Blood Shaper

The Shatterplate War Chapter 16

Yven slowly walked around the board, checking and double-checking the positions of his pieces and that of his invisible opponent. The game of Aik’mu-shal was old, and the only reason he knew how to play at all was his parents’ obsessions with some of the old ways that included it. Their ancestors had made the game, had played the game, some had even lived the game. And so, in their, in Yven’s mind, endless obsession with tradition, he had been taught to play. Personally, he didn’t put as much stock in the old cultural mores and traditions of a fallen people from an ancient fallen kingdom. He did agree that remembering what had been lost and keeping their own culture in existence was a good thing, but his parent’s obsessions? It wasn’t entirely his motivation for leaving the small trading enclave his family ran in order to join a new place, but it was a decently sized part.

To his father, as the best player in their family and someone who actually loved the game for itself, not just the tradition it represented, Yven was about to commit something similar to sacrilege. It was the coward’s way out, the way to end a game early because other affairs pressed, or an insult to the person you played against. Physically destroying your opponent’s flag bearer after it was placed was technically a winning move, but it had cultural overtones that made doing it in an actual game a risky proposition.

Not that Yven cared at all. He was in a Dungeon! Propriety be dammed; he was making sure he got out of here alive.

Besides, he knew he wouldn’t be winning any other way; the invisible opponent was just too good. His father had spent centuries trying to master the game, and he was seeing dozens of moves that he knew no one in his family or among their people had ever heard of. Crushing the flag bearer was his only way out.

He wasn’t ever going to tell his parents about this, though. They’d never shut up about it.

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“Fuck yeah!” Jadet yelled as he did another rep. The ceiling above him shifted upwards as he pushed against it, and a loud boom rumbled through the room as he slammed it up as far as it could go.

Jadet was a simple man. He wasn’t stupid, by any means, but he was uncomplicated. He liked what he liked, his disliked what he disliked, and he just generally went about life in a simple way. Such as enjoying the chance to get some exercise in.

“That’s fifteen reps! C’mon, gimme a little more weight!” He shouted as he took a few more steps closer to the exit. Sadly as the ceiling dropped down at him again, it wasn’t any heavier. It dropped down again, getting inches closer to him each second until it was just the right distance from him. He dropped to one knee and waited for it to descend a few more feet before he sprung up from his kneeling position and slammed his palms into the rocky slab. With a giant heave, he sent the ceiling rocketing back upwards, even faster than the last time, and this time when it impacted, it let out a massive crash and the sound of something cracking.

“More weight! More weight!” He chanted as it started to come down again.

Jadet wasn’t stupid; he knew that this was supposed to be a trap. Or maybe it was a test of some kind since it wasn’t immediately deadly. If whoever had made this room wanted to kill someone, they’d just weigh down the slab that dropped on people so that no one could lift it. They hadn’t, for whatever reason, so Jadet decided to get multiple jobs done at once. He’d make it through this room and on to the next one, and he’d get some good exercise in. Some idiots he’d met out in the world during his travels had thought that after a certain point, exercising was stupid since tiering up made you stronger. That was stupid, though, since exercise still worked! You could still build your body up and get stronger, so why waste the opportunity given to him? Sure, this might have been a death trap to anyone weaker than him, but Jadet had started his life as a laborer. He might only be a tier two Apprentice Defender, but he was a tier three Hauler. He’d lifted and dragged along heavier loads than this for years!

After shouting at the room to make it harder on him five more times, he finally stepped out of the marked area. The ceiling had started to descend again right before he’d stepped off, and as his first foot hit the ground past the line, it started going the opposite direction, then stopped moving.

Shrugging, Jadet rubbed at his tusks in a small nervous tick. He really didn’t like being separated from the other three people, but in the end, there wasn’t anything else he could do about it, so he stopped worrying. After glancing away, then back to the walls, he saw two more doors were suddenly there like he’d expected. He excitedly strode over to them, looking at the symbols on top. Hopefully, there would be one with two triangles! That might mean an even better workout!

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Lauren heard a shift behind her, and she danced off to one side, right as a thin snout full of jagged teeth tore through where she’d just been standing. She sliced upward with her dagger, trying to hit the damn thing, but it withdrew into one of the holes covering every surface, easily dodging her counterattack for the hundredth or so time. She held back a scream of rage that would have been completely unhelpful and waited for the damn thing’s next attack.

She didn’t know what it was since she didn’t have Inspect, but it looked like some kind of warped rodent. It had a small rounded body with four sharp claws and a snout with a bright pink nose. The weird thing about it was its mouth. It could stretch it out dozens of feet, and when it did, it became incredibly flexible. She’d had it attack her from spots she was sure it couldn’t have reached her from, sending its mouth out to attack her and bending around her attempts to block. She eventually gave up trying to block its attacks or grab it and was now just trying to get a swing in when she dodged.

She stepped through the fang-mouth shape door and ended up in a similarly empty room with a single folded piece of paper floating in the middle. With nothing better to do after inspecting every inch she could set her eyes on, she grabbed the paper and read it.

“Strike the creature once to defeat it.”

As soon as she read it, the paper vanished, and the entirety of the room had holes in the ceiling, walls, and floor. Then the creature started attacking her.

Another noise, she rolled to the side and felt the thing’s teeth grab a few pieces of her hair. She flung her dagger backward and hit air.

A sound like birds chirping, the growls of a dog, and the squeaking of a rat echoed through the room, coming out of all the holes at once in what was unmistakably laughter. She snarled at the taunts coming from the bastard monster and rolled to her feet, ignoring the twinge from the bite on her leg. Thankfully, only the monster seemed to be able to travel through the holes, so she didn’t lose her dagger even though it was sitting right on top of one.

She stopped and waited for the noises the thing gave off. It never used the same hole twice, she’d noticed. In fact, she was starting to think that each attack had to use a hole that was at least a certain distance from the last one it had used. Which meant there would be a pattern, one that she was already trying to decipher.

Now she just needed some time to test her theory. And then...

She desperately hoped that the monster wouldn’t disappear after her first hit or anything like that. She really wanted to hit it more than just the one time required by the Dungeon.

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With no information to go on, Kay chose the cooler of the two symbols, the V shape with a square in the gap. Stepping through the curtain, he had the same sensation of infinite amounts of cloth rubbing up against him. Finally making it out, he found another room with the same architecture, coloration, and sourceless light.

This one was different, though. He’d been expecting that it wouldn’t make sense for a Dungeon to just have one room with a board game in it over and over again, but this one had a door already waiting, and it didn’t have a cloth covering. There was an actual wooden door with a doorknob waiting for him at the opposite end of the room.

The otherwise empty space sent Kay’s sense of paranoia into high alert. There was no way that it would be that easy.

He cautiously took one step, then paused. He slowly looked around and listened but saw and heard nothing. He took another step with the same results. Then a third, a fourth, and a fifth.

It was the sixth step that tripped him up, literally in this case. The brick he’d stepped on flashed a deep purple color for a moment, then it dropped down so that his foot was below the level on the rest of the floor. Before he could react, his foot was twisted, and he was sent tumbling down onto the floor.

He threw out a hand to catch himself and landed on another brick with his open palm. That one shone painfully bright yellow for a moment, and he heard something from his right. He turned his head as fast as he could and saw that the previously featureless wall had a small pipe sticking out. Kay pushed himself off with his planted hand and rolled towards the direction he’d entered from. A spray of shimmering yellow flames burst from the pipe as he tried to dodge, and he found himself desperately patting out the back of his head and his clothing as he rolled on the ground.

Once the fire was out, he slowly pushed himself back to his feet. Glancing at three points, he saw that the two bricks no longer had any light to them, and the pipe was gone.

Even more slowly than before, he walked over to the first trap he’d triggered and poked at it with just the toe of his boot. It did the same action as previously, glowing purple for a mere moment before dropping down, and from above, Kay saw some kind of mechanism inside twist the space where his ankle would have been earlier.

He glanced at the two rectangular bricks next to the one he knew was a trap, then across the room to the door. At best, if the size of the area that didn’t seem to be trapped was the same at each end, there was still more than three-quarters of the room that could have traps in it.

He quickly tapped the brick right next to the purple, dropping one with his foot. It glowed a dark green, then sprang up at an angle in a motion that would throw anything on it towards the center of the room. There wasn’t enough space to actually be flung forwards for real, but it would certainly have tripped him up, just like its neighbor.

Kay took a bit of blood and let a few drops land on the two trapped bricks.

Nothing happened.

He dropped one of his canteens on it, in case it was a matter of weight.

Nothing again.

“Dammit.” Kay sighed deeply. “This is going to take so long!”