บท 175: The Deadliest Hopscotch Game EVER! (1)

Jon arrived at a large room with a lot of movement that could be felt inside. Spreading his detection across the room, he could clearly feel the movement in it.

It was his first time to feel movement with no aura of life with it which made him come to the conclusion that the source of the movement is some Dwarven Animunculi. These things are some automatons constructed by the Dwemer to serve and guard their homes and cities.

The problem when it comes to detecting the Dwemer Animunculi is that they are metallic objects with no organic components at all. This makes them the complete opposite of the living creature and even the undead who are not that hard to detect.

It also means that if a Dwemer Animunculi was designed to be hidden then there is no way to discover where it was hidden.

In the end, A moving Dwemer Animunculi is easy to spot. Still, it doesn't mean that they are easy to kill. These things were constructed which means they can't have a weakness like being stabbed from a point-blank or anything like that. Fighting them from the back won't be different than fighting them from the front but it means you can only give the first strike.

All in all, Dwemer Animunculi are a serious pain the ass and should be avoided rather than faced idiotically.

Jon knew all that and he no problem with it at all.

'Now now, let's see what we have here… the room seems to be 100 meters long and 40 meters wide. Some platforms, eight dormant Dwarven Centurions so better not to wake them up, a total of fifty moving objects which are too small and moving with a lot of sounds, they should be Dwemer Spiders, and finally we have a total of twelve pipes in the walls, if I am not mistaken, these kinds of pipes is the one that the Dwemer Spheres. Not sure how many Spheres in each pipe but I read that they can store up to five. The worst case scenario is eight Dwemer Centurions, fifty Dwemer Spiders and sixty Dwemer Sphere… Damn!'

Jon started counting the ins and outs and how much can he bypass… also he had to look for the traps and their triggers.

This room was an open buffet of death traps and Dwemer Animunculi. He had to be the best version of the infamous 'Catatuskr' if he wanted to get this right.

'Phew, I can see it now. That Cube!"

Jon also found the 'Cube' that Shadow mentioned. It was on a stone table in the deepest part of the room and was protected by three dormant Dwarven Centurions alone.

For someone like Shadow to go out of his way and recommend something like that for Jon. It seemed, that there is something very special about that Cube.

The Cube was simply a 'Dwemer Puzzle Cube' or that's what it looked like, Dwemer Cubes can do absurd things. One of them was obtained in the game and it contained some data to make a bigger machine work, just like a hard drive with a passcode. These things contain a lot of mystery and wonder so Jon didn't question Shadow's advice too much.

On the other platforms, Jon could see a lot of shiny stuff. Swords that were giving off light, staves with powerful auras, a strange weapon that Jon had a hard boner once he saw it, a Dwemer gauntlet that almost made Jon's eyes pop out from the shock.

'The hell did I just arrive into? Don't tell me that Lord Fyr's has his own copies of the 'Lusty Argonian Maid' hidden here too!'

It was a place of many shiny stuff indeed.

Jon retreated a few steps and hid behind a pillar then started to prepare. He had a small bag with him that contained some of the necessary thief tools he needs. He then took out a potion and drank it.

This is a something he used to brew and drink during the old days in Riften. He liked to call it the 'Adrenaline Potion' but it was just a regular drug.

Once all was ready, Jon stretched his body left and right, up and down until he felt like to go for it.

***

The room felt like it had three different sections, each section had a certain quality of treasures on its walls. Jon was aiming for the last section of the room.

The first section was twenty meters long and it felt like its floor was filled with random mechanical traps. Let alone getting hit by a trap, the idea of activating one meant triggering all the dormant guardians.

The guardians in the first section were Dwarven Spiders. They are small, arachnid-like Animunculi, and are very common in Dwemer ruins. They can often be found working on rocks or other objects. They can attack intruders using blasts of lightning, or by emitting poisonous gases from a bag.

Jon calculated the location of the hidden Dwarven Spiders and cast 'Muffle' to hide his sounds, 'Invisibility' to hide his image, 'Hasten' to buff his speed, and 'Levitation' to float in the air.

He then started to float into the room slowly.

However, once he passed the door, the 'Levitation' spell was canceled.

Jon who was mid-air fell on his feet but luckily, no sound came out.

His heart almost jumped from its place and he looked around frantically, he then came to a realization.

'A no-fly zone? As expected of Lord Fyr… Still, I should have brought a change with me.'

Jon was intending to pass through the first section of the room while floating but it didn't seem to be working. He then had another idea and tried to teleport himself outside the room.

'As expected! Teleportation doesn't work too. Which means if I wanted to use the scroll to exit the dungeon, I need to run outside the room first.'

It was annoying but Jon understood the rules of the game. He remembered the saying of Lord Fyr in 'TES3: Morrowind' when he said that he likes sport and his favorite sport is to watch people sneak into his dungeon. This must be the most favorite round of Lord Fyr.

"As you wish, Great Grandmaster. I will entertain you to the best of my ability."

Jon whispered those words in a low tone.

Not far from what he is, a Dark Elven man with white hair was sitting and nodding with a smile. Behind him were five Dark Elven women, four of them looked like him and the last one was Nurina. They all looked at a screen like a mist that reflected the image of the room Jon was in.

Back to Jon, he looked up and down, left and right to see if there is anything that he may use to pass the first section unscathed. The only clue he found was that every tile of the floor was a pressure plate and all had foot marks and numbers.

Jon looked closely then opened his eyes wide from what he realized.

"Fuck! Is this... a Master Level Hopscotch?"

He was right! The numbers and the footmarks on the tiles meant that it was a hopscotch game. The lane of tiles even had branches for those who wanted to pick a treasure from the first section of the room.

Hopscotch is a popular children's playground game in which players toss a small object into numbered triangles or a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces to retrieve the object.

This game, however, had no object to toss, it had a treasure to retrieve and a failure probably means death.

The footmarks meant that it only can fit the foot of an adult which means boots were very dangerous in such a game. Jon took off his boots right away.

The first tile required the left foot, so did the second and the third all the way to the ninth. Jon could only do so and jumped on the first.

'Phew, nothing happened.' Jon was feeling better when he didn't mess this one up.'

Each tile was one meter in length so it wasn't that hard to jump from a center to the other except it needed a certain accuracy. As Jon was a tall person, he wasn't really disadvantaged in this trail at all.

He started hopping all the way to the ninth tile, the tenth hop was to be done on two tiles with two feet. Once Jon tired it, he almost felt that he was about to screw it up if a foot landed before the other.

With all the strength that he could muster, he managed to land with the two feet at the same time.

"Fuck, a scale!"

The tenth tiles were connected like a scale, he had to keep the balance between the two while trying to jump to the eleventh.

"Fu- fu- fu- fu- fuaaack!" Jon was barely keeping the balance and his legs were trying to keep up with the scale movement until he finally jumped to the eleventh tile. As he was about to land on the tile with his left leg, he realized that he got accustomed on the previous tiles where he used his left foot and this on changes to the right foot. He switched to the right foot a femtosecond before the disaster falls.

"It is still dry down there, right? Phew1"

Jon took a few seconds to calm down and continued the way to the eighteenth tile were he had to face a scale again then finished it easily this time then passed the twentieth tiles and landed on the threshold between the first section and the second section.

He looked around and made a crying face.

His invisibility has long since gone and he only kept the Muffle spell for the sake of keeping silent.

After complaining for a while, he turned his face to the second section.