"Then we have to go deeper," Jax stated firmly. It was the first time he'd asserted himself the entire trip, even though he was the supposed leader. It shouldn't seem out of character and he was tired of keeping quiet. In many ways, this was convenient; he wanted to know more about the sanctions and was fairly confident that he was now going to learn more than the Broken Blade expected. "Do we know anything about what else there is if it isn't conduits?"

"Uh," Sorleh temporized as he searched the sketch he held. After a moment, he pulled several more pieces of paper out of the pouch he carried. There still wasn't a quick answer; he spent several minutes searching for a map that went farther. When he found one, he swore under his breath. "There are two directions we can go. One of them … it looks like more conduits that go down another four levels and then the corridor ends, the people who were here before never made it past that. I don't see much reason to go that way. I think we need to go down two levels and back up one. The conduits connect straight down, but we can't get there from here without going through the wall and that would break the conduit."

"Where does it lead?" Thera leaned forward to look at the map, then muttered and moved the light she held to get it out of her eyes. "Distal recording node? What does that mean?"

Sorleh shook his head. "No idea. There's a sketch, it's supposed to look like a box covered in glowing lines on a short pedestal. It apparently glows more when it's being used. There's nothing about what to look for if it's damaged; I guess we'll have to go look. Maybe we can figure it out."

"If it's what's broken," Thera muttered. "Fine. Let's get moving."

The next stretch wasn't as simple as walking from a stairwell to one of the conduit openings and back like the last couple of conduits, even with both traps and monsters. The stairwell didn't go any deeper. Instead, they had to cross at least a mile of distance on that level.

It was strange; they were back to entirely traps, and this time some of them didn't seem to work properly. One of the fire-traps spread a flammable mist; when it failed to ignite, Qua'helu Mistwalker swept it away harmlessly.

An iced floor with some kind of ice pellet launcher in the walls drained their shields quickly and try to rush as much as they could without falling on the ice, but the lightning trap after it flickered and fizzed instead of spreading a wall of lightning across the exit and they escaped into the corridor.

A blade sliced out of a slot in the ceiling. It would have caught them by surprise, but instead of continuing into Qua'helu's shoulder, it stopped with a scraping noise. They decided to slip past it while it was jammed and keep an eye out for similar slots in the future.

Despite the failed traps, the ones that still worked were more hazardous than the ones they'd seen higher up in the building. It was worrying enough that it took several turns before Jax realized what else had changed: there were no monsters. That made no sense at all; the monsters had clearly been coordinated with the traps above, why did that stop here?

Or … was that broken, too? Were the monsters simply more traps, traps that could move and bite?

Jax didn't like it at all, but there wasn't anything he could do about it.

Fifteen minutes after that, they found the stairs down. It was a stairwell that went both up and down, but they already knew they needed to go down two levels. That was simple enough; once again, the level they needed to get off the stairs was as low as the stairwell went.

They were cautious the entire time, but there were no traps at all on the stairs. When Jax thought back, he realized that was true earlier, as well; they'd never seen a trap on the stairs and the monsters seemed to avoid them. That had to be deliberate; stairs were some of the best places to put traps. You wouldn't just ignore them without a reason.

There was exactly one monster on the next level, right at the end. Unlike before, there were no traps in the room; there was only a gigantic dark purple lizard with golden horns and shimmering, shifting bat-wings that tried to mesmerize Jax when he first saw them. It was beautiful, which was a weird thing to think about a lizard, but it was also very distinctly hostile.

Jax wasn't the only one distracted by the spread winge; they all were. It took a blast of purple lightning that crackled across the entire group to snap them out of it.

Jax spared a glance at Sorleh and Thera, the two repairmen. They were fine and already moving back, so he turned. Qua'helu was already in the room and Tia and Zarth were right behind him. Kizru had vanished, but Jax was certain he was still planning to attack the monster; he did that. Jax hurried forward himself. He had the feeling that this wasn't going to be as easy as "a lizard taller than a man" sounded, and it didn't sound all that easy.

It wasn't. Even though the lizard seemed not to have any shield, it didn't mind being hit; when Jax saw how even a hard blow did little more than scratch a scale, he understood why. The lizard's scales were stronger than steel, even enchanted steel.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It would be so much easier if he could fight with his actual Abilities instead of his Masked Abilities. Unfortunately, there was no way around it; that would be noticed and would completely destroy his disguise. He might as well wish to heal his arm and use a spear; that would be better against this opponent but it would equally give away his position.

He was going to have to use the long knife with a broken-off tip that he carried to show his falsified connection to the Broken Lord. It was a nearly completely useless weapon against the lizard. At least he had his Masked Abilities; they would be useful. He could really only use the barriers, but manifesting a steel barrier in the air was still useful against a lizard.

The first good news they found was that the lizard's wings weren't as invulnerable as its scales. It started with a long slice delivered by Kizru from next to the lizard. He simply appeared there as he cut.

The lizard seemed even more surprised than Jax was.

A moment later, Kizru disappeared, but he'd given them something to target. The fact that the lizard wasn't flying meant it didn't really hurt the lizard's combat capability, but it did mean that it started to bleed. Weirdly, what it bled was the colorful light that filled its wings instead of good red blood.

Jax smacked the lizard's shoulder hard but uselessly once then pulled back and started to concentrate solely on defense of his allies. He couldn't do anything to hurt the lizard, at least not anything effective, but he could protect his allies. It wasn't his preferred role and it was a little out of character for the brash, slightly stupid persona he was imitating, but it could easily be explained away. He was certain that both Kizru and Broken Blade Seuvarin would accept the fact that he did something effective because he was sulking far more easily than because it was the right choice.

The third surprise in the fight was another bad one: the lizard's purple lightning didn't jump to Jax's metal barriers the way ordinary magical lightning would. Instead, it seemed to wear through them, making them become insubstantial and then disappear. It also made the lightning itself disappear, which seemed like a good trade until Jax realized that he didn't recover most of the mana from the barrier when he pulled it back. What mana he did recover felt strange, almost like it wasn't his, but he felt the Mask slide over it anyway. It would work fine to make more metal; he just wasn't sure if he wanted to use it for anything else.

Normally, his barriers were something he could use fairly freely, summoning them as needed to block a blow or protect an ally. They took enough mana that he couldn't summon many of them at once, but he didn't need to. If he wasn't going to get the mana back, he couldn't do that.

Jax shifted his plans. He couldn't block the lightning, but he could block the claws and the creature's bite. It didn't seem to use its horns at all, which was helpful; that was one fewer thing he had to think about. It took a little practice to get right to block even the small hits; he was used to blocking only the large ones and concentrating on his other Abilities.

The lizard's wings were little more than tatters that continued to leak colored light, but it didn't stop fighting. As far as Jax could tell, it wasn't even any slower. Jax saw Kizru repeatedly miss the eyes while Qua'helu failed at slicing its throat. Zarth and Tia fought defensively, the same way Jax did; they seemed to intend to tire it out and deal with it after that.

Jax liked the strategy. It would work well with his barriers, if he could make them useful. He didn't see what else he could reasonably do without revealing himself, and he'd only do that if he absolutely had to. It was a death sentence.

It wasn't that long before a new problem started to show: whatever it was about the lightning that ate his metal barriers away also damaged them when the lizard slashed or bit them. It wasn't nearly as bad, but some of the mana fizzed in his veins each time he removed a barrier and his mana reserves dropped a little more with each slice. Before long, he had no choice but to Mask some of the strange fizzy mana and include it in his barriers; all of his mana seemed to have threads of fizziness in it.

Weirdly, that made his barriers work better. They were still just temporary constructs of metal generated and held in place by an Ability, but the lizard's claws no longer etched them as deeply. It was like it couldn't simply break the mana it was made of, and like it left a little of that behind each time.

Jax wished he had the control to use only the mana he'd ended up with from the lizard. If he could do that, he could probably even block its lightning. As it was, he still had to try whenever it caught someone in a bad place and breathed out the purple lightning. It could melt metal; he didn't want to see what it would do to someone's face, even behind their Shield.

The lizard eventually slowed enough from blood loss and exertion that Kizru managed to plant a dagger in one of its eyes. From there, the fight wasn't fast but it was certain; its second eye was blinded then Qua'helu managed to sheathe his own blade in its skull through the mouth after Jax blocked a blind attempt to cover the space in lightning.

As it fell, Jax sagged into the archway. He was exhausted and his entire body ached from the fizzy mana. He watched as the winged lizard dissolved into motes of light the same color as its blood.

By the time it was completely gone and Jax looked up from where the lizard fell, there was an open door at the far end of the room. This was supposed to be where the "distal recording node" was, wasn't it?

Above the door, there were some words carved into the stone. Jax could see them, but he didn't understand them. They weren't in English; if he had to guess, they were in ancient Kestii. He'd never learned the dead language; that was what experts were for, especially Professionals. His job in a ruin was to keep them safe.

Like Thera and Sorleh, who were already in the room ahead of him.

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