6-5b: The Tests II

The point of their attention changed suddenly when the three remaining flames within the room gathered themselves together, floating their way along the roof of the cavernous room and through the archway that had appeared within the otherwise solid rock wall to fully light the new area beyond. From what they could now see of it, it was another cavern-like room that was similar to the one they were already in. From their current position, though, they could make no further analysis of its condition.

"Come on, let's follow them, before the wall starts to close," Sakura suggested, starting her way quickly, albeit carefully, into the next room. She made very sure to stay close to the walls and out of any potential danger.

They found that the next room contained more of the same rocky surface lining the walls and roof, the same as their previous location, except for an area of marble tiling that was lining the entire floor up to about two meters before the wall they had entered from. Set into that tiling, on the left side of the room, rested a Greek-style pedestal with a gray, marquis-cut crystal floating above it. Directly across from that display, on the opposite side of the room from where that pedestal sat, floated a metallic, almost mechanized orb. It was inset with some kind of ruby-like eye that was staring right at the pedestal's crystal.

Busy as he was taking mental notes of the room's physical features, Syaoran didn't notice the archway behind him beginning to re-materialize into solid rock until it was too late. Reacting instinctively, he charged shoulder first into the reforming rock wall, though he only received a rather painful whack as the force of the tackle bounced him back hard into the room.

He hid the pain well enough that those around him showed little concern for it, and vented his growing annoyance by stating, "And again we're trapped. What, are we going to be herded about like animals in this place?"

Eriol pushed his glasses back up into place, noting Syaoran's angst, "Until we can come up with a viable method of directly combatting the spirit's true form, we can do nothing but to keep going as it wills. On a side note, it would also seem that our wrong answers will be counted collectively against us."

They all took note to his meaning, finding that there still remained just the three flames from before. This only served to shoot Syaoran's feelings of annoyance even higher than they needed to be, causing him to push his way past everyone and towards the plaque that was inset into the wall to their left.

"Let's just get this over with," he growled as he went.

They all gathered around him to read the plaque for themselves, though Sakura made light of its words aloud, "Silence is the saving grace, yet holds the key against the warding light."

"This one could be a bit more difficult," Tomoyo commented, before scanning the room for any potential clues, though she failed to find any. For starters, she wasn't seeing anything in resemblance to a key or any form of light, unless their trio of flames counted as such.

"I wish Yamazaki were here right now..." Sakura muttered, "He's always so smart when it comes to puzzles and riddles."

"When he and his partner are not trying to tell another one of their stories, anyway," Tomoyo added, though she made a point of aiming her all-knowing smile at Eriol as she spoke.

Eriol caught on to her grin rather quickly, "Tomoyo, I'm hurt. Do you truly believe me to not be honest?"

"Only when you're with Yamazaki," she replied.

Sakura glanced back and forth curiously between the two, before posing her question to Tomoyo, "Huh? Why wouldn't they be honest with us?"

Between his still-throbbing shoulder, and the extremely inane conversation that was going on (although, it was mostly just the throbbing), it was enough to drive Syaoran's annoyance of their predicament to its breaking point. To that end, he turned away from the others and decided to scout out the contents of the room instead.

Testing the marbled floor gingerly with one foot, Syaoran finally braved a full step onto the smoother ground, though he paused briefly to gauge any potential backlash to his actions. But then his own visual scans of the room were revealing as little as Tomoyo's had, and his limited ability to detect things with his mind was also revealing nothing of use. The fact that even Eriol had yet to say anything suggested that they wouldn't be able to just sense out the purpose of this room. Meanwhile, his memory of the various cards that his friends held wasn't coming up with anything either. Although the Silence card did come to mind, he was, for the moment, at a complete loss as to what it could possibly do to help them.

Stepping carefully across the room, he first made his way towards the floating orb. He walked about it, tapped it, eyed it closely, and even tried to push it from its position. Not only did the orb refuse to budge, but it also revealed neither hidden buttons nor inscriptions, or anything else for that matter that would have shed some light on their predicament. He then turned about, making his next move towards the crystal that floated above the pedestal.

Finally attentive of the ongoing search, at this point, Eriol began studying Syaoran's movements as carefully as Syaoran was studying the decorations within the room. Keeping in mind what they were supposedly searching for, Eriol spoke up, "If we are looking for a key, it is likely one of these two objects. The other will then probably be the warding light. But how does silence fit into all of it?"

Syaoran finished circling his way about the pedestal, only to find nothing odd with the neither the crystal nor the pedestal itself. Turning towards the others, he leaned into the pedestal with one hand while giving the crystal a rather harsh, sidelong glance, before starting his way back to them.

"If there's something to do with these things, I'm not seeing it," he told them plainly.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tomoyo saw a bright flash of red, and turned her gaze to find that the mechanical orb was staring right at Syaoran. Its previously dull, ruby-red eye was now glowing something fierce.

"Watch out, behind you!" she cried sharply, but by then it was far, far too late.

Syaoran spun about swiftly at her cry, his eyes catching the tail end of the energy discharge from the orb as it slammed clean into him. It sent him flying across the room faster than the human eye could follow, crashing his body none too gently into the wall nearby the plaque and forcing a loud wail of pain as he struck. He landed back to the ground in a crumpled heap soon after, unmoving and deathly silent, which had everyone fearing the worst.

Sakura was already by his side before anyone else had even thought to move, cradling his head in one hand while attempting to shake him to his senses with the other, "Syaoran! Syaoran, are you okay!? Come on, wake up! Please, be okay!!"

It would have been difficult to explain the level of profound relief that she felt – and everyone else, for that matter – when his eyes soon fluttered open, his amber gaze casting about dizzily as he gradually worked his way back into the world of the conscious. Once his senses had gathered up enough, though, he became acutely aware of an excruciating pain in his right arm, which helped to awaken him completely. He grabbed at that arm as soon as he realized its condition, though the haste with which he had moved only served to worsen the agony, forcing a grunt out of him as he squeezed his eyes shut against it.

"Are you all right?" Sakura asked him again anxiously, just barely holding herself back from outright panicking. She was caught between confirming that he was indeed conscious (let alone alive), and wanting to see what was wrong with his arm.

"Not quite... I... think it's broken," he told them haltingly, forcing the words through various gasps for air that the pain forced him to take.

Eriol pushed Sakura aside politely as he kneeled down beside Syaoran, and took the injured arm to hand as gently as he could. Though he could already see the unnatural bending of the limb with his own eyes, Eriol felt compelled to sense out its actual condition with his inner senses. In the end, though, his magic merely confirmed what everyone could all already see: that Syaoran's arm was indeed broken, and badly at that.

"Your humerus bone has been snapped almost clean in half," he finally informed them, "I suspect that you impacted against a sharp, convexed formation somewhere on the wall. The two halves of your arm are just barely remaining connected, mostly due to the muscle tissue that's pulling the arm back in on itself. However, there is also a great deal of heavy fracturing along the upper half of the bone, and I fear that the fracturing may yet spread. You will need medical attention immediately, once we are out of this place."

His inspection complete, Eriol stepped aside to allow Sakura her spot again, giving her the chance to do what little she could to comfort the pain, even though she herself knew that it would be far from enough. Standing back up to his feet, Eriol took in a calming breath in order to speak further. He feared that his next words would sound cold, yet he needed to speak them all the same, "Still, I think that you should be glad that this is all you received. Trapped as we are within the spirit's natural domain, it could have done much worse – and may still, yet. We should all be glad that this 'ward' chose to use an impactive energy discharge, instead of one that would have incinerated or pierced."

He then looked up towards the roof of the room, noting an increased darkness, "To make matters worse, it would seem that we answered incorrectly again. Another flame has vanished."

With Sakura's help (and with a lot of careful maneuvering on his own part), Syaoran eventually managed to return to his feet, though she remained protectively attached to his good arm once he had steadied himself. Worried as she must have been for him, he made no move to detach himself from her, and in fact welcomed the support. Instead, he put more of his concern towards the two remaining flames at the far corners of the room, as well as to the mechanical orb that had attacked him.

Then he felt an extreme output of magical power, and turned sharply – a move protested strongly by his arm – to find Eriol cloaking himself in a great deal of raw magical energy.

"You're not intending to go out there, are you? Are you crazy!?" he shouted.

"As there are many who would still argue that I am just another Clow Reed, you could say that I am crazy. However, we will accomplish nothing by just standing around and thinking, and since I will not allow Sakura or Tomoyo to be placed in danger, that leaves only me to attempt this."

Eriol's half-humored attempt at joking aside, Syaoran was forced to see his reasoning, and ceded to the man's wishes.

From the very moment that Eriol had stepped onto the tiled area of the room, he felt the ruby eye of the orb turn to watch him intently, despite that it was currently staring straight ahead into the crystal before it. He made his way slowly to the center of the room to step into the orb's visual path of the crystal, and with some minute traces of the power that he wore about him, he began to sense about the surfaces and interiors of the two objects. There had to be something that he could learn of their purpose or design, regardless of whether such information ended up being useful or not.

On the outside, his powers revealed nothing more than that which could already be seen visually: a ruby-set orb composed of mechanical parts, and a salt-based, marquis-cut crystal hovering silently above a normal stone pedestal. What struck him as odd, however, was that the interior of these objects were comprised entirely of natural stone and absolutely nothing else. While this wasn't exactly all that strange for the crystal and the pedestal, the fact that the mechanical orb was also made all of stone was intriguing, at the very least. He hummed inquisitively to himself, as such.

The magical wards that Eriol had weaved about himself picked up on the orb to his right before it even had a chance to charge its attack. This advantage allowed him that split second of time he required to dodge its assault, rolling forward and out of harm's way. The resulting discharge left a small crater against the wall just behind the floating crystal, which later left him honestly wondering at what Syaoran must have felt.

He rolled up to his knees, ready to pounce out of the way again, and in the effort took in an audible inhalation of air to steady himself. Again, the orb reacted and fired upon Eriol's position, missing by only mere moments as Eriol's magic once more gave him the advantage. Springing into the air, he performed a roll in mid-jump to land upright, yet with that landing was forced to evade a third attack as the orb's senses triggered to his heavy landing.

Escaping the boundaries of the tiled floor's reach, he braced himself against an over-calculated jump, pushing off of the wall and just barely managing to catch himself from stumbling back into the tiling behind him. He cursed himself for being careless, though he knew that he couldn't have known the full meaning of the riddle until just now, anyway.

Tomoyo thought to ask after Eriol's condition, seeing as he had just been assaulted with three separate attacks that had put Syaoran out of commission with just one. Her words were instead cut off as a sharp cry from Sakura turned their attention to the far side of the room, with all of them noting a further loss of luminescence within the room. Just one flame remained to them, now.

"I apologize," Eriol said finally, after catching his breath, "that was reckless of me. Now we only have one chance left to us to persevere through an untold number of puzzles."

"Don't worry about it," Sakura told him, "More importantly, are you all right?"

"I will be fine. The orb didn't manage to strike me, as close as it came. However, I do believe that I know how to solve this riddle, now."

Tomoyo spoke up before Eriol could voice his theory, "It's sound, isn't it? Or at least, sound generated from something within the tiled area."

Her observations were astoundingly accurate, although it was not all that surprising, when coming from her. Eriol nodded to her, "I believe so. It would explain the part about the saving grace, since those who cross silently are not attacked. Syaoran was not attacked until he spoke to us, and I was also left alone until I started making noise. By this, it would also make sense that the warding power – the orb, it would seem – is intended to open the path, since the riddle suggests that we use it to reveal the key."

"That means that we have to, say, destroy the crystal to find the key that we're looking for?" Syaoran asked. With Eriol's nod, he continued on to voice a suggestion, "Couldn't you or Sakura just use a card and destroy it that way?"

Eriol considered this for a moment, but eventually shook his head, "It may be worth a try, though I do not believe it will work. The riddle specifically relates the key and the ward to each other. I fear that any other means of destructive force would result in a failed answer."

"Wait a second," Sakura said, "Eriol, you said earlier that the orb used an energy discharge, right? And energy can be a form of light?"

"That's right," Eriol replied, in response to her two questions.

Her idea verified, Sakura pulled out a card from her pocket and called its power into its true form before anyone could stop her. Moments later, she was holding within her hands a small, round, blue-framed and tassel-set mirror.

"What if we used the Mirror to reflect the ward's attack onto the crystal? I did it once before when we were after the Shot card, so it should have the same effect."

Eriol nodded, liking her reasoning, "If the power that the spirit put into the ward isn't greater than that of the card's power, and your own, more importantly, then it should work. In theory, mind you."

Syaoran grunted to himself humorously, at that remark, despite the jolt of pain that it evoked from his injury.

"I would like to yell at you all for wanting to be so reckless. Though, at the moment, what other choices do we have?" he noted, then turned his gaze fully onto Sakura, "But if you're going to go through with this, I want you to be extremely careful. Don't say anything or make a single sound until the Mirror is in position."

She flashed him a cheerful smile before setting her way out into the room, keeping even the noise of her breathing down to the point that she was almost holding her breath. She kept her steps painstakingly slow and measured, to avoid clapping against the smooth stone below her. Eventually placing herself on the far side of the room, so as to avoid having the ward shoot at her friends should her plan fail, she ever-so-slowly turned herself about to create a forty-five degree angle between herself and the room's two objects. The card's magic then guided her to place the Mirror into the correct position and angle.

With a pair of reassuring nods from Syaoran and Eriol, and an audible beep from the camera-obsessed Tomoyo, Sakura began to mentally prepare herself for this task. She needed to be patient with herself, so as not to scare herself away from this. After all, she knew that she was literally about to be shot at with a magic that had put Syaoran out of commission in a single blow. Not only that, but this was also their final chance to put in a correct answer, and she wasn't too keen on wanting to find out what would happen to them if all four of the flames were to vanish. To that end, she took in a silent and deep, drawn out breath to calm her jittery nerves. She took even longer to exhale that breath, so as to ensure that no noise was emitted from her as a result.

When she was finally ready to go through with it, she... looked to her friends curiously.

"What should I say?"

The ward reacted, targeting Sakura and firing without error, striking towards her chest with the full force of its power. Yet unknown to it's eye, as a non-human form of energy, the Mirror continued to lay in wait and reflected the energy attack as easily as it would have a ray of sunshine. The impactive energy blast shot true to its new target, found the crystal, and shattered it effortlessly. Shards of crystal and clouds of dust flew away from the pedestal in every which directions.

All eyes immediately turned upwards to the last flame, watching intently to see if this last guiding light was going to vanish on them as well. As fortune would have it, the flame instead began to dance around in its corner before darting out through a previously undetected opening within the far wall, where it soon was lighting up the next room as best it could.

They could all tell that it was going to be a long venture, and with only one flame remaining to them, their answers to this spirit's tests would have to be meticulously thought out from here on in. There was no margin for error anymore. Settling in for the long haul, they crossed through their current room, still being mindful of the ruby-set orb, and entered into their next test.

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