“No problem.” Another quick air spell and she floated the key into the lock and turned it.
Derek opened the door.
The blast of air coming from the other room slammed him backward into Vera. It hit the rest of us in the next moment, and the sheer force of the gust carried me off the ground before I could react.
I flew backward out of the tunnel, uncontrolled until Jin grabbed me by the wrist. Somehow, he’d reacted fast enough to slam a dagger — a dagger I’d never seen — into the stone wall on the side of the tunnel to anchor himself into place.
Professor Orden crashed into me a second later, breaking Jin’s grip - then Orden and I were out of the tunnel and back in the previous room, airborne over a pool of acid and quickly approaching the opposite wall.
As I flew through the air toward imminent death, my mind somehow managed to inform me, “There’s the hurricane you wanted, Corin.”
Oh, the sharpness of my wit. Truly it cuts me more deeply than any other.
“Wyvern, I call upon our pact! Protect us from the wind!”
Sera’s spell blocked the wind.
This was probably good for those people who were in the tunnel.
Unfortunately, Orden and I were still entangled and airborne.
There was an almost comical instant when the last of the air faded and we began to fall.
I panicked.
Orden acted.
She ripped the dueling cane off my belt, shot a blast of energy at a nearby tile and triggered the trap.
The acid was only a moment away, but the spears of ice from the trap reached us first.
Orden grabbed the closest spear and slammed it into the stone as we fell, intending to use it as an anchor like Jin had with the knife.
The ice spear bounced right off the stone. Magic or not, it couldn’t pierce rock.
Orden and I hit the acid hard.
For a moment, I was pretty confident I was going to die right there. My barrier kicked in before the acid could burn me, but with the barrier preventing the liquid from completely reaching me, I sank like a rock.
Orden was still there with me, her own barrier protecting her. I didn’t realize how important that was until she spoke a single word. “Teleport.”
And then we were standing back at the entrance to the tunnel, very much alive.
I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was only momentary.
Sera was kneeling on the ground at the entrance to the tunnel, breathing far too heavily. “Can’t…hold… the wind…much…longer…”
Resh.
Professor Orden and I stepped past her into the tunnel.
I could see the point where Sera’s spell — a twisting mist of green — was blocking off the wind at the end of the tunnel.
Derek had moved beyond that point. His Emerald aura was flaring, and he was physically pushing his way through the gale. The rest of us didn’t have any hope of mimicking that feat, though, and it didn’t look like Sera was going to be able to hold the wind long enough for the rest of us to wait here safely.
The easy approach was probably to move us all out of the tunnel and way off to the side, but that meant that Derek would have to try to tangle with that room alone. He probably could survive it without difficulty, but we had no way of knowing if he’d find a way to stop the wind — which meant that it was a dead end if we didn’t all get through.
“Can you teleport us to the other side of that room?” I asked Orden.
Orden shook her head. “I need an anchor to teleport. In this case, I was able to teleport back to Jin’s location. I could get us to Derek, but we’d just be blown right back out of the room.”
“Derek, close the door!” Vera shouted.
“What?” He shouted back. “Did you say my name? I can’t hear you over the wind!”
Orden stepped closer to Sera’s wind barrier, while Sera continued to shiver. With my attunement active, I could see threads of green leaking out of her. It was rather disconcerting.
Professor Orden frowned at the barrier. “We shouldn’t close the door. Derek could get stuck in there. We don’t know that this door will reopen if we try.” She turned back around. “Sera, can you make an ice wall at the entrance to this tunnel?”
She shook her head. She was looking flushed, her breathing accompanied by a wheeze.
I needed to do something.
Can I use Selys-Lyann to make enough ice to form a wall? No, not enough time.
Blast through the wind with my gauntlet? No, the wind is continuous, it wouldn’t last.
I gestured toward the tunnel entrance. “Everyone, we need to get out of the hallway and let Sera rest.”
We moved out of the tunnel and off to the side of the door, where the wind wouldn’t hit us when it picked back up. When we were all out of the way aside from Sera, I grabbed onto her tight and pulled her toward me.
I nearly lost her, but Jin grabbed me around the waist and anchored me. Together, we pulled her out of the doorway.
The wind whipped past us at deadly speed, but we were safe.
Sera was still breathing hard. I slipped off my backpack, withdrawing my water and handing it to her. She drank a sip, coughed that water up and retched onto the floor near us, and then drank some more. She managed to keep it down the second time.
She hugged me tightly and I hugged her right back. Even my usual reticence toward human contract was apparently overwhelmed by just how reshing close we’d just come to meeting our end.
We all sat down. I handed Sera the mana watch. She wordlessly accepted it, fumbling with the watch to find the right spot on her back to measure her mana.
-30/112.
She’d gone well beyond her safe mana limit. That meant potential permanent damage. No wonder she wasn’t talking.
She looked at the number, grimaced just slightly, and handed the watch back to me. I mussed her hair. “Quick thinking, blocking the wind. You saved us there. The rest of us will take care of things for a bit.”
Sera nodded, still looking painfully weak. If I was a Mender, maybe I could have healed her, but…
I sighed at my own stupidity. “I’ve still got the ring of regeneration,” I realized out loud. I handed her the ring. “Put that on, it’ll make you feel a bit better.”
She accepted the ring gratefully and slipped it on. She closed her eyes, letting out a sigh of momentary relief.
I felt a little better knowing the ring would probably keep her from getting worse, at least.
I glanced at the others. “Okay. Plan?”
Professor Orden shook her head. “As a Wayfarer, I have all sorts of movement-oriented spell. Unfortunately, none of them really involve blocking or resisting the wind. I could levitate someone, but that would just make them more susceptible to being blown away.”
I refrained from asking why she hadn’t levitated us across this room in the first place. Presumably she wanted to save her mana, or maybe it required her to concentrate on one person at a time.
Maybe she just enjoyed having other people do all the work. It didn’t matter. I needed to focus.
I still had a handful of magical items I hadn’t used, but none of them seemed applicable to the situation. I was sorely tempted to consult the book, but everyone could see me. Was it worth outing the book’s existence here?
Maybe. It really was a tremendously dangerous situation. Extreme measures were warranted. But it wasn’t an extreme approach that I suspected to actually help.
The book would probably just write back something like, “Corin, you’re in the Room of Killing Wind. It has winds that kill you. Avoid them.”
I rolled my eyes at the thought. For a magic book, it wasn’t actually very helpful.