It didn't take long to figure out that the best place to look for Milton was at the top of the tower. On one hand, it was literally the first place anyone thought to look. That was where they'd all been heading, seeming the most "treasure-trovey", and it was where an idiot would rush to.

On the other hand, anyone with a modicum of intelligence would realise that that was the first place they would think to look, and deliberately avoid it as a result. Considering Lord Graves—apparently called fucking Milton—had the rough intellectual capacity of a half-eaten cat shit, Emma actually did fancy their odds of finding him there.

They hurried, because Milton had already gotten a head-start and was given the luxury of travelling with a far faster group than her. Unless he was a total drooler, he'd have been jogging or sprinting the entire way regardless of whatever questions he had for Larry. However fast her side ran, there was every chance of them missing him entirely. If they did that, they didn't know where else he might go. Somewhere else on the island was about as precise as they could get.

Shit, Emma didn't even know if he had a ship of his own or if he'd arrived here some other way.

Up and up they went, picking a random corridor that seemed to be sloping upwards and just following it. Haruki helped, somewhere along the way he seemed to have gotten a knack for navigating the place. Emma actually found herself wondering whether he was tracking their enemies via scent or what. She wasn't left to wonder soon, though, because a minute or two of sprinting—half-levitating for her of course—took them to their destination.

Almost. It was walled off by a great door made of bronze and looking thick enough to stop a howitzer. Before Emma could even ask how they'd bypass it, Storm-Eye was lunging forwards and swinging hard.

His cudgel struck the door and sent a sound like collapsed scaffolding running along every surface of the corridor, rattling Emma's teeth and making her wince. When she glanced back at the point of impact, she saw…

A dent. Impressive, in objective terms, of course. It wasn't every day you saw a man crater solid bronze, even if the crater in question was only the size of a large fist. But…Well, the door was pretty much fine. If it had been a living thing she'd have put a band-aid on the point of impact and told it to stop whining.

"Behold, our glorious leader." Sade grinned. "My how mighty are his arms, how powerful, how masculine—"

—"Why don't you give it a go?" Asgrim snapped, swinging again and worsening the dent. Worsening, but not pushing to critical point. The door still held, and it continued holding even after several more blows concentrated around the same point had mangled it enough that Emma could see the room beyond exposed where metal was forcibly bent apart. By that time, Asgrim was panting in his exertion.

"We…Fuck." He gasped. "We need something, something to slip in and pry the doors apart…"

Emma thought about it for two seconds, then got to work. Her conjurings were still imprecise, and though she'd done some limited testing on what new metals they encompassed there were still a lot of limits to what she could create.

Unfortunately, a crowbar made of good-quality steel just wasn't within her purview. A shitty length of iron barely was, and it was hardly good iron even at that. But that wasn't the extent of her Matter powers either. Focusing, Emma injected her will into the material to leave it stronger and less yielding. Better than steel of the same volume? She had no clue, but better than before at least.

"Try this." She volunteered, holding the bar up. She had to use both hands of course, and even then it was a struggle with one end still propped on the ground. It must've weighed almost half what she did.

They did try it, grunting and crying with exertion as Storm-Eye, Sade, Haruki and Aexilica all pitted their strengths together and drove the tip of the iron into the crack. Vari helped, too, she supposed, but Emma found herself bracing for the idiot's idiocy to idiot everything up.

It didn't, though, somehow. Or at least not enough that the combination of strength didn't force open the door first. The average between all five of them was probably somewhere in the range of twenty times a normal man, Emma imagined there was more than a few tons being applied to that makeshift crowbar. A few tones was barely enough, but slowly the bronze yielded and more of the door groaned as the opening widened. After the first round of exertion, they'd cleared maybe a foot of space. Everyone backed away, trying to peer in through the gap.

"Should we take a closer look before trying to open it more?" Aexilica frowned. "There might be something seriously dangerous waiting in there."

"We can't afford to waste that much time." Asgrim snapped. "We—"

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He paused, glanced over to Emma. Tilted his head. And that was how she ended up being shoved through the roughly-child-sized hole by a gang of money-grubbing bastards.

Emma landed on her face, because it was just that sort of day, and scrambled up to her feet. Armour reforming, shield wreathing her in further protection, she looked around and saw…

Nothing, it was too dark. Shit. Emma couldn't just create light—she had no idea why, it was energy, but for some reason her magic just didn't let her make it. Or rather, it didn't let her make it directly. What she could create was more iron, this time in a flat-bottomed ball about as big as her fist. Emma held it suspended at the end of a rod of hardened energy, funneling heat into it.

First it sizzled, then it warped, then it glowed. Dull red, cherry, orange, brighter. By the time it had a distinct pale note to its light, the object had started giving off enough illumination for her to see everything within a good few metres of it at least to some extent. Emma shoved it ahead, sliding it away from her to keep one section of the room lit, while she worked on others.

By the time her fourth makeshift lamp was finished, Emma found the fireplace. It proved significantly easier to get flames from that, despite however long the wood had been left there. Perhaps some sort of magic was keeping rot from setting it, maybe it was just nice and dry here.

Everything lit up at once, light streaming through the room and turning it in one short instant from a place wreathed in shadow to one bathed in illumination. It felt like getting punched in the gut, how instantly the breath washed from her.

Not in a bad way, it was simply…Stunning. Emma had not, after all, ever seen quite so much silver in one place.

There were piles of the stuff, literal piles. Some as tall as her, some as wide as sand dunes. Coins and jewels, necklaces, rings. Even, she saw, an entire, solid statue made purely of fucking silver. The occasional gemstone made a nest amid glinting metal, as did the somewhat-less-infrequent presence of weapons and armour. In one corner there was a great painting rested against piled silver, depicting some man she didn't know rippling with muscles and standing high on a mountain. Emma found herself taking notes of it all even as she slowly rotated for a better look.

And none of her notes felt like they were truly settling into her, merely bouncing from the surface of her mind. This wasn't just a treasure trove, wasn't just a fortune. If the meagre rooms of wealth the Storm-Eyes had bragged about finding before were anything to go by, this was the bounty of…

Shit, maybe not even a king. An emperor perhaps.

"Emma!" Came a voice that just barely snapped her back to the present, and away from reluctantly-left dreams of tall women with mountainous breasts and very little clothing. "Emma!"

Emma turned to it, with no small amount of reluctance, and found that in the new illumination she could see an obvious locking mechanism at one section of the door. With a quick flex of her magic she raised it high and allowed the grinding bronze to open inwards, bringing the rest of her party to tumble onto the floor.

None of them seemed to mind, they had other things to look at.

"We're rich." Asgrim whispered, then said again, more loudly, "We're fucking RICH!" His voice didn't seem to echo as much in here. Emma realised why, the piles of silver were so high that they actually muffled it before it could strike the walls.

"These coins." Haruki murmured, walking around and examining some more carefully and calmly. "They are from…All over the world. Aroshira, these coins here are from Aroshira. Where my mother was born. We have others, these are from eastern Kobani right?" He asked that question to Sade, the woman of Kobani heritage, who quickly nodded in excitement. Haruki turned back to them, and continued examining. "Others I can't even recognise." He grinned in excitement.

Emma just barely caught Vari moving from the corner of her eye, with all the distractions burning away everywhere. He was drifting across the room in rather an aimless way, like he was following something dangling in front of his eyes on the end of a big stick. She followed him with her gaze, and soon saw where he was headed. To the room's centre, where a great crest lay in the stone floor. Staring up at a single, golden key dangling from the end of a chain.

She drew several conclusions at once, called out a warning, and threw out a wall of hardened energy to bowl the Sculd over. It barely impacted in time.

"What are you doing you idiot!?" She snarled, standing over him and glaring down with as much intimidating physicality as she could muster. Not much. Never much, not when you were under five feet tall, but it was remarkable how much heavy-lifting magical powers could do to emphasise a point. Vari shrinked back somewhat.

"The key," He nodded towards it as if she might have missed it, "It was gold, gold. I've seen maybe an ounce of gold in my entire life, you could melt that down and be rich. What it might open…"

"Of course it's valuable." She snapped. "It's also on the end of a big chain, it's the most obvious trap I've ever seen!"

By now, the rest of the group was gathered around them too, all tucked away into one corner of the room, all looking down at Vari.

"Holy shit." Emma continued. "We could've died, you realise that right? You could've just yanked on the button that blows up the room, or drops the floor into a giant pool of magma, or pumps chlorine into the air or something."

"Chlorine?" Haruki frowned.

"It's a gas that…Basically it's a kind of air that, when you breathe it, is like drowning."

"That sounds awesome!" Sade grinned, and Emma had to actually resist the urge to start clawing out her own eyes in sheer frustration.

Something else hit Emma's ears then, a muffled sort of…Panic. From behind her. She spun, laid eyes on Milton where he stood beside the dangling chain, one hand closed around the key and the other around Larry, smothering the head's mouth while he tried to call out warnings.

Milton was grinning, victorious, triumphant. He did not, Emma think, realise the very obvious implications of what he was about to do. It was the second mouse who got the cheese, except now all the other mice were within range of the first mouse's trap. Emma's magic flared forth, a broiling mass of reality-twisting death readied to fling across the room and obliterate him.

But of course, his hand twitched downwards long before her attack could land. And everything went to shit.

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