The next morning, after a light breakfast of scrambled eggs and fried thick-cut bacon, everyone pulled out their armor and suited up for the next level. The clinks of metal hung in the air along with the familiar tang of steel and rust.

  I was dressed simply again, wearing just a loose grey dress, since I relied on my spells for protection and weaponry. Gone were the days where it took close to an hour to strap on all the intricate pieces of my ornate plate armor.

  As I waited for the others to buckle their gear in place, I nibbled on a slice of baguette bread and reviewed my status screen.

  Not much had changed other than my HP and Mana recovering overnight. My wounds had finally all cleared, and my Spirit Points were back to full.

  The only thing to note was that low 16 Soul Points score, and that clearing out the fifth level had now brought me within 500 XP of level 5.

  We exited the staircase and were immediately greeted by walls of stacked skulls.

  They were bleached bone-white and mortar-less, piled haphazardly as if thousands of heads had been shoveled into a heap and then sheared flat to form the walls. Rows of hollow sockets, half-crushed and full of darkness, stared eternally out at us. The air here was dry and brittle, not just stale like the floor above, but actively sapping the moisture from my skin.

  “Is this the catacombs?” I asked, peering at the macabre masonry.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Just one of the possible configurations for this floor. This isn’t corruption.” Serina sniffed at the air, her nose twitching. “I don’t think so at least.”

  My [Shadow Fingers] fanned out into the various corridors zigzagging away from me. Each shadowy appendage would cast the spell at a shadow further ahead to chain my [Shadow Fingers] forward. The corridors twisted, turned, and branched off, some even turning back on themselves.

  “This… is a giant maze,” I realized.

  “Oh no,” Justin groaned, clutching the side of his head. He glanced at Kamuel. “Remember that last maze we got lost in? How long were we stuck in there?”

  “A couple of days, I believe.”

  “That’s because you two decided to wander off on your own.” Serina remarked, raising a finger that she had just licked to test the airflow.

  “No, you guys left us. We turned the corner and poof, you two weren’t there,” Justin snapped back.

  “Let’s just stick together this time. See anything, lass?” Gorian tapped my shoulder.

  “Working on it…”

  This time, instead of releasing my old [Shadow Fingers] as I cast new ones further ahead, I kept them active to keep track of paths that I had visited, like leaving a trail of shadowy crumbs.

  The problem was that after a while I was maintaining quite a few spells. The strain was starting to tear at my mind. I tried to space the [Shadow Fingers] far apart so that there were fewer of them, but even ten was causing a headache. It was time to cull the spells. Instead of leaving a trail, I drew up a mental map of the maze from above.

  “Interesting… there’s no exit.”

  Writhing, black hands rose out of the dark ground at various points along the twisted pathways lined by walls of bone. There were four main paths in this maze. They twisted around each other, converging in the center. Each path led to one room in a two-by-two grid of rooms that stood in the heart of the maze.

  By the time my [Shadow Fingers] reached the rooms, I had expended over 50 mana, leaving me at 127, and that was with [Shadow Mastery IV].

  I’m glad we slept before coming down.

  All the casting did pay off.

  I knelt over the ground, and gestured for Kamuel to bring the torch closer. Tracing my finger over the dust-covered ground, I drew a rough sketch of the four paths spiraling into the four chambers in the center.

  “So, there are four main paths and each leads to a different room in the center.” I pointed to the center of the drawing. “The rooms are walled off from each other, and if we want to go from one room to another, we’d have to follow the path out before coming back in.”

  Gorian stroked his beard, studying my scrawled-out map. “It’s a puzzle. I’m guessing we’d have to each occupy one of the rooms at the same time before something happens.”

  “So you’ve seen this before?” I reached back into Steve’s past, and found hazy memories of statues to turn, pressure plates to step on, or different color buttons to click in sequence. Those all felt too ridiculous to be real.

  What’s the point? It’s such a convoluted way of keeping people away.

  “Oh yeah,” Justin’s voice echoed behind me. “Remember when we each had to step on a giant button in the ground to open the door? So simple, but took us forever to figure out.”

  So pressure plates are real… I guess now I get to see one up close.

  This feels like such a caricature.

  “I recommend we don’t split up yet.” Zadina cautioned, her eyes focused on the map. “Let us all go look at the first one together.”

  Gorian pointed at one of the rooms with a corner pointing toward us. “Agreed, we will hit that one first.”

  —

  Given that it was a maze, there were plenty of opportunities for ambushes and surprises in all the corners and turns of the path. However, my [Shadow Fingers] had already been through the hallways, and I knew exactly where the monsters all lurked in wait and even the traps on the ground.

  It was almost cheating.

  I held up two fingers and pointed down the corridors which cut sharply to the right. Serina nodded, silently nocking an arrow. The others readied their weapons.

  Sprinting forward, I jumped at the wall of skulls to my left and kicked off it, diving toward two large figures loitering around the corner. The first orc barely had time to react. Its hand was reaching for the sword in its scabbard when my blade sliced through its thick neck.

  The other orc was still stuck looking at its fallen comrade when I struck. The point of my black blade stabbed through its throat. It sank to its knees, gurgling blood.

  Serina rolled into the corner behind me. She popped up, aiming her bow, and then lowered it. “I’m not sure why I even bother.”

  I shrugged, yanking the sword free with a wet squelch. “It’s always good to have backup.”

  The next few encounters were similar, with us ambushing them rather than the other way around. As usual, information was everything.

  Of course, I wasn’t omniscient. I was reminded of this when I nearly stepped on a magic trap while moving to engage a trio of gnolls. Serina shot her arm out in front of me just as I was about to take my first step.

  “Why did you stop me?” I hissed, feeling miffed.

  Serina jutted her chin forward. “There’s a trap, a high-level one, right in front of you.”

  “What? I didn’t detect anything…”

  She blew out waves of magic from her hand, and soft blue light highlighted a circle on the ground.

  I then remembered that [Detect Hidden] could only detect hidden things of “your level or lower.” And I was definitely much lower level than Serina.

  The trap was too high level for Serina to disable. Instead she triggered it by shooting the circle.

  THUD!

  A giant round boulder dropped from the ceiling above, sending reverberations outwards as it landed. It rumbled loudly, rolling down the corridor.

  Panicked yelps and barks came from the other side of the rolling stone. A sickeningly wet squish sounded followed by silence.

  Walking in its wake, we found a bloody smear where one gnoll had stood. Another gnoll leaped at us, but Zadina hammered it down.

  The last gnoll lay with its legs crushed, whimpering softly, its life slowly ebbing away. I knelt over it, placed my hand on its head and ended its life.

  Eventually, after plowing through more encounters, we made our way to the room. It was a simple square chamber, its walls lined with the same morbid skulls as the hallway. An eerie green glow spilled from the ceiling, casting the room in ominous light.

  Gorian walked up to a small pedestal in the center. On top of it sat a lone human skull. Serina joined him, and after examining the skull for a long while, she nodded.

  He placed his hand upon the skull, and two points of green light emerged from its hollow eye sockets.

  His gaze settled on me. “So there are three more just like this in the other rooms?”

  “Yes, I think you were right. There needs to be one of us in each room with our hands on the skulls.”

  I tried putting my [Shadow Fingers] on the skulls but nothing happened.

  It isn’t pressure plates, but it’s technically the same thing. Just a really convoluted challenge.

  Gorian grunted, his beady eyes roaming over us. “No helping it then. We’ve got to split up into four groups. The Sister and I can go solo. Lass, you and Justin go together, while Serina and Kamuel take the last room.”

  I shook my head. “No, I should take a solo spot.”

  “It’s too dangerous, lass.”

  I wiped at the black fabric wavering around my arm. “I can escape into the shadows. So it makes more sense for me to be alone.”

  Gorian sighed. “Winthrop’ll really have my head if he finds out,” he muttered under his breath. He spoke up louder. “Fine. Kamuel, you’re with me then, and Serina and Justin will be together. First, though, let’s get lunch and some rest before we do this.”

  He narrowed his eyes, peering at the wall of skulls. “I don’t have a good feeling about this whole thing.”

  —

  The strange green light and all the bleach-white bones really put me off the mood to cook. Instead, I made simple sandwiches of cheese, lettuce and cured ham. No one complained as we enjoyed them with tea by the fire.

  Afterwards, everyone settled into some contemplative time to themselves. I decided to examine Aaron’s diary again. Even though he was scummy, there might be more I could learn about this world from him.

  I retrieved the greasy, oilcloth-bound book from my inventory slots.

  Skimming past entry 20, he was still full of vitriol and complaints, but reading between lines, I noticed he seemed to be skipping work less, and he was actually taking care of the sheep.

  He was also writing fewer entries.

  — Aaron’s Diary: Entry 28, Eight months in —

  So a funny thing happened at the harvest festival celebration.

  Lune, the neighbor's daughter, sat down beside me on the log. We didn’t say much for a while and just watched the folks dance around the bonfire.

  Finally, she managed to mumble thanks to me. It turns out, she’d seen me repair their fence. I had only done it cause I was bored and needed the exercise while herding the sheep, so I told her to think nothing of it.

  But then she offered me this stick of candy and I couldn’t speak for a bit.

  Her face was glowing in the fire light.

  You remember right, Diary? I had a girl back home, Bree. We only went on a few dates, but we kissed, like with tongue. And compared to everyone else here, she’s beautiful, clean, and smelled and tasted like heaven.

  She’s just an impossible dream now.

  Now Lune, she was a bit pudgy, she had a boil on her face, and I was sure she didn’t smell great.

  But I had cuts and sores all over myself as well, and dirt too. I’m sure I smelled awful as well.

  The old hag, well my mom here, had cooked some mutton for me, and so I offered it to her.

  Lune smiled at me, and it was a pretty smile. We shared our food together and watched the fire.

  I found someone to talk to in this world.

  — … —

  An impossible dream…

  A pang stabbed into my chest. I couldn’t breathe and had to close the book.

  Maybe I had been too quick to condemn Aaron. After all, he was just a normal teenage boy thrown into a world totally alien to him. It was only fair he lashed out. And he only really lashed out in his mind. He hadn’t hurt any of the villagers—just the opposite it seemed.

  Perhaps there is a hero in him.

  Gorian stood up and hollered. “Alright everyone, let’s get going! We should clear out the paths to the other rooms together, so we’ve got a long day ahead of us!”

  —

  It was hard to tell the passage of time underground. I didn’t have a watch, but it felt like an entire afternoon passed as we cleared out the monsters and traps from the paths leading to the other rooms.

  It wasn’t that much of a challenge, just tedious work going through the winding paths of the giant maze.

  After splitting from the others, I quickly made my way over to my designated room. A red glow dripped from the ceiling of the room I entered. I walked up to the pedestal and waited.

  I had [Shadow Fingers] monitoring all the other rooms. Serina and Justin were the last to arrive in their room. When Justin placed his hand on the skull, I did so as well. Two red dots lit up in the eye sockets of the skull before me.

  A low rumble shook the floor beneath my feet in answer.

  A section of wall slammed shut over the entrance to my room. The same happened in each of the other rooms.

  Four orcs dropped from the ceiling, circling me with weapons raised.

  Five goblins faced Justin and Serina.

  Three skeletons rose up around Zadina.

  And a single ogre with a giant axe towered over Gorian and Kamuel.

  It looked like we each had to face our own challenge.

  And Gorian and Kamuel drew the short straw.