Wakespire (The Weirkey Chronicles Book 7), page 6
He leapt backward out of range and only then felt the line of pain across his arm. His coat had blunted the blow, but it had still been split in half and he could see a thin line of blood. Even if his armament would repair itself, that injury would slow him down. They couldn't afford to be taking attrition so quickly.
It lunged after him, crossing the space faster than he would have expected. Before it could strike, Nauda intercepted it, catching the arm between the forks of her staff. She twisted and drove the golem to the ground, but it wouldn't stay pinned. Instead, the construct's limbs rotated around in a way that no real creature could and it climbed back to its feet, stabbing at her with its other arm.
"A little help?" Nauda desperately backtracked, fending off the strikes. This golem was clearly intended to challenge a peak Ruler strength-for-strength, so she was struggling to keep up. "Does it even have vital organs?"
"There should be a material serving as the core." As he spoke, Theo cast several more torsion bolts at its joints. None of them managed to sever the golem's limbs.
Maybe Nauda should have panicked too, because she was taking a beating. The golem managed to slam her against one of the walls, then swung wildly, its blade scraping against the wall. Nauda barely managed to stay ahead of it and she still took a few bruising knocks as well as a nasty cut to her side.
Just as he was wondering if it was worth using a singularity so early, one of the golem's limbs split in half at the knee. Theo froze a moment, searching for the nearly imperceptible blur of Fiyu. Nauda didn't hesitate at all and drove her staff directly into the golem's head.
It had no face to damage, but the force drove it back to the ground. Unfortunately, the golem simply reoriented its limbs and reached up to stab Nauda. Just before it could do so, a brief swath of blue cantae cut through its arm.
This time, the golem lurched toward Fiyu's former position. Theo had no idea if she could get out of the way in time, so he just cast a gravitational field over the entire area. Nauda fell toward the ceiling and presumably Fiyu did as well, getting them both out of the way of the wildly thrashing golem.
"There, toward the top of the torso!" Theo finally spotted the golem's core hidden within one of the shoulder pieces. He returned gravity to normal and hoped the others could adapt.
Nauda actually leapt off the ceiling and slammed into the golem's other shoulder. Her impact carried enough force that she drove its torso down to the ground and flattened its remaining arm. An instant later Fiyu's blade pierced through its core within the armor.
As the golem slumped, the invisible aura slipped away from Fiyu's body. Theo gestured for her to follow, since they needed to get to the next room and make up for lost time, but she instead turned back.
"Nauda, are you alright?"
"I'm fine." Nauda tried to give Fiyu an encouraging smile, but she was favoring her side, which was covered in blood. "Given enough time, I'll regenerate."
"I hope that we do not have too many combat rooms."
"They've all been varied so far," Theo said. He reached down to pull Nauda to her feet and gestured for them. "Come on, we have to hurry before the others send more curses our way." All he could do was presume that there were rooms for cursing and that other teams had already encountered them.
With the golem down, the portal had already opened. On the other side, they found themselves on a balcony... over an endless pit? Theo blinked as he saw several glowing orbs fall from the ceiling into the darkness, only to reappear at the ceiling. So the chamber was looped vertically via some sort of space-manipulation technique. The Noveni really were putting a lot of resources into this competition.
"What are we even looking at?" Nauda leaned heavily on her staff and stared at the falling orbs. "I have no idea what this is supposed to be."
"Look at the openings." Fiyu pointed toward the sides of the room, where there were a large number of circular openings. "Perhaps something with them?"
Fiyu's senses had taken them far, but here they made her miss the obvious: the colors around the openings were the same as the falling orbs. The orbs seemed to be speeding up as they continued accelerating downward, so retrieving all of them might have been a real challenge.
For a team with different skills. Theo reversed gravity in the center of the chamber and cast anchoring points until he finally got all the spheres to halt in the center.
"I've neutralized gravity over the pit," he explained to the others. "Let's match the colors as fast as possible."
To her credit, Fiyu immediately understood once she started considering the colors. She drifted into the center of the room, by now familiar with operating under his gravitational fields. Nauda joined her, moving a little slowly due to her injury but easily capable of grabbing spheres. Theo joined in and with each sphere deposited in the correctly colored circle, the walls gave off a glow and a chime of approval.
This one really did remind him of a game. Without having to worry about gravity, they finished the room quickly enough: with the last sphere, a new portal on their balcony lit up.
On the other side, they found themselves standing atop a mountain surrounded by nothing but clouds.
"We can't be done..." After staring for a while, Nauda sat down and stared. "This must be another challenge."
"This space is... wrong." Fiyu rubbed her forehead with both hands and frowned. "We are still inside a smaller chamber, but it is using a technique to distort that space. I do not understand what we are meant to do."
For once, Theo had no more idea than they did. There were no objects on the mountaintop to draw his attention and the clouds were even more nondescript than the ones in the real Noven. He spotted mountains in the distance in a few places, but there was nothing marking them out as special and they might not even be real.
Were they supposed to venture beneath the clouds? That was the only idea he had, but if Fiyu was right and they were still inside a chamber, then the clouds were near the base of the cube. He really was baffled about what the challenge was even supposed to be.
"You need to destroy the targets." The disembodied voice returned briefly, then after a long pause continued speaking. "Can you see the targets placed on each mountain? You need to strike them without leaving the mountaintop."
"Really?" Nauda shielded her eyes as she searched futilely. "Maybe if my telescope was fully repaired, but right now I can't see anything."
"They are... very far." Fiyu walked to one edge and focused her senses. "Can you assist me?"
Obviously she meant Theo instead of Nauda, but he wasn't sure how much he could help. He joined her at the edge and tried to extend his gravity senses outward. There was definitely some sort of spatial manipulation that was making his senses go haywire. But even without it, he struggled to help her pinpoint these invisible targets. The fact was that he had been so focused on his soulcrafting that improving his base skills had fallen by the wayside.
Eventually he thought he could feel a dense point just in front of a mountain, and there seemed to be others. Fiyu used his assistance to get the precise angle and then fired a thin stream of light bolts. She needed to correct several times before the target was destroyed, since the artificial mountains were quite far away and even the slightest shift in her fingers would produce a miss.
Future targets fell quicker, but by the time they had destroyed them all, Fiyu was breathing heavily. The fact that she had built a Corporeal Floor was usually an advantage, but it did leave her with less overall cantae. That never would have been a problem if they hadn't faced a challenge that forced her to use so much. Even as they walked toward the portal that appeared in the air, Theo had to wonder just what that challenge was even supposed to be.
Given that one of the officials had spoken to them, something must have been wrong. His best guess was that Noveni had good enough eyesight that the targets jumped out at them. If so, then the room was a test of range and accuracy. Still, something about that idea wriggled in the back of his mind, as if he was missing something...
Theo heard the next room before he saw it. Metal and stone smashing together violently, over and over again. When he fully left the swirling cantae of the portal, he found himself facing a swarm of blocks. Instead of a cube like most of the rooms, they appeared to be at the end of a wide corridor. He couldn't even see the other side through the shifting maze of blocks smashing against one another.
"We have to go through that?" Nauda asked. "I don't see a path through."
"I could, if my new skills were more developed." Fiyu lowered her head as if this was a great failing. "But I fear I cannot, and I would have no way to help you through in any case."
"Let's stay calm and begin testing," Theo said. "See how they respond to interference and look for patterns in the meantime."
His first experiment, as always, was a gravitational field. Either the blocks were immune or the test proctors had increased the difficulty, because the maze of blocks resisted his cantae. He tried a torsion bolt, just in case, but it only damaged part of one block. Smashing through the haze of blocks might be an accepted solution, it would just drain so much stamina that it wouldn't be worth it.
In a strange way, by optimizing himself so much, Theo wasn't well-equipped for these challenges. He had numerous skills that he hadn't even tried, such as his disorientation technique. That was very useful against opponents he would normally face, and not useful at all in this kind of artificial circumstance. All told, he preferred actual efficacy, but it annoyed him now.
The critical exception would have been his tunneling technique. Unfortunately, there was no way it would work for human-sized objects until he was an Authority, so that was a dead end. There did seem to be a pattern of movement, so maybe if he looked long enough...
"Another team just applied a curse." They all groaned, but the disembodied voice continued after only a brief pause. "This challenge will be intensified."
"This is what we get for being first." Nauda grimaced and began rolling her shoulders as if she planned to take a run at the blocks. "I guess we should try something before even more teams target us."
Theo shook his head. "The real question is: where do these curses even come from? Maybe the blessing room changes after the first person? That would be really unfair against the leaders, though."
"Are we sure everyone has the same room order? I mean, I guess we did meet other teams in the spiral room..."
They both trailed off, since there was no point trying to analyze the details. Time was ticking away and Theo doubted this room would be nearly as much of an obstacle to teams including Authorities. Unless they came up with something fast, their attempt would end here.
After the curse, the blocks had begun flowing with fresh cantae and moving more quickly. That would definitely make them more dangerous, but the change in tempo made it easier to see the patterns. There was no clean path all the way through, even for the fastest of soulcrafters. He could occasionally see a hint of the portal on the other side, about three cube-lengths away.
If it had been a game, there would have been a space that opened between the smashing blocks that could be followed through the storm. Here, the pattern seemed to have been tweaked precisely to avoid that solution. There were several points where they could follow retreating blocks deep into the swarm, but they were always decisively cut off by new blocks smashing from other directions.
Fiyu seemed flummoxed, while Nauda could only test her strength against the outer blocks. She was able to slow them with great effort, but once she let go they sped up to rejoin the pattern. There was no creating a new pattern through the blocks, then. Theo honestly didn't see any easy solution, given their limited resources.
"I know what we have to do." Nauda took a deep breath and then handed her staff to Theo. "There's an opening that gets blocked by those two long blocks from the sides. If we all run in, I'll brace myself when they hit. You two should be able to get through the rest if I can buy you a few seconds."
"But Nauda..." Fiyu turned toward the blocks, her senses searching for another path, and then she hung her head. "Are you sure you'll be alright?"
"They said there were safety protocols." Abruptly Nauda grinned at them. "Besides, I owe both of you. You've been carrying me so far and helping me recover... let me do this. Then at least the team can keep moving forward."
Fiyu looked like she wanted to argue, but they didn't have any other good options. Theo got a better grip on Nauda's staff and gave her a nod of respect. Even if her life wasn't in danger, he had a feeling that her plan was going to hurt.
"Alright, on three. One... two..."
When the next opening appeared, they all darted into the swarm of blocks. The first steps were easy: they raced forward until they got past the smaller steel blocks that collided in swift patterns. Then they pulled back as two large stone pieces ground against one another. But when those opened, there would be nothing but the final sprint...
Just in case, Theo ran as hard as he could. Not fast enough. The stone blocks came slamming closed around him and he heard Nauda give a cry of pain.
If she had failed, they all would have been crushed. Theo sprinted the rest of the way. He misjudged one of the patterns and a stone cube struck his hip, but he skidded out of the swarm on the other side. Fiyu emerged a moment later, immediately looking back.
Through the swarm of cubes, they could just see Nauda struggling to hold apart the two largest rock platforms. She was braced in between them, her arms shaking as she struggled to hold them apart. Theo began calculating a perpendicular gravitational field, to try to pull her out, and then he saw stone blocks closing in from above and below.
"Go!" Nauda shouted the word at them and then all the blocks slammed in on her.
A cacophony exploded from the maze of blocks as they ricocheted against one another in patterns that had never been intended. When they resumed their former pattern, there was no sign of Nauda. Fiyu shuffled closer to Theo's side and grasped his sleeve.
"A technique warping space pulled Nauda out," Fiyu said quietly. "That means she's alright, yes?"
"They don't let anyone get killed in competitions like these," Theo said. He gestured for Fiyu to follow him into the next portal. "Let's keep going and make sure her strategy works."
Even though his words were true, Theo felt like he was trying to convince himself. As he stepped into the next portal, he glanced backward toward the shifting deathtrap. The sides of the stone blocks were stained with a lot of blood.
Chapter 6
After the violence of the deathtrap, the office felt disturbingly quiet. Empty but for another desk, this one staffed by a young Noveni woman. She beamed at them when they emerged from the portal.
"Down to two, huh? Well, take heart, because most teams don't make it this far at all."
"What's this one?" Theo asked.
"Your first Room of Cursing!" The official gestured cheerfully for them to come closer and then pointed at the model spire on her desk. "You can see how far every team is here, then you get to choose one of them. That makes sense, right? Sometimes foreigners have trouble with the translation. You're foreigner-foreigners, right? You don't look very Noveni."
The tower was an exact model of their location made from golden wires. Unfortunately, when he looked closer he didn't see any clear indicators of rooms or anything like a map. There were simply specks of light that gave off little word-like wisps. If he was reading it correctly, they were the "foreigner" light and they were still ahead of the other groups, but not by much.
Even though speed was still a priority, Theo knew that room difficulty would increasingly be what slowed them down, so he took a moment to examine the other specks. It looked like all three Dortorus teams were still moving up the spire, with Gatrium in the middle of the pack. He also saw specks labeled Jadadictus and Terefilia relatively far up. All those further down he assumed had stalled out on a challenge.
"May we see our comrades?" Fiyu asked.
The woman blinked. "I just sit in this room and handle the curse rules. Speaking of which, have you decided who you want to curse yet? I can explain more if you want, but your team has already been targeted twice, so I think you know how it works."
"Does this give any information about what challenges the other teams are facing?" Theo asked. "Or how many team members they have left?"
"Nothing like that, just relative progress. And don't try to guess based on your experience, because if you haven't figured it out yet, the room order is randomized."
So much for that strategy. Looking at all the team representations, Theo found that he just didn't care. "Can we skip this one?"
"Curse no one?" The official blinked again and regarded them as if wondering how they got in. "You have to bless someone, but there's no rule about needing to use a curse."
"Then we'll just move on." Theo glanced toward Fiyu for confirmation, but she nodded to him. They moved around the desk toward the next portal.
Currently, Theo didn't know the politics of the competition enough for the cursing to be a strategic decision, and he doubted that he could keep the other teams back for long. Both his curses had been anonymous, but if the system was run by Noveni officials, he was willing to bet that others would learn. No reason to make any enemies in their very first competition when they'd already drawn enough attention.
When they stepped into the next room, Theo immediately recognized the glass and silver layout. This representation of a soulhome was much more complex, with pipes emerging from the floor and spanning several tiers. One of the pipes near the bottom still ran to the exit portal, though, so the final goal seemed unchanged.
"Oh... this one is a bit difficult." Fiyu shuffled to one of the corners. "The flow is very wrong here. I will fix it."
