Deacon sucked in a sharp breath as another jet of flame roared past his shoulder, the heat rolling over him hard enough that he felt it through the shield, and he twisted his body just enough to slip into the narrow gap between two bursts before calling back over his shoulder.

  “If the flames touch skin, they make ice grow where they hit,” he shouted, ducking low as another blast tore overhead and forced him to surge forward again. “I’m drawing a blank on what the hell can do that. Anyone?”

  For the first few seconds, there was only the sound of fire roaring and Deacon’s feet hammering against the hallway floor.

  Then Sam’s voice came, quieter at first, almost disbelieving. “Frostflame…”

  “What?” Jass snapped, eyes flicking between the dragon busts and Deacon’s silhouette moving through the fire.

  “It’s Frostflame,” Sam said louder now, the realization snapping into place as he straightened. “It burns like normal fire, but when it actually touches living flesh, it flips the effect and transmutes the heat into the opposite spectrum. It’s a specialty spellcraft from House Constantine, one of the oldest Witch Noble Houses still standing… But I heard it was family magic – what’s it doing here?”

  “Great,” Deacon shot back dryly as he rolled through another opening, coming up hard on one knee before forcing himself forward again. “So either they learned their so-called family magic from some other temple of Solomon, or maybe this Solomon person was some ancestor of theirs, and they forgot about this temple and the Tower refurbished it into a Hidden Quest Zone.”

  Jass grimaced, then her gaze slid sideways toward Bonehead, her eyes narrowing as she looked him up and down in a way that immediately put him on edge.

  Bonehead noticed, given how obvious her gaze was.

  “I am not some eye candy you can just ogle at,” he said as he pressed a hand dramatically to his chest and turned slightly away.

  Clutching his robes and glancing back at her over his shoulder, he said, “Jass, I understand that I am irresistible, but now really isn’t the time—”

  “Couldn’t you reform into a tower shield?” Jass cut in, ignoring him completely. “We use you to push through. You don’t have flesh, and you don’t feel heat.”

  “Excuse—” Bonehead started.

  Sam interrupted him without even looking up, shaking his head with solemn disappointment. “Nope. He hasn’t unlocked his Boneweaving Racial Trait yet, and even if he had, he doesn’t have anywhere near the fire resistance required. The flames wouldn’t transmute into ice just because he doesn’t have skin or flesh, sure— but they’d absolutely melt his bones. Which means he’d still be useless.”

  “Fuck both of you,” Bonehead snapped, crossing his arms. “And here I was thinking about offering my experimental Fire Resistance Potions to you three to get me some data.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “…What,” Jass said flatly, her head turning toward him.

  “You have Fire Resistance potions?” Sam added, eyes narrowing, while Esmerelda continued to stare at Deacon, who was weaving through the spews of fire coming at him from every angle with only a few seconds to dodge them.

  “They're experimental,” Bonehead grumbled, reaching into his Spatial Satchel and fingering the light, reddish-orange potion in question before taking it out and showing it to them. “They barely last a minute and a half, only work on fires at or below your level, and they only protect the body, not clothing or equipment – so unless you all have decided to become nudists and not tell me about it to join in on the good o’l community beach parties…”

  Putting the potion away, he snapped his head toward Deacon just in time to hear another startled noise as Deacon triggered yet another fire vent, narrowly avoiding having his hair set ablaze.

  Then Bonehead said, “Deacon’s been in there for over three minutes already, and even if that wasn’t a problem, I don’t have anything to counter ice that’ll grow on your body when it gets on your skin. I haven’t gotten my hands on any Ice Affinity cores lately, or the reagents needed to synthesize a resistance agent to at the very least lessen the ice growths.”

  Hearing his response, Jass let out a deep exhale through her nose and leaned her back against the wall. Frustration was written all over her face as she stared down the hallway, jaw tight, watching Deacon’s shield tank a blast of fire to the side of his head.

  She then turned slightly toward Esmerelda, concern flickering across her expression as she took in how frazzled she still looked, and reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder.

  Though her hand stopped halfway as the roaring of the flames cut off abruptly, the sudden silence was just as jarring as the darkness that overtook the hallway.

  “I think I stopped it,” Deacon’s voice echoed down the hall.

  At the far end of the hallway, practically invisible to them in the darkness, Deacon stood with one hand pressed against a single sandstone brick in the wall, his shield in his other hand lowered slightly as he caught his breath.

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  As he spoke, a section of the wall several feet behind him began to sink inward with a deep grinding sound, revealing the outline of another chamber hidden beyond the stone.

  Before they could get a clear look at what lay inside, every flame in the hallway died at once, and just like a rural village at night, the hallway dropped into pitch blackness.

  Deacon let out a low, breathless chuckle as he leaned his weight against the sandstone wall, fingers still pressed flat to the recessed brick that had killed the traps. It was obvious now that the brick was different from the others, its surface far grimier than the surrounding sandstone.

  “Whoever was here last was a dirty fucker,” he said, his voice echoing faintly down the length of the hallway. “Didn’t even bother washing their hands.”

  The moment he lifted his palm to inspect what he’d touched, and why it had the grainy texture of gravel mixed with the stickiness of tar, the consequences made themselves known.

  The grinding of the sandstone reversed, the hidden wall behind him beginning to rise back into place as the dragon busts along the hallway flared to life in near-perfect unison—long tongues of flame bursting outward, flooding the corridor with light and heat once more.

  “Oh, shit,” Deacon muttered, already moving to press the brick again.

  He slammed his hand back onto the brick just as another jet of flame screamed past his shoulder, the traps cutting off instantly as the hallway plunged back into darkness and the hidden doorway stalled halfway through closing.

  The sudden absence of light in the hallway didn’t last long.

  A series of sharp cracks echoed through the hall as glowsticks were snapped almost simultaneously, green and pale blue light blooming to life as Sam, Jass, Bonehead, and Esmerelda all produced them from belts, pouches, and spatial storage, the dim illumination painting the walls in sickly neon hues.

  “Careful while crossing,” Deacon shouted, bracing his shoulder against the wall as he adjusted his footing while reaching into his Spatial Sling Bag on his hip, “use your glowsticks, lanterns are a no-go!”

  He wedged one of the glowsticks between the inner grip and rim of his Bearclaw Heater Shield, gave it a quick spin to balance the weight, and then sent it spinning down the length of the hallway with a snappy whip of his wrist.

  Jass caught it cleanly at the far end, barely moving as she did, and thanking the fact that Deacon had gotten her the full gloves given how serrated the edges of the shield were.

  One by one, the party crossed, moving quickly but carefully, eyes tracking the dormant dragon busts as they slipped past and into the space beyond the hidden door. Sam hovered just behind them, casting Esmerelda a concerned look before his gaze shifted to Jass, who met it with a resigned, grim expression.

  Deacon stayed where he was, eyes locked on Jass as she held the shield into the doorway, just in case the rising door would slam shut after its initial slow rise, so that he would be able to make it into the room with them.

  The moment Sam passed through the threshold of the doorway, Deacon took his gloved hand free from the brick.

  Light and heat roared back to life behind him as the hallway ignited once more, and the hidden door began to rise upwards.

  Spinning on his heel, Deacon sprinted towards the now closing doorway, while able to potentially walk on into it calmly, he wasn’t quite willing to risk that, given how Esmerelda was clearly still on edge.

  He asked himself as he sprinted.

  He cleared the rising door with more than a meter to spare, boots hitting the ground hard as the thick sandstone brick slab continued to rise, unbothered and undisturbed by Deacon’s sudden passage nor the loud thud of his boots hitting the hallway hidden behind it.

  Another observation Deacon made was that, unlike the hallway that they just cleared, this one was completely dark and devoid of light other than the illumination of their glowsticks.

  “Thanks,” Deacon muttered as Jass passed his shield back to him, the glowstick still casting a green light across her armor and face along with his own as he grabbed it.

  Slotting the shield back onto his arm and thanking her with a nod, he began to make his way towards the front of the formation. Everyone else quickly followed in after him, getting back into their formation, while lifting their glowsticks higher as Deacon began walking forward.

  As they trekked forward, they could see the end of the hall; reveling that the next room that they would be walking through was a large one, far larger than the trapped hallway they were in just a bit ago.

  As the glow of their sticks spread outward, it revealed a broad chamber filled with statues; some hovering, others rooted in place. Feline forms were frozen mid-prowl, winged creatures carved in tense, coiled poses, and in the middle of the room stood a massive stone effigy of a dryad bound to a cross fashioned to resemble wood.

  As Deacon stepped fully across the threshold, along with the rest of the members of the Ravenlight Party, the chamber responded to their full arrival.

  Torches along the walls and braziers on the ground ignited one after another in a steady wave, their light chasing the shadows away and revealing the true scale of the space they’d just entered.

  Deacon felt his shoulders sag at what the firelight revealed.

  “Oh, come on,” he groaned internally as his eyes dropped to the floor.

  Stone pressure plates covered it almost entirely, hundreds upon hundreds of them packed so closely together that it was hard to tell where one ended and another began, the seams between them forming an intricate spiral all centered around the massive bound dryad statue.

  Bonehead let out a low whistle before muttering, “Hubba hubba.”

  Before he could take so much as a single step forward, Esmerelda’s irises flashed gold momentarily and grabbed the back of his hoodie's robeyanking him to a stop, her grip iron-tight as a look of horror overtook her face as the irises of her eyes returned to their viridian green color.

  Unaware of what was happening to his right, Deacon squinted at the walls, his eyes narrowing as something about the stone didn’t quite sit right, then reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out his binoculars.

  Adjusting the dials, he brought the left wall into sharp focus and felt his jaw tighten as he caught sight of hundreds— no, thousands of pin-sized holes dotting the sandstone brick surface.

  “Are spells still shit here?” he asked, lowering his binoculars as he glanced back at Sam and Esmerelda, as he tucked them away again, exhaustion and irritation bleeding into his voice. "Cause if not... I really need to find someone to be our Rouge of the Party to deal with all these traps."

  “I mean, I guess…Uh, the fuck?” Sam said, beginning to answer Deacon, before a glowing System Notification blinked in the corner of his vision, causing him to stare at it in shock. “Did you all get a level in your Race just now?”

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