Another arrow, and the way too large rat slides to a stop just before the halfway point. That’s the third fight Helen doesn’t have to get involved, and I’m up another archery level.

As we pass the corpse, I take a look at their loot inventory. It’s mostly meat and pieces of fur, but there’s been the occasional interesting thing. Like a small gear, Helen said goes into magical contraptions Tinkerers and other builder classes can make. This time, I find a small opal. I doubt it’s worth all that much, but one lesson traveling’s teaching me is that I need to gather everything of worth unless I want to find out what it’s like being in a city without being able to pay for what I need.

It means I really should look for the hidden caches. But that’s time I don’t want to bother with. And I have no idea how to go about finding them, other than pawing at each centimeter of the walls.

We reach an intersection and I take the right turn again.

Helen: I think we’re back tracking. That looks like a burn patch on the wall. Could be from Silver’s explosion.

Dennis: It’s possible. Keeping to the right wall isn’t an efficient way to do a maze, but it means we shouldn’t get lost.

Silver: Shouldn’t?

Dennis: Well, I’m not taking for granted the system isn’t going to change things on us.

Helen: I’m confident dungeons work under specific rules. The system can’t just ‘change things’ to piss you off.

Dennis: Unless you know what those rules are, my comment stands. It’s just going to be the dungeon trying to kill us, instead of the system.

I see motion ahead before I hear the creatures. Looks like more rats. Helen’s vision spell is really good. A glance at Silver, and she shakes her head, so we back up. A few minutes later, she gives the go ahead and we approach again.

She plays, the music builds until the explosion, then about half the large rats run in our direction. I calmly shoot arrows at them, and they die. The last two go up in flame as they cross the mid-point.

Nothing of worth in their loot inventory.

This time, we’re in a cavern instead of another tunnel; the second such ‘room’. The rats were gathered around a kill. I can’t tell the animal it had been from just lines, and I don’t know that seeing it ‘normally’ would help.

Three openings, so I take the right one.

“There are stairs,” Helen whispers. She’s looking into the left passage.

“We should stick to the system,” I reply.

“The old man said what he wants is on the last floor. That means down. All we’re doing sticking to your system is taking longer to reach it.”

She’s right, but not sticking to the system means a chance to get lost and that will cost us more time. So, do I think it’s going to be more time to go down and get lost or stick to the system and eventually get back here.

I mentally curse Brandon for making me feel like I don’t have the luxury of doing this properly and join Helen at the stairs.

“Can you make a mark in the wall so there’s no doubt that’s where we came from?”

She steps to it while I look down. There’s a landing two, maybe three meters down, nothing visible on it.

Helen returns and I look over my shoulder. There’s now an arrow carved into the tunnel’s wall, pointing the way we came.

I advance to the landing alone, sword and shield in hand. Once I confirm it’s safe, I motion to them. It’s about the same length to the floor. I go first again.

The tunnel is straighter, the walls squarer. Far in the distance, there is movement. I motion for them to join me.

Again, I move ahead alone, bow in hand, this time. The lack of cranny for creatures to hide in means I have to fight the urge to move faster. This is a dungeon. There is no telling what’s hiding in plain sight.

Or underfoot, it turns out.

The floor breaks apart as I put weight on it and I’m tipping forward. My arms pinwheel, and my bow goes flying somewhere ahead of me. More of the floor breaks as my body falls on it, than I’m grabbing onto an edge that’s supporting me, looking down into darkness. In the distance, under me, there are points.

Helen and Silver are yelling for me, but I’m too busy pulling myself up to respond. More of the floor breaks as I pull a leg up for purchase, and I’m forced to use only my upper body strength to get me there.

Fuck, am I glad I put those four points in there. I stretch and immediately sit as the floor under my head breaks away. I test the floor around me and end up with an area roughly half a meter in diameter and I am so not thinking about how it’s being held up since I didn’t see anything there while hanging off its edge. The hallway is about four meters wide. The gap around me is also about half a meter, except towards Helen and Silver. It’s closer to a meter and a half. A little more of it, or a little less height from me, and I’d have fallen into what has to be spikes at the bottom.

Helen: ARE YOU OKAY?

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“I’m fine.”

“Then you could have answered, you scared the shit out of us.”

“I was kind of making sure mine didn’t end up in my pants too,” I reply. Probably more angrily than she deserves. This is on me, not her. I’ve heard stories of dungeons, and that there are traps in them. Seen movies too, so I should have been at least looking for a boulder to roll down on us, or holes in the walls for spikes to spring from.

At least I survived this reminder that it’s not just creatures that are dangerous in here. It’s the dungeon itself.

I stand and look around. My bow’s near the wall. So a full meter away.

“What are you doing?” I call out as Silver puts her foot down and the floor collapses under it.

“Testing for the part that’s going to support our weight. There’s got to be a path, right?” She puts her foot next to that, and the floor breaks too. Helen does the same in the other direction and quickly, there is no floor for a quarter of a meter.

“Looks like we have to jump it,” Helen says.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I reply before she does anything drastic.

Silver snickers.

“Can you…” what can magic do here? “Carry us to the other side?”

“We don’t know where that it, and no, I don’t have any transportation magic. If I did, we wouldn’t have been roughing it out there as much as we did.”

No easy solutions. “How about a way to test the floor? Maybe collapse everything that’s not able to hold our weight? Or how about reshaping the floor so it will support us?”

“Collapsing it is easy,” she replies. She stretches and looks under the floor. “No visible supports. Probably magic. And I don’t have a way to detect magical supports, so I can’t guide us through the correct path.”

“Reinforcing it?” Silver asked.

“My earth magic isn’t really in that direction, or all that strong. Air and fire are what I’ve trained, water after that. Earth…well, not that much use for that in the city.” She chuckles. “Mother and Father keep chastising me about ‘not rounding out my build’.”

She stands and raises her hands.

“Wait. What about my bow? Can you get that to me? Maybe fly it on air?”

“I can’t make things fly, Dennis. Best I can do is create a torrent of air under it, and support it that way, but,” she cuts me off, “that’s going to exert pressure on the floor. If it’s made to break away, it will. You can get another bow when we get back to the city.”

“But Base made that one for me.”

“I’m sorry, Dennis, but I think our lives are more important than a bow.”

She’s right, but how am I going to explain how I lost it to him?

“Wait,” Silver calls. “How about blasting it away?”

“That’s going to break the floor anyway,” Helen replies.

“But the bow’s not going to be there anymore.”

She moves to the wall and looks along the floor. “I can’t tell how far the trap is. With the momentum I’ll impart, if it lands on a fragile part of the floor, it could break through.”

“What if you hit it along the floor? That’s going to send it skipping up and away.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of how far.”

“As far as you can,” I say, looking at the distant motion. “There are creatures all the way back there. So the floor’s solid. I’d rather have to retrieve it from them than lose it.”

“I can’t get it that far. So there’s no guarantee it’s going to land on solid floor.”

“Do the best you can, Helen.”

She goes down to a knee. When she speaks, I can’t make sense of the sounds. She moves her hands and then points.

Nothing happens.

She does it again. Or I’m guessing it’s the same thing. The hand motions are the same, but the sound aren’t like before. Or maybe they are? I don’t recall what they sounded like.

Magic.

When she points, I think nothing happened. Then the floor breaks apart along the bottom of the wall. The bow bounces and the lines, that is how I see it, become indistinct in the distance. All that’s left of the floor along the wall is a platform about a quarter of a meter in diameter just before where the bow was, and one two meters further. Three meters after that, the floor remains intact. I can’t make out if there’s a wall under there or not.

I drop and look under the floor. I’d thought the lack of lines was…I don’t know, but that hadn’t registered as important until now. There are no lines supporting the floor where Silver and Helen stand.

I pass a hand under my section and confirm there’s nothing.

“Is your floor supported by anything?”

Silver mimics my actions, and her hand touches something.

Does it mean the dungeon can block Helen’s magical sight? Or is it because the wall’s perfectly flat? They lack a ‘contour’ for the sight to register? The important thing is that the floor’s supported. I do not want to think about making my way through a dungeon with a floating floor.

“Do you think that’s where the trap ends?” Silver asks.

“Only one way to know.” Helen speaks meaningless sounds, makes gestures and this time, she opens her hands and the only reason I’m not knocked off my piece of floor is that I readied myself for something. The wind’s strong. The kind that’s ripped roofs off back in Court. It’s not long.

Then there are…thirteen sections of the floor floating amidst nothing until, with a straight line, the floor resumes.

There are no obvious paths, but enough of the patches are jumpable we can cross.

We sit down as soon as we are back on solid ground to catch our breath. I pass out jerky while we rest. I don’t know if it’s close to lunchtime, but after that, I need to eat something.