"Alright… let's pace things up."
Rate didn't slow as he spoke. His gaze remained fixed forward, steady and calculating, as if already mapping the corridor ahead beyond what the dim light revealed. His voice carried cleanly through the narrow passage, cutting through the low hum of movement and the faint grind of hidden mechanisms behind the walls.
"Now that Bulk reinforced the cloak with the Re-layered artifact," he continued, measured and certain, "there's no reason to linger on this floor."
A brief pause.
"We're moving unto the next layer."
The response wasn't verbal but it came in motion. The moment his words settled, the dungeon answered.
Thin slits lining the stone walls snapped open in rapid succession precise, uniform, almost mechanical in their timing. From within them, blades shot outward in tight, controlled bursts. Not wild or chaotic but deliberate.
Each blade was narrow, elongated, and polished to a dull sheen that caught what little light the group carried. They came fast too fast for an unprepared party to react cleanly.
But this group did not break formation, the first wave struck.
And failed.
A faint distortion shimmered across the surface of their cloaks the instant steel met fabric an almost invisible ripple, like pressure meeting a surface that refused to yield. The blades didn't pierce. They didn't even cut.
They hit and rebounded.
Metal rang softly as the weapons were deflected off-course, losing all lethal force before clattering uselessly against the stone floor. Some spun wildly after impact, scraping along the ground before coming to a stop. Others dropped almost straight down, as if their momentum had been erased on contact.
The Re-layered artifact held.
More slits opened, another volley followed. This time, faster.
The corridor filled with the sharp rhythm of mechanisms triggering click, release, impact repeating in tight succession as the walls spat steel into the narrow path.
Still, the outcome remained the same.
Blades met resistance and fell.
Rate glanced back briefly, his eyes sweeping across the formation not lingering, not concerned, but verifying. Positioning. Stability. Reaction time.
"Staying idle won't do us any good," he said, voice calm but edged with instruction, he turned forward again before anyone could respond and increased his pace.
No longer a walk.
The shift was immediate and intentional.
Behind him, the rest of the group followed without hesitation, their movements syncing almost instinctively as they pushed forward through the corridor. Boots struck stone in steady rhythm, echoing faintly beneath the constant clatter of failing traps.
Blades continued to fire, the walls did not relent. If anything, the frequency increased.
"We weren't even standing to begin with," Camilla muttered, her tone dry, almost amused.
Rate didn't answer.
His focus had already moved ahead past the current threat, past the immediate pattern. He wasn't reacting to the traps anymore.
He was anticipating the system behind them.
Camilla exhaled lightly through her nose, unimpressed, but didn't press further.
As another volley came, her movement shifted subtly within the group's forward momentum. While running, her hands lifted not defensively, but deliberately fingers slightly spread, wrists loose.
A blade shot toward her.
She caught it clean.
The metal should have torn through skin, or at the very least forced her hand back from the impact but the moment it touched her fingers, its force seemed… reduced. Not nullified like the cloak's effect.
Another blade followed.
Then another, four in total two in each hand. In-between her fingers. She held them for a fraction of a second while still in motion, her arms extending outward slightly as if testing their weight mid-run.
Then she swung, a smooth, outward arc.
The blades left her hands in a controlled scatter, spinning away into the darkness along the edges of the corridor before striking stone and disappearing from relevance.
She reset her posture instantly.
Another volley came.
She repeated the process. Catching, holding, redirecting on release.
Almost casual.
Around her, the others maintained pace, relying on the cloak's layered defense to handle what they didn't actively intercept. The corridor rang with constant impacts, but none of them slowed. None of them broke formation.
Time stretched.
Not long but enough. After several minutes of sustained assault, the rhythm began to change.
It wasn't obvious at first. A slight delay between volleys.
A fraction longer before the next set of slits opened.
Then silence, the mechanisms ceased. The walls went still. No more blades emerged.
The corridor, once filled with the sharp cadence of triggered traps and falling steel, fell into a sudden, unnatural quiet.
Only the sound of their footsteps remained. And even that seemed louder now. No one stopped and no one relaxed.
If anything, the absence of attack sharpened the tension rather than easing it.
Rate's pace didn't change. But something in his posture did subtle, almost imperceptible. His head tilted slightly, his gaze shifting not just forward, but outward… scanning.
Listening.
A low hum escaped him. Behind them something moved. It came without warning.
From the darkness at the rear of the corridor, a spiral blade launched forward larger than the previous projectiles, thicker, its edges curved in a twisted pattern that caught and distorted the light as it spun.
Fast and heavier. Backed more force behind it. It closed the distance in an instant and struck.
Bulk's carriage took the hit directly.
The impact was sharper than the previous volleys, louder, heavier but still…no damage was done.
The cloak absorbed the force in a compressed ripple that spread across its surface before dissipating. The spiral blade lost its momentum almost immediately after contact, dropping with a dull metallic thud behind him.
Bulk felt it.
Of course he did.
Even dampened, the force translated through the layers reduced, but not erased.
He turned his head slightly, his gaze shifting back over his shoulder while maintaining pace.
His light orb flickered faintly, casting a wide beam into the darkness right behind them.
And what it revealed was not singular but five more. Already close. Even too close.
They came in staggered timing, not as a single volley, but as a sequence each one launched with calculated spacing, forcing continuous impact rather than a single point of resistance.
The first hit then followed by the second and the third.
Each strike landed against the cloak, each one producing that same compressed distortion each one losing force upon contact before dropping uselessly to the ground.
By the fifth, the pattern was clear. Higher impact and layered pressure.
The force of impact made bulk retraced his pacing but still was not enough to damage the cloak.
Each blade fell upon each attack. Bulk turned his head forward again, his expression unchanged.
"Hey, old man hunchback," Camilla called out, glancing back briefly while still moving, "you good back there?"
There was a slight delay before he answered not from hesitation, but from observation.
"I'm fine," Bulk replied, his tone even. "But it seems to me the trap's formation has changed."
Camilla's brows knit slightly.
"Changed?"
Her voice dropped under her breath, quieter now.
"Huh…"
She liked the sound of that.
Not because it was unexpected but because it meant escalation.
Above them a sound cut through the corridor, soft at first. Almost easy to miss beneath the echo of their movement. Then sharper.A thin, slicing whistle.
Another joined it. Then another.
The sound layered rapidly, building into something unmistakable a high-pitched chorus that carved through the air with increasing intensity.
Recognition hit instantly.
Arrows.
The formation didn't break but something in it tightened.
Eyes shifted upward. The ceiling loomed high above, swallowed almost entirely by darkness. Their light orbs barely reached it, leaving only fragments of stone visible between deep shadows.
But the sound told them everything.
It was coming from above and ahead. A split second later, they appeared.
A wave of arrows burst from the darkness at the front edge of the ceiling, their tips catching faint light as they descended in a dense, forward-angled rain.
Pouring Toward their direction. It was fast and relentless. And layered in numbers far beyond the earlier blade traps.
The formation pushed forward without pause, their silhouettes swallowed in a relentless storm of descending arrows. The reinforced cloak held each impact dulled into hollow thuds that rippled across its surface but the pressure never eased. Shafts piled, slid, and shattered off them in a constant cascade, forcing their movement into a steady, deliberate advance rather than speed.
Then the pattern shifted.
A low mechanical pulse cut through the corridor subtle, but distinct. The first spiral blade launched. It didn't come from the walls. It came from ahead.
A rotating mass of metal tore through the air, spinning with violent force, its edges screaming as it carved a straight path toward them. Almost instantly, another answered from behind mirroring its trajectory, closing the gap from the opposite direction.
Front and back. A compression trap.
Not outward there was no space for that but into motion. Tight, controlled shifts. Each step calculated within inches. The cloak absorbed the rain of arrows, but the spirals were different. Their rotational force was meant to pierce, to crush and to destabilize.
The first blade passed, a near miss. Its spinning edge grazed the cloak, dragging across the surface with a grinding shriek that bent the fabric inward before snapping away. The impact carried weight enough to throw off balance if taken directly.
Another wave followed immediately. Two from the front, one from the back, then three.
The corridor turned into a converging channel of motion, blades crossing paths in staggered intervals, never colliding but always threatening to. Timing became everything. One misstep meant being caught between opposing rotations.
Forward movement slowed not by hesitation, but by necessity. Each advance now came between rotations, slipping through the brief windows where trajectories didn't overlap. Feet pivoted sharply, shoulders angled, bodies turning sideways to reduce contact surface. The cloak continued to take the arrow fire, but the spirals demanded full physical response.
One blade clipped low. It struck near the legs, its spinning mass catching the edge of the cloak and dragging it downward. The force yanked hard enough to disrupt footing but the momentum was redirected, the body twisting with it instead of resisting. The blade tore past, slamming into the ground behind with a violent crack before dissolving into fragments.
Another from behind, closer this time. The air itself seemed to tighten as it approached, its rotation distorting the space around it. A step forward wasn't enough there was no clear lane. So the movement changed. A drop. A sharp dip of the torso as the blade screamed overhead, close enough to pull at fabric and hair.
The corridor no longer felt like a passage. But a death path, one that disrupt concentration under pressure, forcing constant recalculation. The arrows maintained suppression. The spirals enforced precision.
And still, they moved forward without stopping.
Then they passed through a cloud of gas.
It wasn't dense enough to blind, but it clung to the air in a thin, shifting layer almost invisible until the light caught it at an angle. A faint distortion. A subtle haze that bent the glow of their surroundings just enough to register as wrong.
Rate didn't slow. Quinn didn't question it.
They pushed through.
The cloak held, parting the gas as they moved, its reinforced structure maintaining integrity under both pressure and motion. The arrows still fell less concentrated now, but not gone. A lingering suppression layer. Enough to punish hesitation.
Bulk was last.
The moment he entered the gas layer fully, a spiral blade launched not from the walls, not from a fixed mechanism, but from ahead, its rotation already screaming before it came into full view. At the same time, a wall blade triggered one of the older patterns, one they had already adapted to.
But this time, the timing overlapped. The spiral met the wall blade mid-path. Metal struck metal. And the result wasn't deflection, it was ignition.
A sharp spark bright, violent, immediate flashed at the point of collision. Then the gas reacted, there was no delay. The entire section erupted.
Flame expanded outward in a sudden, concussive bloom, devouring the corridor space within a five-meter radius almost instantly. Heat surged in a wave, the air itself compressing before bursting into motion.
Bulk was still inside it. The fire wrapped around him in an instant violent, consuming.
For a fraction of a second, everything disappeared into orange.
The explosion collapsed into sustained bur flames licking, spreading, feeding on the gas that still lingered in pockets around the corridor.
Bulk didn't scream. Instinct didn't take over but calculation did. Every step had to be chosen.
The cloak absorbed part of it the initial surge, the immediate impact but fire wasn't just force. It was persistence. It found openings, it crawled and it spread.
The heat began to bleed through inside. Across armor plates. Into seams. Along straps. Into the layered equipment secured across his body and that's where it became dangerous. The gear turned against him.
Leather caught first, dry edges igniting in thin lines that quickly spread. Straps began to smolder, then burn. The heat transferred inward, pressing against his skin, building toward something that would no longer be manageable.
Bulk adjusted his footing, shifting weight forward despite the resistance.
Behind him, the flames thickened. Ahead, the corridor remained active. He didn't stop. Up ahead, Rate and Quinn kept moving. With no hesitation and no backward glance.
Because stopping would collapse the formation entirely. But not everyone followed that logic. Camilla stopped.
Her steps cut cleanly against the rhythm of the group, her boots striking the ground once twice before she pivoted on her heel. The cloak shifted with her movement, its dark surface catching the flicker of firelight as she turned back.
She watched him. Watched as the flames climbed. Watched as he was swallowed.
Then she giggled softly. Her fingers lifted slightly, resting against each other just below her chin, the gesture almost delicate completely at odds with the chaos unfolding in front of her.
"Wow… old man Bulk," she said, her voice light, almost playful beneath the hood. "You seem to be having a lot of fun there, aren't you?"
The fire answered with a sharp crackle.
Bulk didn't respond, he couldn't waste breath.
The cloak was already failing in function not destroyed, but compromised. Fire licked across its surface, blooming outward in uneven patterns. It still held structure, but it was no longer neutral.
It was feeding the problem. Heat built along his back, his shoulders were tightened.
Then he made the decision and took it off.
The motion was abrupt forceful. The cloak came loose in a single pull, separating from his body as flames trailed along its edges. For a brief moment, it hung between states still burning, before he cast it aside.
The fire remained, because it had already spread. Now it lived on him, across his gear and his body.
He stepped forward again, adjusting pace not faster, not slower, but precise. Every movement now accounted for heat, for resistance, for the way flame altered balance.
His hand moved back. To the pouches secured at his rear, one on each side. He didn't fumble.
He reached into both after the other, fingers brushing past tools, components, sealed vials until they closed around a single object.
He pulled it free, a small orb. Hand-sized.
Its surface was uneven not smooth like glass, but structured. Bronze-like vines wrapped around it in a web formation, converging toward opposite ends, holding the sphere together in a controlled lattice. At its core, a dim orange glow pulsed—faint, contained, but alive.
Ignis Orb.
A prototype alchemical device, not designed for combat but designed for control. Mages used it to capture wildfire or bind lesser fire elementals when conditions allowed. It didn't extinguish flame. It absorbed and stores just like a storage.
Bulk brought it up, holding it directly in front of his face despite the heat still crawling along his armor.
Timing mattered.
He spoke.
"Prylos."
The word triggered it.
The orb responded instantly.
The glow intensified shifting from dim orange to a concentrated, molten core. The bronze lattice tightened, faint lines of energy tracing along its structure as it activated.
Then the pull began. Subtle at first.
The flames reacted not naturally, but forcibly. They bent. Warped. Drew inward as if caught in a vacuum. Fire that had been spreading outward reversed direction, dragged toward the orb in thin streams that thickened into ribbons of burning light.
The flames on his armor peeled away. The fire consuming the discarded cloak lifted, torn from its surface in a violent sweep.
Even the residual burn in the air the lingering ignition from the gas was pulled inward, stripped from the corridor and condensed into a single point.
The orb absorbed everything, the light dimmed. The heat dropped. What remained was smoke. Heavy and unsettling.
Bulk lowered the orb slightly, his breathing controlled but heavier now, the strain showing in the tension of his posture. He held it for another second ensuring the process had fully stabilized before the glow settled back into its dim, contained state.
Then he stored it back into the pouch.
Only then did he allow himself to shift weight properly. One foot braced, the other adjusting.
The aftereffects were immediate not from damage alone, but from the cumulative strain. Heat exposure. Sudden movement. Controlled response under pressure.
He straightened slowly.
Then bent slightly, reaching for the cloak he had discarded moments earlier.
It lay a short distance behind him charred in places, but intact enough to be reused.
His fingers brushed it.
And that's when something changed. Which he was Unaware of. A sound, a faint grinding noise. Above coming from the ceiling.
Bulk's movement paused.
Just for a fraction.
Dust fell not in chunks but in particles. Drifting. Then the sound deepened.
Stone shifting against stone.
Weight redistributing, and then a release. A section of the ceiling tore free. Quite massive, Nine feet wide and thick. Dense as it dropped.
Not fast at first but with enough weight behind it that speed became inevitable. The slab descended directly toward Bulk, its shadow swallowing him as it fell.
He didn't noticed it dropping. But someone else did. Camilla's eyes tracked upward instantly. No delay. Her posture shifted from idle amusement to sharp intent in a single motion.
She moved.
Each step forward produced a distinct clink the sound of something beneath the cloak, something structured, something heavy enough to register with each impact against the ground.
"Hey, old man—watch out!"
Her tone remained light. Cheeky. As if the situation didn't warrant urgency.But her speed said otherwise.She accelerated. Then leapt.
Her body cut upward through the space between Bulk and the falling slab, the cloak trailing behind her in a sharp arc. For a brief moment, she aligned with the descending mass.
Then struck.
Her foot connected with the slab's edge.
The impact wasn't explosive but controlled, behind the force it carried.
A shockwave rippled outward from the point of contact two directions, mirrored along the slab's surface. The air compressed, then snapped outward, carrying dust and debris in a sharp burst.
The slab stopped mid-fall. Not completely but enough. Its descent broke. Its angle shifted. Tilted, redirected. Camilla didn't linger.
The moment of contact became leverage.
She pushed off it, using the slab's weight and motion to propel herself forward, her body twisting mid-air as she cleared the drop zone.
Beneath her, Bulk had already moved.
He didn't look up cause he didn't need to. The shift in pressure the interruption in descent was enough.
He stepped out of the impact point, transitioning immediately into forward motion as the slab resumed its fall behind him.
Then it hit.
The ground shook.
A sharp, contained tremor rippled through the corridor, the impact sending a low wave outward that rattled loose debris and pushed a brief gust of displaced air through the space.
Dust surged, then it settled.
Bulk slowed just slightly, he turned his head.
Looking back at the slab.
At the exact point where he had been standing seconds earlier.
Silence lingered for a moment beneath the fading echo of impact.
"Time's really catching up, huh…"
His voice came low.
A slight growl beneath it. Recognition.
If it hadn't been for her…
The thought completed itself.
I would have gone to join my ancestors among the stars.
He exhaled once.
Then turned forward again.
she hit the ground in front of him, Camilla landed.
Light and controlled.
Four meters from his position.
Her boots touched the ground with a soft impact, knees bending slightly to absorb the force before she straightened.
As she did, her hood slipped back.
Falling behind her shoulders.
Revealing her fully.
Fair skin pale against the dim corridor light. Gothic makeup framing her features, sharp and deliberate, accentuating her eyes and expression rather than softening them.
Her hair split in contrast blonde and black, braided into twin ponytails that extended behind her, each roughly twenty inches in length, swaying slightly as she came to a stop.
She tilted her head.
Looked at Bulk.
And smiled, a smirk that was sharp and amused.
As if the entire sequence explosion, fire, near-death had been nothing more than mild entertainment.