Chương 135: Chapter 134: The Sun Door

They came from three directions at once. A dozen Weavers skittered down from the upper platforms, trailing dark silk behind them. Twenty or more Sentinels marched from the tunnels on our level, their obsidian blades catching the green glow. More were climbing from below, scaling the stone walls fast.

"Denxy, hold the front! Alice, right flank! Redcap, left!" The orders came out of instinct, and the team responded without hesitation. Denxy planted his shield and activated Bulwark Stance just as the first wave of Sentinels reached us. Three of them slammed into the Mythril shield simultaneously, their obsidian blades scraping sparks across its surface, and Denxy held them without moving an inch.

"Taunt!" The Sentinels locked onto him, their burning eyes fixed on the Guardian, and that gave Alice her opening.

"Lightning Blade!" She came in from the right in a blur of plate armor and crackling electricity. Her sword carved through the first Sentinel's midsection, the lightning arcing to the two beside it and staggering them long enough for a follow-up Horizontal Slash that dropped the first and sent the second stumbling into Denxy's shield bash. Redcap was already among the Weavers on the left. Lothras had told me he was fast and precise, but both were an understatement from my point of view.

The man was comparable to ProDG according to the Oakenlight tournament VODs, and that was saying something, because the latter was widely regarded as the most talented Spearfighter in Tidemark. His spear found joints and gaps in the chitin with ease, turning each thrust into a kill or a cripple. A Weaver lunged at his legs, but he Vaulted over it, driving the spear down through its thorax on the way over.

"Somnus!" I called.

"The ones above us!"

"On it." The Acolyte raised his staff.

"Shadow Bolt Barrage." Five bolts of dark energy streaked upward and struck the Weavers descending from the ceiling. Two of them froze mid-crawl as debuffs stacked on them — Enfeebled, Slowed — and their grip on the stone failed. They fell twenty meters to the cavern floor and shattered on impact. I drew and fired without stopping. Mark of the Eagle went on the densest cluster, and Nature's Howl activated to give me some sustain and additional damage.

My first Piercing Shot punched through a Sentinel's skull and continued into the Weaver behind it, killing both. The Blackraven Arrows hit harder than my old set, and with Adaptive Growth building, each successive shot dealt more damage. A group of six Sentinels pushed past Denxy's taunt range and came at the backline. Desirae didn't flinch.

She sidestepped the first swing, her staff pulsing with golden light as she kept her healing aura running on the frontliners, and a beam of restoration lanced into Denxy as he took a heavy combo.

"Arrowstorm!" The rain of mana-arrows fell on the six Sentinels, shredding them over four seconds while the slow effect kept them from closing on Desirae. She gave me a brief nod.

"Verdant Arrow!" The weapon skill erupted into the largest pack of Weavers, the thorny growth catching eight of them in its area and rooting them in place. Redcap was there a second later, his spear a blur as he executed the immobilized spiders one after another. Somnus worked the battlefield from the back, dealing with the clusters that meant the most pressure on us. He applied debuffs to enemies moments before Alice or Redcap reached them, turning dangerous mobs into easy kills.

A Sentinel that should have taken ten seconds to bring down crumbled in three when every hit against it was amplified by the Acolyte's curses.

"Twelve more from the east tunnel!" Alice called, her sword sparking with another Lightning Edge as she cleaved through a Weaver that had tried to web her legs.

"I see them!" Twilight Hunter made it easy to spot ambushers. I swapped mental focus and fired a basic with a Wild Hunt Arrow layered on top. The physical arrow struck the lead Sentinel in the chest. The translucent green spirit-arrow curved left around a stalactite and buried itself in a Weaver thirty meters away that had been creeping toward Desirae's blind spot. Both hits were critical, killing them instantly. Alice glanced at me.

"Was that two arrows?"

"New trick."

"Show me later." The fighting continued for several more minutes, the waves coming in pulses as if the cave was testing us with increasing numbers. The Sentinels were tough individually; their obsidian blades dealt respectable damage when they connected, but Denxy's positioning funneled them into kill zones, and the combination of Somnus's debuffs with our damage dealers meant nothing survived longer than a few seconds. The Weavers were trickier.

They attacked from the shadows, laid dark silk traps on the ground, and tried to isolate players by webbing paths shut. I handled the aerial threats while Redcap picked off the ones attempting to flank, and Alice cut through any silk barriers the moment they appeared. Desirae kept everyone topped off throughout, her healing rotations smooth, precise, and without panic.

She swapped between single-target heals on Denxy and area restoration for the group without missing a beat, and the golden light from her staff was a constant presence in the chaos. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. The last group came as a combined wave — fifteen Sentinels and ten Weavers pushing from two directions at once.

Denxy taunted one group while Alice intercepted the other with a Lightning Steps dash that put her in the middle of the pack before they could spread out. Redcap followed her in, and the two melee fighters carved the group apart from opposite sides while Somnus layered debuffs so thick the Sentinels could barely lift their blades. I fired from the rear, picking off anything that broke through, and sent Wild Hunt Arrows after the stragglers that tried to flee back into the tunnels.

The last Sentinel collapsed, its green eyes flickering out, and the cavern went quiet. I checked the timer. Forty-one minutes since entry.

"How many was that?" Redcap asked, pulling his spear from the last Weaver's carcass. He was breathing hard, but the grin hadn't left his face.

"I counted around eighty," Somnus said, leaning on his staff.

"Give or take the ones that fell from the ceiling. Hard to count those."

"Everyone good?" I asked.

"Full health," Denxy reported.

"Desirae didn't let me drop below eighty."

"That's my job," the Cleric said. Alice flicked ichor off her blade and looked up toward the stairway Desirae had indicated earlier, the carved path winding around the massive stalactite toward the upper platforms.

"The path's still there," she said.

"And I don't think we've seen the worst of this cave yet." I agreed. The Sentinels and Weavers had been dangerous in numbers, but individually they weren't harder than the content we'd all been clearing for weeks. This was the warm-up. Whatever waited deeper in, past the puzzles and the traps Cyrus had warned about, would be considerably worse.

"We keep moving," I said, and started climbing. The stairway was narrow enough that we had to climb single file, with Denxy leading and the rest of us strung out behind him along the carved stone. The steps were uneven, some shallow and some knee-high, and the stone was worn smooth in places where feet had walked it centuries ago. We reached the platform Desirae had pointed us toward after a five-minute climb.

It opened into a rectangular chamber, smaller than the cavern below but still large enough to fit a house inside. The ceiling was low here, maybe four meters, and the walls were covered in more of the carvings — jaguars, serpents, and humanoid figures arranged in repeating patterns. At the far end of the room was a sealed stone door, massive and circular, carved with a central symbol that looked like a stylized sun surrounded by concentric rings. There was no handle, no keyhole, and no visible mechanism.

The chamber's floor was dominated by a shallow pool of dark water, perfectly still, stretching from wall to wall with only a narrow stone walkway in the middle. Seven stone pedestals rose from the water at varying heights, each holding a carved idol about the size of a vase. The idols depicted animals — a jaguar, a serpent, an eagle, a bat, a monkey, a crocodile, and a frog — each carved from a different type of stone.

On the wall above the sealed door, a line of carved text glowed faintly with the same green light as the Sentinel eyes downstairs. Seven watch the door, but not all with true purpose. True guardians guide. False idols hold. To the right of the door, recessed into the wall, was a stone shelf with seven empty slots, clearly sized to hold the idols.

"So we grab the idols and put them in the slots," Redcap said.

"Easy."

"Only the right ones," Alice corrected.

"If we use a 'fake' statue, we'll likely get stuck here."

"How do we know which ones are true?" Denxy asked. I looked around. The carvings on the walls, the sun on the door — everything seemed to have meaning.

"Let's check the marks all around," Somnus suggested. We spent about ten minutes trying to find meaning between the symbols and the statues, but if there was a connection, we couldn't see it. After a long time spent with no result, I glanced at the pool of water, wondering if something was going to come out of it if we failed the test. The surface was smooth enough to reflect everything inside the chamber, including us, the door and the statues; no movement could be seen under. Wait, I thought.

I stepped next to the closest idol and crouched. It was depicting a jaguar sitting upright, facing the door. The next one was a serpent coiled around itself, head raised. Nothing out of the ordinary. But the third one was different. It was an eagle with wings spread wide. Except its reflection had them folded. I blinked and looked again. The physical idol had spread wings. The reflection had folded wings.

It wasn't a trick of the light or the angle; the reflection was showing something different from the object above it.

"The reflections don't all match," I said.

"What?" Alice asked.

"Come here," I said instead of repeating myself. That got everyone's attention. We spread out along the walkway and started checking each idol against its reflection. Jaguar: matched. Serpent: matched. Eagle: different. Bat: matched. Monkey… different. The statue had both arms raised, but the reflection showed one arm down. Crocodile: matched. The frog statue was crouching, yet the reflection showed it mid-leap.

"Four match, three don't," Desirae said.

"The ones that match their reflections are the true guardians?"

"Maybe," I said.

"Or maybe it's the opposite."

"True guardians guide," Desirae read the inscription again.

"False ones hold."

"The ones with the mismatched reflections have to be the false ones," Alice said.

"They are trying to deceive us." I looked at the shelf again. Seven slots. I had no better idea.

"We don't have much time to philosophise about it, do we?" Somnus asked. He was right.

"Only one way to find out," I said. We retrieved the jaguar, the serpent, the bat, and the crocodile from their pedestals, wading through the shallow water carefully.

"That's good, right?" Redcap asked.

"No traps yet," I nodded.

"But we can't be sure until we used all four of them."

"How do we know which slots they go into?" I looked back at the pedestals. They had different heights.

"Lowest to highest?" I asked.

"Or highest to lowest," Alice pointed out.

"Or something completely different," Denxy shrugged. Well, I thought.

"Jaguar, Serpent, Bat, Crocodile," Somnus pondered.

"With Bat being the lowest, Jaguar the highest."

"I wish I knew anything about Mayan mythology," I muttered.

"Look at the walls!" Desirae called us over to the edge of the chamber. The carvings didn't have any correlation to the idols per se, but there were plenty of jaguars… and bats. The former, always at sun-height, and the latter always below, next to a river leading into a cave.

"So… Jaguar first, Bat last, right?" Denxy asked uncertainly.

"That means…" I looked at the platforms once again. If Jaguar was first, Serpent came second according to the height. Then Crocodile, and Bat last. I looked at the group.

"We've been here for a while, so… who's in favor?" Nobody objected. We placed the idols in the hopefully correct order, and then waited. For a long moment, nothing happened. Redcap shifted his weight. Desirae's grip tightened on her staff. Then the sealed door groaned, dust falling from its edges as the concentric rings began rotating in opposite directions. The carved sun split apart, and the stone separated and slid into the walls.