Chapter 391: Green Means Go
As Cerise Darktouched finishes up her breakfast, Lyota Silverstar pokes her head into the succubus's tent. "We've got a report from Grassbrook."
The Emissary frowns at the news. "So early? They must've left right at first light. Is something wrong?"
"Maybe." The fury waves the message around a bit before reading from it. "That...Problem Solver of yours reports that he caught Ruckus Dullspoon trying to skip town in the middle of the night. Apparently he also left some traps in the Association office, which went off without any casualties. Didn't burn the building down or anything, but it sounds like it might need some repairs if we wish to use it for ourselves. Anyways, Dullspoon is currently incarcerated in the fort with the other troublesome Challengers."
Cerise sighs. "I thought he might be the type to try something, but I would have thought we'd paid him well enough to at least keep him around for a while longer. Did Randall say what triggered this...escape attempt?"
"No, but...he says he'll work on trying to figure it out." Lyota sighs as she places the message on Cerise's table. "If I might say so, ma'am, I don't trust that Randall. He's not exactly...loyal."
"Still sore about that little skirmish you had some time ago? The incident with the Highbranches and Perlins?" The demon chuckles. "But no, you're correct. Still, despite the name of his class the man can be a problem as easily as solve one, and it makes him the sort of person I'd rather keep close. In any case, this seems like a minor concern compared to what occurred up here last night."
Lyota furrows her brow. "Did something go wrong? I wasn't alerted."
"We were safe out here, no worries. But apparently one squad in the dungeon was ambushed and partially kidnapped during the night. Intelligence-gathering, I presume, unless it was just an attempt to thin our numbers."
"So...they've had a chance to examine our new armor."
"A few hours, yes. In which case I suppose it's time to begin the day's events - every additional hour we give them is an hour they can use to find countermeasures."
Setting aside her silverware, Cerise steps out of the tent and finds the draconic in charge of managing the soldiers. Currently the gray-scaled draconic seems to be busy sorting out the newly arrived squads of troops, just finishing their hike up the mountain. "Commander! Where are we on beginning our assault on Floor Two?"
The woman turns to face her superior. "Well, we'll give the reinforcements ten minutes to recover from the climb, and then we can start pushing units forward. Even with last night's...casualties, we still have more than enough soldiers to both secure Floor One and assault the second. Do you have any further orders?"
Cerise shakes her head. "No, we stick to the plan. But keep me updated if anything unexpected occurs. Although I suppose I should say, I expect that some such thing will occur today..."
As the newly-renamed Squad One passes through the Floor One boss arena and into the shaft that makes up Floor Two, there's immediate signs that something is not as they expected. The team's scout, a green kobold, points at the floor and walls. "This doesn't seem right. The entire floor here's supposed to move as a whole, right? You push a pressure plate and the whole thing slides down?"
His succubus captain nods. "So we were briefed. What are you noticing?"
"The seams on the floor don't match up with that. Plus there's like...six plates here? Either some of these are pitfalls, or it's been split up into a bunch of smaller platforms."
The demon sighs. "Of course this couldn't be easy. Okay, everyone else stand back, and you press one of the plates. We'll see what happens, and if we have to wait for the entire thing to go down and back up again, so it goes."
Cautiously, the kobold inches his way forward and presses the nearest plate before quickly hopping backwards. No traps spring out to kill the man, but one section of the floor does indeed begin sliding away. It's about a sixteenth of the floor's total area, indicating that the former platform's been divided into a four-by-four grid. Pushing the scout forward, the demon gives another order. "Take a look, go see if anything's happening to that platform that just moved."
Grumbling, the kobold does so, again inching forward until he can get a look into the gap the mobile stone left behind. "It's going down and...uh, actually, it just stopped. It's about twenty, thirty feet down? Oh, I can see a bunch of other platforms the same size, all over the place. Some are stuck to the walls, some are suspended...it's all at different heights though, it's a real mess."
"Eh? Any monsters? Traps?"
"Not that I can see from here...not well lit, though."
The captain thinks on that for a moment before shaking her head. "Try the other pressure plates. We'll see what happens to the rest of them."
Again, the scout does so, and each platform repeats the motions of the first. Not exactly in the same way, however. "...It looks like they're all stopping at different heights? I think I can see some more triggers on the walls there...oh, fuckin' wyvernshit."
"What?" The succubus's hand reaches for her weapon. "What do you see?"
The kobold stands up while shooting a rude gesture down the shaft. "It's a godsdamned jumping puzzle. I think I can see a route to get to different triggers, but you have to use the right platforms, and if all of them are down then some get in the way. I think we're supposed to figure out how to build the path using these triggers up here to start with."
"...And the platforms aren't big enough for all of us to stand on at once."
The man shakes his head. "Two at most, any more than that and there'll barely be enough time to get the jumping distance you need. And hells, any slimes in here today will need to be carried down."
The succubus taps her chestplate. "At least we're protected from the risk of falls, although it might make the jumping a little trickier. Re-raise the platforms we need and then we'll go down ourselves."
Pressing the triggers a second time does indeed seem to bring the platforms back up, so the scout does so with a few of the more useful-looking ones, and then with a third tap the party is descending down into the shaft. Crystal lights illuminate the walls, although the squad's leader would say they're probably intended more for intimidation purposes than to actually be helpful. It's still too dark to get a good view of the new floor layout, but it does do an excellent job of indicating just how much empty shaft is still below them, and even their magic armor can't prevent a few of the soldiers from suddenly developing a fear of heights.
Once the first platform reaches its lowest point, the party scout very carefully attempts a leap to the next platform along the wall, and it's a rather unusual sight. With the enchanted gear having no effect on horizontal movement but slowing their vertical descent, the kobold actually has to keep his claws scraping against the shaft wall to prevent from overshooting the jump. Briefly, the captain considers skipping the whole thing and just gently drifting down to the bottom of the floor...but there's surely some monsters hidden around here somewhere, and floating around like soap bubbles would leave them just as vulnerable to destruction.
After taking a look around the scout moves on to another platform, and the succubus follows after, while the rest of the party does the same with their own starting points. the kobold stops there however, and the demon calls out a question. "What do you see? Any signs of monsters yet? This floor is supposed to use spider and skeleton ambushes."
"None of those...unless the spiders are hiding on the underside of this damn platform, and now I've gone and made myself fuckin' paranoid...but there is another plate here. I'm...pretty sure this is supposed to move another platform, so that we can keep going."
"Pretty sure?"
"Either that, or it'll explode or drop the floor out from under me, yeah."
The succubus growls. "Can't you do better than a guess!?"
"...One moment, one moment..." Sighing, the kobold begins to inspect the stone he's standing on - including very carefully peaking beneath to see if any spiders are hanging on to the thing. "Not seeing any latches, grooves, magic channels or anything like that. I don't think this platform moves at all. Trigger probably controls a different one."
"...I suppose we'll find out." The captain catches up to her scout, and a moment later he presses the plate into the wall. Sure enough, another platform that was lower down begins sliding its way up the wall to meet them, opening up another path. At least for a short distance. Looking ahead, the succubus swallows uncomfortably. "We have to take the entire shaft bit by bit like this? This is going to take all morning!"
The kobold snorts. "Heh, that's what she said."
"...What? Who? Did Emissary Darktouched say something about the shaft? She said it was long, but I don't think there was anything about it being this damned hard!"
"No, no, just...remembering something else." The scout does his best to get his wheezing under control, and finally does so. "Ah, anyways. Shall we get going? It's not gonna take care of itself, after all."
"...After you."
The kobold does so, as do the other soldiers following their own routes. Once each of them have cleared the starting platforms the second squad behind them summons them back to the start, and a minute later another set of soldiers is very carefully leaping from stone square to stone square.
The trip down is...disturbingly easy, once the soldiers get used to it. The enchanted gear takes almost all of the real risk out of the floor's design, and even when a soldier does miss their landing someone else is usually there to grab hold of them, or the soldier is able to safely land on another platform entirely. None of the pressure plates trigger traps, and at no point do the soldiers run into even a single mundane spider, let alone a genuine threat.
It is, to put it lightly, nerve-wracking.
As the path to the bottom wraps around the shaft and criss-crosses the center numerous times, the route required is far longer than the floor itself. It takes an hour for the first squad to get two-thirds of the way down, and by that point all of the other squads from the first day have begun their own climb down. Eventually the succubus captain is able to get a good look at the ground floor itself, and seeing it devoid of hazards, begins re-thinking her earlier analysis.
"Maybe this dungeon isn't as smart as they said it was? This would be quite hazardous to the average Initiate, but it seems like the dungeon hasn't adapted to our new gear at all. Or adapted in the worst possible way, at that. It really does seem as if it took all of the monsters out of this floor?"
The scout looks up at his commander. "What are you thinking, boss?"
"I'm thinking we've wasted enough time. Shall we take a jump for it, and let the armor float us on down? If there were going to be ambushes we would have seen some by now, and we could cut this trip from 'hours' to 'minutes' for all of those other squads following behind us."
The kobold looks around, attempting to find a reason to say no, but fails to do so. "I can't see anything dangerous-looking from here. As long as our mages and archers are ready to start blasting anything that pokes its head out, we should be able to make it the rest of the way, I suppose."
"Very well. Squad One! Follow me!" With the shout of her command the succubus leaps into the open center of the shaft, and her scout follows.
Watching on, Xenia smiles a devious grin - although only Guy is there to see it. "Green means Go."
As the first squad begins floating their way down, all of the lights in the shaft suddenly turn off. A moment they flicker back on - but it's not the same yellow-white crystals that were illuminating the floor before. Now, green crystals activate all along every wall of Floor Two.
A moment later, the screaming starts.
As body after armored body begins slamming into the bottom of the floor, Guy's screen-like form shivers. "I've seen many a gruesome death over the past few years, but if I was biologically capable of it I worry this sort of sight might actually make me feel somewhat ill."
"...Unfortunately, I've seen worse." Turning her head upward, Xenia peers into the distance as a few more soldiers begin their much-accelerated drop to the bottom. Some had only been partway through a jump or landing when the lights activated and turned off their enchanted gear, and had managed to at least briefly grab on to one ledge or another. Some of those soldiers lose their short chance at salvation though, their fingers slipping off of the stone and releasing them to the pull of gravity. Some don't fall all the way down, instead hitting other platforms or support beams on the way, but this is rarely much of an improvement for the soldiers in question.
As the twenty-fourth soldier slams into the floor in an increasingly bloody display, Xenia nods. "Two dozen's pretty good, and looks like the rest have caught hold of something. Guy, tell Trush and his squad to get ready."
The screen flickers out, and Xenia counts down from ten. At the tenth tap of her foot, the dungeon master smiles again. "Red means...stop."
"What in the hells is going on down there!? What's with all the damn colors!?"
As the draconic overseeing the movement of the second wave of troops rushes towards the entry section of Floor Two, a shocked-looking slime mage turns to answer her. "It's...the...first the shaft turned green and...and people started falling. Then..."
The commander gestures towards one of the open holes in the floor, and the crimson light emitting from it. "And now it's red? What does the red do?"
The sound of a distant explosion partially answers the question, but the mage fills in the rest as best as she can. "It's...some sort of signal, I think. It turned red, and a bunch of alcoves suddenly opened up all along the walls. I...think there were monsters and Challengers hiding inside, or traps, or something."
"Pull our troops out! Spread the word, every soldier must retreat back up to Floor One!"
There's one more explosion, and the slime ripples as she peers down the shaft one more time. "I...I think it's too late, ma'am."
A few minutes later the report files back to Cerise, waiting outside the dungeon, and for the first time in her life the red-skinned succubus looks deathly pale. Concern in her voice, Lyota steps forward to snap her out of it. "Emissary? Cerise, how should we proceed?"
"Proceed?" Cerise begins to give a manic form of laugh. "Proceed? No. For now, Lyota...we're...I'm...fucked."