Chương 147: Hidden within the Maze

"You were saying something about seeing me before? I'm not sure what you meant by that," Joe said as they moved deeper into the maze.

"On the Integration broadcasts. I remember seeing you pretend to be a beast and kill a bunch of competitors inside a mountain. That was very exciting," Zerrepperty answered.

"Broadcast?" Joe mumbled, unsure how to react to this sudden enlightenment.

"You're telling me the Integration is being broadcast on TV? Like a game show?"

"TV?" Zerrepperty asked, her tone puzzled.

"Well, whatever you watch broadcasts on. A device of some kind?" Joe said.

"Holotube," Zerrepperty replied with a nod.

"Yes. Did you not know?" Joe shook his head.

"I did not know that." The realization settled uneasily, but it made sense to him.

"You made many rich forces in the Multiverse very angry. They lost a great many credits gambling on your death," Zerrepperty continued.

"What! Why? Why are they betting on my death?" Joe said, alarm slipping into his voice as the implications sank in.

"Why would they not? They bet on everyone's death. Except for the number one, Kilch'Kitz. No one bets against him," Zerrepperty added. Joe exhaled slowly.

"Fan, fucking tastic," he mumbled. Symphony laughed, her first sound since they started walking through the maze.

"Straight!" Zerrepperty said at the next junction.

"Right!" Symphony added next. Joe flipped the coin. It struck the ground, bounced once, and settled upright on its edge. Again. For the tenth time. This time, Zerrepperty took the coin from him and flipped it herself. It landed on its edge.

"This is a trick coin?" Zerrepperty asked, eyeing Joe. Joe pulled out another coin and flipped it. It landed on its edge. Zerrepperty shrugged.

"Left," she said, and they moved on. At the next branch, Joe raised a hand before either of them could speak.

"Let us try this. Heads, we go right, tails, we go straight. Edge, we go left." Both women nodded. Joe flipped the coin, and this time, it landed on heads.

"What does that mean?" Symphony asked, no longer walking behind them.

"It means we are being guided by fate," Zerrepperty muttered.

"I have a suspicion. But I think we should continue." Joe shrugged.

"Fine by me." He glanced at Symphony, who gave a short nod. For the next hour, the trio walked and flipped coins as they made their way deeper into the maze. Every single time they reached a junction, they were faced with three branching paths. Joe found himself wondering if the other groups were seeing the same thing, or if some were only dealing with two paths. There was not a single living creature in sight. No footsteps, no sounds, no signs of the others anywhere in the maze.

The longer they walked, the stranger it felt. Something was afoot, but Joe could not put his finger on what it was. Exactly three hours after entering the maze, a pulse surged outward from its centre. Everyone trapped within felt it. They all knew, without being told, that something had changed. Something, or rather multiple somethings, had been unleashed. They were no longer alone, and before long, they would come face to face with an abomination.

It took only twenty minutes for a nondescript blob of nothing to appear in the maze before the trio of Joe, Zerrepperty, and Symphony. Joe peered at it as Zerrepperty and Symphony both shifted into fighting stances. Joe raised a hand, stopping them.

"Wait a minute. I don't think we need to fight it," he said, pointing toward the base of the blob. His Farmer's Sight clearly showed thin threads connecting the creature to the maze itself. They were not mana. Of that he was certain. But he had no idea what they were made from. To his surprise, Zerrepperty blinked at him in confusion.

"What are you pointing at? I do not see anything." Joe turned to Symphony, who shrugged, equally baffled.

"You don't see the threads?" he asked, suddenly uncertain. Both of them shook their heads, then tensed as the blob began to drift closer. Now Joe was the confused one. The creature continued its slow approach, and the threads were glaringly obvious to him. Why could he see them when they could not? He had simply assumed they would, because to his eyes they were impossible to miss.

"Are you done thinking? It will be in range of my skills soon," Zerrepperty breathed as she prepared to act. Joe still felt that the blob was not a threat, but doubt was beginning to creep in. Why was he so certain of that? What was it about those threads that made him feel he could deal with it easily? He made a decision. He vanished, reappearing behind the blob. It twisted, sending a wisp of itself lashing toward him. Joe pulsed his aura and directed it straight at the threads binding the creature to the maze.

They snapped, and with a soft puff, the blob vanished entirely. It was a little anticlimactic. Joe stood there, frowning in thought, as his two companions rushed up to him.

"How did you do that?" Zerrepperty asked at the same time Symphony blurted out, "You can teleport?" Joe glanced between them and smiled.

"It is a secret." He did not know why, but that answer seemingly frustrated Symphony to no end. She began hounding him with questions about what other skills he had and why he had not used them during their fight. For some reason, she seemed genuinely angry.

"I demand a rematch!" she declared as they jogged through the maze.

"As soon as we leave this challenge, we fight." Joe stared at her in disbelief. What was wrong with these people? Were all Multiversers like this?

"Don't you have a bunch of skills you didn't use?" Joe finally asked when she refused to let up.

"You didn't use any skills at all. You just swung your sword."

"Because you are not even a D-grade," Symphony snapped.

"Do you know how much shame I would face being forced to use all my skills to kill an E-grade?" Joe almost asked if that was worse than being knocked out by one, but decided he did not care enough to provoke her further. He shrugged and stopped answering her questions altogether, whether they were about his skills or his class. As Joe ignored the increasingly irritated leopard, Zerrepperty grew quiet, clearly lost in thought. They soon encountered another cluster of blobs blocking the path.

Joe dealt with them quickly, though it took more effort than when he had faced a single one. He hoped they would not continue increasing in number.

"What is your class?" Zerrepperty asked suddenly, pulling Joe out of his thoughts.

"Why?" he asked.

"Sorry. I meant its rarity," she corrected.

"You have a lot of stat points. More than any E-grade I have ever met. It honestly boggles the mind that you are even classified as E-grade. You have more stat points than half the D-grades I have encountered." She rubbed her chin as a bit of slime dripped to the ground, clearly deep in thought. Joe was not entirely surprised by her words. He had been blessed with a grade evolution at level one, and he knew for a fact that he gained around five times as many stats as most humans he knew.

Zerrepperty claiming he had more stats than a D-grade was not out of the realm of possibility. What unsettled him was how easily she seemed able to judge that number at all.

"How do you know how many stat points I have?" he asked. She blinked, then smiled.

"It is a secret." Joe laughed.

"Touché." Joe was panting by the time he finished dispatching the latest group of six blobs. This time, he had been forced to ask for Zerrepperty's and Symphony's help. Handling six at once was beyond him. What shocked him even more was how the blobs changed the moment the two women entered range. Their movements sharpened, their speed increased, and they lunged with far more aggression.

"They are D-grade entities," Zerrepperty said calmly.

"It is a good thing you broke through your bottleneck when you did. Otherwise, you would not have been able to disable them so cleanly." Joe did not consider that fight clean in the slightest, but he kept his mouth shut and nodded. They increased their pace after that, moving through the maze at a fast jog. For all three of them, that meant tearing through the narrow hedges with the speed of a racing train.

They only slowed when confronted with another set of three branching paths, once again surrendering their direction to the coin and its fated spin. As they jogged between encounters, Joe edged closer to Zerrepperty.

"If I tell you how I can see the threads. Will you tell me how you know how many stats I have?" he asked as they rounded a corner. Zerrepperty nodded and pointed ahead to the next branching paths. They came to a halt, and Joe flipped the coin into the air. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"It is my sight skill," he said before it landed.

"I do not know exactly what I am seeing. Maybe it is something like threads of fate. But I can see them with my Farmer's Sight." Zerrepperty waited until the coin landed on heads before answering as they surged forward.

"I have an advanced Identify skill. It gives me a total stat range for anyone below my grade. It is not perfectly accurate, but I know this much. Your stats are impossibly high for your grade." She glanced at him as they ran.

"How did you manage that?" Joe didn't feel he knew Zerrepperty well enough to share anything more, so he shrugged and let the conversation die. She seemed to expect that response and did not press him. Symphony, however, continued to stare at him, her gaze heavy enough that the hairs on his arms never quite settled. Before any further words could be exchanged, the maze forced their silence. They rounded a corner and nearly collided with another group, finally confirming that the pairs were not isolated after all.

Garvo and one of the robotic beings, Zeth, were locked in a desperate struggle. They were surrounded by nearly thirty blobs and were steadily forced back into a corner. Unlike Joe, they were unable to disperse the creatures cleanly, and their movements had taken on a defensive edge. Zerrepperty and Symphony launched themselves forward, slamming into the nearest blobs and carving out space. The opening was all Joe needed.

Focused pulses of aura burst from him in rapid succession, snapping the threads binding the blobs to the maze. At least five vanished before they even reacted. The creatures were silent, but not mindless. Their attention shifted to him, abandoning Garvo and Zeth as they converged on their true threat. The duo surged forward, harassing the blobs from the flanks and creating just enough disruption to give Joe room to work.

He took every opening, breaking thread after thread until the fight collapsed into a one-sided rout. The final blob dissolved in a faint puff, leaving the maze suddenly quiet.

"Thanks," Garvo panted as he dropped to the ground.

"That was close," Zeth added, exhaling as he popped a pill into his mouth.

"They were on us for two hours. Much longer and we would have started losing body parts."

"You're welcome," Joe replied before taking a moment to catch his breath. Everyone took this quiet moment to quickly recover before they continued, or the other blobs following behind caught up. Joe even had time to admire his tired, but strangely energetic body. He had always been a monster in terms of stamina, but it only took him barely a minute to recover before he was ready to move on again.

His new movement skill was already paying off dividends, and he had no regrets at all about devoting his time to breaking through as soon as he felt those new cracks forming. He smiled happily at his hands before Zeth's voice called for his attention.

"How were you breaking their shells? Was that aura you used?" Joe nodded.

"There are invisible threads beneath their forms connecting them to the maze. I just severed them and they…. poof!" He made a small explosive gesture with his hands.

"Connecting to the maze," Garvo said thoughtfully.

"That explains why they constantly reformed when we blasted them with mana."

"We would not advise doing what we did," Zeth added.

"When they reformed, there were suddenly two of them. So after they doubled twice again, we stopped destroying their forms and tried to outpace them. Which also failed." Joe was very glad his group had not been forced into that situation. The thought of the blobs multiplying only sharpened his concern for his bonds. He knew both Corel and Rose were capable, but that did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest.

"What do the threads you mentioned look like, and where exactly are they?" Garvo asked. Joe described what he had seen as clearly as he could. Garvo listened intently, then nodded, confidence settling into his posture as if testing the idea in his mind.

"Let's move," Joe said.

"We shouldn't waste time here and try to catch up to the others." He stepped to the branching path and flipped his coin, pointing left. Garvo and Zeth exchanged a glance at Joe's unusual method of navigation, but neither objected. The newly formed group of five surged forward, picking up speed as they disappeared deeper into the maze. __ Corel swore as she and Trevaldo rounded a corner and came face to face with a mass of blobs. Fifty of them blocked the path ahead. It was an ambush.

Another cluster of ten surged toward them from behind, cutting off their retreat. They had struggled from the start. Destroying the creatures only caused their numbers to swell, so they had switched to restraining and trapping them wherever possible. Even that had not lasted. The blobs multiplied faster than they could contain them, forcing the pair to flee again and again. Now they were out of options.

Trevaldo moved with supreme efficiency, holding the advancing mass at bay just long enough to buy them seconds at a time. But seconds were no longer enough. The branch they had just exited ended in a dead end, and the pursuing group had closed the distance too quickly for them to turn back safely. The next path loomed before them. Corel felt her Seeker's sight flare in warning. Every instinct she had screamed that this was the wrong way.

The third branch was completely blocked, and standing their ground would end no better. With no real choice left, they were forced forward, straight into a path she knew fate had marked as wrong.

"Excuse me, green skin, but I think we have to fight," Trevaldo said as they stared down the approaching hordes.

"Don't call me that!" Corel snapped. As always, he ignored her completely, addressing her however he pleased in the moment.

"Look out!" Trevaldo warned, and that was all the notice she received. A cascade of skills detonated around them as Trevaldo unleashed his full power, blasting blobs apart in every direction. Corel groaned as the creatures burst into fragments. She knew exactly what that meant. Every destroyed body would only add to their numbers. Soon, there would be hundreds on their heels.

They surged forward together, abandoning the confrontation and sprinting back toward the previous branch, both silently hoping that nothing else would block their escape. __ At the same moment that Corel and Trevaldo walked a tight rope of death, Rose and Maestro moved in complete silence. They communicated only with brief hand signals as two massive, cloudy shapes pursued them. The smaller blobs had been easy to outrun and were ignored entirely. These new entities were different.

They could not be outrun for long, and they could not be fought. Every attack Rose or Maestro launched vanished on contact, erased as if it had never existed. Neither of them understood what these things were, only that touching them meant death. So they ran, breath controlled, minds focused, searching desperately for the correct path. The problem was that the maze had changed. No longer did each intersection offer three choices. Now there were five. Two always ended in dead ends.

Two led back to the previous branch. Only one was correct. No matter what predictive skills they used, neither of them could determine the right path in advance. It usually took three attempts before they found it. Each mistake came with a cost. Whenever they ran into a dead end, they were forced to double back and engage at least one of the mammoth forms. They dodged by the narrowest margins, evading contact by fractions of a second, testing every possible tactic to slow or damage the creatures. Nothing worked.

They had yet to even slow them down. So Rose and Maestro ran, dodged, and searched, trapped in a relentless cycle as the maze pressed in around them, offering no mercy and no clear escape. __ Joe stretched his senses toward the three branching paths ahead. At least fifty blobs were closing in behind them now, which made his usual coin method far too slow. So now he was forced to make a choice himself. He searched for any difference between the paths, any hint or pull that might indicate the correct direction.

He felt nothing. With no time to spare, he turned right, trusting luck to carry them through. He was only a step from entering the path and leading the group when his eyes widened. A familiar scent drifted through the air. He froze, then spun, dashing toward the central path instead. That smell was unmistakable. Joe blasted down the central path with increased speed. The others behind him reacted instantly, altering their charge to follow.

His heart hammered as he pushed himself harder, the scent growing stronger with every step. He burst around a corner and skidded to a halt, confronted by a scene ripped straight from a nightmare. A vast mound of blobs filled the far corner of a wide, square clearing. Hundreds of them writhed together, layered and packed so tightly they looked like a single living mass. For a moment, Joe could not understand what he was seeing. Garvo stepped up beside him.

"Trevaldo is inside that pile," Garvo said sharply.

"I can feel his shield. It is still active." Joe's jaw clenched. He had suspected as much. The scent of his bond was strongest here. Corel was buried beneath that mountain of abominations. There was no time to hesitate. Joe activated Aura Shout and unleashed a massive, all-encompassing blast toward the mound. Garvo followed with a focused burst of his own aura, aiming at one side in the hope of carving an opening. Blobs vanished by the dozens as their connections to the maze were severed, dissolving into nothing.

Still, the mass remained overwhelming. Joe shouted again, pouring aura into the pile, ripping through tens at a time, but it felt like trying to drain a swamp with his bare hands.

"The shield is weakening!" Garvo yelled as he blasted several blobs free. He was firing blind, unable to see the threads Joe targeted, and his contribution barely dented the whole. Panic clawed at Joe's chest as his mind leapt to the worst possible outcome. He could not afford to be slow.

"Help! Blast them off!" he shouted as he aimed more aura at the mound.

"But they will reform!" someone countered.

"It doesn't matter. We have no choice!" Joe yelled. A sound like shattering glass rang through the air. Joe's reaction was instantaneous; he vanished, Space-Jumping blindly toward what he judged to be the centre of the mass. He reappeared inside the crumbling shield, right between Corel and Trevaldo. Both stared at him in shock as the blobs surged inward through widening gaps. Joe didn't have time to warn Trevaldo to hold his breath.

He seized two arms and Space Jumped, tearing them out of the collapsing centre and back to safety. Joe reappeared beside Garvo, who barely had time to catch Trevaldo before the man violently emptied his stomach all over him. Corel, far more accustomed to sudden Space Jumps, only looked slightly pale as she dropped to her knees, utterly spent. But this hell-forsaken maze gave them no time to recover. The mound of blobs shifted and turned toward them as one.

"Run!" Joe shouted. Corel forced herself upright, and the group, now seven strong, turned and fled the way they had come. After another thirty minutes of frantic running, the group of seven burst into a wide square clearing where the maze around them abruptly changed. Grey leaves and black branches enclosed this new area, the living maze giving way to something colder and more rigid. The blobs failed to follow. They halted at the edge, as if barred from entering.

Joe slowed, breathing hard, and only then noticed the reason. A massive sign floated above a second archway ahead of them. Entering the territory of the forgotten.

"That doesn't sound good," Joe said as they came to a stop.

"No, it does not," Trevaldo agreed, wiping at his clothes with a grimace.

"I apologize for emptying my stomach upon you." Garvo simply nodded. He reached into his storage and pulled out a fresh set of clothes, stripping without the slightest concern for modesty. No one bothered to look. At the same time, Trevaldo produced what appeared to be a portable closet, stepped inside, and emerged moments later in clean clothes identical to the ones he had been wearing before.

"Much better." For a fleeting moment, Joe was tempted to ask where someone could acquire a portable closet like that. The thought vanished when a thunderous roar rolled through the maze, shaking the ground beneath their feet.

"Ah. I believe we should start moving," Trevaldo said.

"It seems we will soon have company." He did not wait for agreement. Trevaldo dashed through the archway, and the others followed without hesitation, close on his heels. Less than two minutes after the group of seven entered the territory of the Forgotten, two enormous, cloudy forms shimmered into existence between the arches behind them. The shapes surged forward, their movement smooth and relentless, already closing the distance. The wails of the forgotten drifted through the air, hollow and mournful.

Soon, more souls would be drawn into that chorus, swallowed by the darkness that pursued them. They may have been forgotten. But they were far from alone.