Chương 289: AF Chapter 288 – Masked Responses

"Damn it!" Fendro shouted in embarrassment as the sands spun out wildly beneath him, while a surge of gravity tried to drag him down into the depths and suck him under. The fellow with the Black Bear Mask sprinted around the edges of the sand vortex at top speed, barely disturbing the coursing sands as he ran faster and faster around the edges, gaining altitude instead of falling.

He actually managed to clear the edge, jump, somersault and twist, and get back to the sandy slopes as he landed and slid along the surface, barely raising a trail at all. The vortex stopped about a long breath later, collapsing on itself and sealing itself up, as if had never been there at all. If it had worked, a ten-foot radius of people would easily have been sucked ten to twenty feet underground and buried in compacted sand, to be crushed and suffocated in the dark.

It was the fourth trap, all of which had been triggered, and none had been exactly the same. The first one was spikes exploding out of the ground in a wide area, requiring a really long leap to get out of the area of effect or some nice contortions to avoid being run through from below. Jorgio the Black Tiger Mask had barely tumbled out of the area of effect, tearing open his pants as a razored edge just missed his groin, much to his dismay and wincing amusement of everyone else.

Tia the Two Moons Mask ended up with a vortex of rocks rising up to crush and spin around, trying to pulp anyone in the area. She had jumped with the rotating of the field, suffering a couple impacts which only helped her be propelled out of the area of effect and barely bruised her.

Markel of the Black and Green Crosses Mask got the closing flower trap, and barely launched himself up in time, using the closing momentum of the jaws to propel himself high enough, then kicking off the top edge as it slammed shut just beneath his heels, and finally off the top and backwards as far as he could, landing just beyond where the jaws had come up. It was Enki's turn next, the Gharu'n man with the Blue and Brown Lightning Bolts Mask sighing as he considered everyone's approaches so far.

"Do we have permission to confer with one other about what to do?" he asked Kris with a long face. Obviously, their ability to get through magical traps like this simply wasn't up to par.

"Sure, we're not in a hurry. As long as we don't wake up that big guy over there." The students all looked down at their feet nervously. They weren't quite off the ground, but moving so gently it was no worse than wind blowing across the sand. If they did something so basic as land off their feet, welp, it was right to roll initiative… He focused, and approached the next trap, his eyes glittering as he brought up his ability to Detect Magic and focused it intently on the slumbering yet poised spell formation.

I helpfully brought up his discoveries for them all to take a look at in the Holo, exactly as he was perceiving them. The Skeeters crowded around to look at them closely. Nedlike the Black and White Spears Mask spoke up, "Can I get a summary judgment? Draining the traps is completely not viable with that thing over there feeding energy to these traps." I nodded once.

"Well deduced." I added a faint golden shimmer leading in slow pulses out from the middle, and they all drew long faces at being unable to sense the movement of mana like that. Tia cursed quietly, shaking her head, as that had been what she had attempted.

"So, we've only cutting and disrupting. We've failed twice at the one and once at the former. Does the method differ between the traps?" Leslee of the Four Flowers Mask asked, rather helplessly. I just looked at Kris, who smiled slightly.

"They were laid down basically at the same time by an Aberrant entity in a bit of a literal time/space crunch, using the same amount of energy in each one. I haven't seen any indications that each pattern is different in its vulnerabilities," she informed them. I nodded agreement.

"Okay," Jorgio took his turn.

"Two failures with cutting is bad, because that means we didn't get the pattern right, OR it can't be cut successfully. I'm looking at this pattern here, and according to what we've been taught, cutting here, here, and here, in that order, should collapse it?" He looked around at all of them.

"Alternately, here and here?" Grey Clouds on Yellow Mask Xena offered hesitantly.

"That looks like a regulator node, right?" Enki nodded as he backed away from the formation, back to the Holo.

"I was going to cut here, here, and here," he confirmed, pointing at that node and two of the ones Jorgio had indicated. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"That… looks good to me, if that's a regulator node," Jorgio agreed, and there was murmured agreement all around. There was no one way to take out a magical trap, simply whatever method could be found to work relatively easiest, especially when it came to cutting.

"If that doesn't work, let's concede that cutting the spell doesn't work," Nedlike proposed, and was immediately interrupted by a cough and sour look from Kris, which made his black and white mask go perceptibly gray.

"That is incredibly arrogant. Just because you aren't good enough at a method that it's not the right way? What did I teach you?" she asked sourly. They all looked embarrassed. Quiet Sonya the Blue Wave Mask spoke up, "We verify the reaction of the trap. Cutting doesn't work if the mana is set up to react if the formation is cut."

"And did anyone do that?" Kris asked coolly. There was more embarrassed silence.

"She wanted you to disarm the traps individually, but that doesn't mean you stopped being a team," I informed them.

"Basically all you learned from the previous traps is what you saw looking on and what method was used and failed." Anyone complaining that Kris hadn't told them they could do that would probably have been thrown right off the team. Instead, all they could do was hang their heads. The team lived and died together. Part of the competition and rivalry was how they could lift one another up. She wasn't training them up to be Champions. That was a completely different set of skills!

"So this is a group effort, and each of us get a chance to be the steady hand. I propose each of us doing the job say what we're going to do, and get feedback on that. We coordinate until we figure it out, and can advance smoothly through the traps," Sonya said firmly.

"What we need to do is a proper assessment. Xena, you're going next. Get up there and watch the reaction of mana while Enki makes his cuts. If it's going south, warn him." The sandy-haired southern Aluvian quickly walked up next to Enki, and they both returned to the edge of the trap's sensory range, with the young woman staying further back, squatting down and staring intently at the mana in the trap. Enki drew his Saber and extended it, the Blade gently dripping vivic mist, out with a hand steadied by his ki.

Delicately, he inserted it into the Formation, cleanly severing the regulating node, and pulled it back carefully.

"No reaction," Xena reported, staring at it intently. Enki took a deep breath and reached out again, the tip of his Saber Skyfall plunging into the sand again.

"Crystallizing!" Xena shouted, and both of them leapt back as far as they could as the trap erupted, thousands of spikes erupting out of the ground and nearly catching both of them as they bounded back once and twice and barely outran the area of effect expanding out.

"I don't think cutting it is going to work," Jorgio mumbled as everyone straightened from their crouching as dirt and disintegrating sandy needles fell on everyone.

"What did you miss?" Kris asked, completely unmoved as she watched all this. There was awkward silence. Kris pointed her chin at me.

"Enki, you did exactly the right move in cutting regulatory node in between pulses. Did you plan the timing?" I asked calmly. He stiffened.

"No…" he admitted.

"Lucky, then. If you had waited another twelve seconds while backing away instead of making a second cut so quickly, the feeding pulse would have come through, the lack of the node would have set off the mana, and the Formation would have blown without you being in the middle of it." All of them groaned.

"But we can't see the feeder flow?" Nedlike asked earnestly.

"All of you can see the Formations glow and dim ever-so-slightly. What do you think it was from?" Kris demanded to know, and they could only shuffle their feet nervously. Sonya was the first to find her voice.

"So cutting and draining don't work. We have to disrupt it. Markel attempted that with vivus and it didn't work. What do we disrupt it with?"

"The Elemental Dominance pattern suggests acidic energies to employ against Earth," the only Viamontian among them, Jorgio, immediately recalled.

"Is this Earth mana?" Sonya asked instead, staring at Xena.

"You had the closest look at the mana. Did it respond appropriately?" Xena frowned as she recalled what she had seen.

"That… no? Earth mana is fairly rigid, right? It should have fractured as the pattern broke. Instead, it… crystallized? Separated and became solid?"

"Acid works because it melts and fuses through the Earth mana, not letting it fracture, effectively dissolving it as it spreads," Sonya continued.

"Crystallizing instead… to solid crystal or motes, Xena?"

"Motes," she replied without hesitation.

"I could see the little crystals gathering…"

"So it didn't 'freeze solid'. It froze in little bits… like snowflakes or something?" Markel piped up.

"Or hail. Which is the reaction of water to air. Stays as vapor until it hits a trigger, and then condenses abruptly at that point!" Tia blurted out.

"It's an Aberrant," whispered Jorgio.

"The Magos said its power was more like sand, fluid and gritty…"

"Air uses lightning to dominate water…"

"Lightning would force a path of conduction through the pattern when it is set to break apart…"

"Drawing the mana away from the pattern and fusing it into an inferior whole in the moment it is supposed to be congealing!" They were getting a bit excited as they reasoned through everything.

"Colmus, you're on with Xena." White on Brown Striped Mask brawny blond Colmus, having been watching all of this silently, just nodded at Sonya's directions. -Just need steady hands, and I think they have it- I /noted to Kris, who was not letting her satisfaction show quite yet. -They have to time it right, - she /answered. -Right at the apex of the fill is the best, the lightning will have maximum effect and short out the whole thing.

They do it at the bottom, and the mana in the Formation won't be strong enough to form the complete circuit, and it'll break down in the remaining portion and go off. - I had to smile to myself. Little tricks, let's see if they could catch it…