System: Team rankings have been updated

1. Team Player 1000 points

2. Team Invictus 720 points

3. Team Maple Leaf 695 points

4. Team Spice 650 points

5. Team N3m3sis 610 points

6. Team Droogs 565 points

7. Team Legion 505 points

8. Team Overgeared 490 points

9. Team Ninja 485 points

10. Team Happy 450 points

11. Team Karma 435 points

It was rare for Stratos to show much emotion, but I had never seen them like this before. I was checking the team rankings after the global announcement about the Void dungeon when they appeared in the brain chamber.

“How do you keep doing it?” they said, eyes literally blazing with a peculiar blue glow.

“Doing what?” I said. “Solving dungeons?”

“Yes!” they said with an enthusiasm that was freakish for them.

“But isn’t that the point of the game?”

“Yes, of course, but not the way you are doing it. This dungeon was supposed to be impossible to solve. Just getting in was made to be fiercely difficult.”

“Jane and I did that on the second day.”

Ignoring our outrageous luck with discovering how to make a key, it really was a heinously difficult place to get into. You didn’t just need to figure out how to make a key, you had to have Void affinity too, one of the rarest.

“The monsters that inhabit the Void Dungeon are some of the most dangerous imaginable, with the single-minded determination to devour anything or anyone unfortunate enough to whet their appetite, and they are always ravenous.”

I shuddered. Command Line was automatically spewing new windows containing information on the creatures Stratos were talking about, and I suddenly knew far more than I wanted to about the sorts of things that existed within the void. Stratos was not kidding. Most of those things were calamity level outer god type monstrosities. Thankfully most of them couldn’t leave the Void. There was something called a Void Slime that I took a special interest in, though.

Stratos was still talking. “It should have taken a significant team of Players with at least Master or Hero level mastery of their abilities to get past the monsters—”

Hero level? That’s the first I’d heard of anything past Master level. How deep is this rabbit hole?

“—assuming they found a way to get in and survive the Withers,” Stratos continued.

“That’s dumb,” I said. “Having too many people would draw the monsters’ attention right away. That’s what I snuck past them by myself.”

Now that I controlled the place I could allow whoever I wanted in regardless of their affinity. What I couldn’t control was the Withers, which I only just learned about from the Command Line notification that popped up spontaneously to explain it after Stratos mentioned it.

The Withers was the collective name for three ways anyone without Void affinity was attacked if they went into it. I knew about the physical attack of suffocation, of course; I’d used it more than once to incapacitate someone. What I didn’t know about was the spiritual attack of draining their mana, nor the mental attack against their sanity.

In other words, even if I could easily invite people into the Void Dungeon, I’d need to give them a way to counteract all three aspects of the Withers if I didn’t want the experience to kill them, drive them unconscious, or make them crazy.

“And if by some miracle the survivors made it into the tower, they’d have to defeat the Great Sage,” Stratos said.

“Defeat? You mean I was supposed to fight him?”

“After killing the Void monsters to get to him, he would not be inclined to simply let you usurp control.”

I scratched my head. “But I didn’t even touch a monster, apart from almost stumbling into Pinky. And Cagliostra was quite congenial, I thought. Was he supposed to be a tough Boss?”

“The toughest,” Stratos said. This was a different Stratos I was talking to. They’d changed, or grown, or something. At the very least, they were getting better at masquerading as a human. I could actually sense their exasperation when they said that.

“Yikes. Glad I didn’t get on his bad side, then.”

“Yes, well, there was the hidden quest of assisting him to ascend to win and gain the Great Sage title, but it was never thought anyone could or would actually do it.”

“How was I supposed to get past him, then? It’s not like a brain in a jar can do much.”

“It can when it is Cagliostra’s brain.”

“That was lucky, then. Now I wish I could’ve seen his Status, or at least saw him use a few of his abilities.”

“So you could have even more abilities to copy? Is it not enough that with your current abilities you were already able to create items that should have been impossible to reproduce?”

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“It does sound a bit ungrateful when you put it like that. I’ll assume that there’s still a dagger and elixir of the elements hidden somewhere I would’ve had to find to win the secret quest.”

Stratos nodded. Their head bounced a bit too quickly, but they’d almost gotten the gesture down. “But it was never thought anyone would be able to do that either. The items required to solve the dungeon are very well hidden in scattered places and nearly impossible to find.”

“They were tricky to make, that’s for sure.”

“It should have been impossible to make them.”

I shrugged. “Guess I got lucky.”

“You most certainly did. The fatality factor here was also the lowest of all dungeons.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Never mind,” Stratos snapped.

Guess I wasn’t supposed to know what a fatality factor was.

>>> Fatality factor represents the chance of respawning in any given scenario

Stratos threw their hands up in exasperation. “You must be kidding me. Command Line access? Really?”

“Something like a fatality factor exists? What was it here?”

>>> The fatality factor for the Void Dungeon was set to 20

“Wow. So if I died here, there was a twenty percent chance of dying for real? That does seem bad.”

System: Incorrect

System: There was a 20% chance of respawning

“Oh,” I said. “That’s considerably worse. Really? Only a one in five chance of survival?”

“This was an impossible dungeon,” Stratos said.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Stratos glowered at me and their eyes flashed with a menacing red glare, but only for a second, then they sighed and the blue glow returned. “It is not only this dungeon. The Light Dungeon’s labyrinth was designed to separate teams and keep them lost and confused for days, if not weeks—”

“It is a pretty crazy maze.”

“—pitting you against terrifying monsters—”

“Some of them are pretty nasty.”

“—nearly impossible to beat—”

“There’s that word again, and the Minotaur was a pretty weak Boss, really.”

“The Minotaur was not the Boss, though. The real solution to the dungeon was somewhere else entirely.”

”Let me guess,” I said, “Echidna. She still won’t let me into her lair.”

”Quite so. You would be upset too if your whole reason for existing was rendered moot because you found Daedalus’s study in a matter of hours and used the backdoor method to solve his puzzle and claim the dungeon.”

“Was that supposed to be hard? And what’s the backdoor method?”

>>> Dungeon Hidden Quests, also called backdoor methods, are secondary alternative routes to dungeon resolution that bring extra rewards

“Are Hidden Quests linked to earning titles, and does every dungeon have one?” I said.

>>> Hidden Quests are mandatory in every dungeon and often linked to Titles

So there had to be a backdoor method to solving every dungeon. I figured that was the case so it was very good to have that confirmed.

Stratos sighed again.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry if I did something I wasn’t supposed to do, but you can’t put a puzzle in front of a Player and expect them to solve it exactly the way you want them to. That’s just bad dungeon mastering. If there’s one thing you can expect Players to do, it’s the unexpected.”

“So it would appear,” Stratos said. “I can only hope that your improbable success and gaining the Great Sage title of all things with all the abilities it bestows does not get me into—” Their eyes darted to mine and for the briefest of moments I thought I saw panic behind them. “Forget I said that.”

Stratos and I looked at each other for a few long moments. That blue glow in their eyes had faded, now they had that same look I’d seen before many times back on Earth, the kind of look you see in the eyes of people as they stumble out of an exam they were positive they’d failed miserably.

What had Stratos stopped themself from saying? The only word I could think of was trouble. Why would my success at beating dungeons get them into trouble? I decided not to press the issue, not at that particular moment, anyway. Stratos clearly did not want to elaborate.

“Forget you said what?” I said with a look I hoped conveyed feigned innocence. “Does it help if I tell you it was a lot of fun?”

Stratos bit their lip as they looked at me for a moment. “You really are a strange human.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment. But I did the Nature Dungeon okay, right?”

“Hardly.”

“Oh man, I did that wrong too?”

Stratos sighed again. “It was not supposed to be solved until the Shadow Dungeon was solved first and you had attained the key to eliminating the Blight. You have a knack for going in the backdoor.”

“That’s what she said. Look, if it’s any consolation, Team Maple Leaf and the Round Table knights are making an attempt on the Shadow Dungeon right now.”

Stratos looked offended. “Do you really think I do not know about their most recent attempt on the Shadow Dungeon?”

“You didn’t seem to know I was in here.” The briefest flash of orange warned me against going there. “Right. Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to. So I guess I should see the global announcement about them solving it any minute.”

“You will not. Their attempt ended shortly before you solved the Void Dungeon.”

“It did? Did I miss the notification?”

“No. There will be no such announcement. Their attempt failed.”

“It did? Aw, man. That’s too bad.”

“The Shadow Dungeon is one of the simpler to solve, but the Shadow Demon is by no means an easy foe.”

“Ugh. That’s rough. They didn’t make it past the boss.”

“Dungeons are not designed to be solved easily, and not on the first try. It is fully expected that multiple Players will not survive the attempts.”

I started to get a bad feeling. “Did any of them die this time?”

Stratos looked me in the eyes. “Yes.”

Crap. “How many?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

Double crap. “But it’s okay, right? They’ll all respawn, right?”

Stratos remained silent and inscrutable and my bad feeling deepened. Did they die or did they die-die?

“Stratos, what was the fatality factor of the Shadow Dungeon?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

“Command Line? System? A little help?”

System: The rules prevent revealing that information at this time

“You told me the Void Dungeon’s factor, but I suppose that was after I’d already solved it. Can you at least give me a hint? Was it less than a hundred?”

Stratos considered the question, then seemed to come to a decision. “Yes.”

“A lot less?”

“Considerably less.”

So there was a considerable chance they might not respawn. I didn’t want to ask outright, but I had to know.

“Will they all respawn?” I said, afraid of the answer I might get.

Stratos gave me a level gaze. “I am not at liberty to say.”

“Oh shit,” I said.