If the Widowmakers’ fortress was built with a typical design, the path to the control crystal would start at the clan leaders room and pass through a narrow and hazardous tunnel filled with traps, defensive artifacts and, possibly, golem guardians. Nobody had achieved rank four in artifactology or golem construction, which meant the golems here were level three hundred and ninety-nine at the most. We should have no problem with them. But the traps… Destroying Plague Immortality wouldn’t stop me from falling into an abyss or getting sent to some astral plane.
We wandered the corridors, finishing off hiding Widowmakers as we went. With my silent consent, the satyr and succubus looted the preventer clan from top to bottom, not sparing even the paintings. The system showed them as common rarity, but Nega explained: “Items of art. Only experts can tell us their true value.”
“It’s like with Elvish wine, boss,” Flaygray added. “It all tastes awful, but different types have different costs.”
I doubted that Eileen had hung any particularly expensive exhibits in the freely accessible corridors, but I didn’t argue with the succubus. Now that she’d died and lost hope of negotiating, Eileen was most likely calling in reinforcements.
The castle wasn’t typical. Only thanks to my heightened Perception did I notice a door in one of the walls. We didn’t check it right away, but once we hit a dead end, we turned back to the hidden door.
There were no visible locks on it, but Flaygray the old burglar and treasure hunter put his experience to use. Taking a generous swallow of some kind of orcish hooch from a clay jug grabbed from a wine stall, he felt out the keyhole, dug around in it with a long black fingernail, made something click inside. A crack appeared in the wall of marble slabs and expanded into a small passageway. And chittered, Ripta translated, Flaygray retranslated: “The bug won’t fit. He’ll stay here to guard the entrance. The raptor will stay with him.
The three of us continued on. Flaygray took the lead. Suddenly, he froze. Nega walked into the satyr’s back and I walked into her curves.
“Not now, boss!” she whispered flirtatiously, turning around.
“Quiet!” The satyr cocked his head, listening. A sound ahead like the rustling of thousands of feet. “Get back!”
I didn’t ask questions, just turned and ran. Flaygray was no man… uhm, was no satyr to sow unnecessary panic. Once we reached the entrance, I couldn’t help but glance back to see who we were running from.
All the corridors surfaces had come alive, transforming into a writhing mass of thousands of blue spiders—small and lightning-fast.
Once sure that Nega and I had escaped, Flaygray turned, fired his most powerful skill at the spiders— Hellflame. All the air in the corridor lit on fire instantly and a gust of wind whipped into the secret passage, throwing me onto Nega, who purred happily. Anf was thrown into the corridor and got stuck in the entryway, breaking a couple of limbs. Ripta, with the best reaction speed, withstood the danger by digging his claws into the floor.
The satyr pushed Anf out and stood before us, his arms proudly crossed, covered in soot, his face black and two cunning eyes shining out.
“Frigid Spideriings” he said. “I’ve seen them before. One bite and you’re frozen, doesn’t matter what you are. They were popular in guard systems in my day. The master returns home to find the frozen corpses of robbers—wonderful! No blood, no body to carry away—just hit them with a hammer, job done! I remember one time…”
“Time presses, Flay,” I cut the satyr off. “Come on.”
Five elementals guarded the control crystal room alongside just as many golems—nine-foot-tall warriors cast from adamantite in the image of the titans. The elementals took no physical damage and magic didn’t affect the golems. On top of all that, sharp spikes dripping with poison extended from the walls, which began to close in, turning the room into a gigantic press.
At the same time, one by one, the icons of my pets were covered with a skull, and suddenly, as if someone one-shot them. Reinforcements must have arrived from the Children of Kratos, I decided, hoping that nobody else would show up. We couldn’t teleport out of the castle because of the block. All I could do was forge ahead and capture it. Sharkon was still alive, and I hoped they’d decided not to tty and take him on.
I put down the golems and the satyr and succubus handled the elementals. It was an unfamiliar feeling, killing top-level mobs with one or two hits, and that was before I’d even invested the two hundred or so extra stat points I had! The huge number of new adepts helped too, of course—kobolds, troggs, Morena’s cultists. Although the bonuses from them were distributed randomly, they were still fairly proportional across my stats.
One last door remained. Flaygray fiddled with the lock, shook his head, muttered something about Azmodan’s cock and walked away. The walls hit the adamantite corpses of the fallen golems, sticking and moving with the screech of metal on the floor.
Nega took the floor. She closed her eyes, touched her temples. Invisible streams of mind magic flowed into the door and appeared in the shape of a symbol—a vertical line with sharpened ends.
“The Isaz rune.” Nega opened her eyes. “That’s why you couldn’t pick the lock, Flay.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, looking between them anxiously. Was that footsteps in the corridor, or did I imagine it?
“Time is frozen in the door’s structure. I will erase the rune. Flay, be ready. It will recover quickly. You’ll have to be fast.”
The satyr was fast. His high-level lockpicking skills were a surprise to me. I have to admit, I doubt I would have made any progress without him. I wouldn’t have even gotten to the lock before the preventers arrived.
The door flew open and there, at the center of a small room, the blue crystal
