In the end, catching up to her teammates hadn't been that much of a problem. Her Speed Augmentation and Hyperkinetic spells gave her a much-needed boost, and within seconds she'd drawn even with Roza, who was now heading the pack.
Ilise wasn't sure if the scorch marks on the wall were recent and caused by students or left there for flavour. Nevertheless, they looked threatening enough - a 'Keep out if you don't want to get your head blasted off' sign. Down here, there was no sunlight, just the corridor's oddly flickering fluorescent lights. Someone was having fun with the light switches, Ilise mused.
The floor beneath them was made entirely out of rusted diamond plate panels. Every step they took came with a loud 'clang' that echoed out for everyone in a ten-mile radius to hear. Ilise had half a mind to take off her shoes and proceed on her socks, but the raised nubs on the floor didn't look that pleasant to tread on.
True to what Marten had said, this section of Helheim had been abandoned for a long time, and was refurbished specifically for the Mistilteinn exams. There was still faulty piping everywhere, dripping water into tiny pools that had formed all around them. Lichen and moss were trying to claim the walls of the facility. Even the doors were opening and closing erratically. That, combined with the flashing lights, made the exam look like the set for some cheesy horror movie.
A cheesy horror movie that would've gotten Ilise scared out of her wits either way, but that was beside the point.
Without a map, they were still lost. All the corridors looked the same. Sure, some of them had a few extra moss patches or more rust on the floors, but apart from that they were virtually identical. Rei had brought a watch down with them. Barely fifteen minutes had passed since they made their descent, but it'd felt more like an hour.
"How is it all the other groups've already made it up so far ahead?" Toby wondered. "It hasn't even been half an hour and we haven't seen anybody, except for those three chumps outside."
"I don't know. There has to be something we're missing." Rei replied. "This is a laboratory. There'd be no point in building so many corridors. It'd just affect efficiency."
"D'you think a Pasithean could be messing with us?" Roza piped up. "Maybe we're all tripping balls right now and we're still back at the entrance."
"It's a possibility. Inducing a highly-detailed hallucination is something only an elite-tier Pasithean can do. So far, all we've seen appears to be the same corridor with minor adjustments." Rei mused. "It's a thought that's worth acting on. Good thinking, sister." He ruffled his sister's hair.
Rei continued. "Assuming we are in a Pasithean-created construct, this level of detail indicates that they aren't a very good one. It's all been modelled around the same environment, which means our Pasithean is too inexperienced to create entirely new ones out of their mind. They need a base to work with. We should start by feeling around the walls. If we find a hidden doorway, we'll be able to break through the illusion from there."
"No need for that." Ilise smiled, and placed both her palms against the wall. "I'll check for movement. Kinetic Silhouette." Blue waves of energy rippled out from where her palms were, spanning the entirety of the corridor, and then some. She remained there for a good ten seconds, her eyes closed and face scrunched in concentration.
"That's third-year level magic, isn't it? Elemental silhouettes," Tobias remarked.
"I got them! Ten metres ahead. There's a door there. Five people are behind it. One of them's got his hands out weirdly. He's probably who we're looking for. I also picked up on a few other signals, but they've been wandering around just as lost as we are."
Roza opened her mouth to cheer, but her brother promptly shushed her. "We can't let them know we're on to them. Ilise, can you do what you did to Roza? Your flash-step thing? You can enter the room and take out their Pasithean. We'll move in right behind you and clean up."
Ilise nodded, determined. A blue aura of light began to surround her. She called upon the same spells she'd used on Roza, except this time she funnelled them throughout her whole body. Instead of being concentrated in her fist, her entire body received the benefits of the spells she was casting. It took out a larger chunk of stamina, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the grand scheme of things.
"Impact Amplification. Concussive Force. Hyperkinetic."
Keeping an eye on the highlighted kinetic silhouettes, Ilise cleared the ten-metre distance in no time at all. She bolted forward, a blue-and-white tsunami devoted to breaking that door down and taking out everyone inside. A single kick broke the door down. Apparently, Helheim's employees weren't all about metal sliding doors. It splintered into tiny shards of wood. The illusion around them melted away almost instantly. The Pasithean jolted, distracted by the loud 'crack' of the door splintering. His teammates whipped around, spells at the ready.
"Fireball!"
"Hailstorm!"
"Gravity Well!"
"Acid Spray!"
Ilise was bombarded by four spells at once. Her Hyperkinetic-enhanced thinking process laid everything out before her in hilariously-simple infographics that Yggdrasil's scientists had helped her develop. Gravity, Fire, Ice and Poison magic. She still had a few seconds on the timer before using Hyperkinetic got too strenuous.
"Avoid the acid. Destroy hailstones and negate fireball. Disable Gravity spell caster." She said to herself, too caught up to form a proper sentence.
When the effects of Hyperkinetic faded away, Ilise galvanised her thoughts and sent a Concussive Force blast at the fireball, all while dodging the spray of acid that was headed her way. The fireball dissipated into a few wisps of flame, licking desperately at the air for the oxygen that would reinvigorate them.
No such luck. The following Concussive Force blast shattered the hailstones, releasing gusts of icy wind that blew the flames out of existence. Ilise was about to finish off the Gravity user when she suddenly felt an immeasurable weight bearing down on her. Her concentration disrupted, the Concussive Force glyphs faded away.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ilise could already see another fireball forming. She instinctively raised her arms, but nothing ever came.
"Discharge!"
A bolt of lightning split the air around her. It flew forward in a jagged pattern, branching out and striking each of her opponents individually as it chained from one person to another. Within seconds, they were all downed, their hair standing on end and uniforms slightly singed.
"You okay, Ilise?" Roza asked as she strode into the room. Little arcs of electricity danced periodically from her fingers.
"Y-yeah. I'm good." Ilise swung her shoulders around just to make sure that the weight was gone. Apart from a little soreness, she was completely fine.
Siegfried knelt over one of the fallen students and rummaged around in their pockets. he came up with a folded map.
"Here's how they got their Pasithean to manipulate our surroundings. He had a perfect view of everything around us. Too bad he chose to focus on the corridor outside them. If he'd picked something with more variation, I think they would've held us up for another five minutes." Siegfried deduced. Rei nodded.
"Correct. See, sister? Power isn't everything. Siegfried, you must've done pretty well on your paper last year."
"I wouldn't exactly put it like that. Let's just say the Headmaster saw something in me, yeah?" Siegfried chuckled and scratched the back of his head. Ilise noticed it was something of a nervous tic for him, just like how she wrung her hands every time she got nervous.
"As expected of a Pasithean as accomplished as Headmaster Vaughn," Rei nodded approvingly. He examined the map that they had laid out before them, stroking his chin and pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose every now and then. The others crowded around Rei, looking at him with bewilderment. Roza rolled her eyes.
"Give him some time. He's in one of his weird thinking phases. Just wait till the muttering starts."
Right on cue, Rei began to mutter a stream of incoherent words. Ilise thought she could make out some of them by reading his lips, and even then it was hard to glean the true meaning of what he was trying to say. Something about probability, Einherjar and... jelly beans?
"AHA!" Rei cried out. Siegfried, Ilise and Toby jumped, taken aback by Rei's uncharacteristic enthusiasm. "Apologies," Rei pushed his glasses back up his nose, "But I believe I have ascertained the location of the vault."
"How? It's not supposed to be on there." Toby said.
"Exactly. Therefore, I isolated the emptiest spots on the map and deduced that the vault would most likely be in the largest void there. Meaning that-"
"The vault's hiding in plain sight!" Siegfried finished.
"Correct again, Siegfried. You could've passed for someone with an affinity for intelligence augmentation. Herein lies the problem: the vault appears to be on sub-level C3. Eleven levels beneath where we are now, and the stairwells are sure to be guarded. Entering via traditional means is sure to get us caught up in a choke point. We must search for alternate points of entry."
"Like the vents?" Ilise asked.
"A viable candidate, depending on the size and durability of the ducts. It would make an awful lot of noise, unless you've learnt how to perform a Silencing spell." Rei said, not lifting his eyes from the map. "There appears to be an open catwalk here. It stretches all the way down to sub-level C10, the deepest section of this facility. We could potentially make the jump from the catwalk here to C3's catwalk. It's likely that we'll run into opposition on the way, but I predict that this will be the easiest way to gain access to the vault. Opening the door, however, will prove to be a different challenge-mmrph!"
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