Stormborn Sorceress: A Fantasy Isekai LitRPG Adventure

The upside was the Temple was essentially backward, which meant the path to the Lord’s chambers was maybe a quarter as long as it would have been had she challenged it at another time of year. The downside was everything was more dangerous for it.

The traps were plentiful and deadly. The living shadows were ubiquitous.

The shadows were not actually that big of a problem now that she had Mana Blade and had figured out how to use it with Wind Blade. She’d even figured out how to activate them simultaneously rather than in close series. So besides the overwhelming dread that consumed her at the sight of the abominations, they were fine.

The traps were an issue though. They were no fewer this side of the Shadow Hall’s central chamber, as Salos called the room with the skill orb. They were, if anything, more prevalent.

Cass leapt back, narrowly avoiding a flurry of darts that had exploded from what appeared to be a smooth wall. Her heart hammered in her chest.

Dodge has increased to level 6.

Cass stared intently at the wall where the darts had shot from. There was no sign of a hole they might have flown from. Her eyes swept the floor where she had been standing. It was as nondescript as every other stretch of tiles thus far.

This was the eighth trap since leaving the Shadow Hall’s central chamber and Cass was no closer to figuring out how they were triggered or where they were hidden.

“Isn’t there a trap detection skill?” Cass asked, poking around the floor where she’d been standing with the end of her staff. There had to be some sort of pressure plate or something, right? That was how booby traps in ancient temples worked.

Yes, but you would actually need to detect a few of these without it to have any hope of getting it.

“I’ve gotten my other skills pretty fast,” Cass said. “Maybe one would be enough.”

My point still stands.

Cass scowled, but he was probably right. She ran her hand over the wall the darts had flown out of. It was as smooth to the touch as it looked to her eyes. Mana Sight didn’t see any unusual hot spots. Atmospheric Sense didn’t feel any air leaking through holes they might have been shot from.

She flailed about in front of the trap. Perhaps it was some sort of motion sensor? Life sensor?

Nothing happened.

Either the trap only went off once or she was somehow completely missing the trigger.

Either way, Cass gave up and continued down the hall. She’d gone perhaps four yards when a SHUNK cut the silence.

Dodge screamed for her to hit the deck.

A blade swung over Cass’s prone head.

Cass lay there another minute, her panicked breaths evening out, before sitting up. The blade had disappeared into the wall like it had never been there. The only evidence that she’d nearly been bisected was her still racing heart.

“There must be a better way than this,” she said. Dodge was the only reason she wasn’t dead already. If she reacted even a little bit slower any one of these traps would have left her as little more than a bloody corpse.

Scowling, she looked between her staff and the apparently empty hallway. “You think my staff would survive the blade trap?”

Do you think your spine would survive?

“My staff is probably sturdier than my spine,” Cass said.

At your level? I suppose.

“So, is that a yes on the surviving the blade traps?”

Only one way to find out.

Her scowl deepened. But no matter how much she liked her staff—or how much she liked not being unarmed—losing the stick if she dodged too slow was better than losing her life.

If nothing else, if a trap broke it, she’d still have two batons, while if a trap split her spine she’d just die.

Lacking better ideas, she waved her staff in the air in front of her and then started jabbing it at each floor tile. Nothing happened so she advanced a step and repeated the process.

It was boring and slow. But she needed to know how these traps were triggered.

An eternity or five minutes later–depending on whether one measured according to Cass’s subjective time or used a more objective measurement– Cass tapped a tile and the tile clicked.

Cass leapt back, retracting her staff out of danger as quickly as she could.

A wall of spikes shot from the smooth walls, ready to exsanguinate any unfortunate caught in the middle. They retracted back into the walls silently, again disappearing without a trace.

She grinned. “There we go. That’s better.”

You didn’t find that one with your face, good job.

She frowned staring at the unmarked walls. She was no closer to figuring out how to spot them and had only the haziest idea they might be triggered by pressure plates.

“I didn’t get a skill though.”

Her disappointment stopped her cold. Was she really disappointed that knowledge wasn’t being shoved in her head?

No, does not seem like it. Perhaps because you only managed to set it off before you stepped in it. You did not disarm it or even spot it ahead of time.

“I suppose that’s true.” She’d been hoping to get one anyway. She crushed that desire. She didn’t need more system help. Skills were useful, sure, but she was more than the things the System had given her.

She crouched down, inspecting the tile she’d tapped to set off the trap. It didn’t look any different from the ones around it. Pushing on it didn’t move it. It didn’t depress under her full weight.

“How do these work?” Cass muttered to herself. Magic was the simplest answer, but that didn’t help her any. Besides, Mana Sense wasn’t picking up anything unusual about the tile or the walls from which the spikes had sprung.

Then again, Mana Sense probably wasn’t that uncommon in a world of magic. Maybe it was possible to shield the magic bits from sight so as not to give away the trap’s position.

But even if it was magic, it had to be set off by something. Was it as simple as touch? Like the magic version of a touch screen? But how did that work? She refused to believe that magic left no mark on the object. There had to be something tying the effect to the tile. But, either there wasn’t, it was expended and disappeared into nothing once activated, or it was somehow under the tile?

Could she pull the tile up somehow?

She ran her fingers around the edges of it. She could get a fingernail between them, but they were too big for her to get any real purchase on.

She activated Elemental Manipulation, willing just the tile to move. This was different than previous uses of manipulating stone. Before she had tried to reshape it to make bowls or spikes.

Here, she was trying to levitate it without deforming it. It was unnatural to her sensibilities. Moving rock and stone like it was water was an extension of its natural properties. She knew that was wrong, but lava flowed, earth settled, rocks eroded, taking direction of this process felt far more natural than this.

Rock didn’t float.

She threw herself at the attempt anyway. Resolve brought her Focus to bear, Alacrity wove it through the tile, and Will held it tight. In concert, she wrenched it up, everything flaring with the attempt.

Tile resisted, held in place by ancient mortar. She pulled harder, pouring more Focus into the problem.

Something snapped. A quarter of the tile flew into the air.

Cass released her focus on the part of the tile still stuck to the floor, spinning her Will around the flying piece with all the Alacrity she could muster. The piece of tile bounced off the wall before she caught it, but she did manage to grab it with Elemental Manipulation before it hit the floor.

Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 7.

With a little effort, she lowered it to the floor beside her.

“Didn’t mean to break it,” she muttered, picking the tile piece up with her hands and inspecting the underside.

It was covered in tiny symbols inscribed into the tile arranged in interlocking circles. Most were filled with the mortar that had held it to the floor. She inspected it with Mana Sense active and they lit up in her sight. They were bright enough that she could see it even through her fingers as she traced them. Even in the few places where more mortar had come up with the tile, she could see the runes glowing through the mortar with Mana Sense.

“Magic runes?” Cass asked.

Looks like it.

She flipped it over and found all of it gone again.

“I can’t see them through the tile.”

No, that’s Keamarian Basalt, it is one of the better mana shielding materials. You’d need to have some specialization in mana sensing to feel mana patterns through it.

“But the effect can still go through them?” Cass asked. “I assume this is all some sort of pressure or touch sensor?”

Salos hesitated. That’s one possibility. This stone is a cornerstone of magic construction because it is possible to construct such things with it.

“I can hear a ‘but’ in that statement,” Cass said. “What’s the catch?”

I am all but certain the creator of the Temple did not have that level of skill or the desire to bring in an outside collaborator who would have.

Cass frowned at that, but Salos didn’t elaborate. “So either you're wrong about that, something changed in between, or what? There should be more runes on the top side to trigger the effect on the bottom?”

Yes.

Cass closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “You realize that sounds completely ridiculous, right? We can both see there is nothing on the top side.”

Yes, he said meekly.

“And yet?”

I do not think I am wrong.

Cass didn’t bother challenging that.

And I doubt things have changed that drastically in the time I was gone. The creators would not have wanted outsiders to know how the internals of the temple worked.

“So you’re solidly team ‘Stuff on the topside of the trap tiles’?” Cass sighed. “You were surprised about the death traps at the front, remember? Couldn’t they have just updated the runes?”

Maybe, Salos said, but he did not sound convinced.

Cass shook her head. Whether there were invisible markings on the top of the tiles or not, she was no closer to figuring out how they worked or more importantly, how to spot them.

“Anyway.” She knew for a fact there were markings under the tile at least, so she focused on that. “Any ideas on how to see what’s under these things besides forcibly ripping them up?”

If you had thief or assassin training, probably. Maybe some schools of artificing or runework might help.

“But not much a self-taught peasant like me is going to be able to figure out on her own in the next five minutes?” Cass asked.

Well, not how I would have phrased it, but yes.

“Unfortunate.”

Cass spent another five minutes poking at the remaining stonework anyway. Like Salos said, there wasn’t a lot more for her to learn from it with what she already knew.

Shrugging, she went back to her slow advance down the corridor, tapping every tile with her staff. A few feet later, a thought occurred to her.

“Wait, how was I able to sense my mana through the tile when I was manipulating it then?”

What do you mean?

“It shields mana, right? I can’t see any mana through it. But I could feel my Focus when I was pushing it through the tile to pull it out. You said Focus is just another form of mana, didn’t you? How does that work then?”

Yes, that’s right. It's a gross oversimplification, but you can think of Focus as your personal mana.

If you close your eyes, do you still know where your hands are? It's like that. Your Focus is as much a part of your body as your arms or legs. That’s doubly true for someone like you with a spiritual body.

Could she use that? It had promise, if nothing else. But did she have the finesse?

She turned around and walked back to the piece of broken tile she’d left behind.

What are you doing?

“Experimenting.” She picked up her tile piece, closed her eyes, and activated Elemental Manipulation. She pushed her Focus through the tile but didn’t give it any commands to move or shape it, just to fill the whole tile, in preparation.

She could make out the edge, where tile met air, but the inscription was too fine a detail for her to make out. She needed to fill it with an even denser concentration of Focus to be able to see them. Her concentration flagged long before she was close.

A headache was building from the Focus loss. She checked the numbers and winced.

Focus: 53/225

Almost three-quarters. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d started with, she hadn’t recovered all her Focus after the Shadows, after all. But she’d been over half then.

Had she spent another quarter between prying the tile up and this little experiment?

She rubbed her face wishing the headache away. It would be better in a little bit, but right now she wanted to just sit.

A part of her wanted to push through but that was probably a bad idea. If she ran into a monster, she wanted to be much closer to full than this.

“Not ideal,” she said as she plopped down onto the ground.

What exactly were you hoping to accomplish by pouring your Focus into the tile?

“Radar? X-rays? Maybe sonar would be a better description? I’m certain there is an even fancier word, but it's not coming to me right now.”

I’m not sure I’m familiar with those words.

Cass shrugged. “I was trying to bounce my Focus against the edges of the tile to map its surface through the tile. But the marks are too fine of details to really be picked up without using way more.”

And you were able to do that with Elemental Manipulation? He asked.

“Was trying to. As I said, I’m not sure it's feasible for me right now. And even if it was, it's definitely more work than just poking tiles with my staff.”

Did the skill show you how to do that?

“What?” Cass asked. “No. But of all my skills, Elemental Manipulation is one of the least…” Cass paused, looking for how she wanted to explain it, “… Chatty?”

Then you figured out all of the stone manipulation on your own?

“Well, it took a lot of experimentation, but yeah. Nobody else was going to teach me.”

Low-level skills are supposed to teach you.

“What?”

It is supposed to be intuitive and natural to use them. Some describe it more as a guiding hand, helping you achieve your desired outcomes.

“I usually describe Staff Mastery and Dodge as yelling at me more than anything. But, I suppose Stealth feels like that.”

And you don’t get any of this guidance from Elemental Manipulation?

Cass thought back to her first attempts. “It took me a few tries to figure out it wanted me to target a specific element and I think it taught me how to manipulate the Focus to manipulate the skill, but otherwise it's been pretty quiet.”

It is a strange skill to begin with. Very few skills have as wide a domain as that. Especially for something you uncovered before your First Step. How did you manage to get it?

“System reward. One of my first. It's one of a few reasons I’m alive.”

Even more strange. The System usually gives rewards that match your current knowledge set or interests. For example, if you were from an ocean town, spent every day in the water, and had some investment in the Mental row, the System might reward Water Manipulation. But more likely Form Wave or Water Blade. Skills with simple and obvious uses are more common spell rewards than something nebulous. Especially at earlier levels.

Cass shrugged. “All my knowledge of magic comes from books, TV, and video games. And magic was almost always elemental in nature. Mages throwing fireballs, benders moving stone with martial arts, lightning blasting out of the bad guy’s fingertips. It was all fantasy, but I ate it up. If there is any silver lining in all this, it's that I got magic out of the deal.”

And maybe that was enough. As far as consolation prizes went, magic was a good one. If things would stop trying to kill her maybe she’d even get to enjoy it.

Have you determined what constitutes an ‘element’ yet?

Cass shrugged. “I was initially going off of the classic Greek alchemical elements: fire, water, air, earth. But stone isn’t exactly the same thing as earth. Not really.

“The description just says ‘elemental forces of the natural world’ which isn’t exactly descriptive. None of the things I’ve been manipulating, except maybe fire, is a force. And even fire isn’t really a force.

“And maybe it's actually the five Chinese elements: earth, metal, wood, water, fire. Does that mean I could summon iron? Rarer metals? Could I make weapons from it? Money?

“Ice and lightning are common ‘elements’ in video games but so is poison. Where does it end? What about light and shadow? Are those elements?

“Maybe it's the ‘forces’ part I should be focusing on. Would that mean I could manipulate gravity? Electro-magnetism? Friction?” Cass shook her head, the exhaustion settling over her deeper than ever. She knew so little about everything. Even the things so directly related to her. “I shouldn’t complain my skill is too broad. I just wish I understood it.”

A lot of that was concepts from your world with no analog here, he said slowly. But if you really think your skill might be able to affect all that, it might be one of the most versatile skills I’ve ever heard of.

“Something to experiment with more when nothing is trying to kill me and I have the Focus to spare.” Would such a time ever come? Sitting here in the dark of the Temple of the Deep, she could not imagine such a time ever coming.