When my parents were alive they would sometimes take me out into the Labyrinth so I could learn to survive in the harsh world. The Shuffling was not the only danger the inhabitants of the world faced. Traps, monsters, even other people.

They taught me that while those were important, it wouldn’t matter if you couldn’t feed yourself, find water, or find a safe place to go to sleep.

I had been taught to follow the tracks of even the lightest paw prints. The entourage of the Prince were about as subtle as a wildfire. Logic dictated that I would be able to travel faster than them, I was alone, and they were having to drag along a crowd of children.

Still there was one thing they could do that I couldn’t, they could fight the monsters.

I found the first corpse of the monster within an hour. It was a tiger the size of my family’s old tent. The monster had been blood red with black stripes and its fur even shone as though it was made of metal.

A sword slash had nearly bisected the beast, and had this been her tribe, they would have taken the monster apart to use its body parts. The Princes group, it seemed, had no need of it, so they had left it to rot.

But any flesh was a meal, so another pack of monsters had moved in and were currently sitting around the corpse, a few munching on the innards.

They had the serpentine bodies of snakes, but their scales and mouths looked more like alligators, with rows of teeth and powerful jaws. There were also about three hundred of them, each as tall as I was and as thick as my forearm.

There was one more thing my parents had ingrained into me, and that was how to navigate my way through the Labyrinth, I had learned to make maps on the skin of sheep, and could even use the stars ahead to orient myself.

Only being an hour out of my tribe I had a decent understanding of where I was. So I went back a few hundred meters so I could safely take my pack off and take out the maps I had of the area.

It would take me a little out of the way, but there was a path to the other side of where the tiger had died. My maps might be a bit dated, but they also indicated that a family of five or so monstrous boars lived in that area, but I’d take five huge boars over three hundred gator snakes.

It turned out that there were not five boars, but twenty. I still chose them over the gator snakes. Not only were snakes terrifying, I couldn’t waste too much time going back and forth.

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I looked up at the tops of the walls of the Labyrinth and huffed a breath, I wished that I could just climb to the top and cross that way but… things lived up there.

My tribe was called the FallingBird tribe because when the first group had come together they had used the bones of giant fallen birds as the frame for many of the tents. The tents could house a dozen people, and something had killed a flock of them.

Boars, even ones as tall as I was with tusks that oozed poison, were not the best at climbing things. So I climbed up to a very thin path that ran across the wall. Not all the way up of course.

My fingers ached because I constantly had to hold onto the wall to scoot across the branch thin pathway, but I was able to make it across without plummeting to my death.

Once I was back on the trail of the knights I continued.

The gator snakes were not my only obstacle, the knights had only killed what they had to in order to cross. They did not cut down the entire forest with living vines, which I had to skirt around, or slaughter then entire family of winged fire breathing squirrels. I had been able to go straight through that one, even being able to fill up my Lotto Box a bit more and secure food for the night, but my arm did get a bit singed.

The landscape changed drastically, sometimes it was a stone capsule with reptiles all around. Other times it was a forest with waterfalls coming from the walls, and I even passed a desert portion. Every once in a while I would see a portion of the Labyrinth wall the rose much higher than the surrounding walls in a pillar straight up.

There had been one thing I had learned about my Uncommon Card Cleanse, it was able to get rid of my scent by cleansing it. It was something I had to practice, if I was too wide with my intention then it would cleanse unnecessary things and cause more of my energy to go away.

That made it to where no beasts caught my scent to hunt me down, but I was tired, much more tired than I thought I would be. So I found a small clear river that I hoped was clean enough for me to drink out of and refill my water skin. I quickly did a quick trek of the area to make sure it would be clear for the time being and started a fire to cook the flying squirrel. Then I nestled myself in the thick roots of a tree that ran all the way up the Labyrinth wall and moved some underbrush to cover me as I went to take a nap.

—

I awoke a few hours later, the blue sky had been replaced by the prismatic starry sky of night. I was instantly on alert, thinking I had been kidnapped and taken into the wilderness of the Labyrinth, then I remembered that it wasn’t me that had been kidnapped.

Then I was on my way. I was getting worried the further along I went. I could still see the tracks of both the kids and the Prince’s group, but they must’ve have been running the children ragged to be making such a pace.

For hours I continued, seeing a camp where they had stopped, it had been brief, they had not make any signs of being there for more than an hour. Surely wherever they were now they were resting right? Misu was a resilient girl, but she couldn’t walk all day and throughout the night.

Unless perhaps there was someone with the Prince that could bolster the stamina of others.

That gave me a bit more hope that nothing too bad was happening to the kids, until I found the corpses.