“Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.”
-Richard Bach
Zidaun emerged from his ordeal with the dungeon to find the others camped out next to the entrance. Gurek waved at him tiredly as he approached.
“Finally done, huh?” he said. “Firi got out hours ago; he's sleeping like a rock. I got out first, and then Inda obviously, and then...” He waved his hand towards Zidaun.
Zidaun yawned. “Are we just camping out here or are we heading back to sleep in beds?”
“Heading back, we were just waiting for you.”
“Good, a bed sounds amazing right now.”
With some, mostly, good natured grumbling they got underway back to their base. There, with the yawning exception of the person taking their turn on watch, they fell into deep sleep.
It was impossible to say if it was morning when they arose. Certainly it felt bright and early, the light within the building feeling like the too bright light of morning and making them squint their eyes and rub out grit.
They also found, to their surprise, that all the food they had provided was carefully recreated and available in the kitchen below in large quantities.
Gurek's prayers of thanks after the food was determined to be safe were enough to make everyone else roll their eyes.
“I don't know how you are so thin with the way you eat,” Inda said.
“Ha! You eat just as much, I just relish it. And we all worked more than hard enough yesterday,” Gurek replied.
While they all gave Gurek a hard time, they each enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their own particular favorites.
Considerably cheered and with their packs full of fresh food, which the dungeon let them take from the building without issue, they went to go examine the next test.
The next test proved to be a test of agility and reflexes. It started out simple enough. A room with some green tiles in the midst of a white floor and a green door. Stepping on anything but the green tiles caused a red light to appear above the door and it wouldn't open.
After that, it got more complicated. The stones got farther apart, the pathway grew erratic with backtracking. Outcroppings of stone rose out of the floor that had to be leapt over. And then the rooms became irregular caves and crystal shapes with narrow passages that could not be touched, filled with moving obstacles and water, and sudden unpredictable bursts of wind. The rooms filled with darkness and the safe passages began to move. The surfaces of the path had long been uneven, though handholds that had to be gripped appeared. Zidaun did well for a time, using his ability to manipulate the stone combined with jumps. However, as things began to move he struggled more and more, until eventually he failed a room too many times. The side door opened and the room locked behind him as he headed toward the surface.
He found Firi waiting for him, and ended up waiting for Inda and Gurek. Inda came out only a few minutes after Zidaun. It turned out she had only gotten one room farther than he had. Gurek came out several hours later, sweating like crazy and covered in a rainbow of colorful dust.
“So I went farther than you all, huh?” Gurek grinned, his chest puffing out a little.
Firi just laughed, while Inda replied. “Either that or you were just really slow.”
Zidaun described where he had gotten stuck.
“Oh yeah, I remember that group of rooms. It got so much harder after that. Timed switches started to appear. You had to get to one and then navigate back across the room to get to the next one, and then the next, all before it ran out of time. At first each switch had its own timer, but eventually the entire room had a timer that would start as soon as you touched the first one. And then the switches started to have individual timers again, but they all had to be active for the door to be unlocked. If you didn't touch the door in time, you had to do it all over again.
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“Then dust was mixed into the blasts of air, and those would obscure my vision like crazy, and some rooms had fog everywhere from the beginning. It was nasty. Then it got worse when colored blasts of dust started getting blown out. If you got hit with those you had to start over. Then there were trip wires, touch one, you fail. That started to happen a lot. Eventually I just couldn't be fast enough and avoid everything too.”
Firi laughed, “I failed well before Inda and Zidaun, let alone how far you got. Sounds nasty.”
Inda sighed, “Well agility is definitely not your specialty. And I know that Zidaun was cheating, but I still got farther than he did.”
“Cheating, like you didn't use any of your abilities to progress?” Zidaun asked.
Inda smiled, “Perhaps just a little.”
They all laughed.
“Are you good to continue Gurek?” said Firi.
“I could keep going, but if the next room involves anything like this I definitely won't perform at my best.”
“What I figured, lets take a break for a few hours to recover.” Firi said. “Everybody good with that?”
Mutual agreement followed and lead to them trekking back through the dim light past the glittering trees. The pathway, glittering trees, and fountains maintained their ethereal appearance beneath the stars of the cavern ceiling.
Their new base was a beacon of warm light amidst the perpetual twilight.
They ate lunch in comfortable silence, each dwelling in their private thoughts and taking the required notes for their eventual expedition report. Occasionally they would discuss a technical aspect of the test together, but since each had dealt with them in different ways, there was little to discuss except the rooms themselves.
After a few hours they were ready to resume.
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Caden had been having a great time. He couldn't really communicate with his new guests, but he actually had guests, and new people were amazing. While the new life developing in his dungeon was also amazing, it was no substitute for actual people. As for Exsan, well... he was not exactly the best company.
It was fascinating to watch them use new abilities and get through the little tests he had arranged. He could safely say, even without their more powerful augments, that the people who had entered his dungeon were superhuman. At least they were by Earth standards. Their strength, agility, speed, and endurance brought superhero movies to his mind. He was looking forward to finding out far more.
He had not been idle as he watched them either. A few shards of his mind watched them, but he had been using the recent offerings and especially the plant guy's genetic information to start specializing monsters. There was simply so much information available and his creations could change so fast. He could not actually keep track of everything that happened. Regardless, he used his abilities to start making areas of higher difficulty. He wasn't sure what a normal person entering a dungeon was like, but his current designs were definitely not going to actually challenge this team.
Exsan continued to work on his tunnel, talking only when he engaged with him directly. The tunnel was close to the other source of resonance, so he expected it would be completed soon.
His recordings of knowledge from his old world, pressed into the stone, had born unexpected fruit. He had not gained any knowledge based skills, at this point, based on the dungeon store and his own efforts he was pretty sure they did not exist. Other than languages, anyway. Unless none of the knowledge he had counted in this world… eh, too many possibilities. In the process of doing some math, figuring out some physics problems, etc... he had, however, ended up getting a new skill.
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You have gained a new skill:
Calculation II
Calculation is the practice of doing mental math and understanding the instinctive value of numbers and geometry and how they relate to one another.
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It had already proved useful. He had a better feeling for how long different monsters took to go through their life cycles. He understood the volume of water flowing though him and the faint changes in flow that happened during different times of the day. He could quantify the brightness his different type of lights released. He corrected tiny imperfections in the geometries of his rooms, making the supports and arches truly perfect. It was a subtle enhancement, but it helped in countless tiny ways. It added to his efficiency, simply because he knew more, and he took less time to gain knowledge.
It had proven especially helpful in designing the test the group had just undertaken.
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“I hate this dungeon,” Gurek grumbled.
Zidaun just shook his head, sweating, not bothering to spare any energy to talk. Gurek’s endurance abilities far surpassed his own.
Outside a bubble around them the air shimmered violently and the stone of the walls was red hot.
Cooling the air around the two of them was taking every bit of his concentration already, and his mana was draining away faster with each room as the temperature increased again and again. Firi and Inda had already bowed out and left through one of the doors that lead out. His task had only grown harder with the absence of Firi’s blessings. Their water-skins were long empty.
They took another step forward, the sweat left on the ground behind them flashing into super-heated steam as it was left behind.
“Next…” gasp, “room.” Zidaun panted out.
As they got to the door it opened into another hellscape with all the surfaces in the room glowing a dull orange and the shimmering of the air grew even harder to see through. The red light crystals inset into the walls in patterns of fire looked like real flames as they wavered in the heat.
Steps took longer and longer as their sweat wrung out of them. Zidaun was starting to get dizzy, and less sweat was coming.
“Done, I’m done.” he said.
“Damn, me too then. I would fry without you.”
Step by step they took the path into side passage and into air that felt like ice. It was glorious and they took great gasping breaths of air.
“I am… ha… going… ha… to dive into one of those fountains… ha... and drink til I pop,” Gurek panted as he dropped his endurance skills and the exertion caught up to him.
Zidaun silently nodded, his breaths very slowly steadying.
They rejoined the rest of the group and returned to base to sleep it off. They next morning Gurek’s cursing stained the air when they discovered it was the exact same test again, except this time it was alone.