Court of Thorns: A LitRPG Story by C.J. Carella

Author:C.J. Carella [Carella, C.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2021-05-28T22:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

The hillside cavern was tiny in comparison to the huge underground jungle the party had left behind, but had enough room to house the original giant boar or the deformed thing that had replaced it. Scattered bones and other remains were strewn all over the place, including some weapons and armor pieces. There were probably some valuables mixed in with all the decomposed body parts, but Hawke didn’t intend to search them. There was no time to waste. An impact on the blocked cave entrance made the ground shake a little. Definitely no time.

“Where to?” he asked Amelia.

“Down there, at the end of the chamber. Naruto discovered a hidden passage. Had to disarm some nasty traps to get through it. It opened into a tunnel that leads straight to the Gatekeeper.”

“All right. Alba and Artos, you’re with me. Everyone else, see about keeping the cave entrance closed. Maybe drop a few more spells to keep the critters out. After that, make sure you’re all topped off. Don’t make coffee, ‘cause we ain’t staying.”

Everyone nodded and went off to do their assigned jobs. Hawke moved toward the narrowing end of the cavern. His Enlightenment spell was on. He had upgraded it recently, learning the Major version from Artos. Between the spell’s ability to find hidden things and his Advanced Mana Sight, spotting traps was almost ridiculously easy. Almost. They cleared three magical constructs designed to hit anyone who came too close with a variety of deadly spells. There was also a mechanical tripwire that would trigger a landslide. Those were the easy traps.

A few steps beyond the entrance, hundreds of glowing Chaos lines crisscrossed the tunnel, making it impossible for anything larger than a hummingbird to fly through without touching at least one of them. Only Hawke could see the energy latticework; his whispered warning stopped Alba before she walked into it. He suspected that touching those energy lines would be deadly. At the very least, it would curse the target with a heavy dose of bad luck. He’d seen Chaos spells like that during his fight with the Undead Troggs beneath Akila: they gave the target a nasty case of Murphy’s Law. Whatever could go wrong would. Among other things, one of those spells had triggered one of his Timeless Mind side effects. At worst… Chaos could turn victims literally inside out.

In the middle of the Chaos network was the actual trap, a layered construct with four linked triggers, including one that activated if you disarmed the outer traps first. Some of the spells linked to the trap were familiar: Death Curse and Death Cyclone, plus the good old Fireball. He could kill those spells without triggering the traps, but there were three others he didn’t recognize. His new ability, Chaos Spike, might have done the trick, but the traps contained thousands more Mana than he had; he couldn’t put enough power into the ability to disrupt the spells. Even if he could figure out a way to take care of the Chaos bubble, it was going to take them a good thirty, forty minutes to disarm the trap.

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