There might’ve been a trick to it. I messed around with the first three trapped tiles. The resets had a pattern, it was the order they’d been tripped - so nothing overly complicated. They weren’t that far in either so it was feasible to just sword-tap them. Thus the primary solution became clear; just had to avoid setting off any traps. Sure, no problem.

My first idea came down to testing for the next trap, popping the one after it and then leapfrogging onwards after the cycle finished. I’d keep going forward like this and then I’d die immediately upon hitting a general trigger tile. Those set off all the traps. This initiated the chaos cascade once more. I figured this out when I threw some wooden cubes well past the first three tiles, yet they still went off. It was the fifth middle tile which caused offence. I sighed amidst the visual violence, then analyzed.

The universal activator functioned as an origin point for the sequential wave, in both directions. There was some randomness to it, give or take anywhere between zero and a couple of seconds between the inciting incident and resulting attempted murder. This was especially egregious mindfuckery as it caused doubles or triples to linger. It was why I’d been so confused after my initial throw, despite there being a cadence to the whole shebang. On the positive side, the spikey stuff and company weren’t quite as unreasonably fast anymore. Much like participating in the Olympics, dodging them was filed into the ‘maybe someday’ folder.

The traps also varied a fair bit. Aside from the many variations of spear trap, I saw the familiar rising tile one too, along with a cartoonish waist high horizontal shiny-black buzz saw. Of course, there was more bullshit, like darkly fluorescent reverse guillotines from the floor and pendulum traps appearing out of what I assumed to be invisible seams in the walls. I called them reverse guillotines because the blade ascended from the seams instead of descending from the ceiling. Most eerie was the silence of it all, all the traps were noiseless except when the occasional rising tile destroyed a wooden cube and sent splinters all over the place – cue another sequence.

Well, that wasn’t true. The ones which shone with vague light were the most haunting. I almost felt my brain glitch out. I’d taken a tour through a nuclear power plant once, including a look at the reactor room. Those had an unsettling blue ambiance which felt unnatural and wrong. This was similar, but even worse because black was supposed to absorb light rather than emit it. I chalked it up to magical bullshit. Out of ideas, I resorted to vandalism.

Unlike with the original Deathtrap, I could damage the tiling here with my sword. I exerted far too much effort, which by my standards meant more than none, widening a seam so I could wrench out a tile but to no avail. The widening bit worked, leveraging less so. I poked the spear-hole in the walls with my mind-blade but there was nothing there and I couldn’t see in either – even when using my lighter. Some of the traps had very obvious locations while others were impossible to spot. I figured anchoring myself between the walls horizontally and then trying to shimmy over might do the trick.

The idea brought up two problems. For one, I probably lacked the stamina to pull it off. Physical endurance definitely improved my otherwise clearly evident smokers’ lung, but so far had only brought me up to roughly the level of a regular, healthy person. The second issue was that a hitch meant death, a likely event because of my trappings – I didn’t want to leave my things behind. So the second plan went out the window, probably unrealistic even if I ditched the extra weight.

Navigating all this turned into a conundrum. My only experience with traps stemmed from games and social situations. The latter never gave me any difficulty, I just blundered right in and left it there. The former didn’t help me either, game traps were designed to be beaten so they were actually just puzzles in disguise. I didn’t like those. Fortunately cold, hard logic picked my side for once since I suspected this gauntlet hadn’t been designed with a solution in mind. While I had no idea why the world had become so dead-set on killing me nowadays, homicide was clearly the intent here. I blamed the Errant out of habit. Get lulled into a false sense of security and blam, dead.

I murmured, ‘’what to do, what to do,” on repeat while lamenting the fact I hadn’t explored far enough and gotten all my testing out of the way beforehand. My dwindling food supplies put me on the clock and I was really fucking tired of backtracking all the goddamn time. Even if I couldn’t justify it, there might ultimately be some kind of solution. I either had to figure it out, starve to death or take my chances across ludicrously hostile wasteland. A wealth of options; did I want to unravel a brainteaser, die slowly, or die quickly?

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

The thought of being forced to try and solve a puzzle pissed me off thoroughly.

And that was the perfect solution. The adage proved true after all. If violence didn’t fix all your problems, you weren’t using enough of it. I swiped at the spear trap while triggering it to manifest my internal frustrations into physical reality and severed the thing, which rapidly dissolved into smoke. Couldn’t let useful implements lie around after all - would be far too nice.

Another handful of thrown unfinished dice bounced off floors and walls. Resetting didn’t repair anything. This looked like the way forward. Destroy everything. It would be my go-to solution from now on. I no longer underestimated the power of breaking shit, had been treating the roadblock too much like an encounter from a tabletop game and too little like someone whose day I’d love to fucking ruin. Yet caution prevailed.

Or I might have been procrastinating because who the hell didn’t delay walking down a hallway of doom for as long as possible. My current excuse consisted of seeing if the traps would repair. I sat down to develop my artistic talent while occasionally tapping tiles with swords, again – but not for too long. The traps did repair and it took around twenty minutes. Self-repairing traps were bullshit, but so was everything else. It was just the current zeitgeist. Why couldn’t we get a nice, survivable apocalypse, like radioactive wasteland or zombies? Fuck monsters, fuck darkness and fuck traps.

Despite my previous reservations, I had to go forward. Preferably as soon as possible, time was a wastin’. The universe finally found something that could make me hurry up, the promise of a particularly unpleasant death. So I hesitated for a good five minutes, hardened my heart, and then reconsidered a couple more times until I finally let my inner soccer hooligan loose. Vandalism had been a favorite hobby of mine and finally an old skillset proved valuable in the post-apocalypse.

I unleashed obliteration to a soundtrack of breaks and crashes.

I handled the place like someone else’s property, slashing, slicing and dodging my way to freedom. I had to do the last part since I couldn’t damage the fluorescent stuff - even chipped a sword trying to do so. Even my kind of persistent brain damage emulation couldn’t ignore the evidence. Magic shit breaks magic shit. Happy that I got the hint on one way reality had been twisted, I made decent progress until another snag presented itself. There were branching paths. Had I been shimmying, I’d’ve gotten stuck here. With no way of knowing what led where, I had to try them out the old fashioned way while aiming for a general southerly orientation.

This led to a lot of backtracking and scratching on walls, of course the dead-ends and deviations were just long enough to give the terror tools time to regenerate. I trudged through while the shadows chased me, always ten meters away. My breath ran ragged and my heart pounded in my ears, needed to rest but I preferred exhaustion over involuntary impact surgery. I stole a few minutes here and there but kept going. My persistence was eventually rewarded with a stairwell.

I stared at it while calming down – sadly without a cigarette. Normally a stairwell would be good news, but this one led down. At least the staircase room wasn’t trapped to the tits, just like the last this one had a T-split arrangement, I’d come from the north and needed to make a choice between south and west.

My cat-like curiosity fought a losing battle versus newly developed survival instinct, so I eventually decided against suicidal exploration. I could’ve stayed here but it was too early to be calling it quits. I almost continued onwards, guided by gambler’s fallacy, until I thought better of it. Beware the bullshit. I’d collected those of my wooden cubes still whole on the way and repeated the whole testing routine. This automatic assault corridor functioned similarly to the last, far as I could tell.

My mana had topped up when I finally made it out, fortunately still heading south. I ‘created’ another batch of heart disease concentrate and took a short break. The recent experience ranked quite high on my personal leaderboard of shittiest things I spent ten hours doing.

At least I didn’t get attacked on the 30 minute romp which led me to the next, thankfully upward, staircase. Now I failed to restrain my inner fluffy feline and had a careful look at where this secret spiral might lead. Unlike the other staircases, which were at least sort of hidden, this just ended up in an area of tall, yellow, two-thumb-thick tundra bamboo - whatever that might be. My old earth, mostly forgotten, biology classes said nothing about such an eclectic mix of biomes. No free house appeared either – a shame because I had enjoyed the twist. Regardless, the fresh air relieved me a bit from all the labor sweat and the gentle rustle of bamboo sounded like music to my ears.

I found one magic-green stalk right at edge of the familiar stone circle and managed to cut it off after a few hours of serious effort. I couldn’t see shit over the wild-growth while the sunset had left without saying goodbye. The shimmering treetops bugged me for some reason and an Errant check answered why. Well, fuck that - can’t fight no trees.

As much as the open air appealed, I elected the safe stairway as my campsite. I treated myself to some higher odds of coronary mishaps again and then fell victim to insomnia. Bored, I spent another 3 hours-something doing drawing lessons on the same old plate before I finally yawned and remembered to leave my interface open before blissful oblivion took hold. Then I fell asleep a little later.