In the end, the team had recovered to varying degrees over the next week. And Prince got the worst consequences with his smaller build as he got shot in the stomach. But he assured them there was nothing to worry about and that all their wounds would get cured on the next floor.

It was a relief as so many of them were now worse for wear and would be unable to give their all in combat.

In the meantime, Prince and Sophia had tried to extract more information from the prisoner but it had been to no avail. Aside from people and factions names they had yet to know the significance of, they got essentially nothing. And so it was now time to decide what to do with the prisoner.

"We can't release him and let him talk to his friends." Michel immediately argued, "Besides, what if we run into him later on? Would you feel forgiving for sparing your life after some arseholes kill two of your friend and keep you prisoner, for a week?"

"I'm not going to let you murder a defenseless sapient. He might be an alien but he should be treated humanly." Moana immediately confronted him.

They indeed could not afford to release him and risk that poor decision coming back to bite them. But murdering that alien? It was also crossing the line. But all the alternatives felt worse. Leaving him here to die? It was basically murder by inaction. Keeping him prisoner indefinitely? They could not afford it. Besides, there was something about the alien diet that their food rations could not satiate: he was obviously getting weaker every day though from no negligence on their part.

If they kept him prisoner, he would die. If they left him to die? He was more than likely to die. And if he were to survive? He would be even more vengeful. And outright killing him in cold blood while he was defenseless? Sophia was afraid that cold-hearted act would make them unredeemably evil.

"Michel is right." Lono sided against his own sister. "It was wrong to make him prisoner in the first place and we should think of the consequences next time we even think about it. But that alien was all but dead from the moment he tried to kill us and failed. If it's too much for you, Michel and I can deal with it while you look the other way. But it has to be done."

"Even tied up, he did keep threatening to kill us." Prince casually mentioned it as if he was talking about the weather and not about the fate of another sapient.

"And we are already in the minority unless Sophia makes it a tie," Paolo concluded. "So I'm not going to try to change your mind. But can we at least try to make this execution more human, so he would go without pain and fear?" And then, he turned to Sophia with a resigned and yet determined look on his face and asked her: "Surely you can brew a poison to that effect, right?"

And it was happening once again, only months after she promised herself to never do it again. Paolo was pretty good at selling his point and she was truly considering it: poisoning yet another sapient, as a mercy kill this time.

"You know more than anyone what you are asking of me." She responded. They talked about it extensively, mostly at night, when the both of them could not sleep. They had confided in one another. And so he knew exactly what it meant for her. And yet, it was to her, not Moana, that he had made that gruesome request.

But Paolo kept staring at her. She could still vote against killing that alien, no matter how ill-advised it would be. Or she could take her responsibility and do her part.

"Okay, I'm going to brew that poison." She finally conceded. "But I don't want any of us to keep around to see him die. No matter how merciful and painless we make it, it's still going to be a gruesome murder, no matter how necessary it is."

And so she brewed the poison. And Michel took it from her, casually adding it to the prisoner's last meal before gently feeding him, one spoon at a time. And then, the first effect of the poison kicked in and the alien fell unconscious. He would not get to feel fear or pain. He would simply die in his sleep.

But as per Sophia's request, they did not stay behind to see him die. Only Sophia knew, on an intellectual level, how that poison would kill him and quietly ravage his body before he died. It was supposed to be painless. But it wasn't like the recipe had any testimony from tutorial's delvers to confirm it.

And so, they had left him for dead in the end. Though the odds he would survive the poison, and then get rescued before he starved were unrealistically slim.

★☆★

One crime often leading to another they stole food from the station crates on the very next day. Thanks to their week of recovery, their realization of the true expanse of this floor, and their now slower pace, they had to admit they might be running low on food before they reached the exit. Of course, they could have gone back to the station and spent their hard-earned credits a second time on resupply. But the team had reached their limits after that fateful encounter with the alien criminals. And so they decided to finally play by this floor's true rules.

They stole from dozens of crates, taking only what they needed, making sure to leave most of the content untouched, so the robots would be less suspicious about the missing food. But in the end, their petty thief still amounted to two months of food, which would have otherwise cost them over 350 credits.

But they felt like the outrageous toll they had to pay to leave the residential deck had paid for it more than enough.

Anyway, compared to the lives the tutorial had forced them to take, and the lives they had unfortunately lost, petty crimes had truly stopped feeling like crimes at all. Even Moana did not object to it, which was really telling something. But there was plenty of food left in the crates and besides, the robots were not eating, but selling the food for a profit.

If anything, the ludicrous amount of food in those crates was telling them something about their peers that they left on the residential deck: the demand for food was picking up, and so the others must have found their own way to make credits, one way or another.

This also means that other teams should join them on the flight deck sooner or later.,

And so they had to keep pushing. If anything, to ensure they would have no competition for this floor's ultimate treasure: the chain chest waiting for them somewhere on the last deck.

Avoiding the criminal organization while keeping to the far edge of the flight deck was not so difficult. Whenever they spotted signs of life, they did their best to disappear and become one with the walls until the hostile aliens were gone with their cargo. It made their travel even slower but also a lot safer.

And Sophia fully subscribed to the logic that better to lose one hour than one week or one life.

And so, it took them two weeks and a half to finally reach the end of the flight deck. But they finally made it.

And this time, the next deck was neither a ring or a donut but a flattened sphere, or as Paolo liked to call it, an oblate spheroid. It had multiple bay windows on all sides. But the most distinctive thing about this floor was its many devices, akin to the engine deck.

It looked like they had reached what passed for the station bridge deck, the main clue being the truly ridiculous large steering wheel — more like a Ferris wheel, to be honest — at its dead center. But there were no robots, crew, or captain on the bridge.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was the very first time they were well and truly alone and left with absolutely no clues or ideas about what they were supposed to do here. That 'bridge deck' was still several kilometers wide and filled to the brim with alien displays and beeping devices.

Obviously, it appeared that not learning those aliens' written language had been a huge mistake. Because they now needed it and had no robots to conveniently translate it for them.

And so Sophia concluded:

"Okay. Look like this entire deck is a freaking puzzle. We have no chance to solve it so let's ignore it and try to find the way to the last deck. We already know it exists. There must be a secret entrance hidden somewhere. It might be protected by a password again. But this time, let's add trespassing and breaking onto our list of crimes."

And so, they started mapping around the bridge deck and checking every nook and cranny for any imperfection in the giant room 'floor' and 'ceiling.'

It took them days of searching. But finally, Michel found something out of place: two wear and tear marks on the 'floor' that looked about right for a ladder, coming from somewhere up the 'ceiling'. Surely, there was a device nearby that was supposed to open a trap door and bring down the ladder. But there were no less than five devices directly around. And they all had indecipherable displays and hundreds of buttons each.

So they indeed would have to find the trap door the old-fashioned way and somehow force their way in.

At least, that new clue had considerably narrowed down their research.

★☆★

Now that they knew it was there, finding the trap door had been piece of cake because it had its own wear and tear at the edge. But forcing that trap door had proved considerably more challenging than they thought.

The trap door could handle a lot more punishing than their combine might. And for all their effort the trap door had barely budged, not in or out like they expected but to the side. It turned out that the trap door was actually a sliding door. And it now revealed a half-centimeter hole to the other side. But it still resisted all their efforts to open it wider.

They could either exhaust themselves gaining half a centimeter every day until the hole was big enough for them to get through. Or they had to get creative to make their efforts more efficient.

And so they took the remaining hours of that day to brainstorm ideas and test them, one after the other on the following days.

Their first idea was to use a lever as a crowbar, as the longer the lever, the more efficiently strength could be transmitted to a singular point in the trap door. But that concentrated effort turned out barely twice as effective as doing without. And one centimeter after giving their all, it meant that it would still take almost a month to make a hole big enough to squeeze through. They could always go with it and steal more food.

But the entire team was impatient. And so that idea was kept as a last resort.

The next idea had been cleaning the sliding door with shape water, as it occurred to them that the door might be dirty from years of being left unused impeding their efforts. But the door had been surprisingly airtight and so, it had been a good idea they couldn't even test.

This brought them straight to the next idea: alchemical explosives. If their spell and strength weren't good enough, maybe a localized explosion around the entire length of the hole would make it budge. The only limitation to that idea was the limited supply: they could only do it three times, test included, before running out of ingredients for the entire floor. But the test explosion only made the door move by three centimeters. And so they scratched the idea. It was a third of what they actually needed.

And so they now had a four-centimeter hole. And Paolo could not help but mention that even if they had the reduce size spell, they had no hope of getting through.

And so they went back to the basics and thought deeper: brute force was not nearly as effective as they hoped. And so they started thinking about applying constant pressure around the entire length of the hole. And so they went back to the lever idea. And indeed, using three levers instead of one and splitting their efforts between the three had showed a slightly better result: one centimeter and a half instead of one centimeter.

So there was some worth to the idea and they were just missing the right tools.

And that's when Paolo came up with a new idea: hydraulics.

Maybe they had tried to use shape water the wrong way and should have used water pressure instead. Since the water was incompressible, if they caged water inside the hole and tried to add more, the increased pressure should move the door very slowly. And cherry on top, shape water being a cantrip every caster on their team had, they could use it on hours end and make it a joint effort, adding three times the pressure.

But it was easier said than done, because of the pressure they had been creating: They felt the exact same pressure on their magic. It did not increase their consumption. But it triggered Sophia's wild magic more than once. And the surge had been putting a halt to their efforts each time: causing the shaped water to explode out of its magical prison, or for the water to freeze, or for Michel to be electrocuted by a truly nasty surge despite Sophia's advanced warning.

But in the end, after four tries and many our of sweating from the magical strain, they finally made it.

At some point, after pushing the door far enough, one centimeter at a time, the door gave away all at once with a loud bang and stayed wide open after that. Though they had not dared even think of trying to close it.

And so, after four days of effort trying to force the door, they finally did it and gained access to the last deck.

Which was actually the station cargo hold.

It contains alleys after alleys of crates, neatly secured together. And they were full of spare parts, tools, uniforms, space suits, and all sorts of containers branded in green with the evocative image of the profile of an alien skull with stylized tentacles inscribed in a menacing seven-pointed star.

They obviously did not dare open a single of those containers as that alien symbol effectively got the point across. It was deadly dangerous and they did not have the means and knowledge to deal with whatever it was. Surely the former crew was trained in handling those, but they were long gone and even if they had left an instruction manual somewhere, they would be unable to read it.

So they kept exploring the station cargo hold. Contrary to the previous patterns of this station design, this deck was also a flattened sphere, but a way lot bigger than the bridge deck. And then, they finally realized the lines of containers were not truly parallel but converging toward something, which they assumed to be the dead center of the hold.

And though they expected to find nothing good at the center of the cargo hold, they kept going. Maybe it was curiosity killing the cat. Or greed, cause the next chained chest was also in that direction.

But they kept walking until they finally got close enough to see what awaited them for themselves.

It was a green emaciated giant humanoid with the same space suits as the criminals they previously encountered.

"Prince, any knowledge about that thing?" Sophia asked in a whisper.

"This time around, yes." The winged cat responded in the same tone, "That 'thing' is a troll. They are treading the line between sentient and sapient. They are intelligent as any sapient but due to their size and self-healing, it's rarely put to the test. You cannot truly kill them unless you can attack them with fire or acid to counter their regeneration. But they are intelligent enough to cover their weaknesses with magic trinkets.

And their unique healing factor and stamina make them even more dangerous than their might. Can I advise you to turn around and forget about it? They are not the kind of enemy you can negotiate with. And so long they have magic to protect them, they are basically invincible. You might win if you are lucky. But they would not go down without taking some of your companions to the grave."

So it was this floor mini-boss. It was not nearly as threatening as the giant elementals or that lesser dragon. But the conditions for beating it were rather drastic. They had to deal with its magical protection first. And then, they needed fire or acid to kill it. Meanwhile, that monster would attack them with wild abandon because it had no reason to care about defense. It was truly an unfair fight Sophia would rather avoid entirely.

"What are the odds that it has mental protection against my stealth-singing?" She finally asked again.

"None." The tressym answered with absolute confidence. "It would be completely vulnerable to your stealth and luring song. You could even probably charm it into drinking acid if we had some."

Unfortunately, for all the alchemical recipes she had gathered, the acid potion was not among them and Prince knew it already. Not that she did not encounter the recipe. She had simply overlooked it and left it behind, among other equally useless-looking potions that she might have underestimated. At least, that error had taught her something: you never know the true worth of something until you need it.

To her defense, the resting area had plenty of ingredients that were naturall acidic so she had not seen the point in brewing a potion to replicate the same effect. But now she knew: that potion might be only useful when one doesn't have any acid readily available, but that was exactly the situation it was designed for.

So, in regard to that failed opportunity, and true to her original plan, she only had her stealth-singing left.

Let's hope that this time, her stealth gamble would go better than it did with that water elemental.