The only way out of the dungeon—the Corridor—was to complete it. Whatever that entailed. Completing it, beating it, could mean anything. Reaching a certain point, completing a puzzle, beating a boss at the end. Worst case, it meant all of those things multiple times over. If we had to kill everything in this place we were definitely screwed.

I still didn’t get what Damien was thinking when he brought us here. Even if his gun hadn’t blown up, he’d only packed a few extra rounds of ammunition and I didn’t get the impression he’d meant to share his other weapons with us. With me. He’d only reached out to me. Was I supposed to have been his meat shield? Somehow, I didn’t think so. He’d wanted me here for something else. Something that probably had to do with beating the Corridor.

Whatever it was, he wasn’t saying.

With no other way out, we’d taken up a marching order with him in the lead and Emilio and I walking side by side a few yards behind him. Emilio had the zombie-killer bat at the ready and I felt like a bad movie villain with both pocket knives out, one in each hand. If it weren’t for the shape of the skulls on the handle pieces of the butterfly knife the thing would have wanted to slide right out of my hand. No contouring, no guard, no point. Okay, it had a point A very sharp one. There just wasn’t a point for something like this to exist. The butterfly knife made about as much sense as this Corridor place.

I couldn’t get over the fact that I was armed with dual pocket knives. It was ridiculous. Damien had taken up the flashlight, a good heavy Maglite. Dual purpose club and illumination. If he wasn’t taking the lead, I might have pushed harder to hold onto that myself. Well, that and the +2 my character sheet said I had for using Knives. That was so weird.

It didn’t seem like a very high number, but I could already tell I was way better with them as a weapon than I would have been with anything else. Especially once I factored in my Melee +0. I wasn’t sure how this system worked, assuming that the numbers actually did mean something, but sacrificing the clear advantage I apparently had with these specific weapons didn’t seem like a good idea.

My back and arm throbbed as we made our way through the stone corridor where they’d been struck by the clubs. I would definitely be feeling those hits for the next few days. I’d actually thought about taking the dead goblins’ weapons. On closer inspection though, they’d all turned out to be crap. Those clubs were shoddily carved sticks and that gladius had looked like it might break after one good hit.

Thinking back on it made me hope that my own knives would hold up. Another reason pocket knives are less than ideal weapons: moving parts. The more moving parts something has, the more chances there are for it to break. If my blades came loose, I was screwed. Assuming Damien didn’t screw us over any minute.

I glared at him as he periodically paused to tag the wall with some spray paint to mark our passing and constantly swept the flashlight’s beam over the floors and walls as we went, looking for what, I had no idea. He’d taken point for two reasons. The first, and most obvious, was that he actually had a clue what was going on and might have an idea how to beat the Corridor. He said he did. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any choice but to believe him and he wasn’t sharing that secret.

That was the second reason for Damien taking the lead. Neither Emilio nor I trusted him at our backs. Would you? He’d lured us here under presumably false pretenses—pretenses I was trying very hard not to think about—and shoved us headlong into a life-or-death struggle with no warning and no way to defend ourselves. Him stabbing us in the back was all but guaranteed.

The third, and admittedly most cool reason, was that he claimed that his Class was Rogue. As in the RPG class. He definitely had some of that down. I always thought of leather armored acrobats wielding short swords when I thought of rogues. Maybe he was just low level and he got the leather later? Weird thought. Hopefully his class actually would let him find and disable traps before they sprang on us. That was why we were keeping a little distance as we made turn after turn down the seemingly endless stone passageways.

“Why don’t we have classes?” I asked him. I’d seen two different backgrounds listed on my character sheet—I had no idea why we had two when most games out there allowed for only one—no class though.

“You’ve got to earn your class with Attainments,” he said, sounding way too happy to know something that we didn’t. “What’s available depends on your Backgrounds and everything you earn. You can upgrade your class later, but it’s better to get several Attainments and start with something strong.”

I hated to divert my attention, but I pulled out my phone and looked over my character sheet. Some MMORPGs gave things like achievements. They didn’t necessarily mean anything, although they did occasionally offer rewards. Were Attainments something similar? How exactly did they impact the kind of Class you could get? I didn’t see any way to track experience points on the app. What kind of system was this?

Another thought occurred to me. Were there mage classes? On the rare instances one of my friends ran a game and I got to play as a character, I almost never played a spellcaster. Now though? There was real magic here. I had no idea how any of it worked, but still. Magic! And maybe, just maybe, there was an opportunity here to learn how to wield it.

Damien stopped. “Hold up.”

We stopped and I tucked my phone away.

He knelt down on the ground and ran his hand over the stone. “Right here…see how the floor changes?”

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He swept the flashlight’s beam across the ground. I didn’t notice anything.

“It’s a complete line,” Emilio said. He started forward only to stop when Damien held up a hand.

“A line?” I asked.

“Yeah, look at the floor,” he said. “The stonework.”

I looked down and examined the layout of the stone. Nothing looked odd about it to me. I could spot a game trail or tracks easily enough, but a floor was just a floor to my eye. My incomprehension must have showed on my face because Emilio knelt down and drew his finger along the seam between the stones.

“Look how they interchange. The rows alternate so that this seam is always at the halfway point. “Over there, the pattern breaks. It’s all a single straight line across.”

“And you think that means a trap?” I asked.

Damien reached into a pocket of his long coat, drew out a large, multicolored rubber ball, the kind you can get out of those old vending machines they sometimes have at grocery stores, and hurled it at the floor in front of him.

The floor swung downward, parting right at the line he and Emilio had been pointing out to me. This wasn’t a small section either. It went almost completely from wall to wall, leaving the barest ridge on either side, and left a hole at least twelve feet across.

“Holy crap,” I muttered, then I heard the chittering.

I wished I’d stayed back almost as soon as I’d joined Damien at the edge to see what was making the sound. Below the giant trapdoor in the floor was a spiked pit. A wicked spiked pit. Every few feet had a wicked, jagged blade sticking up, the steel pitted with rust from dry blood. Bones littered the pit and as Damien swept his flashlight’s beam across it, I saw that the bones weren’t alone.

I spotted the gleaming eyes first. Then the long bodies, covered in matted fur and ending with naked, wormlike tails. Rats. Rats the size of rottweilers with heads longer than footballs. Their lean bodies were emaciated and bony beneath their horrible fur and their eyes, bigger than my fist, gleamed with mad hunger.

Two of the giant rodents went up on their hind legs and chittered angrily up at us, revealing long, pointed teeth as they rung their bald and disturbingly human hands over each other. If Damien hadn’t spotted the trap, we’d have dropped down, been impaled, and then eaten alive by the giant rats.

The trapdoor slowly swung back up, concealing the spiked trap and giant rats from view.

“You know,” Damien said conversationally. “Whenever anyone asked about R.O.U.S.’s before, I always said, ‘I don’t think they exist.’”

It took me a moment to get what he was talking about. “The Princess Bride? Really?”

He shrugged. “It’s a classic,” he said, then pitched his voice. “Twuuh wuuv…”

I rolled my eyes and stepped back from the trap. Movement back down the way we’d come caught my attention.

Emilio was already standing at the ready, bat held in front of him. “You saw that too?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “More goblins?”

“Definitely,” Damien said and we both looked back at him. “They’ve been following us. Waiting for us to screw up. You didn’t think the monsters were just going to stay in their little rooms and wait for us to come to them, did you?”

Yeah, I kind of had.

“Goblins behind us. Death trap before us.” Emilio said. “How do we get around?”

“The same way you get through high school,” I replied, standing up straight and glaring down the corridor at the turn I’d seen the goblins disappear down. “Act like you’ve got your crap together and push on.”

Damien laughed. “I’ll take point.”

Sure enough, acting like we weren’t scared of the goblins worked. Sort of. They continued to follow us after we’d doubled back and taken another turn. No attack came. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. One of them had taken a sharp rock to one of Damien’s spray-painted markers and scraped a dead stick figure on its side, little exes over its angular head. Classy.

I took out my phone again. Those giant rodents, the goblins that were following us…we were doing a good job of keeping everything at bay for now, but another fight was inevitable. I really, really wanted the Chef’s Palate Ability. If it worked outside of the Corridor, then I’d have a leg up on everyone else when I finally got to culinary school. If I made it out of the Corridor. That was a big if.

I selected Hunter’s Mercy and saw the Ability appear on my character sheet.

I didn’t feel any different. Maybe I wouldn’t feel a difference until I got into a fight? I tucked away my phone and realized that beside me, Emilio was tapping at his own screen. I could have kicked myself. If he was on his phone, then I shouldn’t have been on mine. At least one of us needed to be aware of our surroundings and Damien.

“You select your Background Ability?” I asked Emilio after following Damien down several more turns and coming across no further traps.

He said something I didn’t recognize. For a brief moment, I thought it was Spanish. I wasn’t the least bit fluent. I knew a spattering of words, all of which had a very different sound than whatever it was Emilio had just said. The vowels and accent were all wrong.

“Huh?”

“I know Japanese,” he said.

“Yeah, you taught yourself,” I said. “You even went on that exchange program last summer.”

“I could speak some Japanese,” he conceded. “I chose Cultural Immersion and now I’m fluent. I didn’t understand half of the words I just used a few hours ago.”

That…he learned an entire language just by selecting an Ability?

“I thought my character sheet was kind of racist at first,” he said. “My backgrounds are Artist and Pilgrim. Pilgrim. I thought that it had to do with my parents being immigrants, but I’m first generation American, so I don’t think that’s it. A lot of my Tertiary Attributes all have to do with Japanese things.”

I had no idea what to make of that. That Ability sounded weirder than anything I’d had. Emilio was right too, it struck me as kind of racist. What would a Pilgrim from Europe with a fascination with America get with Cultural Immersion? An overbearing sense of entitlement and increased appetite? Or would have learned something like a dead Native American language? There had to be something in this app that would make all of these Abilities make sense.

“We’ll have to sit down and compare notes when we get out of here,” I said.

“Agreed,” Emilio said. “And put together a game plan for finding Seth.”

My heart seized for a moment. It was exactly what I’d been trying not to think about.

“Damien said he was lost in here, didn’t he?” Emilio said. “You think he’s telling the truth?”

“I think he implied Seth is lost in here,” I said carefully. “Maybe he is. Maybe it’s a case of ‘Sorry, your brother is in a different castle.’ Either way, I trust Damien about as far as I can throw him. Apparently, I’ve got a plus zero to Strength, so I’m guessing that’s not very far.”

Emilio chuckled. “Same. What’s that about?”

“Who knows?” I replied.

We rounded another corner and for the first time, came across an obvious interruption in the stone wall.

Damien grinned at us as he stood before an old-fashioned wooden door with an iron handle. “Ready to find out what’s behind door number one?”