Round 2 Transcript

Silra’s fingers trace the uneven cobbles, her eyes flicking for any hint of a trigger. She spots a faint indentation in the stone—an old pressure plate concealed beneath a layer of ash. As she steps closer, the plate clicks softly, and a loose slab above shudders, threatening to fall.

Jeane Cromwell felt the stone shift above them with a groan that scraped her nerves raw—like a crypt door swinging open at midnight. The slab teetered precariously over Silra’s head, and for one sickening moment, Jeane imagined the weight crushing her accomplice flat. "Move your arse!" she hissed, already drawing power from the corruption that thrummed through her veins like bad blood. Her unholy symbol flared cold and blue in the dimness, shadows coiling around her hands as she prepared to freeze the falling stone mid-air—if it didn’t crush them both first. The spell snapped out of her fingers like ice shards, lancing upward just as the slab pitched forward with deadly momentum. Frozen air met falling rock, and for a heart-stopping second, Jeane thought she’d misjudged—the slab groaned louder, cracking through the rime that encased it. Then, slowly, inexorably, the weight settled back onto its original perch with an ominous thud. Jeane’s breath came out in a white fog, her hands trembling from channeling so much dark power in such close quarters. She glared at Silra, barely suppressing her relief that the elf was still alive and uncrushed: "Next time you scout ahead, try not to step on things designed to kill us."

Silra threw herself sideways with inbred grace just as the slab came loose overhead—a rush of stone and dust and the sickening thud of tons of rock hitting exactly where her skull had been moments before. She landed hard on ash-covered cobbles, rolling to disperse momentum like a cat dumped from a wagon. Her hand instinctively found the hilt of her dagger, though it was clear this was no ambush—just the city's ancient bones settling after centuries of neglect. She scrambled back up, brushing dust from her cloak and eyeing the precariously balanced slab with cold suspicion. "Fuckin' place is falling apart faster than my trust in human institutions," she muttered, voice rough but steady. The adrenaline was already fading, replaced by that familiar itch between her shoulder blades—the feeling of being watched. "Jeane, if you're gonna use magic to stabilize this thing, do it before I get a proper crick in my neck."