Once we find the correct blade, the serpent doesn’t take long to dispatch. Since nothing I do has any effect, I spend the next few minutes dodging and yanking Kenji out of the way while Melinda does the grunt work.

Finally, the beast flails and, with a few unsightly spasms, dies.

Enemy Defeated:

Serpent of Loch Cluhir (Lv 17 💀) [Shared with Melinda, Kenji]

+50% Among Friends

Exp: 55

Earned: 184g

Exp to next level: 82/160

Melinda yanks her new sword from the beast, and it turns to dust in her hands.

“Son of a bitch!” she says, giving the serpent a solid kick. She shakes the steel from her palms, then conjures a sword from her inventory that she stabs angrily into her sheath. “Common piece of crap.”

I stifle a smile.

A halo glows over the circle carved into the stone floor. Kenji leans on me as we hobble into the light. When Melinda joins us, the light blinks out, and the room around us disappears.

But we’re not immediately dumped onto the next floor. For a moment, it’s like the levels of the tower have collided. I see our room, filled with shattered swords and a serpent dribbling blood between its mossy scales. I see our room again, now with arrows scattered and scorch marks marring the stone. And then a third time. Clouds laced with lightning blanket the floor. There’s a glimpse of that bastard berserker wailing on the serpent as Ron grapples it around the neck with a rope. I can see Luci and Shota too.

And then it’s over. My eyes open to a new room.

Melinda immediately steps off the dias. “I suppose that answers that. Dave is with your stubborn friend, in this room or somewhere beyond it.”

Kenji’s eyes grow round. “Parallel dimensions…”

“Shit.” The archer can’t reach the apex first.

Where are we? It’s not an arena like the last room. At least not obviously. It’s much more what like you’d picture of a wizard’s tower. A cozy cloistered study, arched bookcases lining the walls, a desk heaped in scrolls, flickering lamplight, creaking wooden floors, towers of tomes, loose parchments, spherical astrolabes hanging from the ceiling, sundials and sextants and other astronomical instruments scattered about.

Despite the dust and cobwebs, there’s a sense of life here. A draft from nowhere rifles the pages of an open tome. The astrolabe rotates above us. Something ticks, though I don’t know what.

I check out the corners, the ceiling, the floor. Nothing triggers my detection. No traps. No hidey-holes for monsters, as far as I can see.

The most obvious game-y object appears to be an old hardwood box wrapped in hammered iron with three distinct keyholes. I jostle the lid just in case, but it’s firmly set. None of us have the strength stats to just break it, and even if we did, we’d probably just be punished for it.

I can feel my pulse racing. We don’t have time for this. “So what the hell do we do here?” I ask.

Kenji, oblivious to any kind of danger, excitedly toddles around the room like a kid in a comic bookstore, grabbing parchments, fiddling with a compass, and smiling at his own reflection in a scrying bowl. I think we could leave him here, and he’d be perfectly happy.

Meanwhile, Melinda saunters toward a large blocky desk in visible disgust. She traces a finger along the surface of a book, then flicks a speck of dust from her finger. “If I have to read every book in this room in search of some pathetic clue, I’m going to jump out the window.”

“Bad luck for both of us. There are no windows.”

“I’ll persevere.”

Melinda deflates into a chair. Wincing, she fishes something out from under her and and tosses it across the desk. It’s a bronze key. “That mean anything to you?”

“The chest.” I pluck the key from the desk. It’s inscribed with a four. “Kenji, try this in the locks.”

The kid obediently scurries over to the locked chest. Squatting, he jiggles the key in each of the locks multiple times, well past the point that failure has become obvious. “It doesn’t work.”

“Then there have to be more keys.”

Kenji and I immediately set to rifling through the room. There’s a key in a vase, another tied to a scroll. At the desk, Melinda grudgingly opens a few drawers. She drops a key into the growing pile.

“I- I think I found something else,” Kenji says, idling next to small square table. He totters hesitantly from one foot to the other.

“Yeah, what is it?” I prompt.

“Oh. Right. Here.” He picks up a wooden paddle. There’s a parchment tacked to it, like a medieval clipboard.

“Hold still.”

“Sorry.”

In the dim light, it’s hard to see. Grabbing an iron lantern off the floor, I angle the smokey orange light toward the page. It’s almost entirely blank aside from three drawn shapes: a triangle with a curved bottom, a circle, and a transparent cube.

“Don’t these look like symbols?” says Kenji. “I think… I think it’s a puzzle.”

Drilling a knuckle into her temple, Melinda groans. “I had the horrible dissatisfaction of attending one of these for my sister’s bachelorette party.”

“One- one of what?” asks Kenji.

She sighs and says bitterly, “An escape room.”

I stare at her for a moment. Then I burst out laughing. “That’s where you draw the line? An escape room?”

“If you were familiar with my sister’s friends, you’d understand.”

“Well, I’ve never done one before. But if it comes down to who you’re with…”

Kenji grins, somehow showing every one of his teeth. “I love escape rooms.”

Melinda nearly chokes.

“Okay, give me that.” I snatch the clipboard from him and aim the parchment at the lantern. “What have we got. Curvy triangle thing, circle, cube…”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“I don’t think that’s a triangle,” says Kenji. “It looks like, um, I don’t know what it’s called…”

“A sextant. There’s one on the desk.”

With glee, Kenji bounds across the room and swipes the sextant off the desk. Peering through the telescope, he gasps. “There’s a number on the lens. A three!”

Melinda groans like she’s going to die.

“Alright.” I say. “Circle, what could a circle be…”

“The sundial. No… Oh, there’s a bowl over there!” Kenji exclaims, racing to the other side. Grabbing the scrying bowl, he splashes the water into a plant. “A seven!”

“Easy enough. The last is a cube.”

With a grunt, Melinda kicks in the general direction of a bookshelf where there sits a small glass box. She makes no move to retrieve it, so I do the honors. Inside the box is a dried flower, and written on one of the petals is the number five.

“Three, five, and seven,” I say. I rummage through the keys. “We have three, four, six, and nine. We need to find the rest.”

Melinda lolls her head over the back of the chair.

After another few minutes, we manage to add another two keys to our collection. When Kenji finds a third in a hollowed out book, I start to panic that we’re going to need to look through another hundred in order to find the key we need. Luckily, we find it just chilling on a shelf.

With the three required keys, we insert them in the order of the symbols: three, seven and five. As the keys turn, we’re met with a satisfying trio of clicks. I throw back the lid.

“Dammit.” I scoop up a pile of placards, each picturing a portrait of a different man. On the back of each placard is a word. “Anyone know Latin?”

Melinda stands. “I’ll start making a window.”

Twenty minutes later, I’m teetering on a ladder, yanking books off the shelf and casting them into a papery mess strewn across the floor. The placards all feature an image of a man with a name scripted underneath, and all of those names share the same surname: Ó Cuilinn, including one very familiar Laserian Ó Cuilinn. So I figure these guys must be his father and grandfather and so on, meaning we need to find a book or scroll detailing his family history. Put the portraits in order, flip ‘em around, and we get the latin phrase that will teleport us out of here.

Which sucks, because Melinda shared a fun lil’ bit of trivia with us: Dave knows a smattering of Latin, meaning he may be able to skip this step.

So yeah, I’m freaking out a little. I’m no longer terribly worried about Melinda stabbing me in the back, though of course, I’m keeping an eye on her anyways. And I’m wary not to trust Kenji either, even if he seems as affable and loyal as a golden retriever.

However, the mere existence of that murderous prick somewhere in this tower is setting me right there on the edge. If his group reaches the top first, then he’ll either gun for the big bad or try to kill Elias. Either way, it’s lose-lose.

The mitigating factor there is the pair of boys from the Japanese party. However, I can’t predict how they’ll behave. They may go for the monster. They may help Elias. They may help Dave. Or maybe they’ll just sit this one out. I have no idea.

If, instead, Luci’s group reaches the top first - which I highly doubt - then they’ll be trapped up there with Shota and the berserker with the axe. I’m guessing the berserker will do what he can to stall Ron and Luci until Dave arrives. He won’t be able to take them both out, and he likely won’t be able to deal the final blow to the boss either.

I don’t know what will happen, and it’s killing me. I need to be there. I can’t protect them if I’m not. Is it the soundest strategy to join the fight, knowing I’m bringing Melinda with me? Maybe not. But I simply can’t stomach the idea of arriving in the boss room to find the visa quest lost or my party bleeding out on the floor.

I told Luci that it does no good to imagine a loved one’s death. It’s grief in advance, and no amount of preemptive grieving will stifle the onslaught of sorrow you’ll feel if something actually goes wrong. So there’s no point, I told her. Distract yourself. Prepare for what you can.

Yet I can still see them. Their bodies contorted. Faces pale. Eyes open, lifeless.

I’ll do anything to ensure that doesn’t happen.

“Found it!” Kenji waggles a book in my direction.

And so begins the painstaking journey of lining up Sorcerer Laserian’s ancestry. The book doesn’t have a list or pictures, nor does it go in order, and it’s about as long-winded as the sorcerer himself. We sit on the floor, placards fanned out, as Kenji thumbs through the pages in search of the names we need.

“May I introduce Exhibit K as to why I dislike escape rooms,” says Melinda.

“Boring clues?” I suggest.

“The puzzle in which one man solves it and the rest sit with their thumbs up their asses.”

“You make it sound like you’ve done more than one.”

“None voluntarily, I promise. They’re worse when you’re sober.”

“Lugaid is third,” announces Kenji. He continues to skim.

“Loo-gade,” I snort. Probably butchering the name there. I shuffle the placard into position. “You’re right. This would be better with a drink.”

“What’s your poison?”

“Beer. Dark. You?”

Closing her eyes, she pinches her lips and hums. “Lemon ginger martini. Though I won’t lie. I’d down a bucket of mouthwash if I had to.”

“Yeah, I feel that.”

Melinda stretches, then cracks her knuckles. “I don’t miss it, you know.”

“Alcohol?”

“No. God, no. Everything else.”

“I miss sleep. But yeah, otherwise.” I pick at Laserian’s placard, drawing him a little mustache with my finger. “What’d you do?”

“Risk compliance manager for the Regal Bank of America,” she says with feigned gravitas. “New Jersey. You?”

“I was in law. A student. But my fiancé died and I guess I planned on, uh…” I point a finger to my temple and shoot. “Didn’t get around to it though. I suppose we’re the lucky ones. Not missing it.”

“I assume that’s what they’re culling for.”

“What, adaptability? Resilience?”

“Resignation.”

A stubborn lock of hair hangs over her eyes. She blows at it, then tucks it behind her ear. Her nails still have a few marks of polish left on them. A french manicure.

As soon as we’re done with this puzzle, I’ll have to kill her.

“Um, Conall is next,” Kenji says. He hesitantly leans over and prods the right portrait into the line.

I could do it right now, though if we lose the book in the crossfire, we could be stuck here for a rather long time. I should wait.

Or maybe I just want to wait? She seems so… human. I mean, a bitch, for sure but… do I want to kill her? I don’t want to kill anyone. Hell, before this whole end-of-the-world crap, I’d never even punched someone. I’m more than willing to make an exception for Dave. He’s a threat, and he’s already laid out his intent quite explicitly. But Melinda… why is she even with that asshole?

I turn to her. “Hey, why are you with that asshole?”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, here we go. I knew you wouldn’t let it rest.”

“You tried to charm me the first time we met.”

“It didn’t work obviously.”

“And you tried to stop him from hurting Luci. You don’t seem like the murderous type.”

“And Dave does, so that makes him worse, does it?”

“Well…”

“But there’s good in me, so I should join your plucky band and callously leave behind my own party because, gosh darnit, you’re just so good, is that it?” she scoffs. “Please. You’re smarter than that. You know who you are. You know what this game is. We simply reached that conclusion first.”

“It doesn’t always have to be that way though.”

“This time it did.”

“You could ditch the visa quest. Teleport to a new region right after this one.”

“So could you.”

I pause. “I can’t put Luci through that.”

“Sounds like an excuse.” She lets out a long, even breath. “I’m with him because he doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t judge. He saved me more than once. If I’m being honest, I believe my chances are better at his side. He knows what he’s doing. Why are you with your party?”

“I guess… because I know what I’m doing.”

“If that’s the case, then you’ll have to get on his level sooner rather than later. At least someone in your party will.”

“Fee-ah-kra?” Kenji sounds out. “Fiachra. They’re last.”

I move the placard into place. Together, we flip over the pieces to reveal a single latin phrase.

Final piece of the puzzle. My hand rests on the grip of my dagger.

Time’s up.