Lair Of Traps

Kies had no way of explaining his way out of this one. It was pretty clear what had transpired. There was no other explanation for it. A magic artifact that can manipulate gravity or wind? That was out of the question. He had nothing else on his body that he could use as an excuse. It wasn't like he could take out the Demonic letter from his pouch and tell them that this piece of paper saved them.

Kies cursed at himself again for being so careless. He should've checked the trap for more arrows. It was a clever design. After triggering the trap, people would think it was safe, but that was a lie. It fired one arrow when the intruder entered and another if the intruder somehow survived and wanted to leave. It was made to catch even the most careful of people off-guard. "Not bad..." He had to give it to the thieves for thinking of something like this though.

Kies walked over to the trap and checked if there were any more arrows in there and found that there were none left. It only had two.

"You're a mage!?" Iris yelled out in surprise after being stunned for a brief moment.

"I don't suppose you would believe me if I told you that the frag- Er, Windstone, protected you from the."

"Of course not. I have had this thing for years now and I know what it can do and what it can't do... Well, a bit of it anyway. But I know for sure that it can't do something like that," Iris said confidently.

"Then what if I told you that a magic invisible fairy saved you?"

"Hey, I may be stupid, but I'm not THAT stupid."

"I used one of my artifacts?" Kies tried.

"Very funny. I felt your magic power when you saved me. You're not fooling me."

"A shame." Well, his secret was out now. There was no going back anymore and he had himself to blame for that mistake. If only he had been a bit more cautious... Oh well. It's too late for that now. There's no point lingering on the matter.

"So, was that wind magic?" Iris asked him, eager to know the answer.

"What do you think?"

"Um... Yes? I don't know. There are a million different kinds of magic out there. Since you're not hu-" Iris put her hand over her mouth, catching herself last second. "I mean, does it even matter if Wompa knows now?" Iris asked.

"Not really." Kies was fine with letting Wompa know since she seemed pretty responsible when it came to keeping secrets. He didn't know why. She just kind of gave off that kind of dependable feeling. She just seemed like someone who one could rely on and talk to about anything. But that's mainly due to the fact that she can't speak back, and could only listen. "You can tell her," he told Iris.

"Okay. Listen up, sis. Here's the thing." Iris got Wompa's attention and she looked at her with a confused expression, unsure of what the two had been talking about. "He's not human!" Iris yelled out the big secret that Kies was keeping in a loud and excited voice. Wompa stared at her sister and just nodded her head. "Hm? You don't look the tiniest bit surprised," Iris noticed. "Did you know about this already?" Wompa nodded her head yes. "What!?"

"Wait, when did you find out?" Kies didn't remember telling Wompa about this, nor did he remember accidentally revealing it to her. So when did this happen? Wompa made some gestures to her hand, explaining to them that she had been suspicious about it for a while now. She made an eating gesture with her hand, showing Kies that she noticed his strange habit of not eating, and also pointed out several other fishy things that he did.

"Ah..." Apparently, Wompa already knew that Kies wasn't normal from the start. After all, no one else had as many magic items, and the main giveaway for her was during the fight in the colosseum. He single-handedly wiped out the entirety of the competition by himself. If that wasn't going to raise alarms, then nothing would.

"Anyway, let's start searching the room," Kies told them, diverting their attention away from the topic that he didn't want to talk about. He turned back to the room and took a good look around at it. It was a small room with a table and chair in the back corner. There was a lone candle on the desk, still burning, and littered all over were piles of papers. It seemed to be an office of some sort.

"Wait, I want to know about your magic though!" Iris wasn't going to let Kies drop the conversation just like that."

"Remember what our task here is," Kies reminded her. He agreed to help Rui with searching the place and getting rid of the beasts down here. And since the two girls wanted to come down here with him, in a sense, they also agreed to help him with the search.

"Ugh, fine," Iris grudgingly said. "But you have to tell us about yourself later."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

"Yes!"

"You know what. I'll just do the search by myself."

"Huh? Wait, that's not fair!"

"You're the one that isn't being fair." Iris wasn't exactly giving him a choice. It was either he revealed his secrets to her or he revealed his secrets to her. There was nothing else. If that was the price that he had to pay for them to help him, then he would rather just do it all on his own.

"...Fine..." Iris gave up and went over to help Kies with the search. "But you have to tell me everything when this is all over?"

"When what is over?"

"You know, when we get this entire mess sorted out. After we get rid of the commander and save the queen and stuff."

"I can't promise that."

"..."

Kies walked over to the desk while the two sisters went to the other side where the trap was and looked around. He wasn't sure if that was the safest of ideas, but it didn't look like there was anything left that was dangerous over there. Kies put his hand over the desk and swept the vicinity with his winds, making sure to be gentle enough so that none of the papers would get blown off. After seeing that there were no traps anywhere on the desk or chair, Kies went through the papers to see what they were all about. Most of them were written in a language that he couldn't read.

"Hey, do you two know what this says?" Kies asked Iris and Wompa, holding out a document for them to read. The sisters came over to Kies and took a look at the document.

"Um... This isn't in any language that we know of..." Iris told him.

"It's not?" It wasn't written in some unique Otanian language or something? That was strange... Kies looked back at the papers and saw that a couple were written in Centrolio. He picked them up and tried to make sense of them but the person or people that wrote it were either terrible with words or deliberately made it impossible to understand since there were a bunch of nonsensical sentences.

"I think it's coded," Iris said out loud after staring at the document for a bit.

"Huh... I guess we'll leave it to the soldiers to handle that then." Kies threw the papers back on the desk and walked out of the room. There were still three more rooms left to search. One of them had the beasts that Rui wanted him to take care of. As for the other two rooms, he had no idea what they were used for.

Kies walked over to the next room, directly across from the office, and broke the wall with his sword again. Kies sent out his winds to search the room for traps and found several. Since it wasn't a good idea to go in with that many traps in the place, Kies examined the room from the outside. From the looks of it, the room was the armory or storage room. There were weapons, armor, bottles, and vials of what was presumably poison, and everything one can expect in the place.

"Woah! There's a lot of-" Iris poked her head through the door and Kies quickly pulled her back just in time as something big and round flew down from the ceiling and almost bashed her skull. *Crash!* The object smashed into the floor and shattered into pieces, sending fragments flying everywhere.

"You idiot!"

"Phew! That was close!" Iris thanked Kies for saving her and then proceeded to poke her head back into the room, not learning her lesson.

"..." Kies grabbed Iris by her shoulder and pulled her back out again. "You... Are you alright in the head?"

"Nope," Iris stuck her tongue out and made a silly face.

Kies sighed and held his arm out towards the room. He called upon the winds to bring him two sets of weapons and gave them to Iris and Wompa. "Wow, you're not bothering to hide it anymore..." Iris commented as she took a pair of gloves with steel lining the knuckle area from the air. Wompa received a pair of daggers, each around the same length as her entire arm. It looked more like a short sword than a dagger considering that size, but the curved shape said otherwise.

"No point. It's safer than going inside anyway." Kies picked out weapons that the two preferred and went on to the next room. He brought down the wall and scanned it with his winds once more to see if there were any traps. The entire place was filled to the brim with traps. From the looks of it, there were multiple arrow traps, a pitfall, explosives, you name it. Going in there meant certain death.

"What's in there?" Iris tried to peek into the dark corridor but couldn't see a thing.

Kies sent his winds deeper down the corridor and discovered that it led to the outside. "It's a secret exit," he told them. The thieves likely escaped through here, and they definitely didn't want people to follow. Assuming the pursuers somehow made it through all the traps, it would lead them right to the thieves, but this wasn't what they were looking for. Rui and the other soldiers already had that handled.

Kies walked over to the last room and found that a section of the wall there was covered in a layer of ice. It went without saying that this was the room that they had been looking for. Kies gestured for Iris and Wompa to move back before breaking the wall, shattering both the ice and the stone with a single strike. Kies scanned the room for traps, but it didn't seem like he needed to. He found that all of them had already been triggered and were covered in ice. Rui had taken care of all of them. Kies walked into the room, followed by the two princesses.

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