Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Belated Regret

Slowly but, at the very least, surely, Mana was progressing through the endless hallways of the castle ruins. A couple of times the floor spooked her by having a couple of spikes shoot out, large enough to pierce right through her legs and maybe even reach her abdomen but they were so few in between and so barely functional that they only provided a temporary scare. Luckily for the magician, she was using the walls for support so the few spikes that did shoot out in the center missed her by a mile. She pretty much had to use the walls to help her walk forward having the state she was in in mind.

If her experience with the architecture of that age was correct, the throne room should've been somewhere in the ground floor, however, having in mind that the throne room also must've served as the treasure chamber it should've been at a separate wing of the castle somewhere at the northern parts. It was surprising how much in common different buildings of the same era had. Mana made a sharp turn that she didn't really calculate to the end, she tripped and fell right on her front and shouted out in pain peeling her body off the ground through sheer force of will.

What her eyes saw after she stood up made her curse internally. The entire corridor in front had no floor, judging from the rather visible part where the floor lead to, the corridor must've once been a trapped one, it must've once had pressure plates on the floor that when triggered sent those poor unfortunate skeletons down below to their spiky demise. The water below was still evaporating even now, it must've vapored away and then gathered at the colder ceiling and then dropped back down to the heating source. Not only did those poor souls fell on giant spikes larger than their whole bodies but the water they fell into was also boiling.

"Someone really didn't want anyone to find whatever's in that throne room..." Mana thought to herself trying to find a way to make it across. Her fingernails were already bleeding and almost peeled off from the time she crawled the castle walls from outside the good old fashioned way, using her boots and torn up and scratched bleeding fingers.

Slowly the magician walked up to the wall on the other side, right up to where the big fall lurked there waiting for another careless visitor to claim.

"Well, if I was a big fancy castle snob, I'd want an easy way into my king's throne room, scaling the walls and ceilings couldn't have been the ideal way to pass this place..." Mana spoke to herself as she softly stroke the right side wall trying to find some pressure plate or switch that triggered something. Her foot accidentally stepped on a strangely elevated brick that closed the drop with a floor made of wet stones.

Mana smiled.

"I didn't see any rocks below, the floor doesn't crumble, it goes into the wall, it's got to be a deceitful switch... The floor would most likely just close back in once I trigger the pressure plates again" she loved every single moment of this. Even when her entire body was beaten and broken, even when she felt like passing out from blood loss and pain of merely staying on her feet, Mana loved trying to beat this puzzle of death. Finally, the magician's hand pressed against a stone on the wall that was supposed to open a passageway but the wall was so old that instead of opening it simply broke off and partly blocked the girl's path.

Through pain and a lot of teeth grinding Mana slipped through the small gap that was still left for her to slip through. It wasn't ideal but she had to be careful not to rub her body too hard against the stone as it could've just all broke into bits and crushed her beneath it. Try as hard as she may have, Mana's body still got covered with cuts and bruises from slipping under the collapsed stone wall. Not that new scratches and scars bothered her at this point, the pain was already so strong that new scratches barely even registered, she just left her bloody mark on the collapsed wall.

Slowly the girl made her way through the passageway and pressed a wooden switch that collapsed another wall instead of merely opening her. After a brief sigh and a moment to catch her breath and let the rampaging pain settle down somewhat, Mana continued her walk forward. She looked around, this was strange, the room she was in was the treasure room but it made no sense. She had figured that the desert king would've kept his treasure somewhere inside his throne room, not made his treasury the default access to his throne room.