[Mini Dungeon]

  Ever gone dungeon diving? What am I saying, of course you have. This entire thing is a giant dungeon. But I feel like you need more. More dungeons, I mean. Doesn't that sound like fun? No? Too bad.

  For this challenge, a representative of each species will select up to four to accompany them into a small dungeon. The first one to reach the end will be the winner.

  Good luck. Don't die.

  Chosen representatives:

  Nathan Lee

  Eminia Laplanta

  Bjorn Justbjorn

  In front of him, the portal to the dungeon was a pure void black. Behind him, the yellow corridor of the Sixth Circle. Nathan stared at the portal, then at the window that had popped up in front of him. He really did just have the worst luck.

  "I don't suppose the orcs will see this as betrayal?" Nathan said.

  Bjorn shook his head. Behind him, a group of four orcs were silently waiting for orders, just out of earshot.

  "They won't," he said. "Everyone is aware of your situation. The main concern has been attempting to figure out how you'll survive when the orcs win."

  "Wow, how generous."

  He felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to face the person. Chad had an awkward grin on his face while Mara's jaw was clenched.. Sarah stood as far from the other three as she could while still remaining at that distance where you were technically still in a conversation.

  "What's up?" Nathan asked.

  Chad's awkward smile looked like it was being held in place by duct tape.

  "I just wanted to say that if Sarah says I said something weird—" His mouth clamped shut. "You know what, on second thought, never mind."

  Nathan reached out his hand and gripped Chad's shoulder. "No, no. Please, keep talking."

  Chad's mouth flapped open and shut when a sudden noise drew Nathan away from him. Footsteps.

  Emi's eyes caught his own gaze. Behind her were four warriors that Nathan had never seen before. She walked up to him and Chad and Bjorn.

  "This whole thing is an incredible farce," she said in a low tone. "But we have to make it look like we're still competing. Otherwise it'll create questions we can't answer."

  Bjorn nodded. "You're right."

  Emi looked visibly disgusted at the fact that Bjorn had agreed with her, but managed to hold back any words. She spoke like she'd just sucked on a sour lemon.

  "…Who should win?" she asked. "Does it even matter?"

  "We need to extend this whole farce as long as possible," Nathan said. "So humanity can't be the one to take the gold. A two out of three would be an instant win for us. Which would be great for us, not so great for all of you."

  She looked over at Chad and the others. "That's why you selected them. They're all on board with the plan, and they won't ask any questions about why you're moving so slow."

  "That, and also because if anything bad does happen, I know that they'll be competent enough to get us out of any stupid mistakes I make."

  Emi nodded at him and faced toward the portal. "Let's not waste any more time."

  She walked forward and stepped into the inky black. Her warriors trailed behind her. Bjorn went next, his squad of orcs stoic and moving in a march drum pattern.

  Nathan looked back at his group. "Ready?"

  Chad shot him a thumbs-up. Mara grinned and twirled a revolver in her hands. Sarah gave him two thumbs-up, almost like she was trying to emulate Chad.

  Nathan turned back around toward the portal. "Then let's get going."

  He stepped forward and walked inside.

  The first thing that greeted Nathan was the smell of iron.

  He had spawned into a room where pipes ran along the ceiling. The walls were made of concrete, as were the floors. It was like he had spawned into an industrial plant.

  “Okay, this isn’t quite what I was expecting,” he said to himself.

  A ding echoed out behind him.

  “What’s up, guys!” Chad made some kind of pose in front of his now active Dither livestreaming window. “It’s your boy, Chad Mann. Thought that I’d take a minute to show off where I am right now.”

  As usual, the comments began flooding in.

  Yo, a Chad Mann stream!!

  Is it just me or does Nathan look particularly depressed today.

  What you mean, he always looks depressed.

  Guys, it’s my favorite character! Mara!

  Who’s that other girl? She looks kind of similar to Nathan.

  Nathan raised his hand in greeting toward the camera. “Hi, everyone.”

  Chad slung his arm around Nathan’s shoulder. “Nathan, my friend, my ally, my friend.”

  “You repeated yourself.”

  “What exactly is the plan?”

  “Walk around and hope for something to happen.”

  Chad wiped an invisible tear from his eye. “Gentlemen, this is who you choose to follow. The leader of humanity.”

  The chat ran off into another stream of nonsense—mentions of Nathan dying in Brazil, statements of how they were all cooked—things like that. Nathan paid no mind, knowing that they were just joking.

  At least, he hoped.

  On his shoulder, Lily twitched. “Why are you all making so much noise?”

  Nathan was about to respond when he decided that it would be better to leave things off the web. Internally, he noted the fact that Lily was apparently not counted as a full person—at least according to the rules of the dungeon. How else was Nathan supposed to bring her in when he had already reached the max of party members?

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  That’s a little dehumanizing, he thought.

  “I’m not really human, so I don’t mind.”

  Nathan snickered under his breath. More than a few of his party members looked at him like he had just grown a second head. It was then that he realized that from their perspective he was communing with magical voices from the sky.

  “Come on, let’s get moving,” Nathan said. “It wouldn’t do for us to loiter around all day.”

  The group continued to walk through the dungeon, their footsteps clicking against the floor. Nathan dropped back to walk beside Chad and poked him on the shoulder.

  “Hey, can we talk?” Nathan asked.

  Chad reached over toward his window and muted it. “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I came up with a plan to start gathering humanity for getting us to the next circle. But we need a way to spread the message fast.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. What you want me to do?”

  Nathan nodded his head slowly. “Well, you know, I was thinking you could use your connections.”

  Chad furled his eyebrows together and looked at the ground thoughtfully. “My connections to where?”

  Nathan stared at him for what felt like a full minute. He then finally gestured toward the livestreaming window, and Chad’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s what you meant. Right, no—that makes sense. I’m gonna... do that.”

  “Not just me, but the rest of the top ten. They might be too far away to get to me, and it would probably be better if we divvied up the burden anyway.”

  “Yeah, that’s smart.” Chad clapped his hands together. “We can turn it into a whole event! It’ll be like a subathon! But without the subscriptions!”

  “I don’t know what a subathon is, but I trust your judgment.”

  Chad gave him a thumbs-up. “You can leave it to me. Next thing you know, your cities gonna be overloaded with people.”

  Nathan nodded and fell into silence. The biggest concern would be making sure that everybody would be inside a soulbound town before the third quest hub. If they could just pull that off, they would be golden.

  Suddenly, a shadow in the distance caught Nathan’s attention. He froze in place and looked directly toward it.

  It was a tall creature, its teeth glittering in the dark. Its eyes were wide and reflected back the fluorescent lights above. Its nails were long and scraped along the ground.

  “Oh my gosh, it’s a ghost!” Sarah shouted.

  Both Chad and Mara glanced at each other. There was some kind of unspoken conversation that occurred between the two before Chad made a half smirk while Mara rolled her eyes.

  Nathan furrowed his eyebrows. What were those two doing?

  He ignored them and stepped forward. His fishing rod appeared in his hand, its gleaming metal catching the light and reflecting like a droplet. It struck Nathan that whoever had made this was a master craftsman, a true genius among blacksmiths. Top-quality materials had been used. There wasn’t a weapon like it in the Nine Circles.

  And all of this had been used for a fishing pole.

  Nathan reared back and swung forward. The hook sailed through the air and caught onto the creature’s shoulder. It screeched, but Nathan was undeterred. He reeled it back in, pulling while the thing tried to dig its heels into the concrete.

  It failed.

  The creature flew forward and Chad appeared in front of Nathan. His sword whistled through the air and slashed through the creature in one go.

  Nathan scratched the back of his head. “Well, that was easy.”

  Chad turned and stared at him. “Why would you jinx it like that?”

  Nathan realized his foolishness and carefully avoided Chad’s eyes. He could already tell that there would be a few clips of this moment later on.

  For the next ten minutes, they continued forward. There were a handful of side corridors and side rooms they could go into. Some of them were guarded by monsters who ended up dropping keys. Nathan was struck by how similar this was to other dungeons in action-adventure games he had played before.

  It got to the point where he was half expecting the final boss monster to have a giant red gleaming spot on its forehead where Nathan was supposed to aim.

  He clenched his fists. The Legend of Zelda had taught him well.

  And then they came to a room with boxes, and Nathan stared at it for a long while.

  “Wait, this isn’t...” Nathan’s voice trailed off as his jaw flapped up and down. “I mean, I joked about it, but—”

  Chad clapped his hand on his shoulder. “It’s a box sliding puzzle. What, you’ve never seen one before?”

  Nathan turned and glared at him. “Look, I play casual games, but even I’ve played stuff with box sliding puzzles. Why would this actually exist in reality? What purpose does it serve?”

  Chad shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t ask me. I’m not the guy who designed this place.”

  Mara dashed forward and pushed against one of the boxes. It slid forward several feet before it fell into a gap in the floor with a click. Mara made a gasp of pure delight.

  “This is just like The Legend of Zelda!”

  Chad looked back at her and grinned. “I know!”

  Did the System, when it was making all the challenges for us at the start of the apocalypse, extract information from video games in order to make these puzzles? Nathan thought. I refuse to believe that it sincerely decided this would be a good challenge for functioning adults.

  It was as he was thinking these things over that he noticed Sarah had moved to the other side of the room and was lifting a box toward another gap.

  He walked over to her and sidled up to her left. His hands pressed against the box and assisted her. “Mind if I help?”

  A funny expression appeared on her face before it was replaced with a grin. “Sure, just don’t break your back.”

  Nathan frowned.

  He stared at her and didn’t budge an inch. Small droplets of sweat appeared on her forehead. “Hey, what’s with that look?”

  Nathan’s eyes narrowed. “Something’s off with you. Spill.”

  He already played therapy for a divine being millions of years old. He could definitely do that for his older sister.

  She scoffed and waved him off. “I’m fine. You’re reading into it.”

  Nathan stared at her for several more seconds before he shrugged.

  He'd figure out what her issue was at a later date.

  The two of them worked together and pushed the box into the gap in the ground. They went around doing this until every single one was complete. At that point, a door to the side clicked open.

  Nathan stared at it for several seconds, even half hoping that the box sliding was just a weird coincidence and that it wasn’t actually the solution.

  “Every day I’m in this world, I lose brain cells,” Nathan said.

  Sarah laughed, then covered it up with her mouth.

  Nathan ignored her.

  The group continued forward and Nathan noticed that Sarah was standing apart from everybody else. Chad and Mara were fiercely engaged in some sort of debate about whether a knight in Renaissance armor would be able to fight against a single guy with a really small pistol. But Sarah was making it a point to avoid the conversation.

  At first, Nathan just thought that she was a woman of high taste who didn’t want to be involved in such a stupid argument, but he noticed the way her eyes seemed to dance when the debate would get particularly stupid.

  But for some reason, she refused to weigh in.

  Nathan couldn’t help but feel a flicker of concern. He had so little time to check in on her that he had been trusting she was adapting well to living in his soulbound town. But what if she was actually going through a miserable time, and he had no idea because he was always too busy?

  After this dungeon, I’ll talk to her, he thought. We’ll have a chat about what’s going on—crap, I’m setting flags again!

  Nathan would need to watch out for a sudden monster attack that would occur toward Sarah. Given his luck, now that he had stated he was going to talk to her, the universe would conspire to create a way in which she would die, or get knocked out, or at least seriously injured. Eventually, they reached a particularly imposing door that stretched up toward the ceiling. Granted, the ceiling was only like eight or ten feet, but still.

  Also, the door was just a parking garage door. Not exactly the most intimidating thing on the face of the planet.

  Dungeons mixed with industrial plants and parking garages. Can whoever’s designing these things please make up their mind?

  There was no response. Nathan looked over at the other two. “I think this is where those keys come in?”

  Mara pulled hers out of her inventory. Chad pulled his from his pocket and held it up toward the sky, palm open. “Da da da daaaaaaaa!”

  Nathan walked over and snatched the key out of his hand. He squawked in protest. “Hey!”

  Nathan ignored him and gently took the key from Mara, who shot him a smile. He walked over to the entrance and inserted all three into an opening to the left of the garage door. He turned each one, one at a time. The sound of gears whirring caught Nathan’s ear. The door slowly lifted up, revealing a large underground parking lot.

  There were several cars scattered around at random, most of them looking brand-new. Nathan wondered if he could somehow fit one into his inventory before deciding that such a scheme would be ludicrous, unfortunately.

  Chad walked over to one of the car doors and swung it open. “Think this still works?”

  The car started up and the headlights flashed. Chad jumped backward, his hand reaching out toward his inventory.

  The car’s engine roared to life with a rumble. It reversed backward. A second later, each of the other cars in the parking lot turned on at the same time. They all reversed into each other and started to crash and flip and disassemble.

  Mara’s eyes started to sparkle. “Wait, I know what this is! The ultimate weapon!”

  Nathan felt his heart drop. If it was making Mara excited, that was a very bad sign for his survivability.

  The cars continued to assemble themselves before a humanoid figure made of dozens of car parts coalesced in front of them. Its chest was made of car doors, while its arms were composed of a complex mix of hoods and pipes. It was everything that eight-year-old Nathan Lee had ever imagined seeing in real life.

  Nathan activated Inspect.

  [Manualbot] - Lv. 101

  It’s everything that eight-year-old you ever wanted! Except with teeth! And lasers! And a high risk of imminent death!

  Nathan frowned.

  Yeah, but he wasn’t eight anymore.