Over the last year, Lowe had – by necessity – become used to experiencing the world through something of a haze. When you had become accustomed to having access to the wide range of Class Skills that had been his bread and butter throughout his career, the drop off in his sensory experience had been sizeable. Indeed, he had spent much of the last year feeling as if he’d taken the sort of blow to the head that Roll with the Punches couldn’t do very much about. Colours were dimmer. Smells less intense. Even something as mundane as working out his per-hour rate for the vanishingly small number of clients his abortive Private Investigator business had been able to muster had needed him to use paper and pen.

Then, the murder of Gianna d’Avec had taken place.

He had, in the early stages of that investigation, come across Mylaf and her talent for producing Legendary quality consumables at the drop of a hat. That the had agreed to move into his apartment had, at a stroke, removed any need to continue to conserve his mana, meaning he was able to go back to using Grid View in the casual, reckless way which had been his trademark. He’d known, intellectually, that he’d missed his perfect memory and the ability to revisit events in his mind at will, but until he’d had that talent back whenever he wanted, he had truly no conception of how crucial that Skill had been to his sense of self. And, then, of course, in short order after that, there had been his first Dungeon delve with Latham and the resetting of his Progress Points . . .

Even that massive boost, though - giving him the ‘pure’ Intelligence and Wisdom of someone double his Level - still hadn’t quite returned him to what he had been before. Nevertheless, those changes supplemented by Mylaf’s smoothies, cookies and afternoon snacks, the Lowe that had walked through the door of Soar Museum at the outset of this case was much closer to what he thought of as ‘normal’ than at any time since his Classtration. Sure, he might not have all the bells and whistles that had come with his original Class, but the core of him – the bit of him that was better at seeing to the heart of the matter than anyone else in Cuckoo House – felt like it was largely back in place.

And then he had activated the Essence of Silent Thought, and he realised how much he had been kidding himself

Whatever else his reward for burning alive the Corrupt Fenrir did, it gave him access to the sort of white-hot insight that he’d forgotten he had ever possessed. Half-formed, idle thoughts about the deaths of Delphina and Harker blazed into focus and either were discarded as pathetic, logical fallacies he was ashamed ever to have entertained or gained traction as new possibilities as potential theories formed and developed.

“What’s so funny?” Gral asked, glancing sidelong at Lowe as they moved their way down the latest – mercifully trap-free – corridor that Preece was leading them.

Lowe simply shook his head in response. He wasn’t sure he could have explained how he was feeling, even if the Essence had not temporarily removed his ability to speak. On the one hand, there was such joy in his brain ticking over in a way he had feared he would never experience again, but then there was also the agony of knowing that all this was just a buff that would shortly expire. One of the major downsides of suddenly being a certifiable genius again was that there was no place for comforting lies to hide. As soon as this reward ran out, he’d be back to being plain old Jana Lowe. Not the stupidest man in the world, but certainly not the sharpest. And, having had this taste again of who he used to be, he knew that was going to suck the big one.

No time for that now, though. Self-pity was a luxury for a future, more stupid Lowe. Bless him, and his dull conception of the world. Right now, though, the ‘him’ that might have moments left to figure out what had happened to the dead Museum employees, plot a way to keep them all alive in this newly formed Dungeon and then work out how to pull everything together into a nice bow for Pernille Fucking Staffen once they’d escaped, had other things to concern him.

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

Grid View sparked into life around him, overlaying the walls of the corridor down which they walked with flashing scenes of everything that had happened since he’d first been called into his boss’s office and told to get his arse down to this Museum. Kaleidoscopic images looped, flared and raced across his mind: millions of details that had not even registered to his consciousness settled and resolved into a coherent narrative he’d not even been aware was being told. Keywords of conversations were cross-checked, lies flagged, and undisputable facts pulled into columns of details that flowed and twisted around that central question: who – or what – was the murderer? Fucking hell, this was how he used to make sense of the world, wasn’t it? No, no more of that. Focus.

For some reason, the supercharged part of his mind kept playing and replaying that desperate, panicked hunt Lowe had gone through in the bowels of the museum. His brain kept showing him the liquified body of Harker, his subsequent, typically bad-tempered, conversation with Lant and then the start of his necrotic slime-fuelled hallucination. But as soon as past-Lowe started walking through the dingy corridors, it paused, reversed and started playing out his first sight of the body again . . .

Lowe leaned into the memory – if he could use as physical a verb as that to explain what he was doing - trying to understand what his mind wanted him to see. The taste of his own frustration was almost tangible – he knew what was important here, but he couldn’t quite seem to see it. It was quite a vibe to have your own psyche stick the dunce’s hat on you and push you to the corner . . .

Standing over Harker’s liquified remains.

Lant being his normal, joyous self.

Then Lowe slips out of Culloden’s office and, in moments, he was labouring under the effects of the necrotic slime and running scared beneath the museum.

Over. And Over again.

What was it that his Essence of Silent Thought enhanced mind was fixating on?

Harker.

Lant.

Lowe walking down the passageway.

The same scene played, then reversed and then played again to him. Lowe felt that if his subconscious mind could have reached out and slapped him, it would have done, so great was its irritation with his ongoing stupidity.

Harker.

Lane.

Lowe walking . . .

Then it hit him. He knew what his subconscious mind had noticed and his sudden excess of Intelligence had finally brought to the fore. And it was fucking irritating because this wasn’t a spectacular leap of intuition; it was something utterly banal that had been staring him in the face all along. Lowe had been labouring under the illusion that he had, somehow, managed to get a blob of necrotic slime on him. Maybe when examining Harker’s body? Or – and if he was honest, this was what he had assumed had happened – Lant had, for shits and giggles, spiked him on his way out of from examining the crime scene. Not enough to cause him real harm – he was a dick, not a psychopath - but enough to cause the nightmarish hallucinations that had followed.

But, no. Watching the scene play out over and over again, it was clear nothing like that had happened at all. Lowe had not accidentally transferred any slime off Harker’s body. Nor had Lant done anything vindictive to put a dent in Lowe’s day.

Whatever had happened to Lowe beneath the Museum on that day was clearly not a necrotic slime-induced nightmare.

Which immediately begged any number of wider questions. For example, if what Lowe had experienced had been ‘real’ and not a hallucination, what exactly had hunted him through the twists and turns of the exhibits? And what about all that bollocks with the candle and the writing? His excess of Intelligence surged to offer suggestions but then – abruptly – put all of its attention on a suddenly pretty important question. When exactly had the Dungeon core that Director Nuroon had retrieved from the outskirts of Soar become sentient? Was it earlier than they were all assuming?

That realisation sparked more supercharged neurons firing in Lowe’s mind, and he staggered against the wall. Karolen looked his way in alarm, but he shrugged off her concern. If his experiences beneath the Museum that day had actually happened – and it now seemed clear to him that it absolutely had - then a whole host of other dominoes could start to fall into place. And they did. One after another. So many aspects of the mystery that had baffled him suddenly all began to resolve into far greater clarity, causing him to reach some pretty important conclusions.

The sort of conclusion that made him suddenly not being able to speak to the rest of his party pretty fucking inconvenient . . .