Sufficiently Advanced Magic (Arcane Ascension Book 1)

by Andrew Rowe

  “Not a bad jump there. It was a good reflex, even if it didn’t quite work. You kids did good for your first fight in here.”

  I winced. “Thanks, I guess.”

  He sounded genuine enough, but I couldn’t help but assume he was probably being snide about the whole thing. Maybe I was just too biased in my assumptions about his motives, though.

  I reached down and picked up my sword, sheathing it and pointing at the pickaxe. “That’s a little weird.”

  “Oh, that?” Derek walked over and picked up the pickaxe. “It’s for breaking stone.”

  I sighed. “I know what a pickaxe is. I just was surprised to see one falling out of a slime?”

  He laughed. “The tower provides. If there’s a need for a specific tool to solve a certain puzzle, or if there’s a secret passage nearby that a tool could help us find, you’ll find that tool somewhere. In this case, we’ll probably find a hollow wall—”

  “Here.” Vera tapped a wall on the eastern side of the room. “Thinner than the ones in the other room and no mechanism on the other side.”

  Derek turned to Vera. “Nice! I’d usually have to tap on every wall to hear what sounds hollow. Believe me, that’s a pain. You’re going to be very useful.”

  He walked over to the wall, ignoring the green gems — and, by my logic, tacitly giving me permission to take them immediately.

  I picked up the gems, and then handed them to Sera. “You did the heavy lifting on the big one. You should probably take these.”

  She waved a hand. “Nah, aren’t those mana crystals? I can’t use them like you can.”

  I shrugged. “They’re worth money, though.”

  “I’m sure I’ll find something else in here I can actually use. You should hold onto those for an emergency.”

  I nodded at the logic, tucking them away with the other one. Then, after thinking for a second, I pulled one back out. “Vera, can you check what these do?”

  She accepted the gemstone. “Life mana crystal, class 3.”

  I whistled appreciatively. I’d never owned a crystal of that level of quality before. I took out the other two. “They the same?”

  “Yep.”

  Nice.

  Derek slammed the pickaxe into the wall Vera had indicated. A chunk of stone fell away, leaving a sizable enough gap to see that there was a passageway on the other side. “I’ll clear this. Check the other door real quick, though. Secret passages are usually better, but it might lead to something we don’t want, like the stairs up.”

  Professor Orden led the way to the other door, opening it.

  I caught the briefest glimpse of purplish scales before Orden slammed the door back shut, immediately tracing a series of runes over the wood with her finger. As she moved her hand, a line of mana burned the runes into the door. When she had finished, a glowing barrier manifested over the wood.

  “Was that...?” Sera asked.

  Orden stepped away from the door. “Mizuchi. I’ve never heard of her being this close to the tower entrance. That is not a good sign.”

  I scratched my chin. “Any chance she’s there to guard the stairs down, and has orders to let us through? Maybe Katashi is doing us a favor?”

  “Extremely unlikely,” Derek called in between swings of the pickaxe. “It’s more likely she’s a sign that we’re not supposed to go that direction. Even I wouldn’t take the risk of tangling with someone like her by myself. I don’t think she’s ever even been injured.”

  Given what I’d seen from her fight with the Soaring Wings, I’d call that likely.

  “We can explore that route if all others are exhausted,” Orden decided. “In the meantime, let’s wait and see where Derek’s passage leads.”

  It didn’t take Derek much longer to clear the way. Even without his obviously enhanced strength, the stone in that section didn’t seem particularly solid. I picked up a small rock and put it in my pouch. It felt far lighter than it looked, and I wanted to figure out what it was made of at some point. I thought about asking Vera, but it didn’t seem sufficiently relevant to the situation.

  Derek led the way down the thin hallway that he’d cleared the way into. After stepping a few feet in, he held up a hand to stop us from advancing further. “I’m going to open up the next door. Step back out of the hallway in case anything happens.”

  “Lemme check for traps first,” Vera offered. Most of us backed out of the hallway, but Vera stepped in deeper, shouldering her way past Derek. I couldn’t see her, but I heard her say, “Door is unlocked. I don’t detect any traps, but I wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s triggered by something too far away, like on the other side of the room.”

  “Should be good enough. I can take a hit or two, anyway — but thanks. You really are very helpful.” Vera slipped out of the hallway with the rest of us, then Derek opened the door.

  No traps. Or at least nothing that made Derek explode outright.

  Derek stepped into the room. I saw him take a deep breath, mumble something, and then wave for us to follow.

  The room was filled with keys.

  Thousands of keys. We had to step onto a pile of keys just to get inside. It felt something like a legendary dragon’s hoard, only the dragon was either very misguided or extremely eccentric.

  Or maybe it just wanted to start a new, key-centric economy. Who knew?

  I knelt down once I’d gotten in there, examining the sheer variety of keys. No two keys looked exactly alike. Some had handle styles that resembled animals, some were painted unnatural colors. Most, but not all of them, looked like they were built for modern pin tumbler locks. A few of them didn’t have the necessary cuts toward the tip, though.

  One of them was just a flat rectangular piece of wood. It took me a minute to realize it was a piano key.

  Apparently, the goddess had a sense of humor.

  The room itself was square shaped, and our entry door was on the center of one of the faces. The left and right faces also had doors. Each of which had an abundantly obvious series of three locks on the surface.

  Vera walked to the conspicuously empty wall face directly across from us and put a hand against the stone. “Not hollow. Seems like a real wall. I’ll see if I can figure out anything about the locks. I don’t detect any other traps, so you can probably look around somewhat safely.”

  Jin and Professor Orden headed to the left door, so I followed Sera toward the right one. The three locks on the surface were blue, yellow, and red. It reminded me of my Judgment.

  Vera walked up next to me, and then touched the face of one of the locks. “Hrm. Built for a specific key; it’ll trigger a trap in the ceiling of the room if we use the wrong one.”

  She repeated the process with the other two locks. I was curious what it was like using her attunement. Did information just appear in her head, like she’d always known it, or was there a visual component? It didn’t seem like the right time to ask, though.

  “These require other keys. Seems pretty straightforward, but I’ll check the other door as well.”

  I frowned. “So, we’re just supposed to dig through a pile of keys until we find the matching ones? That seems...uninteresting, compared to some of the other challenges.”

  Vera shrugged. “Not every challenge you face in life is going to be about combat skills or lightning fast reflexes. This one is probably a test of patience, or maybe problem solving. There’s probably a way to speed this up. There usually is. Maybe several.”

  Sera picked up a key from the pile and offered it to Vera. “If we hand you a key, will you be able to tell if it’s the right one before we try it in a lock?”

  Vera accepted the key. “Probably. Interesting. This key isn’t enchanted. The lock was definitely looking for an enchantment. That’s how it checks if the key is right.”

  I considered that. “That narrows things a lot, actually. I could probably find the enchanted keys pretty fast. Or, at least, the ones that aren’t buried.”

  I tapped my mana
watch to my forehead and checked the value. 48/48. I’d used a little bit of the mana from my hand during the fight, but none of my mental mana. It would be safe to turn my attunement on for just a bit.

  I looked back to Vera. “I’m going to activate my attunement and start picking up keys. I’ll hand them to you when I find them.”

  “Sounds like a good plan.” Vera nodded and started walking to the other side of the room.

  I turned my attunement on. It was momentarily blinding; there was magic everywhere in the tower. Literally everywhere; even the air itself was infused with a little bit of mana.

  I wasn’t just seeing the mana. The mana was so thick around me that I could feel it. It was like a haze of mist all around me, solid enough that I could imagine touching it.

  Could I?

  Experimentally, I reached out with my right hand and focused my mind. I tried to reach into the ambient mana and pull on it like I could with a mana crystal. A tiny patch of mana reacted, swirling around my fingers. The mana pulled away from my hand a moment later, indicating that something was working against my efforts.

  Interesting. I’ll have to experiment with this more later.

  The brightest source of mana in the room was Derek; he had his Emerald shroud active. It made sense. We all knew he was an Emerald, so he had no reason to hide it and risk suffering an injury with a weaker shroud.

  After that, the strongest auras were from Derek’s weapons and Orden’s tunic. The ring of regeneration was next, glowing with a golden Citrine aura.

  Interestingly enough, Selys-Lyann didn’t have a colored glow at all. The aura around it was translucent, much like a quartz attuned. I doubted it was only Quartz-Level, however, which implied that one of the runes on the weapon was designed to conceal the sword’s aura.

  Once I’d gotten used to the glow, I started picking through the keys until I found glowing ones. I found a good dozen of them among the hundreds on the surface of the pile. Apparently this wouldn’t be as simple as just finding the six magic keys among all of them.

  Still, this was vastly more efficient than having Vera check all of the keys.

  After she’d finished checking the locks on other side of the room and confirmed that they worked the same way, I started picking up the magic keys. Professor Orden beat me to some of them.

  I was a little surprised she decided to help, but I wasn’t going to complain.

  Between the two of us, we picked up the visible keys and handed them off to Vera within a couple minutes. After that, we began the exhausting process of digging through the vast piles of other keys for more enchanted ones.

  At one point, I found a wooden slat that had the word “key” written on it.

  Yeah, Selys definitely had a sense of humor. Not a very sophisticated one, but it was there.

  I shook my head and kept digging.

  “Found a couple good ones in this first batch. One key for each door. Want me to go ahead and put them in the right locks?”

  “Go ahead,” Professor Orden replied. Which was good, because I was about to say it myself, and it would have been embarrassing to say something when I definitely wasn’t in charge.

  Vera turned a key in one of the doors. I heard a click.

  “Huh. I think that unlocked it. Maybe we don’t need all three for each door?” Vera put a hand on the doorknob, frowning. “It’s definitely unlocked.”

  Derek walked over to the door. “Don’t open that yet. It’ll probably work now, but it’ll probably work better if we open all the locks first.”

  Jin picked up a key, tossed it into the air, and caught it. “I’m pretty sure opening is all we need the door to do.”

  Derek shook his head. “Yeah, it’s meant to tempt us to leave early. If we solve the whole thing, though, it’ll probably give us something extra. Like an additional tool, or it’ll change where the door leads.”

  I’d almost forgotten that the doorways were more like teleporters. The connections between rooms in the tower were constantly shifting. I’d never actually seen it happen, but someone like Derek who had been in here dozens of times almost certainly had.

  “It could just be that there are three keyholes to give us three options on which key to find, making the room easier to solve,” Jin pointed out.

  He wasn’t wrong; that was a pretty reasonable assumption. Not every group would have an Enchanter handy, and certainly not a combination of an Enchanter and an Analyst. We had a pretty ideal group for this, although a powerful Diviner might have found it even easier.

  “Let’s just see how long it takes to find another couple keys and go from there,” Derek suggested. “We’ve got days before we need to introduce Vera to Katashi. I’d like to do whatever we can to make this as safe as possible.”

  Introduce? Really?

  That was a very... optimistic way of thinking about what we were doing.

  Vera straightened up a bit at the reference, her expression tilting definitively toward the dour in spite of Derek’s friendly language. She was still handling it a lot better than I would have in her place, though.

  I tried not to think about the possibility that I was leading her to die.

  It only took us a few more minutes to find the next matching key. That gave us a bit of encouragement. It seemed like it’d be a pretty easy task.

  It took two hours to find the entire rest of the set. I’d shut off my attunement long before, so we had to rely strictly on Professor Orden’s vision to identify the magical keys. Fortunately, we eventually figured out a system — emptying out one corner, then dedicating gradually moving every single “disqualified” key to that corner — until we had all of the right ones.

  We inserted all the keys into the left door first. Clicks for each, but no obvious change in the door itself. Vera was able to detect that the destination on the opposite side of the door hadn’t changed.

  Exasperated, we inserted the three keys into the door on the opposite side of the room. A huge blue treasure box appeared in the middle of the chamber.

  “Hrm.” Jin mumbled.

  “Yeah, you mumble, you know I won the bet.” Derek nudged Jin as he walked toward the center. “Ah, Vera, you want to check this for traps?”

  Vera wandered over, putting a hand on the box.

  Her eyes shut. “...you’re not going to like this.”

  Derek’s hand went to the hilt of one of his swords. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s not trapped. But...it is locked.”

  She tipped over the box.

  There were eight keyholes on the bottom side.

  And we’d long ago consigned the magic keys we didn’t need into the same titanic pile as all of the non-magical ones.

  That had, in retrospect, been a pretty serious oversight.

  And, more importantly, I learned that Selys had a much meaner sense of humor than I’d imagined.

  ***

  It was another two hours before we found all of the right keys to open the box. By that point, everyone aside from Derek had lost most of their enthusiasm. I was half-expecting to find another box inside the box.

  At least we’d set aside all the remaining magical keys this time, just in case.

  Finally, with every key in place, we popped the box open.

  There was a key inside.

  A single. Reshing. Key.

  It was made out of blue crystal, serpentine in shape, with decorative spines forming the bittings on the blade of the key.

  “Ooh.” Derek snatched the key out of the box. “Vera, any idea what this does?”

  “I’m going to hazard a guess that it opens a lock, Derek.” She sighed. “Beyond that, you’re not going to get much out of me. I can tell you if it’s magic, the dimensions, and what it’s made out of — but not what it goes to. The serpent motif is probably significant, of course.”

  “Check anyway.” He handed her the key.

  “Definitely magic. Strong, too, but I can’t tell you what it does. Maybe one of the Enchant
ers could?”

  Professor Orden silently held out a hand and Vera gave her the key.

  Orden looked the key over while I checked my remaining mental mana. 37/48. I hadn’t used a dangerous amount, but I was already getting a pretty serious headache.

  “No obvious runes. Like many tower items, it’s not enchanted through the same means as the Enchanter Attunement uses. It’s probably closer to Derek’s swords. Mana has been stored in it directly. That does mean that it was probably made by a visage, making it significant. If there are no objections, I’ll hold onto this until we find a use for it.”

  Derek’s expression saddened, but no one objected. I was just happy we’d gotten anything out of all the effort.

  We checked the northern door first.

  The room beyond the door was rectangular, but the floor and walls were divided into black and white squares. It wasn’t set up like a Crowns board, though. Sometimes there would be a few white or black squares directly adjacent to each other.

  After a few seconds, I heard a creaking sound, then a hail of spikes shot upward from the black squares on the floor. We hadn’t done anything to trigger it. Must have been timed.

  Derek shut the door. “Okay, trap room. Looks complicated. Let’s check the other one.”

  We made our way toward the other door, once again with Derek leading the way.

  The other room was another classic; a long rectangular room with a water pit in the center. There was a single door on the opposite side. It had a single blue keyhole.

  There was a broken bridge crossing about half the pool — and no obvious switch on the other side — but otherwise it was pretty close to the water room that I’d found in my Judgment.

  The same room that had led me to the jail cells and gotten this whole mess started.

  Suddenly, that spike look was looking awfully appealing by comparison.

  Derek made the decision for us and stepped inside. “This one looks easy.”

  The tile beneath his feet depressed just slightly into the ground.

  I only heard a hiss before Derek’s hand blurred upward, catching the first spear of ice that emerged from the other side of the room.

  “...okay, maybe not that easy,” he mumbled, hurling the icy spear to the ground and stepping fully inside.