I apologize for the length of the delay in the release of this chapter, I had a hard time getting back online after moving into a new apartment. Thank you for your patience. This chapter was fun to visualize and I hope you enjoy the perversion of the Castlevania games I twisted to my own ends :).
At the top of the stairs they found a soldier resting against the crenelated wall next to the door. His blackened and smoking armor was partially melted, dented and scored from his climb up the Room of Gears the hard way. They could smell cooked meat and when he turned to look at them they couldn't figure out how he had survived so long. A good eighty percent of his face looked like somebody had held his head in a pot of boiling water. His goldish hair was burned and missing in patches and his left eye was burst and shriveled like a raisin crushed between one's fingers.
"Be careful, you'll never know what this place will throw at you next. I was jumping from one gear to the next when an enormous cloud of steam came up from below and caught me." Dyme spoke without thinking about it. "We should have known that steam wasn't so easily forgotten when we avoided it."
Damien elbowed him painfully in the ribs. "Ouch man, would you people quit doing that to me already?" Dante pulled a small crystal with the word Curaga engraved upon it out of his pouch and knelt before the soldier. "Can we at least cure you and get you back on your feet?"
"Don't waste your magic. I can feel it. I'm dead already. My heart just hasn't had the sense to stop yet. Besides with the way the security system is acting you'll need all of your healing spells and items for your own survival. Captain, I beg you, don't let the lady die here. It would be a severe injustice and I would be unable to enjoy my next life."
Faintly from the distance below they could hear the tiny crack of the faraway gunshots of the Gunblades carried by the security robots. Nearer at hand they could hear the jarringly discordant sounds of the armored feet of Soldier Heartless climbing the Room of Gears. The palace traps were, by their very nature, deadly to an invading force of living flesh. But the companions exchanged worried glances for they did not know if such things could stop creatures composed of the Darkness itself.
"Leave me. It will be a soldiers death, for in this condition they will not be able to take my heart. Farewell friends. May you survive long enough to teach these bastards a lesson they'll never forget. Me, I just hope to give them enough pause for them to hesitate to attack anybody again, or at least sit still long enough for them to learn their lessons from you in that regard."
Dante put the crystal away and stood. Stepping back he and Damien saluted the soldier about to make his last stand. Kira bowed to him out of respect causing tears of some unknown emotion to spring to his eyes. Dyme, not really knowing what to do, shuffled his feet and tried to be unobtrusive to the moment.
Tinker held out a small glass bottle stamped with the Gummi seal and filled with a dark ruby liquid which the soldier gratefully accepted. "Gummi Berri Juice. Its magic works differently and for different amounts of time for different creatures. But it gives humans strength, and a limited ability to bounce like the Gummi, for a few minutes. Maybe that few minutes will be enough for us to get the Lady Kira safely out of their reach." The soldier nodded solemnly to Tinker and stood as they entered the door. As the door closed they heard the tinkle of breaking glass and the soldier's final wordless challenge to a powerful and respected enemy.
They found themselves upon the threshold of an open bridge. It was wide enough that they need not worry about falling off the sides, but the traps were decidedly more troublesome. Parts of the bridge would flip over to cause whoever was standing atop them to drop into the abyss below. Assuring their deaths no matter what room they stopped in on the way down.
Other panels of the bridge would open up quite suddenly to reveal a short drop onto a strategically hung grating covered in jagged, dull blades and rusty bladed spikes. A few of these held grim tokens to their effectiveness though the old, rusted chains from which they hung seemed ready to break.
There were several apparently safe sections of the bridge but a few of these were questionable or suspect at best. No traps lined the walls and the floors didn't move to drop people to their deaths. But from the multiple grooves in the floor of a couple of these sections they weren't as safe as they seemed.
Walls hung from the ceiling above making the room into a rectangle rather than the open cylinder they had been dealing with thus far. And looking up provided clues the the damaged stonework of the bridge directly in front of them as they could see a precariously hung object that could only be described as a giant meat tenderizer. But the walls also made possible other insidious traps.
Along the walls between the opening and rotating sections of the bridge were either a series of randomly placed round holes or one to three vertical openings that could have hidden quite a few nasty surprises.
"Wow. This is nice. I want to get married in this room." Everybody looked at Dyme like he had finally lost what little sanity he possessed. Raising his hands in defeat he grinned in embarrassment. "Okay. I get it. Shutting up now."
Kira, knowing that the Gummi were legendary for keeping secrets, gently asked. "Tinker, are there any Gummi shortcuts through here?" Tinker stood in silence for a long moment sizing her up. Then apparently deciding he could trust her he finally spoke. "No. back home we have entire schools filled with rooms like this to train young Gummi to control their bounce. Please allow me to go first. I stand the greater chance of getting through unharmed and tripping the most traps while I do it. This way you will see how they are laid out so you can plan a way through for yourselves."
Seeing no objections forthcoming he turned to face the bridge and pulling another bottle of Gummi Berry Juice from his pouch planned the angle of his first bounce. He downed the bottle's contents and tossed it over the side of the bridge. He took one step forward and finished the move in a ten foot bounce with an odd muffled 'boing' which got him out of the way of the falling trap and placed him directly in front of the first set of holes in the wall.
He bounced again as the holes launched arrows at him with the audible twang of multiple old bow strings. There were also a few snaps as the aging trap systems were stressed beyond their worn down limits and a few of the crossbows broke under the strain of being reloaded.
He landed on a section of bridge which promptly spun and slapped him toward the left wall, which he bounced off of to hit the swinging wooden shaft of a bladed pendulum that sent him soaring over a pit that opened upon a set of spikes, even as the rotting wood of the pendulum shattered dropping the blade with a loud clatter to the ground.
No sooner had he landed on the far side of the pitfall than six circular saw blades emerged from the grooves in the floor and began moving from one end of their track to the other. The party of friends could hear the metallic grinding of the blades even from where they stood, which showed that the blades were no longer true to their tracks and the occasional sparks said that the traps were malfunctioning, and the blades were likely dull and rusted as well.
He bounced over the blades and through a field of arrows that launched as he passed through to land on another piece of the bridge that dropped away as he stood upon it. He bounced up and nearly avoided a ghostly grasping hand that came up from the hole and tried to drag him into the spiked pit. He broke free of its grasp and bounced through the final trap by a close margin, three inopportunely timed pendulums swinging so closely together that small sparks flew as they ground together.
About ten minutes later Kira stood at the final trap waiting, when all three of the pendulums were at the furthest point of their arch she stepped between them and jangled her earrings, creating a shield arch around her that prevented the blades from approaching while allowing her friends to walk through unscathed.
As they passed the final traps Dante released the magic keeping the ice across the holes in the walls in place. Since they had made it through they didn't really need to prevent the crossbows from firing upon them any more. The only tricky part had come when Damien had been knocked into one of the slicked walls by a trap that Tinker had been too small to set off. A stone disk on a giant spring had broken through the ice from the right and smacked into him, if not for his Keyblade he would have fallen. As it was he had been lucky not to have been injured by the uneven frozen sheet on the wall.
With them all on this side of the bridge they felt that it was time to move on once again.
