B3? Chapter 268: Grand Larceny, pt. 3

Surrounded by the desolation of his assault, Kaius tuned out the remnant agonies of his battle, and the slaughter he had smeared up the wall.

Ire and fury had faded from him—dissipaiting much like all evidence of his wounds. He knew if he continued to ruminate on the anger he still felt for his captors, it would pull at his mind—distract him.

That couldn’t happen. There was work to be done, and his indulgence had already cost them enough time.

His attention turned to the warded door—the vault, that even now, held contents that tugged at his soul. His blade, and potentially a king’s ransom in spatial storage artefacts besides.

It was an impressive thing. A continuous slab of polished dark hardwood, stretching to the ceiling some twelve strides up, bound in plating of thick steel gleaming with the iridescence of alchemical reinforcement, and bolted deep into the uncompromising stone that made up its arch.

Those features, and the thick keyport that was two thirds down its left side, were inconsequential.

Complex runes scribed every surface of the door, spilling over onto the raised stone that surrounded it. They were small—dense, as Vhaxanish demanded. Some five-hundred and twelve different simplistic characters, woven into words of arcane power, each a minimum of thirty-five characters long. Each word blended together, with little delineating gaps, and each line swirled into arrays of stunning complexity.

Kaius knew that whoever had inscribed this vault had been a sublime runewright, and whoever had commissioned it must have done so at great cost—its destruction would wound Old Yon almost as much as their theft of its contents.

The script was an interesting choice for a ward of such complexity. He could see the elegance in it. Redundancies had been built into every facet of the working that he had been able to identify, dozens of triggers set to activate any number of countermeasures that he lacked the skill to interpret.

The slightest hint of tampering would be enough to set it off, and Vhaxanish was so niche, complex, and specialised that it was impossible to intuit your way through breaking the ward.

Thankfully, the runewright responsible for this testament to over-engineering had made a fatal error. They had been far too confident in the security of obscurity.

Vhaxanish was inherently unstable. The creator of this formation had leaned on that in its construction—relying on the ease with which individual arrays destabalised when manipulated to trigger the failsafes they had inscribed.

Yet that was a weakness.

He might have lacked a tenth of the experience and Skill required to create something like this, but he had the knowledge and ability to understand its construction, and how to exploit it.

All it had taken was time—to memorise, and to study. Something he had been given in ample volume. He hadn’t understood how it worked on the frequent but short glimpses that he’d seen of the vault. Instead, every moment he’d been unwatched in its presence had been spent engraving every rune of its creation into the fabric of his mind.

A visual image he could investigate and manipulate in the relative privacy of his cell, as he leaned on simple knowledge and the subtle nudgings of Explorer’s Toolkit to ferret out every trap that lay within its confines.

A feat only possible due to Glass Mind’s focus on memorisation, even with his vastly inflated mental stats. Still, he’d managed, and he’d spent hours leaning on Father’s teachings to tease apart every line and array.

He didn’t understand all of it, but he’d mapped how it fit together—and how to cause a cascading failure.

Eyes roving over the formation, he refreshed himself—double checking that the mental map of the inscription that he had built in his mind had been accurate. It was.

First, three dense whorling knots of runes, bound in sequence across the thickest steel plate that bisected the front of the door through its middle.

Each was only the size of his thumb print, and was a small part of the array that physically reinforced the door and kept it locked fast—he doubted even Porkchop would be able to batter it down while it was in play.

A minute spiraling word, right by the bottom hinge, was the next locus. Each component rune was so small he wondered how they had been inscribed in the first place. It was an almost identical clone of a dozen other spirals that clustered around it. If they broke this section of the array, it would aid in furthering the building cascade.

If they so much as touched any of its twins, they would trip an alarm.

The next two were similarly small sections of an array that stretched across the top of the stone arch around the door. One in each corner, they needed to break a single runic character inside of a single word. Rather annoying, considering the words were eighty-six characters long, and the rune in question sat right next to an identical pair.

Unfortunately, it was necessary to stop the destabilised formation from connecting to what he could only assume was some sort of communication artefact—and interrupt a half dozen other contingencies as well.

The next was another tricky one. Located a third in from the right of the top left quadrant, it was another singular rune. Thankfully, it was located right at the end of a discrete word, so it would be slightly easier to target.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

If four hairs-breadths of space was any much better than five. It was tied to a targeting mechanism—the nature of which he wasn’t entirely certain of, but suspected was some form of curse. Like all of the arrays he was targeting, it was directly tied to the stability of the overall formation.

And last, a small triangular sigil on the bottom left corner of the door. This one played no direct role in anything of extreme relevance, other than the fact it was a vital part of the stabilising array that allowed all of the constituent parts of the formation to work together in harmony.

Individually, destroying the weak points he had identified would do little other than trigger every other counter intrusion, ward, and locking mechanism that had been inscribed.

Together, their destruction would overload the entire formation from the inside out—causing the mana bound within the Vhaxanish lines to destabilise and burn out at once.

Kaius’s jaw clenched as he took in the sheer precision the task would require. It was a lot to ask of Ianmus, all it would take is a single beam being off by a hair, and all of his work would be for naught.

If they triggered the wards, they had almost no chance of ever getting through that door—even with Porkchop’s brute strength.

And yet…if anyone could do it, Kaius knew it would be Ianmus. He’d seen the mage use his solar rays with surgical precision, and he was always boasting about being the best shot in this college.