When I finally looked up from my task, I saw that Kael was sitting cross-legged, watching us. SCRUB crawled in small circles around him, beeping and booping adorably. "About time you guys finished."
I stared. "You could've helped me."
Kael shook his head. "Nope. I can't touch mana, and I'm legally not allowed to touch chemicals."
Before I could disbelievingly respond, Hask interrupted. "Traps?"
Kael gestured across the way, standing. "A Chest Mimic is lying dead down a side tunnel that we'll need to mop up. Down that big tunnel over there, there's a floor trap that might actually still be armed. Not sure yet."
Hask grunted. "Understood. Callister. Stay here and catch your breath; I'll go handle the Chest Mimic, then we'll move on."
As Hask disappeared down a tunnel, Tessa grabbed my arm urgently. "Lorne! You're hurt!"
I looked down at my arm and saw that indeed, there was a big splash of viscera mixed with Grime Reaper that had burned through my clothes and was now sizzling my flesh. I hadn't even felt it until I noticed it. "Oh."
Then the pain hit. I'd never felt anything worse. I would bet that I could still have said that even if I had memories. I yelped loudly, slapping at my bubbling skin. This caused the chemical to splash onto my hand, and now that was burning too. "FUCK! SHIT! HELP! FUCK!"
I felt something hit the back of my head. Now my head hurt.
I looked up to see that it had been Alara's hand. "Shut up for two seconds. Here."
She knelt beside me and grabbed my arm. She observed my sizzling meat before reaching into her pack. She opened a small box, pulled forth a piece of cloth, and pressed it to the spot. "Healing Art: Minor Cleanse. Activate."
I watched the cloth begin to glow. The magic she was imbuing it with drew the blood splashes and chemicals into the cloth and kept it there, like it was ordinary water.
She then retrieved a small bandage and pressed it to the wound. "Healing Art: Lesser Mending. Activate." Her voice was calm and measured; indifferent and almost mechanical. The angry red burn began to recede and eventually disappeared, leaving unscathed flesh behind.
She repeated the process with my hand. "Word to the wise. Don't spread chemicals to other body parts. Stupid."
I shook my head, unable to find words. "Ummm…thanks, Alara."
She stood, not even looking at me. "Mhm."
As she walked away, she stopped. "Even minor healing consumes mana quickly. Stop being an idiot, or you'll be dead meat in no time."
Kael sighed. "Raging bitch. Damn good healer."
Hask returned some time later, brushing some manner of gore from his jumpsuit. "Alright, guys. Team meeting."
We circled him and he bid us to sit down. "We need to check in now before we go deeper. See where we're at. Tessa. I need your report."
Tessa nodded, flipping open her notebook. Her posture and expression were enthusiastic, but not giddy. She had a professionalism about her now that I hadn't seen yet. "Strap in. It's a lot. Already."
Hask grumbled for her to continue, and she took a deep breath. "So…first of all…the mana pressure is wrong."
She caught my still-confused glance and explained. "Normal dungeons have a consistent internal mana pressure — it flows from the core outward in predictable patterns, feeds the respawn cycle, maintains the dungeon's internal systems. This place has pressure that is doing something weird — it's flowing inward in places. Not all of it, but pockets. Like something deeper in the dungeon is pulling at it rather than generating it. A healthy core pushes mana out. But this one is sucking it up, throwing it all out of balance."
Her eloquence took me by surprise; she sounded more like Kael in this moment; I realized in that moment that Tessa wasn't just Hask's bubbly niece, but a legitimate expert in her field that Hask depended on and looked to before making decisions.
I already really liked Tessa, but I found a deep respect for her as I listened.
Hask pondered her words for a moment, then bid her to continue.
She took another large, slightly dramatic breath. "Next…the tainted mana has a different signature. Normally even corrupted mana has a similar signature to its healthy state. The tainted stuff here has an opposite signature, like it's from a different dungeon entirely."
I watched the foreman's mouth turn down at the corner, but he said nothing.
Tessa continued. "Normally that wouldn't necessarily be cause for major concern: there is precedent, even if it's rare. But in those cases, contaminated mana patches all had different signatures from each other. These are consistent across the board. That's what bothers me."
I tried very hard to look like all of this wasn't going entirely over my head; I could tell this was serious.
"Thirdly…the elginarium veins are weird. From what I know of it, it absorbs ambient mana and holds it…but here…it's cycling. The mana goes in, basically swirls around a bit, and then pushes through the veins."
"To the lower levels of the dungeon," Hask said. "toward the core."
Tessa held up her hand, indicating she wasn't done. "Yes. Basically the elginarium is acting as a vehicle for whatever is pulling mana into the core. This is not what normally happens. And there's one other thing."
She took a deep breath. "The magical residue in this place is the wrong age."
Hask cocked his head curiously.
"Normally I can date residues like a geologist does with rocks…theoretically, there should be lots of recent residue from the dungeon just…being active. But…everything in here is old. About ten years old specifically."
"Right around the time the dungeon was sealed?" Hask asked.
She gave an affirmative hand gesture. "Exactly. So where's all the new residue? Where's the residue from the adventuring party? I find it hard to believe that they didn't use magic or abilities in here. Veilworms aren't exactly 'Baby's First Monster'."
Hask sat in silence for a long moment, and we all followed suit. "Any idea what it means?"
Tessa shook her head, her expression one of worry. "Not a clue. I've never even heard of this combination of effects. I've got all of it logged. If it looks like this up here, I'm deeply concerned about what's below."
He sighed and stood. "That's why we're here."
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
I understood about half of what Tessa had said. But I understood all of how everyone else was sitting with it.
Kael sent SCRUB back ahead to relocate the trap it had discovered earlier, and we followed well behind. With Tessa's breakdown of what was happening here, I had so many more questions, as well as several important, repeated ones.
Why was this dungeon breaking?
What were we supposed to do about it?
Why was a low-ranking team of janitors placed on a mission that was so important and dangerous?
When would we stop for lunch?
My reverie was broken by Hask. "Lithwell. Brief me on the details of the trap you found."
Kael cleared his throat. "Floor trap. Multiple pressure plates, connected to dart-firing mechanisms in the wall, probably poisoned ones. SCRUB's data was incomplete because of the mana fluctuations. He definitely detected at least one plate that was still armed. There could be more. We need to be extremely cautious."
Hask was silent for a moment. "Fitting of an adventuring party to not properly disable the trap. Just enough for them to get by."
Kael shrugged. "Thunder Hawk's rogue is Arren Shadowflash. He's a professional, going by the file I've read on him. I doubt he did it purposely. Maybe his trap detection was muddled the same way SCRUB was."
"Possible, I guess…"
We walked for another few minutes before Kael raised a hand to stop us. He pointed at the seemingly normal tunnel ahead of us — normal by the standards we were operating in, anyway. "Here. Two hundred feet, takes up the width of the tunnel. I have some idea of the path Thunder Hawk took, but I need to emphasize that the data is imperfect. If we move slowly, we should be fine, but there's still risk."
Hask rubbed his chin as he mulled things over. After a beat, he punched the open palm of his opposite hand. "Alright. We move forward. Kael and SCRUB first, then myself, Tessa, Lorne and Alara. We move slowly. Follow Kael's footsteps exactly. If any of you trigger a poisoned dart, it's five hundred pushups, provided you survive."
I suspected the foreman was trying to make a joke to lighten the tension, but it was very hard to tell. He, like the rest of us, was coiled like a spring at the thought of the danger ahead.
We all took formation and waited for Kael. He observed the floor for a very long time.
I could tell he was seeing things I wasn't: the floor looked perfectly average to me. Just old, broken stone amidst dirt and rubble.
He finally, after a deep exhale, took a tentative step, very carefully testing his weight with his toe before stepping fully. We all held our collective breath until he had both feet in the same spot.
The cycle repeated for several more agonizing steps before we began to follow. Hask was clearly an old hand at this, and had no trouble placing his feet exactly where Kael had just been before.
Tessa seemed to be rather adept as well, and I bet she had an advantage over the rest of us: as a halfling, she was shorter, lighter, and more nimble than the rest of us. But she, like the rest of us, was clearly anxious.
Kael had said two hundred feet. I reckoned we were about halfway when it happened.
I felt a shift under my feet. Not dead on, but at the very edge of my heel.
I heard a click and a quick hiss.
The next thing I knew, I was on one knee. My left hand held Alara by the collar, where she crouched, trembling. My right hand was clutching the shaft of a nasty-looking dart, barbed tip glinting dangerously in the light of our lamps. I was holding it about an inch from her eye.
Alara was wide-eyed and staring in a way that I hadn't yet seen her. Her gaze was locked on me.
I noticed that my breath was even and measured.
What the hell had just happened?
I looked over at Tessa, who was planted on her rear. By the way my foot was positioned, it appeared that I had kicked her off her feet. She too was staring at me.
I looked at the walls: dozens of darts had embedded themselves in the rocks on both sides, exactly where the three of us had been.
I was suddenly flooded with emotions: confusion about the events that had just transpired, guilt - I had triggered the plate and put everyone's lives in danger - and a hypervigilance I was not familiar with. My eyes were all over the place, scanning for signs of something I didn't know I was looking for.
Most of all, I felt deep concern at how calm I was: I was a nineteen-year-old janitor with no memory and one skill. I should not have been able to do what I apparently just did. And someone who could would probably still be shaking like a leaf.
Instead I was, at least outwardly, calm, cool, and collected. My visual searching was quick, not frantic. That disturbed me.
But the other side of that was that I had just protected my companions.
By my estimate, about six seconds had passed. I searched desperately for something to say. "Sorry about that."
Stupid. That was the wrong thing to say.
I carefully helped Alara and Tessa up. Neither of them had taken their gaze off of me. But I brushed off my clothes and looked at Hask: his eyes were also fixed on me. Calm. Calculating something I wasn't privy to. He said nothing.
I looked at the girls. "You guys okay?"
Alara nodded mutely. Tessa's face was blank for all of another moment before a huge grin broke out on her face. "I KNEW you were an assassin!"
Relief flooded my body: she wasn't angry with me. And Alara wasn't sneering, so she didn't seem to be either. I couldn't help but smile at the exuberant halfling. "I'm not an assassin, Tessa."
"But then what was that?!"
"I don't know."
"Guys!" Kael's voice cut through the moment. He stood waiting on a patch of rock, hands on his hips.
He wore an expression of impatience, but I could see his hands shaking as they rested on his hips. "The trap?"
I shook my head. "Right. Sorry."
We resumed our formation nervously.
There were no more incidents as we traversed the last hundred feet. Once Kael determined we were safe, we all breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Kael grabbed a tool pouch from his belt. "Now that we're safely across, I'm going to go back and fix the trap, and re-arm it. I think I know where the main mechanism is. Don't wander."
Hask waved an affirmation, but his attention was still on me. "Callister."
His tone was oblique. I couldn't tell if he was angry, upset, or something else. "Yes, sir?"
There was a very pregnant pause.
"Nice work."
I felt my face flush slightly and focused my attention on Kael as he carefully retraced his steps. SCRUB stepped with surprising alacrity ahead of him.
I felt something wrap around my thighs tightly. I looked down: it was Tessa. "Thank you, Lorne."
I felt something like gratitude mixed with pride well up in the pit of my stomach. "Don't mention it."
She continued to hug me for a long moment.
I saw Kael carefully analyzing a wall not far from where the incident happened. He found a loose rock and removed it, leaning into the hole with his tools. It only took several minutes before eight square sections of the tunnel lifted into the air, rotated, and settled back seamlessly into the floor.
He then proceeded to carefully make his way back to us, dusting his hands off on his jumpsuit. "Child's play."
Hask decided we would take a breather after that. We all sat down and broke out our rations: carefully packaged sandwiches and sweets, courtesy of Ojola. There was a large canteen of fruit juice as well. I decided that that lady was the greatest person in the world.
As we dug in, Kael leaned in close. "Don't think too much about it. I didn't see that plate either. And you only hit it on the edge. Not your fault."
I wondered how obvious my brooding had been. But that definitely did help. "Thanks."
I glanced up casually at Alara. She had quit staring at me and seemed to have regained most of her disdainful composure. But I did take note that she had not uttered a single cutting word since the trap went off.
I wasn't sure what that meant.
After lunch, we continued down into the tunnel. Kael sent SCRUB ahead again with the same instructions: search, report, return.
It wasn't long before the floor began an obvious slant: not enough to be treacherous, but enough to make it clear we were going down.
As we walked, I noticed the terrain slowly began to change. The raw stone tunnel gradually shifted to patches of worked stone and broken columns that no longer supported anything. The elginarium veins became thicker and more glossy. Their mana signature was even heavier, according to Tessa.
We went deeper. The tunnel levelled out into an ancient stone hall. I got curious. "What…is happening?"
Hask gestured vaguely. "Dungeon's getting weird."
Succinct and accurate. A perfectly Hask response. It was honestly good enough for me.
Torches flickered in sconces, ancient tapestries hung from the walls, many of them ripped or worn thin from age. I couldn't make out too much detail in them.
The strangest part was that the hall ended in a beautifully carved spiral staircase, its stone smoothed clean from many, many feet.
The foreman stopped us before we could descend. "We're officially entering the next level. It's only going to get more dangerous from here. Follow my lead, keep your eyes peeled."