The strike that would have taken Laurence’s head swung towards him but never arrived. Moments before it would have landed, Yveth was knocked aside by a human cannonball. The speed of the human moving was slightly beyond what either of them could see, so Yveth had no chance to respond before being flung aside like a ragdoll. She crashed into a wall as the human landed on their feet and stood up.
In front of them was a young boy, about the same age as Laurence with white fur clothes covering his body. The fur clothing was of the same cut as Laurence’s handmade clothes, but with thick fur mittens instead of sleeves that ended at the elbow. In his hand was a short spear that looked more like a needle than anything else. It exuded a similar sensation to Laurence’s hammer, but rather than the strength that was inherent in Laurence’s spirit, this boy’s spear expressed a radiance of finesse. The young boy’s grey-white hair flickered in the rubble and wind generated by his entry. He looked like a wildling, with bright yellow eyes, standing in the fine mist of dust.
Yveth stood up, pressing off the wall she had slammed into to propel her back into a standing stance. Her form was no less oppressive than it had been before, but facing two boys of equivalent power seemed to neuter her capabilities considerably. She frowned at the odds before finally sprinting towards the unguarded exit of the building. The boy in white dove towards her at breakneck speed, but just as he reached Yveth she swung her hands back towards his unprotected neck. Unable to halt his momentum he ran straight into the wall, cracking it and shattering half of it.
Yveth stepped over the boy and sprinted from the building and off into the distance. She had decided that fighting Laurence and the boy in white was more effort than it was worth, so left them to their own devices. Laurence walked over to the boy and grabbed him by the hand, pulling him out of the wall he was partially trapped under.
“Who are you?” He said, looking at the boy who saved his life.
“Brother, don’t you recognise me?” The white haired boy looked slightly hurt at this.
“Yun?” Said Laurence. “Yun, is it really you?”
“Yes”. Replied Yun simply. He brushed himself off and began to walk back to the main room. “We should help the others find the target”.
As they walked to the back of the building Yun began to shift and blend his current form and the form of the wolf he was before. Soon he had melded the two forms before shifting finally into his canine form. The path before them slowly became littered with less and less debris through their journey, finally clearing away at the large room in front of them.
The room was cluttered, full of objects that displayed various sigils and patterns on them. The rest of Laurence’s team stood around the room, rummaging through the objects surrounding them. Laurence could see that they were quickly becoming more and more angry at the area surrounding them. Sara smashed the pots in front of her in a fit of rage, then began looking at a box full of jewelry.
“This pattern could be on anything” Said Louisa, sighing as she put back a small bowl full of multicoloured stones. She turned around and saw Laurence with torn clothes and bloodied flesh. She gasped, “Laurence, are you alright?”
“I’m fine”. He responded. “I encountered the Kimbramancer, and it did not go as well I thought it would”. He did not sigh, or complain about his loss, he just told them that he was more confident than he had reason to be. “If Yun had not shown up when he did, I would have not been able to hold out for much longer. What happened here?”
“We won,” said Quentin glibly. “It started off tough because we were evenly matched with the enemy party, but when Yun showed up we quickly overcame them. Aliss, the other Golden Child, managed to hold us off as they escaped, but that’s because she sealed the exit behind them. Briar clansmen are very gifted at rearranging terrain quickly, so they pulled back the moment they realised they were losing”. He threw some clothing on the ground as he talked, flicking through a variety of styles but only taking a moment to look for the Lupe clan insignia.
“Since then we’ve just been ransacking this room for the object that we need to find, but we’ve not found anything,” said Sara.
Hearing Quentin’s and Sara’s words, Laurence began to relax. He smiled and rubbed his hands together, immediately delving into the mass of objects in front of him. Every so often he would throw one or two of the objects in his bag, but for the most part he just discarded the things that he found.
They spent twenty minutes before Sara, Quentin and Louisa sat down in the middle of the room, surrounded by clutter and feeling no closer to actually passing the challenge than they had when Laurence arrived. Laurence still looked but even he was beginning to think the searching was unlikely to bear fruit. He cleared away the big pile in front of him when he heard a bark from Yun.
Brother! Sent Yun. Brother, I found something! Yun stood in front of a small alcove that had been hidden behind a settee. Inside there were three objects. A statuette, a painting and a box. Each one was a lot less intricate than any of the objects in the main room, but clearly had the logo of the Lupe clan emblazoned on them. When Laurence saw this, he grabbed all three and yelled over to his allies. Before he could say anything coherent, however, there was a bright flash of light and everything disappeared.
The group appeared in another room carved from lava. It was sparse, but there was a table and some chairs set up in the middle. The group sat down and Quentin began tending to Laurence’s wounds. He wiped up the blood and injected mana into Laurence’s skin, allowing the wounds on his body to quickly knit back together. Laurence felt some minor discomfort as his wounds were sealed back together, but it was nothing he could not deal with and was comparatively pleasant to the sensation of the injuries themselves. His only real complaint to Quentin was that everywhere healing was uncomfortably itchy.
They sat in the middle of the room looking at the art objects between them. Nothing there was particularly special, and yet each piece had an aura about it, a personality that seemed to stem from the emblem of the Lupe clan on the artefacts. Because of this they interested Laurence. He had not thought about them before, but could see how the symbols that a clan rallies behind could become a sigil for creation in its own right. It was the intent behind the glyph that gave it the power, so the more intention that could be held in a glyph from any and all sources gave it more power. It made the boy wonder what else could be considered a glyph and whether he could manufacture a glyph that could contain the same sense of prestige, the same radiance as the Lupe clan glyph.
As Laurence sat working out how to create a glyph with the prestige and inherent power of a clan emblem the adjudicator of the floor, Declan, walked into the room and sat down in front of the group. He pulled his jacket up to flare the collar, some would have said it looked more imposing that way. Looking at the group in front of him, the dog-man stretched out and picked up the three objects. Putting the statuette down, he smiled and said, “You’re the tenth group to finish this test. Well done”. His voice still contained the arrogance that it had when he was explaining the way the test floor worked, but it was a quieter arrogance. It was the kind that commanded the room without effort rather than the kind that someone had to work for. It was like he had been bred to lead. “Now, before I send you to on to the fifth floor I would like to ask you all, did any of you end up in the plains of fire on the previous floor? If so, could you tell me whether you discovered anything other than just a plain of fire?”
“I did,” said Laurence. “I was in the plain, and I discovered a mountain. Inside the mountain was a man. A man called Luke”. The moment Laurence mentioned the man, Luke, a flash of recognition passed across Declan’s face. It was nearly imperceptible, and left as quickly as it came but it was there.
“Would you pass me your pointer stone, child?” Said Declan, reaching out towards Laurence. There was a light in his eyes that betrayed his cool exterior, a fervent vigour that expressed his excitement and apprehension. He took the small black stone and placed it next to a black ring he had on his finger. A string of fluorescent symbols sprang from Laurence’s stone and injected themself into the ring. Soon the symbols began moving back from the ring into Laurence’s stone.
“As you should remember, on the second floor testing area your pointer stone would have been augmented for the first time to give you an instant mana restoration skill”. Declan continued, handing back the stone to Laurence once he had been done. “On the third floor test room your stone would have been changed to include a communication hub, a text based one. Last floor your stone would have been restructured to include a person sensor, one that shows the location of any living persons in an area around you”. Declan paused, taking in the pointer stones from the rest of the group. A beam arced out of his ring and split into four more, landing on the stones of the others. “This floor gifts you with a barrier. It will stand up to any single strike, but will shatter after that. It takes one full day to recharge but after that will be good to go again”.
“An incredible lifeline,” said Sara, quickly taking up her stone. She grabbed her chewing pouch and stuck the stone inside it. “Do we get anything else? I have already found the medicine pack rather useful. Some of the herbs are excellent battle stimulants”.
“So that’s what you’ve been chewing!” Said Quentin. He had a great respect for medicinal herbs, being from the clan of the Book of Life, so to hear that someone was chewing the herbs that they had been given on the fourth testing room angered him considerably. “You’re wasting the herbs!” He gasped. “If you are just going to chew them, then give them to me. I’ll make sure someone actually gets some use out of it”.
“Hell no kid, If you want me to give you the herbs then I need something back for them. Teach me how to do that healing thing you do and I’ll give you them”. Sara waved the bag at Quentin, almost taunting him with it.
“I don’t have a problem with showing you the path of Life, though I would have thought you were more suited to the path of Destruction. You are a mercenary”. He began playing with his fringe again. “It’ll take a long time too. You’d have to come with me for a few years, and I’ll be travelling mighty quickly. I have to keep up with people like him”. He pointed at Laurence.
“So does that mean you two will be travelling with each other from now on?” Said Louisa.
“I guess so,” said Sara. “I got nothing better to do, my bounty is impossible for me to collect on and the kid can teach me how to get stronger. You two?”
“I’m going to keep climbing the tower. I want to see what is on the next floor, and Yun is going to come with me,” said Laurence. He had no trouble deciding what he wanted to do, because his wanderlust was the driving force behind everything in the boy’s life.
“Would I be able to come with you Laurence? It may not mean much to you but I would love to be able to spend some time with an iconic creature like your wolf. A white tiger-wolf is the totem of the Lupe clan, and while my clan’s totem is the vermilion phoenix it would still be a magical experience for me,” said Louisa. Her eyes shone with a light that Laurence understood well. She wanted to know better what living with Yun was like.
“I don’t see why not,” said Laurence. “I probably won’t be trying as hard as Quentin to climb the tower, but I will be quick. You will have to keep up”. He laughed.
Declan stood up and handed the group a small bag. “In this bag there is 20 copper shards. and a small poison kit. You can apply them to your weapons to act as a numbing agent or mix something more lethal. The antidotes are also in there in case you poison yourself. If that will be all, I must ask you to leave. I have other groups to see”. He ushered them towards the door and pushed them out quickly. “Good luck upon your journey, challengers, I wish you a safe trip”.
