Free Web NovelChapter 4: Treasures with a mix of betrayal
"Hey William." His voice came out quieter than usual, stripped of its usual weight. "Look."
William turned.
Nobody moved for a full three seconds.
"This is Floor One," William said.
"I know what floor it is," the tank said.
"Floor One does not have guardian chambers." William looked at the open door, at the room beyond it, at the unmistakable silhouette of the chest on its raised platform. "I have run this dungeon eleven times. There has never been a guardian chamber on Floor One."
"So either the dungeon changed," the assassin said quietly, "or no one ever found this room before."
The second option landed heavier than the first. They stood with it for a moment, the weight of what that meant settling across the group. A hidden chamber. A guardian. A chest that eleven runs worth of adventurers had never once stumbled across.
"We’re the first," one of the newbies said from the back, his voice carrying a disbelief that was quickly becoming something closer to excitement.
"Don’t get ahead of yourself," William said, but he was already stepping through the door.
The room breathed differently from the corridor outside.
The air inside was older, stiller, carrying the particular weight of a space that had been sealed for a very long time. The walls were smoother here, carved rather than natural, and along the floor faint geometric lines ran from the entrance toward the centre of the chamber where a chest sat on a raised stone platform.
In front of the chest, motionless and waiting, was the golem.
It was large. Not enormous, but large enough that the chamber suddenly felt smaller than it had a moment ago. Stone the color of old bone, joints carved with the same geometric patterns that ran across the floor, two arms that hung at its sides with a heaviness that suggested they could do considerable damage if motivated. It had no face. Just a flat expanse of stone with a single crack running across it that glowed faintly amber, like something warm and old was burning just behind it.
It hadn’t moved yet.
"Guardian type," William said quietly. Both blades were already out. "It won’t engage until someone crosses the line."
Everyone looked at the floor. There was indeed a line, a raised ridge in the stone running across the full width of the chamber about four metres from the entrance.
"Plan?" the assassin asked.
"Hit it hard and fast before it can build momentum. These things get harder to stop the longer a fight goes." William glanced at Violet. "I need you on support and whatever you can land directly on it."
Violet was already studying the golem with her head tilted, the same expression she had worn watching the kobolds earlier. Analytical. Faintly entertained. "I can work with that."
William crossed the line.
The golem’s amber crack flared white and it moved, faster than something made of stone had any right to, one arm swinging in a wide arc that William ducked under by dropping to one knee, both blades scoring across the golem’s forearm as he passed. The stone sparked but held. The golem turned with a grinding that Kael felt through his entire floor and brought the other arm down.
The tank was already there.
He caught the blow on his shield and the impact drove him back three full steps, boots scraping against the stone floor, but he held, planting himself and pushing back with everything he had. The golem pushed harder. The tank’s legs shook.
"Violet," William called. ƒreewebɳovel.com
She raised both hands and purple flame bloomed between her palms, not the small precise beam from earlier but something fuller and sustained, the color of a bruise and the temperature of a furnace. She didn’t throw it wildly. She shaped it, compressing it between her hands until it was tight and humming, and then released it in a concentrated column directly into the golem’s back.
The stone cracked.
Not broke. Cracked, a spiderweb of fractures spreading from the impact point across the golem’s upper back and shoulder. The amber glow flickered.
The assassin appeared from nowhere at the golem’s left side and drove both daggers into the crack simultaneously, twisting hard. More stone fractured. The golem turned toward her and she was already gone, back into the shadow, leaving her daggers embedded in its back.
It was slowing down.
Violet hit it twice more in rapid succession, each burst finding the existing cracks and widening them, and on the second hit a chunk of the golem’s shoulder broke away entirely and hit the floor with a sound like a hammer dropping. The amber glow in its face crack was guttering now, flaring and dimming in uneven pulses.
William went for the chest joint at the neck.
Both blades, full force, crossing each other on impact. The stone at the neck gave way completely and the golem’s upper section tilted, the amber light dying in a slow fade, and then the whole thing came apart and hit the floor in pieces that skidded across the geometric lines.
Silence.
Something small and metallic clinked against the stone in the settling debris. A key, old iron, warm to the touch when William picked it up.
’Not bad,’ Kael thought. ’Violet especially. That compression technique was pretty neat’
He was paying close attention now.
The chest opened with a sound like a held breath being released.
Inside, resting on dark cloth, were two objects and a modest pile of gold coins that none of them looked at for more than a second.
The first artifact was a gauntlet. Single, right-handed, made from a metal that was almost black but caught the light with a deep red undertone, like cooling iron. Geometric engravings covered every surface, and at the knuckles four small stones sat embedded in the metal, dark red, the color of old blood. When William lifted it the air around it seemed to compress slightly, a faint pressure that everyone in the room felt without being able to explain it.
The second was a pair of ankle bracers, lighter than they looked, the metal a pale silver that shifted toward blue at certain angles. The engravings on these moved. Not visibly, not in a way you could catch directly, but if you looked away and looked back they were never quite in the same configuration. When the assassin picked one up she was on her feet before she registered standing, her body responding to something the bracer had done before her mind caught up.
She set it down carefully.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
"Alright," William said finally. "We’re not splitting these up and we’re not selling them. We keep them with the team, use them when we need them, and they stay with me until we know what they fully do." He looked around the group. "Any arguments?"
There weren’t any.
They pushed to Floor Two after that, floor one had given them all it could now. The newbies quieter now, the earlier bravado fully spent and replaced with something more useful. The second floor was darker, the ceilings lower, the sounds coming from further in different enough from Floor One that two of the newbies stayed closer to the group without being told.
They found a resting alcove cut into the wall near the second corridor junction and stopped there. The newbies were asleep within minutes.
The four stayed awake longer, but one by one the silence took them.
Almost one by one.
In the furthest corner of the alcove, where the torchlight didn’t reach, two figures sat close together. The tank’s voice was barely a sound, more a shape of breath than actual words.
"You felt it too."
The assassin didn’t answer immediately. When she did, her voice was the same, low and careful, the kind of quiet that wasn’t about being considerate of the sleepers.
"The gauntlet and the bracers."
"We could take them tonight. Be gone before sunrise. This artefacts could set us up as higher ranked adventurers, William and Violet are already miles better than us, we just keep playing keep up " the tank said.
Another silence. Longer this time.
"William is a light sleeper," she said.
"I know," the tank replied. "That’s why I said we, not I."
The torchlight at the alcove entrance flickered once and went still.
