The Land: Forging (Chaos Seeds Book 2) (29 page)

While they were walking, Richter accessed his inventory. All of the quartz soul stones Gloran had given him had taken up only one slot in his Bag of Holding, each type of larger soul stone also took up one slot with a number next to it to show how many there were of that type. The five soul stones holding the spirits of the hell
bugs,
though, now took up one slot each. These stones had a pulsating radiance at their center. Richter pulled one out of his inventory and looked at it. The amber jewel did indeed have an undulating spherical light in its heart, that showed a rainbow of colors, changing from second to second. The tingling feeling was still there, but there was also now a slight sensation of warmth. He put it away.

The silence in the tunnel was deafening. The air had adopted a progressively worsening ‘stale’ smell as they went further in. Richter could only guess that opening the iron door had let in the first fresh air this dungeon had seen in ages.

The four party members walked for at least half a day. The tunnel bent and zigzagged. Occasionally it even led back up for short stints. The actual features of the hallway they walked through, remained
uniform, simple grey
blocks of closely fitted stone. It was clear that they were slowly being led deeper into the earth.

To stave off boredom, Richter withdrew one of the soul stones containing an eater’s soul. He also took out the Wand of Dark Bolts. First, he simply held the glowing jewel next to the wand, but nothing happened. He left them pressed together for a full minute, but
unfortunately,
it still didn’t yield a positive result. Next he examined each item, but it just gave the basic stats of each separately. The wand had recharged another five shots in the past day or so. Richter was getting frustrated, but then he remembered Gloran told him to ‘will it.’ He
placed the two items together again
and imagined the power in the soul stone flowing into the wand. A prompt came up:

Do you wish to recharge the Wand of Dark Bolts with the Basic Soul stone? Yes or No?

Richter chose ‘Yes.’

The same ribbon of rainbow light that appeared when a spirit was captured, now flowed out of the soul stone and into the wand. The gem lost its inner
light
and then fractured. Richter was left holding a few pieces of broken amber in his hand. He put them away, not wanting to just leave them on the floor of the tunnel. Another prompt appeared:

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Enchanting. The path of the enchanter is to make the wondrous out of the mundane. You can now add spells to items to greatly increase their strength.

Awesome, Richter thought. The soul stone had added another eleven charges. He was about to use another soul stone when he realized that the tunnel had ended. Directly across from the passage they were in, on the other side of the open area, was an archway made of the same
grey
stone that formed the hallway. Set into the archway was a large door made of overlapping bands of metal. Four other doors were randomly set into the walls. One appeared to be made completely of long bones, like femurs. Another was made of red iron with no handle or apparent means of opening it. A third was black wood with glowing silver sigils carved into the frame. The fourth was simply a hatch. It looked like a dome, and it bowed outward in the direction of the room. It had a
cross-shaped
indentation set directly in the center of the dome, but no apparent handle. What concerned Richter, was that it was set two
feet off the ground, but was only three feet in diameter. Good god, don’t let the
passage way
on the other side be a small tunnel, Richter thought. He wasn’t afraid of small spaces per se, he just heavily preferred NOT to be in one.

All of these doors were definitely weird, but everyone in the party was happy to have a change from the tunnel
. Richter
was about a step
into the room
when he had a strange feeling. It could only be described as
a ‘wrongness
.’
He sharply snapped his arm up, hand flat, to stop the sprites behind him. He immediately heard the creaks of Sion and Daniella drawing their bows taut, and the
shing
of Yoshi drawing his blades. He didn’t know what had alarmed him exactly, but he knew on an instinctual animal level that something in the ‘bad’ category of things would happen if he walked into the room.

Despite being sure of his feeling, he just didn’t see anything. He scanned the room, but nothing jumped out at him. No giant spiders, no robots with laser blasters, and no
womp
rats. He looked at his familiar.

*
Alma, do you feel anyone in the room?
*

*
No*
, she thought back.

Well at least
there is that, Richter thought. She had been able to detect those bugbears even though they were hidden by magic. He guessed psychic vibrations were hard to hide,
or at least
common concealment spells were not aimed at hiding them. That still left the question of what was going
on,
though. The feeling had not debated.

He expanded his other senses, but still felt nothing. He stared at the walls, the ceiling, the floor… Was that a red glow? He knelt down and examined the floor of the room closely. Unlike the slate block floor of the hallway, the floor of the chamber in front of them was an irregular pattern of shapes: circles, diamonds,
rectangles,
and triangles. They interlocked with one another in a seemingly haphazard manner. From his lower vantage, he didn’t see the red glow, but his feeling of unease increased. Letting his eyes relax, he gazed at the floor. When he saw the red again, he was able to focus
upon
it this time. The closest circle had a superimposed red glow. A prompt appeared:

You have found: Level 3 trap.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Pierce the Veil.
The Land
is a place of hidden secrets. Traps to snare the unwary, hidden treasures, booty: both pirate and otherwise. From this moment on, you will be able to find that which others have concealed.

Casting his gaze wider, he looked at the other nearby shapes and with close attention, all of the circles near him began to glow red.

“Relax,” he said to the sprites. “There aren’t any enemies here, but the floor is full of traps.”

Yoshi looked at him, “Who trained you in trap detection?”

“No one,” Richter replied. He tapped one of the rings he was wearing. “It’s called the Ring of Hidden Dangers. It increases my likelihood of detecting traps. The real question is,” he said looking at Futen, “why didn’t you warn us about the traps?”

“The trigger was not magical in nature, my Lord. I have no skill in detecting this type of trap.”

Why doesn’t everything always just work out for me, Richter wailed silently. So far only the circles were glowing, but that still made the floor a minefield. It would take careful footwork to avoid the traps, and one misstep would…
well, he had no idea what it would do, but he was pretty sure that it would both suck and blow.

“So what do you think the traps do,” Sion asked.

“Let’s find out,” Richter said. He tossed a small pebble from the tunnel floor towards the other side of the room. It bounced once then lay still. Yoshi reached out a hand to stop him, but Richter’s impulsive action caught him by surprise.

Nothing happened. Richter looked at Yoshi’s irritated expression. “Maybe the traps are duds,” he said.

A loud whoosh heralded a foot-high gout of black flame extending vertically up from the floor in the exact spot that the pebble had first hit the floor. At the same time, a flash of steel showed at the final resting place of the stone. Three different razor wire hoops shot up from the floor crisscrossing each other at ankle height. Both
traps
started and ended in the space of a second before disappearing completely. The only evidence that anything had happened was a lingering smell of burnt ozone.

“Fucckkk meee,” Richter said slowly, backpedaling away from the dangerous room. What was truly terrifying
was that
neither of those traps seemed designed to kill. They would
just remove a portion of a leg. Then you would fall back on even more traps, and… yeah, definitely in the ‘bad’ category of things. “I thought you said the traps weren’t magical Futen! Since when is black flame not magical?”

“I said the trigger wasn’t magical, my Lord.”

“Greattt,” Richter said.

“Gyoti
,” was all Richter heard before a hand slapped the back of his head. Hard. “What did I tell you about just pushing buttons!”

Richter was wired from everything that had been happening, and the disrespect from the sword adept pushed him over the edge. He took a swing at the sword adept who dodged under the blow. The situation would have grown more out of control if not for Daniella.

“Enough! Mother Forest! The Hearth
Mother
was right,” the female sprite shouted. “There isn’t a brain among you! Lord Richter, Yoshi was right. You had NO idea what those traps would have done. It could have triggered something that would hurt us even though were still in the tunnel. And you,” she said pointing at
finger
in Yoshi’s face, “are not making a bad situation any better.
Gyoti
or not, Lord Richter is the Master of these lands, and the Hearth Mother sent you to assist him. Now can you stop bickering like old mothers and act like men? I can show you how if you need me to!”

Richter and Yoshi glared at each other, but by the end of Daniella’s verbal barrage, Richter was looking down in shame. Even Yoshi looked a bit sheepish. Richter looked back up at Daniella’s fierce expression, and then at Sion. His Companion was standing behind her,
clearly trying not to laugh. Little bastard, Richter thought. He looked back at Yoshi. He couldn’t find it inside himself to apologize just for striking back, but Daniella was right. It had been a bone head move. He nodded at the half-human. Yoshi gave a noncommittal grunt in return. Richter decided it was as much bro love as he was going to get. He turned his attention back to
floor.

“All of the circles that are close by are rigged. I’m assuming they all are, so what do we do here?”

Yoshi pulled out two small spikes of metal. One had a small hook at the end. The other undulated like a sine wave at the end. The opposing ends of both spikes were sharpened like needles. “We disarm them. Point out the closest trap. Your skill to detect it might be more advanced than mine.”

Richter showed him. The sword adept knelt down to examine it. After a few
seconds,
he said, “I see it.” His face was only inches away, but he never directly passed any part of his body directly over it. Yoshi looked at it, and then he looked at it, and then he looked at it. After twenty minutes, the other sprites sat down in the tunnel. After forty minutes, Richter joined them and broke out some hard rations from his Bag and handed them to Sion and Daniella. Hours passed.

Sion was in the middle of his ‘a dwarf, a goblin,
and an elf’ walk into a bar joke when Yoshi called out to get their attention and then waved them over. Richter was hoping it meant they could start moving again, but he really had wanted to know why the dwarf had looked so triumphant and why the goblin’s butt was sore.

“You figured it out,” he asked Yoshi. The sprite told him to kneel
down and then pointed to a small square to the side of the circle he had been studying.

“The release mechanism is here,” Yoshi said pointing at the square. “That’s why it took me so long. I was examining the circle meticulously, but couldn’t find
any way
to disarm it. Then it occurred to me that if one symbol triggered the trap, maybe another disarmed it. Watch.” Yoshi reversed his two tools, pointing the
needlelike
ends of both picks downward. He placed them at opposite corners of the square. They slipped into barely perceptible holes. He pushed both down, and with a soft click, one side of the circle popped up. Yoshi carefully pried it up further, and a mechanism could be seen underneath. A bar was underneath the circle, and it was connected to a small spring. That was in turn connected to a bar of metal which disappeared down into the floor past the point that Richter could see. With a grunt of satisfaction, Yoshi used the hook end of one of his
tools
and detached the spring from the lever that was apparently the trigger for the trap. He then put the circle back into the
floor
and stood. He cracked his neck and then arched his back, stiff from squatting for such a long period of time.

“Is it disarmed,” Sion asked.

Yoshi waved Sion closer, and then put a hand around the younger sprite’s shoulders once they were standing next to one another. The adept looked at Sion and said, “What do you think?” At the same time that he asked the question, he
stomped
down on the circle.

Sion shouted in alarm and leapt
back. Yoshi just stood there with a manic grin on his face.

“So, are like, ALL sprites assholes,” Richter asked
his heart racing. Yoshi just chuckled while Sion cursed under his breath.

Richter looked at the sword adept, “Okay. So I’m glad that you’re having a good time, and that you disarmed that one trap, but it took you an hour.” He looked out at the sea of small shapes that comprised the floor of the large room in front of them.

“That’s why I’m going to need your help. Did you follow what I did?”