“You guys have a really weird definition of ‘fun,’” Aaron observed.
“No, this will actually be pretty cool,” Albert replied, leading Aaron to one of the treadmill rooms.
“We’re going to test your endurance, agility, and reflexes,” Kiara said. “Again, just to establish a baseline.”
“I’m just going to run on the treadmill?”
Griffin snorted. “Not quite. Remember how Albert said these weren’t far from being like those holodecks on Star Trek? You’re going to be doing a kind of obstacle course. Just follow the prompts and try not to second guess your reactions; we want to get an idea of where you struggle as much as anything else so we know where to put our focus.”
That was one hell of a sales pitch for running on a treadmill, Aaron thought. Way more effective than anything about being skinny or heart healthy or whatever the hell.
Aaron stepped into the treadmill room and the door was shut behind him. For a few seconds, the walls remained the same vaguely beige padding he’d seen on the tour earlier. Then large words appeared on each of them in letters six inches high.
< Move to the center of the room. >
He didn’t need to be told twice, so he walked over to the middle of the room. It would have only been an estimated middle, except a small section of the floor tiles had changed color to let him know where the exact center was.
Walking on the omnidirectional floor was a little unusual. It was almost like a cobbled path, except the tiles felt a bit softer under his feet and the height was more evenly distributed.
As soon as he reached the marked tiles in the center of the room, the text on the wall changed.
< Beginning exercise in... >
< 3... >
< 2... >
< 1... >
The lights in the treadmill went out, plunging the small room into darkness. In the few seconds before they came back, Aaron realized he could vaguely see the floor and walls. That was odd. Or was it?
He hadn’t actually been in total darkness since the lake back in Yellowstone and he had been able to see for a few feet even then. Tia had said there were a lot of innate powers drakus could develop, maybe low-light or darkvision was one Aaron had. He’d have to test that out at some point in the near future.
Whatever illusion magic was at work in the treadmill activated and Aaron’s surroundings changed. He was in some kind of hallway or tunnel. It was several hundred feet long and appeared to be made almost entirely of metal. Thick beams framed the walls at sharp angles and the floor was a mesh of heavy grating. Small panels of slowly flashing lights lined the corridor.
This really is kinda awesome, he thought. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was a spaceship from some kind of gritty sci-fi thriller.
No sooner had that thought crossed Aaron’s mind than the corridor was filled with the unmistakable sounds of an explosion. It came from behind him and Aaron flinched terribly, stumbling forward a few steps before his rational brain reminded him this was all an illusion.
When he turned to examine the corridor behind him, Aaron saw a plume of fire bursting into the corridor about a hundred feet away. It was real impressive sci-fi shit, a billowing, roiling cloud of purple flame that looked more like a fluid than fire.
A smile formed on his face at the awesome spectacle, but it only lasted a second — the plasma fire was quickly heading in his direction and he could actually feel the heat from it, even from so far away.
So maybe not entirely illusory, Aaron thought, turning to run.
He’d never been much of a runner. He could do okay with quick sprints even if he was never the fastest, but he’d always hated the act of running itself and had never really gotten over it. His form was awful. Still, as the heat grew more intense behind him, Aaron pushed himself to go as fast as he could.
He hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when one of the walls ahead burst in a shower of sparks. Part of one of the beams welded to the wall came loose and swung towards him at just about the right height to hit him in the gut. Before he could second guess himself, Aaron directed his will into his legs and leapt forwards.
He cleared the swinging beam, but he also smacked into the padded wall face first and crumpled to the floor in a tangled heap of his own limbs.
“What the fuck?” he shouted.
As he scrambled back to his feet, he noticed that the flames that had been chasing him weren’t quite as… roiling as they had been. In fact, they looked like they were frozen in time. And the support beam wasn’t moving anymore, either, it was just suspended improbably in mid-swing.
“What the fuck?” he said again, gingerly touching his nose to see if he’d banged it up too badly hitting the wall.
The door of the treadmill opened, revealing Albert, Griffin, and Kiara. They all started firing off questions and comments at the same time.
“Holy shit, that was hilarious and dope,” Albert cheered.
“Are you okay?” Kiara asked.
“Damn, dude, that was a great jump,” Griffin exclaimed, a huge smile on his face. “And without practice, too!”
Albert was chuckling quietly. “I didn’t think there was any chance you could hit the wall on your first run.”
“Me neither,” Griffin agreed.
“You’ve got to be mindful of your movements,” Kiara said, her tone bordering somewhere between her normal bossy voice and outright scolding. “The tiles can only adjust based on where you’re standing.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
She came into the room fully to examine his nose for any damage from the impact and generally be a mother hen. Aaron tried to take it in stride. He’d been pretty embarrassed when the door opened at first, but the three drakus had been so enthusiastic it was hard to feel like they were really laughing at him. Even if Albert pretty obviously was, it felt more like friendly teasing than mockery.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he told Kiara. “More surprised than anything else.”
“You were doing pretty good, even if you hesitated at first,” Griffin observed.
“For sure,” Albert agreed. “I was looking forward to seeing how you’d do once you got into the rhythm.”
Kiara gave Aaron a measuring look, as if she were considering the many hidden dangers of a padded room. “Do you want to try again? We have other scenarios or you can do that same one.”
Aaron took a quick breath, blew it out, and pushed against the wall. He slid over the omnidirectional tiles until he was back near the center of the room.
“Let’s go again,” he said. “And surprise me.”
“Remember to be mindful of your positioning if you jump or dive or anything,” Kiara reminded him again as they closed the door. “If your feet lose contact with the floor, your face might make contact with the wall.”
Aaron rolled his eyes as he prepared himself for another round on the treadmill, although it wasn’t without a bit of fondness at Kiara’s well-intentioned nagging. He took a breath and waited for the exercise to start anew.
The new illusory setting was about as far from the industrial, futuristic space station corridor as it could be. A medium-sized room, the walls were made of large, irregular stones laid with cyclopean masonry so that they were flush against each other. Time had worn grooves into the space between the bricks, which had been filled by the accumulation of dirt, moss, and dried roots.
Vaguely humanoid faces were carved into many of the stones, recognizable largely by the deeper carvings in place of their eyes and mouths. The room had a distinct slant to it, not so much it endangered his footing but enough that it was noticeable.
There’s something really familiar about this room, Aaron thought. Why in the world do I feel like there should be a bag of sand involved?
A faint rumble interrupted his musing. It was coming from behind him — because of course it was — and from somewhere above. Aaron poised himself, ready to move in any direction as he turned to look at the source of the disturbance.
At first, he didn’t see anything of note. The room he was in continued into a hallway with similar eerie stone faces carved into the walls. The passage from the room to the hall was huge, an open stone arch maybe twenty feet across and just as high.
The rumbling grew louder, closer, and small tremors began to shake the stone floor beneath his feet. That was not a good sign. Clearly Aaron was missing something.
He dithered on the spot for a moment. He should probably start moving to the hallway, but what if that was the trap? He’d been told not to second guess himself, but it just seemed so obvious that he couldn’t get himself to commit.
A shower of dirt and loose gravel fell down onto Aaron from above, pelting him on the head and shoulders. He looked up for the first time since the illusion formed and saw a massive chute, nearly as large as the room itself, that was cut into the earth at a steep angle.
And there, careening down the slope, was the source of the noise — a boulder fifteen or twenty feet across, no more than fifty feet away, and rapidly picking up speed.
“Shit!” Aaron exclaimed, throwing himself toward the hallway as fast as he could.
As he passed through the arch, he felt one of the flagstones beneath his feet sink into the floor. It was hardly any movement, but it was like the key to a lock. It was the last bit needed for his brain to finally grab all the disparate information he’d picked up since the scenario started and flood his thoughts as it made connections between them, finally reaching a conclusion.
Aaron stopped dead in his tracks just as a column of thin metal spikes shot out of the wall on either side of the hallway. If he hadn’t stopped, they would have skewered him from ankles to eyebrows. He could hear the rolling stone rushing closer from ahead.
Well now that slant of the room makes sense, he realized. That rock’s going to smash into the floor then roll right down this damn hallway. Oh, that’s a very nasty little change that makes the trap way more dangerous.
“You cheat, Doctor Jones!” he called out as he started to run again.
This time he paid more attention to the stone tiles in the floors. It had been a long time since he saw the movie he was thinking of, but he was pretty sure the diamond pattern cut into the square tiles were pressure plates. If he could avoid stepping on those, then he shouldn’t have to worry about any more traps.
He hadn’t taken more than a couple ginger steps when the boulder slammed into the chamber he’d just left. A shockwave of dust and grit plumed out into the hallway, showering Aaron as he turned to look over his shoulder. Sure enough, it had filled most of the room and, thanks to the angle of the floor, was already starting to tilt in his direction. Not good. Very not good!
Aaron resumed running.
He couldn’t watch his footing as much as he wanted, but his choice was between potentially getting nailed by some wacky trap or definitely getting plastered by however many tons a room-sized boulder weighed. He might be ridiculously strong, but Albert was right: he wasn’t anywhere near as strong as a superhero. Not a Hulk, or even a Spider-Man.
Spike traps weren’t the only obstacle waiting for Aaron. He avoided setting anything off for the first ten or fifteen feet, but when he finally did put a foot down in the wrong place a thick piece of lumber swung out of the wall. It was more than a foot wide and large chunks of sharpened obsidian were embedded in its body. It swung right for his thighs.
He remembered Kiara’s warning right before he jumped. Instead of fully diving, he tried to do a kind of midair somersault. If it weren’t for the physical changes he’d gained from the Emergence, he would have almost certainly faceplanted trying that. Thankfully, he managed to clear the bladed trunk trap and hit the ground on his shoulder.
It was an odd sensation. His hands, forearms, and back were more sensitive to touch than his feet, especially since they weren’t protected by shoe soles. He could feel the treadmill tiles under the illusory stone and experience the super weird feeling of the tiles rolling to keep him in roughly the same position as he landed.
Aaron popped back up onto his feet with a smile on his face. He’d gotten caught up in the amazing magic of the treadmill and momentarily forgotten it was all just an illusion. It was a lot easier to enjoy the experience thinking of it as a harmless game instead of worrying about being smooshed by a humongous boulder.
He was able to avoid activating more traps for another ten or fifteen feet, then he got distracted again. Even knowing the boulder chasing him was fake, it was still exhilarating and he made the mistake of looking back over his shoulder to see how far away it was. There was a bit of space between them, which was good and got Aaron to relax a little. But because he wasn’t paying as much attention as he should have been, he stepped on one of the pressure plates in the floor.
A log dropped out of the ceiling, held by thinner wooden frames wrapped in thick, coarse twine. The log was almost as wide as the entire hallway and swung like a pendulum right at him. It was little more than a crude swinging trap meant to knock people back into other traps — there weren’t even sharpened rocks embedded into it! — but it caught Aaron by surprise and hit him square in the face.
The moment of impact was one of profound cognitive dissonance, expectation clashing into reality to catastrophic effect.
Aaron expected the log to pass right through him, the same as any other holographic or light-based technology he’d ever seen. He thought the magic might make it slightly uncomfortable, the same way the plasma flames in the space scenario had produced heat.
What happened was a blunt force slammed into his head, lifting him clean off his feet and flipping him over. He landed on his shoulders before he could do more than tuck his chin and his feet kept going, the momentum of the fall carrying him into a full roll. He saw the boulder — upside down, naturally — barreling down on him for a split second before he flopped over, crashing into the floor with his knees.
“Shit!”
Without thinking, Aaron lifted himself onto his hands and the balls of his feet, trying to run on all fours like this was just an inconvenient high school football drill. He didn’t know how hard that boulder would hit and didn’t really want to find out.
Unfortunately, the log trap had waylaid him long enough to eat up all the distance between Aaron and the rock, so it was on top of him before he could crawl more than a couple steps.
The last thought he had before the stone rolled over him was, Shitshitshit!