(Second Book Complete!) Runeblade: A Delving & Skill Merging LitRPG

B5 Chapter 559: Retrieving Some Books, pt. 2

The brick was weird. There was definitely some sort of obfuscation effect — one that Truesight shattered like glass. But just like the trap, there was no glow of magic, nor visible runework, nor even any sign of alchemicals at play.

It was just a brick. Soft grey stone speckled through with darker patches, worn away by unknown years of stormwater. All but identical to the endless twins that were stacked above and beside it.

He couldn’t immediately spot anything else. The bricks of the tunnel had been fitted by a skilled mason to use friction and pressure to hold them firm: there was no mortar that had been scraped away, and the seams were no wider than any other.

Yet among the many millions they had passed, this lone brick had been subject to a Skill.

Kaius frowned, peering closer. It wasn’t trapped — Sergeant’s Insight lay silent despite the full force of his attention on the thing. Still, he didn’t have any Skills for detecting the functions hidden mechanisms, so it was down to raw sense alone.

“See anything? The obfuscation is making it a nightmare to inspect.”

“Not yet.”

He kept looking, before his eyes settled on the seams that adjoined the surrounding bricks. Comparing them to elsewhere, they looked a little more…rounded. Just barely, and the weathering had made that inconsistent anyway, but something in him latched on to it.

“I think it’s a button,” he said finally, looking up at his friend.

One of Kenva’s brows crept up her face as she crossed her arms. “And I think we might be standing in a storm drain. Any other world shattering insights?”

“Hey!”

“Kaius, you were the one that suggested they might have used a hidden door. I was more asking if you could tell if it's trapped, or if there’s some sort of special way to use it.”

Kaius hesitated; he hadn’t seen anything of the sort. It was just a strange brick.

“I don’t think it’s trapped?”

Kenva grinned at him. “You press it then, and I'll stand back.”

Kaius rolled his eyes. As if they would have done it any other way. “I’m not the one who charged through the last hidden passage and got spiked through the back.”

Backing down the tunnel, Kenva narrowed her eyes at him in jest.

Shaking his head, Kaius turned back to the brick. He patted the hilt of A Father’s Gift for reassurance. This was the lion's den now — and if Kenva’s welcoming had been any sign, they’d have to watch their steps. Plus, the rogue might have allies inside.

“We should play it quiet at first.”

“Why? Even if they have a few Golds, I’m confident we could take ‘em.”

A potential fight wasn’t the reason he thought they should be surreptitious. Plus, Kenva should have been a little more cautious. They might have the Skill rarity and stats to bridge the gap, but Golds would have decades of experience on them — and Kenva had just confronted what that could mean for a weaker opponent. Out in an open field? Sure. But on their home turf, in a place that he’d bet good money was trapped?

He and Kenva would win, he’d make sure of it — but it would be a messy fight.

“I’m not suggesting we try and take the journals back without them being any the wiser. But they are our priority. I want to be damn sure they don’t have enough warning to slip away.”

Kenva smiled. “That I can do.”

Summoning her bow, her outline tugged his vision slightly as she activated her stealth skill. He could still see her perfectly fine, but he knew that it would be much harder to notice her presence when he wasn’t looking straight at her.

Deciding not to waste time, he pressed the brick.

It slid into the wall with a soft click.

Kaius leapt back immediately, placing himself between Kenva and the mechanism. He was fully ready for the wall to explode in a hail of shrapnel, or boiling oil to rain from the ceiling, or an earsplitting alarm to ring — instead, a section of the wall slowly slid out and swung open.

He drew his sword and approached.

The hidden door opened into a short hallway that dropped away into a set of stairs that lead even deeper into the earth. It was rectangular, lacking the high arched roof of the storm drain, and the masonry was different too. Smaller bricks, that were a darker grey.

No lighting either, though that took him a second to notice with how used he was to the darkness of the drain.

He took the first step in, motioning Kenva to keep a bit of distance between them. While she was their scout, Sergeant’s Insight was plenty good at pointing him to potential dangers all on its own.

Nothing had set it off yet, but he still stayed alert.

The stairs punched down for another twenty longstrides, before they veered off to the left in an identical walkway. Kaius took his time with them, his patience rewarded when his Skill nudged him half way down.

Kaius skipped the offending stair.

“Careful,” he warned his friend, pointing it out.

By the bottom, he’d skipped two more, and felt the subtle chime of his Skill increasing. The hall they followed was similar: every few longstrides, his Skill would scream about a random brick in the floor. Just how damned trapped was this place? Even the Depths weren’t this egregious — had the rogue gotten bored?

The hall wound through the earth, before it started to split. After a quick investigation, he found that most led to other sets of stairs leading up — other entrances, though some seemed to be connected to tunnels that sat deeper than the surface-level drains. The sewers, maybe?

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Others led to short adjoining passages connecting to halls identical to his own, sprouting their own exits from the main stem. That had two make, what, a dozen or so exits so far? Whoever used this place certainly was paranoid.

Regardless of the complex layout, eventually Kaius spotted a dim, but harsh white light seeping around a corner. The halls widened enough that he and Kenva could walk abreast, lit by blazing bright wardlights that wiped away any semblance of shadow that they could have used to hide. No doubt that was intentional.

They passed doors — shockingly normal ones: Golden-brown carved wood that had been oiled to a sheen. Kaius couldn’t hear so much as a peep through them, but he refused to leave it to chance.

Peeping through the keyhole only showed a dark room, full of shelves that held bulging canvas sacks that were coated in a white dust.

“What’s in there?” Kenva asked.

“Flour, I think.”

And enough to feed a village for a month at that. What were these fools preparing for, a multi-year siege? Or maybe there were far more of them than Kaius would have liked to consider.

Still, if they’d hit storage rooms, they were getting close.

Kaius still kept peering through the keyholes, just in case. He didn’t just find provisions. Some held barrels of arrows and racks that held everything from common arming swords to hook-beaked halberds, and others held oddities like cloth-wrapped frames, artfully glazed pottery, and even cases of wine. Ill-gotten hauls, waiting for the fence, no doubt.

Eventually, the hallway ended in another door. It was slightly ajar — and there were black smudges on its gleaming handle. The hall beyond it was much nicer than the bare stone they had left, with plastered walls and hardwood floors. Every dozen strides or so, a painting had been hung, the closest a smudged mess of meaningless swirls of yellow and orange. The wardlights were nicer, too — a softer yellow.

It led to a mezzanine that overlooked a wide, domed chamber. The overlook encircled the whole room, and Kaius could see many similar halls poking from the outer edge like the spokes of a wagon wheel.

More importantly, the place was occupied, judging by the unnaturally muffled voices he could hear. Though he couldn’t make out the words, he could tell the speaker was a woman, and frantic. Another cut them off, male this time, before another, different woman butted in.

“Seems like we found them. Rogue must have thought they lost you,” he said silently.

“And I hope they rue the day when they find out how wrong they were,” Kenva replied.

“Let’s go — we strike as soon as we spot the books.”

Heart pounding in his chest, Kaius crept forwards — though he made sure to point out a floorboard that made his Skill twinge.

Reaching the mezzanine, Kaius ducked low, hiding behind the waist-high wall that separated them from the wider room below. A quick peek was all he needed to surveil the space.

The chamber was open plan — part living room, part command centre. Couches were scattered around a massive open hearth that lay against the edge of the room to their right — though the dim glow of magic and the lack of a chimney suggested it was a product of artifice. Trophies were scattered everywhere, like the mantle that held sapphire broaches, white gold rings, and a duck-egg sized green gem that sparkled in the firelight.

Across from that, the other half of the chamber had been dominated by a massive table, its surface a mess of unfurled scrolls, large blueprints weighed down with inkwells, and strewn stacks of books.

Half a dozen figures stood right next to it — one of them a woman in dark canvas and leathers. They were burned through — the rogue. She was talking to a man with greying hair who was dressed in mud-smeared burlap. Kaius wouldn’t have looked twice if he’d seen him lurking in the alleyways above. The rest were a similarly interesting cast of characters: a tall man in a suit, frowning slightly at the rogue they’d followed, a woman with her back to them, rugged boots poking out from the bottom of a mottled green cloak, and two more men dressed as common labourers who watched the proceedings with disinterest.

All Steel.

Out of sight, Kaius listened in. This close his senses were sharp enough to overcome whatever they’d used to dampen their voices, though it took him half a minute to get used to the distortion.

“We’ve got the bloody books, they can come fetch them themselves! This job was a gods’ damned shit show, just like I told you it would be,” a woman raged. No doubt it was the rogue.

He looked at Kenva questioningly. She shrugged.

“Distortion’s throwing me off — but they’ve got her ire.”

“Silence! The job was clear: retrieval and delivery if we picked up any heat — there’s a reason it paid so damn well when we didn’t have to knife anyone.”

“You’re not the bastard who’ll have to walk their ass through the middle of a high mana zone! It’s the gods’ cursed Midnight Crater! Plus this isn’t heat — with how that went, the guards will be on me like flies on shit if I so much as sneeze!”

Kaius froze, sharing a long look with Kenva. Well now, wasn’t that interesting? Still, it was annoying that the distortion meant that they couldn’t recognise who was speaking. He’d seen two women and one of them had the books.

It had to be the rogue. A stealth specialist would be perfect for slipping out of the city — and into a high mana zone without getting eaten alive.

“Oh hush,” a second man said, his voice oddly soft. “The job went sideways — so what? They do that sometimes. Only one thing’s important here — we need to deliver the books to get our cut and make a positive impression. I’ll give you a diversion myself if you need help getting out of the city, but the fact is that you’re the only one with the right Skillset for this.”

“Are we forgetting there were two other people there!” the woman shouted back. “One of them was Silver! This is messy as fuck — I’m not interested in getting ambushed by a hit squad out in the middle of nowhere.”

“I don’t care,” the first man replied. “You’ll be more fucked if you don’t — and I’m not just talking about the fact you’ll be burning the rest of us. Now, we need to move. With all the heat someone pulled here, it won’t take long before a sniffer squad finds this place.”

One of them sighed. “I’ll grab the jewels from the mantle.”

Kaius realised that the first man had a good point. They could hit the thieves and steal the books, but did they need to? They had a location, and even a helpful guide that could lead them straight there. It seemed like Flowers and his party really weren’t involved.

They’d be missing a piece of leverage to barter for Kanmost, but would that even work? They weren’t exactly dealing with trustworthy individuals.

Kaius hesitated — no, far better they hoard as many cards as they could. He locked eyes with Kenva.

“We’re doing it. I’ll Warp down, you shoot from above.”

Couldn’t get a better surprise attack than teleporting into the middle of the enemy's formation — especially when he could use the fractured space as an attack. Gods, he loved the spell.

“Lethal?”

He paused, before nodding. He wasn’t taking the risk of word getting back to Kanmost’s captors. Not for a team that made so casual a mention of murder for hire.

“Ready when you are,” Kenva said, silently nocking an arrow.

Kaius gripped his blade, taking a slow breath as he prepared to take another man's life. Again.

“On three.”

An explosion rocked the chamber, coming from the corridor they entered. Another followed, this time from in front of them.