Volume Dragon: Start by obtaining the Infinity Gems

Chapter 336 Dark Castle
After a night's rest, the two set out again on their journey to Vek's lair in the rising sun.

The castle where Vecna ​​lives is called the Dark Castle by the townspeople of Rime Town.

It was a military fortress standing proudly in the wind and snow.

After several days of traveling, the two finally arrived at the gate of the Dark Castle. Like the wilderness, the monster guards who were supposed to guard the gate had disappeared.

"Be careful when you go in. The internal defense mechanism should still be there, and the monsters may be inside." Nemesis reminded while standing in front of the gate.

The hem of his robe swept across the stone steps, stirring up a flurry of snow. The gate of this obsidian castle standing in the blizzard looked like a huge, indestructible shield.

But this 'shield' was resonating with Emma's scabbard at a frequency he couldn't decipher.

"Do you know the path of the first snow?" Liquid moonlight suddenly seeped out of the archway, condensing into frost words in the air. The silver-haired girl's fingertips were still on the carvings on the hilt, and those vine-like protrusions were growing at a speed visible to the naked eye, entwining her wrists wearing chainmail gloves.

"Of course I know," Emma looked at Nemesis and then answered bravely, "I hunted a frost wolf last winter."

Nemesis used his little finger to hook the invisible thread that detected magic. The moment the frost text received the answer, it collapsed into an array of ice crystals - it was clearly a three-dimensional projection of the swordsinger's professional emblem, but Emma's azure eyes only reflected ordinary snow.

"Welcome." Accompanied by an unknown female voice, the stone door opened with a roar.

The scene behind the door made Nemesis tighten his staff. The space that should have been the castle's antechamber now extended into a corridor made of bronze gears. Each floor tile was a rotating concentric circle, and when Emma's boot heel landed, the speed of the gears suddenly synchronized with her heartbeat.

"This mechanism is imitating me." Emma frowned. Nemesis noticed that there was liquid substance flowing in the walls on both sides. Whenever Emma turned her head to observe the murals, corresponding ripples appeared in the walls - the whole corridor was actually a living mirror.

As they turned the seventh corner, the chill intensified. The white mist exhaled by Nemesis condensed into a luminous data turbulence in the air, but there was no visible trace of Emma's breathing. Above their heads, a maple leaf-shaped crack appeared in the bronze dome, and snowflakes wrapped in the smell of motor oil fell.

A huge humanoid machine suddenly fell from the sky.

When the huge humanoid mechanical golem emerged from the frost and snow, Emma's sword was already against the gap in its breastplate. Nemesis began to prepare a spell attack, and the three-meter-tall gatekeeper suddenly knelt on one knee. The brass breastplate "clicked" and the holographic projection wrapped in the scent of honey rushed towards him.

"Look! It's the tree house I lived in when I was a child!" Emma's exclamation made the blonde girl in the phantom look up. The seven-year-old girl was cleaning a wooden sword under a maple tree. In the light spots leaking from the treetops, blue-winged beetles that Nemesis had never seen before were flying.

Nemesis watched this scene in silence. Would a modern American girl practice swordsmanship in her own backyard? It seemed that it was not smart enough.

The mage's arcane vision tore through the sweet appearance - the maple tree rings were actually encrypted runes, and the beetle's wing beat frequency was completely synchronized with the corridor gears. When the phantom little Emma suddenly turned to the real swordsinger and blinked, the [Ice Thorn Trap] prepared by Nemesis had already entangled the golem core.

"You're too nervous." The real Emma swung her sword to split the out-of-control golem, and the flying gears formed half a human face on the wall. Until the end of its death, the huge bronze golem did not choose to resist.

Nemesis silently put away the recording crystal, on which the last code flashed by the golem's eye was frozen: ERROR 1107 (object authority conflict). The two continued to move forward, neither of them discussing the phenomenon that had just occurred. Nemesis could vaguely detect a trace of panic and self-doubt in Emma's eyes.

After passing through the broken glass screen of the audience hall, the style of the entire castle suddenly changed, and the spatial structure began to grow abnormally. Nemesis's boots sank into some kind of fleshy floor, and blood vessels pulsated under his feet. The vines on Emma's scabbard suddenly grew, piercing the wall and causing a violent rejection reaction.

The stained glass refracted the twilight into gear-shaped rainbows. The bronze gears that were supposed to symbolize the sealing array were now slowly opening up maple leaf-shaped patterns. When Emma's silhouette overlapped with the glass totem, the same black slime as the wall oozed out of the gaps in the armor.

"Be careful!" Nemesis's warning was a moment late. The rust that Emma blocked etched a vine pattern on the wall, which perfectly meshed with the metal veins of the stained glass gears. The energy flow went back along the vines and finally merged into the gap in the chainmail on her left hand.

But the moment the black energy flow touched Emma, ​​it seemed to have seen some kind of ferocious beast, and it receded like a tide, causing Nemesis, who was about to lend a hand to help, to stop.

Emma could no longer ignore these strange things. Turbulence appeared in her eyes again, and she fell to the ground in panic: "...What, what's going on?"

"Why don't they seem to hurt me? This is Vecna's trick, right?" She looked at Nemesis in panic, like a drowning person trying to grab the last piece of driftwood, her eyes full of expectation.

Nemesis looked at the increasingly dense data turbulence in her eyes and finally spoke. He didn't want Emma to restart at this time.

"Yes, this is probably Vecna's trick. But no matter what his purpose is, we can just use it for the time being. Since they won't hurt you, it means we are not in danger for the time being."

Nemesis' words made Emma feel relieved. She didn't know what she was afraid of before. Now when she thought about it, her mind was blank.

It was as if...she was afraid to remember something.

The two continued to move forward in silence, and all they saw were endless bronze gears and annoying noises, as well as many dangerous traps and golems. But in front of Emma, ​​they all lowered their noble heads and allowed the two to slaughter them.

Emma's mentality had changed from shock at the beginning to numbness. Even the fact that the two of them had reached level 14 did not surprise her any more.

"We're here. This should be the underground treasure house." The two men stopped at the entrance of a downward spiral staircase.

The sound of bronze gears snapping together suddenly disappeared as they stepped into the underground stairs. Nemesis looked at the barcode light marks on the back of Emma's neck - those originally stable blue vertical lines were now flickering at a frequency like breathing, as if they were resonating with the surrounding environment.

"This place is actively cooperating with you." Nemesis used the tip of his staff to pick up a strand of glue stuck on the steps, and the slime quickly corroded a small section of the top of the staff. Emma did not look back, her scabbard was resonating with the wall, and the vine-like protrusions had covered her entire left arm.

The door to the treasury collapsed without warning. The ten-meter-high bronze door disintegrated like a shattered mirror, but the flying fragments hovered before touching Emma's armor, reorganizing into a metal torrent that protected the knight.

(End of this chapter)