NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 46: More Difficult Than It Looks
Hiral climbed up the ladder for the fifth time, water cascading off him and back down into the pool, then looked up to find Right crouched in front of him.
“Tried the old block-the-spinning-bar-with-your-face tactic that time, huh?” Right asked, only to then smile and offer a hand to help Hiral.
“Thought I had it,” Hiral said, taking the offered hand to get pulled the rest of the way off the ladder. “The rotation speed changed as soon as I got past that second vertical part, though.” He turned back to track the moving bars with his eyes. Hrm. Speed is back to normal.
“I saw. Not sure if you noticed, but the next tier beyond it raised about two feet at the same time too.”
“Damn, really? That changes where I need to go, then.” Hiral ran the path in his head. “What do you think? Need to ride the windmill up as high as I can, then jump?”
“Without a Rune of Rejection to soften your fall, I wouldn’t suggest that…” Right trailed off.
“But, since I have just such a rune, that’s likely exactly the answer,” Hiral said. “Good catch on the elevation change. I would’ve needed another swim or two before I noticed it.”
“What else can I do?” Right said, frustration leaking out of his voice. “I don’t like not being able to help directly. That ice, I could blast through if I was allowed to help Seena.” The double turned a dirty look towards where the woman likewise pulled herself up from the vast pool.
Right had actually tried to help at the beginning, but like Yanily and the portal, it was like there was an invisible boundary preventing him from getting inside each trial. In the last hour since the party had been attempting the trials, the doubles had been forced to do little more than sit and watch.
“Left is the thinker. I’m the doer. Yeah, I get I’m helping, it’s just not…” Right shook his head.
“It’s not punchy enough?” Hiral offered, though his eyes lingered on Seena. She’d gone straight to staring at her tome as it floated in front of her like she was actually reading it, instead of just pulling abilities from it. Is… is there something written in the book? Why didn’t I ever ask that before? “How are the others doing, anyway?”
“It’s probably no surprise, but you’re the closest one to making it to your platform,” Right said.
“What? Really?” Hiral asked, clearly showing he was, in fact, very surprised. “What about Wule? He should’ve been able to make it by now.”
Right shook his head. “He keeps running out of solar energy before he makes it all the way over. The air blades get more and more intense with every step. Hit harder and faster. Like his brother, he gets about three-quarters of the way before he has to abort and dive into the water.
“He tried to push it once, but as soon as he didn’t have any healing energy in him, the next wind blade was more like a wind battering ram. Knocked him clean off. Unluckily for him, Nivian just happened to be watching.”
“Hrm. It’s not just about the wind blades, then. His trial is about conserving his solar energy… or at least using it more efficiently.”
“Left said the same thing,” Right said.
“And Nivian? Any luck there?”
“Not a bit. He falls at the same spot every single time. He’s tried fifteen times at this point, I think. He either succeeds or fails pretty quickly.”
“How’s he feeling? That’s got to be… frustrating.”
“Seeing Wule take a dive—he actually flipped in the air and yelped; it was amazing—helped Nivian’s mood,” Right said. “Honestly, though, he’s fine. He’s looking at it like part of protecting everybody. Doing his job. He’ll get it. It’s just a practice thing.”
“Makes sense. And Yanily? He made the jump?”
“He made a jump. Missed the platform by a mile. Said it’s harder to aim without the spear to guide him.”
“What’s he using? Don’t tell me it’s a fork. Would that even count as gear…?”
“His hand,” Right said. “Like…”
“Like what Balyo did against Picoli?” Hiral asked, thinking back to the brutal encounter with the thing that’d taken over their friend.
“Exactly that,” Right confirmed. “It takes more solar energy to do it that way, so he’s only made a few jumps since he figured out how to. Seeyela, though… What she’s doing now is really interesting.”
“Faster portals?” Hiral guessed, but Right shook his head.
“She’s trying to directly transport herself. No portal to step through. Just bamf and she’s there.”
“Bamf?”
“That’s the sound effect she told me it would make when she finally succeeded,” Right said.
“Has she succeeded?” Hiral asked.
“No,” Right said, pointing to the woman back in her white armor.
She took two steps towards the trial, the armor vanished, and she stopped. She seemed to ponder something for a few seconds, then spun on her heel and walked away from the trial. As soon as her armor reappeared, she paused again, then repeated the process.
“She’s trying to copy how the Urn is taking our gear,” Hiral guessed. “Using that to get a feel for it. Smart woman. And Seena?”
“Seena needs a break from reading,” Seena said, coming up behind Hiral while he looked at the others.
“Not a hot romance, then?” Hiral asked, nodding towards the floating tome. “Figured you needed a dip to cool off.”
Seena stopped and blinked, and then her eyes darted to the side.
“Wait, it is a hot romance?” Hiral asked.
Seena shrugged and tilted her head to the side. “Kind of, actually. The writer had… a thing… for fire. And burning stuff. Burning it completely down. It gets… graphic.”
“Oh… uh…” Hiral said awkwardly. “And you’re still reading it because…?”
Seena’s lips quirked in a mischievous smile. “Because… this…” she said, crooking her fingers almost like they were claws, then snapping the hand down and across over the water. A scar of flame ripped across the air twenty feet out and left a shimmer hanging even after it winked out a heartbeat later.
“What the… Did you get an ability evolution?” he asked.
“Cinder,” she said with a nod. “Minor fire damage, and pretty short range, but it also reduces the fire resistance of whatever it hits. Ten percent at a time, and it stacks up to three. No cooldown, and hardly costs any solar energy to use.”
“Wow. That’s amazing, and just what you needed. Will it help you get through the ice?”
Seena shook her head. “Doesn’t do quite enough damage,” she said, though she was still smiling.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” he said, spotting the cues on her face.
“You got me,” she said, thrusting out her other hand. A gout of flame thirty feet long roared through where she’d just used Cinder, the fire going on and on for a solid five seconds before she finally cut it off. “Phew, that drains more, but with Cinder, that should get me through.”
“You got two ability evolutions?” Hiral asked, eyes wide.
“I did!” Seena said, actually giving a small fist pump in the air. “And, best of all, they’re my abilities, not the book’s. I don’t need to have it open to use them. Hoping I can eventually figure out the fireballs and totems… but one step at a time.”
“That’s amazing!” Hiral said. “I wonder if it’s some kind of benefit of being in proximity to the Urn on top of our PIMs.”
“I’m fine either way,” Seena said with another smile. “That’s enough of a break, though. We should get back to it.”
“Yeah, we should,” Hiral agreed, glancing back at his own trial.
Like Wule and Nivian, he’d made it to around the three-quarter mark of the course before getting knocked into the water. The movements of the spinning bars changed depending on where he was at any given time in the obstacle course, so it wasn’t like he could just stand back and figure out…
But why do I need to stand back? I can treat this like I did the Time Trial up in Fallen Reach, and pause to observe the next section. I don’t need to rush… yet.
Hiral rubbed the tips of his fingers together like he was getting a feel for his new plan, then noticed Seena was still standing beside him.
“You have a suggestion for this?” he asked, seeing how her eyes went from him to the course.
“Maybe?” she said a little awkwardly. “Why aren’t you doing your… you know… running-on-the-air thing? With the runes under your feet? Couldn’t you just skip all the bars and go straight to the platform?”
“Ah, apparently the course considers that cheating. I can’t do that twice in a row. The second one fizzles out. On top of that, I need to touch certain bars, or a barrier appears to block off the next section of the course.”
“Your trial sounds way more complicated than ours,” Seena pointed out.
“Yes and no,” Hiral said with a shrug. “Like we guessed before, the trial is trying to teach us all something. For you, obviously it was that you needed new abilities not tied to your weapon. For me, I think it’s about control.
“I’ve been brute-forcing my usage of the runes a lot of the time. Big jumps, fast movements. Like Nivian, kind of, I’d go in one direction, all at once. This”—he waved at the sprawling obstacle course—“is teaching me to use the runes more subtly. More naturally. Small pulls and pushes to guide my movements without thinking.”
“Maybe you should use those pulls and pushes to stop the bars from hitting you in the face?” Right suggested with a chuckle… but then both his eyes and Hiral’s widened.
“That’s it!” they said at the same time.
“Aaaaaaaand, that’s my cue to leave,” Seena said, giving Hiral the shoulder tap. “Thanks for the talk. Go get ‘em.
“Rah, rah.”