“Apprentices can be divided into two groups.

The reckless ones, hoping to unleash the unnatural energies they wield to overwhelm their opponent. They will evoke scorching flames threatening to burn man’s skin or chilling winds that make breathing painful. If lacking a support, they are not a big threat. Most of them will know three or four different spells and those who studied together would have a similar repository. Each further encounter with those having the same master would be easier. Dodge their spells, use the environment as protection. Even if they manage to score some hits with their spells, they would faster deplete their mana reserves than seriously injure those who adequately cultivated their body.

It is a second group that we need to be wary of. They wouldn’t ever try to fight alone, always preferring to hide behind the lines of warriors. Even if skills of their guards couldn’t be compared to the prowess of even an unskilled practitioner, it’s the apprentice’s support which makes them dangerous. He will wait for a moment your attention slips away, until you invest too much to attain the strike on your enemy, before unleashing their mana to make you lose your footing, restrain your movements, seal your sight or strength.

If you can’t close to the apprentice, resort to arrows or throwing weapons. Even if he is able to protect himself with spells, every spell he casts in his defence is one less he would be able to use against you.

Never forget that every apprentice slain in a combat today is one wizard less to fight against tomorrow.”

- an excerpt from the Blade; teachings of Lăoshī Tauric

„Let’s see what they are keeping here!” Sae moved towards crates and barrels laying near the wall. “After I start breaking their inner wards, we won’t have enough time.”

The containers stored inside that room were puzzling Sae since she first noticed them while they were deciphering notes. Something that was apparently valuable enough to keep it stored inside the vault, but not enough to be placed in its inner part. So either they didn’t have enough space there, or it was something that should be easily accessed by some of their retainers if needed. Both options were worth a try.

“Really? Do we have time for this?” Reria said. “What if someone decides to check the vault earlier?”

“Just a moment…” She began opening lids of containers. “Iron, copper, beer, some arrows… engraved ones, let’s take them, they might have some additional effect… some battered armours, old clothes… really? Junk that nobody wants to keep in their own room? Oh, spices, now that’s something we might try selling later… some mixtures, we can find out what they do later, let’s take them too…”

“I feel a little sorry for Silverfords…” Ion suddenly said, putting what Sae pillaged into his bag. “We were their guests, weren't we? And now, we are simply stealing from them…”

He felt a slight guilt for their actions. During their stay, he had some occasions to talk with the edler. The well-read man made a good impression on Ion. The whole family treated them very well during their stay.

Sae stopped searching through containers and looked at Ion strangely.

“Is stealing from them what really concerns you the most? Your traps could probably kill servants if they happen to trigger them.”

Ion was baffled.

“I never thought about this. When we prepared the wards, I simply focused on creating them, testing my skills…”

“Wizards…” the girl shook her head. “Far too often too careless with their actions…”

Sae continued after a moment, with a tinge of sadness in her voice:

“But to address your concerns, that’s the biggest problem with any infiltration. It is hard to not get too attached, to not try to understand the people you are spying and planning to betray…”

“Oh, cut that crap!” Reria interjected. „We are here only because they stole something from your friends, right? They are at fault of everything that happens because of that!”

“But the people who work for them… they might not even know anything about their superiors’ wrongdoings…”

The sudden revelation about the possibility of an innocent servant accidentally dying because of his traps in the apartment was a distressing thought for Ion.

‘When the titans wage their wars, it’s the powerless who die,’ he heard a pensive voice. ‘That’s simply the way of the world. You can try to protect them, but in the end, those who won’t reach further, who won’t learn how to defend themselves, will be simply swept by the ripples of those that yearn for power…’

“You know… it’s hard to not hear the rumours about Silverfords and their businesses here," Sae said. "Sure, they might have acted nicely because they wanted something from us, yet... extortion, drug dealings… well, the human trafficking part is dubious, but the rest of the gossips…”

“No matter their servants know or not, simply by serving them, they are supporting everything Silverfords represent,” hearing Sae’s remark about drug dealing, Reria immediately imagined Silverfords paying the dreamspark dealers to remove any people trying to hinder their businesses; killing families like hers. “If they have chosen to serve them without learning about their dealing, it’s their own fault.”

“Harsh. You aren’t the most empathic one...”

Reria scoffed.

With no more containers to inspect, Sae started examining the wards on and around the inner door. With everyone carefully observing the rogue at work, their earlier discussion abruptly ended.

Few minutes passed as the girl produced numerous small stones from her pockets and began inscribing them with symbols.

“What are you trying to achieve?” Reria finally asked.

“By placing my runes correctly I can rearrange the way mana is flowing in between theirs.”

“This is something similar to what I was doing with old wards in the garden,” Ion mused. “However, I can’t imagine altering something that complicated, already charged with mana and constantly working. With real spells inscribed somewhere inside and the runes here only responsible for relaying them, just a small mistake would be enough to activate everything.”

“Yeah, no pressure at all,” Sae shrugged. “The truth is, the array here is too advanced for me to completely disable it. It was within our expectations already. I should be able to delay triggering some of its parts and reduce the strength of the others. Hopefully for long enough for us to get out from here before edler’s device notices him that something is wrong.“

“A device?”

“If security measures used by nobles of Vrolan can be of any reference, his key is also enchanted so that it alerts him should someone enter into the inner part of the vault.”

Sae spent few more minutes rearranging the stones she had engraved on the floor, somehow glueing few of them to the walls before finally speaking again.

“I think this would be the most optimal combination. Now we really need to proceed quickly.”

She swiftly placed the last remaining stones in the places, then with a small brush began slightly altering runes in the room; extending few lines in some of them, slightly curving or straightening other parts.

Many of the runes she tried to modify immediately returned to their original shape, eliciting curses from the rogue, as she attempted to alter them once more, or tried with the others around them.

Looking at her quick and seemingly careless work, Ion expected the whole array to explode to their faces, however, nothing like this happened.

“Have you never considered becoming a runemaster?” Reria said, observing Sae’s work intently with Eldritch Sight. “I bet you could make a fine living out of it.”

Sae laughed as if she heard a good joke.

“Drawing all those symbols to make the mana contained within do something meaningful? Fill them with mana on my own? No way. I can only understand how the mana flows between them, nothing more.”

“Wait a moment...” Ion suddenly realised. “So you aren’t sure whether you disable the part responsible for alarming the edler?”

“Of course not. Do you expect a warder creating an array leaving a big rune saying ‘disable me first’ somewhere?”

“So you are not sure whether he will immediately know or not that we have entered?”

“Well, I’m trying to disable as big part of the array as possible without it getting unstable and activating itself… it’s just a matter of probability.”

“So you are just taking chances on this?” Reria was bewildered.

Sae sighed, not stopping her work.

“With practice, you began to identify more suspicious parts of arrays, which have to be prioritised when disabling,” she pointed on one of the runes she altered earlier. “Do you see that symbol resembling an angry murlock? I needed to add something between its arm and the rune representing drake’s wing. Thanks to that, the drake’s part of the ward would receive lesser amounts of mana… which should immediately activate it, taking mana from another part of the array. But as I have directed that mana towards this drunken gnome here, it won’t. The ward will think that everything is still all right, even without this part working anymore.”

“Murlock? Drake? Gnome? You must be kidding, right?” both Reria and Ion looked at the runes that Sae pointed at while explaining. They couldn’t believe what they heard.

“Haha, of course,” the rogue laughed flatly.

‘Wizards, why they are always trying to overcomplicate,’ she thought. ‘ If it works then it works, the end.’

“I will keep some tricks of the trade to myself. After all, I don't expect you to explain to me how exactly you are casting your spells, right?”

Ion and Reria didn’t seem really convinced, but let the matter go.

Soon the rouge finished and quickly picked the lock.

“Quickly, follow me. It’s hard to say how much time we have until the array repairs itself.”

They entered inside.

The corridor before them was dark and narrow, about twenty meters long. The rows of the door were on its both sides, eight of them on each side of the wall.

“It looks like they built this as a place to hold prisoners, before adapting it for a vault,” Ion said.

The doors were built from metal, with a small hole at the height of head which could be used to see inside or pass some small objects.

Sae stopped in front of the first pair of the door. Ion navigated the mote of light from his cantrip, trying to peek what is on the other side of them, yet the darkness was unaffected by the light source.

“Do you have any idea which one would be a correct choice?”

Reria and Ion shook their heads.

“Damn, trying to pick every one of them would take too long, but we don’t have a choice.”

Sae started preparing her lockpicks when Reria suddenly caught her hand.

“What are you doing?”

Sae and Ion looked at her quizzically.

“Trying to pick a lock?”

“You might have broken through the earlier wards so I am willing to trust in your experience, but surely trying to stick a lockpick into the middle of the glyph drew on the wall surely isn’t the right thing to do.”

“What?”

Ion focused on the door in front of them, and after few seconds he was sure that it shifted before his eyes. Just a little longer and the entrance disappeared revealing the glyph Reria told them about.

“Well… that was something I didn’t expect,” Sae said, as she too managed to disbelieve the illusion.

"Illusion layered with a faint compulsion to try opening the door... it's a pity we don't have time to investigate that glyph..."

Now when Ion knew what to look for, he was able to see that only the fifth and the furthermost pairs of doors were real, all remaining turned out to be traps.

“Now we only have four rooms to check, follow me!” Reria commented cheekily.

Trusting in her Eldritch Sight’s ability to spot magical traps, Reria moved forward.

“Careful, a pressure plate!” Sae shouted.

*Click* Reria immediately stopped, yet too late.

“Argh!” an arrow shooting from the wall hit her in the arm, “Aw!”

Sae immediately removed it and poured a potion on the wound.

“The wound isn’t deep; the armour stopped most of the impact. Hopefully, it wasn’t long enough for the poison to affect you,” the rogue scrutinized the arrow tip. “Now, could you please stay behind me?”

They sidestepped over few other traps. Nothing too hard to avoid once Sae told them what to look for.

“It looks like Silverford hadn’t wanted to make retrieving anything from inside more bothering than necessary,” Sae said as they progressed. “The spells on the vault’s door were probably its main protection. Still, if not for Reria, we would have been screwed by that illusion spell.”

Finally, they’ve reached the first pair of the door.

Sae scrutinized the ones on the left.

“In Vrolan, they usually had better security measures in noble's estates. It looks as if only a variant of an Arcane Lock is closing the door. Nonetheless, it will take a while to break through it.”

Ion looked at the runes creating the ward and nodded. He was familiar with some of them. Given some time he should be able to break through it even on his own.

"So the main difficulty was realising which doors were real..."

“Look at all those weapons inside…” Sae was gazing through the door hole and salivating. “Some of them is engraved, we have to break inside! I hope that you still have some space in that bag of yours.”

“Guys, I guess that I’ve found what we were looking for,” Reria called them. She was looking through the other door. Most of the room was filled with various sculptures and paintings, but near one of the walls stood a shelf with some books. Ion immediately recognised the one they were searching for.

They forced Sae to turn towards Reria’s door.

“Eh, I guess we start with this door,” she said sadly.

“Should I try to open the other door?” Ion offered.

Sae seemed to fight with herself.

“No,” she finally shrugged, “It isn’t the best place to learn how break wards stealthily, without accidentally triggering the main array. But with this attitude, we still might have a chance to make a good thief out of you one day.”

The rogue smiled and began working on the door.