《Debts Come Due!》Day-49 What is that ticking noise?
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"Just tell me one thing, Is my son acting like the world must bow to him because I am a thing or because he thinks he has somehow earned the right to send others to their deaths bases only on the place he was born?"
"If you have to ask the answer is probably worse than what you are thinking of that is for sure," Sasha said while looking the noblewoman straight in the eyes. She was not going to even try and cover for the fool, he made his bed and could now lie in it.
After explaining what had happened to the noble she was asked what should be done with her son. She wanted her heir to no longer to be such a disappointment in this regard and was willing to pay a great deal if everyone was willing to take the boy inside with them. He would be an observer and say quietly unless there was a pressing need or he was asked for input. She wanted him trained on how to behave professionally and could not think of any better place for him to learn than by shadowing a group of professionals as they risked their lives.
That is not to say that he would be in any real danger as they had resurrection magic casts on him in case he was assassinated by a rival house. He would survive and be brought back but at a steep price of pain. All in all a small price to pay now then later when the magic would no longer be able to bring him back. It only really worked on children and after a cetin point anyone brought back with it was better off dead.
Only those worthy of a second chance would be brought back with an intact mind. There were many out there that hoped to prove they had the metal or come up with a way to preserve their minds even at the cost of their mortality. They often did not care if life was worth living so long as they got to live.
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"We agree on the condition that he will do exactly as I say when I say it. No muss, no fuss, just action." Sasha said and the look the rest gave the kid showed just how willing they were to see that resurrection magic work. If he so much as stepped a toe out of line then they were going to kill him in the most painful way they could just to see him die. It turns out that being disliked in a dungeon was a quick way to 'accidentally step into a trap' as it were.
"It's a trap!" Sasha said with no room for doubt. She had taken one look at how easy it was for them to progress and came to that conclusion. This was a trap and they were too far in to pull out. They either survived the jaws closing or died on their feet. it was time to get to work.
"Throw up more counterspells, I want this entire area to be a dead magic zone on my word, am I clear. Now get me, everyone who can find a hidden room, we need to go over this entire area to make sure we have not missed a single thing." Embrda took that as if it came from the creator of this place himself. He immediately went out of his way to try and spring it while they had the advantage.
"I am going to start mass animating the monsters that have already died so guard me for five minutes. It will be far easier to do it if I can remain still." Tea took the opportunity to throw some more fodder between whatever was going to try and kill them and see if anything funny was going on behind the scenes. Better to look now than to have it shoved in your face later as the saying goes.
"Anyone with even a scratch comes to me at once, I do not want to have to explain to your loved ones that you died of some obscure poison because you wouldn't bother a healer five feet away from you." Drassisa said and started healing everyone to at the very least check on their health and remove fatigue but she did find five cases of poison that would have driven them crazy when it met an unknown trigger. That was one card off the table and now she knew to look for it so she would also look for any possible triggers.
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"There was a second layer of traps, I think it was meant to go off when we had destroyed enough of the obvious ones. Obvious being subjective for some of them mind you. Now that I know there is more than it appears I am having the entire place swept over again. We are looking for several layers of traps down just in case. Do you think that is the trap or just one of the teeth coming for us?" Smithy asked while being covered in soot. He was patting out a small fire on his right shoulder. If the trap he found had gone off properly it would have turned the entire dungeon into a great big oven and roasted everyone alive. The second one he found when he knew what to look for would have boiled them.
"I would say good job but I fear that it is just one more of the teeth. This will not be so easy if I am not mistaken. Tell us everything that you have learned and leave out not a single detail that could be important." Sasha said with her war council in the background, they were the leaders of this expedition.
"Excuse me but I may have a suggestion." The boy said and now that he was showing some common courtesy everyone else was willing to hear him out, even if it was just to tell him how stupid an idea it was.
"What if assume there is no trap. That this is all a distraction from what will really kill us and we are just meant to die in the dungeon or die while spending all our time looking for the 'real' threat." He added after moments of thought.
It did not take long for that to go through everyone's minds and at first, they called him crazy but then it collectively hit them. This place was made by the mad mage. Sasha immediately ordered Drassisa to search everyone's minds for something that did not belong. It did not take her long to find it.
It was a noise, one that they could not physically hear but could still affect them all the same. It did not do anything obvious like make them insane though long enough exposure could make you see things. No, what it did was to make you make a mistake. Not a big one, just a single mistake when you could afford to make none. Say you are disarming a fire trap and you slip up. The trigger appears slightly farther right in your vision thin it actually is and you are engulfed in a raging inferno.
After finding this they took precautions to stop it. Then they looked and found that the traps would have repaired themselves. It was something they had missed. A single mistake that would have killed them all. All it would have taken was to leave the traps alone after disarming them and not using some magic to prevent the repair from happening for some time. That was all it would have taken for them to all die. The idiot had saved their lives and no one was happy about it.
Now it was time to push farther into the dungeon. Into the brink of death.
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