A choice lies beyond the portal: easy or hard, some or all.
The path of ease is to place the last first, for the last is the end.
Memory leads the way, yet memory also blinds.
Follow the true path to the hidden truth of yourself.
The true path lies.
“Should we take the easy way out or look for the hidden boss?” Serenity stared at the plaque. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?
“The hidden boss will get us better gear, won’t it?” Echo skipped over to the pedestal and looked at the plaque. “Does this tell you how to find it?”
“Maybe. It’ll be a lot harder and I think a lot more fights. Everyone up for it?”
“Yeah, may as well try. If it’s too tough maybe we can take the easy way out?” Lancaster tapped the plaque. “I don’t see how this tells us where to look.”
“It’s that last line. There are only three doors, there wasn’t one where we came in. Why?” Serenity walked over to the empty wall and tapped the spot where a door would be if it matched the other walls.
CLUNK
He turned around to see that bars had extended to block the three doors. When he turned back, the wall had become an opening into darkness and a cool mist was coming out from the hole. “Ready?”
The darkness led to another bare, white-painted room similar to the first. There was no pedestal and the opening behind them didn’t close, but the doors had the same three symbols.
“Memory leads the way … anyone remember what we fought first?” Serenity knew the kobolds were the last thing they’d “fought” … it was hard to forget them running away in fear. He couldn’t remember what they’d fought first. The spiders were the first thing they’d fought in stage 3, but that clearly wasn’t correct since none of the doors had a spider. The goblins and boars were the first thing overall, but that was with the larger group and he didn’t think it counted since they’d fought it again later.
“Ants and beetles and those waterbugs. Oh, and grasshoppers.” Moira paused. “There was a moth at the end, it was annoying mostly.”
“That must be a moth, then.” Serenity led them through the door on the left marked with a moth.
It led directly into another white-painted room with gray doors. The door to the right was open; the other two doors had symbols depicting a man-shaped figure with a club and a group of animals.
“Then it was that crazy overgrown suburb with the squirrel bombers, right?” Rissa’s description got nods (and laughter from Echo).
After going through the next door, only the door to the right wasn’t open. It had spiders.
Serenity remembered the spiders. “They were the third room, huh?”
The spider door led onto a long industrial-looking hallway. As the group walked down it, the lights dimmed until it was only as bright as moonlight, then the hallway began to widen and started looking like stone. It wasn’t long before they started hearing water dripping in the distance. The pathway opened into a space that looked like a cave, but the top had several openings which let in moonlight. Serenity could even see a moon through the far opening. It didn’t look like Luna; the features were different.
As he started to step into the room, he felt something softly brush his arm, so he stopped and backed up. A strand of webbing was barely visible in the moonlight.
It’s always spiders.
“Spiderweb. Be ready.” Serenity pulled his knife, cut the webbing blocking the way, and waved his knife through the area he’d need to step through to get into the cave itself. He didn’t find any more webbing, so he took a step into the cave and looked for the spider.
He expected a large spider like the ones they’d fought on the third floor; the biggest had been waist-high, which was more than big enough. He found a spider scuttling towards them from the left, but it wasn’t what he’d expected; this spider was taller than Serenity.
Fortunately, it seemed to be the only spider present.
A blob of darkness impacted Serenity’s arm. It didn’t hurt at all, but it did leave him in darkness. He could see fine; it was colorless, but he hadn’t been able to see much color by moonlight anyway. “Move past me, see if you can take out the moth while I get the spider. Watch out for animals!”
Serenity changed weapons, took a few steps towards the spider, and infused his naginata with Deathstrike. He had enough energy for now; he could afford to spend some on killing the spider faster.
He heard everyone else move past him, then a BOOM behind him. Probably a squirrel. He didn’t have time to look; he had a spider to deal with.
The spider stopped at what it probably thought was “out of reach” and started to twist itself to do something the spiders on the third floor hadn’t - throw its web at Serenity to immobilize him. Serenity recognized it from past experiences and nightmares and dove out of the way.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Serenity had looked it up after the third time he’d run into it. There were real spiders that could do something similar, but they didn’t generally also make actual webs. Serenity knew from experience that monstrous spiders could and would do both.
As Serenity rolled to his feet, he swept the blade of the naginata under the spider. It wasn’t expecting the assault and the blade sheared three of the spider’s legs. It started to fall and Serenity aimed for the joint between the spider’s body and its abdomen. Even if it lived through a cut there, that would remove its ability to throw webs and with multiple legs down it would be immobilized, neutralizing the threat.
The spider didn’t intend to be taken out so easily and turned into the blade, which slid off its exoskeleton. It lunged at him, but its aim was thrown off by the missing legs and it threw itself at the air beside Serenity.
Serenity stepped quickly around its side and aimed at the joint again. This time, the spider was partially on its side and didn’t manage to move in time.
When Serenity turned back to the rest of the fight, he saw an odd collection of animals circled around a fight between a two-tailed black dog and his friends, covered in darkness. The squirrels occasionally threw exploding acorns, and the rest seemed to cheer when the dog managed to bite someone. Echo was still hitting it with sonic bolts, but Moira and Lancaster didn’t seem to know where it was. As he watched, it teleported next to Rissa. She stabbed it and yelled “NOW! Lancaster, it’s in front of me!”
Lancaster moved roughly in front of her and started slashing. It was obvious he couldn’t see it, but as long as Rissa controlled it, he could do some damage.
Serenity pulled out his bow. A few arrows would take care of the hawk moth; it was already injured and seemed to be trying to stay out of the way while it kept the area blanketed in darkness. It might not matter to him and Echo, but it mattered to everyone else.
Serenity shot the hawk moth twice. It was a nice, stationary target and didn’t even see the arrows coming. When it started to fall out of the sky, he changed target to the two-tailed dog. Two arrows later, the black dog attempted to dodge and moved its neck into the space where Lancaster was wildly swinging.
The circle of animals erupted with noise as the animals started running away. Serenity saw several attack each other as they fled; the most amusing, somehow, was the exploding acorn that stunned a rabbit long enough for the squirrel to bite its neck, then run away with it, even though it was several times the squirrel’s size.
Serenity turned and finished off the spider, then they stopped for Rissa to heal the injuries from the dog bites. Some of them were quite nasty.
They headed towards the far end of the cave, which unsurprisingly dumped them into another tunnel and then another white-painted room with the entrance they came in through and three doors.
This time, the doors had a goat, a man-shaped figure that seemed to be wearing a large mask and holding a stick, and something that could only be a sea lion.
Lancaster came up with the answer this time. “Goblins and boars was next, so it should be the one with the mask. I think that’s what the guy at the center of the camp wore.”
They went through and were met with another white room. The open door was across from them; the closed doors had a diamond shape and a man-shaped figure holding a weapon of some sort, possibly an axe.
“Undead. So not the diamond.” Serenity didn’t have to think about this one. It was undead, then the puzzle.
The only closed door in the next room had a simple circle on it. Serenity smiled and felt a little hungry at the reference to death elementals, before he opened the door.
Unexpectedly, this door led to another white room with three doors, a pedestal in the middle, and a cage. Serenity could tell the cage held an undead creature before he even got close to it, but when he got close, he could see it was an undead Goblin Shaman, mask and all.
It threw itself at the cage, thrashing and trying to get at the people outside. It didn’t seem to even be intelligent enough to attempt to use the wand that fell at its feet.
Looking at it … feeling it … it made Serenity hungry. The idea of eating the undead was both interesting and repulsive at the same time.
Another step forward put it within his aura and Eat Death kicked in. Serenity felt a rush of Death energy running through his aura to his Aspect. If he’d wanted to actually eat it, he’d have needed to hurry; it seemed like undead didn’t have the same barrier to his aura that the living had.
This wouldn’t feed him, but Serenity hoped it would help slow down the drain on his body from his damaged Aspect; since he’d gotten better control of the mana he was taking from his friends, he’d found that he had to direct some at his Aspect or it would drain him faster and faster. That seemed to be the reason he’d lost weight so quickly; his Aspect had been pulling energy from him when it didn’t get it from elsewhere.
It was probably why he’d been able to kill the entire fifth floor, yet hadn’t been able to do anything with his friends’ mana until he pulled it using Essence. Undead got their vitality from Death mana, while the living were bound to Life mana. Somehow, that made it accessible.
Serenity watched as his aura pulled the mana out of the undead creature. It reminded him more of using Void magic than any Death magic the Final Reaper had used. It was almost like his aura was fusing the two Affinities together to get a new effect.
It wasn’t quite the same. Void magic destroyed what it took, while this repurposed it. It was sort of like the first half of Void magic stapled to Death magic. Serenity wondered what would happen if you took the other half of Void magic and used it with another Affinity.
For a moment, his aura warped and he saw bits of the undead creature disappear; he could feel the remaining Death magic was left behind and it flowed into him. Some of it disappeared with the creature’s flesh and his aura rebelled, twisting back to the first way.
Serenity wondered if he could do that with other Affinities. General practice was to work within a single Affinity; if more than one was needed, you’d find a specialist in a merged Affinity, do them in succession, or simply have more than one person work on it. Often an item would be a better solution. Especially complex situations could be handled with a ritual. If there was a way to combine Affinities to achieve extra effects, why wasn’t it used?
Perhaps what he was looking at was more a technique for using magic than a combination of two Affinities. If that was true, then was Void magic really even a separate Affinity? It had connections to Space magic; it was supposed to be true emptiness rather than the fabric of reality, the inverse of Space - yet was it even real? Serenity had already found out that Space and Time weren’t really different. Were Space and Void closer than he’d thought and it was simply different ways of looking at the world?
He’d have to look at them some time later, when he could concentrate on that instead of on the joy of using Eat Death on an undead.
Serenity couldn’t take his attention off the undead goblin until it fell over and turned to dust. He found his friends standing around the pedestal, reading another plaque.
An achievement’s progress grants a reprieve; a solved puzzle provides the cage.
The plaque seemed to be saying why there wasn’t a real fight in the room. Serenity guessed it was probably because of killing the hidden boss on the 5th floor. Serenity supposed that was fair; undead wouldn’t have been a challenge, even if it hadn’t been a single undead in a cage.