Ends of Magic

As soon as he was through the barrier of adamant, Nathan could feel the magic. The magical environment inside Sussu’s vault was intense, a cacophony of powerful artifacts. Trying to examine them with his magical senses felt like staring into aggressive concert lighting. Something about the adamant shell had completely blocked the magical signatures until this moment. Nathan looked around, trying to tune out the magical background to feel for traps. His first pass didn’t find any.

He stepped forward, running his eyes over the galleria that took up most of the space inside the shell. All around were plinths and display cases in a regular grid, carefully labelled and sorted according to some kind of higher-level scheme. The place looked like a museum. One of the light fixtures flared brightly and fired a [disintegration] spell his way. Nathan ate the spell and killed the enchantment before spreading out his aura to take out every light fixture in the room. Each one of them had held a similar spell, though there was some divergence in the exact magical payload.

If I’m understanding them right, the triggers are optical, not magical. Tricky.

He nodded to himself and took another step. A blade of the dark metal emerged from between two floor tiles to slice him from groin to crown. He managed to get his head out of the path of the blade and flopped to the ground in a puddle of blood while his two halves knit back together.

Rude.

He reached his magic into the tiles under the floor and felt for a triggering mechanism, finding only the faintest elements of magic. It hadn’t felt like a trap to him because the trap was mostly mechanical, and the enchantments were of the kind of preservation enchantment that kept mechanical parts pristine over a long period.

He scanned the rest of the room, and now that he knew what to look for, he found a half-dozen more of the floor traps. With the larger sample size, he could feel the faint threads of wizardry that connected them. It was some kind of disarming mechanism that would disable all of the traps if the right magical authentication was given. He tried to figure out how to hack the system, but it was built on Esebus principles, and he couldn’t immediately figure it out. They didn't have time for him to puzzle over it, so he followed the threads back out to find a series of magical explosives hidden in the plinths. They were using the signatures of the artifacts as cover and would detonate if any of the artifacts were picked up.

He disabled the bombs with his aura, careful to keep away from the artifacts. He didn’t want to know what would happen if he broke something like the [Last Arrow of Olita] with his antimagic, but it seemed like a bad idea. He worked quickly, burning focus to rapidly work through every trap he found.