B3? Chapter 268: Grand Larceny, pt. 3

    Surrounded by the desolation of his assault, Kaius tuned out the remnant agonies of his battle, and the slaughter he had smeared up the wall.

    Ire and fury had faded from him—dissipaiting much like all evidence of his wounds. He knew if he continued to ruminate on the anger he still felt for his captors, it would pull at his mind—distract him.

    That couldn’t happen. There was work to be done, and his indulgence had already cost them enough time.

    His attention turned to the warded door—the vault, that even now, held contents that tugged at his soul. His blade, and potentially a king’s ransom in spatial storage artefacts besides.

    It was an impressive thing. A continuous slab of polished dark hardwood, stretching to the ceiling some twelve strides up, bound in plating of thick steel gleaming with the iridescence of alchemical reinforcement, and bolted deep into the uncompromising stone that made up its arch.

    Those features, and the thick keyport that was two thirds down its left side, were inconsequential.

    Complex runes scribed every surface of the door, spilling over onto the raised stone that surrounded it. They were small—dense, as Vhaxanish demanded. Some five-hundred and twelve different simplistic characters, woven into words of arcane power, each a minimum of thirty-five characters long. Each word blended together, with little delineating gaps, and each line swirled into arrays of stunning complexity.

    Kaius knew that whoever had inscribed this vault had been a sublime runewright, and whoever had commissioned it must have done so at great cost—its destruction would wound Old Yon almost as much as their theft of its contents.

    The script was an interesting choice for a ward of such complexity. He could see the elegance in it. Redundancies had been built into every facet of the working that he had been able to identify, dozens of triggers set to activate any number of countermeasures that he lacked the skill to interpret.

    The slightest hint of tampering would be enough to set it off, and Vhaxanish was so niche, complex, and specialised that it was impossible to intuit your way through breaking the ward.

    Thankfully, the runewright responsible for this testament to over-engineering had made a fatal error. They had been far too confident in the security of obscurity.

    Vhaxanish was inherently unstable. The creator of this formation had leaned on that in its construction—relying on the ease with which individual arrays destabalised when manipulated to trigger the failsafes they had inscribed.

    Yet that was a weakness.

    He might have lacked a tenth of the experience and Skill required to create something like this, but he had the knowledge and ability to understand its construction, and how to exploit it.

    All it had taken was time—to memorise, and to study. Something he had been given in ample volume. He hadn’t understood how it worked on the frequent but short glimpses that he’d seen of the vault. Instead, every moment he’d been unwatched in its presence had been spent engraving every rune of its creation into the fabric of his mind.

    A visual image he could investigate and manipulate in the relative privacy of his cell, as he leaned on simple knowledge and the subtle nudgings of Explorer’s Toolkit

    to ferret out every trap that lay within its confines.

    A feat only possible due to Glass Mind’s focus on memorisation, even with his vastly inflated mental stats. Still, he’d managed, and he’d spent hours leaning on Father’s teachings to tease apart every line and array.

    He didn’t understand all of it, but he’d mapped how it fit together—and how to cause a cascading failure.

    Eyes roving over the formation, he refreshed himself—double checking that the mental map of the inscription that he had built in his mind had been accurate. It was.

    First, three dense whorling knots of runes, bound in sequence across the thickest steel plate that bisected the front of the door through its middle.

    Each was only the size of his thumb print, and was a small part of the array that physically reinforced the door and kept it locked fast—he doubted even Porkchop would be able to batter it down while it was in play.

    A minute spiraling word, right by the bottom hinge, was the next locus. Each component rune was so small he wondered how they had been inscribed in the first place. It was an almost identical clone of a dozen other spirals that clustered around it. If they broke this section of the array, it would aid in furthering the building cascade.

    If they so much as touched any of its twins, they would trip an alarm.

    The next two were similarly small sections of an array that stretched across the top of the stone arch around the door. One in each corner, they needed to break a single runic character inside of a single word. Rather annoying, considering the words were eighty-six characters long, and the rune in question sat right next to an identical pair.

    Unfortunately, it was necessary to stop the destabilised formation from connecting to what he could only assume was some sort of communication artefact—and interrupt a half dozen other contingencies as well.

    The next was another tricky one. Located a third in from the right of the top left quadrant, it was another singular rune. Thankfully, it was located right at the end of a discrete word, so it would be slightly easier to target.

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

    If four hairs-breadths of space was any much better than five. It was tied to a targeting mechanism—the nature of which he wasn’t entirely certain of, but suspected was some form of curse. Like all of the arrays he was targeting, it was directly tied to the stability of the overall formation.

    And last, a small triangular sigil on the bottom left corner of the door. This one played no direct role in anything of extreme relevance, other than the fact it was a vital part of the stabilising array that allowed all of the constituent parts of the formation to work together in harmony.

    Individually, destroying the weak points he had identified would do little other than trigger every other counter intrusion, ward, and locking mechanism that had been inscribed.

    Together, their destruction would overload the entire formation from the inside out—causing the mana bound within the Vhaxanish lines to destabilise and burn out at once.

    Kaius’s jaw clenched as he took in the sheer precision the task would require. It was a lot to ask of Ianmus, all it would take is a single beam being off by a hair, and all of his work would be for naught.

    If they triggered the wards, they had almost no chance of ever getting through that door—even with Porkchop’s brute strength.

    And yet...if anyone could do it, Kaius knew it would be Ianmus. He’d seen the mage use his solar rays with surgical precision, and he was always boasting about being the best shot in this college.

    He would just have to have a little faith.

    Besides, if he said he couldn’t, there were other options. There was a different, much easier, sequence they could destroy that would cause the main locking and reinforcement array to fail.

    It was just that if they went that route, they’d be unable to avoid activating every other nasty countermeasure imbued into the door.

    A startled gasp from behind him caused Kaius to look back.

    His team was approaching quickly—furtive steps carrying them down the hall in almost complete silence. Of the three, Ianmus moved with the most focus—every step placed with directed intention as a dense knot of solar mana swirled into a circlet of overlapping sacred geometry.

    It was something unfamiliar to Kaius—and potentially still a work in progress judging by the imperfections in the simplistic sigil. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who had been busy during their long confinement.

    Kenva had her hand covering her mouth as she gawked at the ravaged bodies and pooled blood that lay around him.

    Porkchop seemed to find some amusement in her shock, his ears flicking subtly.

    “Tell me, Kaius, is this some new two-legged bathing custom that I have missed? Or did you go swimming in their blood by accident?” Porkchop said, deftly shaking loose some of the heavy grimness that had settled over their group.

    Kaius rolled his eyes at his brother''s jab, his attention more focused on Kenva’s narrowed eyes of concern as they flicked between the remnant remains of the vault’s guards and the hanging rents in the chain that covered his chest.

    He doubted the woman had much to draw on to contextualise his strength or abilities, so he could understand the unease of seeing him so covered in the marks of fraught battle.

    “I’m alright, already had a few skills that made me tough, and our little ‘holiday’,” Kaius tried to hold himself back from spitting the word. “Has led to them being capped handedly.”

    The ranger frowned, clearly struggling to believe him. “Just a few chest wounds, no big deal? Draining most of your health seems bloody reckless to me, especially considering we’re currently in the middle of trying to break out of a prison.”

    She was completely correct, of course, even if not about the magnitude of his expenditure.

    Every drop of Health was a valuable resource that couldn’t be squandered. Still, better him than someone else, and, all things considered, in his mind it should be plenty understandable that he’d let his emotions get the best of him.

    “Trust me, I''ll be fine. I’m still well over three-quarters, I just...let the circumstances get the best of me for a moment.” he replied, the tense line of Kenva’s frown laxening as she stared at him in surprise.

    “Kenva, he could have been ritualistically disembowelled and he’d still be in fighting shape in a minute or two—I’ve seen close enough to it myself.” Ianmus interjected with a grunt, his voice strained.

    Even now, Kaius watched him focusing intensely on the strange sigil of mana he held contained with his will alone.

    “Now, please, holding this many spells in sequence is not exactly easy. I would much appreciate it if we could move on to the part where I actually cast?”

    Kaius nodded, seeing Kenva echo his motion a moment later—though he did catch her still looking at his chest with curiosity.

    Strange—he’d sworn that his external wounds had long closed, even if the damage to his internals still had a little bit left to recover.

    Putting the matter out of mind, Kaius waved Ianmus over.

    “I’m not going to lie—this is going to be tough.” he said, getting a nod from the mage. “If you miss the exact targets even slightly, we’ll have zero chance of ever breaking in, so I hope you haven’t been boasting about your aim.” Kaius shot the man a grin.

    Snorting at his jab, Ianmus straightened up to his full height—looming a full head taller than him.

    “I don’t recall boasting—just facts. Now show me what I''m hitting, even with my Glass Mind this channel feels like I''ve stuck my head in a wardrum.”

    Buoyed by his companion’s confidence, Kaius moved through the different rune sequences he would have to destroy. He took his time with it—any slight increase to the risk of their discovery was worth it if it improved their chances of getting access to some proper gear.

    With each target, Ianmus grew ever more focused, his pupils shrinking to needle points as he stared at each point to engrave them into his mind.

    “You’re going to owe me a beer if I pull this off Kaius.” Ianmus hissed. “These shots are going to need more precision than is even expected of my professors. We’re talking about hair''s breadth tolerances here.”

    Kaius’s heart sank. He considered the backup option—disabling the worst of the locking and reinforcement wards—but weathering whatever offensive countermeasures the vault was imbued with and battering the damn thing down was something he sincerely hoped to avoid. That, and he was almost certain they would be hit with some sort of tracking curse. Even if he hadn’t found one, he knew they were commonplace for these sorts of formations.

    “So you can’t do it?

    Ianmus’s smile was wild—almost strained.

    “I never said that, now, did I?”