They made good time through the forest, reaching the entry point to the underground ruins as the sun settled in directly overhead. It was a small, raised stone platform, teleportation runes carved into the hard surface, miraculously not overgrown or worn by age and weather. The dormant magic lingered, waiting to be used.
"And here we are." Mint made a pleased sound, putting her compass up. "Elroy's ruins and atelier. Let's go."
Rue nodded. Mint vanished in a flash of blue light before he stepped up to the platform and triggered it again. Blue flared before his eyes, followed by the floaty, disorienting sensation of teleporting before solid ground was under his feet once more. There was also light, without any visible source. More magic, no doubt.
"I wonder if he carved through this marble, or if it was here already," Mint mused, placing her hand on the wall. All around them was green marble, shot through with black veins or some other material. The floor, the walls and the high ceiling were all the same material, seamless as if he'd found a vein in the ground and simply hollowed it out. "What do Klaus' notes say?"
Rue took a moment to fetch the papers out of his pack, smoothing them out and scanning them. "They say we have to find the parts for a series of floating platforms that will take us to the next level."
"Lovely." Mint rolled her eyes. "Always some task to go through. As if the maze isn't enough."
"Maybe it won't be too bad," Rue said.
Three hours of wandering the maze later and he was regretting that statement. Not that he believed in jinxes, but it hadn't helped anything and had put Mint in a bad mood. To make things worse, the ruins were overrun with gudons, stocky bipedal lizards with an orange colored rubbery hide that resisted the Arc Edge's strikes. They almost waddled when they walked, but were capable of spinning surprisingly fast to attack with their tails. Their primary attack was far more dangerous. Rue wasn't sure what he'd been expecting when the first one lumbered towards them with a gaping mouth, but spewing a stream of fire at them like some sort of wingless dragon wasn't it.
Mint's knee-jerk reaction to blast anything that got too close to her came in handy more than once as they trekked through the seemingly endless halls of green marble, especially the few times they ran into a king ant. A mutant variety closer to the size of a small horse than an actual ant, still possessing similar pincers it snapped menacingly at them between bouts of spitting acid. Rue pointedly did not get in close near its head, preferring to strike at its massive abdomen.
Despite both creatures having potent attacks, it really wasn't so much that they were individually threatening as there were so many of them. The branching pathways they traveled through would have three or four gudons between every split, and at least one king ant would be scuttling nearby. By the time they found themselves in an area that looked different, they had fought a few dozen of the things.
They reached a dead end with a drop-down, hopping down carefully and entering the new area even deeper underground, the air stale and slightly cooler. Heading down the hall, they found a small room with the first platform piece, marked with one of the runes Klaus had drawn in his notes. There were six of them, and it took traveling through a lot of monster infested tunnels into dead end rooms to find them all.
When they'd finally collected them all and traveled back to the beginning of the section, they formed perfect stair steps up to a slanted hall. Rue looked at it warily, not sure what to make of it. "This is strange."
"Very," Mint agreed, walking up it a ways. "It's closed in, I can't feel any breeze from anywhere."
"There's doorways somewhere," Rue said. "I doubt we're at a true dead end."
"Well you'd hope not." She wasn't counting on it in this mess of a maze Elroy had designed; he clearly hadn't wanted anyone finding his atelier. "You'd think he'd have a shortcut somewhere. A teleportation stone or something."
"Or another entry somewhere bypassing it entirely," Rue said. He paused as they reached a sudden block in their path – a boulder frozen in time. Nothing holding it in place. His pulse skipped. "Mint, don't touch that."
"I'm just checking it, geez, don't panic so much," Mint said. She tapped the boulder with her hand, barely a touch, and there was a ripple through the air.
Something creaked.
Rue swore and turned on his heel. "Run!"
Mint broke into a sprint, hurrying down to the nook she'd seen a few paces away. She heard Rue cry out behind her, but didn't stop until she was safely pressed into the indentation and watched the boulder roll by. "Damn... Rue?"
He'd been hit.
Mint cringed, going back to take a look at him. Rue had pressed back against a shallower indent in an effort to get away from the advancing boulder, and had barely managed to protect himself. He'd crumpled to the ground by the time she reached him, bruised, scraped and breathing shallowly against the pain. Mint knelt, checking his pulse – still strong. She rolled him over, taking a look at the injuries. They were largely superficial, the sort his healing would take care of. It would probably be a while until he woke up, time she didn't want to wait around.
She'd just... check ahead. He'd be fine, right? It was Rue.
With only a brief, easily ignored pang of guilt, Mint got up and left him to recover. She'd come back for him after she'd seen what was ahead.
The boulder had broken down a wall at the other end of the hallway, which led her down further into Elroy's ruins. It was a bizarre combination of platform hopping and trying to ignore the spaces in between that dropped down into a bottomless pit. Worse still, there was the increasing pressure of power in the air. Something nearby, either some creature or perhaps a dormant trap waiting to be sprung. As she reached the seeming end, she felt something trigger and it occurred to her, briefly, that of course it could very well be both.
Another guardian. If Cadomon, a lesser magician, had one guarding his atelier, naturally Elroy would have one as well.
The beast came flying out of the pit, landing with a clatter of bone. It was skeletal, like something long since dead and dug up out of the ground, and made a strange shrieking sound when its jaw opened. Maybe it had died, and Elroy's magic kept it animated.
The thought made her shudder with revulsion, bringing her hoops up defensively. Whatever. She was sending it back to the graveyard.
It moved clumsily, all joints and bones without the finesse of muscle and tendon to smooth out the motions. But at its size, it didn't matter. It didn't need finesse. It had reach and weight and –
"Holy!" Mint dodged a sudden blast of billowing fire, staring incredulously at the guardian. "Where did that even come from?"
Magic, obviously, was the only answer to it and one she could have done without. Elroy's guardian wasn't quite as big as Cadomon's, but it was still a menace and this time she didn't have Rue's backup. Not that she was sure his ax would have done much good against a creature made of bone. Maybe he could hack it apart at the joints.
But Rue was likely still unconscious and not in any position to help her. She'd have to get through this fight herself.
Hoops spinning around her fist, Mint charged a small attack to test its resistance. The first energy attack seemed to slide off harmlessly, but the second caught it in the mouth just as its jaw dropped to let out another fiery blast. The resulting explosion nearly knocked her off the platform she was standing on, momentarily blinding her. Another deafening screech said it hadn't taken the guardian out, but as her vision cleared she saw it had done damage.
Well now, that might be handy. If she could do it without knocking herself off...
She charged another attack, magic brightening around her hand, ready to be fired. She waited for the perfect moment, biding her time before she would be able to strike. When its jaw opened, power just beginning to glint in its jaws, she fired. The resulting explosion knocked her off her feet, skidding to the edge and almost going right over it. When her vision cleared, however, she saw the risk had paid off: the guardian was reduced to a pile of inanimate bones.
Sighing in relief, she got up and dusted herself off before looking around. She found what looked like the final platform, stepping onto it and being lifted into the next space.
