We had been searching for our enemy for a little while now. As we visited the classrooms, we told the professors to instruct the students to stay quiet.
Feeling like a fish out of water playing babysitter, I made my way to the second floor with my companions and lowered my voice to mutter, “Huh…we have another one.”
I was looking at a slip of paper imbued with magic—a charm.
“I sense fire magic… Is this the source of that explosion?”
It was a magic tool—by imbuing a charm with magic energy as you wrote it, you could use it as a medium to cast a spell. And this baby happened to be imbued with fire magic.
“Yeah, ninety percent chance this is our culprit.”
In other words, whoever caused that last explosion had done so via a similar method. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the charm was set to cause an explosion when something passed in front of it. And these things were stuck all along the stairs connecting each of the floors of the school.
Most people would set up these charms to prevent their enemy from escaping… That’s one conclusion you could draw.
“Why did they leave some areas uncharmed?” I mused. “I don’t get our enemy’s angle.”
I found it eternally baffling. When we searched the second floor, there was just one flight of stairs that was free of charms. It was almost as if our foe was saying, “Please walk this way.”
“Let’s check the stairs that aren’t a trap one more time,” I said.
“Aren’t we going to disarm them?” Albert asked.
There was something I wanted to test. So we would leave these stairs alone and check over the uncharmed staircase one more time. This idea didn’t seem to sit well with Albert.
“I ain’t an expert on charms. It’ll take too long to disarm them. Besides—”
“Besides what?” Colette asked.
We would never have enough time to go back and disarm all the traps from one end to the other. It would make much more sense to have an expert defuse them later—someone was surely on their way already.
I turned to answer Colette, “I doubt anyone is dumb enough to fall for these obvious traps. Nobody would even try to come close to them when the school is on lockdown like this. Right?”
“Hmm. Point taken. However, some students might get hysterical and tear down the halls.”
“If that was gonna happen, we’d already be in a sea of explosions right now. Just a hunch, but I don’t think our friend had any intentions of stirring up shit here.”
The charms were placed so obviously even a normie could spot them. They were almost like…a DO NOT ENTER sign.
Nobody was dumb enough to break a rule just to be contrarian when their life was on the line.
Which connected squarely to the sneaking suspicion I had—
“Somebody is guiding us to something. We have to figure out where to go, and what it is we’ll find.”
We were dealing with a roundabout treasure hunt. If the attackers wanted to kill the students or faculty, there was a number of easier ways to go about it.
Our enemy was treating this like a game. I felt a discrepancy from Pearlman’s supremely level-headed modus operandi.
Shit, did this mean there was another pesky cult besides Gods of the Moon?
I’d never run out of questions… But we had to go on our little treasure hunt and see what’s at the end of the trail before we do anything else.
“Let’s go.”
I dodged the garish DO NOT ENTER sign and headed for the living staircase.
Okay, then…what the hell’s waiting for us up there?