Looking at Max and Emma, I could see spiderwebs of connections in my mind. And those strands connected to everything in the room. Lines went from both Max and Emma to the drawings on the wall. They had been and would be spending a lot of time trying to understand them. The chair in the room was connected to Emma, who moved it into this room. Webs connected both of them to me, each other, and others trailing off through the walls and ceiling.

The number of connections was overwhelming. Worse, though, was their erratic behavior. Max and Emma weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary but weren’t following the strands they ought to be. And that created a phantom noise in my head, discordant and grating. If they would simply color inside the lines and do what the web of connections told them, everything would be in harmony.

None of this was tangible. It wasn’t an overlay in my vision like the menus. It was just a sense, a feeling, something in my head, neurons firing off in ways they never had. It was making my world swoon and spin.

I staggered.

Max leaped forward and grabbed me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I… I…” I stammered. I tried taking a step, and the world and all the webs spun.

“Come on, let's get you out of here,” Max said as he guided me back to the first room.

I stumbled and leaned heavily into his arms. The world around me continued to spin with the weight of all those connections, and everything faded to black.

When I woke, someone had tucked a blanket around me. I was still down in the dungeon and could hear a lot of commotion from upstairs. I pushed myself and listened. It didn’t have the frantic urgency of fighting. It sounded like a lot of people just moving around.

Footsteps came bounding down the stairs, and Max entered. When he saw me sitting up, he asked, “You okay?”

“I guess so,” I said. My neck and back ached from sleeping on a stone floor, something I’d never done before in my life.

“We’re heading out soon,” Max said. The raiders are eager to confront the goblin king and return home. Slade seemed too eager.”

“He’s sober enough to agree?” I asked, “He seemed pretty smashed last night.”

“Apparently, drinking is his current major,” Max said, helping me up to my feet. “He talks about his house parties all the time.”

I stretched and rotated my head around, trying to work out the kinks in my neck. “Yeah, I try to tune his stories out as much as possible.”

“You know,” Max said, “he’s not a bad guy. Loud, but still a good guy.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “all the blah blah blah just gets on my nerves. There are times I just want quiet. I’d kill to have a moment to read a book.”

It was interesting that Max would stick up for Slade. They were polar opposites. Where Slade was big, brash, and verbose, Max was unobtrusive, quick in both movement and wit, and very much to the point when talking. I could only chalk it up to some sort of brotherhood of men type thing, and for a moment, wished there were some equal sisterhood type thing.

“Hey!” I asked Max as he bent to gather my blanket, “Do you know where Emma is?”

“Probably still looking at the wall.”

“She’s been there all night?” I said, “Does that seem peculiar to you?”

“No, I was with her most of it. I wanted to catalog the writing.”

“But at some point, you left?” I said, “Decided to go get some sleep. Did Emma?”

“I didn’t see her come up the stairs.” He replied.

“Max, this seems like it is becoming an obsession with her.”

“She may have a point,” he said.

“How do you figure?”

“Maybe Kane lied to us,” Max said as the blanket in his hands faded into his inventory. “We’re not here to find bugs. They may not even know how this all works. We may be in here to solve another problem altogether, and the writing on the wall might be a part of it.”

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I had a horrible thought, “You think they may not know how to get us out?”

“That has occurred to me,” Max said. “But Kane and the military aren’t really giving us a lot of info. If this was technology they found or were given, wouldn’t it make more sense to tell the people you are sending into it?”

“Not necessarily.” I said, “If it was a psychological experiment to study and test the reactions of small groups in unknown high-stress situations.”

“Like explorers going to Mars,” Max said. He seemed to consider that as we walked to the door of the second room.

Emma sat on a chair bent over the table. Under her head was her beige sweater, fluffed up like a pillow. The wall of letters loomed over her. Where Max seemed to think it was perfectly acceptable for her to become obsessed with solving whatever riddle those symbols hid, I had a tickling feeling that something sinister lurked beneath the surface. Emma, the quiet one in our group, was the first one breaking. Why would they even choose to send her in here?

Max stood at the door as I approached Emma. I put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a little shake, “Emma, we’re moving out soon.”

She roused, looked up at me, and asked, “Where?”

“Hunting the goblin king,” I said.

“Oh, right. Slade’s quest,” she said as she twisted her head with loud popping noises.

She looked up at the symbols on the wall, stood, and whispered something to them that I missed. My internal alarm levels shot through the roof. And now she was talking to the wall. This doesn’t get any weirder, I thought.

Max and she exchanged good mornings, and we left the dungeon without too many other words. The main floor was mostly empty. A few raider stragglers were gathering up bedrolls.

Outside, I saw Slade already mounted and chatting with some of the raiders who were also on horseback. He was making gestures with his hands and pointing to the south. He was committed to finding the goblin king… and what? Making a treaty? Didn’t catch me as very Slade-like. Plotting to slaughter him and his goblin court? That seemed more likely. As a matter of fact, I had a very bad feeling we were riding into a hellacious fight.

I asked Emma how she was feeling and if she was okay and got some non-committal responses as Max went to get our mounts. She watched Slade the same way she’d been staring at that wall the night before, and I started to wonder if obsession was something she was no stranger to, out in the real world.

Slade whistled and waved an arm over his head as we settled onto our horses.

“What?” I shot, dripping with sarcasm, to the other two, “He thinks he’s Genghis Khan now?”

Emma shot me a sour look, and Max said nothing back. Knowing comments like this usually got me kicked from friend groups, I decided to keep my mouth shut in hopes it would prevent any further feet from getting stuck in it.

“Onward, ho!” Slade cried out. Our troupe of twenty-plus raiders trotted out of the fort. Slade veered around the edge of the palisade and led the line of riders south. There was no road. We were headed off the map into the here-be-monsters' territory.

South we went. Max, Emma, and myself were near the front of the column of riders. Slade was at the very front, with the raider leaders surrounding him. It didn’t take long, not even a half-hour, before we started seeing goblin scouts on their swiftscales shadowing us in the distance.

The raiders told Slade that the goblin scouts would almost certainly send outrunners to warn the main goblin horde that a small party was riding toward them. His solution? Urge us on faster southward.

We sped up to a canter. It was faster than a trot but not quite full-out galloping. What surprised me was that it went on for a while. I was struggling to stay on my horse, Princess. I wanted to ask any of the raiders with more experience riding, how long the horse could go on like this.

Within twenty minutes of our canter, we had to slow. The raiders spotted goblin scouts trying to set up an ambush ahead of us. We veered around it and continued south.

The terrain was getting rougher and rockier, and the foothills were getting steeper. I figured it was only a matter of time before we’d have no route to the south except through a valley between two mountainous crags. A valley would be the perfect place for goblins to ambush us with no way to maneuver.

We continued dodging goblin war parties for another hour, and then it happened: our options ran out, and the column of riders was funneled between two steep foothills. The raiders seemed aware that this wasn’t the safest course of action and began drawing out weapons.

I saw a raider with a bow out. It hadn’t occurred to me to try firing one from horseback. That hadn’t ever been an option in any of the games I played. Then again, in most MMOs there was no fighting from horseback. In fact, in all the games I’d played, getting hit while on a mount immediately caused you to get thrown off it.

Max had his katana out, sheathed, and in his hand. Emma had a staff out, and I wondered briefly where she had gotten it. All the other raiders were armed with weapons, ready to go. Even Slade had his ridiculously large battle axe out, and it looked like he was all too eager to use it.

It was insanely difficult to ride and hold onto the bow. I knew that if I wanted to fire it, I’d have to slow the horse down considerably so I could take a hand off the reins. Trying to fire, even at a much slower pace, would be almost impossible.

A horn blast came from behind us. The goblins were herding us south into a valley between two steep foothills. Slade, either oblivious or very confident in our ability to charge through anything the goblins threw at us, urged his horse forward into a full-out gallup. The raiders around him sped up to follow suit. As did the whole column, nobody wanted to be left behind.

As we charged up the ravine, I spotted the goblins ahead waiting for us. A hasty ambush had been positioned at the far end of the ravine we were charging up. Spears and swords glinted in the late afternoon sun. Slade continued the charge.

I had to admit, if I wasn’t so terrified about dying, or even how much it would hurt falling off a charging horse, it was, if nothing else, pretty damn exciting.

It was the first cavalry charge I’d ever been in.