Trinch shook the blood from his chains as he paced along the craggy shore of the island.
“This place seems the same,” he said.
Oriz nodded as thunder echoed from somewhere far overhead.
“Not for long,” she said. “It seems our arrival has upset the dungeon.”
“Who cares?” Trinch snorted. “It can’t contain us.”
“We can’t escape until we complete the quest.”
“You are still thinking within the rules they hand down to us. That’s why I’m in charge.”
Oriz narrowed her eyes. Her Skein flowed, restless within her, but she did nothing. What could she do against a monster such as Trinch? Grass may crack the concrete eventually, but time was not on her side, and Trinch was a mountain.
“What is your plan to escape?” she asked.
He ran his fingers through the air, sensing something, sniffing, and smiled as the bugs crawled through his grey teeth.
“Do you feel the shape the dungeon is taking?”
Oriz reached out with her mind. Her power was not as great as Trinch’s but she didn’t need to do something as crude as touch the dungeon’s Skein with her hand.
Whenever a dungeon opens, it assesses the adventurers and molds itself around their actions. It doesn’t change itself, but listens to them, and reacts to fulfill its function.
The dungeon’s shape is like a pearl formed by an oyster. A system takes incursions, wounds, and aspects of other systems, and bundles them up with space-time ripped from its own body. It is a painful process, but a dungeon is a place of pain.
Usually, the dungeon remains unchanged because every adventurer enters as a blank slate and so the dungeon reacts according to its nature.
But Trinch and Oriz had been here before, and they dragged behind them the broken nets of the Mirrorbell quest. The dungeon read them and found instructions at odds with its current situation. They had not come in through the door but through an incursion. And the incursion remained. Growing, as energy bled in and out through the rift between dimensions.
Oriz felt the dungeon gnashing its teeth and grinding its bones as it sought a way to consolidate these new variables. It would make things harder, like an immune system overreacting to cleanse itself of intruders.
For one, the boss would change. She could feel it already, Skein gathering around Zazzatha’s sinking corpse. The remaining fragments, two if she guessed correctly, were pulsing. The dungeon had already changed once to accommodate Zoe’s naïve actions, but now Zoe was not here, and neither was her party.
Oriz raised an eyebrow at that.
“Zoe hasn't arrived yet, and her friends are gone. So... we’re the only two adventurers in the Mirrobell dungeon, but the dungeon doesn’t know what to do with that information.”
“It knows,” said Trinch. “It’s going to reform Zazzatha. Bigger, stronger, crueler…” he sighed, staring across the water at the cruising mirror-clad yacht and seeing a simpler time. “I used to think all bosses were to be fought. I suppose such hubris led me to purgatory. But I’m not in purgatory anymore.”
“I thought you blamed Crik?”
“He played his part.”
Oriz shook her head.
“What’s your plan? Are we going to wait for Zoe to come through the incursion and finish the quest? Things might be harder with the dungeon changing Zazzatha but…”
Trinch ignored her and watched the incursion. A gash in reality of scintillating pink and blue and pulsing white. It rose from the rocky beach shore up toward the sky. Seventy feet tall, and growing.
“It’s stable, but it’s growing. Soon, it will pierce the dungeon’s shell, and we can escape to Zoe’s planet.”
“She called it Earth.”
“Like dirt?”
Oriz shrugged.
“So your plan is…?”
Trinch lay himself down on a bed of chains.
“I plan to relax and enjoy myself while I wait for my first plan — using Zoe — to reach fruition.”
Oriz stared at him.
“You’re a monster.”
He shrugged.
“Don’t blame me. Blame the system.”
###
From nothing, Zoe blinked into being.
She lay on her back as the world groaned, dusty stone firm beneath her fishskin suit. A wooden room enclosed her. Familiar ancient planks covered in brilliant green moss. Beams of sunlight leaked through the ceiling and lit the swirling dust. She breathed the air and tasted the dryness. The familiar spice. She knew where she lay, and her breath escaped the cage of her lungs in a relieved sigh.
She lay once more in the church of the Mirrorbell. She was back in the Mirrorbell dungeon. After all her ordeals in purgatory, she finally made it back. A smile cracked her face as she stretched out her arms wide. Her fingers brushed a white box: the python amulet from the Gambler’s show.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
So it hadn’t been a dream. She knew it hadn’t, but one can always hope. Dust danced above her, and she wondered where Oriz and Trinch ended up. Were they standing somewhere in the dungeon and waiting for her? Or were they sent elsewhere? She couldn’t really find it in herself to be worried, so she sat up to look for Bella and Anton.
System notifications slammed into her brain.
[Quest received: A Meeting At A Crossroads.]
[You are part of a timed event: return to The Magnifying Glass in 6 days, 23 hours, 45 minutes.]
[Title awarded: The Magnifying Glass (due to the efforts of Anton, Bella Moore, and Zoe Chambers, you have received one free level)]
[Level up! You are now level 26.]
[The void grows sick with hunger.]
[Please select an element to incorporate:]
* [Wood: Dexterity +2, Vitality +2]
* [Mirror: Insight +4]
* [Sun: Might +2, Vitality +1, Insight +1]
She felt the hunger squirm inside her. Eleven levels of emptiness. She felt scooped out, and the hole sucked at the world. Devour. Everything. There were metal weapons outside. They called to her…
But she fought down the urges. She knew she had to take this opportunity to adjust the imbalances in her build.
Status
Name: Zoe Chambers
Level: 26
Body: The Bell At The Center Of The World (Rank 2, Progress 6/10)
ATTRIBUTES
Might: 62
Vitality: 20
Dexterity: 13
Willpower: 61
Insight: 21
Skein: 177/177
Titles: Intrepid, Lodestone, Fools Rush In (Incomplete), Quest Breaker, Glutton, True Believer, Magnifying Glass
Techniques: Our Hearts Toll As One, The Self Reflects The World
If she didn’t increase her dexterity, her strength would be useless. Her Vitality and Insight also lagged behind her other stats. She really had let the bonus that came from the Lodestone title block out all other options.
But now Wood surrounded her, and with +2 to Dexterity and Vitality, it could solve her problems. Especially since she had eleven levels worth of elements to incorporate. She relaxed her restraint on her hunger and reached out for the ancient wooden planks of the church. It might be a sacrilegious act, but after surviving a meeting with a real god, she felt as though she earned this.
Her hunger reached out, a force of system-empowered willpower, and brushed against the wooden planks. They trembled and groaned in an echo of the thunder in the world beyond these wooden walls, but they did not split. No tendrils formed. Her hunger retracted, sullen, starving, but she received no essence.
It was as she feared…
The body she chose with the Smith, [The Bell At The Center Of The World], only admitted Mirror, Metal, and Sound. The Wood that surrounded her was useless. Unless…
She reached for the python bracelet with a burning hope.
The box opened on its own, and the brass-colored serpent slithered free. Its eyes were sapphire beads. As it stretched its jaw, yawning, tasting the air, the pearlescent glass fangs glimmered in the sun-filled room. Zoe outstretched her fingers and forced herself to crawl. Her movements slow as she contained her rapacious hunger.
“Please,” she whispered as blood leaked from her lips. Taste of her own chewed soul on her tongue. “Hurry…”
The serpent swayed and rose out of the box like a dancing cobra. It watched her, and in those blue gemstone eyes Zoe saw — perhaps imagined — a dancing figure: the Gambler. The mad god who existed in all gifts.
Was this just one more taunt from the cruel mind of the universe?
The snake lunged for her. She didn’t have time to react.
Another reason to increase Insight and Dexterity…
Fangs outstretched, the snake wrapped around her hand and slithered up her arm. She expected the needle jab of its fangs, but it closed its mouth and settled around her upper arm. The scales clicked and stiffened. She blinked, and the python bracelet appeared no different from any upscale jewelry.
[You have received the python bracelet. This item allows you to view expanded essence options. You have 5/5 charges remaining.]
Her hunger burned one charge instantly. The blue eyes glowed, and information assaulted her.
###
It was a mistake to view the types of essence as discrete. These individual natures — Blood, Mirror, Wood, etc — were but the most surface level. They were expressions, words in the language that was Skein. If Zoe looked deeper, she could see how one essence flowed into another. Water into Wood. Blood into Metal. Earth into Shadow. But if she looked deeper still…
The expressions flowing into each other were merely the surface, going beneath she realized all essences were already one. She reached out, staring at the single-room church, at the motes of light that truly constructed the Wood and Sunlight and Stone… she reached into that deep layer…
And it rebuffed her.
Such depths were not yet hers to plumb.
The refusal stung as she swam her consciousness back up to the surface world, where essences flowed into each other, composed each other, words and meanings and symbols intermingling…
But she couldn’t deny the knowledge she saw in those depths, couldn’t help but hunger after it, because down where Skein was one, she saw another truth.
Skein was not all.
She knew this from her experience in purgatory. There were other ways of breaking down the universe. Other ways of rebuilding reality into the shape of one’s desires.
The chain around her throat, for instance, spoke of love in all its complexities.
This was a topic that would require further study but for now…
For now, she needed to feed.
###
The only element in her immediate vicinity which she could choose was Mirror. It would boost her Insight, which she needed to do, but she was concerned about her Vitality and Dexterity falling further behind. This was a unique situation, where she had many levels to advance at once, and she knew it was because of how Trinch used her to slay the others.
She couldn’t trust that she would have such an opportunity again. So she needed to be smart. The python’s blue gaze surveyed the room. The wood. The stone. And Zoe saw an option.
With a blood-streaked grin, she punched the floor. The stone cracked, and rumbled, an echo of the thunder beyond the rooftop. A tremble rose from the floor and into her bones. For the briefest moment, the element became available…
Sound.
She rose to her feet. The hunger chewed at her. Dug spikes into her like knives and forks working at overcooked steak. She chanelled the pain and her foot struck the floor with all her Might. Dust flew up. She closed her eyes. Stepped again. Foot pounding stone. Fist reaching out. Knuckles crashed against the wooden wall. She moved through the steps of the Grasping Vine.
She found the rhythm hidden within the stances. Moved. Stepped. Struck. And a resonance built as she moved in tune with the center of the world. She didn’t need to open her eyes to feel the subtle shaping of reality as it warped. Enveloped her. She reached out an open palm and slapped the wooden wall.
The church rang like a bell.
[Please select an element to incorporate:]
* [Wood: Dexterity +2, Vitality +2]
* [Sound: Dexterity +1, Might +1, Willpower +1, Insight +1]
* [Sun: Might +2, Vitality +1, Insight +1]
For a moment she hesitated, knowing that this was not a perfect solution. Her attributes would advance, but her Vitality would fall further behind. The Sun and Wood options taunted her, but they were not accessible. She gritted her teeth — fully realizing the burden of the body path Oriz tricked her into choosing — and she sighed.
What was done, was done.
Time to move forward.
She released her hunger and devoured the Sound of the ringing church.