Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 900
🕑 Added 2025-06-03 23:39:44 +0000 UTC“So, you’re saying there’s an access point at the bottom of that island?” Abel said as we all stood on the same roof Callie and I had left earlier. “Why? What’s down there? Because it seems stupid to build an entrance facing down into the chasm like that. What if someone uses it to break in? You know, like we’re going to try to do.”
I rolled my eyes. “We don’t have to bring you, you know. Bethy can do your part. If you don’t feel like helping just let me know.”
“You don’t have to be snippy,” he muttered, looking away sulkily. “I was just asking.”
“They don’t know about the access point,” I said, getting back to the point. “It was an emergency escape tunnel created by the third city lord. He was stupid paranoid, and he never revealed its existence to anyone in the fortress. Realistically, it’s less a fortress and more a small city inside the larger one. The first city lord’s bloodline are in charge, but tons of small families and factions have married or been hired in.”
Chelsea cocked her head. “Then why make it sound like they’re perpetual isolationists. If there’s access to this place for normal people why not just sneak in the front door?”
“Because there isn’t,” I sighed. “They don’t hire in very often, and marriages are done sparingly, usually prepared for long distance for years before being executed. There’s no short term method to enter, which I suspect is why we were hired to do this to begin with.”
While it might seem simple and convenient for me to access this place, the truth was that the combination of Dantalion and the Wisdom of Solomon made me damn near perfectly suited to crack defenses of almost any type provided they weren’t higher ranked than me.
Being D-ranked made this particular area perfect for my skillset. I wouldn’t have gotten nearly enough information in such a short time with a higher ranked target, if I was able to get enough in the first place. “Anyway, access will be tricky. Bethy is going to need to carry us in. There chasm has special countermeasures to flight of almost any kind. But the island is protected. If Bethy can go misty and stick close to the island and the bridge, she can slide along the rock and access the passage directly.”
This was also useful because the damned thing was thousands of years old and probably rusted shut. Bethy would be able to slip through the cracks to get us inside, and once there, I could take care of our route to the vault.
Bethy beamed. “That sounds like fun! Sure, guys, come on in.” Her Domain flickered out, and within moments we were all standing on black grass under a blood red moon, a much squatter black stone building in the distance. Up in the sky, the moon reflected a series of images that were easily recognizable as the view we’d just been looking down on.
A loud trill echoed in my ears, and I grinned as Archie swept down from the sky to land on my shoulder. I nodded to him. “Hey bud, you been having fun in here?” He trilled once, then nipped at my mask in annoyance. I just laughed. “I know, but things have been crazy, can’t have you out all the time, especially not in a place like this. They have air defenses mounted all over the city. You fancy a B-ranked bolt to the face?” He let out an indignant squawk and I laughed. “No I’m not THREATENING you, you overgrown chicken. I wasn’t the one who set them up.”
He snorted (which is impressive with a beak) and took flight, sweeping off in a huff when he saw I wasn’t planning to bring him out this time.
“Bit of an attitude, huh?” Callie asked in amusement.
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t know the half of i-” I was interrupted by a shaking as I was suddenly dropped somewhere completely different. I stumbled, catching myself easily, and then looked around to find that were were standing in…something. Some kind of big stone banquet hall full of wooden tables and dust.
“We’re in!” Bethy announced proudly. “It was super easy. There was this complicated door lock mechanism, and I was like ‘not today lock’ and then I was like ‘whoosh’ and I snuck in through the lock and dodged all the tumblers and then came out the other side as mist.”
Abel, who had put his hands down on a table when catching himself, coughed himself silly as he inhaled a ploof of dust he’d kicked up by accident. “A warning would have been nice!”
Bethy shot him a confused look. “But I was only supposed to bring you in. How long did you think it was going to take? I figured you would all just be waiting for me to let you out again, and I didn’t want to keep you waiting.”
“I…have no response to that,” he said lamely.
Neither did I, but I also hadn’t brought it up, so he could be the one to look stupid. “Anyway, everyone gather up. This place is boobytrapped. The guy who designed it was terrified someone would use it to get in.”
“How would they do that?” Asked Chelsea. “Hell, how would they use to get OUT. You can’t fly out of here, right?”
I pointed across the hall and up, and a small wooden platform hanging under a very large wooden spool wound with thick sturdy rope. Beneath it was the trapped door we’d come in through, which Bethy had been thoughtful enough to bring us away from, just in case all of us standing on it caused it to drop open and send us plummeting to our horrible deaths.
“That thing can lower you down to the nearest web bridge. It’s a ways down, so it isn’t quite so visible, but the rope is long and very durable. We can use that to leave after we’re done, if we don’t have another exit.” I tried to sound casual about that, despite REALLY hoping it wasn’t necessary. It would mean that most of my other exit strategies had failed, and I REALLY didn’t want to think about that.
For now, I just turned and looked around, triggering Dantalion just in case. I knew the locations of all the traps, but it never hurt to be careful. The guy who built this place was insanely paranoid, even moreso than most of the other lunatics who had lived here. He’d trapped EVERYTHING. Tables, chairs, loose paving stones. If it could move, it was a pressure plate, if it wasn’t it had a detection rune on it.
There were so many traps down here that more of the floor HAD them than didn’t. Weirdly, they started about ten feet from the trapped door, which was an odd choice, but I guess he wanted to lure them into a false sense of security. When you subtracted the traps though, there was only actually one safe path through this place.
Although…I frowned, looking around the room slowly. It would make no sense to have all these here if this place was going to be USED for anything. And the tables implied it might be. I focused on my Perception, spreading Dantalion out to search and…yup. As I’d suspected. I reached into my ring, pulled out a heavy shield, and threw it expertly in a seemingly random direction.
It landed with a clatter, and there was a clink and a thump and then the room shuddered. Then everything kind of…settled. I frowned, scanning the room, and just to be sure, I stepped forward slowly, ready to use Double Trouble to avoid if needed. Turned out it wasn’t. As I’d suspected, that had disabled the traps.
“Ok, we’re clear to walk through here,” I said cheerfully. “Stick close. This place isn’t connected to any other passages, because it predates most of them and was meant to be a complete secret. Which means we need to emerge into the main fortress to cross over, and there are a few points where that’ll be necessary.” I dropped Dantalion, triggering Murmur, and covered us all with my stealth domain.
The walk to the exit passage was quick and easy without the traps, even if the place was dusty and terrible. My mask protected me from that, of course, but everyone else was coughing their lungs out and I had to suppress a chuckle. I waited after reaching the exit to make sure everyone was done, just in case. The sound wouldn’t have left my domain but it made things harder for no reason, and once they were clear, I pressed on the wall inside the archway and it swung open smoothly (albeit with a bit of a groan I had to cover).
We emerged into a large but relatively cramped room. Despite the overall size, the ceiling was low and the space was limited by large wooden racks full to bursting with heavy barrels. The barrels all had labels on them, names and years, and it was clear without much thinking that this was a wine cellar.
“Alright,” I said, turning to my friends. “Here’s the deal. The nearest access point to the tunnel network is only a hallway over. BUT its to an old defunct tunnel that isn’t connected to any others. We’d need to leave halfway through, and we’d have a long trek to the next access point. Instead, we’re going three halls up, and we’ll access one of the newer tunnels. Once we’re in, we can use it to enter several other passages, and we won’t need to emerge again for a while.”
Everyone nodded, but Callie raised a hand inquiringly. I snorted. “You don’t need permission to talk, Cal, I can cover any noise with the domain, and if I can’t I’ll let you know. What’s up?”
“Where is the vault?” she asked worriedly. “My model didn’t get too detailed before you switched to the simulation. I assumed it was low to the ground, since where else would a vault be, but you make it sound like a long trip. Is it on this floor? How big is this place?”
“In order, on the tenth floor, no, and big.” I ticked off my responses as I gave them. “Or at least, it was yesterday. That’s where we run into a bit of a problem. The vault is built into a central shaft that runs the length of the fortress. The walls are ten foot thick D-rank metal, and the only access points are the doors on the few floors that it opens onto. It can be lowered into the bottom floor, but when it’s down here, it’s in an inaccessible bunker that we have no shot at breaching.
I conjured a stone and waved a hand, dissolving it and using Dust Construction to reshape it in the air, creating a model. “It usually sits on the tenth floor. It’s accessible up there, and the family uses that as a sort of waystation to access it. If there’s any sign of trespassers, it drops into the basement and gets sealed in. If that happens, we have ZERO chance of cracking it within the next year. So we absolutely can’t get detected.”
The mobile vault layout was absurdly complicated, but for ninety percent of the time, it was also nearly impenetrable. That was why I needed this specific team of people to access it. There were multiple layers even once we got inside, and if we wanted to get this done and get out without detection, certain skillsets would be key.
We walked the few halls over to the access point of the next tunnel, a statue in a nook, and I pushed it aside, gesturing them in and heading for the stairs at the far end of the passage. We had a long way to travel in here, and not much time. My perfect simulated plan was on a timer, and I still wasn’t sure we’d make it. Despite all that, I found myself grinning like a loon. Say what you wanted about the WCP, but they were never boring. This was already turning out to be a lot of fun.
