Page 39 of Spirit Storm

He dips his chin. “I’ve got this. Focus on the target, no drifting.”

A split second later, I’m standing on the other side of the gap, and Wylder lets out a relieved breath. “Well done, Hendrix. I’m impressed.”

Orion pats Wylder’s shoulder and grins. “Oh, you have no idea how impressive that man can be when he’s focused.”

I press my hands over my ears. “La-la-la-la.”

Orion laughs, and by the time we’re settled down, our entire group is on the correct side of the floor trap.

“All right, then.” Freya gestures forward. “Shall we?”

Before we’ve even gotten ten feet, the floor rumbles and we all brace ourselves. A deep grinding fills the tunnel, low and mechanical, and we all spin toward the gap.

Stone rises from somewhere below, slow and deliberate, sliding upward in sections like a puzzle reassembling itself. Everyone stares in total silence until the surface comes level with the rest of the ground and settles with a solid, final thud.

The grinding stops.

Asher looks at the floor and grins. “Huzzah! I solved it."

"You didn't solve shit." Rowan turns around fully to look at him. "You evaded it.”

"And negated the trap. It gave up because I beat it at its own game."

She rolled her eyes. “If you say so.”

"I do. Didn’t you just hear me? I said so just now." He grins, delighted with himself. Orion, at the back, makes a sound that might be a laugh that he's deciding not to fully commit to.

I pat his shoulder and push him into motion. “You’re the shit, buddy. I celebrate everything about you.”

His grin widens. “That’s because you’re a remarkably perceptive and intelligent woman.”

And with that, we continue on our way.

The second trap is some kind of magical motion sensor that Asher triggers. When the ceiling drops two feet in half a second, we all duck. Asher takes the edge of a stone ledge across his forehead in the rush to not get cracked in the skull.

He's fine, just bleeding, and spends the next ten minutes milking it while Rowan presses a folded cloth to his head and tells him to stop being a baby.

"I’m not a baby,” he insists. "I’m a hero. I found the trap."

"With your face," Rowan says.

"With my forehead, specifically. Very noble. Very brave."

The third trap is a crosscurrent of pressure magic built into a doorway arch that Henrik detects before anyone steps through, pressing his hand to the frame and feeling the charge hum against his palm.

Wylder finds the trigger on that one—a root system grown through a crack in the stone, old and dried, that responds when he coaxes it back to life.

He disables it completely and the arch falls still, allowing us to step through.

The fourth leaves Rowan with a bruised shoulder and a genuine scorch on the hem of her jacket from a burst of ancient ward fire. When it hits, she rolls forward and is smothered by shadows faster than anyone can process.

They recede when the fire is out, and she brushes herself off, and inspects the damage done to her jacket with a homicidal glare. She points at no one in particular. "I'm billing the Order for this."

The progress is slow, but I feel like we’re doing our part to help map out the new tunnel system and making it safer for the next team to come through.

Tired, a little banged up, and with the novelty of the mysterious tunnels long since replaced by annoyance and apprehension, we check our position on the map.

“We’re through the worst of it.” Freya refers to the map, running her finger over a section indicating where we are.