Aetuornos Beta 2-7

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2-7: Triple Trial Threat

The pair of magicless adventurers heard a high-pitched 'ding' sound from seemingly the center of the ceiling of their room, and then Noire's ears picked up something spinning up inside the slots in front of them. Then a ticking sound began to play from the same general direction, and a small piece of blue, glasslike crystal shot out from the farthest right of those slots. The rogue instinctively tossed her dagger at it and scored a hit, which caused it to shatter, the pieces seeming to vanish inches away from the point of impact. Then one of the left slots fired a larger chunk that moved at a smaller speed, and—deciding that she had the right idea—Jack moved his axe so its blade was in the crystal's way, breaking it, too. Another 'ding' sound played.

---

"Hrrrnnngh...woof, there. Hey, did you hear that?" Grigori said.

"Hear what?" While she was nowhere near as physically strong, the monk had been pushing with her back to help him position the largest of the metal boxes. The druid was in part-bear form for the strength bonus.
"There was a 'ding' sound, from somewhere..above the ceiling. And then something shattering..there's another 'ding!"

"Perhaps our comrades' trials are directly above us," Zef suggested. "At any rate, this should be sufficient to reach—"

---

This time, Noire got a rapid series of three small crystals, right-center-right. In between, at a somewhat slower tempo, came two larger ones from the left slot. The rogue had little difficulty hitting each one in turn, while Jack almost missed his second one. Still, they managed to do it. "This is less 'puzzle' and more 'skill check," she commented.

---

After Grigori picked up another, slightly longer series of shattering noises from above, a point on the magic circle on the ceiling began to glow, and a yellow flame rushed down from it toward the suit of armor on the right side of the room. The fire spread across its body and it seemed to come to life as a result, taking an aggressive step toward the two of them. "I bet you should touch where it's glowing," he said. "Can you reach?"
"It's a leap, but—yes," she said, nodding, as the armor began moving faster, brandishing its halberd to swing at them.

"Go, I got this."

Zef ran for the shortest metal box, running up it, across it, along the wall it was up against to the next highest one, then jumped to the rough 'staircase with gaps' they had managed to make so far, picking up momentum as she went. Meanwhile, the armor made a hard sideways chop at Grigori, who ducked back away from it.

---

"Next?"
"X! Three, two, one—goo-ooww!"

"Yeowch!" Both of the demon-girls' attempts to push the third button-pair were unsuccessful. Fiori found that there was much more resistance from the square button than the triangle and circle, so that slapping it like she had the first two just hurt her hand and didn't budge it, and—turning around to look—she found that the buttons on Thora's side were now covered in a bright yellow flame. Something in her mage-class intuition told her that she could counteract it with her own necrotic fire magic.

"What th—"
"Switch sides, hurry!" Fiori started running across the room. "Square is next, hit it as hard as you can."
"Oh-okay!" Thora ran across on the opposite side of the metal slab, drawing her fist back. Fiori sent Roth ahead of her to spew some flame on the right-side buttons, and she punched in the X button at the same time as the berserker literally punched the square one, resulting in another satisfying 'ding'.

---

The third 'ding' from above came with a substantial delay compared to the period between the first two, and Noire could hear machinery spinning up in a different location from before. "Watch the left wall," she advised quickly, turning toward the right herself. This time, five crystals shot out in rapid succession from Jack's side, with three larger ones interleaved from Noire's. She hit all three of her targets easily enough, and just barely managed to play catch-up on the three her partner missed.
"I literally can't move that fast!" he complained.
"I guess we're meant to swap sides," Noire said.

"How were we supposed to know that?"
"We'd best jump to ensure the plates stay down," she said quickly, half-over his complaint. Time was surely ticking before the next set of things-to-hit came out, after all.
"Okay," he turned around to face her. "Count three for me."
The catgirl nodded. "Three, two, one—"

---

"—Circle!" A fourth 'ding' sound.

"More fire, switch!"
"On it."

As the demon-girls turned around toward the center of the room to swap sides, both of them had the opportunity to see a flash of bright yellow fire in the indentation opposite the door they had come from. A humanoid creature which seemed to be made of golden light, with pieces of flat, metallic material in a winglike shape floating out from behind its back, had appeared. Its hands each held a short sword, and it seemed to hover slightly off of the ground, gliding forward almost as soon as it came into existence.

"Uhh—" Thora started toward the back side of the slab, watching the thing as it came toward her.

"Keep running!" Fiori had already cleared the front of the slab; she sent Roth over to toss a fireball at the creature, which it caught with a sword swipe and seemed to instantly dispel. Then it was between Thora and her destination, brandishing its weapons. She made to go left, then right, and it simply swept itself directly in her way each time.

"Grrr.." Gaining a bit of her usual berserk aura from sheer annoyance, Thora raised her own weapon and swung, trying to hit the thing in the side. It blocked with both swords, but her strength proved more than sufficient to overpower it and send it flying toward the wall it had started out up against, crashing hard into it.

---

At the peak of her leap from the tallest metal box, Zef brushed her hand against the glowing part of the magic circle with her fingers, resulting in the glow fading out and the armor it had animated halting its motion, becoming seemingly frozen in place. Her momentum carried her on to the wall, and she landed neatly against it, gently sliding down to floor level. Then there was a fourth 'ding' and a new spot on the magic circle glowed, a yellow flame traveling down from there to the armor on the wall opposite the door, animating it.

"Second verse, same as the first," Grigori said, shrugging and approaching the armor so it would target him. "Can you reach that one?"
"Uncertain. I will attempt," Zef said, landing and immediately running to start her chain of jumps and wall-running all over again. However, no sooner had she reached the top of the first box in that chain than a loud buzzer-like sound echoed all across the room, and the armor that had been advancing on the druid went still, the glow on the circle above them fading out.

He lowered his clawed arm from its defensive position. "Uhh..okaaay?"

---

Six targets came out this time—four on the left, two larger ones on the right. Noire thought she heard two hits from behind her, and knew she hit all four of hers: Three with thrown daggers, one by chopping it with her hand while still waiting for her weapon to finish returning. Nonetheless, their success was followed by a loud buzzer, like someone had gotten a wrong answer on a quiz show.

"Ow, what?" Jack turned around, still covering his ears. "Did you miss one?"
"No. Hold on—" The rogue held up a hand for a second of quiet. "..No ticking. That timer ran out."
"How could we go faster?" he said, exasperated. "We had to wait for the, uh, things to come out."
"Not sure...but I think we should swap back," Noire suggested.

"Why?"
"Hm~mn, call it a 'treasure hunter's instinct'?" she said, giving him a winning smile.
"Uh..'kay." Knowing she was 'really' male didn't do much to help him resist her charisma, it seemed.

---

While the golden light-thing was busy picking itself up off of the floor, Thora ran for the buttons. But, just as she arrived, the ticking resolved to a loud buzzer—they had run out of time. "Gaah. Sorry," the berserker said, turning around.

"It's okay, that thingy showing up was totally unexpected!" Fiori leaned over to get a look at the symbols on the slab. "Mmh, looks like it's reset, first symbol's yellow and everything. Soo, we can try again for free! No pressure."
"Yeah. Okay..." Thora nodded, punching into a hand with a fist. "This time, I'll knock that thing away way faster."

"You remember your first two buttons, right?"

"Dot, cross."

"Yep~! Let's do them like, bam-bam," she said, cutely punching the air with her fists to demonstrate, "then switch right away!"

"Uhh..yeah, got it." Thora turned back to her buttons to hide a slight blush.

"Okay, I count up three and we press on four and five," she said. "One, two, three—"

---

Two chimes came from above: Ding, ding. Noire readied her weapons, and found herself bombarded with four small crystals, the third almost instantly after the second. She barely managed to catch the fourth with her hand, but Jack got three targets—one instantly after the first—which he was ill-equipped to handle. The one he missed crashed against the back wall, and another loud buzzer sounded.

Jack growled in frustration. "What the heck?! I couldn't react to that!"
"Easy there," Noire said, tossing one of her daggers up in the air and catching it back in her hand a couple of times. "I have a feeling we'll get another, more reasonable try in a moment."
"Huh? You figure something out?"
"I have..a suspicion," she replied.

---

"Buzzer?!" The two demon-girls stopped halfway through swapping sides. "What'd we do wrong this time?" Thora complained.

"Umm, I guess that was too fast?" Fiori suggested, equally confused herself. "Let's just walk back and give it another shot?"
The berserker sighed. "Alright. So maybe a timing somewhere between the first time and this time will be the Goldilocks speed."

"'Kay. One, two, three—"

---

"We appear to have bought a moment of time somehow," Zef stated. "Push that box against the wall," she snapped, pointing to one that wasn't part of their path, followed by the wall.

"Uh, sure." Grigori walked around the unmoving suit of hostile armor to go shove the box into place. As he pushed it, he heard two dings in quick succession, some shattering sounds from above...but the circle above them didn't glow. It was as if some convoluted set of conditions needed to be fulfilled for it to activate, none of which were in their hands. Well—at least the cute monk girl seemed to have had some idea of how to hit the second glowy spot more reliably, he thought.

Around the time he got it against the wall, the bell above chimed in somewhat slower succession, followed by a series of shattering sounds. Turning toward the halberd-wielding armor, he found exactly what he expected to see: A yellow flame coming down to activate it. It seemed to 'look around' with its helmet briefly before spotting him. "Uh, Zef?"
"On it!" She made the same leap-run combo as before, brushing her hand against the glowing point on her way to the wall and then sliding down it. As soon as she was close enough to safely do so, she pushed off the wall to start running around the boxes and back to the first one of that same pattern of movement.

Above, there were more chimes and shattering sounds. The druid turned toward the second armor, which held a sword and a shield. This one seemed to know where he was instantly, running straight for him and swinging right away. He backed off, sidestepping a couple of swipes and trying to navigate himself in a circle so he didn't get his back against a wall or box. Meanwhile, Zef used her momentum to leap from the highest box over to the one he'd just pushed, along it and up the wall next to it to wall-jump-backflip just barely high enough into the air for her foot to kick the glowing spot on the ceiling and deactivate this suit of hostile armor, too.

---

"—jump!" Noire swapped to the left, and caught the series of five smaller crystals. They always came in the same pattern, so she was able to anticipate them and throw her daggers ahead of time at the first two and one in the middle of the sequence.

"Hey, I'm getting a little better at this," Jack said after the fourth 'ding' and the following four targets.
"Good—it's likely to grow more difficult still," she said, turning around toward him. "Swap again. Three, two, one—"

---

Thora turned after the fourth button-press, readying her giant club as she ran to swap the second time. She again ran to her left of the metal slab in the center of the room—behind it—and gave a hard, two-handed swing into the glowy monster that had appeared without really even looking at it, achieving a similar result to before in far less time. As she ran the rest of the way to the buttons, Fiori called, "Cross, dot!"

"Got it!" Thora punched the button with the cross on it as she arrived, and waited for the countdown to hit the other one.

Fiori had Roth's eyes available to watch the light-thing get up and start floating toward her, and she had her familiar hit it with a jet of flame to annoy it, which seemed to have the effect of making it target him with its swords. The necromancer had the distinct sense that this thing was magical in a way that meant it could harm her physically-intangible familiar, and made him fly back away from the swipes, thankfully clearing them. At the same time, she counted: "One, two, three—"

---

The fifth set of crystals alternated between slots on the right and back wall for Noire, while Jack's came only from the left. "Keep an eye on the back wall," she said, correctly anticipating that the sixth set would include one that way for him, too. The rogue was starting to get a hang of how the targets tended to alternate, but her compainion barely kept up with this last one.

"That's two more, so we swap," she said, mentally preparing to pick up some slack for him if needed.

"Yup." Jack elected to count this time: "Three, two, one—"

---

The third armor held a warhammer in its hands, and predictably activated next—after the six faint ringing sound from above. Grigori took a step toward the armor as it awoke. "Hold it," Zef said, running up to him. "I cannot reach that target as things are now." She pointed at the ceiling.
Risking a brief glance skyward, the druid saw what she meant. "Oof, yeah."
"I will keep it busy," she stated, placing herself between the armor and him. "Push them, quickly."
"Sure!"

Grigori tried to imagine the kind of trajectories she would be able to manage, with the wall-running, wall-jumping, and so on, and find the least movement of boxes needed to give her a route. In a moment, he settled on moving a mid-size box that had been unused before to where she could chain a jump down to it from the biggest one to get across to the latest target spot on the ceiling, and got to work moving it.

While he did this, Zef effortlessly danced around the armor's attempts to smash her face (or any other bones) in with that hammer. She even found time to talk while doing so. "I would inform you, that in contrast to the false image you perceive, my actual body is male."
"Oh? Funny world," Grigori said between breaths as he pushed. "Hnngh! My actual body's, ffh, female."

---

The sixth button press summoned another floating light-guy, and it approached Thora while the one that was already present gave up its pursuit of Fiori's familiar to go for the necromancer herself. "Two of them now! Go away!" The berserker batted her pursuer away as easily as she had the other one, and ran to knock away Fiori's problems too, sending him flying in the direction of the door they had come from.

"Thanks!" The short demon-girl hurried to the buttons, having Roth harass the guy who'd just hit the back wall with some fireballs to keep him busy as he recovered. "X then dot; you count!"
"'Kay! "One, two, three—"

---

"There! You're set," Grigori called, hurrying to intercept the hostile suit of armor. "Guess you mean to discourage any future advances, but trust me—you're not interested, I won't bug ya. I've had a taste myself, and no intentions of inflicting it on anyone else." As he moved forward, the monk faded back, examining the configuration for herself and discerning his plan almost immediately, running to get back onto the highest box.
"Very well."

As she made her way up, the druid realized that her position—consequently his, now—had been pushed back by this third suit of armor into a place about equally close to the two inactive ones. "Ooh boy," he mumbled to himself, making an effort to get himself away to one side, so he could at least face toward all three at once. His opponent predictably didn't like this much, and tried to deny him with a hammer swing or two—but he took advantage of his bear-strength, grabbing the hammer just below its head after a downward slam missed and yanking it out of the armor's hands to throw it into the inactive armor with the halberd.

It clanged off the metal of the breastplate—disappointingly not knocking the armor pieces all apart onto the floor—and clattered onto the ground, and its owner ran to retrieve it, giving him time to maneuver into a much less surrounded position. Just then, Zef hit her target—grazing the ceiling with a light-blade from her arm—and hit the wall past it, sliding down gracefully once again.

"Get ready to hit all three again," the druid said.

"'Gamer intuition'?" she asked, doing so anyway.
"Nah, just normal intuition this time, I think."

---

The seventh barrage of targets proved especially difficult, and Jack missed half of his—but Noire picked up that slack. "I can't even—how!?"

"They're all at the same elevation on that side," Noire said as quickly as her mouth could go. "Just swing wildly in a circle, I'll catch the rest!"

"Okay!"

This strategy was more successful than his attempts to target them carefully had been, which was good since the eighth target set left Noire very little room to play catch-up. She wound up kicking her foot out to one side to get the last one.

"Swapagain! Three, two, one—"

---

The light-things were almost on them by the time the eighth pair of buttons had been pressed. Fiori whirled and drew her scythe quickly to block the two swords of the one after her with its shaft, while Thora botched an effort to dodge and got a cut across her stomach before roaring and swinging her club into the culprit, sending it back to crash into the side of the metal slab. Roth came up behind his master's attacker, spewing flame and forcing it to turn and deal with him instead of continuing to push on her weapon. She took the opportunity to drop her scythe and run around him, and he replied by ignoring Roth's assault and chasing right on her heels.

Thora swept her recent victim off to her right as she passed him, then did the same to Fiori's pursuer as she passed, making it to the buttons a bit ahead of the necromancer. "S-square!" Fiori breathed as she came to the other side, just behind a fireball from Roth, and pounded the cross button, the other half of the final symbol in the sequence. Behind her, she heard the click of Thora hitting her assigned button, and then the usual 'ding' sound repeated itself thrice, followed by an audible whooshing noise as their two pursuers vanished back into yellow flames.

The first six symbols on the slab now glowed white, the next two green, and the last one bright yellow.

---

"Keep spinning!" Noire advised, listening to every single slot wind up at the same time after three chimes in a row above them. Then, somewhat predictably, they all shot out at the same time. Jack got lucky and hit all but one of his targets, plus one Noire missed; she threw her daggers in anticipation, then twice more, and then had to improvise a roundhouse kick to catch the rest, but nonetheless—they did it. "...Phew."

---

When all three of the armors animated again, their strategy was recognizably different. The one Grigori had just finished disarming, instead of resuming the pursuit of its big hammer, ran toward the nearest box, making to push it; the other two advanced on the druid, weapons readied, to try to prevent him from interfering. "Hey hey, none of that!" he growled, calling on his ingame deity to throw some vines out from his left arm, whipping them around the disarmed suit's torso and pulling to reel it back toward him. He had to let go before long, thanks to another armor's sword-swipe, but he managed to turn the force into a jerk strong enough to topple it over onto its back. All of this left him awkwardly positioned for the downward chop of the third armor's halberd, and he just had to duck aside and take it square in the shoulder. Almost immediately after this, that armor went still.

"Ouch." The sword-and-shield armor pressed the assault, while the unarmed one got up and started toward the box again, pushing it a foot or so before he came around to kick it in the side and send it stumbling over—which, unfortunately, also hurt his foot about as much as one would expect from kicking solid metal. He mentally observed that the Monk wasn't asking after his condition; it didn't seem to him that it was necessarily unimportant to her, but rather that focusing on turning off the second suit of armor was more important than inquiring after obvious information. Anyway, he had a plant-god to call on, and the shoulder cut was already in the process of regenerating.

The attempt to sabotage her path didn't even slow Zef down, and by the time the armor he'd kicked had recovered itself, its second companion had been stopped. So it went and grabbed the halberd from its closest unmoving ally, stabbing hard at him a few times before backing up and pushing its back against the box to move it some more, watching him with its weapon ready to swing if he approached. The joke was on their saboteur, however, as Zef had already figured out a somewhat more complicated path which let her build up the needed momentum and make it to the tallest of the boxes without involving that one at all. Seeing this, Grigori just backed off and let the armor waste its time until she touched the last glowy spot above, deactivating it again.

Zef slid down the wall one last time and strode over toward him, her stance still tensed and ready for some last-second ambush. "Were we successful?"

"I think so. I heard three chimes in a row up above a minute ago, and no more buzzers. You have fun running and flipping around all over?"

"This has been...fruitful," she said after a second or two's thought. "Removing my wings has forced me to consider terrain differently. It is nothing I have not experienced before, but it has been a while since I practiced 'grounded' maneuvering."

"'Your wings'?" Grigori asked, curious.

"I am a servant of Sol," she stated; her tone was almost as flat as ever, but with the faintest hint of...maybe pride, he thought?
"Ah. Neat."

<hr />

Jack dropped his weapon somewhat ingratiously and clutched his head. "Ough...didn't know virtual bodies could feel this dizzy."

"I believe it should fade quicker than it would in reality," Noire said. "It certainly helps with immersion, at any rate."
"Yeah, sure..

"..Soo, we won, right? How do we get outta here, and on to the top floor?" Still holding his head with one hand, Jack squatted to recover his axe and put it away again.
"An excellent query. My first guess is that there is a slight delay before we are all abruptly teleported up there. My second is that 'obviously' we should go back through the door we used to get here, and its destination has changed via magic," the rogue said. "Either way, I suspect waiting a moment will elucidate that bit."

"..You sure use a lot of big words," he observed. "And fancy phrasing."

"Ah, well, that is my character, after all. Just a noble-kid runaway," she said wisfully, "who received just enough education to be dangerous before feeling choked and smothered by a loveless household and deciding to strike out on her own, to prove that a fortune could be rightfully earned rather than squeezed unjustly out of peasants."

"Huh. You thought up a backstory and everything already? Dude, I am way behind on that stuff..."

"Well, half or more of roleplaying is improvisation. Say, if someone acts like they know you, just go with it," Noire suggested. "Could be fun."

---

Both demon-girls moved toward the center of the room, watching as the symbols changed color from left to right until all nine were glowing white. "I guess, uh, we did it?" Fiori said. "Wonder what's with the weird extra timer, though."
"No idea. But, I'm glad those light-things are gone," Thora said. "It had what felt..very realistically like an aura of celestial magic."

"Mmh. I'm a bit lucky it never managed to slice Roth with those blades. There are huuuuge penalties if your familiar gets deaded, and uh..it's slightly complicated to revive a wisp." Roth took on a fearful expression and rotated back and forth in a manner resembling someone shaking their head—except that his entire body was the head. "Aawh, there there. You're just fine," Fiori said, putting her hand palm-up just underneath him. Roth floated back into her again.

"Is that uh...does Roth have an AI or something? I thought there were no AI's technically."

"Well, like, enemy AI exists—but i know what you mean," Fiori said. "Nope, I'm just acting, to be honest. I get physical control over my familiar and some kinda 'extra processing power' so it's not disorienting to experience things from two perspectives at once. It'd be kinda neat if people could 'split in two' with magic in the real world too, I think."

"Some people can do something similar with..really high-level astral projections," Thora said. "I've..never been too good with meditation magic, though. I just tend to get distracted way too easily."

A familiar voice cleared his throat, echoing throughout the room. "If you are hearing this message, it's because you were insufficiently curious to check the doors you entered through," Mondelain's disembodied voice continued dryly. "Please do that now, and cease wasting your time and mine."

"Huh?" Fiori looked (as did Thora), and found the door shut again—though she couldn't remember if either of them had done so.
"I guess that's how we get to the top floor...somehow," the berserker said, walking up to it. She hesitated in front of the door for a second, her hand extended partway toward it. "I hope this isn't another instant-teleportation thing..."
"Heehee!" the necromancer giggled. "Hey, we survived the last one, didn't we?"
Thora looked to her, then back at the door. "...Guess so." She reached her hand the rest of the way to the knob to pull it open.

---

I hope it makes enough sense what's going on with the trials here. But, I'm sure some DM, somewhere, has made a more complicated puzzle/encounter than this.

A majority of this chapter was actually written as part of 2-6, before I realized that it was getting way too long and looked around for a good place to cut it and add that scene with Ronin in instead.