Blades of the Beholder

Somehow, this didn’t end up being another outing full of regrets.
It sure seemed like it would at first. A man named “Archie Ologist”, an archaeologist, wanted to pay a measly 70 gold for us to retrieve mythical weapons for him. Despite him being in the barrier, I half expected that it was going to turn out to be another scheme by Scam Likely, may he be turned into a potted plant for a millennium. I went along, to keep some of the new blood safe and try to stop Archie if he turned against us.
It was myself, Constance, Crackle, Ichika, and Spoon that went with him. We arrived at the location and dug up the entrance. We were crawling through a passageway when Constance suddenly slipped down a slide. I tried to keep her up with my grappling hook, but to no avail. I lept after her, knowing that I could break our fall with my armor if needed. Thankfully, it ended not with a bottomless pit, but with a large room. The others followed soon after.
On the wall was a mural depicting a Beholder, with white quartz placed on the eyestalks. Touching the quartz made it light up with a color, and touching it again would switch that color. I spotted an object buried beneath the moss in the corner; a shield with a blue gem on it. We searched some more, and found many objects with gems in them that matched the colors that the gems on the wall would light up with. One of them, a sword, had a red gem on it. We set all the gems in the wall to red, and it opened up to another room with a small slot in the door. Placing the sword in that slot opened yet another large room.
In the center of it were ten blades. When we approached, they rose up into the air and were collected by a Beholder. Bladeholder? At any rate, it wasn’t a normal beholder. The fight went quite well, but when we defeated it, a second one came. Then a third after that. The last one nearly managed to take down Crackle, but he’s apparently made of tougher stuff than any of us anticipated.
When that was done, several of the blades disappeared. We were about to give the remaining ones to Archie, but it turns out he booked it! Ran at the first sign of trouble, and we couldn’t find him no matter what we tried. Thankfully, he paid us in advance. We decided to keep the blades that remained.