"Why not?" I said, squinting my eyes in an effort to see what I was missing.
"Too small of a passage," he remarked. "Easy to trap someone in there. Let's go through the living room like we did in the previous layer."
With that, Rory took out a bucket from his inventory and placed it on the ground in front of him. I could see there was a blue liquid on the bottom of the metal container, but before I was able to ask him what he was going to do with it, he had already put his right foot in it. Dripping blue paint everywhere, he took it out and did the same with his left before putting the bucket back in his inventory.
"Aye," he said, noticing my facial expression. "Standard trap-dungeon tactic. Now step where I step."
"Alex, carry me," Louie said.
"What?" I asked, surprised.
"Take me in your arms," he repeated. "My feet won't match Rory's footprints very well and if I cast my telekinesis spell to float, I won't be able to cast anything else for the duration."
I nodded in agreement and picked him up, holding him like a messenger's bag at the side of my waist. Rory was already two steps ahead of us, so I made sure I stepped where he had and moved behind him. He was holding his long sledgehammer out in front of him, first pressing it down on the floor ahead and then swinging it around that same area. Another couple of steps and we were standing in the middle of the room without having set off any further traps. On his next press of the hammer onto the floor, however, there was a soft clicking sound.
"Morrigan's tits," he said and grimaced. "Ye heard that too right?"
"Yes, you must have triggered something," Louie said.
"What do we do now?" I asked.
"Well, if I remove me hammer, the trap will go off."
"Try to leave your hammer straight on it," Louie suggested, "and move back slowly. Alex, backtrack a couple steps too."
"What will ye do?"
"I'll try to lift your hammer telekinetically once we've put a safe distance between ourselves and it," Louie explained.
"I like me hammer, boy," Rory said, but did as Louie bid him. "Bring her back to me."
"I'll try," Louie responded.
With the hammer standing on its head, we all walked a few steps back and Louie cast his short incantation from the safety of my arms. The weapon moved but only a bit. Casting spells like this required a minimal amount of mana, but that was because they weren't meant to be used during combat. Lifting Rory's heavy hammer was probably pushing the spell's capacity to its limits, and it was easily the heaviest item Louie had ever tried moving with it.
Louie growled as if to intimidate the heavy object into moving and somehow he succeeded. The long war hammer lifted into the air and moved toward the dwarf. As soon as its weight left the floor, a set of four spears protruded up from below it and down from the ceiling, forming an "X" with its center roughly where a human's torso would have been. As swiftly as they had appeared, the spears retreated back into their floor and ceiling holes, completely vanishing out of sight.
"That would've been fucking bad," I said as Rory grabbed his weapon, which was now levitating within grabbing distance.
Just as he was about to take a step forward, the spears thrust out and pierced the air yet again.
"Oh, nasty bastards," he exclaimed upon seeing the viciousness with which the trap was designed. "I'll fix this shit right up."
With that, he moved closer to where the spear holes were, took out a fist-sized rock from his inventory, and smashed it down on the trap-tile. As soon as the long weapons started moving, he swung his weapon and smashed it into the two bottom ones. The metal spears were now bent and unable to retreat in their hiding holes, so with a crack from somewhere under the floor, they simply stopped moving. On the second hit of the trap, Rory repeated his attack and disabled the top part as well.
"We should be safe from this one now," he said and waved for us to follow him.
"Just how many of these traps are there going to be?" I asked, frustrated that I was just walking along behind him, not doing anything other than carrying Louie.
"I'd bet on two more," Rory said.
"That's not what I--" I started, but was interrupted by Louie.
"I say only one more," he said. "What are we betting?"
"Five thousand," Rory said, but didn't stop moving his weapon around and tapping the ground in front of him. "Sound good?"
"I'm in," Louie said and barked excitedly.
"What are you guys doing?" I asked. We had almost reached the bedroom door again. "Gambling while we're on a rescue mission?"
"Half-Celt, each of us deals with stress differently," Rory said, making a face when I waved at him dismissively. "Ready for it?"
"Just open it this time," I said.
"Where's the fun in that, lad?" Rory retorted, apparently really enjoying literal dungeon-diving.
"Just move to the side of the door," Louie said. "I'll open it from here."
Rory did as Louie asked and we both waited for the little corgi in my arms to telekinetically turn the doorknob. Having chanted his short incantation, the door opened slowly, its hinges creaking loudly enough to almost cover the small ping of a wire being cut--almost.
There was a loud gust of wind half-a-heartbeat before a strong and steady stream of fire shot from the inside of the room. The fire was bright and burned so strong that I could barely stand its heat even though I was still quite a few feet away from the door.
The way the fire hit the opposite wall, splitting the layers of paint and pushing its structural integrity to the limits, it looked a lot like there was a dragon on the other side of the door and we'd barely been able to take cover before
