Chapter 140 – And Deeper

It was clear, when they came back down the next day, that Scrappy had been hard at work. Five of the rooms near the front had been reset. Thankfully, the strange golem was nowhere to be found, and it hadn’t made it to the back rooms. The two greater labyrinthine horror corpses were missing, which was creepy, but the door was still open. Mirian cautiously checked the antimagic room, but they weren’t lurking in the corners. Which was good; they’d left the soldiers behind this time.

The next room to conquer was a stone floor inscribed with strange shapes. Mirian found the tiles could be levitated off the floor easily. When one of the tiles came back down, a faint glow traced its way along the grooves. After a half-hour of moving them around, they discovered the trick was to rotate them around so that they created a complete pattern. The tile that let out a glow could transfer that light to the next tile if the grooves were aligned. Once they were all lined up, the light flowing through the channels like water through a canal, the next door opened.

The room after that was similar; the floor tiles had the carved grooves, but they didn’t match up, and only some of the tiles could be lifted.

A half-hour later of trial and error, the frustration was growing.

“None of the rotations seem to matter. There’s no way to get the tiles with grooves to share a border, because every other tile is immobile. And it’s not a remote connection. So what is it?” Cediri complained.

“We can keep going with trial and error,” Aelius confirmed. “Eventually, we’ll cover all the possibilities. It’s how we opened the Vault in the first place.”

“These are heavy, and we only have so much mana to lift them,” complained Aelius’s mage. Mirian still couldn’t remember his name.

She was busy doodling in her notebook. I thought the theme of geometry and dimensions stopped at the horror room, because the next room was a trial of artifice, but maybe it didn’t. There’s a new magic component added to these rooms testing magical endurance, but it’s still a geometry problem. If the last problem was a two dimensional maze, perhaps its iterating again like in those first rooms. Line, square, cube, tesseract. This is the three dimensional room.

“There’s a way to make the tiles touch each other,” she said. And with that, she used lift object and tilted one of the tiles on its side so the grooves matched the glowing one on the floor. At last, the light continued, flashing through the grooves.

Beatrice grinned. “Mirian, you’re a genius!”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I did have a good math teacher though.”

“Is it really that simple?” Grimald asked.

It wasn’t entirely simple. They had to build a rather precarious looking structure out of the tiles. Once the last tile was in place, linking a lopsided block pyramid they’d made to the grooves in the ceiling, the light passed through the entire structure, and the next door slid apart.

“More tiles? Really?” Cediri moaned.

“There’s a pattern to the rooms, though. This one is going to need the light to follow a four-dimensional path.”

“But we can’t see in four dimensions!”

“We can deduce the path the light is taking by inference. Professor Jei taught me how to do that with a coordinate system.”

Cediri gaped at her, then shut his mouth. “Alright. Just tell us what to move and where,” he said.

The puzzle was straightforward, but there still was a trial and error component to see if grooves were matching in the unseen spatial dimension around them. Thankfully, this room had fewer tiles. Even then, it took two hours. The resulting structure was nonsensical, with tiles scattered all over the rooms at various right angles from each other.

But the door opened.

Waiting for them was a golem.

It wasn’t Scrappy, but it had a similar look to it. There was an orb in its center glowing a harsh red. Rings of brass and steel orbited it. Unlike Scrappy, it had one arm, and that arm ended in a nasty looking rod. Arcs of electricity danced down the rod.

There were two doors beyond it.

“I don’t see a way around it,” said Aelius.

“Look at the floor,” Cediri said.

Grooves in the tiles.

“Are you kidding me!?” Beatrice exclaimed. “Right, so we do a tile puzzle, but this time there’s a golem trying to bash our heads in? If it’s anything like Scrappy, it chews through magical defenses. And I don’t think holding onto a shield when it hits it with an electric cudgel is going to be a pleasant experience.”

Mirian pulled out her greater lightning wand. “I think I might be able to make this easier on us,” she said.

She stepped into the room. As soon as she did, the red energy-eye fixated on her and the golem began making a low keening noise. Its arm came up, and the rod in its hand crackled.

Mirian coated the spell heavily with soul energy from the repository, then unleashed.

The golem let out a scream. It flailed around, then, as the electricity roared out, thunder echoing through the tight halls, it backed up, then collapsed into a smoldering wreck.

Mirian grinned. “See? Not so—”

There was a clunk as the ceiling opened up and another golem fell down. As soon as it did, its red eye brightened, looking at Mirian. The pieces of the destroyed golem levitated around it, swirling around, clicking into place all over the new golem’s body.

“I think you just gave it more armor,” Cediri commented as the golem came at Mirian, club raised.

Mirian used the Water form and started circling the golem, dodging to the side whenever it struck with the club. No matter how she moved, though, the eye stayed focused on her. “Beatrice! Come inside the room. I want to test someth—shit!” The golem lunged forward, and she only just avoided it.

“Are you sure? I think—”

“Just do it! If it turns on you, I’ll zap it again.”

WHAM! The golem’s club sent sparks racing across the ground as Mirian leap backwards. It seemed totally unconcerned with Beatrice.

“The symbols in here are important,” Mirian said. “The eye’s on me. I don’t think it’ll bother—” She kicked off to the side this time as the golem lunged forward. “—bother you.” She pulled out her levitation wand. At least it wasn’t in an antimagic field. She could use the wand to rapidly accelerate herself in a direction, which would be easier.

“Alright, let’s go. This is just another rotate-the-tile,” Beatrice said. “Heavies stay out just so we have more room to move. Actually, Aelius can your group watch our backs?”

“Got it,” Aelius said.

Cediri entered. He and Beatrice got to work moving tiles around while Mirian zipped about. At least the golem was predictable. She started to notice that it prepared its club in a different way for each different attack, which made it easier to know which way to dodge.

Now that they knew how the puzzle worked, this one went much faster. As soon as the glow of the floor tiles covered the room, the golem stopped moving. The ceiling above it opened, and the golem levitated back out of the room.

The ceiling closed.

In the next room, there were two golems.

Mirian grit her teeth and had to take a moment. “Alright. Alright. Shit. Fuck. It’s going to be like that, yeah? Alright. Beatrice and Cediri, you rotate to guard duty to replenish your auric mana. Aelius, your arcanists are on tile-lifting.”

“How’s your mana?” Beatrice asked.

“Fine. And I have an elixir if I really need it. Ready?”

The two golems’ central eyes each lit up as they saw her enter. Mirian started with her levitation wand for the extra distance and safety, then once she’d gotten the golems into a predictable attack pattern, she started dodging with the Spear Cuts Through Water form. By the end of it, she was sweating, but the next door was open.

She didn’t dare look. “How many golems?”

Beatrice peered through the door. “Just one, but it’s way bigger and this time it has a hammer. Ah, uh, the tiles on the ground look funny. They’re covered in… it sort of looks like labyrinthine horror carapace.”

Mirian took a deep breath. “Alright. I’m going in.”

“You don’t need a break?”

“I need to see the end of this Vault.” She walked into the room.

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When the golem’s hammer came down, the carapace around the tile shattered. When Mirian tried to cut away the carapace herself with Eclipse, it rapidly regenerated. Only a strike from the golem’s hammer kept it clear. She quickly figured out the puzzle required her to lure the golem over to each covered tile and get it to hit her, dodging at the last second. Once the tiles were clear, Beatrice and Cediri could come in and rotate them again.

The next room, there was a small golem with two bladed arms next to the giant golem with the hammer. As soon as Mirian walked in the room, it camouflaged itself. Detect heat worked well enough to give her a good idea of where the tiny-stabby golem was, then it was a matter of keeping her eye on both golems.

That wasn’t easy. Tiny-stabby-camouflaged golem liked to circle around behind her if it could. Using lift object to keep the smaller golem in place turned out to be a bad idea; the larger golem suddenly accelerated to twice its usual speed, and only a desperate leap back prevented her from getting pasted onto the tiles.

Then it was the next room, where it was the three-dimensional puzzle and one golem. Then, Mirian really did have to take a breather. She drank a mana elixir, looking out the door.

“Oh thank the Gods,” she said. They were finally done with the golem rooms.

Beyond the door, the room opened up into—well, maybe ‘room’ wasn’t the right word. It seemed too big to be called that. The door opened up into a primeval forest. Some hundred meters above, they could see the faint glow of the ceiling. They could just make out walls on either side of them through the trunks and brush, some fifty meters distant. The forest seemed to extend outward in a corridor. How long that corridor was, they couldn’t tell.

Aelius furrowed his brow. “I’ve never heard of an econode inside a Vault,” he said.

“Is it an econode?” Beatrice asked.

Cautiously, the group stepped out into the underground forest. “There’s two other doors the way we came,” Aelius said.

“Alternate routes?” Cediri wondered.

“Maybe. The antimagic obstacle course could lead here too. Which means—we have to be near the end.”

“If it’s not at the end of this room, we have to head back,” Aelius said. “We’re already pushing the limits of our endurance, and our mana.”

“Fine,” Mirian said. “Heavies, two to each side, mages, aegis ready. Columns of two by—” She paused when she saw Aelius’s face. “Sorry, force of habit. Would you prefer an alternate formation?”

“One heavy front, two on the wings. I can smell an ambush.”