It was said that deep in the woods stood a mansion, six floors high, surrounded by a giant fence maze. The maze was reported to be ten feet tall and composed of a chain-link fence crafted from the strongest metal imaginable. Supposedly, entering the maze was quite easy; exiting the maze was quite another story. No one had been able to solve the maze thus far. Everyone who had attempted would eventually make their way back home, exhausted and downtrodden after having been lost in the maze for days.
One would naturally conclude that the owner of the mansion must have had a strong desire for privacy to have gone through all the trouble of crafting such a maze. However, the mansion had no apparent owner; tales of the empty mansion with the fence maze had been circulating for decades. The legend indicated that whoever was able to conquer the maze would become the new owner of the property.
Of course, research suggested that there was no solution to the maze. There had been those who were desperate enough to solve the maze that they sought out a way to chart it from above. For the ones who were successful in finding a tall tree to climb, or a nearby vantage point, or a contraption of their own, they found that the maze was much too complicated and dimly lit to be properly viewed in detail. Of maps drawn by these scheming individuals, no two are the same. That being said, they do all have one thing in common: there is no solution to the maze, and no opening at all that leads to the mansion.
Just climb the fence, you say? Bring a ladder, or even just scale the chains? Brilliant idea! So brilliant, in fact, that it had been attempted many, many times. Sadly, as found out by the poor individuals who made such an attempt, the fence is covered in razor-sharp spikes, which means that touching it was out of the equation. The fence is also quite slippery; those who have tried to climb it while covered in armor have had no success in getting a grip on the thing.
Bring a ladder? Yes, you could get over the fence that way – or at least, the first layer. Once you’ve passed the first wall, however, how are you to get over the next one? Your ladder is now on the other side. Could you just carry the ladder until you reach the innermost layer, then climb over to reach the mansion? Perhaps you could if you could reach the innermost layer. So far, the closest anyone had gotten was still three layers away from the mansion.
With all the knowledge I have about this mansion and its maze, I must sound like a fellow enthusiast. Not so! While I admit to finding the whole mystery to be rather intriguing, I had no interest in inheriting a building that has been uninhabited for nearly a century and had surely fallen into disrepair. Upon pointing this out to enthusiasts, however, I had been informed that the mansion was allegedly protected by some form of enchantment that kept its structure intact.
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There had been plenty of speculation about the mansion itself, though of course, no one had ever seen the inside – or at least, no one still living. The windows, though large and plentiful in number, seemed to be covered in a thick layer of dust or grime or something else that prevented anyone from seeing through. Predictably, that did not stop people from creating stories about what the inside contained. The most common theory I had heard was that the mansion was a fully furnished luxury home in perfect condition, needing no restoration work – or in some versions, needing only a light cleaning to account for the dust and cobwebs that had built up. Nearly as common, but far less exciting, was the theory that it was simply a dilapidated abandoned building filled with rotting furniture, completely overtaken by pests and rodents, and in need of complete rebuilding in order to be inhabitable once again. This was the theory I had subscribed to.
It was for that reason that I didn’t care to attempt to best the maze and infiltrate the mansion. Many expected me to – after all, I had bested countless monsters by combining careful strategy with brute force, so why couldn’t I do the same to the maze? Even if I didn’t want the mansion, couldn’t I just figure out how to get to it, then sell it to the highest bidder? No, I didn’t think so. I wasn’t foolish enough to think I was more skilled than any of the other countless people who had tried so desperately to get through. For one thing, I didn’t care half as much as they had; for another thing, they had often gathered in large groups to fight the maze together. This put me at a disadvantage due to my refusal to work in groups. At the risk of sounding cliché – I only work alone.
Even if I did think my monster slaying skills would translate to traversing the maze – and slaying a beast with my axe was one thing; wandering around a giant fence was quite another – I believed it to be a fool’s errand. It seemed clear to me that the maze was a red herring. There was no way to get through the maze to the mansion; why bother trying?
How, then, did I find myself standing outside of the maze, fully armored, in the midst of a group the size of an army? That was all November’s handiwork. I shot her a sideways glare as I listened to her speak with the leader of the group.
“No, Arrow’s not a friendly fellow.” I heard her voice at a distance. “That doesn’t mean he’s a traitor.”
“You’re saying that the infamous every-man-for-himself monster hunter isn’t going to bail on us the second he figures out how to get through this on his own?” I rolled my eyes at the leader’s concern. It was a tempting suggestion, and one I may have considered, aside from one particular detail – this was for November.
“He won’t. I’m sure of it.” November turned to me and shot me a look, reminding me of the way she had convinced me to join her in the first place.