Paladin of the End - Volume 3.1 - Chapter SS2

Lethal Traps in Ancient Ruins

“Ooh! Hey, Will, Menel! Are you fixing up your adventuring stuff?! Show me, show me!”

We had some time free one day, so we’d spread a sheet out on the grass and were doing some maintenance work on our tools when Bee, the red-haired halfling, came bounding up to us with sparkling eyes.

“No! Hands off.” Meneldor, the half-elf with silver hair, flicked his hand at her as if swatting away an insect.

“Aww, whyyy?!”

“You look like you’d manhandle them. They’re my precious tools of the trade.”

“I would not, Menel the meanie! No one likes a fussy man, you know?”

“I’m sorted there, thanks.”

“Yep, you’re lovey-dovey with Will, after all!”

“Why’d you bring up Will?! I’m talking about women!”

There was a fun rhythm to the rally of quick quips going on between them.

“Ah, thief tools!” Bee’s eyes went straight to the item Menel was holding. It was a leather case, about the size of a closed book, containing several smaller tools. All kinds of tools were there, including tongs, hook-shaped objects, and metal files.

“Oh? A hand mirror?” Finding a slightly unusual item among them, Bee tilted her head. “What do you use that for?”

“Guess.”

“Hm.” Bee frowned and started thinking. “Signals? Reflecting light or something?”

“You could, but I wouldn’t carry it around just for that.”

“Grooming.”

“You ever seen an adventurer look neat and tidy?”

“Oh, I know! Disguises for city adventuring!”

She sounded convinced that she’d got it, but sadly that wasn’t the answer.

“Well, yeah, I use it for that too”—he shook his head—“but that’s not the main thing it’s for.” He polished the mirror, grinning. Bee thought even harder.

“Mggg... Will, hint please!”

“Okay. An old adventurers’ saying: You can buy a mirror and look handsome, or lose an eye and look ugly.”

“Ah! Disarming traps!” Bee yelled out.

“Right answer.” Menel nodded.

I nodded too. A mirror was virtually essential for scouting ruins. Even Blood had told me about it in the past.

“You’ve heard of this one, right?” Menel continued. “It’s a standard trap. A careless thief goes peering straight into the keyhole of a treasure chest, sticks one of his tools in there and rattles it around, and then—”

“Poison gas or needles come shooting out and make you go blind! That kind of stuff.”

“That’s where the mirror comes in.”

“I get it. So if it looks dangerous, you don’t look straight at it.”

Working via a mirror made blinding traps easier to avoid.

“And we also use it for checking if a passage is safe to go through.”

You could check what things were like in the corridor around the corner without poking your head out. Plenty of ruins were dens of the evil gods’ minions, so this came in surprisingly useful.

“Huh! Scouting just gets brushed over a lot of the time in the stories. So it’s like that! Oh, what’s this one?”

“Wedge.”

“Just what it looks like? How d’you use it?” Bee cocked her head to the side.

This time, I was the one to answer her. “You can use them as points to tie ropes around when dealing with steep outdoor slopes or places where it’s easy to slip and stuff.” And besides standard usages like that— “It also has another important role in holding ruin doors in place, I guess.”

“Holding them in place?”

“Because of lock-in traps.”

“Oh, right, those. I heard about them in some story. Someone went to the atelier of a great old sorcerer and got chased around by golems, then he escaped into a room and the door closed all by itself and locked him in.”

“Those are actually pretty scary.”

“They are?”

“Ya. He’s right, ‘lock-in rooms’ like that are fig scary.” Menel looked vaguely into the air, as though remembering something. “Back when they were made, the idea was apparently for whoever was in charge of the house to call the authorities or something and unlock the room from the outside once they arrived.”

But now that those houses were ruins, whoever had once been in charge of them was obviously long gone.

“Set off one of those now, and you could end up starving to death inside a room sealed tight by magic. I’ve seen one of those rooms before where some poor fecker had set the trap off. It wasn’t pretty.”

Bee and I winced audibly. I didn’t really want to imagine the despair of the person who fell into that trap or the gruesomeness of the scene. I could only sympathize with Menel for having inadvertently laid eyes on it.

“Ya, so if you don’t want to get caught in something like that, fixing the door in place with a wedge before going into any suspicious rooms is a standard countermeasure.”

If you stuck a wedge in first, the door wouldn’t shut completely. There would also be a gap for you to escape. It was a tool with a surprising number of uses.

“Interesting.”

“Death traps are always where you least expect them, so you can’t let your guard down,” Menel muttered bitterly.

The phrase “ancient ruins” conjures up a strong image of death traps, but the ruins of the Union Age rarely contained traps set up with the intention of killing someone. It wasn’t as if we set up those sorts of traps in our own houses and workplaces either, military bases and other very special facilities like that aside. However, the passage of time was frightening, and things could change without anyone noticing. Floors became brittle and turned into pitfall traps or descending ceilings. The cables of lifts became old and transformed them into boxes that would fall when you entered them. And absent the person whose presence was assumed, lock-in rooms became rooms of death by starvation.

“Whoever made them didn’t want to kill at all, but time comes along and converts these things into fig murderous traps.”

“Yeah. We have to factor all that in and stay alert.”

We carefully inspected our tools as we talked, polishing them and making sure they were in good repair. They were our lifelines when we went exploring dangerous ruins.

“You can never be too prepared, I guess.”

“Exactly.” Menel and I both nodded.