Things went back to a new normal after we cleared the dungeon, more or less. If Sifu was surprised to see me open a magic circle floating in mid-air and unload from it the dead body of a Doppelganger, a Gorgon’s head and a Chimera’s heart both wrapped up in blankets, and two Minotaur’s horns, he politely kept it to himself. He simply nodded with a curt grunt and asked me to send Morgan to his alchemy lab. I had no idea what mysterious potion they wanted to brew with all that, but I hoped it would be worth the effort made to gather the ingredients.

Spoiler: it was. In fact, it was a literal game changer.

In the following days, other people kept getting new quests, both team and individual, but not me. By this time I was getting used to the snub, but it still made me angry. I was sure that my lack of quests was a love letter from Stratos, reminding me who was in charge. Or maybe it was just to knock Team Player out of the top spot in the rankings, but that might take a while; my brand new team had done nothing to earn ranking points besides conquer a dungeon, but that alone was enough to make me number one in the charts. Clearly, beating a dungeon was worth more than even a large number of daily quests. I filled my time by working to improve my skills, finding new ones to learn, and exploring my labyrinth to see if there was even more value to be gained from dungeon control.

I was starting to feel like I was getting a handle on this game; after all, getting a handle on games was my specialty. That’s why the convention’s Godgame had been so irresistible to me. Except for a few cooperative games, most games are zero-sum in nature, designed to make the players compete with one another until there’s a clear winner and a clear loser.

In a good game, the rules are balanced, making it a fair contest. In a trash game, the balance is off, and it’s not fair at all. Out of the box, both are boring to me. What I like about games is figuring out how to break them. It may not always make me the most fun person to play with, and it may also go pretty far in explaining why I’d been largely forced to play alone for several years, but that’s how I like to play. Deconstruct the rules, and game the game.

There’s always a way.

In a trash game, specialization usually works. That’s where the min-maxer shines. Put all your eggs in one basket, and unless you’re really unlucky you can usually win. It’s a primitive, clumsy strategy, but it works. Boring.

The basic abilities given to most Players at the start lent themselves to specialization. Look at Nina, the healer. Or Bruce, the mage. Strong in their niche, but only in their niche. The reason why it can work is because this was not meant to be an individual game. Stratos hit us with that on day one. Make teams.

The winning formula was obvious: assemble enough variety of strengths in your team to balance out each other’s weaknesses. But the abilities Players were given didn't lend themselves toward balanced teams. The pure combat types heavily outnumbered the support types. Sure enough, most teams were heavily skewed toward combat. From listening to the others talk about the quests they received, most of those were combat-oriented, too. There were a lot of puzzle-type quests, and some challanges that relied on things like stamina or speed, but fighting definitely took center stage.

The question I was asking myself was: had Stratos plunked us all into a good game or a trash game? I was starting to lean toward the latter. This whole thing felt like a game designed by someone who'd only read about games but never actually played one.

It was clearly designed as a zero-sum game. If you extrapolated into the future, there was only one outcome we were working towards: one team would become the strongest and win. They’d grow strong enough and gain enough momentum to start winning consistently, and continue to win, and continue growing stronger, until they were overwhelmingly strong and came out on top as the ultimate winners. It was inevitable. That’s obviously what this game was designed to do. Which would be great for that particular team, but what about everyone else?

What about me?

My abilities were not specialized. Not at all. I didn’t have a strong team. All I had was me. It’s like Stratos was purposefully excluding me from the game. Hadn’t they said it before, that I was not playing the same game as everyone else?

Did that mean there a Godgame going on here too? Was that what I was playing? If so, who else was playing this meta-game with me?

If I was going to break this game — and I was determined to do just that — I needed a better understanding of the game’s mechanics. This was not given to us on day one, nor on any other day. A big part of this game seemed to be figuring out what the game was. There was no rulebook, only occasional pointers. And System, the ultimate rules lawyer.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it completely at the time, but I knew that dungeons had an important role to play, more important than anyone knew yet. Stratos has been thrown for a loop when I got control of the Light Dungeon. What was the real deal with these dungeons?

Only System knew all the rules of this game, and the only way System would tell you about a rule was if you happened to try to break one. Which meant there was only one logical course of action for me to take: try everything.

I was in a unique position, as well. I was the only one who had a dungeon, so I was the only one able to experiment. I wasn’t sure what to experiment with exactly, but at least I had something to work with.

I’ll be honest, having my own personal dungeon was amazing. I started spending more and more time there and less and less time at the dojo. The labyrinth was no longer a maze to me because thanks to Daealus’s diary I now knew every twist and turn, but I usually used the secret magic doors hidden throughout to get around. I knew all those too. And yes, there was one behind the Gorgon's waterfall, we were just too lame to find it.

I made a point to visit all the various rooms and meet the monsters that inhabited them. Like the Doppelgangers, all the creatures in the dungeon now obeyed me as their master. I confirmed something I'd suspected from the start: this was a training goldmine. Like the orcs in the forest, the monsters slain in the dungeon would respawn after a while, which meant I had an endless supply of sparring partners. The labyrinth’s monsters wouldn’t drop treasure for me anymore, but I was able to work on all my combat abilities against an assortment of creatures in relative safety; I say relative because even though I instructed the monsters to stop short of killing me, accidents can happen. I very nearly snuffed it when a lamia got a little too gung-ho, but after continuously testing myself against the labyrinth’s monsters I managed to max out a ton of skills. It wasn’t hard, Adept is not what you’d call a high bar to reach, especially when Jack Of All Trades made advancement faster too.

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Daedalus’ office was also a treasure trove of information. There were countless notebooks filled with scribbled ideas and plans for all sorts of things. In addition to architectural blueprints of several buildings, there were designs for dozens of mechanical contraptions as well as magical devices. When my friends and I had first explored the labyrinth, we’d barely scratched the surface. The place was huge and should’ve taken ages to explore and puzzle our way through, but using the Doppelgangers to take us to the end was a shortcut the game’s designers clearly had not predicted. No wonder Stratos was put off by how quickly we’d solved it.

Daedalus had also kept several volumes of history in his collection, which spread the canvas of an astoundingly deep and complex backstory to this artificial world. Unfortunately, it was written in a dry, plodding manner that made the Silmarillion seem like a romping page-turner. I was never able to get very far without my eyelids drooping, so I tasked one of the Doppelgangers with reading it for me and giving me the Coles Notes version. I was particularly interested in what the deal was with those elves in the forest. I was more curious than ever about what was on the other side of that wall of thorns, and why it was there in the first place.

There were many gaps in the history, but I managed to squeak out an overview that perhaps posed more questions than it answered. In the past, this region had been a happening place where all manner of intelligent species coexisted in peace. In addition to humans, elves, beastfolk, and a litany of other fantastical demi-humans and humanoid creatures had lived and traded together, including the mysterious Elohim that had made Sigrid’s armor. That peaceful era ended after a costly war against an alliance of creatures including orcs, Titans, and other monsters led by a Demon Lord that left both sides devastated. The elves suffered a diaspora, and the few who remained went into seclusion in their forest. There was no specific mention of the wall of thorns, but I had to assume that the elves had made it themselves to keep away outsiders.

It wasn’t just the elves who kept to themselves. The beastfolk similarly shunned contact with the humans, the orcs retreated to their northern homeland, and the demons skulked back to their lands in the east. Even the lands across the sea to the west cut off most ties with the entire area, and the vibrant shipping trade that had once flowed back and forth had dwindled to a relative trickle.

I found it particularly indicative that there was a bigger game going on that the entire hex on the map was under my control, making it seem more and more like a tile on a gameboard. There were more creatures in this area outside the labyrinth, all from Greek mythology, including a herd of centaurs and a forest full of dryads, and many of them had the ability to come and go between the labyrinth and the outside world. In particular there was one group of wild monsters living high atop the mountain that I was especially interested in and had plans for, they just needed to be broken in and tamed a little first.

The rest of the time I spent in the Gorgon’s lair, which I’d pretty much moved into, so I guess it was my lair now. I chose not to allow the Gorgon to respawn, at least not yet. Her bed was just too comfortable to relinquish, and I found the quiet serenity of the grotto the perfect oasis to enjoy the solitude that had been forced upon me by Stratos, the game, or both. I wasn’t really that alone, though, because I had the dungeon’s monsters to keep me company, in particular the Doppelgangers.

There was a whole village of Doppelgangers, more than a hundred of them, living in a special area in the labyrinth. It was similar to the Gorgon’s grotto, only on a much larger scale. It was only accessible through a few well-hidden passages, or my special teleportation backdoor, but once you entered you found yourself in a vast cavern with rivers fed by waterfalls, a veritable jungle of towering trees and lush vegetation, and a tight community of very intelligent and capable shapechangers.

I didn’t have to be the Grand Architect to know that the Dopplegangers were not native to the dungeon — they were the only species that did not follow the Greek mythology theme — but thanks to Daedalus’ legacy I knew that they’d been part of the Demon Lord’s army who’d rebelled and switched sides, and had been welcomed into the labyrinth after the war. As the holder of Daedalus’s notebook, they all acknowledged me as their master, and I chose a dozen of the most competent to assist me directly.

Along with the ability to shapechange into any humanoid form, the Doppels could read people’s minds to a limited extent. This allowed them to access a lot of the memories and personality traits of the person they mimicked, albeit imperfectly. But they didn’t have to copy a real person, they could become anyone, real or imaginary. At first, they’d assumed the forms of my friends, but I quickly put the kibosh on that. So they dug into my mind and took the forms of people they found in my memory with strong personal attachments, friends and family back on Earth. I put a stop to that too, and fast, for obvious reasons. Then they tried shaping themselves after real people I had a different sort of attachment to, but as amusing as it was for a while it also seemed wrong to have a gaggle of Hollywood actors hanging around gossiping about how the lamias were getting belligerent with the centaurs for not cleaning up their droppings again, so then they stopped shapeshifting into real people and started probing deeper into my subconscious, searching for the perfect form to take, a form made just for me. Fantasy people.

We stuck with that.

I relied on the Doppelgangers to manage the affairs of the dungeon, and they turned out to be quite good company with a huge assortment of skills. One of them proved to be an accomplished cook and I ate very well, as long as I remembered to never ask what exactly it was that I was eating. I’m pretty sure a lot of it was Flesh Golem — the Doppels didn’t tell me what they did with all the bodies and I chose not to ask about that either — I just told myself it was chicken or tofu and enjoyed the spicy exotic seasonings my new chef preferred.

As they settled into their new forms, they developed more individual personalities and even got their own names, which System invited me to give them. It’s going to come up later, so I’ll just put it out there now: Doppelgangers were hermaphroditic by nature, or maybe gender fluid would be more accurate, but all of the ones I selected as my core assistants eventually adopted female personas. Given that this happened after they probed my mind for the form that I’d be most comfortable with, you can make your own assumptions about what that says about me.

There were a number of times when I stopped and looked at all the beautiful Doppelganger women around me and I felt like Harry Mudd surrounded by his harem of androids. It was discomfiting to say the least, but you can also make your own assumptions about what it says about me that I didn’t do anything to change the arrangement.

A few weeks passed this way. At first I'd visit the labyrinth in the day, then return back to the dojo at night. Then I started spending my nights at the dungeon and visit town in the mornings to exercise with Sigrid and catch up on gossip. Then, it was every other morning. Then I stopped leaving the labyrinth altogether, retreating into my own little world like a hikikomori.

I told myself it was fine. I didn't need anything else, nor anyone else. And they certainly didn't need me.

It was fine, I told myself.

I'd grown a lot since coming to Crucible, but clearly my ability to lie to myself was still as strong as ever.