Chapter 248: Stigweard Graggs Legacy (1/2)
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A/N: Hello, everybody. As a number of you might know, Philippines was recently hit by a devastating Typhoon — Typhoon Ria, locally known as Odette. It has racked up a sickening death count that has long past climbed up to triple-digits. But what I didn't know was that Ria was the 15th Typhoon that hit Philippines this year.
Millions of people are affected, hundreds of thousands people were made to evacuate their homes, essentially uprooting their lives.
So, I urge those who have the means, please donate to the relief funds to help those in dire need of any help.
One of the relief funds you can donate to: [ new-donate (dot) ayalafoundation (dot) org]
]
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Quinn stretched his body — touching his toes with the opposite hands, arching his spine back, twisting his waist, and all the works. He looked at his feet, the toes right at the edge of the line that separated between the room from the safe solid floor and the vast field of cubes dividing the floor that might as well be called landmines.
He bent forward and rubbed his legs below his knees to scratch the phantom itch in the places his legs were pierced last time he was in the third room of the Architect's Vault.
Quinn cracked his neck and took a step onto the first cubical tile, and unlike the last time, nothing happened. The tip of his lips curled up ever so slightly. He looked down and saw the small hole in the tile — he had pocketed the cylinder shot at him the last time.
”If the material isn't reinserted,” he said, smirking, ”then it's not going to reset.” He took another step forward with his eyes on the next tile, which now had two holes as he had yet again pocketed the two cylindrical projectiles last time around.
It was the next step Quinn was worried about. He looked to the opposite side of the room, and he was standing right in front of the exit door. A straight path laid in between them — it was the shortest path he could take to get to the door.
It's the most obvious path, thought Quinn. Anyone with a sound mind would want to take the shortest path in a trap-laden area. There was no point in taking another route, hoping to face an easy path because the traps became increasingly difficult as he would move away from the entry door and walk towards the exit door. It had been proved by the amalgamation of his previous experience — he had faced tiny cylinder projectiles as he had tried to go deeper into the room and had been shot with small circular pellets when he had hobbled back — both of those tiles were just near the entry door.
But this was the Architect who had designed this place, and it might be just him, but Quinn didn't trust the creator a bit. Maybe it was because he had a name and a face to rant on that Quinn was channeling everything wrong onto Stigweard Gragg.
”Alright,” said Quinn, wiggling his body to get loose, ”just like planned. Need to be quick and strong.”
He took another step and stepped onto the next tile, and immediately, like a bolt of lightning descending from the heavens to strike the earth, a baton-sized rod shot from the ceiling. Quinn had only a split second to look up before the rod was near him.
A red screen ballooned up in front of his eyes, and Quinn watched as the screen stretched towards him as the rod tried to tear through. Quinn raised his hands, and the red flexible tarp-like screen faded for the stone-rod fell into his hands.
Quinn injected his magic into the rod and nodded, ”I knew it. I knew it; he had a reason for that mindless labor. Thank god it had meaning.”
He recognized the stone in his hand. It was the same type as one of the hundreds of material cubes he slogged through.
”Ugh, this is going to be difficult,” Quinn ruffled his hair. He held the tip of the rod with one hand while the other held onto the shaft. After a few seconds, Quinn pulled on the tip, and it came breaking off from the rest of the rod.
He dropped the rest of the shaft onto the ground and watched as the rod turned into a blob and sunk into the ground. Quinn looked up, and as per the rules of the room, nothing was shot at him.
A sigh escaped him as he pocketed the tip he separated using transmutation. The specially made stone — a product of alchemy — was complicated to transmute because of the complex physical structure, and it was okay with objects of smaller size, but when an entire column was falling over his head or an enormous mass of stone suddenly launching towards him out of nowhere, it would get difficult to maybe cut a portion off.
”Nothing I can handle,” said Quinn, clearing his throat.
He stepped forward and depressed a tile, triggering a trap. This time the rods didn't come from the sky but from the floor. Four rods emerged from four tiles a distance from him like something coming out of the water and drilled towards him.
Quinn raised a hand and a cutting whistle like a screech as his magic cut down on the momentum. He raised his hand, and a rod floated towards him while the other three fell to the ground. Once again, he transmuted a chunk off before letting the rest sink into the ground.
Quinn took another step without hesitation, and maybe he should've had some hesitation. The second the tile depressed, and abruptly Quinn found himself sinking into the ground — into liquid.
”Shi—”
Quinn flapped around, but a six-tile area around him had turned into liquid stone, and he couldn't find a place to hold. He tried to float, but it was like quicksand as he sunk, but unlike quicksand, the sinking didn't stop after he had displaced his weight. He raised his hand above, futilely trying to grab onto something, but alas, there was nothing, and soon, his wrist, hand, and then fingers disappeared into the floor.
The liquid stopped sloshing around, and from the outer boundary of the liquid pool, the stone started to solidify, and the cube pattern began to reappear.
But before the liquid could completely turn back to normal flooring, an air bubble rose to the top, soon a gurgle of them followed, and the entire liquid stone started to stir. Then breaking out from the viscous stone-turned-liquid came, a top of a sphere made from spinning air, sending out splashes of liquid.
The sphere of air rose from the liquid; the air spun so fast that it turned solid, and not a drop of liquid entered the sphere. Inside the sphere floated Quinn, his face set into stone, his lips pressed into a line, only his eyes glowed a deep shade of purple.
He looked down and jabbed a hand towards the liquid, and a blob of liquid stone floated out from the pool. Quinn looked ahead, and the air sphere flew forward outside the boundary of the liquid pool on the next tile (skipping six tiles that had turned to liquid.)
The sphere disappeared, putting him down on the floor, and the moment the tile depressed, the liquid turned solid and set off the next trap.
Two hands rose from the tile below, and ten cold fingers wrapped Quinn's ankles. Immediately multiple chains with hands at the end shot towards his hands once again gripped their stoney fingers around his wrist, forearms, elbows, and upper arms.
Purple eyes turned towards the ceiling to see a depressed ceiling tile while feeling the grips around his arms and legs turn firmer by the second and the arm chains pulling his arms apart — they weren't going to stop until his body was into parts or his arms were separate from his body.
Two giant, waist-level, circular blades appeared from the ground as two adjacent pathways revealed themselves, crossing below Quinn's feet for the circular blades with jagged saw teeth to pass through his body. The blades started to spin rapidly and began to move towards him from his sides.
Quinn now had his arms spread wide, with joints about to enter a pain stage. He blankly stared at the incoming circular blades. He tugged his right arm, and chains snapped before they could even groan, he looked to his other hand and once again jerked, and his arms were.
He didn't move from his spot — the path of the blades — and instead stared at the liquid blob that he had pulled from the liquid poll. A blob stilled, and a layer of ice covered it before the liquid was entirely encapsulated in ice.
After Quinn pocketed it, he started to pull off the hands clutching his body — all of them tried to clasp his hands, but Quinn threw all but one away that he pocketed.
Quinn looked down, and the hands gripping his ankles turned into goo. The blades were a foot away from him when Quinn stepped ahead to the next tile. The next tile suddenly rose in the form of a cuboidal column, but before anything happened, it exploded into bits with a yellow light covering the blast.
Quinn watched the point-blank explosion behind his shield, and when the dust settled, a vortex of wind flew above the stump of the blasted pillar with chunks of debris trapped inside the vortex. He beckoned the vortex, and it dropped a handful of stone into his hand, which again froze into a block of ice that once again into his expanded pockets.
Quinn stepped over the crude stump onto the next tile.
A 3x3 cube tile area with Quinn standing in the middle disappeared and revealed a pitfall of around twenty feet with a bed of stone spikes waiting for someone to fall in give them the drink of blood they desired. Quinn glanced down; purple glowed in his eyes, and the entire twenty-feet pit became a twenty-feet long column of ice.
He stepped over to the next tile, and the entire room started to shake — hard enough to register high on the Richter Scale. Quinn's eye narrowed as his balance began to stagger, coming close to step on another tile or even fall on multiples of them at a time. A pulse of magic pumped into his body, and his physical attributes rose up on the charts, and he stood his ground, but even that wasn't enough as the room started to shake more and more, so Quinn did the logical thing and stepped forward.