Byron turned his gaze away from the Doppeganger and stared at me.

"You don't need to do this, Byron," I said. "Let me handle it."

He kept looking at me for a few moments, then nodded once. "If it's you," he said, "then okay."

That was a weird response, but whatever. As long as he's not going to do something he'll regret later.

I took the Plate of Peace out of my inventory and placed it on the ground.

Plate of Peace The Great War began when the Demon Queen demonstrated the use of this enchanted plate of malficium to the High Chancellor of the Land, to whom she had just given it as a gift, then kept him inside its bubble until he told her something. Nobody knows what he said, but after she killed him immediately following that, the Land was at war with the Demons. Powers:

Alternate Energy Source: Biofuel - Use the life force of target(s) inside a Dome of Silence to fuel the Plate of Peace’s powers instead of mana

Leave Me Alone - Infuse mana to add a force field effect to a Dome of Silence

Shhhh - Create a Dome of Silence; Restriction: Must be standing on the Plate of Peace

“Can everyone please back up a bit?” Surprisingly, they all did, not even asking why. “But not you,” I added, pointing at the fake Chika. The other Doppelgangers were dragged away, with knives held on them as threats to keep the one who looked like Jane from teleporting away. When it was just me and the monster that looked like Chika, I stepped onto the plate and turned on the dome of silence. A shimmering bubble covered us.

All sound from outside the bubble stopped instantly and there was an almost imperceptible drain on my manna to keep it up. I added a light force field to the bubbleu. The mana drain increased, but it was still acceptable. I tend to use mana a lot so my mana pool had grown quite a bit over time, so a modest drain like this was no big deal. I opened the mana tap, allowing more to flow into the force field, strengthening it. The plate worked just as I imagined it would so far. I lowered the force field to minimal.

“Now then.” I looked at the monster. I pointed at it. Then I moved my finger to the left and shot a bullet composed of both Light and Fire affinities at the ground beside it, the glob of bright plasma shooting from my fingertip and kicking up sizzling hot sand where it landed. Then another to its right. Then my finger was back, pointing at its head. “Where are they?”

The monster’s face paled a bit, but it showed now sign of backing down yet. I couldn't help but admire its resolve. Interesting creatures.

Outside I could see the other Doppelgangers and my friends talking, but I couldn’t hear a bit of it. Most of them were watching me and I could just see their mouths move and their bodies gesture, so I knew some kind of communication was happening. The monsters seemed agitated; the humans were trickier to read.

“Okay,” I said. I chose it as the victim of the plate’s Biofuel power. The drain on my mana stopped abruptly, but I could tell by the look on fake Chika’s face that it was now feeling that drain on its life. I thought about making the force field stronger. Fake Chika looked even more shocked as the life drain increased proportionately, and signs of desperation started to show.

“What about now?” I said.

Fake Chika looked left, then right, then up, its face running a gamut of emotion. Then it pointed behind me, toward the door. "They're just outside,” it shrieked.

I turned to look behind me, without taking my foot off the plate, of course. I knew there was nothing to see, I just wanted to know what it would do.

The monster scrabbled in the sand in the opposite direction, trying to get away. I turned back, not in any hurry, though, just fast enough so I could see it bounce off the force field, which I made even stronger just before it hit it, sucking even more life from the now despairing creature.

I thought about making the force field much stronger, then I casually raised my finger and pointed at a random spot to the side, without even looking where, and shot off another plasma bolt. It hit the force shield and was incinerated in its own heat, disintegrating against the bubble in a white-hot splatter. The sudden concurrent bleed of its life to fuel the force field's blocking of the plasma made fake Chika fall into the fetal position and writhe on the floor.

Whoops. Maybe I overdid it. That looked like it really hurt. But if I didn't do this, Byron would. I couldn't let him.

Fake Chika coughed up blood. “Okay, fine. I’ll show you! Just...stop.”

“Alright then,” I said. Then I turned off the dome, picked up the plate, and stowed it. Then I bent down and offered my hand to help the monster up. “Let’s go.”

For a long moment nobody moved, but everybody was watching me with a strange looks I couldn’t decipher.

An unnamed observer shakes its fists in frustration

An unnamed observer couldn't hear what was happening but it looked amazing

What had all that looked like from the outside? My head sunk a tiny bit down between my shoulders.

“We’re all good," I said, trying to sound reassuring. "It’s gonna show us where they are. Right?”

Fake Chika stared at me with enormous side eyes for a few long moments, then nodded, drool dyed red with a bit of blood dribbling down its lower lip. It extended a tentative hand, which I grabbed and pulled until it was on its feet beside me.

Everybody else just kept gawking at me with those unreadable looks. I had the feeling I’d have some explaining to do later.

After that, we went together in one big group, the Doppelgangers all with their hands bound behind them and the business ends of several swords at their backs. We followed fake Chika’s lead, trusting that it would take us to our colleagues and not into a trap. It still looked hurt, and for a split second I felt bad that we couldn’t heal it back to full health, but then I remembered the whole point of this was to rescue our healer and my resolve returned.

There wasn’t a lot of talking as we progressed through the labyrinth this way, I think we were all too aware that we had enemies in our midst, and there was a high degree of tension over what condition our friends would be in if, er, when we rescued them.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

I did notice a few people glancing sideways at me sometimes, but they all inevitably looked away immediately.

“Something stinks,” Kenji said.

“Where?” I said.

He shrugged. “Somewhere up ahead.”

We passed a number of short hallways with doors at their ends as we progressed, all similar to the one at the Gorgon’s lair, but all with different things carved into the wood. One had serpents entwined all over it, another had a flock of sheep. We didn’t stop to check them out, though, our current mission was too important to be sidetracked.

Eventually we reached a door at the end of a corridor. Fake Chika nodded her head toward it. “That’s the place.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

It gave me an offended look. “You really think I'd get this door wrong?”

The Doppelganger was right, it was impossible to mistake this door. It wasn’t the same as the others. It was bigger. It was metal. It was decorated with pictures, but the images were not engraved into the metal, rather slightly raised in bas-relief. It had a repeating pattern of carpenter’s squares and sets of compasses around the edge, and in the middle there was an intricate maze of lines. At first I thought it might be a map of the labyrinth, but a closer look revealed that it lacked any rooms like the monsters’ lairs, it was just decoration in a maze-like motif.

Kenji gagged and bent over as though he was about to throw up. “That’s where the smell is.”

“You know what would have been a good thing to ask earlier?” Morgan said. “What’s guarding them?”

I turned to fake Chika.

“What?” it said.

“What’s guarding them?”

It stuck out its lower jaw. “I dunno,” it said.

I pointed at it and winked. “Seriously. What’s guarding them?”

Its eyes focused on my fingertip aimed at it and I knew it was remembering the plasma. It shrank back a bit, the petulance it had just been showing faded noticeably. “N-n-nothing,” it said. “No guards are needed.”

“Don’t trust it, Daniel,” Sigrid said. “It’s lying.”

“Probably,” I said.

We made the four Doppelgangers sit in the corridor, back to back, and tied them all together. Morgan volunteered to stay behind as guards while the rest of us performed the raid, and after some encouragement we convinced Byron to stay behind too; we were afraid that in his eagerness to rescue Nina he'd do something reckless, combat wasn't really his specialty. He agreed, albeit reluctantly.

Andy was also going to stay behind to keep nullifying fake Jane’s teleportation power, but Sigrid simply clobbered the Doppelganger, knocking it out cold.

“We can’t afford to lose our strongest fighter,” she said, and I thought Andy was going to implode with joy at getting that compliment from her of all people. His chest swelled and he marched toward the door, ready to open it and demolish whatever he found on the other side.

“Let’s take a peek first,” I said, before he managed to reach the door and barge in. If we’d had Sam with us, he could’ve made a little animal we could’ve sent in to spy, but we needed to rescue him, too. We'd just have to rely on a clumsy peek.

I pushed the door open a smidge, just enough to see inside, like we’d done before entering the Gorgon’s den. The room beyond the door was large, not nearly at the same scale of the Gorgon’s, but still impressive. It seemed like it had been an office at one time, with a huge desk shoved into a corner, piled high with parchments covered in scribbles and sketches.

Over to one side there was a collection of objects displayed in wall niches or glass cases like museum displays, including a spiral seashell, a huge white crystal, something that looked like the bones of a pair of pterodactyl wings with a leather-buckled harness in the middle, an array of detailed scale models of buildings, and a great wooden cow. But what captured my attention were the cages.

There were six of them, dangling on chains from the ceiling like bird cages in a separate part of the museum area. Under them, in a tangled heap, was a mess of pale white bones. One of the cages held the skeleton of a mermaid, its human torso giving way to much thinner fish bones below the waist. The other five held our friends. Jane, Nina, Chika, Sam, and Galahad were each slumped in a cage, not looking good. They were either unconscious or dead. Both Galahad and Jane’s mouths were hanging open. Their tongues were bright blue.

Oh, and one more thing: they were all stark naked.

On the other side of the room a fire burned in a soot-blackened brick hearth. There was a sofa in front of it and on the floor between the sofa and the fireplace, sprawled on a huge yellow sheep-skin rug, I could see someone’s large bare feet poking out. He was snoring loudly.

In the middle of the room, probably where the desk had once been, there was the dead body of a man. He was lying on his belly between two short pillars with his arms stretched out as though he had died straining to reach what was on top of one of them. He hadn’t been able to reach it, however, because one of his legs was chained to a large, heavy-looking lump of metal. On one of the pillars there was a ragged, well-used notebook, and on the other sat a brown apple. He’d died trying to reach the notebook.

I had no idea how long he’d been dead but his body was bloated and the stench of putrefaction made me gag. I knew why Kenji had struggled, with his super senses I couldn’t imagine how bad the smell must have seemed to him. The tongue lolling out of the corpse’s mouth was blue, just like Galahad and Jane’s.

I shut the door as quietly as I could. “Kenji, you might want to turn off your sharp senses,” I said, but it was too late. He was already hurling his lunch against the corridor wall.

I described to everyone what I’d seen. Then I kicked fake Chika’s leg. Not hard, but more than a nudge. Better to say I poked fake Chika with my toe. I felt like I'd caused it more than enough pain already. “Who’s that in there with them?”

It looked up at me with defiant eyes. I was rather hoping it wasn't aware that I didn’t have the stomach to use the dome of silence on it again.

Another poke.

“Why are their tongues blue?”

No answer. Another poke.

“Who’s the dead guy?”

No answer. I sighed, then turned back, not bothering to poke anymore. “Guess we’re on our own.”

I probably still had a lot of leverage over it and could've made it talk, but I’d decided that that wasn’t the sort of Players I wanted us to be. I wanted us to be the sort of Players who figured it out on their own. And didn't torture. Or send live baby rats to their peril to detect traps. We'd have to do it the hard way.

Ordinarily I’d suggest sending Kenji in to scout things out, but...I looked at Kenji, who had stopped dry heaving and turned to look back at me, wiping his chin. Then his eyes bulged, and he turned his head away before retching some more.

As though she could read my thoughts, Sigrid said, “Too bad we couldn’t use Kenji’s superninja powers to sneak in and see whose feet those are and what we’re up against.

Then Wayne said, “If only we had Sam. He could summon a mouse or something and have a look-see. My summons can’t help but attract attention.”

"A mouse," Morgan said, "or a rat. Maybe we should go catch one then send it into the room first to trigger any traps."

“That's a hilarious idea," Arthur said. Morgan raised her eyebrow at me, a silent I-told-you-so.

"Since Kenji's incapacitated, does anybody else have any stealth skills?” Arthur said.

I raised my hand. “I do.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Sigrid said.

“I have the Sneak skill,” I said.

“Looks like you’re on deck as scout as well,” Arthur said, slapping me softly on the back.

“Looks like,” I said. Did he mean as well as torturer? If he needed an executioner too, was I skilled enough to take a head off in one cut?

"Just be careful," Morgan said. "I'm out of healing potions."

Sigrid gave me an encouraging smile. “You got this.”

I nodded, taking my braided six-clan armband and using it as a muffler to cover my nose. Anything to help block the stench. I made a mental note to keep some masks in my inventory, then I opened the door and took one careful step inside.

I felt the floor sink every so slightly under my boot.

Tinkle tinkle.

Crud nuggets. Of course there was a warning bell.