A slab of solid stone brick slammed down from the ceiling behind him. As it struck the ground, it kicked up a gust of stale air that caused him to throw up an arm to shield his face.
Coughing as the dust settled and taking a step back, he cracked open his eyes.
The path he'd just come from was blocked off.
Deacon stared at it for a moment. "Right. So that's how we're playing it."
He stepped forward, knocking once.
"Guys?" he called, voice echoing in the enclosed space. "Jass? Bonehead? Anyone?"
Nothing. Just the faint drip of water echoing somewhere in the distance.
"Perfect," he muttered, slamming the wall with the side of his right fist. "Fucking perfect."
For a second, he considered trying to burn through it with Ignis, see if maybe magic would do what fists couldn't, but he stopped himself. Jass's words echoed in his skull: "We don't know what this place is made of. One bad collapse…"
He turned back toward the hallway, Ignis's light pushing into the darkness again. The corridor continued forward, curving slightly like it was spiraling inward, deeper into wherever the temple wanted him to go.
Deacon exhaled slowly and started walking down the spiraling corridor. "System fucking damn it."
Deacon's boots clacked against the stone brick flooring as the downward spiraling corridor finally leveled out, and the narrow corridor abruptly gave way to a vast chamber, he instinctively slowed to a stop at the threshold.
"…Shit."
The room stretched out wide and soared up at least four stories high, just about the size of a small arena like the ones in the academy he'd use for monster and beast combat simulations, and was lit with various bioluminescent torches that hung along the ceiling.
But what caught his attention were the pillars.
Three ornate, pyramid-like constructs, each etched with strange sigils that shimmered faintly and hadn't shifted themselves into a language he understood, stood in very specific places throughout the chamber.
The first was directly ahead of him, maybe fifteen meters across the floor, placed before a massive door that was barred by metal bars.
The second pillar sat atop a platform that hovered ten meters above the center of the room, which was surrounded by other floating, smaller platforms. These platforms shifted slowly in a drifting orbit, and some of them spat out spears at irregular intervals, metal-tipped projectiles that shot out with audible clinks
The third pyramid was perhaps the most oddly placed one, as it hung upside-down from the top-right corner of the room, which was four stories high.
Before he could fully piece together the situation, a low thunk echoed beside him before several more followed, echoing throughout the small arena-like room.
Hissssssss.
Deacon whipped his head toward the source of the hissing, but that didn't do him any good as it was coming from all around him.
All along the base of the chamber walls, the bottom two bricks in between every other brick vanished and began to release thick, noxious black fumes that spilled onto the stone-brick floor.
"Oh, great. Poison gas… just my damn luck," he muttered to himself as he instinctively took a step back, but there was nowhere to retreat.
The corridor behind him had been sealed sometime during the period he was taking in the room.
Deacon's gaze flicked up to the three, short pyramid pillars scattered across the large room, then down to the room floor as the black fumes were pooling together and now reached the tips of his boots.
"Alright. Guess we're doing this, he said to himself as he tucked away his daggers and shot towards the nearest pillar.
Deacon sprinted across the chamber, uncaring how each step he took was echoing against the chamber walls and alerting any potential creature where he was. Almost immediately, he stopped funneling mana into Ignis as he was fairly sure that keeping an active flame was most definitely a horrible thing to do, and instead used the bioluminescent lanterns as his sources of light.
He ignored it and focused on rushing toward the nearest and most accessible pillar, the one stationed right in front of the barred doorway.
He skidded to a stop in front of it and immediately reached out. First, he gave it a shove in an attempt to see if it could be moved and needed to be pushed out, but it remained in its place. Then he began to see if he needed to twist it out of its place, as though it were screwed to the floor, but similarly, it didn't budge, even with his 53 Strength.
"Okay... What about this–" He said, seconds before slamming a fist into its side. Pain shot up his knuckles, but the pillar didn't budge. "Right. No punching it either."
Next, he placed both hands on its surface and began to channel his mana into the stone in hopes that it possibly needed mana in order to function.
The reaction was instant as the pillar gave a faint hum from beneath his palms, and the pillar's sigils pulsed a bright cerulean color for a short moment before the stone face of the pillar facing him had its sigils form themselves into an outline of a panda.
Deacon blinked. "A… panda?"
He quickly scanned the room, eyes flicking toward the floating platforms and the barred door. No obvious change.
"Huh," he muttered, turning back to face the pillar.
His hand slid slightly across the stone face in front of him, and he felt the surface shift as the entire face section of the pyramid rotated a few degrees under his touch.
The panda sigil flickered, shifting into a monkey, then a jaguar, then back to the panda as he fully rotated it three times.
"…Great. A pattern puzzle," Deacon groaned, stepping back for a second. The gas was now ankle-high and rising faster than he'd like. "Because having to deal with poison filling a room wasn't enough to deal with."
He reached into the inside of his Spatial Sling bag and pulled out a folded, parchment mask, the very same makeshift face cover he'd folded back when exploring that blight-infested prison just under that giant tree on the very first day he arrived onto Floor Three. He strapped it over his mouth and nose, while it wouldn't realistically do much as there weren't any detox spells or enchantments on it, it would buy him just a bit more time to work with.
Sliding it on, he turned his attention back to the rotating pillar.
"But what's the pattern I need?" he muttered, brow furrowing as he stared at the pillar in front of him.
Deacon exhaled through the mask, the parchment already starting to feel damp with his breath. The gas was now pooling around the middle of his shins. He didn't have time to waste.
"Alright," he muttered, pressing his palm back against the pillar's face. "Let's try monkey first."
He twisted the surface until the glowing panda sigil spun into a blue outline of a monkey with one hand curled on itself and scratching its armpit, and the other on its stomach. Releasing his mana and pulling his hand back, he watched as the glow faded.
No click, no sudden changing around him, no pillar rising, nor a change on the bars that blocked the doorway in front of him.
"Let's try the jaguar."
Without missing a beat, he twisted the face again. The monkey shimmered away and gave way to a jaguar bearing its teeth at him with narrow eyes. He held it for a second, then released his mana and stepped back.
A faint click echoed from somewhere above.
Deacon's eyes snapped upward.
From the top half of the chamber, a series of footholds, small, stone platforms not there a moment ago, extended one by one from the wall, creating a jagged but climbable path toward the upside-down pyramid pillar in the corner.
"Bingo."
Except, he immediately noticed that the lowest foothold was at least 10 meters off the ground. No way to reach it from where he stood, even if he were to flood his legs with mana, it was simply too high.
"So that's not happening," he muttered. If only I had a Physical Boosting skill that allowed me to be able to use my stamina in tandem…
His gaze drifted across the room, toward the center of the chamber, to the second short three-faced pillar. The one on the floating central platform, surrounded by the shifting orbit of smaller platforms, some of which he'd already seen launch spears out of them.
"Well, I needed to go up there anyways," he said to himself, wondering where the spears could even be stored in those smaller platforms and how they look to be perfectly ramrod straight and not with frills that would denote them as being able to collapse in on itself.
Deacon glanced down and saw that the poison gas was now reaching the middle of his shins. Crap.
He turned and sprinted across the chamber floor toward the center platform, boots splashing through the haze like it was liquid.
The floating platforms surrounding the center pillar drifted lazily through the air. He watched one pass by slowly, before a row of spears jutted out from its face suddenly, stabbing into empty space before retracting just as quickly.
Deacon exhaled hard through the mask as he sized up the floating platforms. They shifted slowly in their orbit around the central pillar, like predatory fish circling a meal.
Each had at least one flat surface wide enough to stand on, and most were plain, inert slabs of stone. Most.
A few, however, had small rectangular slits on their sides, barely visible in the low light, slots from which spears had already stabbed out like mechanical fangs.
"Alright," he muttered under his breath, "just don't get skewered, Deke."
He timed his movements carefully. The first platform came by without any sign of activity, and he leapt, landing low to avoid the risk of triggering something unseen. The stone wobbled slightly under his weight but held. Good.
The next platform was trickier; its spears had fired earlier, so the odds of a repeat were high. He waited until the next rotation. Just as the platform shifted and the spears punched out again, Deacon launched himself across, tucking into a roll midair, just as the spears were beginning to sink down and land into a crouch, just as the spears retracted themselves entirely with a mechanical clunk.
"I'm never gonna complain about having to do flexibility exercises… Yeah, I'm gonna need to ask Jass for some tips when we meet back up," he muttered, his breath already starting to feel heavier.
He reached for his Spatial Sling Bag but hesitated. He had three Poison Resistance Potions stashed, one for hemotoxins, one for neurotoxins, and one for corrosives. The problem was, he didn't know what the gas was.
The stinging in his lungs could've been a sign of a blood agent, but it could just as easily be a nerve agent messing with his respiration. Hell, it could be something else entirely. If he drank the wrong one, he'd waste the potion, and he didn't have a second shot for any of them.
Deacon swore under his breath and took his hand out of his Spatial Sling Bag. "Not yet. Need to know what I'm dealing with first."
He pushed onward, hopping to another platform, ducking as spears exploded from one corner, missing him by centimeters. One snagged the side of his leggings and tore through the boiled leather like it was paper.
Three more platforms left.
One almost ended with him slipping, catching the edge of the stone with his fingers, and hauling himself up just in time to avoid the next set of spear thrusts.
His vision was beginning to blur at the edges, and his fingertips had started tingling.
"Crap… either that's oxygen deprivation or the first signs of a neural poison," he muttered between heavy breaths as he landed on the large, central platform with the second pillar standing just a few meters away from him.