The orbs had started moving. All of them, in a circle around the obelisk, like the tiny planets they looked like. They were now in orbit.
They all moved slowly like small sluggish planets, barely a centimeter a second. That they moved at all made them infinitely harder to navigate through, however, and even worse to keep track of.
Sofia’s first reflex was to try to hide underground but the graveyard skill wouldn’t even activate, as if she was currently in the sky with nowhere valid to use it.
If I stay facing the current, since they all move in the same direction, I’ll at least not have to watch my back... This sure makes everything much worse. How do I find the damn thing fast? Clearly, brute force isn’t a solution this time; I’d be dead long before I could even touch a tenth of them…
Maybe the pattern is a lure?
Sofia stopped staring at the orbs, as much as she could afford, and thoroughly scanned the obelisk with her mana sense. She found something there that hadn’t been obvious before, a mana current. It would have been easy to think it was the cause of the orbs’ orbital movements, except it spun in the opposite direction.
This led Sofia to another discovery; some of the floating orbs were also spinning on themselves and around the obelisk. Some in one direction, some in the other. By focusing on these particular spinning orbs, one could notice that they had the same mana currents the obelisk had.
That lowered the possibilities. Now she needed to find orbs that had the correct pattern as well as the correct spin. With caution, advancing against the current, Sofia looked around everywhere for an orb with these features. All the while, the soldier skeleton lay on the ground to avoid touching any orb by accident. By the time Sofia had almost walked a complete circle around the platform, she had found one. A softly glowing green orb, it was about four meters high and on the outer periphery of the platform. One of the hardest orbs to reach out of the entire cloud. But it was engraved with the correct pattern she had found on the obelisk, and it spun in the right direction.
Unless I’m missing something, this could be the one! It was so hard to find too.
Sofia was too focused on keeping track of the position of her discovery; as it followed its orbit, a red orb grazed her ankle.
The whole void flashed red with a buzzing noise.
Fuck.
Sofia was ready to block an incoming attack from the orb, but it plunged into the ground instead. Soon after, the temperature on the platform rose a lot, enough to be uncomfortable even with the protection from the princess set she got out of the first trial.
At least it’s not as dangerous as the previous one. Are the orbs effects color coded? Yellow thunder, red heat. What happens if I touch another red, does the temperature increase by that much again? That would start to become a big issue…
The crisis averted, Sofia kept moving to try to grasp the green orb she thought might be the key. It was pretty hard to reach, and to make the matter worse, she couldn’t spread her wings. Unless she jumped off the platform and into the void, her deployed wings would touch many orbs. And even if she did that, she would have to touch more as she tried to land afterward.
Either way, she had to walk closer to the edge to get that orb. The farther she got from the obelisk at the center, she noticed that the orbs were moving faster there. That was because they all moved as a whole around the obelisk, and these ones were further from it. Also, the void around her started to get a reddish hue instead of black. Will it buzz again if I get too close to the edge? She carefully took a few steps back, and the void regained its black color. Alright then…
I still have the page with a single crow, so…
Sofia summoned the one crow out of her book. That was actually her most used page, as she used the small bird as a pet occasionally to keep her company when she trained her skills.
Go fetch that green orb. Take extra care not to touch the other ones.
She felt that out of all of the book’s skeletons, this one was the smartest, which could understand the most complex commands. But maybe I’m imagining things…
The crow reached the green orb, and it grabbed it with its talons, only for it to prompt another buzzing sound and red flash. The orb freed itself and shot down into the ground. Green gas clouds started appearing near the ground, spreading over the whole platform and rising.
What’s this now? It doesn’t seem corrosive. Poison? Whatever, I just need to stop breathing. This one’s not even an inconvenience.
The real problem Sofia faced now was that this hadn’t been the correct orb. Should I look for one in a unique color? Sofia kept looking around, walking against the current of the floating orbs. It wasn't so hard to avoid them, especially now that she focused her mana senses on herself to have a better view of her immediate surroundings. She could also walk in the sense of the current, which made avoiding the orbs very easy as long as she walked at the same speed they moved, but that way, she would only see the same few orbs near her all the time.
After about ten minutes of looking around everywhere, she was fairly certain to have taken note of all possible candidates for the key. Keeping track of them was almost impossible since they all kept moving, but she knew their approximate orbiting position relative to each other. There were six more in total with the correct pattern and spin direction.
I can power through a few more of the harmful effects… But this doesn’t feel like a good solution. In terms of color, the new candidates were of no particular interest. There was a red one that Sofia wouldn’t touch if she could avoid it, and the other ones were all different colors she hadn’t tried but which appeared many times.
There has to be more indications. A better way to go about this…
What if I pick the closest one to the obelisk, even if it ends up being wrong, and slam it into the hole before it can attack? Hmm. That doesn’t feel particularly right, either.
Sofia desperately looked around for clues or patterns among the cloud of orbs but didn’t find anything. As she pondered over her options, the whirring sound that had started when the orbs had begun orbiting the obelisk suddenly became louder. In turn, the orbs started moving faster.
Dodging them was still manageable, but focusing on anything else started to get hard.
Since it now seemed the orbs would only keep getting faster if she took too much time, she gave up overthinking and grabbed the first orb that she could reach that had the potential to be the key.
Wrong choice. After the usual red flash, the marbled pink and white orb changed into a flying sword. It charged to try stabbing Sofia in the weakest spots of her armor. Struggling to avoid the orbs moving along and only managing to stay standing up through the ordeal thanks to [Way of the fool], she wrestled with the flying sword. She eventually trapped it into the right arm of her bone armor as she controlled it to wrap around the wretched sharp flying stick. It kept struggling inside, causing some involuntary movements, but Sofia had enough arm strength to keep it in check.
Five more… How can I even do this?
Sofia was starting to panic a bit. Between dodging the balls, making sure the flying sword and lightning arrows didn’t free themselves, and trying to find the key, it was hard to keep track of everything. To make matters worse, her skeletons were useless, and worse even, they were a potential threat if they happened to miss a dodge and let an orb touch them.
The tip of her left wing bumped against a yellow orb, and soon, another lightning arrow was pursuing Sofia around the platform. At least it had the courtesy of avoiding the other orbs as it flew and turned, so there was no cascade effect. Sofia gave up trying to catch it and focused on dodging it when it came; after all, she was already dodging all the orbs. What was one more thing to avoid contact with?
She caught another one of the five remaining possible keys, a light blue one. It melted in her hand, and after a depressing red flash, hail started hitting Sofia from above. The hail in question was rock-hard chunks of ice, the largest of which were around the size of a head. They dented her armor as they fell and started gnawing at her health. At least she could reduce the amount that touched her by continuing forward. The crow skeleton was hit by a chunk of ice and died on the spot.
Sofia could only grit through it all and focus on searching for the next possible key. There wasn’t much else she could try anymore, short of exploding everything with a bolt or summoning Pareth and triggering a tenth of all the orbs at once in the process.
She almost reached another possible key when it suddenly sped up and escaped her grasp.
The whirring had, again, gotten louder.
Where is this damned key!
The orbs had started moving. All of them, in a circle around the obelisk, like the tiny planets they looked like. They were now in orbit.
They all moved slowly like small sluggish planets, barely a centimeter a second. That they moved at all made them infinitely harder to navigate through, however, and even worse to keep track of.
Sofia’s first reflex was to try to hide underground but the graveyard skill wouldn’t even activate, as if she was currently in the sky with nowhere valid to use it.
If I stay facing the current, since they all move in the same direction, I’ll at least not have to watch my back... This sure makes everything much worse. How do I find the damn thing fast? Clearly, brute force isn’t a solution this time; I’d be dead long before I could even touch a tenth of them…
Maybe the pattern is a lure?
Sofia stopped staring at the orbs, as much as she could afford, and thoroughly scanned the obelisk with her mana sense. She found something there that hadn’t been obvious before, a mana current. It would have been easy to think it was the cause of the orbs’ orbital movements, except it spun in the opposite direction.
This led Sofia to another discovery; some of the floating orbs were also spinning on themselves and around the obelisk. Some in one direction, some in the other. By focusing on these particular spinning orbs, one could notice that they had the same mana currents the obelisk had.
That lowered the possibilities. Now she needed to find orbs that had the correct pattern as well as the correct spin. With caution, advancing against the current, Sofia looked around everywhere for an orb with these features. All the while, the soldier skeleton lay on the ground to avoid touching any orb by accident. By the time Sofia had almost walked a complete circle around the platform, she had found one. A softly glowing green orb, it was about four meters high and on the outer periphery of the platform. One of the hardest orbs to reach out of the entire cloud. But it was engraved with the correct pattern she had found on the obelisk, and it spun in the right direction.
Unless I’m missing something, this could be the one! It was so hard to find too.
Sofia was too focused on keeping track of the position of her discovery; as it followed its orbit, a red orb grazed her ankle.
The whole void flashed red with a buzzing noise.
Fuck.
Sofia was ready to block an incoming attack from the orb, but it plunged into the ground instead. Soon after, the temperature on the platform rose a lot, enough to be uncomfortable even with the protection from the princess set she got out of the first trial.
At least it’s not as dangerous as the previous one. Are the orbs effects color coded? Yellow thunder, red heat. What happens if I touch another red, does the temperature increase by that much again? That would start to become a big issue…
The crisis averted, Sofia kept moving to try to grasp the green orb she thought might be the key. It was pretty hard to reach, and to make the matter worse, she couldn’t spread her wings. Unless she jumped off the platform and into the void, her deployed wings would touch many orbs. And even if she did that, she would have to touch more as she tried to land afterward.
Either way, she had to walk closer to the edge to get that orb. The farther she got from the obelisk at the center, she noticed that the orbs were moving faster there. That was because they all moved as a whole around the obelisk, and these ones were further from it. Also, the void around her started to get a reddish hue instead of black. Will it buzz again if I get too close to the edge? She carefully took a few steps back, and the void regained its black color. Alright then…
I still have the page with a single crow, so…
Sofia summoned the one crow out of her book. That was actually her most used page, as she used the small bird as a pet occasionally to keep her company when she trained her skills.
Go fetch that green orb. Take extra care not to touch the other ones.
She felt that out of all of the book’s skeletons, this one was the smartest, which could understand the most complex commands. But maybe I’m imagining things…
The crow reached the green orb, and it grabbed it with its talons, only for it to prompt another buzzing sound and red flash. The orb freed itself and shot down into the ground. Green gas clouds started appearing near the ground, spreading over the whole platform and rising.
What’s this now? It doesn’t seem corrosive. Poison? Whatever, I just need to stop breathing. This one’s not even an inconvenience.
The real problem Sofia faced now was that this hadn’t been the correct orb. Should I look for one in a unique color? Sofia kept looking around, walking against the current of the floating orbs. It wasn't so hard to avoid them, especially now that she focused her mana senses on herself to have a better view of her immediate surroundings. She could also walk in the sense of the current, which made avoiding the orbs very easy as long as she walked at the same speed they moved, but that way, she would only see the same few orbs near her all the time.
After about ten minutes of looking around everywhere, she was fairly certain to have taken note of all possible candidates for the key. Keeping track of them was almost impossible since they all kept moving, but she knew their approximate orbiting position relative to each other. There were six more in total with the correct pattern and spin direction.
I can power through a few more of the harmful effects… But this doesn’t feel like a good solution. In terms of color, the new candidates were of no particular interest. There was a red one that Sofia wouldn’t touch if she could avoid it, and the other ones were all different colors she hadn’t tried but which appeared many times.
There has to be more indications. A better way to go about this…
What if I pick the closest one to the obelisk, even if it ends up being wrong, and slam it into the hole before it can attack? Hmm. That doesn’t feel particularly right, either.
Sofia desperately looked around for clues or patterns among the cloud of orbs but didn’t find anything. As she pondered over her options, the whirring sound that had started when the orbs had begun orbiting the obelisk suddenly became louder. In turn, the orbs started moving faster.
Dodging them was still manageable, but focusing on anything else started to get hard.
Since it now seemed the orbs would only keep getting faster if she took too much time, she gave up overthinking and grabbed the first orb that she could reach that had the potential to be the key.
Wrong choice. After the usual red flash, the marbled pink and white orb changed into a flying sword. It charged to try stabbing Sofia in the weakest spots of her armor. Struggling to avoid the orbs moving along and only managing to stay standing up through the ordeal thanks to [Way of the fool], she wrestled with the flying sword. She eventually trapped it into the right arm of her bone armor as she controlled it to wrap around the wretched sharp flying stick. It kept struggling inside, causing some involuntary movements, but Sofia had enough arm strength to keep it in check.
Five more… How can I even do this?
Sofia was starting to panic a bit. Between dodging the balls, making sure the flying sword and lightning arrows didn’t free themselves, and trying to find the key, it was hard to keep track of everything. To make matters worse, her skeletons were useless, and worse even, they were a potential threat if they happened to miss a dodge and let an orb touch them.
The tip of her left wing bumped against a yellow orb, and soon, another lightning arrow was pursuing Sofia around the platform. At least it had the courtesy of avoiding the other orbs as it flew and turned, so there was no cascade effect. Sofia gave up trying to catch it and focused on dodging it when it came; after all, she was already dodging all the orbs. What was one more thing to avoid contact with?
She caught another one of the five remaining possible keys, a light blue one. It melted in her hand, and after a depressing red flash, hail started hitting Sofia from above. The hail in question was rock-hard chunks of ice, the largest of which were around the size of a head. They dented her armor as they fell and started gnawing at her health. At least she could reduce the amount that touched her by continuing forward. The crow skeleton was hit by a chunk of ice and died on the spot.
Sofia could only grit through it all and focus on searching for the next possible key. There wasn’t much else she could try anymore, short of exploding everything with a bolt or summoning Pareth and triggering a tenth of all the orbs at once in the process.
She almost reached another possible key when it suddenly sped up and escaped her grasp.
The whirring had, again, gotten louder.
Where is this damned key!
