I didn’t get the chance to respond, as he jumped straight ahead, just after a bolt passed in front of him. A second later and he moved forward again. I sighed, looking at the old man making his way across the walkway.

“Fuck…”

Woosh then plink said the bolt as it flew past me and into the wall opposite. I moved into its path immediately after, then waited for the next trap to fire before leaping ahead.

Aside from the Latin chanting in the background, the cacophony of the traps firing, and the many sounds of crashing bolts, you could also hear Adam and I’s laborious breathing and exhausted grunts as we moved across the room. If it wasn’t for the life-threatening aspect of the room, it would’ve been a great work out, since the whole body was involved: abs, knees, and arms for balance; feet, shoulders, and thighs for the strenuous traversal; and neck for constantly keeping track of the wall-mounted traps.

As I thought about such pointless things, I suddenly mistimed my rhythm and only barely avoided certain death as I flung out my blade to slap away the incoming bolt.

“Focus!” I heard Father Adam yell. He’d already made it to the exit.

“Shut up,” I mumbled, then leapt forward again.

We were both breathing quickly when I caught up to him, and we spent a few minutes just letting our stamina replenish before pushing through the gate, next to which was a lever to disable the traps. Unlike the prison chamber, this door wasn’t a fake tombstone, but rather a door made of simple iron bars like that of the prison cell. Similarly, it wasn’t locked and pushed open with an ear-splitting screech.

The tunnel we went through next was slightly wider than the previous one and it curved around to our left, leading to another unlocked gate and a long room.

“Another trap?” I asked the Father.

“This one is trickier,” he replied.

I’ll take that as a yes then…

In order to explain the mechanism to me, he got down on his knees just before where the room started and put his hands on the floor. As his weight on the engraved stone increased, it started pivoting towards us, until eventually it was flipped ninety degrees and led to a drop into more spikes below.

“It would’ve been way easier to just go through the castle,” I commented.

“Focus,” he replied.

Since when was he this annoying?

After the large three-by-three-metre floor tile had returned to its normal state, the Father looked ready to go. I wasn’t as confident as him though, and had to inspect the walls first to ensure there weren’t more crossbow traps next to the many torches that lined it.

“You have to do it,” he then said.

“You’re shitting me…”

“There’s another switch at the other end which disables the trap.”

“Again, I have to ask why the hell we went in from this way…”

“Focus.”

I sighed heavily, exhaling out my nose. Then I took a running start before sprinting across the first platform.

The tile only got to a twenty-degree tilt before I leapt off it and onto the next. As I landed on the second one however, it started tilting to the left. I sputtered a long string of profanities as I scrambled to the right to balance it out, and ended up in a ‘forest-shitter’ pose as I stood with my arms out and legs spread wide to keep the platform from tilting to either side. Slowly, I got my feet closer to the centre of the tile and then I tried walking across it.

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Though it felt as uncertain as walking across a rope with no railing for support, I managed to reach the third platform. As I carefully put my weight on it, the second platform started tilting again so I jumped off it. Unlike the first two, this tile didn’t move at all, which I concluded to mean that it would tilt forward as soon as I moved past its centre-point.

I took a deep breath, then ran from the edge to the centre, before leaping off and landing on the fourth tile without ever triggering the third. The fourth was like the second and I quickly found myself back in that awkward legs-spread-wide pose.

“Be careful!” the Father yelled belatedly.

“Yeah, no shit…” I grumbled to myself.

“The last platform—” he started, but I was already moving.

As I made to run across the fifth and final tile, it just simply fell away. I only managed to hang on to it by grasping the delicate edges of the surface engraving with the very tips of my fingers. Somehow, I was able to hold my entire bodyweight by just my fingertips, as though I was some seasoned free-climber.

Though it was gruelling, I was able to lift myself up the three-metre-long tile little-by-little. I wasn’t sure where I got the strength from, though the idea of being impaled ass-first as well as the copious amounts of adrenaline surging through me were both strong contenders.

I crawled up and onto the ledge just before the gate and fell to my back, my chest heaving as I drew in the stale air of the chamber. My whole body was burning from exhaustion, but I knew that there’d be another room.

There’s always three…

After giving myself ten minutes to come down from the adrenaline high and exhaustion, I got to my feet and pulled the heavy lever next to the gate. Several clicks sounded throughout the chamber, no doubt safety-pins getting into place under the platforms to prevent them from tilting. The fifth tile still remained down however, so, after Father Adam walked cautiously towards me, I had to catch him when he leapt from the fourth tile and over the fifth.

We moved through another bending tunnel, this one going to the right, and were greeted with another long hallway with a pit full of spikes. Spaced randomly throughout the floor were tall pillars. They were situated in such a way that you’d have to jump to get to the next. Further, each platform was barely half-a-metre in diameter, making landing on them a precarious ordeal.

“This is way too excessive for a single prisoner,” I told him.

“And yet he escaped,” the Priest countered.

I thought to the broken wall of the cell. “Your security is only as strong as its weakest link.”

While taking in this third challenge, I considered the path I wanted to take.

“You think you can do this one?” I asked him.

“I will be alright,” he replied. “But be careful of the pillars. They sink when you put your weight on them, so you have to be fast.”

“Of course they do…”

I’m SO done with this place already…

Although this was the third chamber, I made it through with the least effort of the three. The sinking pillars were slow enough that it wasn’t necessary to fret too much about them, but I also simply leapt for them one foot at a time, kicking off with my left to land with my right, then kicking off with my right to land with my left, and so on. Though I hated myself for thinking it, it was actually kind of fun.

Father Adam imitated my movements in a way that I thought was way too spry for his old body, but then again, in the light of the brilliant-glowing torches, he seemed so very different from the liver-spotted frail monk I’d met in front of the Old Church several days before.

The lever in the third chamber caused the pillars to stop descending into the spikes as well as releasing a narrow walkway that followed the left wall. It almost seemed more dangerous to walk along the narrow path than jump from pillar to pillar.

From the exit of the third chamber, the following tunnel curved left and led up a wide-stepped staircase chiselled into the stone of the cliff.

We emerged at the top onto the landing of a great chamber that sat atop the three below. At the opposite end to our entrance was the exit. It seemed simple enough, but I knew it was misleading, though I couldn’t figure out what the gimmick to this place was. Unlike the other rooms, the lights here came from braziers fixed into the ceiling.

Father Adam held out the map, studying it carefully. Then he looked to me. “Are you ready?”

“I guess,” I replied, not knowing what was about to happen.

He took a step forward, and the whole tile he stepped on recessed into the floor, then, with a sound that made me think the whole place was falling apart, walls shot out of the floor, beginning near the exit and then coming our way like a wave of stone. Within ten seconds, we suddenly found ourselves staring down a narrow hallway. The whole room had become a maze.

Based on the size of the chambers below us, I guessed the entire chamber had to be something like twenty-by-twenty metres in size, though it was possibly more than that.

Without skipping a beat, the Old Priest moved forward and I had to scramble to keep up, lest I be left behind to wander alone and lost.