Chương 61: 61 Loop 2, Part 15

Ten minutes later, Finn and I were headed for the kitchens. As soon as I entered, I settled down into a chair and cast [Ex Nihilo Caseum], because it was easier than the other food spells. A wheel of cheese thumped into my hands.

"What the fuck?" Finn said, shocked.

"Since when could you conjure food?"

"Dude. I'm stuck in a time loop. Get with the program." It felt odd technically lying about the fact that I might not still be in one. I summoned a second wheel and handed it to him before tearing into my own.

"There's a couple of… ahhh," I said, yawning around a bite.

"There's books in here with other food spells, if you want to take the time to learn a few. I figure if we're going into a dungeon, we're going to need some way to stay alive. Besides, you should probably be the one who casts the majority of them."

"What? You've been trying to figure this stuff out the entire time I've known you. Why aren't you champing at the bit?"

"Because I already have the spell I need."

"Dude, you can't live off of cheese alone."

"Says who?" His face dropped, and then he scrunched his nose in disgust as if realizing something.

"Besides, you're a healer. Isn't it the job of the healer to keep the party healthy?" I said. Finn just shook his head before he started poring over the cookbooks. He had grabbed three and already had one open. Within a minute, he was muttering incantations. He paused his reading and asked me a question.

"Bread has a much lower cost than soup, and they're both cheaper than cheese," he reported.

"Why is soup more expensive than bread?"

"Structural integrity messes with mana integrity," I said with total confidence and zero knowledge. He wrote something in the margin. He was taking notes in a cookbook. Disgusting. Why was everybody I hung out with a nerd? When we finished our breakfast, Finn gathered up the books, and we left without another word. Getting down was easier the second time, especially considering it was just the four of us who needed to go and not twenty-whatever golems. We all floated our way there.

The army was exactly where we'd left it. Nineteen golems in formation before the great doors, gold boots planted in rubble, holding a position that nothing had threatened in almost half a day. It was a nice change of pace from the absolute workaholic nightmare my life had become. Axe walked down the line like it was a real army, stopping at each golem and checking to make sure they were in tip-top shape. Most were covered in burn marks. Some had chipped paint. But overall, the golems were still golems.

Flag also went behind him doing his own checks, except he added commentary.

"You look ready. And you look ready." He had stopped at a red golem that somehow didn't have a scratch on it.

"Ooh, you look very ready. I'm so proud of you and this team." Why are you talking to them like that, Flag? They don't have souls, Axe butted in.

"Neither did we, at one point. I don't know where my soul came from, but I like it. It lets me do things." Finn, though, had walked straight past the army. He was staring at the entrance to the dungeon.

"Laz, why is the door so big?"

"Maybe it's compensating for something."

"That's not comforting." Up close, I couldn't see how we'd open the door. There weren't handles or hinges, and there definitely wasn't a keyhole. Just painted-over wood, which seemed out of place in the ghostly library.

"So, how do we open it?" Finn asked.

"Maybe it's a push door," I suggested before walking up and putting my hand flat on the wood. I pushed. And darkness flooded in like light filling a room. Only in reverse. At the same time, our quests updated. The notification chimed louder than anything I had ever heard. I had to hold my head to keep steady. Through [Wideview], I saw Finn flinch and Flag go completely still. Even Axe swiveled his head around, as if confused by the quest.

I guess that made sense, since he hadn't been with us when we'd gotten the first update. [Quest Update! Step Two Complete: The Dungeon, Entered] [Step Three: Clear the First Floor] [Reward: The Deepest Desire of your Heart.] [Time remaining until floor collapse: 36 hours, 00 minutes, 00 seconds] As soon as my foot crossed the threshold, time started counting down.

"Thirty-six hours," Finn said.

"It's, what, half past eleven on a Tuesday night? So this expires Thursday morning."

"Yep," I replied.

"Huh." He looked at me. And he relaxed.

"Thursday. That's your dragon day, right? Good thing that's all sorted."

"Right," I said.

"Because if it wasn't sorted…" He paused and looked at me steadily.

"That'd be a real problem. Our timer running out the same morning." If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"It would be."

"Good thing Kalin's in a cell."

"Great thing," I said. Did Finn know something he wasn't letting on? Or was I just being stupid? Everything was fine, right? He held my eyes a bit longer than the conversation warranted. Then he shrugged and went back to watching the doors. I sat there recounting through every time loop problem, trying to make sure there were no loose threads. I wasn't certain. I mean, I knew for sure I didn't know everything, and I did still need to figure out who'd given Kalin the Lich's orb...

I cast a [Marble] and [Light] combo, but it did nothing against the overwhelming dark.

"So what do we do?" Finn asked.

"We don't stand around waiting for the quest to fail, that's for certain." We moved forward and entered into the dark of the dungeon. While I couldn't see anything yet, something had changed in the air and [Soul Sense] pinged. Not a tiny ping, like when I saw Flag for the first time, or the magiball Malus has been playing with. No, this was an overwhelming, foreboding ping. As if I was walking into a soul.

It pressed against the sides of my skull, and I had the sensation of standing in a room where everybody was staring at me. I felt small in a manner I never had before. I know it didn't exactly make sense. But I knew that just like Flag and Axe, the dungeon was alive. I gripped the arms of my chair and made myself go in. Behind me, the golems entered in ranks, their gold boots ringing on ancient stone. The sound should have been comforting. But the sensation of being watched just got worse.

"Did you feel that?" Finn looked around.

"Feel what?"

"The dungeon is a soul. This whole thing. It's one giant soul, and it's awake, and it's watching us." Then Axe did something weird. He went down on one golemy knee and spoke.

"I have fought inside many halls over my years. But I have never been inside of one that was living. I apologize for the blood I am about to spill." And then Flag started talking, too.

"Oh, hello," Flag said out loud to the dungeon.

"I'm Flag. I used to be a floor, too. Yours is much bigger and very nice, and the stonework is definitely beautiful, even though I can't see it. We're going to be inside of you for a while. I hope that's all right." But nothing answered them. I was a little confused about why my soul-bearing companions would suddenly start talking to a dungeon. But I guess it made about as much sense as anything else that had happened to me lately. And then the lights came on. And the dungeon introduced itself.

[Dungeon Alert] The voice was loud and booming. [You have 36 hours to defeat the challenges of this floor and prove yourself worthy of my attention. There will be no other messages.] Well, that was ominous. I chuckled. As I looked around through [Wideview], I got the feeling we'd need all thirty-six hours. The chamber was big enough for the whole army to play hide and seek in. The ceiling went up past where I knew the school would be, which didn't quite make sense to me. And it was split straight down the middle.

A hard line running from the entrance to the far wall where it met a giant door. The craziest part was that the two halves disagreed about what kind of dungeon this was. The left side was a forest. Roots came down through the masonry from a ceiling with a poisoned sky above it, sickly green and ashy. They were thick as my arm, hanging down in looping ropes. The flagstone floor was moss-covered, deep enough for boots to sink into.

And there were trees, dozens of them, grown up out of the floor, trunks reaching for the sky as if they were trying to escape the room. The right side was flooded. Ankle-deep water met a solid barrier in the middle, covering polished gray flagstones. The water was flat as a table, and it held a reflection of a blueish glass ceiling. Eight different rivers cut into the walls in random patterns leading off in various directions. An ambient blue light smothered everything in a hard-to-see haze.

Finn crouched at the divide. He pressed two fingers into the moss, and then did the same with the water.

"Strange. The water's freezing, but the forest is warm."

"Magic's so weird," I said.

"Well, the Keeper did say there were two themes to the dungeon."

"That she did." There were four other doors set in the walls, one to each quarter of the room. There were two on the forest side and two on the water side, closed with the same wood as the front doors. I focused in on the giant door. It was twice the height of the other doors, and its keyhole was the size of my head. It was big, ornate, and copper-rimmed, and looked like it needed a key meant for giants. The smaller doors had their own keyholes, too.

They looked like mini-versions of the big one and were a dull grey color, though there was surprisingly little rust. Iron chains held the locks in place and kept the doors from opening. I floated to the nearest one and tried the handle. It swung open, but the chains remained. And when I tried to put a hand through, it was clearly warded. So much for the easy way out.

"They're all trapped," I said.

"I'm assuming the other three are locked and warded, too."

"So, what's the way forward?" Finn asked.

"Maybe one of those small rivers?" I said, pointing to the watery side of the room. Each of the eight rivers had been formed by channels that had been cut into the flooded floor. Every one was wide enough to stand in and most moved so fast it was clear they were leading somewhere. They were also so deep, the bottom wasn't visible. If someone in our party couldn't swim or get back through the current, they were fucked. I looked down as far as I could through each path with [Wideview].

Still, I couldn't see anything other than an endless supply of water through the haze.

"So we have eight paths, that's clear. And four locked doors for afterward," he said.

"How much you want to bet there's a key down one of those paths?"

"Oh, for sure," I said.

"One of them, anyway." I did the math quickly. We couldn't afford to spend more than five hours per locked door. That meant we had, at most, five hours to go down these paths and still have time for at least one night's rest—plus meditating for mana. I shuddered. I didn't like that idea. That was nowhere near enough sleep. Especially if we ended up using all our mana.

"We could split up," Finn suggested. And I'd have said no about an hour ago. But the fact that we had a time limit changed things entirely. And splitting up was the efficient way to solve things. Without waiting for anyone to say anything, Axe made the decision for us.

"I will go first. These rivers are choke points, and I am an expert at dealing with those." He floated to the edge and dropped in with no ceremony at all. Finn sent two golems in after him—a red and a gold—and the water swallowed all three without so much as a ripple.

"Flag, take the second one," I said.

"Bring two golems with you. If anything down there talks to you, please don't stop and make friends. Or at least talk to me before you do."

"I make no promises," Flag said before going into his tunnel. That left Finn and me with about fourteen golems and six more rivers to figure out how to clear. I ran the numbers. Well, I definitely would've worked faster with Finn around to do my work for me, but splitting further meant more ground covered.

"All right. I'll take this one, and you take the fourth one," I said.

"You take three golems, I'll take three, and we'll leave the rest behind here. Check back every half hour. And make sure you stay in contact with Axe. I'll do the same with Flag."

"That sounds easy enough," Finn agreed. He was already making his way toward his path. I noticed he'd placed his cookbooks in the forest half of the dungeon so they wouldn't get wet. I floated over to my path and looked down into the water. Thankfully, it looked clear enough that I could see my own reflection. Imagine if it had been sewer water. I shuddered and then dropped in.