Book 9. Chapter 32: Elemental Gauntlet
It had been a blinding, unbroken dash since the Battlegroup first phased into the Dungeon Raid Prime Instance.
After having experienced four, Jake had realized that they were never fully identical in their flow. Their first raid on Highlands had felt almost like a structured event, with timed floors and designated rest time in the shared rest area in between.
Serthune had been a grueling, contiguous slog through a parasitic gem corruption environment and greed traps. Morvalis was a lot like Serthune, an endless mausoleum or crypt with various undead bosses placed in rooms with a deadly miasma they had to fight against.
And Bramvalen… Bramvalen had been a bizarre, tactical escort mission where the Battlegroup had to stand in a tight circle around a glowing, magical payload cart. The cart slowly moved down a jungle and frozen wasteland track while the Battlegroup fended off endless waves of beasts between boss battles. It had been an effective, if oddly familiar, test of their mobile defense tactics.
The Burning Steps, however, was a Rapid Gauntlet.
The dungeon wasn't a natural cave system or external environment this time. Instead, it was a colossal, subterranean machine. Towering obsidian gears the size of houses ground against each other in the walls, powered by hissing magma vents and thick, pulsing arcane cables. Massive, exposed elemental cores hung from the ceiling like grotesque chandeliers or popped out of surprise trapdoors, tracking the raid's movements and raining hellfire, freezing geysers, and slicing winds down on them as they sprinted through the corridors.
Fhesiah couldn’t disarm any of it. It wasn't that the Kitsune Sage lacked the skill; it was a matter of the event shielding the mechanisms from tampering.
Jake knew the dungeon rules well. If a trap was designed to be instantly lethal–like a collapsing ceiling or a room flooding with lava–the Framework mandated that Tartarus provide a reasonable puzzle or physical mechanism to bypass it. But these magical turrets and floor vents weren't instant death. They were merely ‘environmental attrition.’
Because the damage was manageable and meant to be tanked or dodged while fighting the spawned clockwork-golem mobs, the system allowed their arrays to be completely encased behind invulnerable, untargetable dungeon geometry. There was nothing to hack or disarm. They just had to eat the damage and keep moving.