The statue at the back of this hidden chamber drew my attention, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was designed that way. There had to be something in this room that the statue was trying to redirect our attention away from.

“Have you two checked the room for traps and other mechanisms?” I asked.

Spook shook her head. “I figured hiding the room behind an elevator was the gimmick, but you might be right. There could be something else here.”

“Can you smell anything strange, Kaiser?”

Dogs had a sense of smell forty times stronger than that of a human and Kaiser always followed his nose with gusto.

Kaiser: Wait, yes. There’s a different smell here. Like some kind of pungent herb, but there’s nothing growing in this chamber.

“That means there’s something hidden in this chamber too,” Spook said. “Where’s the smell coming from?”

Kaiser sniffed the air, then started an investigatory trek around the perimeter of the room. While he searched, I approached the strange statue and really inspected it for the first time. It was like looking at a naked mannequin in a shopping centre. It was all smooth lines and nondescript features. Even the face was blank, with slightly recessed stone where the eyes should be and a smooth surface in place of a mouth. It stood on two very human legs, with both arms held out in front as though it was waiting for something to be placed there.

“Is that meant to be a person?” I asked.

Spook shrugged. “Not sure. I thought it might be one of the Architects Altessa talked about. This was here before the empire came, even though the empire has co-opted it for their contest.”

“Are we sure about that? If they could dematerialise us and store us for ten months before reconstituting us here, what’s to stop them from fabricating dungeons like they fabricate monsters?”

“Hmm,” Spook said. “Yeah, I don’t know. Anyway, the reason we needed you to come down here is the statue’s arms. They move independently, but I think we need to open the arms at the same time to complete this puzzle. You see the glyphs on the walls?”

I hadn’t noticed them before due to the low lighting, but now that Spook had pointed them out it was clear they had to be a clue. Square bricks showed various images on the walls. They were arranged in a pattern that stretched around the whole circumference of the room – one large brick in the centre, with other smaller bricks encircling it.

The larger brick in the centre of each repeating pattern showed a crude image of the statue, but each brick had the arms pointing in different directions. One showed the figure with its arms opened with, and the next showed the same figure with one arm up and one arm down, then one arm held to the hips and one arm pointing to the side. Each of these large bricks was surrounded by sixteen small bricks, which displayed random images of open and closed doorways, stairways, swords, a swirl of mist, and skulls. There was no discernible pattern that was immediately apparent.

“The problem is if you move one arm without the other, bad guys fall from the ceiling,” Spook added. “Every time you mess it up, a random number of bad guys fall down. Last time we had to take on three at a time, and I doubt Kaiser and I could manage more than that, so we told you to come here.”

“You’re too small to move both arms at once anyway, so the gestures you can reproduce are few and far between. I have a feeling the stick figures relate to whatever happens when you move the statute. What did you do when the first bad guy fell?”

“Well, I think we just need to open the arms, because see above this guy with the open arms it has an open door? If we open the arms up, we can open the door. Like, the statue is seeing the open door.”

“Okay, but can you tell me what you did to first spawn the enemies?”

Spook frowned. I got the distinct impression that she didn’t like her theories being questioned. “I lifted the left arm up, and two enemies fell from the ceiling. A bloatmage and a rotknight.”

I walked around the room almost mirroring Kaiser’s investigation into that herbal smell and looked for glyphs that showed the statue with the left arm raised and the right arm bent in front of the statue with its hand outstretched.

Each of these glyphs had a small open doorway above the statue’s head and a skull directly above the raised left arm. There was also a sword immediately to the right of the other arm in the neutral position.

“I think you activated this,” I said and motioned for Spook to look. “See the skull and the sword? I think the bloatmage is the skull, and the sword is the rotknight. You’ve unknowingly activated this. We just need to find which gesture is going to open the doorway. We need to find one that has both arms pointing at open doors.”

Spook’s eyes widened and a blush rose on her cheeks. “Right, okay, I’ll start searching.” She mumbled under her breath as she walked away. I heard words like idiot, stupid, and loser repeated during her mutterings.

That’s when Kaiser barked from behind us. He’d come to a stop almost halfway down the opposite wall.

Kaiser: I found the source of the smell. It’s coming from behind here. Behind the wall.

“Do you smell any bad guys back there?”

Kaiser barked twice. No.

“So there’s something behind that wall. I think we’d be best placed to try to find a solution to the puzzle rather than force our way in. People who run games like this don’t like it when you break the rules. Besides, I don’t have any anima left in my tank to form an anima grenade. We need to find what gesture will open a doorway for us. Spread out and let’s find it.”

My mana had regenerated about halfway, which was nice to see. However I was a bit concerned at the regeneration rate. I’d need to be wary of my resource consumption when use mana abilities during combat.

We all looked around the room for a gesture permutation where both hands pointed towards the open door symbols, and we found it eventually. This one required us to raise the right arm at an upward diagonal angle and have the left arm pointing downward and to the side, in the complete opposite direction. I lifted the right arm up. Spook aimed the left arm down, as she’d never be able to raise an arm all the way up because of her height.

Something clicked and whirred after we held the arms in that position for a few seconds. The wall that Kaiser had found a few minutes before slid into the floor, leaving a dark and open doorway for us to enter. There was no light beyond the threshold, and I held my breath as I waited for something to rush out at us.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Nothing came, so I pulled a torch from one of the sconces in this room to bring into the new chamber. I motioned for Spook and Kaiser to wait in the puzzle room as I investigated.

Light bloomed around me, dancing in shades of red and green as the light of the flame mingled with the green glow of my Balaran Knight armour. A chest sat at the far end of the darkened corridor, and it definitely felt like a trap. A foolhardy person might rush ahead thinking they’ve solved a riddle, but it felt way too much like bait.

All I could use at that moment were my healing spells and my rancid claws. I had enough mana but all the skills I had were useless in this situation, so I decided to improvise.

I threw the torch down the hall towards the chest. It landed unceremoniously on the stone floor and again nothing came lurching out of the darkness towards us. Could it really be this simple?

It was day one of the contest, so maybe they were keeping the more treacherous traps for the next few days. This whole situation felt like when I’d played Dungeons & Dragons when I was a younger man. Our whole group was so terrified of springing an unseen trap that it took us half an hour to open a doorknob that had absolutely nothing special about it. I swallowed nervously before heading toward the chest. I waited for something to spring out at me, but nothing ever came. I picked the still-lit torch up again and continued.

The chest lid opened easily and a loot table appeared showing the contents. It contained three pieces of gear: Butcher’s Gloves, a Spiked Collar, and Mist Ghost Pantaloons. The gloves gave a bonus yield to butchering animals for their meat, the spiked collar reflected a percentage of damage back at attackers, and the pants increased evasiveness, with a 5% chance to fade into mist for 10 seconds when receiving damage. It certainly felt like these pieces of gear were tailor made for us.

The equipment was accompanied by an assortment of crafting materials like twine, supports, adhesive, and honed edges. Three ration packs waited for us too, which was a good thing. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was until I thought about it.

On previous EDGE Force missions, their augment did something to our body’s normal functions. We didn’t get hungry or thirsty in the same way as we normally would, and being tired was a thing of the past. It didn’t seem like those regular old human trappings were disabled in this competition, and I hadn’t eaten a damn thing since we’d awoken.

“Is it safe?” Spook asked.

“Sure is. There’s some gear for us here,” I said as I handed the pantaloons to Spook.

She took them with a grimace. “Oh no. Are those puffy pants? And they’re made of parachute silk? What am I, a dumb ancient 90s rapper?”

“Look at the stats. They’re going to help you stay alive, and even negate some damage, so it doesn’t matter what they look like.”

Spook sighed, but she equipped them. “Ugh, I look like a reject background dancer from a Vanilla Ice film clip.”

“How do you even know who Vanilla Ice is?”

“He’s a meme.”

“Ah, right.”

Kaiser took the collar and equipped it immediately. On our last mission, he’d accessed a skill that permanently reflected a percentage of incoming damage back at attackers, so this was familiar territory.

“Maybe we’ll find a way to get your reflected damage to stack,” I suggested.

Kaiser: Yes, and if we can find some health regeneration armour, I can negate the incoming damage that way.

That comment took me by surprise. I’d known Kaiser was smart, sure, but he understood these skill mechanics and mathematics? It was no wonder he’d gotten frustrated at having to use pre-recorded buttons to say stilted phrases when his mind worked at the same speed as ours.

I equipped the Butcher’s Gloves. They still came with stat-boosting values along with the extra butchering efficiency.

Kaiser: Where are the herbs? I can still smell them.

I looked around. There was nothing on the walls, and nothing hanging from the ceiling.

“I don’t know, buddy. I didn’t see any,” I said.

Kaiser sniffed the chest, then stood up and peered inside. He whined, barked twice for no, then circled around the chest. He growled from behind the chest.

Kaiser: It’s behind here! Whatever it is, it’s so much stronger here. I think I can-

Kaiser’s nails scraped along the stone floor as he tried to dig into the wall. I almost told him to stop when I noticed the wall behind the chest begin to shimmer. Kaiser stood on his back legs and scratched at the wall, which suddenly gave way under his touch.

Kaiser: What the?

The wall behind the chest was illusory. It had just enough substance to make us think it wasn’t there but gave way at the slightest effort. The chamber beyond was wider than the treasure corridor, and the mist that covered the ground rushed in from our hallway.

“Whoa, these guys have obviously played From Software games,” Spook said, shaking her head. “Hidden passages underneath elevators, and illusory walls behind treasure chests? That doesn’t bode well for how difficult this dungeon’s boss is going to be, though.”

“What’s the software from?” I asked, still focused on the mist. It behaved strangely, like it was liquid rather than a gas, and drawn into the next room by something.

Spook laughed. “No, it’s the name of a game development company. They’re called From Software. They make all the Soulsborne games, which are notoriously difficult, and the game devs enjoy messing with players by faking out their usual expectations.”

I shook my head, still not really getting it. Spook’s exasperated sigh made me feel very old.

“You’ve played games, right?” Spook asked.

“Played them? I used to help design them. I just never really had time to play any modern stuff since my kids were born.”

“Dark Souls? Bloodborne? Sekiro? Elden Ring? Do any of these games ring a bell?”

“Yeah, my son Seth wouldn’t shut up about Elden Ring right before we got disintegrated for this whole thing. I never played it myself. Too busy figuring out these new powers.” I flexed my glowing claws for effect.

“Well it’s incredibly difficult. All From Software’s games are, but they’re fair once you understand the language of their design. And I think I’m starting to understand what’s happening here.” Spook grinned a manic smile, and I delighted in seeing her open up. This was clearly something she was both passionate and knowledgeable about. “This isn’t just a contest. It’s an evaluation. The Alarendei Empire are assessing our puzzle-solving ability as well as our combat prowess.”

“I doubt that’s all they’re assessing,” I said.

Kaiser: If they’re figuring us out already, then they’ve got another six days to counter whatever weaknesses they find.

I grinned. “That works both ways, buddy. We’ve got six days to figure their weakness out too.”

“If they’re using games from our world as a template for their contest, then I’ve got some ideas on how we can test out the boundaries of their knowledge,” Spook said.

“But first, we need to clear this dungeon. What’s going on with this mist?”

It rushed into the room from our hallway. I stepped across the threshold into the next chamber, using my glowing armour and the torch as light sources.

The source of the herbal smell Kaiser mentioned earlier became obvious. A cluster of prickly-leafed bushes sat in the centre of the room, growing through deep brown soil in the middle of shattered stones. I could only see the soil because the bushes were sucking the mist in like a barfly with a pint of lager at ten in the morning.

The name of the dungeon flashed back into my head. The Mistbegotten Crypt. What properties did these plants have that gave them the power to absorb the mist? And was there anything we could do to take on those same properties?

I approached the bushes and shot a look back at Spook.

“You should be safe. They’ve faked you out with a dummy treasure, which was locked behind a puzzle. They wouldn’t pull a triple fake-out, surely,” Spook said, but the last word wavered.

I reached out and tore one of the leaves free, but it crumbled to dust in my hand. A deep rumbling spread out under my feet as the stones began to shift and rise from the ground. A hand made of roots, moss and fungi slammed into the cobblestones as an entity hauled itself out of the floor. The bushes rose on the back of something enormous, something that had a bear skull sitting between massive shoulders. The empty eye sockets burned with pale green anima.

I’d seen something very similar back in Romania, and I knew what this was before the nameplate showed up. I swallowed nervously as my fears materialised.

This boss monster’s name was Mistbegotten Leshy.

“I guess I was wrong,” Spook said from beside me in a small voice. “There’s another thing From Software does really well, and that’s hiding deadly bosses where you least expect them.”