Chương 72: 72 Loop 2, Part 26

"About damn time," Finn said as he stood up from his crouch.

"Took you long enough."

"What? I was busy."

"We've been here almost fifteen minutes. What, were you too lazy to finish the fight?" I laughed.

"Why are you complaining? Honestly, I'm jealous. Fifteen minutes is a nice nap." He rolled his eyes at me. I floated past him and looked into the chest. It was empty, of course. No reason to leave it unopened for fifteen minutes.

"My fight was pretty bad, I almost lost a couple of times." His wand was out and scanning me before I had even finished speaking. I hadn't said anything about my shoulder. But he knew I needed help anyway. Even without his damn scan spell, he had a sixth sense about this kind of thing.

"Hold still."

"Still? Dude, I'm a fucking statue. I mean, Axe is moving more than me." The green light at the end of his wand went into my shoulder. And the ache disappeared.

"So what did you have to face?" I asked Finn when he was done invading my space.

"It was the weirdest fucking thing, man. These clones, of me, stepped out of the mirrors. And tried to gang up on me. They were a pain to get rid of at first, until I realized they were made of water. And then I just [Evaporate] d them." I stared at him, dumbfounded.

"Well, that's annoying. I guess I will need that spell after all."

"I mean, wasn't that obvious? What, did you face clones, too?"

"I didn't just face clones, Finn. Mine all turned into a fucking slime." He looked at me for a second, uncertain.

"A slime?"

"Yeah. A big one with my face on it. Stretched all weird."

"How the fuck did your clones turn into a slime?"

"I don't know, dungeon bullshit? Like, thirty of them popped out of the mirrors at once and started forming this thing. To make matters worse, I kept killing them, but they just kept turning back into water and rejoining the slime." Finn's confusion turned into a smirk.

"What?"

"I just figured something out about why mine didn't turn back into water."

"Oh, good for you. Rub it in, why don't you?"

"No. I mean, I hit them with [Evaporate]. There wasn't any water left afterward, so they just disappeared. How many did you kill before the slime formed?"

"Um, none. They all just kind of ganged up on me and then formed into it themselves."

"You were running away, weren't you?"

"Well, I mean, yeah, I needed time to plan."

"Well, there's your problem. You took too long before slaying the first one, and the second dungeon phase started."

"A second dungeon phase?"

"Yeah. Most bosses have multiple phases if you don't clear them fast enough."

"Well, that's bullshit."

"You said it yourself. Dungeon bullshit." I shook my head. How was that even close to fair? As if he had been patiently waiting his turn to talk, Axe added how his journey went.

"I did not have a challenge, I simply had to find the exit out of the maze. Eventually, I realized I could follow Finn's tether, and once I did, I made my way here quickly." Axe speaking made me realize we were missing a member of our group.

"Hey, have you guys seen Flag?" Finn and Axe looked around, but that wasn't particularly useful. It was clear neither of them had seen him. I tried the tether again. Flag. We've got the key. Also, I fought a slime and won. It was really cool. Solo'd that bad boy. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. But he didn't respond. That wasn't worrisome yet. I mean, Flag meditated sometimes, and he could get distracted by almost anything.

We'd already lost several minutes to him talking to a tree root. If he'd found another one, chances were he'd talk to it for hours without intervention. I gave him a little longer and then sent another message. Flag? You okay there, buddy? Still no response. All right. That was a little weirder. Two messages without a response. I could still feel the tether. But Flag refused to answer.

"Huh," I said.

"Flag's not responding."

"Maybe he is busy talking to another tree root," Axe said. I mean, it was a possibility. But I didn't quite think that was what was happening. I sighed. I took a look at the tether and tried to figure out where he was. But instead of pointing sideways like I'd been expecting, his tether led upwards.

"Well, shit. He's that way." I pointed up and to the right. Finn had the map out already.

"Uh-oh. If I'm right, he's through one of the water doors."

"So much for going the easy way to find the dungeon key, right? What a useless fucking map."

"It's fine. We would have cleared it anyway," Finn said nonchalantly.

"Dude, I've been trying to min-max our dungeon run this entire time, and it's like everything's preventing me at every step."

"How do you think he got so lost?" Finn said.

"Oh, that's obvious. The dungeon probably grabbed him and moved him through the mirrors. No big deal." Finn looked up from the map.

"What do you mean, 'moved him'?"

"Well, the clones could move between mirrors. During the fight, I realized it wasn't creating new ones unless it had to." Finn frowned.

"Mine weren't moving through the mirrors."

"Well, maybe you just evaporated them too fast to notice. I had plenty of time to study while mine were trying to drown me." If the mirrors were all connected, then maybe the maze wasn't just changing paths around us. In fact, it could move things without using the paths we went down at all. Maybe Flag hadn't gotten lost. Maybe the dungeon had simply taken him somewhere else. Finn was thinking along the same lines.

"So maybe there's a way we can use the mirrors to move around the dungeon."

"Hmm. It's possible, but I'm not sticking any body parts into a murder mirror." He looked down at the map.

"Still, could be useful."

"Finn, everything in this dungeon would be more useful if it stopped trying to kill us." Then Finn folded the map back up and said, "Look, we're wasting time standing around. Let's move on before we run out of it." Back at the main entrance, we went through the rightmost of the two water doors. It took key number three, and we walked in. All the other rooms so far had ceilings, or a visible sky. But this one just opened up into a great, unending darkness.

It had a circular wall of wet grey stone, intermixed with wooden pillars. And rough dirt. It was kind of jarring to look at. Like a tower that had been half-finished before it slowly turned into a cave. The first two stories were broken every few feet by narrow ledges, and old iron brackets before the third story gave way to dirt and nothingness. A thin waterfall ran down the bricks in brown, sludgy streaks.

There was very little space to stand where we entered—basically what amounted to an extended stone ledge a yard into the room. The entire rest of the room was filled wall to wall with water. The surface was black enough that my marble light reflected off it without anything visible underneath. Oddly, the water was calm without ripples. Or any flow at all. Even with the thin waterfall. Though I wasn't sure if that was because of the strange-looking dock just beyond the waterfall.

In the center of the room, a giant—and I mean giant—tree rose straight up, reaching beyond where even [Wideview] could see. The trunk was absolutely enormous. And I would have brought it up sooner, if not for the fact that even it was dwarfed by the absolutely massive amount of water around us. If Finn were to swim across it, it'd likely take him five minutes. Thank Therumia for magic. We'd probably cross it in one with [Float]. The tree looked vaguely familiar.

Maybe it was just the fact that the past twenty-four hours had been filled with hundreds of trees, and I was getting déjà vu. But I kept staring. And the realization came to me. I pushed more light into the marble and focused it on the trunk. There were little square patterns carved into it, running in uneven rows up and down.

"Hey, do you think that's Flag's tree?"

"Flag has a tree?"

"Were you not paying attention, man? He spent, like, five minutes ranting about a tree root. Yesterday, before we cleared the first room?" I shined my marble light and cupped my hands to focus the beam, lighting up the tree. As I directed it, I caught a sparkle of metal in the distance. The same patterns were carved up and down the tree. And then to the great beyond. Flag's tether flew up in the same direction. Straight into the tree. Fuck. Had the thing eaten him? No, that didn't make sense.

The tether still worked. I needed to find him, and quickly. I tried to focus myself on solving the problem of Flag missing, but my curiosity got the best of me. I focused the beam in the direction of the glinting metal. In the distance attached to the dock were four sets of iron rails that almost looked like train tracks. They ran up the wall parallel to the waterfall. And then I saw the same damn shape of the crank box from the lobby. It was immediately clear to me what the puzzle was here. Oh, fuck my life.

It was like this entire dungeon had been explicitly designed to stop magical shortcuts and make people do more work. The longer I spent in it, the more I hated that smug wannabe teacher masquerading as a dungeon with a soul. As if to add insult to injury, Axe spoke up.

"The crank clearly raises the water. We have to go back and get it, and then manually raise the water. Hard work will reward us. With victory." Axe didn't have a real face, but it was clear he stared right at me when he said this.

"Yes. Thank you, Axe. You're very helpful," Finn said, glancing at me sideways and grinning.

"You are welcome." On occasion, I would do what had to be done to help others learn something new or make the world a better place. Hell, on occasion, I'd even been known to help idiots learn something. But what I despised most wasn't work for work's sake. No. What I despised, most of all, was pointless, extra effort when easier solutions were possible. And I had a sinking feeling this room was going to take the cake when it came to the amount of effort needed to solve it.