"Don't move," Deacon hissed out, as his eyes darted to the walls of the hallway they were in, while simultaneously sharpening his hearing to be able to hear for any mechanical shifting in the tiles around them. "It could be a mine that you're on."
Upon hearing the faint noise of a gear being shifted beneath Esmerelda, Deacon quickly grabbed Esmerelda by the arm and yanked her back, milliseconds before the tiles beneath her snapped down. In place of the tiles was a ten-foot drop filled with pikes all along its bottom and sides.
Upon the both of them peering over the sudden appearance of the pit, Esmerelda's lips pressed themselves thin as a thin membrane of wind revealed itself to still be covering the both of them. "I did not account for a pit trap to be a thing… I guess I'll have to keep that in mind now."
"You and me both," he muttered as he witnessed the tiles that Esmerelda stood on rise back up.
They pressed on, now more cautious than ever, and now Esmerelda used Lux to light their way. The second trap came an hour later – a geyser of flame erupted from the end of a hallway when Deacon placed a hand against a faintly different colored brick in a hallway wall and accidentally activated a hidden pressure plate.
Why had he pressed it? He was curious if it led to the treasury room of the castle.
Unfortunately, instead of finding a path to the royal treasury, both he and Esmerelda were met with a massive geyser of flame erupting from the far end of the hallway. The flame pushed forward, but it stopped just a few feet short of where they had been standing; thanks to Deacon's quick reaction, the moment he spotted the initial tuft of flame in the darkness ahead, he quickly turned around while ducking, grabbed Esmerelda by her waist, and dashed back towards the beginning of the hall.
They tried dousing it with water, him using Water Ball, and Esmerelda using Aqua, but they did nothing to weaken the inferno as the sheer amount of flames overwhelmed their spells. With no other choice, they waited it out, crouched at the beginning of the hall, and played a short game of chopsticks while the heat seared the air.
The flames finally sputtered out twenty minutes later when the oil ran dry and Esmerelda won the fifteenth game, bringing the end of the game and the score to 8 to 7, in her favor.
"We're wasting time," Esmerelda muttered as she looked at her side to see the Floor's countdown timer.
"Meh," Deacon voice in response. "If we rush, we could end up screwing ourselves even worse and getting into a trap that shoots out arrows all along the walls of a room or hallway that we find ourselves in the middle of."
"But even then, it shouldn't be a problem for us," Esmerelda replied back. "There is a short delay before the actual trap goes off, and you can always just turtle shield yourself with a shield that I know you took off someone's corpse you klepto."
Begrudgingly shrugging at her words, they delved deeper until the castle split into two halls. The fork stretched in opposite directions, one leading down into the belly of the fortress, the other angling up toward the higher towers.
Esmerelda slowed, her eyes narrowing on the divide. "We'll cover more ground if we split. You take the left, I'll take the right."
Deacon didn't answer right away. He stared at both paths, his fingers flexing around the hilts of Echoform Reliquary for a few tense seconds, debating whether or not it would be worth the risk to split up, considering the two traps they've triggered.
Finally, he exhaled through his nose. "Fine. But stay sharp. These traps we trigger could always kill us if we don't react quickly."
Her lips quirked faintly, though her eyes stayed serious. "I'll be careful."
"Good," he said, stepping toward his path. He glanced back once, voice low. "We'll meet back here in five hours. If you're not here by then, I'm coming to find you."
Esmerelda nodded, then slipped into the opposite hall.
Letting out a sigh, Deacon walked through the hall in front of him.
***
Not long after splitting up with Esmerelda, Deacon found himself navigating a long and winding pathway inside the castle's inner bailey. Each turn seemed to loop into another hall, yet not once had he come across a single soul. The emptiness gnawed at him, enough that he came to two conclusions: either the System hadn't seeded this Floor with creatures, and he and his Party were the only living things here, or at some point within the twenty-four hours, the creatures that inhabit the castle would start spawning in.
His money was on the latter, and that the creatures that would spawn in would be undead ones.
How did he come to that conclusion?
The absence of beds in the quarters he passed, the lack of kitchens, wells, and chimneys. Hell, he hadn't even seen a toilet, not even a shit bucket, in any of the rooms he'd explored. All of it pointed to this being the Undead Kingdom's stronghold.
Plus, the surplus of bone furniture sealed the suspicion: chairs carved from femurs, a writing desk supported by spines, and a grotesque chandelier of human skulls strung together like ornaments. No holy human noble in their right mind would dine beneath something like that.
He exhaled through his nose, muttering, "I guess this is the undead equivalent to dining under their spoils of loot?... But instead of a moose head, it's a chandelier crafted out of the bodies of ten humans... Yeah, I guess I can understand why war is just about to break out between both kingdoms."
Finishing his mutterings, Deacon pressed himself into a shadowed corner of the corridor and shrugged off his Soldier's Leggings. The metal plates scraped lightly as he shoved them into his Spatial Sling Bag before fishing out the Leggings of the Barbarian.
Sliding them on, he immediately felt the shift ripple across his body. His Strength climbed by +10, though the Vitality he'd gained from the Soldier's pair dropped off, as well as the Endurance. However, it didn't matter to him as the Barbarian leggings gave him +10 Endurance too, and since they were part of the Barbarian Set, the set bonus he had also improved, giving him: +5 Strength, +5 Vitality.
For a level 10 set, it was disgustingly good.
A grin tugged at his mouth. Can't wait until we find an armorsmith for the Guild once we make it. Full sets for all of us – that'll be something.
That thought circled him right back to the Guild itself. The Guild Waystone, sitting safe in his Spatial Sling, had torched all the plans they made prior to climbing the Tower, as now, they no longer needed to keep scavenging for coin to fund their future Guild Base. That step was handled.
Now they'd have to revise everything once this Floor was cleared and rent out a room at some tavern in the World Hub for Floor Five, where they could hammer out the details before the competition date, which was in a week's time.
"I wonder what the Hidden Quest for this Floor is…" He murmured to himself as he cinched the leggings tighter around his waist via his belt.
Letting his answer hang in the air, he continued onwards.
As the corridor bent left, he slowed when it opened into a forked hallway. One hall looked normal, while the other was very different, and not in a good way.
The hallway on the left was filled from floor to arch with rolling, churning smoke. It didn't spill into the hall, though. Some kind of invisible membrane held it back, the black mass pressing against it like a living thing straining to get out.
Deacon narrowed his eyes at the sight as he stood firmly in place, not getting closer to either option.
"Now that's not normal," he muttered.
His tongue clicked against the back of his teeth. "…Is this some sort of boss fight entrance or something?"
Carefully, he slid a hand into his Spatial Sling Bag and fished out the black sponge-like mask he'd tucked away since Floor One. Compared to his origami paper mask, this one was designed to filter far nastier things, but it came at a cost; its durability was horrible, which, considering the Tier 0 materials it was made out of, made sense.
Every time it was worn and or absorbed a contaminant, the integrity of the enchantments would drop lower and lower until it became useless. That was why he hadn't bothered with it back in the blighted prison beneath the tree that he found when entering Floor Three. Worst case, there, he had the purifier seed ready to purge infection.
But here? With this rolling wall of smoke, pressing and seething against the invisible barrier like it was hungry? There was no chance in hell he was going to walk in there without knowing what that smoke could do to him, especially considering it was making his skin crawl the longer he stared at it.
He turned the mask over in his hands, frowning at it. "This better be worth it."
Hooking one of the straps onto the end of a longsword that he swiped from the armory he and Esmerelda passed through earlier, he extended the blade outward. The mask dangled from its end as he nudged the black smoke with it, letting just the tip of the sponge-like material breach the membrane of the invisible protection that was holding the smoke back.
The reaction was immediate. The black mask crinkled in on itself in less than a second before it turned ashen. As his brain caught up to the changes, he saw that whatever the black smoke did was growing as the area around the ashen bit was peeling off and now beginning to rust the metal of the sword.
Without thinking, Deacon threw both mask and sword straight into the churning smoke before jerking his hands back as if whatever was corroding his weapon and mask to ash and rust might spread to him as well.
"Holy fuck," he hissed out as he could actively hear his pulse hammering in his ears. As he flexed his fingers and looked down at them to reassure himself that whatever that smoke was or its effects hadn't brushed against his skin. The hairs on his arms stood stiff, as a shiver raced through him.
"Yeah, fuck that shit."
He straightened and took a few steps back, focusing on his breathing, drawing in through his nose and exhaling slowly, to keep panic from settling within his mind and body.
His eyes flicked again toward the wall of smoke, watching it churn and roll against the barrier, pressing like a tide of death desperate to spill forth.
"I'm definitely not going to fucking try that again," he muttered as he then turned on his heel and headed for the opposite path – the normal-looking one. "That path would probably be fine for undead races like Bonehead, but that would 100% kill me if I were to even stick an arm in. Hell, maybe if I stuck a pinky toe in it would…"
"If we all converge back at the bridge with time to spare, maybe we could bring Bonehead here and…" He trailed off, shaking his head as the thought fizzled. There was too much ground to cover between this castle and the one Bonehead was at, and not enough time on the Floor's timer to find him and bring him here. "Bad luck on our end," he muttered. "That could have possibly been something in regards to the Hidden Quest for the Floor."
Cautiously pushing open the slightly ajar door at the end of the normal hall with the tip of his right boot, Deacon was greeted with a small library filled with cobwebs and dust.
The moment his eyes skimmed the spines of the books that decorated the library shelves, their unfamiliar script shifted before him into languages that were familiar to him.
He slid a few volumes free, leafing through brittle pages. Nothing jumped out as particularly special: no hidden maps, no tactical manuals detailing the fortress, not even anything useful about the war. Just history written by the undead for the undead about the conflict between humans and undead, the way both sides despised the other, and how their race was the one true race that deserved to rule.
"Wow." His lip curled faintly as he flipped another page and skimmed it for a bit before returning the book to where he had taken it from. "This sounds like basically the same shit from back when undead were first found in the Tower… when everyone on Earth at the time got dumped onto Floor Zero."
Back then, at the beginning, the tension between humanity, non-humans, and undead back then could literally be cut by a blade, and more often than not, it was.
Yet with all the constant death and misery as people struggled to climb the Tower, tolerance eventually had carved itself into the cracks of the races. It took many years for the fragile tolerance between the many races of the Tower to grow into something resembling true understanding and trust, to where the races would even allow their younglings to be around the other.
Settling down his thoughts on the Tower's history, Deacon closed the book and placed it back onto the shelf before reaching into his Spatial Sling Bag to pull out something that had been on his mind ever since he got it: the Grimoire of the Ritualist of Huitzilopochtli.