Cores forgotten for the moment, Dominic padded quickly to the wall, eyeing the colours that flickered up on it intermittently. At first he speculated they were being projected onto the wall but closer inspection proved that not to be the case. It was more like the colours were emerging from inside the wall and then sinking back within it, faster or slower depending on the instance.
There didn’t seem to be any sort of pattern to the colours, not as far as he could tell after a short while of staring at them. One colour would flash up and then stay illuminated for a little, before it would fade while another colour would flash up and then be gone. It wasn’t always the same colour, and the different colours didn’t seem to go in any particular order.
‘Do you see anything useful, Leo?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘That indentation,’ Leo started slowly, consideringly. ‘We received a golden disc in the chest upstairs which we haven’t yet been able to find a place for. Could this be it?’
It was a good idea, Dominic realised as he compared the size of the indentation to the disc they had received.
‘Maybe. Let’s try it,’ he replied, pulling the item out.
The amesheks watched curiously as he carefully manoeuvred the disc so that it slipped into the indentation. As Leo had suggested it might be, it was a perfect fit.
For a split second, Dominic feared that it might actually be a trap. He flinched as voices came into his mind.
‘It’s not doing anything.’
‘Maybe you haven’t pressed it correctly.’
‘You’re saying you could do any better?’
‘Maybe. Move over and let me try.’
‘Stop arguing. Maybe these lines mean something.’
Dominic grinned mentally in excitement and relief, wishing for once that his mouth was able to show his expression.
‘Sekhmet. Fang. Lionel. You’re here!’
The voices fell silent for a long moment.
‘Dominic!’ Sekhmet exclaimed with equal joy. Lionel and Fang didn’t use his name, but instead sent a scent memory of him into the Pride chat with an emotion attached. Lionel’s was a polite greeting with a hint of relief; Fang’s was almost the same, but Dominic sensed a touch of dismay to it instead of relief. Apparently not everyone was as happy to see him as Sekhmet was.
‘The males better not have made a move on the female!’ Leo grumbled in the back of Dominic’s mind.
‘We can deal with that when we’re actually in the same room,’ Dominic told him. Surely that would happen in the next room – they just needed to get through to it.
While he was talking with Leo privately, the amesheks also greeted the other members of their little pride and received back similarly polite if not effusive greetings. To Dominic’s surprise, the warmest exchange was between Lionel and Procyon. He hadn’t realised that they’d developed a sort of friendship but the tone of their greetings couldn’t be anything else.
‘Alright everyone,’ Dominic called them back to order. ‘Sekhmet, please tell me quickly what happened to your group after we were separated.’
‘We stepped through the door which opened after the piece of stone fell and separated us,’ Sekhmet started, her mental tone brisk and her sentences surprisingly grammatical. Dominic had suspected for a while that she was capable of full sentences, but just didn’t bother most of the time. Maybe she’d decided to bother now for some reason. ‘We had to make our way through a series of paths, some of which ended without warning. While we were doing this, we were attacked frequently by canines and vermin.’
She sent images to illustrate her words and Dominic saw dusty-coloured corridors hiding dusty-coloured trodils and meerkats in side alcoves. As she’d said, there were also dead ends and paths that doubled back on themselves unexpectedly. His guess was that it was a maze.
‘When we reached the end of the paths, we had to fight a large canine surrounded by several large vermin. The fight was difficult, but thanks to Lionel’s healing, we were all able to survive it.’ She didn’t say it, but something in her tone told Dominic that it might have been closer than they would have liked. Considering Dominic’s own experience with trodils in the previous version of the dungeon, if this had been another miniboss, designed to be even more difficult than the monitor miniboss they’d faced upstairs, he could understand. It had probably had Rage, and maybe some other annoying Abilities too.
Dominic wondered briefly why they hadn’t had to face a miniboss, but perhaps the dungeon had decided that the environmental challenges of their room were sufficiently difficult. Or perhaps the dungeon couldn’t have more than two minibosses at F-level – it had only had the single trodil mini-boss last time.
Still, Dominic wasn’t sure he preferred what he and the amesheks had had to get through. Sure, a miniboss crocodile in the water environment would have been an absolute nightmare, but if it had been a warthog miniboss, he’d have been happy with that.
On the other hand, if their positions had been switched and Sekhmet had ended up facing the crocodiles, he doubted they’d have got through the room intact even without a miniboss. It could even have been a whole party wipe – having Sonic Attack had really been important for the winning strategy.
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‘Once we killed the large canine, the next entrance opened. We found a set of stairs like we were walking down when we were separated. This led us down to this room.’
‘But are you all fine?’ Dominic checked anxiously.
‘We are,’ Sekhmet confirmed. ‘We have had time to heal and we have increased in power.’
Looking at the Pride status, Dominic was able to see that was certainly true. When they had separated, Sekhmet had been at level 19, Fang at level 16, with Lionel at level 15. Of his own mini-group, Procyon and Sirius had been at level 21. Each of them had managed to advance, Procyon and Sirius still tying at level 23, Sekhmet at level 21, Fang at level 19 and Lionel at 18.
While two levels wasn’t a huge step, the fact that they were all rapidly approaching the twenties – or were already there – and had gained two levels in a matter of hours was still impressive. At least, it was by non-dungeon standards from Dominic’s experience. Procyon and Sirius must have levelled when he wasn’t watching since he only remembered seeing Procyon blur once. While he was looking at the Pride status information, he checked on Jenkins. She was still listed which was a relief, though the absence of more death notifications had been a relieving indication.
Realising he hadn’t checked his own progress for a while, he quickly did so.
Level: Evolved Beast Level 26 Tier 2 (Path of Evolution)
Progress to Evolution: 939/901 PP level up
‘Excellent!’ he hissed to Leo, pleasure in his voice. ‘What shall we enhance this time?’ Then he checked himself. ‘Wait, let’s figure out what we’re dealing with first. Then think about what to level up.’ It definitely showed how much the Prey Point requirements for each level started to increase in the mid-twenties – the amesheks had quickly caught up on him because where they managed to go up two levels, he was only able to go up one.
At least he was rapidly closing in on Nyx’s level – she was still at level 30.
‘What can you see on your side of things?’ he asked Sekhmet. ‘You talked about lines of some sort. We don’t have anything like that.’
‘Yes. We have lines that form different shapes. We are able to press the different shapes, but nothing seems to happen. There are five buttons which are different colours. Again, nothing seems to happen when we press them. Other than that, there is a round hole in the wall above the lines, a little smaller than my paw.’
‘The hole is probably for the disc which is allowing us to talk – I doubt it’s part of the puzzle. On our side we have colours that flash up in unpredictable patterns,’ Dominic told her, ‘though they haven’t been while we’ve been talking.’ Then something occurred to him. ‘Wait, have you been pressing any of the buttons while we’ve been talking?’
‘No,’
‘Then press a button, please.’ Nothing happened for a long moment. ‘Did you press it?’
‘Yes.’
Well that didn’t work, then. Dominic considered it. Colours had been flashing up and his gut told him that it was because of what those on the other side had been doing. But what?
‘Just…do what you were doing before, but stop as soon as I tell you to. Try to remember your actions so we can repeat them.’
Sekhmet agreed and the lions on the other side of the wall started pressing buttons. As soon as he saw a colour appear, he exclaimed in the Pride chat. It took a few tries to find out what was happening, but they managed to conclude that the coloured buttons and the non-coloured ones worked together.
Sekhmet sent Dominic an image in the Pride chat of what they could see. There weren’t any creatures in the picture, not like on the first relief they had encountered. This picture was instead made up of lots of different shapes – geometric shapes like squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, and parallelograms. This was one set of buttons. The other set were the ones with colours on. To have a colour flash up for Dominic’s side, one button from each set had to be pressed.
‘Alright, this time, keep pressing the same button from the picture, but try the buttons from the set outside the picture one at a time. Don’t press the next button until I say,’ Dominic instructed.
The lions on the other side obliged. A square lit up in a light green. It stayed there for a few seconds, then faded away.
‘Next colour, please.’ The square lit up again, this time a light blue. Again, it remained coloured for a few seconds, then faded away too.
They repeated it with each of the buttons and Dominic made an interesting discovery. There was one colour which didn’t fade away at all. In this case it was a shade of dark blue. If the light green button was pressed, for example, the light green would replace the dark blue and then would fade as before. But if the dark blue was pressed then it would stay in place seemingly indefinitely. On Sekhmet’s side, apparently that button remained slightly indented too, like it was half-depressed.
‘I think we have a clue,’ Dominic told the rest of the Pride. ‘This should be easy enough.’
*****
By the time they succeeded in solving the puzzle, Dominic was ready to tear his mane out. He thoroughly regretted ever thinking it would be easy. While it wasn’t actually that difficult when they got the idea, it was so time-consuming.
It was just as well that the other lions were separated from him by a wall because he’d have been tempted to attack them a few times – particularly Fang when he accidentally pressed the wrong buttons at the wrong time and delayed them even longer. Then again, maybe a rough play-fight would have actually helped reduce the level of frustration.
Whatever awaited them in the next room, he seriously hoped it would be a fight – he had a lot of irritation to work out. At least the amesheks had realised that they would only get in the way and had backed off. They’d made themselves useful by digging out the Cores from all the crocodile carcasses and then decided to take a nap after Procyon tucked a couple into his bracelet.
After his mess-up, it seemed like Fang had done the same on the other side. Lionel was actually surprisingly helpful – he was quiet but he followed directions nicely and seemed to work well enough with Sekhmet.
A design had started showing itself in the set of geometric shapes. It looked something like a key, if a key looked more like a mace than the traditional toothed shape. The whole picture was in shades of blue and green, the key depicted in light green, its surroundings in darker green and blue, and the border in light blue.
When they got the final piece in place, the whole thing suddenly glowed. The sound of grinding stone woke the amesheks and they moved to join Dominic in looking at the archway turning into a proper door. Like the entrance to the room, the door slid down into the floor. Unlike the entrance, though, it was quicker and once it was fully buried, it stopped moving and stayed down. Fortunately, it seemed like they wouldn’t risk being trapped in the room.
The next room was shadowy and took Dominic’s eyes a couple of moments to adjust, especially after staring at the glowing design. As soon as he was able to make out what was waiting for him, his stomach dropped to his feet.
‘I know I wanted a fight, but not this!’