“Your arrows don’t agree with mine, Vince.”

“What are you talking about?”

Byron sighed and held out an arm in front of him. “Look, your arrow points this way, right?”

“Yeah…”

Byron walked backwards, pacing toward the corridor he’d come from while keeping his arm held stiffly. “Come look at my arrow. You really think it’s pointing the same way?”

I followed him, glancing from his arm to the marking scrawled on the wall. “Well it’s… I mean… Huh. Okay. I guess one of us is wrong. We were probably both in a hurry to get to each other.”

“Hmm.” Byron eyed me suspiciously.

First contestant has reached center!

I glared at the offending arrow. “Damn. I wonder how far out we are. Well, since we’ve got to find the way to the center, I guess I should jump up and check."

“Keep your feet on the floor. You know the aliens just sent that message to make us rush. You really want to get your head blown off? You’ve already been shot twice.”

“It might be okay if I was quick… we ought to be farther from the walls now, and I assume they’re firing from there. It hit me in the back when I was looking toward the center.”

“Hm. It might not be okay, in which case you’ll be dead and Granny Annie will be mad at me.”

“So you don’t want me to…?”

“No! Damnit, Vince, I thought you wanted to get home. What is with this deathwish of yours? Just hold on a minute.”

Byron set down his pack and fished around in it for a minute, bringing out a small rearview mirror that had probably been snapped out of a passenger car.

“You packed a mirror?”

“How do you think I started making markings to begin with?” Byron shot me an irritated look. “I stuck one in your bag too, and told you about it. Would have been nice to have full periscopes, but even a basic mirror is better than sticking your fucking head out to get a look at a dangerous area. At least I have you to help me this time… getting my first look took a long-ass time, trying to make a pole long enough to hold the mirror up out of alien bushes.”

Double-checking didn’t take long at all. Byron was tall and I wasn’t short; after attaching the mirror to the end of my spear, I was able to lift him high enough to see over the wall.

“So?” I called up. “Who was right?”

“Not you!” Byron said. “It’s that way! We’re about halfway there.”

I followed the direction he was pointing, which was indeed in the exact opposite direction of my most recent arrow. But… “That’s not the way your arrow was pointing either, was it?”

“I wasn’t as wrong as you!” Byron said.

“But you were still wrong,” I said.

Byron jumped down. “I guess we should double-check as we travel, since apparently neither of us can be trusted.” He glared at the wall. “I don’t understand. I was really careful, and my sense of direction is really good…”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

With our bearings regained, we started heading toward the center again. To my delight, we found several more of my markings, proving that I had been heading in the right direction. To my embarrassment, Byron also detected several more mistakes in my arrows. My trajectory had been more luck than skill.

“Meghan told me about the time you drove 30 minutes in the wrong direction down 72 before you realized you weren’t heading home, but I thought she was exaggerating. I’m sorry I doubted her.”

“Hey! I was sick that day.”

Byron made a little sling for the mirror so we could easily put it over the end of my spear, and we checked our heading regularly… a necessity, as even with the two of us, we still found ourselves heading off-track.

A few more alien announcements interrupted our journey, letting us know that four more people had reached the center. It was frustrating, not knowing how many “contestants” were in this maze. If there were twenty of us, the top 25% had already won. If there were 2,000, these numbers were a drop in the bucket.

Even knowing why the aliens were making these useless announcements, I still felt pressured to move quickly.

When we found the string monster I’d encountered before, Byron shot a small fireball into a thick clump of strands… whereupon the entire ropy mass came to life, flinging itself down the hallway toward us with frightening speed.

“Oh, hell no!” Byron yelled, raising both hands as he filled the area in front of us with a wall of flame.

The monster came straight through it, not noticeably harmed. Byron switched tactics, freezing death's own hairball solid just before it reached us.

After seeing it come through the flames intact, I didn't trust its apparent immobility. I struck it repeatedly with the haft of my spear, shattering it into hundreds of pieces. Only when no fragments larger than my hand remained did I relax.

Byron was breathing hard. “Damnit. I used too much energy. That was… harder than it should have been. Maybe it has cold resistance or something? I better take it easy for a bit while I recover. Didn’t want to let that thing reach us.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said, poking the monster debris with my toes. “Since the corpses don’t disappear here, I’m honestly wondering if it’s even dead.”

Byron shuddered. “Let’s not be here when it thaws.”

I considered sending off a message about the nasty rope-monster, but that would be my last message. There wasn’t much I could say anyway. We'd found one way to kill it, but not one that the others could replicate without Byron. No. That message would be pretty useless. Our friends were smart enough to approach an unknown monster with caution, and this thing hadn't been stealthy in the slightest.

In spite of his intention to take it easy, Bryon kept flashing quick Spotlights at the ceiling as we traveled. He said that if he kept the illumination brief, it didn’t tire him too much. More importantly, at least from my perspective, neither of us was willing to give up on finding our friends.

We encountered another new monster - a creature I can best describe as an animate red haystack, some kind of quadruped covered in a mound of fur that concealed all features. Nasty little claws that emerged to swipe at me whenever I got too close. I suspected the fur also acted as armor, but fortunately for me, I didn’t rely on slashing damage: my spear pierced its defenses easily. It took a number of stabs before I found a spot vital enough to bring it down. The monster got its claws into me the first time it stuck them out - I hadn’t expected the extra, hidden limbs - but the injuries were easy to heal. It didn’t manage to tag me again after I was wise to its tricks.

After the monster died, I took a few moments to look at the corpse, trying to lift the fur to get a better idea of its anatomy, when Byron let out a mighty “Yes!!”

I looked up to see a series of Force Shields dancing around his Spotlight.

“That’s got to be Davi!” I said. “It’s got to be!”

Byron and I tore through the hallways toward her location, stopping only when monsters forced us to, not bothering to mark our path on the walls. The only distraction we allowed ourselves was continued glances at the ceiling and the Marco Polo-esque game of Spotlight and Force Shield.

We had to fight another string monstrosity, but Byron flash-froze the monster before it could react, and I crashed through the barricade it presented, shattering the monster into tiny pieces.

When I rounded the next corner, there she was.

To my surprise, she wasn’t alone.

Over a dozen people were following Davi down the corridor.