How hard could going upward be?
Pretty darn hard, it turned out.
I managed to blast us into the wall, rather than upward.
As we thudded against the wall, though, Marissa formed a blade around her good hand and slammed it into the wall. It made a hole.
She buried her arm in deeper as we began to slip back downward, then held us both in place with just that one arm. I had to cling to her, since she wasn’t in any position to hold onto me.
I was worried her arm was going to break — it certainly would have if she’d tried this on her way down. Fortunately, the ring’s slow falling function was still active, and she still had her own strength-enhancing ring on.
Still, holding us in place with one arm couldn’t have been comfortable.
“Don’t let go,” she instructed me.
“That’s pretty obvious, yeah.”
I’d like to say I came up with some kind of brilliant solution, but in reality, we huddled there against the wall for a solid ten minutes before Patrick finally managed to levitate himself all the way down to us, then made a gust of wind that lifted us back up the shaft.
“Sorry for taking so long. We had to fight the monsters that appeared up there.”
When we finally arrived back on solid ground, we found that the room was once again lit, and a dozen monster corpses were pinned to the walls with spears of bone.
A few of them also looked like they’d been burned.
One of them somehow had been crushed with the single remaining sphere. I wondered how they’d managed that one, but for the moment, Mara and I were both too busy recovering from our terror to say almost anything.
Marissa and I scrambled as quickly as possible away from the edge of the pit, then just sat down with our backs to the wall, next to each other. Breathing. Just breathing.
It took me another minute to realize that aside from the monsters, we had one new addition to the room — a human-sized cube with a question mark written on it, near the door. It had a crease in the middle and a keyhole.
Patrick lifted up a key which was also shaped like a question mark. “Want to see what’s in there?”
“No.” Marissa and I responded immediately.
“Aww.”
I sighed. “Give us five minutes.”
They gave us a good hour. With the clock stopped and the monsters dead, there were no further threats here. No obvious ones, anyway.
I still felt incredibly nervous about the box. I didn’t trust anything in this spire.
I drew my sword before Patrick moved to the keyhole, and Sheridan set up a cage of bone around most of the box — just in case it exploded.
Patrick insisted on being the one to open it. Sheridan left just enough room in her bone cage for him to stick his hand in and turn the key.
There was a click, then nothing. No traps.
Patrick extracted his hand, then pushed on the top half of the box. It fell open.
We couldn’t see through the bone wall, but Patrick could see through the hole he’d reached through.
His eyes widened.
“We’re going to be rich.”
Most of the contents of the box turned out to be coins. Gold, silver, and copper.
Money was always good, but the items inside interested all of us more.
There were six of them, presumably because the spire was designed for six people.
The first was a spear, leaned up against one of the walls of the box. It looked like a single piece of wood that had grown naturally into a spear shape, rather than cut. At the center, the bottom, and the tip of the spear, blue gleaming crystals were embedded in the wood, and light seemed to radiate outward from them like veins.
The second was a shirt of greenish metallic leaves. It proved to be both lightweight and extremely resilient. Also, shiny.
The third was a pair of completely ordinary looking boots. They looked a little small for me.
The fourth was a hatchet made out of polished blue stone with a leather grip.
The fifth was a classic longbow with a dozen golden runes etched into the wood.
The last was an unlabeled potion bottle filled with blue liquid.
All six of them glowed with Citrine-level auras.
“This might actually be worth almost dying.” Mara leaned forward, focusing on inspecting the weapons.
Sheridan looked at me. “Can you identify items yet?”
“Only a little. I can cast a Lesser Identify spell, but it doesn’t tell me much.”
After we confirmed there were no hidden traps in the box, we extracted the items and laid them down. I spent a few minutes inspecting the runes I could find on each, as well as casting the Lesser Identify spell on each of them.
Lesser Identify just told me the specific mana type of the strongest enchantment on each.
The axe and spear, as well as the armored shirt, had enhancement as their strongest magic type. That was unsurprising; enhancement was the standard mana type for both making items harder to break and for making weapons hit harder.
The bow and the boots had air.
The boots were almost definitely levitation boots, which would have saved us a tremendous amount of trouble if we’d had them a few minutes earlier. That was probably also an element of the goddess’ sense of humor.
The bow I was less sure about, but air magic to guide arrows or make them fly faster made sense.
I couldn’t get any results from the bottle, presumably because the liquid was the magical part.
I didn’t try casting Lesser Identify on the liquid because I knew some liquids — like the primer I’d taken from the fountain — reacted to magic being cast on them. I’d have to find a better way to figure out what it was for.
We decided we’d need to figure out what the items did in detail before we split them up permanently, but that we’d hand out some temporary assignments for the moment.
The boots only fit Marissa, so she took those and shoved them in her pack.
Patrick took the spear. He already had a magic weapon, but he said having one with more reach would be useful.
Sheridan took both the hatchet and the bow. As the only actual Citrine-level person there, it made sense for them to have a larger share of the spoils.
I threw on the shirt of leaves. It required moving my silver phoenix sigil to my pants and taking off my other shield sigil entirely to prevent them from overlapping, but it was a Citrine-level defensive item. Marissa didn’t want it — she was worried about it ruining her mobility — so I was the next best candidate.
I stored the potion in the Jaden Box.
We counted up the gold pieces — there were only twenty of those — and split them evenly. It was still a lot of money.
There were so many other coins that I just shoveled them all into the Jaden Box and stored them to distribute later.
When we were done and recovered, we headed to the doorway with the up arrow and opened it.
On the other side of the door, there was a glowing portal, rather than a stairway.
I glanced at Sheridan.
“Not unusual. There’s usually only one physical stairway on each floor. You’re stepping in a teleporter any time you go into another part of the spire, anyway. This is just a fancier version.”
I nodded at that. “I’ll go in first.”
Mara stepped up next to me. “Right behind you.”
I stepped into the portal.
When my vision cleared, I was in the center of another room.
It was pure white, and mostly empty, save for a pair of regal-looking doors about twenty feet away from me.
I glanced behind me, finding another door of the more routine variety on the opposite side of the room. The ceiling was a high one, probably dozens of meters up.