a risk, Corin. You can calm down. Should be fine as long as we don’t touch it.”
I calmed down. Marginally. What if the gunk had a deadly scent? I sniffed the air, smelling something foul, then immediately realized that sniffing the potentially deadly substance to determine if it was deadly was perhaps the worst decision anyone could have made.
I’ll save you from my own anxiety; it was not, in fact, a substance with a deadly toxic odor. No, the threat from the goop was much more direct. I didn’t even realize it until Mara mentioned it, but…
“The goop is moving.” She stared at it, taking a combat stance. “Very, very slowly.”
I didn’t even see it moving, not at first. It was only after several seconds of staring that I saw a tiny bit of it twitch.
“Eew.” Sera remarked. “I think it’s trying to move toward one spot.”
“Maybe I should fireball the whole pile? Won’t hurt the metal,” Patrick offered.
“Or maybe that’s what we’re expected to do and the whole thing will explode into a cloud of toxic gas if it’s ignited,” I replied.
“Oh.” Patrick’s shoulders sagged. “…I suppose that’s possible.”
“Don’t feel too bad, Patrick. We all like to blast things on occasion. In this case, however…” Sera conjured a ball of ice. “I think this might be safer.”
“You’re doing that without incants,” I noted. “You’ve been practicing hand-based casting?”
“Right you are, Corin. Very observant. Now, if there are no objections…”
“Wait.” Meltlake spoke up, surprising all of us. “Ice will work, but you’ll ruin one of the items inside if you use it. And you’re right,” she grinned at Sera, “I am getting part of the loot. Best to keep it intact.”
“Then…”
“You’ve figured out enough. I’ll help a little.” Meltlake tapped her cane to the floor. There was a rumbling as a section of the ground shifted, disrupting the pile of junk. Stone flowed like water, forming a dome over a small section of the junk. “Now, Sera.”