Chương 185: Chapter 183: Anything you can do...

It's around dawn that we come to another sheer ice cliff. At its base is another igloo style cave. Amanda stopped here before going up the cliff. It's at least something to know that we're still following her trail. She didn't diverge and fly straight up the mountain. I wonder why. Maybe there are more rings of anti magic. Or maybe she just thinks there might be, and isn't taking the chance. Whatever the case, there's another sign of her passing here, and that encourages me at least a little bit. We don't stop.

Maybe we'll stop tonight, but for now, we're going to climb the ice cliff. It's not going to be easy; we're on the eastern side of the mountain right now. That means the sun is about to be shining directly on the cliff. Which is definitely going to reflect. We might be climbing blind.

"Anything you can do, you can do blindfolded," Gigi says. I look at her like she's crazy. That might be the stupidest thing anyone has ever said.

"What?"

"It's something my climbing instructor used to say," she says.

"I always thought it was crazy, but then he'd make us climb with a blindfold on. And then it kind of made sense. We don't need to be able to see to climb. You climb with feeling. You feel for the next grip. It makes you keep yourself balanced, because you can't afford to have to a weak grip or a weak stance."

"Still sounds crazy," El says. Gigi just shrugs.

"It just means we can do this." I like the sentiment, but I agree with El. Vincent flies up the cliff wall very carefully, keeping his fingers trailing along the ice as if ready to grab on to it. Given that the magic has been cut off suddenly before, I don't blame him. A few minutes later, he drops the rope down to our feet. It coils up a fair amount at the bottom. How long is this rope? I think it's like two hundred feet feet long.

That means that the cliff is somewhere between one and two hundred feet tall, depending on how much he used to tie it off.

"I'm not putting on a blindfold," El says as she grabs the rope. She's already squinting as the light hits the ice. Gigi just shrugs.

"You might change your mind on the way up," she says, wrapping a cloth around her own eyes.

"It'll at least cut off the glare." Climbing a rope blindfolded isn't easy. I don't know why I believed Gigi that it would help. It is nice not to have a blinding light in my eyes as I move, and it's nice that the extra padding of the blindfold dims the glare that would otherwise be pounding against my closed eyelids, but I feel silly. I feel crazy doing this. It helps, but it makes me feel like a lunatic. I climb hand over hand, trying to balance my feet against the ice as best I can.

This kind of climb is becoming old hat, and I take advantage of the darkness in my vision to call up some notifications I've been ignoring. My climbing skill has increased all the way to thirteen. My survival has gone up two levels as well, and is now all the way at twenty. I also gained a level of sneak, probably from those hours sneaking through the dark cave. And my alertness is now twenty eight. I like seeing skill increases. I wish my bow had gone up more, or my sword.

My bow is at forty five, my sword at only forty three. Those both take a lot to increase. I guess I should be happy with what I have. My skill list is long, and pretty deep. I don't have that many skills below ten, and I have a lot above twenty. I keep climbing, focusing as best I can on my grip and on the ice in front of me. I don't know how close I am to Ash, who is climbing above me, but I don't think I'm going to catch her. I'm keeping a deliberately steady pace, and she's stronger than I am.

So she can probably go faster. Gigi is behind me, but I think she's keeping the same pace I am. She stayed behind so she could go last, partially to keep an eye on us as we started up with blindfolds. She shouted encouragement at us until we were each up about twenty feet. Once we achieved that distance, she told the next person to go. So I assume she's about twenty feet below me. And I assume that El is close to reaching the top. I don't know how close I am to the top. I'll get there eventually.

It feels good to be climbing. We're making much more progress much faster doing it this way. We're going straight up, instead of at an angle like we were going when we were blazing the trail. When I get to the top, I follow the rope forward a bit before taking off my blindfold. It's still too bright to be able to see much of anything, but I can make out the shapes of my friends in the haze. And past them, some welcoming darkness.

"Another cave?" I ask, hopeful. I can't tell if he nods or not.

"Not a very deep one," Vincent says.

"And there's no tunnel leading into the mountain. There's a god bear inside, but it's already dead." Amanda. I go into the cave anyway, just to give it a good look around. The god bear's corpse is pretty deep in the cave, which gives me some pause. Why would Amanda fight the creature if it was already deep into the cave? She may have started fighting it towards the entrance and just pushed it back all this way before she killed it, but I don't think it's as simple as that.

Yes, the battle tracks support the theory, but I think there's something more to it. Amanda can turn invisible and she can fly. She could easily have avoided this battle. And she's been avoiding battles wherever she can on the way up. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. That means there's something here. Something that Vincent didn't catch in his examination. I stay deep in the cave as my eyes adjust.

The glare of the sun felt like it was going to burn my retinas, but in here it's dark and I can actually see again. I start examining the wall at the back of the cave. It slopes downward like you'd expect a cave to do as it comes to an end, but it doesn't slope all the way down. The back side of the cave is still a flat wall. A crag filled flat wall. It doesn't look like anyone worked the stone or anything, but there's still something off about it. Something I can't quite put my finger on.

I move along the way, gently sliding my fingers along all the nooks and crannies. I could spend an hour here and not find what I'm looking for. I need to think about this. If there's a secret door here, and I think there might be, then there has to be a trigger to open it. And the trigger has to be somewhere that is both hidden and obvious. Somewhere it would be easy to reach if you knew where it was, but also somewhere people wouldn't think to look.

That suggests, to me, that it's either at about shoulder height or at ground level. It's either somewhere you can easily grab or somewhere you can press with your foot. I look along the ground, but I don't see anything exposed like a pedal or even a jutting piece of rock. The problem is, there's nothing like that at shoulder level, either. If you really wanted to hide the trigger to open a secret door, you'd put it far away from the door itself. Like along one of the other walls of the cave.

But Amanda was here, and she wasn't flying after the battle with the god bear. I don't know if she was letting her mana recharge or if she just prefers to fight on solid ground, but she left footprints in the cave. She left a trail that I can follow, and that trail moves back and forth in front of this wall. Finally, I find it. It's a deep crevice in the wall at about shoulder height. I reach my arm in just a few inches shy of shoulder deep, and I find a lever. I pull on the lever, and there's a click.

Part of the wall slides away. There were no cracks visible, no seams to suggest it, but there it is. A secret door. I call for my friends, excitement tinging my voice. I found a secret door! I've always wanted to find a secret door. Secret passages are, by definition, awesome. I used to want a house with secret passages. I still do, if I ever manage to get a house. But I've never found one before. It's something to check off my adventuring bucket list, I guess.

Amanda's footsteps do not continue into the passageway. That might mean that she didn't find the door, but I don't think so. I think she just started flying again. I think if we had left the cave and kept climbing the outside of the mountain, we would've lost her trail. I lead the way down the passage, Ash right behind me with her glowing mace. It provides plenty of ambient light to allow me to see with my dark vision. Which in turn allows me to find several traps along the way.

These are more sophisticated than the traps we found earlier on. They look like they will self-reset, which makes it impossible to know if Amanda set any of them off on her way by. Several of them she skipped over by not being on the floor. I do my best to disable those pressure plates at least long enough for us all to get past them. But there are a few magical traps that I don't think Amanda could have skipped over. The problem with magical traps is that I can't disarm them.

Even with my disarm traps skill going all the way up to nine, there isn't really anything I can do. The magical sigils are difficult to spot, and they're placed in such a way that you have to set off the trap to get to them. I try using Magical Dart to disrupt them, but it doesn't work. The only way through is to set off the trap. I take a running start and dive over the trap. Two huge blades sweep across the tunnel.

I'm luckier than I've ever been, as the blades pass just a few inches away from me, one above and one below. I make it to the other end unharmed, but with my heart pounding in my chest. Those blades were huge, and they moved so fast I could barely see them. I don't know if there was another blade at ankle level, but those things looked like they could have cut me apart at the waist and at the neck at the same time. Vincent lowers himself to a position parallel with the ground and flies through the trap.

It goes off again, harmlessly passing over and below him. He gets each of the others through the trap the same way. Better to let him fly us through than to trust to luck any further than that. I hate magical traps. Have I said that already? The passage starts to curve pretty sharply, spiraling upwards almost like a staircase. I draw my sword and dagger. This feels like a battle ground, and one not in our favor.

It's spiraling upwards at an angle that will make Ash and Gigi have to either fight left handed or not really be able to use their shields. That's what spiral staircases were invented for. They made it so that your enemy, fighting from below, wouldn't be able to effectively use their shields, while you could fight from above without difficulty. Sure enough, I hear movement ahead and above us. I stop and take a deep breath of the passageway's air. Sifting through the smells, I think I know what's ahead of us.

Mountain hobs, it smells like. But they smell different from the ones in the village. Maybe these are a bigger, nastier version of them. I creep forward, leaving the others a few steps behind. I want to sneak up and get a glimpse of these creatures before we engage with them. A little bit of foreknowledge should make this battle a lot easier. Peeking my head around a corner, I get sight of the creature. It looks like a mountain hob the same way the mountain hob looked like a goblin.

Same basic features, but about a foot taller, a foot wider, and better armed and armored. The one I get a good look at is wearing as much armor as Gigi or Ash. Hob knight. Legendary elite goblinoid, level 60. HP: 60, 000/60, 000. And, of course, there are a lot of them. I can't make out how many, but the fill the corridor as it curves out of sight. I sneak back to the others. There are at least a dozen of those creatures up there. But Amanda got through them. How did she manage? Can we sneak past somehow?

I look up. The ceiling here is about ten feet tall. It's possible that Amanda flew along the ceiling and avoided them that way. We can't do that. But it would explain how she got past them. Or maybe she negotiated her way past them.

"Do you think we can talk our way past?" Ash asks as I explain the situation. If we have to fight our way through, it's going to take a long time. Possibly long enough to be dangerous.

"I don't know," I say.

"They looked ready for battle. They're waiting for us. I'm guessing they've heard us coming, or seen the glow from your mace." Ash bites her lip, her pointy teeth gently pulling on the soft flesh.

"Do we try to talk, or do we just charge forward?"

"The passageway is only wide enough for two of us to fight at a time," Gigi says.

"That could be to our advantage."

"I can cast a lightning blast through them, do some damage to the whole group," Vincent offers. Ash looks at me.

"That's two votes for just attacking, I guess," she says.

"What do you think?"