It was a strange sensation, to be so easily winded again. I’d become used to Max’s alterations to my actual body. Now that I was back in the game world, effectively reverted to a previous update of my biological being, the contrast was obvious. My knees ached from all of the running around and kneeling on stone floors as I crafted my chems. My breath seemed to only half fill my lungs, and my steps even seemed shorter as I beat feet towards the tar chamber in the center of the trial maze.

Still, I pushed through it all, keeping an eye on the minimap to the side of my HUD and watching as small groups of enemy markers lazily tracked through the various tunnels of the convoluted 3D shape of the underground complex. There was another group of–thankfully slow moving–rival dwarves that I needed to beat into the tar room and stay ahead of as they hauled out stolen ore from our bismuth and nickel chamber.

After a few minutes of running, I made it to the long snaking and bloodstained tunnel that connected our zone to the central tar room. I finally allowed myself to slow to a brisk walk and checked over the map.

“You look clear to cross. House Hammerting is in the tar room, but they are busy dredging up tar and dragging out sportrell trunks.”

I nodded at Max’s summary, yet still verified his words on the map for myself. With how he’d been acting up lately, I just couldn’t bring myself to take his word on it this time. His call-outs seemed accurate enough though. After extinguishing my lamp, I continued into the room with cautious steps.

“Damn man, are you gonna double check all my work now? You don’t have to worry about me falling for any trickery from the rival bugs, we’re not even talking.”

My distrust must have leaked through to him, despite my attempt to entirely ignore his gripe. I crossed the tar room in a half crouch, my roughly wrapped feet padding along the splotchy floor that was dotted with fresh blood stains and smears of faint glow-light goo.

“Ugh, okay, I’m sorry. I messed up before with Greg, but I learned my lesson! Watch your step when you cross their threshold, by the way.”

I frowned in response to his words, and noticed the handily highlighted series of tripwires strung between the hastily stacked stone block entryway. The thin copper wires were easy enough to avoid with Max turning them to glowing red laser-like beams stretched across the path at around knee-level for me.

“Could you repeat that? I think I misunderstood.” I sent back, not quite believing he had actually just apologized to me.

He chose not to reply directly, but my shoulders tingled with a strange feeling as he sent the mental equivalent of a shrug back at me and my body responded sympathetically to his weird pseudo-gesture.

“Don’t push it, monkey boy.” Max’s words were accompanied by a new glowing line mixed into the blue wire-frame outlined dark vision I was using to navigate the corridor in pitch darkness. This one a thicker golden thread that seemed to shed flickering sparkles of light as it led me into House Bassaldourn’s territory.

I followed the yellow thread road through a nearly identical path, a long winding tunnel with messy stacks of jagged stone blocks along either side of the whole tunnel. I crossed through the slightly widened room at the end, and entered a tunnel opening on the left when presented with two side-by-side doorways.

“No, really. You’ve never said ‘I’m sorry’ for anything before.” Glad for once to not have to waste my breath with replying to him vocally in my winded state.

Max didn’t reply right away, leaving me to the quiet sounds of my footfalls and ragged breathing for a few minutes as I worked my way deeper into the unsuspecting rival’s zone. The golden thread I was following looped off to the side on my third choice of passages, leading me into a room with obvious signs of both fighting and mining. A pile of cleaned out guts from some cave critter was stinking up the place, slopped off to the side of the chamber as far as possible from a half depleted patch of roughly excavated ore.

“Look, I feel bad, but I also blame you. You should have told me about this earlier, warned me about how crazy this whole ‘feeling’ thing makes you. It’s like… I wanna be mad at those mercenary bastards, but at the same time… I get it now. I’d be pissed too if I was Greg, and now that you point out how they were using euphemism and subtlety with every word to say one thing and imply the other, I see that too! It’s fucking embarrassing.”

I put my back against the wall–out of sight from the entrance to the chamber–and slid down until I was sitting on the ground, drawing deep breaths. I found myself suddenly conscious of my breathing, and was forced to take manual control now that I had noticed.

“You’ll get it sorted out eventually. I think it’s good that you're still thinking about them rather than shoving them to the side”

“Hmm.” He paused for a long moment before continuing. “On second thought, you are definitely the wrong person to be asking about this. Shoving your emotions into your little ‘dark corner’ is basically all you do. Maybe you should take your own damn advice sometime.”

I frowned and watched as a pair of dwarves passed by our side chamber, heading back from their headquarters to my own row’s territory to grab a fresh load of loot. I rose back to my feet and stretched a little, drawing a breath in and pushing it back down with a flare of annoyance.

“You’re always using sayings and phrases and stuff, ever heard the one ‘do as I say, not as I do’? Just because I’m… a little emotionally numbed right now, doesn't mean I don't know what I’m talking about.”

After drawing in another annoyingly conscious breath, I checked the map and hurried back towards the proper tunnel to continue our journey to the enemy vent room. The next group of returning looter dwarves was only a few hundred meters behind me, and we needed to move quickly for our reckless plan to have any chance of working.

The coast was clear, all the way up to the lone sentry dwarv posted at the entrance to the circular vent room that seemed to nearly mirror our own forge room's proximity to the gorge that divided our territories. As I thought it, Max zoomed the map out and overlaid the two sections of map for a moment to give me a proper visual on how similar they really were. While everything did not line up perfectly throughout the entire thing, they were very obviously similar in layout and shape with only some rooms and tunnels in slightly different positions. We each had the same amount of rooms and tunnels though, and the choice to put two of the vent rooms near each other and have them both so close to the dividing barrier of the deep ravine rang a warning bell that I couldn't quite define in my mind.

Were all of the territories like that? Paired up and symmetrical to each other to bring the obvious choice for a home base close together? That didn’t make any sense though. There were five clans, and the vent rooms were not central to each territory. I drew in another breath and let it out as I jogged down the hall, clutching my clinking satchel to my chest next to my unlit lantern in an effort to keep it quiet.

“You’re almost right, Rocksturdy is the outlier. Their vent room is central to their zone, for whatever reason.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I drew in and huffed out another manual breath as the map shifted back to its normal view. We only had another couple of turns and one more room between myself and the second scariest part of my plan.

“Weird, but understandable. The dwarves normally seem so fair, but it makes sense that the ruling clan might be given an advantage sometimes. Remind me to look into that later, alright?” I asked internally, slowing to a brisk walk.

“Easy enough. I definitely wanna spend some time in the library once we get access, we can probably look it up then.”

With a gulp, I pulled my lamp off of my chest and re-lit it, before clipping it back into place. I also pulled two of the large tar-filled bottles from my inventory and frowned down at them. “What odds do you give this plan?

“Oh quit your stalling, it has better odds than anything else you’ve thought of. What else are we gonna do, find someplace to hide and ride the rest of the challenge out? They’d probably disqualify us out of principle. Just don’t psych yourself out. Passing the Trial is contingent on you making it through this with honor and without getting sent to respawn, and we’d have a real hard time without the dwarves backing. Man up, it's go time.”

I scowled, and continued down the tunnel. “Thanks, that helps a lot, Max.” I thought at him, grateful that our conversation was internal and that there was zero possibility of him missing my sarcasm.

With another deep breath in, then forceful exhale out, I rounded the final corner. I could see the light of the vent room now, and the silhouette of the sentry leaning against the wall in the doorway. The strange dwarv called out to me when he noticed the bouncing light of my lantern approaching.

“Lo! Grendle, Edwark? What ‘cha bringing back this time from those greedy Galids?”

I grit my teeth and did not reply, picking up speed again and moving from a brisk walk to a mild run. With my longer legs eating up the distance, I made it to within 10 meters when he called out again.

“Gah-rah, you reek. Did you go for a swim in the pit? We should scorch your shell clean from that slag, you’ll drip it all over everything.”

I only picked up more speed in answer, breaking into a flat out sprint. By the time he could make out who I was behind the glaring bright light on my chest, and the coating of tar that masked my scent, it was already too late for him. I dipped my shoulder down, and slammed it into his outstretched arm as I ripped past him.

I had to turn slightly to avoid having to jump over the smoking vents in the middle of the room, and angled left before I had a chance to get my bearings in the dimly lit room. The path to my right around the central forge was blocked off by a trio of large molded stone storage vats, while the other was more open and cluttered with a number of stone workbenches and a pair of dwarves in the process of turning to greet who they thought was their friend.

“Just set it over by the–” The larger of the two dwarves started to say before they spotted who I was. “Cracks and rust! Alarm, alarm!”

The dwarv I had bowled over scrambled to their feet and added their own curses to the mix, while the two ahead of me picked up various tools and prepared to meet my charge. Disappointing them, I leapt over one of the work benches about 10 feet to their left, skirting around the edge of the room in my mad dash towards the unguarded exit.

I didn’t bother to look back at them, but Max filled me in on the situation as I brought one of the tar flasks up to my chest and lit it with the bright white lanterns flame. “Hah! Awesome! You should see the looks on their faces, wanna see some screen shots?”

“No!” I actually yelled back at Max. Having him plaster more screens over my vision was the last thing I wanted right now.

I threw the flaming bottle over my shoulder after I had sprinted down the tunnel for a few meters. I heard the fragile stone shatter, then felt the plume of heat as the burning liquid spread out to fill the tunnel behind me with hot sticky fire.

Max continued to laugh and joke. “Who the hell just yells ‘alarm, alarm’? Hahahaha. I’m totally gonna clip that–”

“How are they reacting?”

“They’re… confused, I think. Just look at the map, dude. Haha.”

“I’m a little busy right now!” I shot back as I continued sprinting down the tunnel. While the layouts of each of our territories were similar, they were slightly different. On this side of the gorge, the tall vertical shaft that Jozoic was using as a defensive point was instead on the other side of the vent room and now stood between me and my goal. I lit my second bottle of tar and tossed it back in the direction I had come from, sending another whumpf of heat and blast of air towards me that quickly reversed and became a stiff breeze as the flames drew in air from above me.

Now that my hands were free, I began to claw my way up the rough cliff face. My gauntlets made for pretty good climbing gloves, the interlocking metal plates were sharp enough in places to be able to hook into small cracks and protrusions, but my tar soaked foot wraps were a different story. Luckily Chane’s rigorous training had prepared my grip strength, and I was able to haul myself up using mostly my arms. While I climbed, I internally prodded Max to quit goofing around.

“Max! What are they doing?”

“Arguing, hilariously. One of them is throwing things at the guard… oh, now the other two are coming this way. The fire only slowed them down a little bit really, it might be better to just pour the third bottle down the cliff face to make it more difficult to climb.”

“Well, isn't that just dandy” I thought back, although it made sense after a bit more thought. The dwarves were actually big ass beetle-like beings with hard carapace covered bodies after all. I wondered briefly if their hair or the ragged remains of the initiates robes they wore would catch fire as they passed through the blocking flames, and how that kind of thing worked with their Masks. It was still something I only barely understood, and had never managed to get a real explanation for.

I continued pulling myself up the cliff face, and had made it three quarters of the way up before a voice shouted up at me from the bottom of the room. “Human! You and your dusted clan of beardless cowards will fail!” He threw something up at me but missed, whatever it was bouncing harmlessly against the cliff face a few feet below me.

I pulled myself up by another handhold and spared a glance down at him. There were two of them, both with smoldering hair and feet. The one who wasn't yelling at me seemed to have the worst of it, and was doing a goofy little dance around as they tried to stamp out the clinging sticky fire soaked into their foot wraps.

“Oh yeah?” I called back down at them. “Big talk for a bunch of Bassal-terds who can’t even raid without the king's House holding your hands like the babies you are!”

I pulled another of the tar bottles out of my inventory and dropped it, aiming at the one who was still struggling to put out the clinging flames around his feet. I missed, of course, but the stone vessel shattered on impact, and splattered the whole lower cavern with specks and globs of the sticky flammable substance. It took a moment, but the fire from the hallway and the dwarves' feet spread from puddle to puddle as the viscous liquid spread out and the flames danced and engulfed the whole lower portion of the cavern.

“Not bad! Haha. Even if you stole my insult, you hack.”

The heat billowed up the tall shaft, quickly growing unbearably hot. The dwarves shouting insults turned to frantic wordless screaming as I pulled myself over the ledge and rolled onto the level surface at the top. I lay there, panting in the noxious plume of fumes for a moment before I started to cough. Without bothering to look back, I pushed myself up off the floor and stumbled through the smokey tunnel using the map to point me in the right direction. I reached out and ran my hand along one wall, coughing and hacking as I tried to get a real breath.

I rubbed at my eyes, and let out a yowl as the tar encrusted hard metal plates of my gauntlets dug into my face. It didn’t really hurt, the game only delivered a sharp sting that faded quickly when you were supposed to feel pain, but it also didn’t do anything to clear the tears from my eyes and only made things worse. Blinded, and coughing, I tripped over my own feet and fell to my knees. I kept moving, crawling forward until a new block of flashing white text on my HUD caught my attention.

[X] - Join the House formation

[X] - Proceed to the gathering hall

[X] - Explore, Equip, Entrench

[ ] - Survive the migration

(bonus solo objective)

[Slay 10 Scolovian - 0/10]

[Collect 10 sets of mandibles - 0/10]

I read over the newly unlocked section of the quest and cursed loudly, before spitting out the saliva that flooded my mouth in response to the nasty smoke. I rapidly blinked my eyes and crawled down the tunnel, noticing I was only a few meters from breaking into the long dividing chamber with the gorge that my plan centered around.

As I closed my eyes tightly again and focused on the map to guide myself, the shaded section of map that represented the 15 second freefall deep chasm went from the dark color of the lowest point on the map, to a mass of wriggling red markers.