Crouched at the base of the hole they’d found in the centre of the Imperial ruins, Kaius looked over four skeletons with a critical eye.

  It was a team, no doubt about it, though he had no way to tell if they were actual delvers, or simply a team of unfortunate would-be graverobbers. It looked like the group was made up of three men and a woman, all human. At least from what he could tell based on their builds and the anatomy lessons he’d had early in life.

  Judging by the half-rotten bodies and the leftover scraps of equipment they still had, they hadn’t had a mage. Two heavies for sure — a vanguard and a bastion — as well as a ranger and a rogue, the last of which was the female member.

  Frankly, even if he ignored the effects of time, their gear looked shoddy and half put together. Another point in favour of them not being career delvers — even simple Copper jobs were highly lucrative.

  He could tell by the way the bodies had fallen that they had died in formation, the two heavies clustered protectively around the ranger and rogue. Small holes had bored their way through weapons, armour, and bones alike, the edges scorched black. Kaius couldn’t help but look from them to the holes that dotted the walls and dome above.

  The burn holes in the remains were the same size.

  The only other notable factor about them was their age. They were old, and their equipment was made in archaic styles, but the sort of thing that suggested they’d lasted an age on the order of centuries — not the millennia that would be needed for these remains to be the same age as the ruins.

  It barely mattered. Whoever these people had been, they’d met a violent end exploring this place. It was worrying, but judging by the crude make of their gear, they hadn’t exactly been strong.

  Still, what had possessed them to explore here, of all places? Even bumbling fools knew that Imperial ruins could be dangerous.

  “What’re you thinking?” Kenva asked, crouching beside him.

  Kaius grunted, shaking his head. He wished he had something clear to share. “Explorers who got lost? I don’t know. It’s hard to make heads or tails of. Even cocksure tomb raiders are usually wise enough to know better than to mess about with Imperial ruins. I don’t think they were particularly strong either, so its not like they would have had the strength to fall to overconfidence. Gear’s crap too — high-quality artisan-made equipment would still have at least a trace of magic. Hells, Depths-wrought artefacts, with their self-repair enchantments and stability, would probably still work. Only useful thing is confirmation those murder holes are dangerous.”

  With the scorch marks, it almost looked like the kind of damage Ianmus’s rays would leave.

  “What do you think?” he asked the man.

  The mage took a closer look, before switching his focus to the holes in the wall. “It’s definitely ray magic — and hot. But any traces of mana have long since vanished. Could be light, solar, celestial. Hell, even specific shapings of heat or fire… or something more esoteric. With so many of them, they wouldn’t need to be that overly strong to cause serious problems.”

  “Can you help me defend against it?” he asked. While he had a charge of Warhaven prepped and a number of Bound Maelstroms, there were an awful lot of those murder holes surrounding them — hundreds, if not thousands. Potentially more if their angle of attack could be adjusted, and they were targeted from up high. Kaius wanted every additional layer of security they could get. Sure, the remains suggested that this fallen team had been weak, but like Kenva said — volume of fire had a quality all its own, and a few burn holes told them very little about how powerful the defences really were.

  “So we’re pressing on, then? And of course I can.”

  Kaius nodded. Ro had told them to be careful, and they would be, but she had also emphasised that, if they could, they should make an attempt at shutting this facility down. If they could find a way past the vault door, they would be able to get a far better picture of the true internals of this ruin.

  “We make an attempt at the door, but slowly and cautiously. I’ll take the time to investigate it, without spells or direct touching. Once we’re ready for a more thorough look — using mana manipulation if need be — we’ll pre-cast our defensive spells.”

  “You don’t think that if there are active defences, they might trigger based on the casting of unknown magic?”

  Kaius shrugged. “If they’re that sensitive, they’ll trigger based on us tampering with the door anyway. And if they’re going to activate, I’d rather it be after we have our shielding up.”

  “Makes sense,” Porkchop said, as Kaius felt his brother release his hold on his natural magic that kept his size compressed. Porkchop’s body rippled as he grew to his full height, a couple of strides taller than Kaius. “I’ll wait to summon my armour until then. But the two of you better stay close so you can hunker under me if we get attacked,” he added, nodding towards Ianmus and Kenva.

  Moving to the vault door, Kaius stared up at it. It was gargantuan — large enough that it must have sealed a tunnel that could have held an entire parade with ease. Almost monolithic, the slab of metal showed evidence of gearing within as movement lurked in the shadows of gaps between metal plates.

  To his senses, the barrier positively glowed with mana, arranged in lines that looped and wove in on themselves. He assumed it was similar to what Kenva had sensed in the tunnel walls above, but now charged with enough energy that even he could see it radiating through the solid material.

  To him, it was obvious what the shapes meant: sacred geometry. Whatever runes had been used were hidden within, but the door held a formation of immense complexity — a network that converged at the chest-high flat panel on the lower portion of its centre.

  It was another confirmation that the Eternal Empire had set its runework inside its pieces of artifice. The thought of it was mind boggling — the complexity alone! Sure, it had advantages, but to use it on such a large scale? From what Father had told him, such work was ruinously complex, tough, and often highly ineffective due to the build up of cumulative errors. The realm of masters, doing it on such an industrial scale spoke to the civilisation’s capabilities.

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  Yet even as he scoured the door with his Sight, the style’s greatest strength was hammered home: it made it almost impossible to tell the tenets of the inscription without interfacing with it directly.

  Rotten roots, he needed mana manipulation — a distinct problem. He alone had the expertise to avoid tripping something in his investigation, but his manipulation skills were geared towards internal control. Much of his dexterity was lost when he passed flows of mana outside himself. He still could do it — especially with his monstrous mental stats — but it was less effective.

  Kaius shook his head. “Get ready to flee when I give word. If this door confounds me, we leave it here and return to Ro.”

  He was met with grumbles.

  “Surely you’ll find a way through! I’d hate to have come all this way and lose out on being the first to explore a ruin because we got bested by some ancient traps.” Kenva replied, the confidence in her voice sounding thin.

  Kaius could only shrug. What else could they do? If they were right about the lance holes projecting some sort of ray, and if the defences were potent enough, they would be in serious danger — far too much to make any major attempt at breaching what had to be multiple-stride-thick enchanted steel.

  “Ready?” he asked, reaching for the power bound in his glyphs. Ianmus nodded, his own mana mobilising deep within his marrow. Kaius would cast first, and then Ianmus would lay defences as soon as he could.

  Mana spouted from the glyph on Kaius’s chest as Vyrthane released burning embers. A bubble of safety popped into existence as he cast Warhaven, followed in the same instant by a funnel of roaring winds.

  His team acted in the same instant. Porkchop’s Totem erupted from the ground next to them, bolstering their resource regeneration as Ianmus started to cast.

  Kaius felt it — energy soaring through the conduits within the door, surging through the walls around them so forcefully it almost burned. He blanched, gasps resounding from his teammates.

  The sheer power…the sheer volume of it… they might have made a mistake.

  It was building fast — fast enough that they would struggle to reach the exit even if they fled now. Before he could call an immediate retreat, Kaius’s stomach dropped as he heard a procession of rhythmic clangs. He knew what it was without looking. The blast doors above, slamming down.

  They were sealed in.

  Ianmus grew focused, magic roaring out of his hands as he wove a construct atop his staff, intent funnelled.

  “Thirty seconds for the first shield,” Ianmus said. “Five minutes after for a stronger one.”

  Kaius nodded, his jaw clenched, as Porkchop summoned his armour and stepped over their entire group as they crouched down.

  Attempting to ignore the ocean of magic surging through the walls around him, Kaius turned to face the flat panel in front of him — the nexus of the door’s formation. Harder to ignore were the lances of screaming danger that, for a moment, painted lines through the air. A warning from Moment of Flow. Each line cut an angle from one of the murder holes that dotted the walls of the shaft around them, drawing an intersection on his location.

  The holes began to glow.

  Grabbing hold of his mana and leaning on Spellblade’s Harmonic Control, Kaius reached beyond himself and sent his senses deep into the door’s featureless control panel. His senses were murky. Compared to the bright clarity and fine sensation he was used to, grasping and manipulating his mana felt like threading a needle while wearing steel gauntlets.

  Inside the door, a quagmire awaited him — a maze of inscribed lines that contained a barely controlled flood of mana.

  There was something oddly familiar there — something he couldn’t put his finger on. If he had a bit more time, he might have been able to place it. Really all he would have needed was a little more investigation and a search within himself for where he recognised the logic of the runes.

  He didn’t have the time, and his sight and mana control were far too hazy to give him a clear picture of what he was looking at.

  He growled, frustrated. It was so close — yet his sense of mana felt blurry and indistinct. Like this, he was useless. If he wanted clarity, he needed to get closer. Shuffling forward, Kaius laid his hand flat on the panel — only to feel a lance of pain as a shaped spike of metal punched into the palm of his hand.

  It was a shallow wound, barely more than a pinprick — but the sudden shock of it made him yelp. Ripping his hand back, he stared at the quickly sealing hole as metal flowed like water.

  Gods’ scorn, how had it even done that? It was barely enough to draw blood, but it happened so quickly he hadn’t even been able to react, and it had punched through his gauntlets with ease.

  Staring at the control panel, Kaius flooded his senses throughout the door, trying to figure out what it had done. Magic pulsed within it, reacting to the lance. It felt new, different from the flow of power that roared towards the murder holes surrounding them.

  Then the confluence of magical force seemed to stutter, as if halting for a moment. Before Kaius’s bewildered eyes the flow reversed, retreating from the traps to build brighter in the door. A section of the formation, larger than him and positioned just above its centre, grew bright.

  How the hells had he missed that? It was huge! Even dormant, the simple fact it was connected to the rest of the enchantment should have made it visible to him.

  Whatever it was, it was active — an unknown reaction to his touch.

  Pulling back his senses, Kaius looked around to see the lines of danger painted by his skill had vanished, and his team were looking around with cautious eyes.

  “Did you crack it?” Kenva asked, almost incredulous.

  “I… no. It stabbed me. Whatever it’s doing, it’s doing on its own.”

  Right as he finished speaking, the grinding of gears long disused echoed through the borehole to resonate in the dome above. There was a slamming resonance as bolt after bolt retracted, and seconds later the circular door started to roll, retreating into the slot inside its arch with agonising slowness. Kaius stepped out from underneath Porkchop, drawing his blade.

  Whatever had happened, he didn’t trust it. Why had the ancient vault opened when it had so clearly killed the last explorers to stumble across it? The yawning hallway beyond the steel desolation was revealed to them. Made from the same moulded stone as the rest of the installation, the impossibly tough material had been shattered and cracked. Ward-lights lining the ceiling flickered, creating a strobe of off-white light in the greyscale of his darkvision.

  Kaius didn’t like it one bit. He smelled a trap.

  “Do we go in?” he asked.

  “Why not, it’s only an ominous kill pit that we don't understand — sounds fun,” Porkchop replied.

  “I wonder why that other group fell afoul of the trap,” Kenva said, ignoring Porkchop as she eyed the old skeletons behind them.

  “Maybe they tried to force their way in? They didn’t have a mage — perhaps they lacked any form of mana sense.”

  Kaius didn’t have an answer, no matter how much he wished he did. “Come on. Maybe I can get a better look at how the door functions from the other side.”

  That, and he hadn’t heard the blast doors that had sealed above opening. It looked like they might be forced to find the central reactor regardless of how well defended it was.

  Stepping forwards, they entered the flickering hallway and the war-torn remnants of the Imperial ruin.

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