The catacomb tunnels were free of spiderwebs, and while Jace knew everything was computer generated, he also knew Gandhi paid attention to details. He didn’t think they would find any spiders, insects, or any other living creatures to fight. The feeling of death in the air was so overwhelming that even Snowy seemed on edge. Nothing was alive down here.
It wasn’t long before they got to the first test.
The tunnel exited onto a small landing on the side of a stone cliff. Jace peered about and saw only impenetrable darkness in all directions but straight ahead. It didn’t feel like they had descended that far below the Academy, but even straight up, all that could be seen was inky blackness. Before them, a narrow metal walkway extended half the distance of a chasm to a circular dais suspended by nothing over nothing. The platform had a shimmering dome, which cast the only light in the cavern, an eerie glow that illuminated 50 feet in every direction. Their ledge blended into the sheer stone wall to their left and right, barely leaving enough room for a party of four to stand side-by-side.
The width of the chasm was a little over 100 feet, and Jace saw another walkway retracted on the far side that, if extended, would reach the platform in the middle. Jace understood the basic layout: walk to the floating island, solve a riddle, and the other walkway would extend, allowing them to cross the distance. It was possible someone could jump fifty feet in the game, but he couldn’t, and he doubted any level 9 character could.
{How much do you want me to tell you?} Gracie asked as Jace moved to check the bridge’s stability. His illusion necklace had expired, and he didn’t waste mana to reset it. If it was strong enough to support a standard party of four adventurers, he was sure it could hold one orc, but he wasn’t willing to take too many chances.
“Tell me everything,” Jace replied. “Failure means death, so there is no reason to mess around. I’ve solved plenty of puzzles on my own. No reason to bring unnecessary pride into this.”
{Sure,} she agreed. {The platform you see ahead of you is supported by mana. Once you step on it, the mana begins to decrease. You have about 5-10 minutes. People have reported different times, which might be based on difficulty settings. You should assume we will have five. The undead stone is locked in a pedestal in the center of the dais, similar to the setup in your stronghold that secures the level 50 crystal. To free it, you need to solve a puzzle comprised of seven different shapes in seven different colors, each charged with seven different levels of mana. The shapes have 1-7 sides, the colors are the seven in the rainbow, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet, and they are charged with mana in increments of 1 up to 7. The goal is to put them in sequence, so all three characteristics are in some kind of order. Typically, this means that one aspect is ascending, the other is descending, and the third has the odds and evens separated with an odd in the middle. The trick is that the shapes are always different colors, and the mana charges are always different, so I can’t tell you the order; you need to figure that out.
{After you solve it, you can remove the undead stone. Once you do that, this walkway retracts, and you need to pull a lever to extend the bridge from the other side. This is where it gets tricky. The lever is outside the shimmering dome. There are openings in the shield to access both walkways, but in order to pass through the shield to reach the lever, you need to be undead. To do that, you grip the stone tightly in your hand, and it will suck the life from your arm, then you can reach it through the dome toward the lever. However, to grip the lever, you need all five fingers, and you have to drop the stone. It falls deep into the abyss below and is magically collected by the lich.}
“I assume people have tried everything to keep the stone in their hand while gripping the lever,” Jace said.
{Yes and no,} Gracie replied. {Most people have seconds left after they solve the riddle and don’t waste time trying different things. They’ve read the walkthroughs that say you must drop the stone, so they do it. As you’ve already said, if you mess up, you die, so people aren’t willing to take too many chances. Those that do have time have tried complicated balancing routines or sleight-of-hand tricks, but the stone is the size of a tennis ball, not a coin, and they only get one shot at it because if it falls, it’s over.}
“Once the stone leaves your hand, how does your arm remain undead?”
{To pass through the shield, you need to be undead, and everything that passes through the dome is undead, so your arm stays that way. As you draw it back, it heals.}
“Well, I can’t solve this problem without getting up close and dealing with it.” Jace took a tentative step onto the walkway. It didn’t creak in the slightest. He strode purposefully out over the terrifying drop, with Snowy and Esther following in single file. Jace paused as he was about to step onto the 25-foot platform, which looked like a massive collection of hexagonal paver stones. “The timer starts when we step onto the platform?”
{Yes,} Gracie answered. {No point in leaving anyone on the walkway. It will retract when you pull the stone and doesn’t save you time.}
Jace nodded and walked onto the stones. They gave slightly under his weight as if tied together with bungee cords, but he trusted they would hold. As a stone shaman, he could easily reach into the hexagons and read their mana total: 64. “Tell me when a minute has passed,” he told his operator.
He stepped around the pedestal in the center and felt a shudder pass through him as the obsidian sphere suspended there emanated negative energy. Behind him, Esther was entranced by the item and stared hard into its glassy depths.
Jace focused instead on the colorful stone tiles on the opposite side of the dais. A circle was the one-sided shape, followed by a half-moon for the two-sided one. The rest were standard geometrical figures, though Jace wasn’t sure the last time he had seen a heptagon. He looked at the green square. It was the middle of the shapes and the color spectrum. When he touched it, he saw it had three mana. The middle shape would have to be odd in some fashion, so he put it in the center of the available stations. This meant the shapes and colors ascended and descended while the mana was separated by odds and evens.
Jace took a moment to appreciate the design of the puzzle. If it weren’t for the mana, Jace could have looked at the shapes, memorized the colors, and then retreated to the walkway to think about it. But since the only way to read the mana values was to hold the tiles, he needed to stand before them, using up time on the suspended floor.
The circle was violet, so it either went at the front of the line or the back. It had two mana. The only way to solve this was to assume that the odds and evens were also in order. He put the circle in the first position. The rest of the shapes went quickly, and he placed the last one when Gracie told him a minute had passed. Jace read the mana in the platform and saw it had dropped by half to 32. That gave him six more minutes.
He walked to the center pedestal and saw Esther staring into the stone as if hypnotized. Snowy sat by and whined. Jace broke the woman’s concentration by placing his enormous hand over the black sphere. Jace wondered if his massive orc fingers might give him an advantage in manipulating the stone and keeping a hold on it while pulling the lever, but it was slippery in his clumsy fingers, and the only way he could hold it at all was to squeeze it tightly in the middle of his palm. Once he took it off the pedestal, the bridge that extended back the way they had come retracted into the cliff wall, leaving them stranded on the island.
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Even with his sensitivity settings turned down, an intense cold crept up his arm. Esther took a step back. “Boss?” she said hesitantly. “What is happening to you?”
She must have sensed something because Jace didn’t see a change right away. As a stone shaman, his orc skin was more gray than green, and the pale complexion of undead flesh was not easily discernable at first. But eventually, his bare arm took on a dry, ghastly appearance that only made Snowy whimper louder. Esther took another step back.
Jace’s arm went numb to his shoulder, and a crackling sound filled the silent cavern when the transformation finished. Jace held his dead arm out, still with total control of it, but with his senses numbed, he had even less dexterity in his fingers than before, and as soon as he lessened pressure on the stone, it slipped from his grasp. It hit his large boot and bounced toward the edge of the platform.
“Snowy!” he shouted, and the wolf bounded after the sphere like a dog chasing a ball. She pounced on the rolling stone, her claws scraping against the floor, trying desperately to stop her momentum before she careened over the edge, but the indestructible dome stopped her cold, not allowing living flesh to pass through. The wolf wouldn’t stay that way for long as the stone started transforming her too. Snowy hastily spat the vile stone back toward Jace before the undead magic took hold, wanting nothing to do with the deathly object.
Jace knelt on the platform and scooped it up into his hands. He tried a few more techniques to manipulate the sphere but had no control, and this was without gripping it tightly, which would give him even less dexterity as his fingers went numb. “This isn’t going to work, is it?”
{Not everything can be beaten,} Gracie advised.
Jace checked the time and found he had five minutes left. “Esther,” he said. “Can I borrow one of your knives?”
Esther didn’t have enough empty accessory slots to bring them forth quickly, but she was in and out of her inventory in a second and offered one of the four weapons to Jace. She had stolen them from the female orcs she had killed when they had secured their stronghold. Topper’s gnomes had upgraded them and set several diamonds into the hilts. Jace didn’t need any of their enchantments; he just needed a sharp edge, and Etcher was too big for the job.
Jace briefly stored the stone in his inventory and then knelt to attack one of his pantlegs with the knife. He managed to cut off an 18-inch section without slicing his leg. The game let him remove the piece without having to take off his boot, and he then handed the hollow length of cloth to Esther. “Can you tie one end in a knot so it makes a small bag?”
The woman had far more dexterity than Jace and finished the simple task in seconds. He took the bag back and cut a slit in the open end parallel with the top about an inch down. The slit was big enough to fit his hand through, and soon the bag was suspended from his wrist, the stiff material hanging wide open.
“Are you telling me no one thought of this?” Jace asked, a bit too much pride in his voice.
{No comment, Einstein,} his operator said.
Jace removed the stone from his inventory and practiced dropping the sphere into the bag. He even let his whole arm go numb, and the stone still dropped straight into the pouch when he released it. Jace looked up from his handy work to find the lever and saw it to his right, just outside the dome. Gripping the stone tightly again so his arm went dead, he walked toward the platform’s edge. The lever was secured to the underside of the dais and extended away from the perimeter before rising to hip height on the orc. It was only two feet outside the dome, accommodating for all but a halfling or gnome.
Moving slowly, Jace sent the knuckles of his hand through the shimmering force field, and they passed through easily. However, once he got to his wrist, the bag wouldn’t go in and only slid up his arm as he continued to reach for the lever. Jace tried to shove the bag through the field with his other hand, but it was no use, and eventually, it slid up to his massive bicep, and the slit tore off and fell to the ground.
{Maybe if you made the bag out of some undead flesh, it would work.}
Jace ignored the sarcastic comment and checked his time. Two minutes left. “What about summoning undead?”
{What about it?} Gracie asked.
“I mean, if you summoned an undead minion, could they reach through the shield and pull the lever without needing the stone?”
{In theory, yes,} Gracie confirmed. {But there are two problems with that. The biggest is that you don’t have any undead summoning spells or skills. And even if you did, the game doesn’t allow players to summon undead minions unless dead bodies are lying around or if you are in a graveyard. There are no dead bodies anywhere near here. You need Dayrin to open the door for you to get down here, so even if you went to the Gershire graveyard first and summoned a zombie, time would run out before you could initiate this quest and get down here. There is a note on the wiki page that someone killed one of their NPC party members to try and summon them back as undead, but their body disappeared and respawned in their stronghold before they could cast the spell.}
Jace thought that through, wondering how Esther would appreciate it if he killed her to try and resurrect her. Then it hit him. “What about a vampire?”
{There are no summon vampire spells,} Gracie replied, but then she grew quiet as she understood what Jace was saying.
The large orc turned to the much shorter woman and extended his hand toward her with the undead stone in the middle of his palm. “Will you try this?”
Esther took several steps in retreat, carelessly enough that her back came up against the opposite edge of the shield. She pressed into it, proving that even though she was a vampire, she wasn’t undead and couldn’t pass through. “But . . . but you freed me from that. I . . . I don’t want to go back.”
“I don’t think it would be permanent,” Jace said.
{Jace,} Gracie’s voice was pleading. {Don’t make her . . .}
“Will it save Draeklynn?” Esther asked, a calm resolve spreading over her face.
Jace was about to retract the offer but hesitated. “I believe so.”
Esther took several quick steps toward the orc and plucked the stone from his hand. Her eyes rolled into her head immediately, and a shiver went through her. She didn’t need to grip the sphere tightly in her hand for the transformation to occur, but the effect raced through her once she did. Her skin took on an ashen hue that sped up her right arm, across her shoulders, and down her body. Jace saw her other arm and legs go pale. Her hair lost its sheen, and her eyes went from blue to black. On her back, bony wings started to protrude through the lacing of her armor, but she shook her head and wriggled her torso, and they shrunk back to nothing. When it was over, and Esther had gained control, she looked at Jace and spoke in a breathless whisper.
“What do you need me to do?”
Now Jace took a step back. Even Snowy had her tail between her legs and moved to the far side of the platform. The orc pointed toward the lever and stammered. “P-pull that l-lever.”
Esther nodded as Jace checked the mana in the platform. There was one left. The vampire glided over the stones, reached effortlessly through the shield with the hand not holding the obsidian sphere, and yanked hard on the metal arm.
Across the chasm, a metal drawbridge extended over the expanse and gently nestled on the platform’s edge. “Hurry,” Jace said, feeling the tension that held the hexagonal stones together weakening every second. The trio raced across the bridge before the platform fell, gasping for breath once they reached the far ledge. At least, two of them were gasping.
Esther calmly appraised the black stone in her hand, rolling it around in her palm with unnatural precision, always keeping it at the edge of her hand without falling off. “I think I’ll keep this,” she said, reaching under her skirt to where the game simulated her gem bag. Once the item was out of her hand, her body shimmered back to life. Esther’s expression changed from calm to hesitant to confident after the change. “Not as bad as I thought it would be,” she said. When Jace gave her a concerned expression, she hastily added, “But I don’t want to have to do that again any time soon.”
A look in Esther’s eyes made Jace doubt her statement, but he hoped he was wrong. “Agreed,” Jace said. “And thank you.” He looked back at the platform, still hanging on with only one mana left and no bridge to the other side. There was no escape back to the surface now. Hopefully, the island would reset once they dealt with the lich. He turned and led his group deeper into the caverns.