Chương 141: Chapter 139: Inside the pyramid

We start moving carefully into the pyramid. I have my bow out, arrow nocked and ready. There is light behind us as we go in, the sunlight from the early afternoon shining in and providing just a tiny bit of light for us to see by. We have dark vision, but I'm not entirely sure how well that will work when there is no source of light whatsoever. We don't close the pyramid behind us, partially for that reason, partially so that we'll know if anyone comes and closes it behind us.

We don't know that this island is uninhabited; maybe there is a sapient species around her somewhere that will come after us. It would make a certain amount of sense. The greater lynxiths and the goar had no fear of us, which suggests that they may have seen humans before, or at least humanoids. Things our shape that might be dangerous, but also might just be tasty. That would explain why they keep attacking us. There are cobwebs everywhere, and I'm glad I'm not in front. I'm also glad that I'm not all that tall.

If I were towering over the three of them, I'm sure I'd be getting a face full of a cobwebs. But I'm not. Ash is dealing with them, pushing them out of the way with her mace as we go deeper. After a few feet, the tunnel we're in curves to the left. As we move farther from the entrance, the light becomes weaker and weaker. Ash whispers something under her breath, and her mace starts to glow. I guess she doesn't trust our dark vision to see everything that might need to be seen.

I can understand that, though it does make her kind of a beacon to anything that might be in here. Trouble is, there doesn't seem to be anything in here. None of the cobwebs have been disturbed before we got here, and I don't see any footprints in the dust other than ours. Is this an empty dungeon? Does it even count as a dungeon then? Maybe it's just a ruin. Ruins are okay. Ruins still have treasure in them. Maybe we're not acting as adventurers, but as archaeologists.

Only without planning on putting things in museums. Unless you count a dragon hoard as a museum. Which, thinking back to Wrax's hoard, wouldn't be all that far of a stretch. Wait a second.

"How did Wrax get such a big hoard?" I ask. I'm whispering, because it just seems right to whisper.

"What do you mean?" El asks over her shoulder.

"Wrax was the tutorial god, right?" I say.

"So he has only been in this world for a week longer than we have. We ran into him pretty quickly. How did he have time to amass a hoard?"

"Maybe he took it from someone else," El suggests.

"Maybe he killed another dragon and took their hoard and their cave," Ash suggests.

"That cave was too perfect to have been empty for long."

"What does this have to do with anything?" Gigi asks, her whisper a bit more harsh than she maybe intended it to be. Is she nervous? I guess I can understand that. We're walking in an ancient tomb, and nothing has come out to try to kill us yet. We haven't set off any traps, no one has closed the door behind us, no monsters have shown up and tried to eat us. This is all very unusual. Maybe the tension is starting to get to her.

Maybe it's starting to get to me; why else would I be bringing up Wrax at a time like this? Am I just talking to hear the sound of my own voice? Maybe just to split the silence. I must be nervous. Scared. It's somehow easier when things are trying to kill us. Then, at least, I know where I stand. The pathway continues to curve around, and I'm pretty sure we're walking all the way around the base of the pyramid. This path must be leading somewhere. Pyramids are built for a purpose. Usually as tombs, right?

So there must be a burial chamber around her somewhere. Damn it. I bet there are undead in here. What other monster would there be in an ancient tomb? I hate fighting undead. They don't bleed, they don't take full damage from piercing and slashing weapons, and they're just gross. I put my bow away. It won't be all that useful in here. I'll use my magic. Fire Bolt will still hurt the undead with its full potential. I'll just use that. I've got the mana for it.

Fire Bolt only costs ten mana, and I have almost six thousand. That's a lot of castings.

"I feel like I should activate Mab's Rage," I say.

"See if it goes around corners and through walls. We might be able to kill everything in here before we even come across it."

"Don't do that," El says, her voice a bit of a whine.

"That would be so boring."

"Hold it in case we need it," Ash says.

"Don't waste it. Just in case it doesn't go around corners and through walls." I sigh. We keep walking. We're still moving really slowly. I think Ash is checking for traps. I should probably do that too. I look over her shoulder at the walls ahead of us. Hard to tell if there are holes for spear traps or anything like that; the cobwebs cover the walls completely. If there are traps, they'll probably have to rip through the cobwebs. I reach out to my side and wipe the wall clean a bit.

There are runes carved into the wall. Polyglot doesn't help me with reading, so they don't mean anything to me. But it does support the idea that this is a burial site of some kind. Maybe what I'm seeing is the story of whoever was buried here. It has to be someone significant. If everyone got their own pyramids, the island would probably be covered by them. So whoever is buried here must have done something worthy of all this. I just can't tell what any of it means. What I do see, however, are lines in the wall.

Long horizontal lines, at about waist height. That may be just a way to separate the glyphs above from those below, or it might be a groove in which a blade is hidden. A blade that is meant to cut us all in half. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Or it might be both. Maybe it's mostly to separate the two stories, but occasionally there are places where a spinning blade will come out and try to kill us.

I start looking down, trying to find signs of a pressure plate or a trip wire or something. Ash stops suddenly. Maybe she spotted something.

"What is it?" I ask.

"Trap," Ash says.

"I just stepped and I felt something click." El lets me by, and I crouch down by Ash's feet. I push the dust away from around her foot. Sure enough, there's a brick that she's got her weight on. Something was triggered. But nothing has happened yet. That must mean that the trigger will go off when she takes her weight off the trap. I've seen things like this, usually in movies. It's like a land mine, I guess.

You press down and break whatever is preventing the trap from going off, but your weight keeps the trap from springing. When you take your weight off, the trap springs. I think it's meant to get more members of the party. The first person steps on it to get the trap ready to spring, then they move on, and the trap springs on the other members of the party. Killing or at least injuring as many of them of as possible.

"Okay," I say.

"Everyone move around Ash. Ash, don't move."

"I'm not," she assures me. There's a little quiver in her voice. I'm not sure it's worth being afraid; she has more than twenty three thousand hit points, plus Shell. I doubt there's a trap out there that could do that enough damage to be a real threat to her. But we sometimes forget about our hit points. We think of ourselves as mortal, the way we did in our old world. Old habits are hard to break, I suppose. I can understand. The trap is the unknown. She has no idea what it's going to do.

Maybe it will shoot out little darts that do five points of damage, and we'll just ignore the traps from here on out, letting them go off and not caring one bit. Or maybe it will something much worse, like a poison gas that bypasses our Shell completely and poisons us. We have no way of knowing. Everyone else moves past Ash. I examine the ground for a few more steps, making sure that we can put some distance between us and Ash. I'm not leaving her alone, but I want to make sure that there's somewhere for her to go.

"Okay," I say.

"El, I want you to take Ash's hand. Then, on the count of three, I want you to throw her this way as hard as you can. Ash, you jump to go along with it. The trap is meant to hit whoever was behind you, so this should get you out of range of it." Ash nods, putting her mace on the hook on her belt and reaching out for El. El sheaths her sword and braces herself.

"Ready?" she asks. Ash nods. On the count of three, El pulls and Ash leaps. As soon as Ash is moving, the traps sets off. The walls slam together with a thud. I can just imagine the crunching noise that would have been there if any of us had been in that space. Ash lets out a breath she was clearly holding, and wipes the sweat from her brow.

"How bad do you think that would've been?" she asks, looking at the closed off space. The walls slowly begin to separate, and I can hear a faint clicking sound as they do. The trap is resetting itself.

"I don't know," I say.

"But maybe I should take the lead, just to watch for traps and stuff." She nods.

"Good idea," she says. She gives me a nervous smile as she takes her mace out again.

"I'll, um. I'll have your back." So we start walking again, this time with me in the lead. My detect traps is only at six, but that will probably get higher as we continue. I do draw my sword, so that I can use it to push the cobwebs out of the way. Actually, maybe this is a good time to use fire.

"I'm going to try something dangerous," I say.

"If it works, it'll clear the path for us and make traps easier to find."

"And if it doesn't work?" Ash asks.

"Then we'll let everything in here know we're here," I say. Then I shrug.

"Or it won't do anything." I cast Flame Bolt and toss the flame into the cobwebs. They immediately ignite, and fire traces all down the corridor, briefly lighting the whole thing up as it moves away from us in both directions. I hear at least three other traps go off in the distance. Apparently, the cobwebs were stopping traps from going off. That's weird. The air smells acrid and gets a little thick. A bit harder to breathe. Hopefully, that's temporary.

It's not all that bad either way, but I'm still hoping the smell will go away. It's offensive to my sensitive nose. I see that Gigi is wrinkling her nose, too. She has the second most sensitive nose next to mine. I give her an apologetic smile.

"Sorry," I say. She waves me away.

"It's fine," she says. We move onward. I know that there are at least three traps ahead of us. I'm assuming that every trap resets itself the way the one we first set off did, and I heard three go off. So I keep an eye out, trying to find what will trigger them. I identify another pressure plate, pointing it out so that no one steps on it, and then a part of the floor that looks rigged to open up. Pit traps are really dangerous, even for us, because the traps usually lock you in the pit once you've fallen through.

It's not just a matter of falling in that causes the danger. You might fall a few feet and twist your ankle or something. But the real danger is that there's no way to open the top of the pit from the inside. So you're stuck in there until you starve to death. It would probably take us a long time to starve to death. We all jump over the pit trap, and nearly get impaled by the third trap. It's just past the pit trap, and seems to be designed to go off exactly when someone jumps over the trapdoor.

It's only because of my superhuman agility that I'm able to twist and dodge as the spears come out. One of them still grazes my leg, dealing 140 damage as it goes by. I bet it was poisoned, too. Thankfully, Shell prevents that. Shortly after the third trap, we come to a burial chamber. It's lined with skeletons all laid out on slabs of what looks like marble. There are maybe thirty of them lining the walls, and another passageway leading out from the far side.

"Those are definitely going to rise up and attack us," Gigi says.

"I mean, look at them. This place is totally a trap."

"What do you want to do?" Ash asks.

"Destroy them now?"

"Shouldn't we?"

"What if they're just skeletons, and we end up desecrating their bodies for no reason?" El asks. Then she laughs.

"That would actually be kind of funny."

"It might be that defiling them is what will wake them up," I point out.

"I say we leave them alone, and just be ready for a fight." We walk carefully though the chamber, bunched up and ready for the assault. I keep my eyes on the floor, looking for something that will set off a trap. It might be that setting off the trap is what makes them all rise up. Or maybe I just don't want to keep looking around at all these skeletons, expectantly waiting for them to rise up and try to kill us. We move slowly across the chamber, and the skeletons don't move.

We make it halfway across, and the skeletons don't move. I see the passageway out of here, and even step over the threshold, and the skeletons don't move. We make it all the way through the chamber, and they don't move.

"Aren't you glad we didn't smash them?" El asks once we're through.

"We may still have to worry about them on the way out," Gigi points out. El just shrugs at that. The second passageway is once more covered in cobwebs. I cast another Fire Bolt, and the fire dances and trickles its way down the corridor. I listen for more traps, but nothing happens. I glance over my shoulder, half expecting to see a platoon of skeleton warriors coming at us from behind, but there's nothing there. The tomb remains quiet. We keep walking, and I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

There is something about the lack of monsters that is really bothering me. There are traps, sure, but the traps aren't all that dangerous. They're relatively easy to spot, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting all of them. I haven't been hit by anything that suggests otherwise, and my detect traps has already gone up to eight.