Practically as soon as the dungeon opened for the day, Anther rushed in soaking wet. It was a perfectly sunny morning outside, but his long brown hair was dripping and his clothes were damp in several places.

The young elf ignored any strange looks he got as he made a mad dash down to the second floor and up Deorsa’s hill.

“A hole!” he gasped. “You put a hole in the bucket!”

Above a lotus-like flower, a beautiful illusion of a woman appeared. To Anther, it looked like the moon priestess from his village, objectively the most beautiful person he knew.

“Correct,” Deorsa nodded.

“Why are you wet?” Merina asked him. She was simply doing her job sunbathing when Anther arrived like a storm.

He beamed proudly. “I borrowed a barrel from my dad when I went to take a bath in the river this morning. While I was trying to figure out the answer to the riddle, he warned me I was going to put a hole in it if I wasn’t careful. I came straight here after that!”

“You’re hilarious, you know that?”

Deorsa didn’t care for their conversation and continued with the next prompt in a calm voice. “Please provide a new riddle for future challengers.”

Anther blinked when he realized the puzzle wasn’t over yet. He sat down in the grass and folded his arms, humming. At least this was a bright and warm place for his hair and clothes to dry off.

“Oh boy. This is going to take a while.” Merina chuckled, returning to her sunbathing.

***

Eventually, Anther ate a picnic lunch in the dungeon, courtesy of Archimedes, and he finally came up with a riddle to offer the Nymph.

“Okay, I’ve got one. What word is always spelled wrong?” He paused for dramatic effect, then grinned. “The answer is “wrong”. Get it?”

“Acceptable,” Deorsa nodded. “You are permitted to enter the third floor.”

Anther stumbled to his feet as the hill faintly shook, and he watched in glee as the crest unwound into a descending spiral ramp.

A silly grin played on his lips. “That’s always so cool!”

He had seen this path open several times to others, but this was the first time he was allowed to follow it. Anther padded down the ramp excitedly but was slightly disappointed to see a dim and austere library waiting for him.

Just past the open area around the entrance to the level, his sight from floor to ceiling was blocked entirely by intricately carved bookshelves made from rich, dark wood. The ceiling was about thirty feet high from what he could see, so the shelves were quite tall. Ladders made of thin, winding metal, painted gold, could be seen here and there. They were affixed to the bookshelves and rolled from end to end on dainty wheels, allowing people to reach the books higher up.

There was no way to tell from the entrance how far back the room went. Another tall bookshelf blocked Anther’s sight just past the opening between the first two. He could imagine already that it was a maze inside.

“I hope I don’t have to read a lot for the puzzles here. I don’t really like reading.” He looked around eagerly, knowing that Thesia and Helios worked on the third floor.

No sooner did he think it than a gelatinous purple slime and a fluffy yellow spider the size of a cat pounced on him from his blind spot. Luckily, the former also broke his fall.

“Hey! You surprised me!” The boy laughed and grabbed Helios in his arms while he lounged on Thesia like she was a living bean bag chair.

The King Slime slipped a small device into his ear that their voices suddenly came through—or rather, simulations of their voices that Archimedes conveyed.

“Anther!” Helios cheered in a young boy’s voice.

“You made it! Welcome to the third floor!” Thesia congratulated him brightly in a girl’s voice.

“I did! And I can hear you!” He gently touched his ear and found a small and smooth something nestled in it. “What is this thing? A tiny speaker?”

“Correct. It’s called an earpiece,” Archimedes’ naturally somewhat arrogant voice came through the device. “You can keep it. I wanted to be able to talk to you privately even when other people are around.”

“I see.” Habitually, Anther looked up toward the ceiling while he spoke to the dungeon. “I didn’t know monsters could talk through speakers too.”

“I’m facilitating it for them.”

“I see.”

Anther flipped Helios over and tickled his abdomen. The sound of boyish laughter echoed through his earpiece, encouraging him until a sticky white web stuck his hands together. Then the Trick Spider flipped himself right side up and got his revenge by tickling the elf boy’s stomach with six of his eight fluffy legs.

“Ahahaha! No! Stop!”

Anther rolled off Thesia to escape and laid gasping on the ground. “It’s great news,” he said, “but didn’t you tell me that it tires you out when you talk like this?”

“I found a more efficient way to do it,” Archimedes said casually. “Last night I was criticizing someone else’s work for its inefficiencies, and this morning it occurred to me that I was making the exact same mistake. Mithril conducts mana, and that isn’t limited just to whole particles. Using the energy released from splitting mana particles would theoretically be much more efficient, and who said all formulas had to transmute matter and energy somehow? Once the idea occurred to me to make a formula that just changed the way energy is released from mana, from the timing to the intensity, it was simple. I can talk as I please now.”

The elf boy shook his head and stood up. He thought his dungeon friend must really like the sound of his own voice. But he did only just get it after all.

“I didn’t understand most of that, but I’m happy for you, Archy.”

“Let me welcome you~” Thesia wobbled excitedly. “The third floor is currently the lowest floor in the dungeon. It may look and function like a library, but the theme here is closer to a labyrinth.”

She extended a stubby tentacle to point at an unmanned desk. A tidy plaque on the front explained various details about the floor that she elected to elaborate on personally for Anther.

“All the books in here are free to read, but if you want to take any of them away from this floor, you have to donate a book first. That’s what that bin on the front desk is for. You can also write down the title of any book in that big journal there, and the floor will light up to take you to where it’s stored if we have it. Saying the words “front desk”, “exit”, “help”, or “I’m lost” at any time will lead you back here from anywhere in the maze~”

“I made all the enchantments!” Helios raised a foreleg proudly as he jumped up onto the desk. “Minute and daddy only had to help me a little bit with the maze.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” Anther said, petting the little creature on the head.

“I’m sure you don’t want hints, as usual,” Archimedes half-asked.

“Right!” Anther bobbed his head, holding his fists up to his chest as his heart filled with eagerness.

Somehow, this floor was fairly intimidating to him… but he would push through it. This was his best chance to finally catch up to Archimedes and see the dungeon core with his own eyes—before the fourth floor was built and he fell behind again.

***

Anther stepped past the two towering bookshelves that marked the entrance to the labyrinth of tomes. Another shelf blocked his path forward immediately. To the left was a way forward, but to the right, a perpendicular shelf placement formed a dead end immediately.

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He peered up, thinking that if the shelves didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling he could’ve climbed to the top and peeked over them.

The temptation would have been there anyway, but he had no desire to cheat his way through things after coming this far genuinely.

Anther turned to the left, strolling casually and tapping the spine of every book within arm’s reach. He quickly noticed that many of them were copies of each other.

“Are all of these just the same couple of books?”

Archimedes’ voice sounded through the earpiece, “It can’t be helped. As more come in, I’ll replace the duplicates.”

As Anther strolled along, moving randomly through the increasingly complex maze of towering shelves, he kept an eye out for anything else that might be part of the puzzle. Since most of the books were identical copies, they didn’t particularly stand out, and the intricate carvings in the dark wood composing the shelves were quite uniform.

The more he didn’t come across anything special, the more he started to think that just navigating the maze was the puzzle.

“I’m really glad you made it so that people can’t get lost in here,” Anther said. “I’m completely lost already.”

In response to his muttered words, the floor beneath his feet suddenly lit up with dashes of a warm, lazy, yellow light, leading back toward the entrance of the labyrinth.

“Uh, oops. Sorry.”

A single step away from the luminous trail seemed to convey that he activated the enchantment by mistake and caused the lights to fade away again.

“Right?” Thesia slid out from between two bookshelves, squeezing her gelatinous purple body through cracks that were too small to even see through. “Usually us monsters know exactly where we are in the dungeon, so we’d never get lost in a maze like this. But we had to test it out before we let people down here, so papa stopped echoing back our locations for a while. I got lost, and Helios’s enchantments weren’t working yet. I felt like I was just going in circles—it made me want to cry.”

“Not being able to get lost would be convenient outside. Can you tell where explorers are in the dungeon too? You guys always seem to know where I am.”

“Papa knows where everybody is, so we more or less do too. That said, I’m not interested in most of what happens on the higher floors during the day, since I’m not allowed to go up there.”

“Gotcha,” Anther bobbed his head. “Say, do you wanna race me? This place is huge and I’m not getting anywhere like this.”

“You’re not supposed to run in a library!” Thesia laughed. “But sure!”

“You’re racing?!” Helios whined through the earpiece even though he himself was somewhere far away. “I wanna join! Wait for me.”

***

Anther ran with a young hunter’s swiftness, pivoting past sudden turns and corners as easily as dodging trees in the forest.

Despite not having legs, the King Slime Thesia could turn in quick bursts by jumping, or roll along straight corridors, gradually building up momentum as she went. She was never far behind the elf.

Helios had the advantage of being able to walk on vertical surfaces and upside down. He could also produce lines of webs to easily swing around tight corners. Though he was small, he was swift, and he managed to get ahead of the pack on a handful of occasions.

The two monsters were surprised when the race began. In the interest of fairness, Archimedes withheld knowledge of their location in the maze from them, so they were running just as blindly as Anther was.

“Dead end!” Helios cried, as the line of web he swung on nearly slammed him into a wall. He waved his two forelegs and summoned a magical gust of wind that flipped his body around and allowed him to land safely. Then he immediately began scurrying in the opposite direction.

Anther laughed and only needed a step to pivot directions. He was breathing hard but having a great deal of fun all the same. As they ran past a small clearing, populated with comfortable reading chairs and tables stacked with books, he wondered aloud, “How do we decide who wins?”

“There’s a fancy door somewhere in here! First one there wins!” Thesia bounced high overhead and overshot the elf, but he leaped over her like a fallen log right after.

The three hooligans were running and yelling in the library, but Archimedes gave them tacit approval. Nobody else had come down to the third floor that day, so who would they bother? And something about the scene did warm his heart somewhat.

Of course, the third floor, unlike the second, bore abundant mana, and physical activity stimulated the elf’s organs which craved mana as much as they did air. Archimedes knew that mana signals would be firing off more frequently in Anther’s brain now, increasing the likelihood of another divination misfire—or worse. By manipulating ether as his sensing medium, he was able to supervise the boy’s internal situation, since mana still simply refused to yield to Archimedes’ control when elves were involved.

Right when he sensed that all the wrong mana channels were about to signal at once, he summoned a burst of frigid air in the maze corridors that the three racers were forced to run through.

“Cold!” Helios cried as his legs involuntarily contracted. A line of webbing saved him from falling all the way to the floor as he lost his grip on the ceiling.

Anther held his arms tight to his chest and shivered, and Thesia seized the opportunity to lunge ahead.

“Papa, that’s cheating~” she said, despite giggling gleefully.

“Wha—?! No fair!” Anther shook off the cold, which was quickly dissipating anyway, and hurried to catch up.

Archimedes chuckled, satisfied to see that the sudden stimulus caused more mana channels to fire and override different signals that were about to go through, avoiding the misfire.

“Just keeping things fair,” he assured them.

Helios, who was now far behind the pack, whined. However, as he was about to pass a certain corridor to follow the others, his orange fur fluffed up, sensing magic in the air like it was static electricity.

“Ah! This way!”

Anther saw the spider pivot and suddenly choose a different route, and he made the split-second decision to trust the little monster’s instincts.

“Wait really?!” Thesia, now in last place, bounced after them. As she followed, she soon felt a tug at the mana inside her, forming small bubbles in her gelatinous body. “I feel it too!”

“I don’t feel anything!” Anther complained, desperately chasing after the agile Trick Spider. The cold air from earlier actually helped him cool off after running so hard, but he was still beginning to get exhausted.

They kept running, and at some point, Anther noticed that Thesia wasn’t behind them anymore. Before he could pause to wonder where she was, Helios turned one last corner and they entered a large clearing. Against the back wall was a beautiful and imposing door, made of pitch black adamantine. Twisting metal vines created an elegant frame around it and also served as a gate barring the way. The vines swirled around three runes carved into the wall, highlighting their presence. One was placed above the door, one to the right, and one to the left. They were abstract, but they reminded him of an eye, a hand, and a foot.

They’d found the door, but the race wasn’t over until one of them touched it.

Helios and Anther both ran fiercely, and in the open area the elf’s longer legs gave him an advantage. But unexpectedly, Thesia, who had disappeared not that long ago, began to seep between two bookshelves much closer to the door.

“Cheater!” Helios shouted. He shot out a net of webbing and used wind magic to catch it like a parachute, propelling him forward.

Anther was close enough to the door that he too could feel the magic in it, making his ears tingle. And yet his lead was fast disappearing before his eyes.

At the last moment, Thesia extended a rubbery tentacle, which moved much faster than she could run. She was still only halfway into the clearing, but she grabbed the metal vines regardless.

Anther nearly crashed into the gate a moment later, grasping the cool black metal with sweaty hands. “So close!” he groaned.

Helios continued sailing forward with his little net, landed on the pretty gate, and reached a fluffy leg inside, patting the black door with his paw. He giggled like the mischievous little boy he was.

“Why are you touching the gate? Weren’t we racing for the door? I win!”

Thesia trembled in shock. “What? Isn’t the whole thing the door?! Papa!”

The dungeon chuckled. “You’d like me to arbitrate? The gate and the door are separate, and you yourself said to race for the door. Helios wins.”

“No way…”

Thesia slumped on the floor and Anther quickly joined her.

“I feel better losing to a riddle than a race anyway,” he confessed.

After spending a few minutes to catch his breath, Anther got up and tried the gate. It was locked, and the door beyond was inaccessible. This appeared to be part of a bigger puzzle.

“So navigating the maze wasn’t all I had to do. Hm. It’s getting kind of late, though.”

Anther looked around and noticed something sitting on a small table in the clearing: a thin book with a binding he hadn’t seen a thousand times already on the way here. He picked it up and read the title: A Comprehensive Guide to Blacklisted Dungeon Creations: Sixth Edition.

“Did you get this from the guild?” Anther wondered.

He opened the thin book and flipped through a few pages, wincing. “Scary. What kind of disease makes people's limbs fall off? That sounds more like a curse.”

As he put the book back down, he noticed that its place on the table had a little framed outline and a plaque labeling its spot, and it suddenly occurred to him:

“Is this the only copy of this book in the whole library?!”

“Correct,” Archimedes said.

Anther grinned. “Then I can write its name at the front desk to come back here whenever! Thank goodness, I need to get home for dinner.”

“Exit.” He chanted, and the floor lit up to guide him out of the maze.

“I had a lot of fun today. I’ll see you guys tomorrow, alright?”

“Don’t leave,” Helios hugged his leg and begged.

“We’ll walk with you to the floor exit,” Thesia declared.

“Take care of yourself,” Archimedes said.

The elf boy nodded and withdrew, saying his farewells to all the monsters he passed on the way out.