“Uh, not particularly. Going to be kind of a pain to get over to each of the walls...but I suppose that was a rhetorical question and I should do it anyway. Fine. The rest of you wait on the bridge. It’s all safe, as far as I can tell.”
We waited on the bridge while Vera made a careful circuit around the room, feeling her way across the floor to find the safe spots before she stepped forward. After a couple minutes, she stood up to rub her back. All that bending forward and half-crawling must have been pretty awkward.
Eventually, she reached the walls and made her way around the room to check each of them. It was when she hit the south west corner that she paused. “Huh. Light me up, that’s a surprise. There is a false wall here. You still got that pickaxe?”
...we’d left the pickaxe in the key room.
After about a minute of deliberation, we decided that simply having Derek punch his way through the false wall would be faster and more efficient than trying to make our way all the way back to the key room.
Vera led Derek over to the wall.
He started punching right through it with his bare hands.
I really hoped he wasn’t the traitor I thought he was, because if he was, we were going to be in a lot of trouble.
Punching out sections of wall didn’t take him much longer than the pickaxe had, but it took us all another couple minutes to make our way over to the hole he’d excavated. It led into another tunnel, just like the first secret passage had. There was a door with a blue keyhole at the end.
“Gotta make a choice here,” Derek explained. “Keys in the tower almost always disappear when they’re used, so we can only open one of these two doors. Assuming it’s the same key for both.”
Vera tapped on the keyhole. “It is. I checked the other lock. They use the same key.”
“We’ll take the secret passage, Derek,” Professor Orden instructed.
“Yes, Professor.” He nodded to her. “Okay, Sera, can you float the key over here?”
“No problem.” Another quick air spell and she floated the key into the lock and turned it.
Derek opened the door.
The blast of air coming from the other room slammed him backward into Vera. It hit the rest of us in the next moment, and the sheer force of the gust carried me off the ground before I could react.
I flew backward out of the tunnel, uncontrolled until Jin grabbed me by the wrist. Somehow, he’d reacted fast enough to slam a dagger — a dagger I’d never seen — into the stone wall on the side of the tunnel to anchor himself into place.
Professor Orden crashed into me a second later, breaking Jin’s grip - then Orden and I were out of the tunnel and back in the previous room, airborne over a pool of acid and quickly approaching the opposite wall.
As I flew through the air toward imminent death, my mind somehow managed to inform me, “There’s the hurricane you wanted, Corin.”
Oh, the sharpness of my wit. Truly it cuts me more deeply than any other.
“Wyvern, I call upon our pact! Protect us from the wind!”
Sera’s spell blocked the wind.
This was probably good for those people who were in the tunnel.
Unfortunately, Orden and I were still entangled and airborne.
There was an almost comical instant when the last of the air faded and we began to fall.
I panicked.
Orden acted.
She ripped the dueling cane off my belt, shot a blast of energy at a nearby tile and triggered the trap.
The acid was only a moment away, but the spears of ice from the trap reached us first.
Orden grabbed the closest spear and slammed it into the stone as we fell, intending to use it as an anchor like Jin had with the knife.
The ice spear bounced right off the stone. Magic or not, it couldn’t pierce rock.
Orden and I hit the acid hard.
For a moment, I was pretty confident I was going to die right there. My barrier kicked in before the acid could burn me, but with the barrier preventing the liquid from completely reaching me, I sank like a rock.
Orden was still there with me, her own barrier protecting her. I didn’t realize how important that was until she spoke a single word. “Teleport.”
And then we were standing back at the entrance to the tunnel, very much alive.
I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was only momentary.
Sera was kneeling on the ground at the entrance to the tunnel, breathing far too heavily. “Can’t...hold... the wind...much...longer...”
Resh.
Professor Orden and I stepped past her into the tunnel.
I could see the point where Sera’s spell — a twisting mist of green — was blocking off the wind at the end of the tunnel.
Derek had moved beyond that point. His Emerald aura was flaring, and he was physically pushing his way through the gale. The rest of us didn’t have any hope of mimicking that feat, though, and it didn’t look like Sera was going to be able to hold the wind long enough for the rest of us to wait here safely.
The easy approach was probably to move us all out of the tunnel and way off to the side, but that meant that Derek would have to try to tangle with that room alone. He probably could survive it without difficulty, but we had no way of knowing if he’d find a way to stop the wind — which meant that it was a dead end if we didn’t all get through.
“Can you teleport us to the other side of that room?” I asked Orden.
Orden shook her head. “I need an anchor to teleport. In this case, I was able to teleport back to Jin’s location. I could get us to Derek, but we’d just be blown right back out of the room.”
“Derek, close the door!” Vera shouted.
“What?” He shouted back. “Did you say my name? I can’t hear you over the wind!”
Orden stepped closer to Sera’s wind barrier, while Sera continued to shiver. With my attunement active, I could see threads of green leaking out of her. It was rather disconcerting.
Professor Orden frowned at the barrier. “We shouldn’t close the door. Derek could get stuck in there. We don’t know that this door will reopen if we try.” She turned back around. “Sera, can you make an ice wall at the entrance to this tunnel?”
She shook her head. She was looking flushed, her breathing accompanied by a wheeze.
I needed to do something.