We spent the next two days in an endless cycle of eating, grinding, and sleeping.

Two new breeds of chimera appeared as we delved further into the Labyrinth: A scorpion goat hybrid with horns, arachnoid form, and stinger to match; and an eight-legged vehicle of death called a Sea Locust Chicken Chimera that sported a rooster’s head affixed to its segmented body.

Naturally, the sea locust chickens proved to be the deadlier of the two.

A brood of them, made up of five specimens, rushed us in a corridor. Despite lacking the advantage of a surprise, they forced us back in seconds with painful wounds to show for it.

“The hell?” Paz said, prying himself out of a wall. He had been knocked headfirst into it, courtesy of a rocket punch from a chimera’s forelimbs.

I dodged around a similar strike, struggling to see past the blood that obscured my vision. True to form, the Sea Locust Chickens were relentless in attack. A blow to the head had earlier emptied the last of my HP and left a deep cut over my eyelid.

Even as I dodged the supersonic punches, one chimera rushed at me with its large beak and gnaw to tear off my head. I slapped its beak aside at the last minute and earned three gashes across the chest.

The sea locust chicken brandished its forelegs, all of which were equipped with claws. And, here I was thinking that its forearms and beak were the only weapons I needed to fear.

Oh, fuck this.

“Paz! Cover me,” I said and slipped into the darkness. [Fear Aura] filled the corridor on my command.

I typically refrained from activating it while [Dark Stalker] was active, for fear of giving away my position. However, I’d since learned that my non-damaging abilities didn’t disrupt [Dark Stalker]. If anything, they were strengthened by it.

Using [Fear Aura] from the safety of the shadows improved its potency, enough that I could [Dismay] enemies who had previously resisted.

The sea locust chickens were such enemies, and they froze in terror the instant they sensed my aura. Paz and Nicola erupted in violence, tearing the chimeras apart in the brief window I had granted.

“Game, set, and match,” Paz said, cracking the skull of a twitching chimera with one end of his jägerstock.

“Where did you learn that phrase?” I asked, picking my way around the corpses.

The rising difficulty of the chimeras suggested that we had gotten to the more dangerous parts of the Labyrinth, though we still didn’t gain XP at a rate I would have preferred.

Paz scratched his chin. “Now that you mention it, I don’t really remember. I think I picked it up in a tome or something of the sort.”

A tome? That sounded probable. If other Migrant Souls had visited Vizhima before my arrival, a few of them could have written books about their experiences.

Paz didn’t seem interested in elaborating, so I poked at the wounds on my chest, noting how my jerkin had gotten ripped up in the process. Useless regular armor.

Nicola hummed with satisfaction and wiped the sweat from her brow. “I feel a lot closer to level twenty.”

“Same,” I said. “Any idea what kind of technique you’d like to unlock?”

She fell into deep thought. “[Mage Armor] or [Magic Hand]. Both are skills that would allow me another way to defend myself whenever I run out of MP.”

Paz snorted. “Skills, like melee attacks, rely on the value of your physical damage modifiers, and most Mages ignore physicals early on in favor of Magic Intellect and Magicka. You’re honestly better off focusing on abilities.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Nicola said with a smile, pleased to know something that Paz didn’t for the first time in a while.

“Explain.”

Nicola’s smile deepened. “It works that way for other classes. However, casters as a rule use fighting styles that force their damage-dealing skills to rely on Magic Intellect rather than Strength. We still depend on Strength for melee attacks, but the majority of our skills aren’t beholden to it.”

I mulled over her words. “So, in my case where my melee attacks are modified by both Strength and Dexterity . . .”

“Your damage-dealing skills would do the same,” Nicola said. “Rogues and Skirmishers outpace every other class in the damage department for a reason. No one else can leverage the benefits of two attributes in both skills and melee.”

“A Beast Rider can,” Paz said, “with the right template.”

“True. But, Beast Riders famously have a lot to juggle in terms of stat allocation.” Nicola spun her staff. “I won’t always have you two to watch my back. If I must survive as a ranker, I should be able to defend myself against a variety of builds. Collecting more skills would do me a world of good.”

“Not as much as improving your usefulness in a melee,” Paz teased. “But, I guess casters need a weakness to prevent them from melting everyone else.”

We looted the chimeras and continued down the corridor.

“Safe room up ahead,” I announced with a sigh.

The safe room appeared on the [Map] as a chamber with a cleft in the wall, a typical designation for rooms in the Labyrinth. I could wait long enough to reach it and recover HP via [Meditation], but goddammit, my injuries stung. And, many other things could kill me in that short distance.

Paz’s bored drawl cut through my musing. “Hopefully, you’re wrong, and that safe room turns out to be a boss’ chamber in disguise. We could use a few more boss battles.”

“And, you could use,” I said through gritted teeth, “a zipper over your mouth. Try not to jinx this, okay?”

Still, there was no denying the probability of his words, so I chugged a health potion in preparation for the worst. The wounds on my forehead and chest receded, forcing a sigh of bliss out of my lips. They left the faintest hint of scar tissue on my skin, though this was normal, according to Nicola, and I healed better than most humans.

We kept moving in silence until we spied a T-junction at the end of a long hallway. A sturdy wooden door stood across the gap from us, marking the entrance of the safe room. It bore a large insignia on its wooden surface that glowed brightly in the lurid hues of the Labyrinth.

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Paz inspected the insignia from the distance which my elven sight made out to be some kind of chest.

“That’s not a safe room,” Paz said. “That’s an item room. We’ve hit the jackpot!”

“Are you sure—?” I started.

But, Paz had already started bounding for the door. No sooner had he begun than he screeched to a halt and raised a hand in warning. “Trap.”

The corridor seemed harmless to me. “How can you tell?”

“Magic residue. I’m sensitive to this kind of aura.”

Because of [Dragon Touched], huh?

“Not just you,” Nicola said, stopping beside him. “It’s the same for all casters. There’s a power in the air here, the kind you’d expect from active magic.”

“Enchantments,” Paz growled.

“No,” Nicola corrected. “Runes. Notice the movement of the aura. The magic here is static, not cyclical. That’s typically proof of a Runecaster’s work.”

I looked at the corridor again. It honestly felt no different from the other corridors we had passed. On a whim, I plucked a copper coin from out of my inventory and flicked it onto our path.

The coin bounced once . . . twice . . . and then, it vanished—just like that, leaving a gleaming inscription of blue on the tile wherein it landed.

“Disintegration?” I choked.

Paz narrowed his eyes. “No. Something different . . .”

“Teleportation,” Nicola said with a finality. “That’s among the rarest of runes. Seeing as they are invisible to the naked eye, it would mean they were etched beneath the stone.”

“Careful,” I said. “We have no way to know for certain. The coin bounced a few times after I’d thrown it. Possible delay of the onset of magic?”

“Not delayed”—Paz tossed another coin down the corridor. It vanished the instant it landed. “Notice how the tile responsible for the deed lights up after the fact. I’d wager that there’s an equal number of marked and unmarked tiles in that space. But, without a divination technique, there’s no way to tell until one of us has been teleported.”

Crap. “What are we waiting for then, Nicola? Use your eye-thingy.”

“Excuse you?” She squawked. “My [Eldritch Eyeball] may be advanced enough to spot residual Eros and see in the dark. But, it can’t uncover magic traps. Not at its current tier, at least.”

Paz shook his head. “Useless.”

I intervened before they could devolve into another one of their fights. “We should probably abandon the item room, then. We are not getting through fifty meters of guesswork unscathed.”

“No way!” Paz said. “We’re not giving this up. The Way-keeping loot might as well be gutter trash when compared to the hoard in item rooms. We can’t afford to lose this chance.”

“We can’t afford to die either, Paz.”

“I know . . . But, there has to be a way. You’ve not seen the interior of an item room, Damien. You can’t fathom what you are about to give up.”

And, you can?

Once again, Paz’s spoken experience clashed with his actual power level. Regardless of my reservations, he had managed to sway me, because if we failed to find the dungeon egg, stealing as much loot as we could from the Labyrinth could provide a lucrative alternative.

“Okay,” I conceded. “We will try another route. If we fail to reach the item room, however, that’s the end of that. I doubt there’s anything good waiting at the end of those boobytraps. And, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to find out.”

“Fine by me,” Paz said. “You’ll be sure to thank me later. Now, forward, scout! Find us a new way through the maze.”

We did as he requested.

I set a waypoint on [Map] to keep us on track, yet we failed to find our way back to the item room until three hours had passed.

We returned to the T-junction via one of the other corridors after navigating a dizzying series of turns.

Paz checked the hallway for traps and then proceeded to kick the door open. He spread his arms and beckoned us to follow. “Feast your eyes, you bloody wankers, on the kind of rare loot that can only be found here in the Labyrinth. Stuff your inventories until they are full to bursting—!”

An utterly wrecked room rose to greet us.

Paz sputtered to a stop. “Huh?”

Huh was right. What once had been an item room stacked to overflowing now stood bare and disheveled like the aftermath of a tornado. Mannequins lay dashed against the wall, some with limbs divorced from the rest of their body. Wooden splinters peppered the ground: the remains of storage chests that had been bashed open.

A weapons rack keeled dangerously close to the door, but even with the blatant signs of violence, my mind fixated on only one feature:

“The items are gone?”

“Bastards,” Paz spat under his breath. “Someone got here before us.”

“Some people,” Nicola said, “And, judging by the look of things, the meeting didn’t end well for one of the groups.” She gestured at bloodstains in a corner of the room—a detail I had earlier missed.

“Goddammit,” Paz growled. “If I find who did this, I’d be sure to kill them.”

“If you can,” I said with an eye roll. “Whoever survived this battle won’t make for an easy kill.”

Nicola studied the carnage. “Shouldn’t you consider it fortunate that we arrived when we did? Any earlier, and we could have been the bloodstains on the floor.”

Paz ignored her and collapsed to his knees. “This bounty should have been ours!”

“There, there, big guy,” I said, patting his shoulder. “We’ll find some other hoard waiting to be looted. I’m sure there are many more in the dungeon.”

“We spent hours making our way here, Damien. Hours.”

Nicola shook her head at him and walked out of the door. She ran back in with an ashen face. “Um, guys. You might want to see this . . .”

“What?”

“Chimeras! A whole bunch of them. Headed this way!”

No sooner had she spoken than a Sea Locust Chicken Chimera barged into the room. Her [Summon Tentacle] spell tripped it up, and I decapitated the segmented mass of murder without a second thought.

“No way,” I said. “They can enter dungeon rooms now?”

“This one has been emptied,” Paz said, still kneeling listlessly on the ground. “It has lost its protection.”

“More incoming,” Nicola cried. “Spread out!”

Two more Sea Locust Chickens scuttled through the open door, keeping low to the ground. The fight didn’t proceed as easily the second time around. A hammer punch from one chimera launched me into a wall, despite being blocked. The second chimera dodged Nicola’s spell and flew straight for Paz.

[Fear Aura].

The chickens stopped short in their tracks, enabling their dismemberment after a short but vicious exchange.

Paz peeked out of the door jamb, done with his funk. “Um, how many chimeras did you count when you looked, Nicola?”

“About ten. Why?”

“Ten?” Paz chuckled. “You might want to drink some potions. This is about to get ugly.”

I ducked beneath his arm and peeked into the corridor.

The mad clucking gave it away.

An entire army of Sea Locust Chickens barreled down the path, scuttling toward us like a squawking, writhing, boiling mass of death. I counted over twenty chimeras before I fell back into the room, struggling to tug mana and stamina potions out of my inventory.

“Shit!” Paz said, retreating from the doorjamb. “It’s a horde. Spawned right on top of us too. I think they are being led by an Alpha.”

“An Alpha chicken?” I stammered, unable to wrap my head around the incredulity of it. “I’m guessing that is worse?”

Paz’s answer was drowned out by a roar—louder even than the cacophony of clucks.

“Well, Damien,” he yelled. “You’re in luck. What was that phrase you used again? The one about fucking around?”

“Not the right time, Paz!”

“Well, we’ve done the first bit. Find out came calling a little too early. Brace yourselves!”