Once Jack located the tip of the pyramid, he couldn't look at anything else.
“Thanks,” Jack managed to say to the back of the leaving player.
Happy to have quickly found his destination, Jack took off. He left the huge station and tried to keep his eyes glued on the pyramid's tip. It wasn’t easy. With each step, Jack found new incredible sights.
On the one hand, Embersgate was mostly modeled after a medieval city with knights, plate-armored soldiers, and European architecture. On the other hand, the thick bones that made up the doorways, columns of buildings, and lampposts, together with the ancient-looking bird, made it look like he was in the Stone Age.
The looming wall occupying most of the horizon reminded him of the Great Wall. Then suddenly, there was a massive pyramid in the middle of the city, taking him back to the time of the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs, not to mention the dinosaurs outside of the wall. It was an uncanny mix of historical periods.
Finally, Jack arrived at the entrance of the pyramid. If these pyramids were built to scale, then the real things were incredibly tall. He felt like he was standing before a mountain. He first thought he’d been lucky enough to find the entrance right away, but as he looked left and right, he spotted several other entrances where players chatted with NPCs.
Finding an empty entrance, Jack approached. According to the name tag hovering over his head, the NPC attending to players at this door was called Babu. His hairless scalp and long forehead gave Jack the impression that the man’s brain was bigger than normal, and therefore, this NPC had to be very intelligent. His shaven eyebrows locked his face in an eternal stoic look.
“Excuse me, sir, I would like to learn more about dungeons,” Jack said.
The man easily initiated a dialogue with him, just as Robert had promised him. “Oh, I see. So this is the first time you’ve visited a pyramid.”
“That's right.”
“We don't know who built these pyramids. The technology required to build these artifacts is beyond even modern capability. Regardless, there are many treasures inside. No wonder you and others try to find out more about them. However, to find these riches, you must face many dangers.”
“So, how does it all work? Is there a specific way to enter?” Jack prompted. He needed to gain levels to unlock his next bushcraft skill and keep tackling his [Jack of All Trades] quest.
“The dungeon reacts to the human mind. To this day, we're not sure if we actually enter the building or if it just manipulates our minds to make us believe we do.”
“But wouldn’t the passersby know if you’re outside or if you’ve actually entered?”
“What if the pyramid affects their minds too?” countered Babu.
“Right. How do I go in?”
“Just touch the pyramid, and it will reveal itself to you.”
“That’s it? OK.” Jack took a few steps and touched the pyramid. A system window appeared before him.
Welcome to Embersgate Dungeon!
Select one of the following dungeons to begin an exciting new adventure:
Tutorial.
It wasn’t like he was being given much of a choice, was he? He selected the only listing and was transported into an underground chamber in the blink of an eye. There were torches all around him, illuminating the yellowed walls. The only sound was the crackling of the burning torches. The fire wasn’t enough to repel the smell of mold and time.
“Welcome to your first dungeon experience!”
Jack let out a shrill. Looking over, he found Babu, who had joined him in his first dungeoneering experience. “You frightened me!” Jack protested.
“Lesson one: when inside a dungeon, be prepared for everything. Now, let me show you how it works. Here, see the hieroglyphics?”
Jack approached the wall Babu was referring to. He had seen similar things when he visited a museum on a school trip. Different hieroglyphic, colorful drawings depicted the same scene over and over again. A man was holding an umbrella. Nine sheep followed him. Did ancient Egyptians even have umbrellas? The whole scene looked a little ridiculous.
“Not all dungeons are this friendly,” Babu began. “In many of them, clues are scattered, hidden behind nasty traps. However, as this is your first experience, the great artifact benevolently hands it all to you on a silver platter.”
“Wait. These are all the clues?”
“That is correct. Once you are ready, step right through that door,” Babu invited.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Jack only took his eyes off the guide for a second, but he was gone once he tried to locate him again. Just what was he supposed to make of this? “An umbrella. Nine sheep. I just don't get it.” Even though he was pretty sure that the internet would have some answers to his questions, he decided to trust his cousin and run the dungeon alone.
The door led to a suspiciously calm corridor. Jack took a few hesitant steps in, but seeing that nothing bad happened, he marched more confidently.
Click.
A mechanical sound rang, and a shower of pointy darts fell on him.
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His health bar plummeted, leaving him with only half his hp. What in the world had happened?
“That was a little careless, adventurer,” Babu said from behind him, startling him again.
After the darts, the last thing Jack needed was another scare like this. “Please stop sneaking up on me like that!” he demanded between gasps.
“The pyramid really is benevolent. Look. There are torches everywhere. You didn’t even have to bring your lighting and fire. It warned you of the danger and made it mild so that you would survive,” Babu preached as if the pyramid were a cherished, respected friend.
“B-benevolent?”
He saw that his health bar was slowly recovering and turned his attention to the nearby torches. Of course. The regeneration bonus from being near a fire. That’s why Babu had said that this dungeon was helping him. There was a way for him to recover health.
“Babu, how did the pyramid warn me?” he asked, but the NPC was gone again. Jack clicked his tongue. He walked back toward the main room to see if he had missed anything in the drawings, and just as he was almost out of the corridor, there was another click.
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This time, before all of the darts landed on him, Jack jumped forward to avoid some of the damage and managed to preserve his life, with only a sliver of HP left. With heavy breaths, he tried to make sense of what had just happened. Could he have tripped a wire when he walked back to the first room? No, it couldn’t be. If that were the case, he would have activated the trap when he stepped into the hallway.
He looked intently at the drawings again. He tried to compare the different scenes, looking for hidden clues, but he came up empty. This whole thing was so frustrating!
“Sheep and umbrellas…” Jack muttered under his breath, rubbing his temples. As soon as he said it out loud, he got it. He had figured out why there were umbrellas in the drawing.
If Jack was looking at this right, the drawing warned him about where the danger would come from. An umbrella's purpose is to protect someone from the rain. The drawing warned him that danger came from above.
He would have breezed through this dungeon if he had a buckler, like the man on the carriage. He could just put it over his head and use it to shield himself from the deadly darts.
This first experience told him these drawings couldn’t be taken too literally: there wasn’t water in the dungeon, and an umbrella would fail to protect him from these traps. That being the case, what were the nine sheep supposed to mean?
Multiple theories sprang into his mind, which he immediately discarded. After some contemplation, he gave up. The sheep could mean anything. There could be literal bloodthirsty sheep running wild in the dungeon, a wool blanket hidden somewhere that deflected the projectiles, or anything else.
The umbrella warning was OK, but he didn’t get much help from knowing that the darts rained from the ceiling. He figured that out by almost dying.
Having no shield, the apparent solution to the problem was either walking, getting hit in the face with darts, pausing to recover health, and resuming the painful march again and again and again, or running at full speed, hoping that he would dodge the darts by staying on the move.
Between the two, he was inclined toward the smartest option, option number two. He had better things to do than watch his HP recover gradually. He would face this dungeon like a man and hope for the best.
Jack came to the doorway again. He looked up and found no obvious signs of where the darts rained from. The only hint that there were traps was the darts on the floor. At the very least, he knew that he had activated the traps at the very beginning of the hallway. Or did he? The traps didn’t necessarily have only one salvo of darts in them.
Scratching his head, Jack shrugged and took off running. What was the worst thing that could happen? He ran at full speed. His full speed was pitiful for someone at his level but, with his stats, it was the best he could do. Almost as soon as he started running, another barrage of darts fell on him.
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Aha! There you go! I dodged most of them! Jack thought happily as he kept sprinting. However, almost as soon as he had outrun the projectiles, he was hit with another round of darts!
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Another trap? So soon? Even though he was dodging most of the darts, some of them were still grazing him. His HP couldn’t keep up. It was a matter of which one would last longer, his HP or the corridor. After springing his 8th trap, he finally hit the first turn in the hallway, which veered left. He saw several more torches that disappeared into a distant curve. He only had ten HP left. He couldn’t keep up. There was still so much of the dungeon left to cross, and he was at death’s door. He screeched to a halt and sat near a torch, waiting for his health bar to recover slowly.
“This is tougher than I thought,” Jack muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. This dungeon was harder than it looked, and it was only the most basic of dungeons. He really wanted to check for guides online.
“Hi, cousin. How did the dungeon tutorial go?” he said, trying to make a deeper voice with a slight Portuguese accent to imitate his cousin.
“It was fine, Rob,” he said naturally. “I was just so stupid that I couldn’t even do the tutorial without opening a walkthrough online.”
“No wonder you’re a disappointment to your father and Lydia, cousin. Maybe I will date her instead. You are just too stupid,” he mocked himself using Rob’s voice.
He was sure Rob would never speak to him like that, but even so, he didn’t have it in him to call his cousin and ask him for help. He had already helped him plenty when they talked earlier. He had to do this one alone!
He would either have to keep running like this, waiting for his HP to recover slowly between breaks, or he would have to figure out what those nine sheep meant. “Sheep. Sheep. What is there about sheep? Wool? They’re meek? They eat grass?” No, that didn’t make sense.
There had to be a smarter way of completing this dungeon.