Chương 195: Chapter 216: Keikthagorus

P'gyaqu was almost identical to Ofxupo, just a man-sized dust bunny with delusions of bipedalism. Unlike the other, he did not bother with riddle games, he just started summoning up a writhing ball of black flame that would probably kill us. I hit him with a strong gust of wind, and it was super effective. With his physical form blasted free of his untethered essence, he was dispelled for good. There was another snap of ozone smell, and then we were straight to the looting.

Gold is heavy stuff, silver and copper are both pretty bad especially in the quantities we're gathering. Kurumi's got stars in her eyes looking at all this treasure. Especially tax-free. I don't know what it is, merchants and their kin just always seem to get especially excited about not paying taxes. Or maybe I've got the wrong perspective because I was raised by people that taxes are paid to. This load, plus what we shoveled in earlier, is a lot of mass.

Enough that I am kind of feeling the pressure on my void affinity. I'm not in danger, but it is enough for me to aware of it all the time, that I am storing too much in the void. It's similar to the pressure I get when I bring too many people through at the same time, the void essence pressing against me. Last time this was really an issue, Elica had to pull me aside and tell me to tone down the bitch. So now I'm monitoring myself, screening my behavior lest I start getting particularly hostile and callous.

If Lady Elica Dandston feels you're being notably bilious, that is a wake-up call. That said, we really are making damn good time through this dungeon. After knocking out Ofxupo's track to the left, and P'gyaqu's route to the right, it was time to address the father-figure for this convoluted mess, Keikthagorus the father of occultic mathemagicians. Philosopher, necromancer, demagogue, crackpot. And now, also a lich and a pain in my ass. I promise you that liches are actually very rare in this setting.

Hardly ever see them. The ones that are around are always hiding and avoiding notice, working through trusted proxies to minimize exposure. The fact that I have been running into them over and over is not representative. Though, this particular mission just sort of uses them as a shorthand for "sapient undead with powers". They don't have the real threat of a real lich, the ability to respawn out in the world.

All of their prepared corpses decayed to nothing centuries ago while they were trapped in these soul-sealing shrines. The center door pushed open, and Kurumi stood at my side confidently as it swung in. Instead of a hallway into the first challenge room, this door opened to a staircase that led down into inky darkness. Kurumi casually stepped back to put me between herself and that well of the unknown. Just the most nonchalant nope you first that you've ever seen.

My lantern came up and I illuminated enough of the surroundings to mark the stairs and their edges, and I started walking down. Kurumi followed after, first slowly to avoid the darkness, then quickly to catch up to me and avoid being alone in here. I kept the wick low so she would not be able to see the carvings that were on the walls here; they would not do her state of mind any favors right now. Best she not see that stuff. I don't know if I'll get full XP for this mission if she refuses to follow me to the end.

Also, I saved this one for last because if she thought we had to do this again she would have been very unhappy with me. Stairs descending, all in a straight line, no turns no curves no landings. If you lost your footing here, there's nothing but tumbling down the steps until you get to the bottom. And after that many impacts against hard stone, there wouldn't be much of you left reaching the bottom.

So we walked carefully and deliberately, which did have the unfortunate effect of stretching out the suspense for Kurumi. Her nerves were already tight by the time we got to the bottom, and almost fraying. It wasn't the darkness and the descent, it was the noises. So this is where things get different. For the two disciples, the pattern was established that there would be individual rooms that were alternately built to frustrate either the cultist rescuers or the adventuring tomb-robbers.

Simple in concept, straightforward in execution, and much more efficient for resources. That all went out the window here. One long gallery led from our position and out to the far end, where a ledge and a door led to the resting place of Keikthagorus. And in between us and that ledge was a transplanted pie slice of some circle of Hell. One of the nastier ones.

"We're headed there," I said, pointing. The far door was flanked by two candles, burning eternally to show brave souls where they were headed. That small detail is what elevated this gallery from "a stupid exercise in assisted suicide" to "a monumental challenge." After all, it has to be a challenge.

"What... what is happening?" she asked.

"It's very loud." I can feel the parts of it that are close enough to my essence. I can tell well enough without light. But I don't think that Kurumi Lautan is feeling very friendly to a "leap of faith" right now, she's going to need to see things in detail. I twisted the dial on my lantern, letting out more wick, soaking up more oil, a brighter flame. It did not help much, the light mostly got lost twenty feet out. Enough for her to see movement, sinuous shapes, flickers of reflection, brief bouts of color.

Seeds for her imagination to populate with unfathomable horrors. Obviously that's the unfavorable outcome. Sure the darkness is concealing horrors, but at least they're fathomable. I gave up on the lantern.

"I'll bring us a bigger light," I said, and opened the void for us. The portal was over our heads, facing out into the room itself. A beam of stark white light blasted out into the gallery, illuminating part of it. I created and lifted a glass lens, and brought it up into position, dispersing the primal glare into a more useful spotlight that showed what was going on in here. Shifting bridges whipped about, ready to throw off anyone who was not standing in exactly the correct part at the right time.

Whirling wheels suspended from the ceiling by sliding rails were flinging around thin steel cables like razor-wire, ready to slice anyone who did not discern the faint gleam of reflection in the darkness. Obstructing walls would emerge from the sides and ceiling, periodically blocking paths that looked safe. Below us, the floor was replaced by a hissing cauldron of heated acid, more than capable of eating flesh and bone in instants: anything that fell in there was lost, nothing to pull back.

Hidden pumps would spray that acid in long arcing squirts or fine misty geysers. Obsidian ravens circled in apparently-random spirals: their black-glass wings would unzip flesh like butter, and they swooped all about in the air, barely showing up in strong direct light. There was hardly a foot of space between us and that ledge that was not a deadly hazard. Too many directions to watch, too many angles to worry about. And from here, you could see that it was a long, long way.

Hundreds of yards, with every step of it promising three to five different death sentences. It's pretty intimidating in person.

"How..." she said, her voice falling away.

"The jets of acid over there? Timing is based on Fibonacci. The swinging rope bridges? They're shifting between sine waves, cosine plots, and tangents. Easily predictable movements. The razor-wheels are riding on tracks, you can literally just look and see where they're headed. The ramming walls are on a simple timing sequence. The black birds look like they're moving randomly, but it's a pretty common fractal pattern that resets when it reaches the walls of the place.

Every four yards the air shifts, between normal and desaturated deoxygenated air that can poison you without you feeling it. The red bulbs are proximity mines, if you don't step near them they won't explode. That pillar over there that looks like a safe place to stop and rest? It's a projected hologram and you'll tumble straight into the acid." She started to look at all of it again with fresh eyes.

"So... so if we are careful, if we watch our timing..."

"In theory yes," I said.

"Normally I'd just redirect the acid jets, melt all the hazards down and then fly us across. I do love a direct solution to an insoluble problem. But unfortunately, all forms of unauthorized magic are nullified once you move more than five feet in. They're very prepared for exactly my kind of unconventional tactics."

"Then we'll just have to move at exactly the right-" she stared at all of it, trying to sort out the hidden opportunities to move through. Comparing the tracks to the fractals, the jets, the walls, the cosine bridges. I was ignoring all that and messing around with the lintel of the doorway, trying to find the switch. I activated the bracers to bring down the difficulty of the Awareness check to find the hidden catch. The bracers are only usable once per day, and this is the perfect time to use them. She stared.

"What are you doing?"

"Turning it off," I said.

"Just as soon as... hang on... it should be... Ugh. This is embarrassing. I should have found it right at that dramatic moment, but instead I've got to hunt around and- ah!" The switch clicked. The whirring steel wire-blades started winding down, the rattling tracks went quiet. The grinding, grating noise of sliding walls came to a stop. The heating elements in the acid stopped, and the bubbling hiss from below became silent. The ravens all abandoned their formations and lined up out of the way near the ceiling.

The whipping rope bridges began swinging in a more natural arc, back and forth, rocking down to equilibrium. The glowing red bulbs went dark. And all around the walls, hidden candles in recessed alcoves lit up to show all the space clearly.

"The fuck?" she blurted. Clearly in utter disbelief. I would have preferred to look a lot cooler in this moment, that delay had thrown me off, but I'll settle for this.

"This place was built by people," I pointed out.

"People who needed to be able to plan, execute, iterate, test and refine this mechanism. Any engineer that's good enough to design any part of this is good enough to insist on fail-safe conditions. If engineers died in droves down here, they'd never have finished this project. It had a budget, after all. And a cutoff switch is not fail safe unless it defaults to shutdown, meaning there's no way to disable the cutout without disabling the traps. It's just a necessary design consideration.

The designers always leave themselves a back door." The rope bridges were almost settled now, and I led the way, stepping from out stone ledge to the first leg of the hanging causeway. Normally you'd think of rope bridges as wood and hemp rope, but this was actually steel cables and stone slabs. Very rugged, and they've got lots of momentum when the hidden mechanisms yank them into new configurations, movements that can send you over the side and into the acid, or fling you into the air to be cut apart.

And right now, they were just the simple pathway that we needed.

"This is... so easy," she muttered, staring around. All the deactivated weapons pointed straight at us. Just waiting. But safe.

"Yeah," I said.

"If we came down here first, you'd have been so disappointed that the other two legs don't have a simple cut off switch. On those routes, the fail-safe switch is built into each door as you open it, wouldn't do us any good but perfect for engineers cutting in one room at a time. Down here, they trusted that the intimidating difficulty would distract anyone from searching for a backdoor or a simple solution."

Footfalls echoed in darkness, with the occasional wet sound from the stirring acid vats beneath us, or a creak of steel from the razorwire-wheels.

"But.. all those magic items! The adventuring gear! The red pawn, the wraith key!" And that's an excellent point. For example, I could have just started the coin spinning and tell it to stop at the exact perfect time for me to run down the gallery, the perfect safe spot in the timing of all those hazards. It would have worked, and it would look a lot cooler. But I'm not going to choose the small-chance-of-failure option over the zero-chance-of-failure option. But that doesn't need to be brought up.

Instead I nodded.

"Yeah, those are going to come in handy. But not here. Not today. I was not counting on them. I'll find a great use for them later, I'm sure. When I have a chance to proactively build a plan around those capacities. But for this trip? Nah, I'm not leaving anything to chance. I run into enough trouble as it is, I don't need to tempt fate by taking chances and trusting to luck." She was walking behind me, I could not see her expression of dubious disbelief. I didn't need to, it was right there in her voice.

"This is you playing it safe?!"

"Maybe my standards are a little different, but yes." And I stand by it. Things might have been scary, with monsters lunging and spikes descending and blades whirling about, but we were not ever in any danger. There's a difference between being scared and being in danger. This whole trip had been nerve-wracking for her, but at all times, it had been safe. That gave her something to think about while we crossed the gallery, and approached the door at the far end.

The bridge ended right at the edge of the ledge, and I walked right up to the door. She spoke up.

"Uh, is there another lich behind that?"

"Yep," I agreed confidently, and pulled the handle. Stale air gusted. Some day I will bring doorknobs to Hearstwhile. It's on my list, just not near the top. Unlike the other two, Keikthagorus was not worn down to powder, abraded to scraps. He was sitting in a throne, hands steepled in front of him, staring straight at us. An ancient mummy, desiccated to paper-thin skin over strings of muscle, every soft tissue collapsed and shriveled.

There was a fine layer of brittle hair laying on top of his head and chest, but as the door swung open the puff of air pressure blew them to fine vapor. He glared, straight at me, with empty sockets. He did not need to move a muscle or say a word for me to receive the raw malice that poured out of him. His disciples fell to dust because a thousand years of even normal movement would grind dead bones to nothing. Keikthagorus was intact simply because he had not been moving.

He had sat, and waited, and glared, for a thousand years, exuding a patient hate that filled the air.

"Good evening," I said to the ancient power that was trying to hate me to death. The muscles in his mandible snapped like dry grass as the lich moved its mouth for the first time in centuries.

"You are none of mine." His arms lowered slightly, and dust sifted down out of his wrists.

"No, we are not," I said easily enough.

"Sorry to report, your cult died out within weeks of your imprisonment."

"Ah," he said. Something inside his ribcage shook loose and fell, with a rustling sound. I think it was a lung, because a sift of dust puffed out of his nose.

"Not mine. Then, you are enemies."

"Not that either," I said. I was speaking calmly and directly, no sign of fear. Kurumi was quaking in her boots behind me. That's the good news. When you face him down with Dizzy Capstan, you have to work to keep her from antagonizing the lich.

"And you are wrong," He said, sitting slightly forward, unlacing his fingers with a sound like potato chips crushing.

"All are either my follower, or my enemy. I shall take your lives and make- Oh, bugger," he said, staring at me. He is not supposed to say 'oh bugger'. Not part of this cut scene. His eyes changed color briefly, staring at me. Like, staring at me. I think we're having a lich-to-lich moment. Recognition. His skull twitched slightly, and part of his neck seemed to deflate as something gave way. His sockets stared over my shoulder at Kurumi.

"Well, her life at least. For my own, until I find one more suitable. But before I displace your essence and plunder your lives, I would know why you came. What drew you to face death up close, in its most naked form?"

"We need your notebook," I said easily.

"For our school project." His skull creaked in my direction, and he shifted his posture, elbow on the armrest, knuckles tapping his chin with a sound like maracas.

"Truly. My notebook." Kurumi nodded, moving up alongside me.

"It's true. She never lies. We just want your notebook and then we'll be out of your... scalp."

"Of course she doesn't," the lich said, waving a hand as if that was the most obvious thing that could have been said.

"My notebook. For a school project."

"Yes."

"You risked life and limb for the pursuit of of knowledge? The world still values education so highly?"

"This part of it does," I said easily. The lich nodded, rattling.

"For ages I have sat and loathed the world for its commitment to ignorance. It seems I was in error. The world is more committed to my values than I ever was. I am a disappointment to myself. Have what you will. Without hate, I am undone." And the mummy collapsed, skull falling off its neck and rolling away. I kicked it over the ledge and heard it splash in the acid below.

"C'mon, let's loot hard and get out of here. We can grab dinner and then count it all up." Those were the magic words to complete the quest. XP tallied in my status menu, and I finally leveled up.