Chương 77: 77, Loop 2, Part 31

Finn plucked the key from my hands and examined it.

"Huh. I'm noticing a theme here," he said.

"What theme?"

"Are you for real?" he said.

"It's spiders, Laz. The bell things had, like, eight legs, and then these wooden spiders. And now this key, and the spider webs above the tree."

"Those things weren't spiders." I thought back, trying to think of how they had looked.

"They had eight legs, dude."

"Lots of things have eight legs. Doesn't make them spiders." He looked around at the forty-six Flags before handing the key back to me. I turned the key around in my hands, examining it. It was larger than I'd been expecting, and heavier to boot. Almost a foot long, in fact. Eight iron spider legs curled outward from the shank, forming the teeth of the key, while the handle itself had been carved into a miniature treetop. I paused, because I thought back to what Flag had just said. Master key.

There was something about that that didn't sound right to me. It was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't place it. Then I thought back to the entrance, and how we were going to use this key. There were four normal locked doors at the entrance. One giant master door that presumably led the way to the boss room. And yet we'd only opened three of the normal ones. The math wasn't hard. But it sure was annoying. We had wasted our fucking time. Probably.

Though if Flag was to be believed, the dungeon could have sent us through one more set of rooms. We'd only ever really needed to visit the crank room, and then this one. I sat down on the dock and sighed in frustration. I hated wasted time. Now I was feeling like the poster child for the entire concept. We'd been here for twenty-two fucking hours. And I hadn't had anywhere near enough sleep in that time. Barely ten hours. It was an outrage. I knew I'd be pushing my luck if I asked for a nap right now.

I was practically sitting at full mana, anyway. But instead of yelling at me to get up and do something, Finn just sat down next to me.

"Commander. There are forty-six Flags. And three of us. If we strike first, we will likely lose, but lose with honor."

"What? Nobody's gonna attack anybody, man."

"Then when the sudden but inevitable betrayal comes, we will die with dishonor."

"Dude. They're not gonna do anything." Despite my protests, he was right, of course. The red tethers were a dead giveaway that there was something rotten about these clones. Having them follow along with us would most likely backfire in some awful, awful way. They were really unsettling, too. The second after the battle stopped, they all froze. Well, Flag Prime was still acting suspiciously like he always had. He was walking around, observing his clones. Renaming them, now that he had time "Maur-ice! Pat-Rick!

Joe-Nathan!", patting them on the head, and telling them they'd done a good job. The scene was adorably unsettling. And the kind of ticking time bomb I was going to let Future Laz deal with. Besides, if it really was what I was thinking, I already had a plan forming in the back of my mind. Thank you, Keeper. Of all the tethers stretching out of Flag's back, one kept occupying my attention. Specifically, the one that didn't end at any of the clones.

The one that went straight up, past the branches and webbing, and disappeared into the gray brick ceiling. He had so many fucking tethers now that you couldn't even really see Flag anymore. Or at least, I couldn't. My tether was still there, too. Running from me into Flag, like always. Except now, there was a thin streak of red in it. It was hard to make out, what with the absolute mess of color suffusing Flag, but it was slowly creeping its way through my gold tether toward me. I'd have to keep an eye on it.

As Flag started talking sweet nothings to the tree, something clicked into place. It was faint, but I could see two souls above me—one connected to Flag's red tether in the direction of the tree branches and the other a bit away. And it all finally made sense. The dungeon had a soul. I'd seen the damn thing the second we walked into it. But that didn't mean it had been the thing talking to Flag this whole time, because the tree had a soul, too. In fact, what if it hadn't been the dungeon talking to Flag at all?

Maybe it had been the fucking tree. This led me to some interesting, if not terrifying, conclusions. Back when we'd first gone down the river tunnels, the tree had been the one draining my mana. And that was when it had gotten into Flag somehow. We had absolutely no idea how much of what Flag had been telling us lately was actually true. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

I stared at its blinding white soul, which, while massive, utterly paled in comparison to the one we'd first encountered upon entering. The one I could barely see off in the distance above. Poor, naive, innocent, trusting Flag. He'd been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. By a con man. Well, a con tree, I guess. The only reason I hadn't found the soul this whole time was its color, which made it blend in with the cobwebs that filled the ceiling almost to the brim. Which brought us to the elephant-sized key in the room.

We were officially out of excuses not to finish the damn dungeon. And that meant it was time to do something. Fuck. Just as I was about to get up, Finn finally spoke up.

"You know, ever since you woke up in the infirmary, I have been questioning my life choices."

"Why?"

"A series of decisions that led to me becoming your roomate somehow also led to me sitting in a dungeon with forty-six Flag clones. I'd like to say you get me into shenanigans, but honestly, I'd probably get into enough trouble on my own even without you." I didn't know what to say, so I just kept staring ahead.

"You okay?" he asked.

"You've been staring at the ceiling for, like, two minutes." He climbed to his feet.

"I'm fine," I said.

"I'm just admiring the brickwork." Finn rolled his eyes, but I still got up after him.

"We've got something like fourteen hours left." I didn't bother checking the timer. It wasn't worth the effort.

"I'd like to spend as few of them up here as possible and leave with a sizable chunk of time left. Besides, I know it'll be Thursday soon. And if we don't hustle, this weird-ass tree is going to be the least of our worries." The crank was still sheathed in its socket. As soon as we stepped onto the platform, we started alternating casts, but in the reverse direction. The whole damn thing groaned with each rickety inch we dropped as the water slowly began to fall beneath us. But we had finally made it.

We were back on the road to finishing this damn place. I had thought making our way up each floor was going to be the worst part of the dungeon experience. I was so fucking wrong. If we'd been moving at a molasses pace before, lowering the water was glacial. I swear an entire hour passed as we moved between the two floors. The most interesting thing that happened was that all forty-six of the Flags followed suit.

Those that had been water-walking remained floating on the surface of the water as it lowered bit by bit. Otherwise, it was a very anticlimactic trip down. There were none of the bell monsters. And when we stopped on the second floor, we made our way across the platforms using my old ice, which had somehow stayed exactly where I'd left it despite spending at least half an hour underwater. Apparently, magical ice didn't believe in floating. I was trying hard not to glance at my tether. I couldn't really see it move.

But it was clear that the red tether was inching its way toward my heart. And I didn't want to find out what happened if or when it got there. If getting down to the second floor had felt like an hour, getting down to the first felt like a lifetime. It took so long and got so exhausting that the absolute worst-case scenario occurred. I fell asleep. And fell off the platform. From the sudden vertigo and sensation of falling, I expected to find myself drowning once more.

However, I landed in ankle-deep water that still soaked me head to toe from my landing. I had been assuming the water would have swallowed my golems whole and been so deep there'd be no way to recover them. But it wasn't deep at all. Another part of the dungeon that had needlessly wasted my time. On the bright side, my three golems that had fallen were walking into the wall like nothing had even happened. The entrance hall was still split down the center when we made it back.

I'd had a funny thought that maybe draining all the water would cause it to flood back into the right side of the room. But no, it was as dry as a desert. The forest had taken on a pale brown color. The roots and leaves that had once covered the forest half of the room had shriveled up and turned gray at their ends. It was clear the lifeblood of the forest had been the water on the right side, and removing it had started to kill the trees. But that wasn't what I was focusing on. No.

It was the giant ornate door at the end of the room. I walked past the forty-six Flags, who were trying their hardest not to take up too much space in the entrance. In a much smaller room, they honestly looked even more intimidating. Finn was the first one to say anything.

"We kind of make an intimidating sight. We have a small army of golems. There's forty-six fucking Flags. And almost two whole people." He smirked at me as he said that.

"If we're being generous. And now we have the dungeon boss key." I realized now was as good a time as any to finally address something with Finn. Most likely, Flag would be able to overhear no matter what I tried or did. But I went off to the far side of the forest, and he followed suit. When I was fairly certain we were mostly out of earshot, I told Finn the plan I wanted Flag to hear. It wasn't even a lie. Not exactly.

"I don't quite get how we're going to do this. But if you pull it off, it'll be the most insane thing I've ever seen."

"Well, of course. That's why we didn't tell the rest of the group. The more you speak about a plan, the less likely it is to work. Don't you know that?" The best part was that even though it was mostly for Flag's benefit, there was still a solid way the plan could work out in our favor. While trekking down, I had noticed that the red part of the tether didn't stretch when the gold part did. Which meant, as long as I stayed far enough away from Flag, I wouldn't have to worry about it at all.

And it also meant, unfortunately, that we had time to meditate. Which we absolutely needed to do if we were going to fight a fucking boss. We spent the next ten minutes repainting our golems with a fresh coat. And then, even though I didn't want to, we meditated for an hour to regen up to max mana. And then we reapproached the door. Up close, the keyhole was the size of my head. And it had a shape that perfectly matched the master key. Eight notches that linked together into a treetop-like shape.

I held the key out and tried to figure out how to perfectly line up the eight legs without damaging anything. I turned to Finn.

"How does this thing even work?" I said.

"It's not like any key I've ever seen." But as if I were activating a spell, the key lifted out of my hands. And then rotated in the air until it found the exact angle. The notches lined up. And then, all at once, the key sank into the door. The chains immediately melted away.