Wyatt stood in the circular room, thinking for many minutes about the images he had been shown.

This world rewards brutality with levels and experience. Even gods are not immune to the corrupting effects of such a system, it would seem.

The more he thought about it, however, the more his interpretation seemed wrong somehow, and he turned and studied the now stilled shapes along the wall. At the beginning of the mural was what seemed like a nine-on-one battle, but at some point, it turned into a free for all; each of the gods battling one another with a savagery Wyatt had previously imagined below a god.

The image was also rather vague on the results of the fighting, only showing that the prayers of the mortal races were left unanswered. This meant that either the gods had all died, or whoever was left had turned their backs on their charges. Either that, or they were being punished by the system somehow.

The thought that this seemingly sentient system could contain the power of gods made Wyatt shudder, but he disregarded it immediately. Thinking back on his class selection, each choice was combat based, omitting anything that could be considered a civilized profession. Whatever this system was, it wanted conflict, and these gods would never be punished for epitomizing this.

Wyatt put his musings on the subject aside. He wanted answers as to why he was in this world, but he doubted these gods, now long gone, would help him find answers.

He readied himself before descending the stairs to the third floor of the dungeon.

The first room he entered was empty of any threats, but already he could tell this floor would be different from the other two. The walls and ceiling seemed dilapidated, like Wyatt was walking through ancient dungeons. The floor of the dungeon was filled with a thin layer of white smoke, making it difficult to see where he was stepping.

Wyatt tried blowing the smoke away with a burst of air magic, but it was a waste of time. The smoke remained undisturbed, and as he moved about in the smoke, he realized his legs didn’t create any noticeable currents, either.

An illusion, maybe? I’ll have to be careful here; I don’t want to step on anything dangerous.

There were three exits in the room, not counting the stairs. This was the first time since entering the dungeon that Wyatt was forced to pick a direction to continue. The doorways each led to a different hallway, each devoid of the standard door that the previous rooms all had.

Wyatt chose a path at random and moved slowly, feeling out every step with his toes before placing his foot. The next room was nearly identical to the first, save for the lack of stairs. Not wanting to get lost, Wyatt continued moving in a straight line. After several such rooms, He got a bad feeling in his stomach, and turned back to head towards the room with the stairs.

When Wyatt walked back into what should have been the first room on the floor, the feeling worsened. The stairs were gone.

Realizing that something was off with this floor, Wyatt turned his focus on studying the room itself. Given the radical change in the condition of the dungeon, he assumed the walls were also under the effect of an illusion. When he pressed his hand against the wall, however, he felt only the cold surface of the brick. He ran his hand over a crack, and his finger caught as it should, disproving his theory.

Taking a step back, Wyatt crouched low to the floor. He could barely see the ground through the smoke, and even then, only when he focused. In several spots, he thought he could see lines drawn on the ground, but when he tried looking closer, the smoke seemed to thicken.

That’s interesting.

Taking out his quill and paper, he began trying to fill in the lines by studying them from the corner of his vision. Drawing something using his peripherals was as difficult as Wyatt expected it to be, and the most he could come up with were two concentric circles encompassing most of the room, with other lines or shapes in the middle.

Wyatt turned his attention back to the wall. There must be something here that will help me. The system wouldn’t just trap me in a room without any way to escape. Would it?

For what felt like hours, the young man examined every inch of the walls. He scanned brick by brick, pushing on each of them in the vague hope that one would be a secret button. He tried putting his head under the smoke to examine the floor closely. He even walked through the doorways several times, trying to find some semblance of a pattern to their layout. Each time he seemed to enter the same room, arriving through the same door he left from, as if he was turning around the moment he left.

That’s strange. I’m not even entering through the opposite door.

Wyatt tried backing out of the door, keeping his eye on a unique spot on the opposite wall. The strange sensation made him queasy, and it felt almost as if he was entering a room that completely mirrored the room he had just left. Wyatt thought for long minutes about what this might mean, and how it might help him solve the mystery he found himself in, but he could draw no more conclusions from his observations, and soon became increasingly angry at the situation.

Finally, in a fit of frustration, Wyatt used Rock Spike to try and rip one of the bricks from the wall. It flew across the room and impacted the opposite wall with a crash that echoed around the empty room. Behind the brick, he saw only solid earth.

Behind him, however, Wyatt saw something odd. Where the projectile had impacted the wall, a crack had formed. It spread out like a web from the center, blending in with the cracks that existed previously, except for one small detail. When it reached the doorway, the crack seemed to stop, rather than extend around the corner like the others.

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

Wyatt experimented with the phenomenon. He sent another spike at the wall, targeting a spot directly adjacent to the doorway. Sure enough, when the cracks formed in the wall, they stopped at the corner. He repeated the test at the other doors, finding all four shared the same strange quality. When he walked through one of the doors, the room he entered had the same cracks in the walls that he made, proving once and for all that he was stuck in one single room.

Something is up with these doors, I’m sure of it.

Wyatt focused his attention on the empty air beneath the arch of the doorway. It seemed normal, and through it he could see another room. He picked up a rock and threw it into one of the doors, regretting it instantly as it hit him in the face mere moments later.

Wyatt tried to analyze the door, but the skill gave him nothing. Trying something new, Wyatt gathered his mana within him before trying to use analyze again, feeling for any mana that might lay before him. His mana drained slowly as he attempted to divine the nature of the magic in front of him.

Finally, his efforts were rewarded. He could feel the magic in the air before him, a similar feeling to the magic within him. It had the twisting feeling of spatial magic, and a prompt appeared before him.

You have gained a new ability:

Analyze Mana

Ability:

Analyze Mana

Cost:

50 MP

Skill:

Analyze

Description:

Reaching out with the mana within yourself, you are able to detect the subtle variations in magic around you. A higher Analyze skill increases effectiveness.

Your skill has leveled up:

Analyze – Level 5

Smiling, Wyatt used his new skill to determine the nature of the smoke. What he got back was odd; he could tell there was mana in use here, but at the same time it looked like there wasn’t any mana there at all.

Maybe this is illusion magic, and that’s how illusion magic appears.

With no experience in illusions, Wyatt filed the image away in his mind. He turned his attention back to the door, trying to come up with a way through the magic. After several seconds, an idea came to him, one so simple he had to resist hitting himself on the head as it came to him.

Wyatt used Shift and moved forward by only a couple feet. Looking around the new room, he was relieved to see the set of stairs directly ahead of him.

Wyatt turned to examine the doorway he had just teleported past, and saw a rune set in the stone above the door. In the center, he could see what he recognized as the rune for space, denoting spatial magic was in use. There were also two other runes Wyatt did not know, which formed a small triangle with the first. Two circles surrounded the triangle formation, similar to the circles on the floor beneath the smoke. Wyatt took out a paper and copied the runes down, hoping to study them later.

Wyatt put the paper back into his storage and turned his attention back to the dungeon. He was in the room he started in. Looking at the stairs made him feel better about his situation, and he vowed to be more careful as he continued.

That will likely not be the last trap I encounter. I need to be smarter.

Wyatt chose one of the remaining two doors to walk through, moving even slower than his previously plodding pace. He examined the walls and floor, even glancing up at the ceiling as often as he could. The hallway was relatively short, taking only a minute to walk through at a normal pace, but Wyatt was now overly cautious and took roughly ten minutes. It was a fair tradeoff, he thought, as he had only one life and all the time in the world.

The next room was the most unique Wyatt had experienced thus far. Like the two other trial rooms with pits, this room held only two ledges on either side of a long room. This time, however, the endless pit was replaced with water, filling the entirety of the room. The water was clear, but the mage could only see into it by a few feet. Not knowing how deep the water went, but knowing full well the lever was within it, Wyatt began his examination of the peculiar challenge.

First, Wyatt used his newfound Analyze Mana ability, reaching out with his own mana to discover what, if any, magic was in play in the water. To his surprise, the water was just that, and no traces of trickery seemed to be contained within.

Next, he produced a rock with his earth magic roughly the size of his palm and inscribed the rune for light onto it. The rock lit up, and he threw it into the water and watched it drop. It took the rock only a few seconds to reach the bottom, and there beside it was the lever Wyatt was looking for. He knew this lever would lower a bridge no doubt hidden in the ceiling, as well as open the door on the opposite side of the room.

He sat cross legged and thought through the possible scenarios with this challenge. Obviously, this wasn’t just a test of his ability to swim, and something would be waiting for him if he were to jump in. Maybe the lever would also activate a trap, opening more compartments to allow the room to fill completely. Maybe there was a magical trap, whose mana was undetectable until triggered. Wyatt wasn’t able to examine the rune trap before it was triggered and had no way of knowing if he would be able to detect the mana within before it went off.

Accessing the lever should be fairly simple, Wyatt surmised. He was never the strongest swimmer, but he knew enough to be able to swim down to the bottom and back without much difficulty. He could also make it easier by using his air magic to form a small bubble of breathable air around him to increase his chances of success. Additionally, he should be able to unleash a blast of air to shoot him to the surface quickly if anything happened.

With his plan created, Wyatt stood up, and channeled his earth magic, pumping a considerable amount of MP into the ground. The stone responded to his command, and within moments the lever was above the water atop a pillar of earth.

Wyatt, now sweating from the exertion, took a moment to catch his breath before jumping easily to the lever. Examining the lever with his mana, he felt a faint trace of magic at the base but could not determine the source or type. Assuming this was the magic that was needed to activate the bridge, Wyatt shrugged and pulled the lever. Sure enough, the bridge hidden in the ceiling began to drop, and the door on the opposite side of the room began to open.

At the same time, Wyatt could feel something moving underwater. Looking closely, he could see dark shapes in the water, swimming around the pillar he stood upon. The human panicked briefly and readied his magic, but it seemed whatever creatures were in the water were unable to leave it, and he stood unmolested on his island of safety. Amused, Wyatt jumped back to his ledge and watched the bridge descend, lowering the pillar with the lever slightly when he realized the bridge was coming down atop it.

“Not today, nerds,” Wyatt said to the shapes in the water, and walked across the bridge to the exit.