Mind Your Step, Draft 1, CH 18

Stepping inside Karliak was no longer stepping into something obviously made. The path was grassy, the walls foliage and rocks at their base. There was something of how Firmen had made his walls mostly of trunks, but this felt more natural. Anyone walking here would question how it came to be, but wouldn’t immediately conclude a person had done it.

Heather stopped at the first room’s entrance before Tibs warned her.

It was larger than before, and the floor’s tiles were no longer uniform, looking like pavers stones instead of a cracked floor. He smiled as the path they were on was implied to continue within the room by moss covered pavers.

What he sensed of the next room was odd, but he pulled his sense in, limiting himself to this one to avoid the distraction.

“This is going to be a trap room,” Heather said.

“How can you tell?”

“The way the floor’s tiled. Some will have triggers, while others will be safe.”

“Some could have false triggers,” he added. “What can you tell about what the trap might be?”

She looked at him. “Aren’t you the rogue on this team? Isn’t that your job?”

“I already know what this is. You’re the one here to train.”

“I’m a fighter.”

He shook his head. “That’s what the guild decided people who confront a dungeon’s challenges head on are called, but this isn’t a guild dungeon. Here, you are whatever you decide to be.”

“Fine. I’m deciding to be a fighter and leaving the traps to the rogue.”

“I can do it,” Ruppert said, and before Tibs could react, he ran to the other side of the room. “See!”

“Aren’t some tiles fragile enough to break under Ruppert?” Simtor asked.

“Not many anymore, and they did something to themselves. I don’t think they’d have reacted.”

“I’m not crossing on your say so, Ruppert,” Heather called.

Tibs didn’t know if it had been on purpose, but Ruppert had taken a path through the pavers that would support their weight. “Try sensing for the traps.”

“I’m the fighter,” she stated.

“You’re the one training, Heather. That means pushing yourself at every step.”

She sighed. “How do I even do that?”

“The same way you do when you’re attacked. You sense for how your element accumulates and see if that tells you anything.”

“That’s only for when something is in motion,” she complained.

“As far as you’ve worked out.”

“No, that’s what you told me. Force sticks to things that move. That’s what I sense.”

“It’s what I read. How do you know it’s true?”

“You aren’t letting me get out of this, are you?”

“Do you want to get better? Or are you hoping that will happen while you sleep?”

She crouched and placed a hand on the first paver. “I can’t sense anything,” she finally said.

“Okay.” Tibs crouched next to her, ignoring her glaring.

“Okay? That’s it?”

“I asked you to try, not tell me what the trap is.” He placed his hand on a paver to the side and pushed. It shattered. Unless the Runner had been careful in where they set their foot, they’d been enough off balance they’d fall forward. If they kept from falling into the pit, and the stakes at the bottom, would depend on if they could grab onto the other side, and if it would support their weight. “All I’m asking, Heather, is that you try. That you push what you think you’re able to do. Everything one element can do, the others can do a version of it. If I can sense water around a paver to tell there’s nothing under it, you have a way to do it too. You just have to work out what it is.” He stood and tested the pavers before him with his foot, pushing from the edge to the center, before stepping on it fully when it didn’t break.

“Test them like I did before following me. You are more muscular and taller than me. And you have metal in your armor. These might not support your weight even when it supports mine.”

He purposefully didn’t follow Ruppert’s path so some pavers would break.

“How deadly would it be to fall?”

“Depends on a lot of things. For an Omega Runner, deadly. Even with the kind of armor the guild would provide them. The stakes are far enough they’d die. Once they have their element, it’s still going to be deadly until they figure out how to use it to protect themselves. An Earth Runner might workout how to coat themselves with enough they’d only get hurt instead of die. One with Corruption might coat themselves in enough the stakes will melt.”

“How about someone with Force?”

“Maybe you can do what you did to get on the roof and send you out of the pit.”

“That used everything I had. And the landing hurt.”

“But you survived.”

She cursed, and he looked over his shoulder. The paver she’d been testing broke.

“Back to the other one, I’ll find a new path.”

Crossing the room was slow, having to backtrack twice more due to a paver that didn’t support her weight.

“It would have been faster if you had followed mine,” Ruppert said.

“How do you know they wouldn’t have broken under our weight?” Heather asked. “We’re heavier than you.”

Ruppert climbed onto her shoulder. “I can tell how much essence you have.” He jumped on Tibs’s shoulder. “You too. They had enough to support that.”

“You can tell how much weight we have by our essence?” Tibs was stunned. People’s essence didn’t tell him that, as far as he knew.

“Of course.” The tone was definitely that of ‘everyone can,’ but Tibs figured it was something dungeons did. Which made sense, since Karliak had to set to pavers to support some and not others.

The hall was twenty paces long, and his confusion about what he’d sensed in the room resolved itself by all the wooden beams leaning against each other, blocking their path.

Heather looked at him.

“I have no idea what this is.” Even sensing it, he couldn’t tell more than they were made mostly of Wood essence, and leaned against each other. They might be connected where they touched, but he couldn’t tell from the essences.

“This looks like a trap,” Heather said. “Shouldn’t it be something else? We already dealt with a room like that.”

“There are no rules about them alternating,” Tibs said, studying the ground. It was all grass, with earth under it. As far as he could tell, other than the top layer, the earth was normal. “I don’t think there are triggers in the ground. This all feels normal.”

“Can’t a dungeon make normal stuff?”

“Yes. But we’d need a way to tell there’s something there. Remember, every challenge can be overcome. It’s just about figuring out how.”

“I’ll tell you,” Ruppert said, then ran into a small gap between logs.

“We can’t follow you,” Tibs called after the squirrel.

“I’m not sure he understand what this is about,” Heather said, chuckling.

“Okay,” Ruppert called, sounding high in the room. “None of the beams are attached. So, if you aren’t careful, you can bring everything down.”

“Maybe that’s how we do it?” Heather said. “Bring that down so we can walk over?”

“Is that cheating?” Karliak asked. “The squirrel moving among the beams like that and telling them about it?”

“I’m on their team,” Ruppert said. “I’m doing my part.”

“A team should be five of them,” Simtor said.

“Does that mean I need to change the combat room? I’ve only accounted for Heather, since Tibs isn’t going to fight.”

“I’m not fighting,” Ruppert replied. “Have you seen this body I’m in? Unless you want to let me make something better?”

“You are not touched my essence. Gather your own.”

“I’m doing that. You have no idea how much it takes to make something better,” Ruppert grumbled, then reappeared, and ran down a beam.

“I don’t know if being careless with how we do this is a good idea,” Tibs said, “with how many there seem to be, if this just falls, we could end up buried under them. I think this is a puzzle, not a trap. We need to work out how to make an opening without bringing everything down.”

“Ice it,” Heather said.

He stared at her.

“If you ice the top of the beams, we can remove some to make a path and nothing falls.”

“Omega Runners don’t have elements,” he said.

“I have one. So I’m Upsilon, and even an Upsilon water Runner can make ice. I’ve watched plenty of them train when I moved in with my dad. And you have water as an element, at the very least.”

“Karliak, do you feel that’s fair?”

“Why are you asking the dungeon?” she asked.

“Because I don’t want to get on their bad side since we’re going to be training here.”

“Heather makes a good point that you are an Upsilon team, so I can’t protest. I’ll say it’s not how it should be solved, though. This is a first floor.”

“He’s okay with it, but points out this can be solved without an element.”

“Maybe we do that next time?” she offered. “I’m hoping for a fight.”

“Okay.” He let out a little Water essence, and sent that to the top of the beams, using it to make the water essence in the air his.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

“An Upsilon Runner doesn’t have the kind of reserve I have, so I have to use what’s in the air. I have to make that essence mine before I’ll be able to ice so much area.”

“Can I do that?”

“You should be able to, but I don’t know how it would work with Force. Water’s all around, even when the air doesn’t feel wet. So I can spread it. From what I read, Force is only there when something moves.”

“A lot of things move,” she said after a stretching silence. “The leaves in the trees. The grass in the wind. Us, walking.”

“Then it’s worth trying it if you can sense that little essence on those things.” He willed the water to ice, and it spread over the top of the beams with a crackling sound.

She whistled. “That’s just from what was there?”

“With a little of mine to start the process.”

“How do we do it now?”

“Now, I just free the beams we want to move and go through.”

The work was tedious because of how heavy the beams were, and once, Heather deflected one with her essence when it slipped from their hold.

On the other side, they rested before continuing.

The combat room looked, to Tibs, like one of any of the training rooms he’d used at the guild. Large, and empty. In this case, a normal-looking deer stood in the center of the room, along with three raccoons, four foxes, and six rabbits.

“I’m not going in the room,” he told her. “This is your fight.”

“Are you sure? That’s a lot of animals just for me.”

“Karliak adjusted the room for you, probably taking into account you are Upsilon. I’m not going in to heal you. If you get hurt, you need to get back here for that to happen.”

“You can heal too?”

“I’ll explain after the run, I promise.”

“What if I die?”

Tibs was surprised at the lack of trepidation in the question. “Karliak, I need your opinion on this. If she’s in danger of dying, I can easily save her, but I’ll act as stronger than Upsilon. I can’t limit myself to that when fighting, no matter how hard I try.”

“You have to let him,” Ruppert said. “She’s our friend.”

“She’s a Runner,” Simtor replied. “If a Runner can’t overcome a challenge, we get to absorb them.”

“Kill them,” Ruppert snapped. “Call it what it is.”

“Simtor’s point is valid,” Karliak said. “But this isn’t a situation we’ve been in before. What if Heather fails the challenge because I miscalculated? So, for this one fight, if it looks like Heather might die, you can rescue her. Then we’ll decide if it’s because she just failed, and I’m not going to change anything, or because the fight was unbalanced, and I’ll adjust.”

“I can rescue you for this fight,” he told her. “Because Karliak isn’t sure it’s going to be a fair one.”

“Okay,” she said, drawing her sword. “And word of advice?”

“Don’t get overconfident. They won’t be like the deers Karliak attacked me with, but they might not act like real animals either. They are dungeon creatures. So expect surprises.”

With a nod, she stepped into the room, and immediately the animals moved, spreading.

The foxes attacked first, faster and leaping higher than any he’d seen. She dodged and cut one in two, but received scratches that cut through the leather and drew blood. Sharper claws. While she evaded them, and received more scratches the raccoon moved to her left and the rabbits to her right. With the second fox dying, the raccoon attacked, on grabbing her sword and pulling, before its paws were sliced off.

“Rabbits behind you!” Ruppert yelled, claws digging into Tibs’s vest. “Fox on your right! Yes! Take that raccoon.”

Karliak didn’t comment, so Tibs let him continue to help as he could while he watched.

Speed and damage was what Karliak had increased in them, and for each Heather killed, she accumulated cuts and bites. None of them were deep, but the total was causing her to lose a significant amount of Life essence.

And the deer still hadn’t joined the battle.

When the last of the rabbits died, she was panting hard. She was slow killing the last fox, and so sloppy with the last raccoon it almost cut her throat.

The deer reared and huffed before charging, head down, antlers forward.

She wasn’t fast enough, and her shoulder was open. He saw bone.

He fought against going to her as she stood. This wasn’t an unfair fight yet, or at all, as far as he was concerned. What happened next depended on her. The kind of fighter she was. And if she was like many of the fighters he’d known, he didn’t know if he should rescue her.

He breathed easier when she ran toward him, the deer on her heels.

She threw herself out of the room, and Tibs cut the deer’s head off with a metal wall as it crossed the threshold. Then he went to her and channeled Fever.

“This is probably going to hurt,” he warned her before applying the etching.