“Feeling stronger yet?” my travelling companion asked. “By all accounts, it’s supposed to happen soon after rebirth. Well, that’s not what the accounts say, per se, but with the number of tales of Ancients springing to life and smiting whole armies in the same day, I’d have thought you’d be more… impressive.”

We’d been walking for hours, thankfully with no more death shafts. What we had encountered were branching passages. After so long on an unbroken straight stretch, at first it had been a relief to see them. As more appeared, however, the relief seemed to have wandered off into one of the now-frequent offshoots and gotten lost. We’d taken a few of those, too, Ipoh erasing over our footprints each time. I thought we were still headed approximately the same way overall, but without landmarks, it was hard to tell if we were subtly being turned around.

“I think those accounts were greatly exaggerated,” I said. I hadn’t told Ipoh about the Guide. He hadn’t mentioned it, and it seemed like the sort of thing the Servant wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to give advice on.

We still hadn’t found a path leading up. With the hole behind us, the most pressing tension had eased away, but new ones were clamouring to take its place. Where to find water. Food. How long we could last before sleeping. Not long, if my body’s protests were anything to go by.

The environment had also started to change. Till now, the passages had been dry, dark and unembellished, acting as vehicles for transport only, with no sign of the wonders Ipoh kept referencing. I’d heard a few of his stories now. Beetles bigger than people that lay jewels the size of a human head. Cities cut off for so long no one knew if anyone had survived. Zones plagued by deadly electrical waves or gravity wells. I wasn’t sure if he was making it up, but he hadn’t stopped talking. It helped take my mind off the likelier concerns, and I suspected that had been his plan.

Now, however, I had something other than rocks, rusted metal and terrifying abysses to look at.

And that thing was cubes. Metal ones. The first ones were very small, perhaps the size of a fingernail, and I took them for flakes of rusted debris. After a while, however, my brain pieced together a pattern was occurring and took proper notice. I stopped to pick one up while Ipoh was in the middle of a story about long, legless creatures covered in hands and rolled it between my fingers. It was fairly heavy for its size, and the first metal structure not rusted, though the thin dust coating told me it had been here at least a while. Other than that, it was just a hunk of rock.

I tossed it aside while Ipoh finished describing the hand snakes. It wasn’t the last I saw of them. By the time the story was done, we were seeing them regularly. Bigger now, too – up to the size of a fist. Some lay gathering dust, but others were embedded into the walls or ground as if having grown there, jutting out in perfect symmetry with the angle of the floor.

A fork in the road appeared, and Ipoh’s lights conducted their usual scout. In unspoken agreement, the pair of us turned down the fork with the greater number of cubes. It was something different, the cubes seemed harmless, and we’d been getting nowhere sticking to the barren paths.

I stubbed my toe on an embedded cube, tripped, and smoothly saved the landing, gritting my teeth as the extremity ached with pain. Different was not without its drawbacks.

The cubes continued to increase in size, protruding into the passages. They crowded the walls, shafting us closer to the centre, and I began to wonder if we’d made a mistake. At this rate, we’d have to start climbing over them. Worse, they might block off the passage, leading us into another dead end.

“Aha!” Ipoh exclaimed. He pointed down the tunnel, where two of his lights had gone on ahead. It took a moment, especially with all the cubes in the way, but I was able to make out the shift in the way the light fell up ahead. The walls and ceiling had fallen away, opening up into a larger chamber than the passages we’d become accustomed to.

“Do you think there’ll be stairs in there?” I asked wearily.

“One way to find out.”

We did have to clamber over a few of the larger cubes to make it in. The chamber turned out to be a large cavern, ceilings higher than the space was wide. And it was wide; Ipoh’s lights not nearly enough to illuminate it all at once, even when he sent each of them off in opposite directions. In the centre of the space lay a mound of cubes piled haphazardly around and on top of one enormous central cube dwarfing all the others around it. The cube throne, I dubbed it internally, although the name had more to do with how it made me feel rather than any actual seat-like resemblance.

The whole thing was cold, dry and lifeless, much like everything else we’d run into.

“Start checking the walls for exits,” Ipoh advised. “I’ll send one of my lights to follow you. I want a closer look at that.” He gestured at the central mountain.

“What is it?”

“Not normal. Which means it might be very valuable or very dangerous. Either way, Red will want to know about it.”

I crouched and ran a palm over the cube I was standing on. “Solid metal is valuable, you said. If so, this must be a treasure trove.”

“Well, that’s where the level of danger becomes applicable.”

I stared at the cube with a cool expression. It did nothing. “How –”

“Leave that to me. You focus on exits.”

Disappointed, I made a noncommittal noise and set off towards the wall on the left, intending to make a circuit of the cavern. The light followed me, bobbing at my back like an obedient mascot.

With all the cubes throwing up shadows around me, it was hard to tell darkness from genuine gaps. It brought back the fear a little, and I grew quickly tired of jumping at shadows with right angles. It didn’t help that some of the nooks were real – shallow depressions where time or cubes had worn away at the chamber. The closer I came to the cube mountain at the far side, the worse they were underfoot as well. My balance upgrade from the Guide helped; each time I tripped, my body instinctively righted itself and avoided a fall. Soon I was trotting between cubes with newfound confidence; an emotion I hadn’t experienced till now in my short and troubled existence.

No sign of a real exit, though. I didn’t understand the logic of the people who had built this place. Why so empty and full of dead ends? Why was there no way to the surface? They’d have had to get here somehow.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Unless they hadn’t, and had started here, building a shelter from the inside out and searching for a way out just like us.

I made a noise of frustration in the back of my throat. Again, my lack of knowledge thwarted my attempts at reasoning.

I hit the back wall and veered away from the corner riddled with cubes. Next up. If the creators of this place had had any design sense, the most likely place for an exit would be directly behind Cube Mountain, opposite the entrance.

So of course, there wasn’t one.

I took the opportunity for a quick break, wishing I had food to eat. My mouth was dry, my feet sore and aching, and I was fairly sure I was tired enough to sleep on a cube if I had to. My eyelids drooped just thinking about it. Around me, layers of angular shadows overlapped in the presence of Ipoh’s light, moving eerily every time the illumination shifted with my movements.

And then they moved more suddenly. My eyes snapped open from where they’d almost shut, and I realised I’d almost fallen asleep.

Ipoh’s light was moving away, in towards the centre. I scrambled to my feet, afraid to lose it, pushed by the primal fear of being left alone in the dark. A sharp edge scraped my calf as I misjudged a cube, and I forced myself to ignore the pain.

I heard it not long after. Noises, from the entrance we’d come in by. Voices.

The light ducked behind a cube twice as high as I was tall, and my vision went dark. My mind went blank and I looked around wildly, finding only darkness, and reached out till my hands brushed flat metal.

I was blind, in an enormous chamber full of obstacles and sharp edges, with pursuit closing in and no idea how to find my way out. My heart thudded wildly in my chest, and it felt hard to pull air into my lungs.

Something fell on my shoulder, and I lashed out on reflex. My elbow connected with something soft. It made a muffled ‘umph’. I recognised it.

“It’s me,” declared Ipoh, his voice barely above a whisper. A very dim light flared in front of my face, cupped by the Servant’s palms. “We stay low, out of sight. Did you find a route out?”

“No,” I whispered back. Panic rose in my chest. “They’re going to find us, aren’t they?”

We hadn’t stopped, and Blue’s scouts had still caught up. Despite the trick with the footprints and the hole in the path, they hadn’t been deterred. How could they track us so effectively? How could we hope to compete with that?

--Upgrade available for selection.-- the Guide announced. --Will you accept?--

I mentally slammed the affirmative.

“Calm,” Ipoh soothed me, talking over the mental conversation he was oblivious to. “We’re not out of the game yet.” He waved me forward in the direction of the entrance, crouching low behind the stacks of cubes. “Here’s what we’ll do. They’ll send the bulk of their group in. Everyone, if we’re lucky. They’re expecting us to run, not set up an ambush.” He tilted his head to one side, listening. “I hear four, maybe five people. We move towards them, hide. Then, when they’re far enough in, we make a break for the exit. I can handle up to one or two stragglers if it comes to it.”

I stared at the Servant, his wrinkled face uplit by the dim glow in his palms. He didn’t look like he could take on anyone, much less a group of fugitive hunters.

He saw me watching and grinned. “I won’t claim to be infallible – you saw me in Blue’s prison – but it doesn’t mean I don’t have a few tricks. And if you have to, you can still use a promise. After we try my plan.”

The Guide had been waiting patiently for Ipoh to finish. --Your first option is Sleep Resistance,-- it resumed when he was done. --This upgrade will allow you to function longer without rest, and improve performance when fatigued.--

It was exactly what I’d needed some minutes ago. Even now, jolted awake at the threat of capture, I was still victim to the effects of lethargy. My dry eyes stung, my feet burned, and my movements had become slower and less precise. My mind felt sluggish, struggling to focus as well as it had. If all the upgrade did in the short term was bring me back to my starting baseline, it would immediately raise my chances of survival.

Long-term, it would mean I could put more distance between my pursuers and I, as they stopped to rest and I kept going. But that didn’t play well with others. I wasn’t travelling alone; I was travelling with Ipoh, my anchor to the world I lacked knowledge about. Without him I might well have succumbed to fear and making poor decisions. He would still need rest, and I didn’t plan on leaving him behind.

--You may alternatively select Cartography. This upgrade will improve retention and measurement in relation to wayfinding.--

Useful for not getting turned around in circles, and for recording discoveries like the metal scrap. Its usefulness now seemed less relevant, unless it could somehow wayfind me into the exit I’d failed to discover. Maybe it could.

Ipoh crept forward, beckoning me with him. We kept low to the ground, darting between cubes, and my blood wouldn’t stop pumping. We drew into view of the entrance, which was no longer black, but dim and lightening further. Moments later, lights danced at the entrance – brighter than ours had been – and our pursuit stepped into view.

--Finally, you may select Nutrition. This upgrade will improve your ability to last without nutrients, slowing your metabolism.--

It had given me this option before. I had spent most of my life worrying about starvation, and as priorities went it didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Not for the first time, I wondered if I should have accepted my fate and stayed in the prison. The way we were going, I’d only end up in one again anyway.

None of it helped against a group of five presumably experienced hunters. Why couldn’t I have been offered something to serve me better in a fight? Why wait until an emergency, if the upgrades weren’t even going to help?

--At your current stage of development,-- the Guide answered me, --this fight would not end favourably, even with an upgrade. Upgrades have been determined based on your current objectives and likelihood of usefulness. In other words, what you need, not what you want. Please make a selection.--

The first of the hunters stepped into view at the edge of the cavern. In one hand she carried a long stick with cold bright light spilling from its tip. Sharp, serrated metal covered the rest of its length in varying hooks and barbs; ten different weapons rolled into one, with only the handgrips spared. Given the apparent ease with which she carried it, I was sure she knew how to use each one.

The man who emerged next was equipped with the same. Both wore colourful tunics, trousers and boots of tougher make than I’d seen in the city. Armour, not clothes, though it didn’t make them any less stylised and ornamented. Society took colours seriously. My own clothes were positively drab in comparison.

The third person to emerge was the prisoner from the cell, the sleeper. The bindings encircling his limbs had gone. Next to me, Ipoh took in a sharp draw of breath. “Avoid that one at all costs,” he whispered. “He comes near you, run.”

If anything, the sleeper looked more terrified than before. His clothes, while touched with colour, were little more than rags. I wasn’t sure how he was connected to the massive blades that had obliterated half of the prison.

--Please make a selection,-- the Guide repeated in my head. The three options reappeared distractingly before me, and I jabbed at Cartography mainly to make them go away. If we made it out of here, something to help orient us both towards food and shelter seemed like the best option. The others were only delaying the inevitable, and only for me. At least this way, we’d both get the benefits.

I still had one upgrade banked. But the Guide wasn’t sharing.

Something shifted in my perception of the cavern. I knew approximately how long and wide it was and the depth of the ceilings. I understood I’d covered about forty percent of the lower walls during my earlier check, and I’d neglected to check higher up at all.

Wait, higher up?

In the brighter light of the hunters’ staves, I raised my eyes to the walls above their heads.

There, mockingly, halfway to the roof, sat a clear opening.