Chapter 19 (Patreon)

Bruce shook his head to clear it.  The skin on his back still tingled from a near miss by one of the balls of sentient lightning, but the floor was a bit easier to navigate once he knew what to look for.  A bit.

In front of him stood the staircase to the sixth floor.  It was only seven steps, a far cry from some of his previous climbs, but still, the memory of the pressure and struggle contained in each slab of not-stone made Bruce shiver.

He glanced back down the hallway.  Once again, it ended in a false wall.  The illusion was only betrayed by the slightest blemish of green aura visible in Eyes of the Void.  Anyone with a more mundane perception ability wouldn’t have a chance to notice the doorway.  Rather, they would be consigned to wandering the hallways of the seventh floor, dodging sapient lightning while hoping in vain that they accidentally stumbled upon one of the stairwells.

“Oh.”  Kassar’s voice was distracted, like the big warrior had been in the middle of something when he noted where Bruce was.  “You made it through the lightning traps.  Congratulations on that, they’re a formidable obstacle at your level.  Most explorers won’t even risk floors occupied by them until they can take at least four or five hits.”

“Not having any other options outside of dying seems to be a good motivator,” Bruce replied with a chuckle, bouncing up and down on his toes as he limbered his body up.  The moment he stepped on the staircase, he was committed.  He would either ascend to the sixth floor, or the forces that powered the Labyrinth would tear him apart and consume him.  It didn’t make sense for Bruce to begin the assent even a second before he was completely ready.

“Just think of necessity as a very aggressive tutor,” Kassar rumbled.  Distantly, Bruce thought he heard a clink of ice cubes against the side of a drink.  “You might not be slaying apparitions and gaining EXP, but you are learning to use the skills you do have to their utmost.  That is a talent that not everyone develops.”

“An aggressive and painful tutor,” Bruce said with a roll of his eyes.  Absently he brushed a hand over his back, wince as his fingers touched the tender skin where he had been nicked by the lightning.  “If I were to guess that you’re drinking another rum colada right now while I’m stuck torturing myself in this maze, would I be wrong?”

“You would be,” Kassar replied cheerfully, the sound of a straw slurping against the bottom of a mostly empty drink clearly audible through their connection.  “It was a mai tai this time.  Your people may have squandered their inheritance in many ways, but their drinks are to die for.”

Bruce sighed, closing his eyes as he waited for the follow up he knew was coming.

“Do you get it human?  I’m dead, so the drinks are to die for.”

Rather than reply, he placed his foot onto the staircase.  Almost immediately, pressure began to build up all around him.  Bruce clenched his teeth, taking another step.  Deep in his head, he could hear Kassar cheerfully begin singing a drinking song to himself.

Bruce tuned the alien out, focusing instead on the rapidly increasing weight that was pushing down on him.  Every step was harder than the last, and by the time he reached the top of the stairwell, Bruce’s hands were trembling and he was breathing heavily.

After his fourth climb, he had basically figured out the stairs’ rules.  Each step was about twice as hard to traverse as the last, meaning that the tenth floor was his absolute limit.  Bruce had barely managed ten steps at his peak condition, and even then he wasn’t sure he could replicate the feat.  Trying to climb up from the eleventh floor would require him to more than double his current ability level.

Puffing and heaving, Bruce leaned against a wall, putting his hands on his knees as he surveyed the sixth floor.  There weren’t any immediate traps or surprises, but he did his best to keep his wits about him as he called up Eyes of the Void.

The Labyrinth around him lit up in the rainbow hues granted by the ability.  A minute or so of focus let Bruce catch his breath and scan his surroundings more thoroughly.  Unlike the previous floor where traps were a counterpoint to the dangers posed by their denizens, the sixth floor was a minefield.

Bruce identified a couple of monsters moving through it, blobs of brownish red that moved slowly and close to the ground, but in most hallways the floor itself was a checkerboard of green and red.  Only a couple of spots such as the top of the staircase and immediately around the entry to the one sanctuary within range of his scan were free of the traps.

Almost worse was the fact that the walls, the ceiling and larger swaths of the air itself were also filled in with streaks of color.  It wasn’t quite as pervasive as the floor, but any creature trying to climb or fly past the near constant traps would find themselves in their own brand of trouble.

“Okay,” Bruce said, standing up from his half crouch.  “This is clearly a rigged game.  How am I supposed to get past all of this nonsense?  Unless there’s a secret passage somewhere that Eyes of The Void can’t pick up, it doesn’t look like there’s an option other than deliberately triggering these traps.”

“Eh?” Kassar grunted, the faintest hint of a slur to his voice.  “Oh yeah.  This floor is miserable.  You’ll have to stick to the patches lit by green auras.  Those are illusions.  With any luck Eyes of the Void will let you see through them.  Just be careful of any that are tinted yellow.  Those will have a mind control element and you haven’t been able to afford any mental fortitude patterns yet.  Those will convince you to just march straight into the nearest fatal trap.”

“So green,” Bruce replied dryly, “but the right shade of green.  Do I look like I have a Godforsaken color wheel on me?  I wasn’t exactly an artist or an interior designer before I jumped on that rocket.”

“Try that one,” Kassar responded, and Bruce felt his gaze drawn to one of the large splashes of green.  Outside of his enhanced sight, there was nothing to differentiate it from the rest of the floor surrounding it.

A shiver ran down Bruce’s back as he glanced at the other patches of red.  When inspecting them closer with Eyes of the Void he could see sparks of blue, orange, and silver flickering around inside them.  There was no way for him to tell exactly what they would do without setting them off, but Bruce had a distinct feeling that triggering one of the crimson auras would be the last action he would ever take.

Taking a deep breath, Bruce clenched his jaw.  He could stare at the patch of green for another four hours and it wouldn’t move.  There was no way forward but to actually take the first step.

His foot lifted.  Bruce swore he could feel static electricity running up and down the limb, raising gooseflesh as his mind raced through every possible way his actions could go wrong.

Bruce’s toe touched the stone and every muscle in his body clenched as he prepared himself for anything.

The world went black for a second, and the stark hallways of the Labyrinth were replaced by a grassy hillside, patches of blueberry bushes shifting slightly in the breeze and forming a semicircle in front of him about fifteen feet away.

Above him, a songbird flitted through the cloudless sky, warbling happily to itself before it landed in one of the bushes and began jumping from branch to branch, gorging itself on the berries.

“Kassar,” he said hesitantly.  “I know you said green meant illusions, but where the hell am I and how do I get out of here without accidentally killing myself.”

For a second, the only reply was the crash of the surf and the rush of wind.  Finally, Kassar spoke up.

“Just use Eyes of the Void you fool.  That’s half the point of the pattern.  Other than letting you map out the Labyrinth from a distance, it can see through almost any illusion.  There’s no need to bother me with every little stubbed toe and skinned knee.  You’re a talented individual.  You can figure it out from here.”

His voice vaded away, leaving Bruce grumbling to himself.

Rather than re-engage Kassar in conversation, he activated Eyes of the Void once again.  A moment later he shook his head, a pained half smile on his face.

The green aura of the illusion enchantment ended about a foot or two away from the blueberry bushes.  Instead, the angry red light of traps crackled angrily at him, lying in wait for anyone foolish enough to rush toward them.

Carefully, Bruce crossed the distance.  Whatever had made the illusion, it did a good job.  The grass smelled clean and fresh, the air tousled his hair, and the birdsong was as realistic as a movie. In every way, it was a perfect duplicate of an early summer day back home.

He took a deep breath, crouching slightly before hopping directly into one of the bushes.  A half second later, he landed in the next green square over.  The checkered nature of the trap hallway meant that there was only a thin connection at diagonals.  If he simply walked across the line, there was too much of a risk that Bruce’s foot might accidentally trigger the red psychic energy that lay snarling at his feet.

The world went dark.  This time, there was no light whatsoever.  Only the howl of cool, stale wind as it rushed past him.  Underneath Bruce’s feet, he could feel the uneven stone floor of a cave.

Once again he activated Eyes of the Void.  Even though he couldn’t see anything normally, the patchwork of auras shown brightly in the dark, guiding his way to the next illusion trap.

Another hop, and he was standing on the ceiling of the hallway he had been walking down.  Above him, an image of himself walked easily down the corridor, untroubled by any traps or defenses.

Bruce didn’t let the illusion slow him down in the slightest, continuing his journey by the invisible light of the psychic energy glowing beneath his feet.  The ‘ceiling’ was completely unmarked, nothing but smooth gray not-stone running from wall to wall.  He walked diagonally toward a corner where the green squares met, senses scanning back and forth across the hallway as he moved.

In the distance, Bruce noticed one of the slow-moving brown smudges that marked the floor’s monsters slowly dragging itself in his general direction,   He pushed it out of his mind, instead pacing up to the edge of the illusion and preparing himself for another jump

Just as his muscles were tensing for the leap, a flash of yellow drew his attention.

Bruce cut the jump off short, wobbling slightly as he barely contorted his body into falling backward.  With a groan, he reached back rubbing his lower back.

He squinted, slightly disoriented by the illusion of himself running back down the hallway above his head.  Sure enough.  The square he was about to jump into had a webwork of yellow light, barely visible, running like veins through it.  A chill ran down his spine as Bruce remembered Kassar’s warning about the compulsion enchantments woven into some of the illusions.

If he had taken that final step, there was no question that the psychic energy of the illusion trap would have forced him to wander blindly into one of the more fatal defenses.

His body screamed at him as Bruce scooted back a bit and stood up.  There was still some residual nerve pain from where he had been winged by the seventh floor’s lightning, but most of his discomfort came from the muscles strained by forcefully halting his jump into the next zone.

Grumbling to himself, he walked across the edge of the illusory area, crossing over toward another safe box of green energy before making his jump.  A hop and he was on a barren mountainside, an avalanche of rocks tumbling down the slopes toward him.

Everything instinct screamed simultaneously, demanding that Bruce turn and run, but he held fast.  Closing his eyes, Bruce planted his feet into the ground and as the noise of the onrushing stones grew louder.

A second later, they stopped entirely.  He opened his eyes again to find himself inside a partially translucent boulder.  He waved a hand, watching his fingers pass in and out of the ‘stone’ without any resistance.

With a shrug, he walked out of the rock pile at the base of the slope, aiming himself toward one of the corners of the square yet again.  Just behind him, red energy, shot through with crackling silver bands, hummed angrily, waiting for someone foolish enough to flinch in the face of the tumbling rocks and take a step backward into its grip.

He could feel tension beginning to build in his aching muscles as he jogged to the next transition between squares.  Even if Bruce wasn’t taking any physical damage, the stress of being tossed from one scenario to another was starting to wear on him.

Bruce crossed the threshold, and almost immediately he was in a burning barn.  Wooden beams blazed on either side of him in a half collapsed lattice.  This time there wasn’t any real relationship between the illusory building’s walls and the edges of the green aura.  He was simply in a maze of flaming and half destroyed wood.

“Of course,” Bruce mumbled to himself as he walked through a pile of flaming debris, his body tensing reflexively.  “There’s no way they would keep things predictable.  Whoever made this used the first couple of illusions to lure me into charging toward danger to avoid traps.  Now that I’ve gotten a little experience under my belt, they’re switching it up.  If I followed what worked before, there’s a pretty good chance I’d end up running into a red zone.

“What are you doing dawdling?” Kassar’s question practically made Bruce jump out of his skin.

“I’m not dawdling,” he replied crankily, jumping over the boundary and flinching slightly as his surroundings transformed into a steel cage hanging from a chain over an abyss.  “I’m just taking the illusions slowly.  I almost accidentally wandered into an area that had a yellow aura, and even with Eyes of the Void it’s a little bit hard to tell the truth from fiction at times.”

“And did you think that the Great Labyrinth would simply let you slowly walk through its hallways, using your patterns to avoid its traps with impunity?”  The warrior pressed.  “That you could take your time and relax in the midst of its death maze?”

“Yes?”  Bruce hazarded.  “I mean, it’s still pretty dangerous.  I’m not exactly having a stroll in the park here.”

“Well,” Kassar barked, “It’s about to get quite a bit more dangerous.  You’ve been focusing so much on getting to the end of the hallway that you stopped paying attention to what’s behind you.  The illusions aren’t just there to disorient you, they also hide the floor’s monsters from casual sight.”

Bruce whipped around, his eyes widening as Eyes of the Void explored the auras behind him.  There was the usual patchwork of red and green psychic imprints, but barely fifteen feet away, a large blob of brown energy slid toward him, a whirl of barely visible brown tentacles swinging back and forth in front of it.

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