Chapter 31: A Second Day of Challenges
After letting the chamber cool for about a half hour, they descended the original ladder back to the southern island. The white mage announced their plan.
“I really don’t think there’s an answer no matter which island we start on. If we need to cross every bridge, we just need to leave someone behind.”
“Are we allowed to do that?” asked Daphne.
“Think back to the, uh, instructions,” the fighter pointed out.
“Be gentle with the tentacle?”
“Not that!” the fighter admonished Daphne. “If I remember right, it said, ‘If you can’t trust each other, you’ll fail, forever.’ I think your encounter with a tentacle was just a coincidence…”
“So, we just need to trust each other to split up to different islands, huh?” Daphne looked around at the group, silently counting the seven members including herself. Then, she gazed at the three bridges available from this island. “Let’s stay together as long as possible, though.”
Nobody objected, so the group followed the same route as last time. They crossed the easternmost bridge, causing it to collapse. Then they crossed the bridge to the west, crossed south back to the southern island, and north again across the parallel bridge to the center island. The white mage was marking off bridges on his hand-drawn map as they collapsed.
“All right,” he said. “All that’s left are those two bridges to the northern island and a bridge connecting the northern island to the eastern island. Let’s split up on the next island." Everyone glanced at his map and nodded before they proceeded.
They crossed the westernmost bridge to the northern island, causing it to collapse. All that was left was to decide how to split up the party.
“Should we split up evenly?” Daphne proposed.
“Normally, I’d say yes, but not in this case,” Alenia answered. She gestured to her friend, the master of bladed weapons, who separated from the group. “I’m not letting you kids out of my sight until we reach the bottom.”
As the lone elf walked east towards the other bridge, the larger group waited. A minute later, everyone was in position. Daphne waved, and then they set out to cross the two bridges simultaneously. Matching paces, Daphne’s group returned to the center island just as Alenia’s friend reached the eastern island. Both bridges collapsed into the magma.
“So, this just isn’t possible if one person is here by themselves?” said the swordsman.
“Somehow, I doubt that,” Alenia answered him. “I bet there’s some way to get past here even if you’re alone. It just didn’t apply to us…”
“I was thinking the same thing,” the druid offered.
The ground started to shake.
“Not again!” yelled Daphne.
They scrambled to the ladder. At everyone else’s insistence, Daphne went up first, with Alenia taking up the rear. They could clearly see over at the adjacent island that their distant ally had safely ascended the ladder over there as well.
Shortly before Alenia reached the catwalk, the magma level rose again, submerging all of the islands. Once Alenia was safely up top, Daphne complained.
“We crossed all the bridges, though! Maybe we aren’t allowed to split up? Maybe we need to split up more and cross all the bridges in less time?”
“Wait, Daphne. Think back to the last puzzle,” said the white mage. “When we walked the final hallways, everything lit up red. At first, it looked like we failed, right?”
“You’re right…”
Everyone looked around for a sign that they had actually succeeded, but all they could see was magma throughout the entire chamber. Just as they were considering backtracking out of the chamber via the entrance they originally used at the catwalk’s level, they noticed the magma receding again. Even after it retreated into the rivers, the bridges had not returned.
“Wait, look there!” Daphne shouted as she pointed.
A lone bridge allowed passage from the northern island to another island further north. The new island included stairs down to the next floor.
“We did it! Let’s go down the ladder to the northern island and then cross together.”
“Daphne, are you forgetting something?”
“O—Oh yeah…” At Alenia’s prompting, she agreed to wait a while for things to cool down again.
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After cooling their heels for a while, they descended the northern ladder and proceeded further north to the island with stairs. As they descended, the stony surfaces transitioned from being warm and marred to cool and clean, likely due to the decreasing influence of magma.
They emerged in a small room with a pedestal. As usual, Daphne stepped over.
“You’ve reached the third floor. Search for the door. To floor four. There’s no gore and no shore. I promise no less and no more.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The bad news is, I finally got my A* search algorithm working recently. My puzzle design skills have improved tremendously. Sucks to be you.”
The first part of that message was no surprise, given all they’d encountered so far. The second part was quite strange.
“What do you think that means?” said the fighter.
“I have no idea…” Daphne admitted.
“It sounds to me,” the white mage offered, “like the dungeon master developed new tools for designing dungeon challenges.”
“But why didn’t he say all that before the last two puzzles?” The swordsman’s question was a reasonable one. Alenia stepped in.
“I believe it’s like the strange statements he’s made that sound like cultural references. He’s been throwing challenges at us that are classic, at least in his mind. What we’ll see on this floor is probably novel by comparison.”
“Th—This is going to be hard, isn’t it?”
“Daphne, let’s rest here.”
At Alenia’s prompting, the group took turns getting some sleep. Their dive into the dungeon was taking longer than they expected, and due to the large number of floors remaining, they likely wouldn’t be finished any time soon. This was now a multi-day affair.
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For the next half-day the group encountered puzzle after puzzle. In each case, the group could only proceed to the next area after it was solved. Common necessary actions included lifting up crates and moving them to alternate locations to stand on, sliding or rolling heavier crates around on the floor, and destroying crates. Some of the crates were indestructible. Others would continue sliding once they were pushed until they collided with something to block their path. Yet others magically disappeared if they were pushed too many times.
The solutions to most of the puzzles were fairly complicated, requiring dozens of actions. This must have been what the dungeon master meant when he bragged about his puzzle design skills. Still, all the puzzles were solvable, and the sizes of the puzzle areas were small enough that the possible actions were never unreasonably open-ended. The final puzzle was the strangest of all. Daphne stepped up to read the instructions.
“Defeat me in chess to proceed.”
“What’s chess?” said the swordsman.
“Read the instructions,” Alenia prompted.
Daphne proceeded to read the full page of instructions for exactly how to play chess. At the end, she read, “And don’t worry. I won’t use my search algorithm for this one. I’ll play fair and square.”
For the next several hours, they took turns playing chess on a stone structure with magically enchanted glass pieces representing units in an army. It was similar to other games, but not quite like anything they’d seen before, especially considering how the dungeon master’s pieces moved all on their own.
At first, they were defeated easily by the dungeon master’s play style, but as they started to mimic his opening moves and tactics, they fared better. By watching each other’s games, they improved their own skills as well.
“This game is pretty fun, actually.”
“Yeah, I want to play it more when we get back.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t lose focus,” Alenia chided them. “Worry about that later. We are in a dungeon right now.”
Once they had all gained some confidence playing chess, they realized there were no rules prohibiting them from working together. They started discussing each move as a group, avoiding blunders and more easily driving the dungeon master into a corner, despite him likely being able to eavesdrop on their discussion. Finally, he resigned and a door opened to the next stairway. Before they left, the white mage jotted down the starting position of all pieces on the chess board as well as the written rules…
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Daphne read the contents of a pedestal at the beginning of the fourth floor. “Inspect these items.” She blinked a few times. “That’s it?”
Just beyond the pedestal were several strange objects with writing on them. The first was a wooden stick labeled “A stick with a length of 1-meter.” The second was a wooden cube labeled “A box with a volume of one liter.” Its dimensions were each one tenth the length of the meter stick. Finally, a stone labeled “An object with a mass of 1 kilogram” sat on the floor next to the other two items.
As they finished inspecting the three objects, the words on the pedestal changed, so Daphne read them aloud. “You may use these objects if you wish. Proceed to the next area and answer the question correctly to continue.”
After handing out the objects randomly to three people, they walked down the short hallway into the next room. Finding another pedestal, Daphne read. “How much does Daphne weigh, in kilograms?” Daphne looked at the stone from earlier and glanced down at her own body. “I don’t know?”
“Daffy, just guess,” the fighter instructed.
“Oh, okay.” Unlike the other pedestals, this one included a simple console for entering answers. Since it was intuitive to use, Daphne easily inserted her guess of 40 kilograms. However, the pedestal flashed red and rejected her answer. “H—How am I supposed to know!?”
“Just keep trying.”
Daphne tried several more times, eventually guessing correctly. The instructions told her, and her alone, to stand on the other side of the room and wait. The fighter investigated the pedestal next, and it asked her for her own weight as well. She wasn’t terribly happy about the question, but she eventually succeeded just like Daphne. The white mage and swordsman soon followed.
Alenia reluctantly stepped up to the pedestal, and unsurprisingly, it requested her weight too. Her eyebrow twitched as she entered in a guess. After a few tries each, she and her friends succeeded. The door to the next room opened.
Before they proceeded, Daphne queried the group as to how the dungeon master knew their weights. Alenia sighed and pointed to the platform each of them stood on while they interacted with the pedestal.
“Daphne, we were clearly measured while we were there.”
“Oh…”
In the next chamber, they saw a tall column rising from the floor in the center. It nearly reached the high ceiling. The nearby pedestal asked the group how many meters tall the column was. Per the instructions, this time they had to guess correctly the first time or they’d have to go back and repeat the weight question.
“It’s too tall to measure…” said Daphne.
“There must be some way to figure out the height without climbing up the column,” the white mage explained, although he wasn’t immediately sure of how.
“Remember that triangle from the first puzzle?” Everyone looked at the swordsman, not sure how the triangle path they walked in that first puzzle was relevant, so he elaborated. “I was just thinking, can we make a triangle with the column as one side and then figure out the height that way?”
It took them a while, but they realized that they could form a 45 degree angle between the floor and the hypotenuse of a triangle, then measure the distance along the floor using the meter stick to indirectly determine the height of the column. Daphne was actually the one to realize that a random drawing on the wall included useful markings for measuring a 45 degree angle. Ultimately, they succeeded and proceeded to the next area.
“I present you a 3-liter bucket and a 5-liter bucket. Fill the 5-liter bucket with exactly 4 liters. Of blood.”
Just as Daphne finished reading, the floor rumbled. A large cage rose from the floor, locking into place with a boom. Inside the cage were over a dozen monsters, including dogs, cats, foxes, jackalopes, a dryad, and even a morphling… in Daphne’s form. Below the cage, a revetment with sufficient capacity to capture hundreds of liters of liquid drained to a small collecting pool adjacent to the two buckets.
The fighter shrieked, not because of what they had witnessed, but because the 1-liter cube she was carrying suddenly turned into powder and fell to the floor.