Chapter XVI (16)

  Mitsuko quickly lapped the pyramid’s halls, calling out Holly’s name. But the trail always led her back to the yawning pit at the temple’s center.

  “Damnit, Holly!” she yelled down into the hole. “You stupid, reckless, idiotic, curious gnome!”

  Mitsuko hurled an ice sword down into the pit. She never heard it shatter at the bottom. Either it was deep enough that the sound never reached her, or her vision of her previous life had been honest about the abyss. That meant there were spatial shenanigans at play.

  Cursing. Mitsuko took a deep breath, then leaped forward.

  She fell for a few meters before the area around her lit up with dim light. She rolled with the impact as she landed on a stone road.

  She didn’t black out or lose her sense of self this time. Probably because she passed through the spatial gateway far quicker than when she’d climbed down the rope.

  Once again, she stood back in the city frozen in time. Only, this time it was a different street than before. Definitely the same city, but the roads were unrecognizable from the arrival in her vision. Still, the city was structured where all paths led to the central temple.

  The temple filled with a pile of corpses. On which she’d died.

  But not this time. Mitsuko now understood her opponent better. She knew about his antimagic body that destroyed her icy sword. Instead of relying on her usual blade, she searched for something else to use.

  She jogged through the silent, stoney streets, looking for anything to use as a weapon. Nearly everything was built of stone. In fact, she quickly realized that she was hard pressed to find a single non-stone object outside the homes. Nothing organic. The best she found was a rusted metal horse bit caught in the side gutter of one of the roads.

  It was only inside the buildings that the people frozen in time existed. After poking her head in a couple homes she came away with a metal fire poker and the shaft of a broomstick she was now attempting to sharpen with her sword into a spear. Ineffectually.

  She cursed again softly to herself. Her wrist was seriously messed up from the fight earlier. She struggled to grip the broom properly.

  Then a thought occurred to her.

  “Mend,” she commanded, pointing at her wrist.

  The broken skin knitted together slightly. Then it fell apart, bleeding even more than before.

  “I suppose that’s too much to ask for a ‘level one’ spell.”

  She ended up abandoning the now bloody broomstick in the street. The fire poker would have to be enough. It lacked the range she wanted against the juggernaut, but it was solid iron. She would need to get in close, and strike quickly through the joints of his armor. Easier said than done with someone of his skill and strength. But Mitsuko believed herself to be of a match with the juggernaut so long as she caught him unaware.

  She slowed and ducked into a house as she saw the church in the distance. If possible, stealth would be ideal. Now that she had the church building in sight, she would at least know ahead of time if Holly arrived.

  Assuming that she wasn’t already among a pile of bodies inside.

  The thought chilled her and she tightened her grip on the fire poker.

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  Not this time.

  She waited, eyes glued to the church’s entrance. This time the doors were closed. She couldn’t see the pile of bodies beyond it.

  The juggernaut never appeared. She waited for several minutes before creeping closer. Then she dashed, building to building for cover. If he saw her, there was no sign of his hulking figure.

  Eventually, she reached the church’s front doors. She looked around, almost suspecting this to be an entirely different place. But no, these streets were exactly as she remembered them. And the stained-glass windows of the church depicted the same images as in her vision. She even recognized the marble statues in the front rock garden.

  She carefully pushed one of the double doors open a crack. Just enough to see inside. She held her breath, afraid of any unintentional noise.

  But the inside was empty. No bodies. No juggernaut. Just an empty stone church, cleared of pews. There was an altar at the far end of the room and two sets of stairs that curled around it, up to a podium.

  “Behind the altar.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Was that where the juggernaut hid? Perhaps he had an invisibility spell hiding him from view? Or some means of using spatial spells to jump to a location once trespassed? The voice was egging her forward. It sounded different from that of the juggernaut’s cadence, but why should she trust it?

  She turned away, prepared to walk away. Her number one priority was to find Holly and keep her friend safe. Not go explore catacombs beneath ancient churches lost to time.

  Except…that sounded amazing. The adventure spoke to her. The mystery gnawed at her. The atmosphere’s pressure weighed on her.

  Fuck it.

  She ducked inside the church. The large door banged closed behind her.

  As she got closer, she realized that the altar wasn’t just a slab of stone, but rather an extremely wide hourglass. The sand was caught in the act of falling, half above, half below.

  Then she looked back at the windows and from this side could see what they depicted. It was a woman slowly falling apart. Every panel had her losing more and more body parts until she was completely disjointed, with a heart at her center.

  At least…that was if you looked at them in that order. The normal order to read the Universal Script was top to bottom, right to left. But this church looked far older than the Universal Script. If she instead looked left to right, it was her piecing herself together until she was whole. Creepy. But interesting. Mitsuko recalled the spell she’d been granted after visiting here. Mend. The glass depiction and her acquiring the spell in the same place seemed too convenient to be a coincidence. If she leveled it up, could she access that sort of power? The ability to reassemble a human? Or was she jumping to conclusions?

  There was nothing behind the hourglass alter. But Mitsuko had seen these sorts of hidden passages before and knew what to look for. She spotted a crack barely thicker than a centimeter along the base of the altar. A flick of her wrist, and she held a sword. She jammed it into the crack and used it to leverage her weight.

  Her first ice sword snapped under the pressure, so Mitsuko created two more and tried again. This time, she reinforced the blades with a constant casting of her Mend spell. Whenever they came close to snapping, the spell fixed them back together. And, surprisingly, that actually worked. She had half expected to need to use her fire poker. But this was much better. She didn’t need to risk bending her only decent weapon for fighting the juggernaut.

  The altar dragged across the stone until it was wide enough for her to slip down under it to a room below.

  She found herself in a treasure vault. Suits of golden armor and piles of gemstones the size of her fist. Ancient tomes and scrolls were carefully preserved on shelves, doubtlessly filled with priceless information. Mitsuko lacked the ability to enhance her spellsense like most mages, but even she could tell the other objects scattered amongst the treasure were powerful artifacts. This was every treasure hunter’s wettest dream.

  Gold glittered under the light emitted from torches that lined the walls. All of the fire was frozen in time just like everything else in this city. At least that meant there was no risk of her suffocating on the fire’s smoke.

  It took every fiber of her willpower, but Mitsuko stayed very still. She dearly yearned to grab handfuls from the piles of golden coins and let them trickle through her fingers. Or to try one one of the enchanted helmets that glowed a soft pink. Or swing the sword that emitted a slight mist about it. But a vault like this always had traps. Nobody left something like this unguarded.

  “Salutations,” a familiar voice said. “Welcome, Champion, to my sanctuary.”

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