Chapter 20 (Patreon)

He jumped through the ‘wall’ of the cage.  For a brief second, Bruce felt a rush of vertigo as he ‘fell,’ but the illusion was unable to maintain the sensation for long.  He landed in empty air above a roiling ocean and broke into a sprint toward one of the glowing boundaries of his current square.

Behind him, a strand of brown energy whipped through the air.  For a fraction of a second, he felt the wind of its passage on the back of his neck and the crack as the attack broke the sound barrier, then the sensations died abruptly.

Evidently, the power infused into the illusory squares blotted out all outside input, including the image, tactile sensation, and sound of interlopers.  The monster could see and attack him, but without Eyes of the Void, Bruce would have been completely blind to its passage, ambling through the hallway until it silently snuck up on and murdered him.

The next square saw him situated on a narrow mountaintop, open air and steep cliffs on either side of him.  He paused only for a second to scan the surrounding enchantments, and then Bruce was running toward the upper right, away from the flecks of yellow that would spell his doom in the leftmost square.

His feet padded on empty air, bringing another wave of swirling vertigo as Bruce’s senses screamed that he was about to fall.  Then he jumped into the next zone, buying himself a couple seconds of breathing room.

The brown blob of the monster was some twenty feet behind him, moving slowly but steadily after him in a zig zag pattern that took it through the same boxes Bruce used in his flight.

“I need to make it to the sanctuary,” Bruce said through gritted teeth, scanning through the maze of upcoming traps and illusions.  “The phantom images are going to give me a migraine if I push it too far, and a single slip here will kill me.  Worse, getting chased by a monster is playing hell with my stress levels.  I’ve got maybe two or three more minutes of focus left in me before I accidentally jump into a flaming pit or something.”

He crossed another boundary and found himself in a grassy field with thunderclouds gathering overhead.

“I don’t know if that’s an option,” Kassar replied quietly.  “If it’s within a couple hundred feet of you, I’ll be able to see you enter the sanctuary and follow you in.  Of course, that’s only if you manage to leave this square.  I think you’re in a bit of trouble here.”

Above Bruce, the clouds opened up, sending down a deluge of warm rain as he frowned.

“What do you mean-” Bruce began, only for his eyes to widen as he inspected the two available exits to the prairie.  Both flickered with yellow undertones.  Behind him, the monster slid inexorably toward him.

“You won’t survive the traps around you, and if you backtrack the monster will end up in front of you, blocking your path,” Kassar said grimly.  All of the previous lethargy and breeziness gone from his voice.  Goosebumps sprouted on both of Brad’s forearms.  It was like he was back on the tenth floor with a flaming skull hovering over him all over again.

“I don’t suppose you have a plan?”  Bruce asked, ignoring the rain and distant thunder as he turned to face the slowly oncoming smear of brown.  “I’ve grown pretty attached to living, and if it's all the same to you, I’d prefer to keep at it.”

“I would also prefer to survive long enough to enact my revenge,” Kassar’s voice boomed over the crack of thunder.  “There is one option.  It is risky and will likely hurt, but it is better than simply accepting our fate.”

“I like options.”  Bruce’s voice was clipped, his attempt at humor falling flat as his heart rate kicked into high gear.

“You’re going to need to kill the monster,” Kassar replied flatly.

Lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the rainy grassland.  The invisible monster, tentacles whipping back and forth in front of it, was almost to the corner where it would transition into Bruce’s square.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said, shielding his eyes against the phantom rain.  “I thought I heard something stupid rather than a plan.  I doubt my hammer will even touch whatever the hell that is.  Attacking it seems just as suicidal as jumping into one of the traps and hoping for divine providence.”

“You aren’t going to use your hammer,” Kassar intoned.  “Your shield is strong.  It can deflect one or two hits from the labyrinth snail’s tentacles. It is avoiding the traps, same as you.  If you could ram-”

Bruce didn’t hear the rest.  The monster was crossing the threshold of the illusory zone, and the alien’s advice was well taken.

His shield popped into being as he ran, crackling angrily as illusionary rain hissed and crackled off of it.

A rope of brown coiled around his head level, and Bruce ducked just as it snapped outward, too fast for the eye to see, and traced a tight arc that would have slashed through his neck like wet tissue paper.  A second tentacle slammed into the center of his shield, rocking him back on his heels for a fraction of a second and leaving a webwork of cracks in the psychic construct.

Then, Bruce hit the creature, shield leading the way.

For a second, the illusion cracked and he could see the monster.  It was a dark blue oval the size of a small car, its entire body covered in thick chitin.  A half dozen holes lined the creature’s spine, each with a pulsing pink tentacle pushing through the opening.

It tipped over onto its side, tentacles snapping wildly, and fell into the nearby trap square.

Bruce barely had a chance to jump free before the entire corridor burst into light.  A pillar of fire flecked with wrist sized bolts of lightning that put the illusion of the thunderstorm to shame.

A tentacle burst from the fire, sawing through the air toward Bruce, and time seemed to slow.  He tried to bring up the shield, but he wasn’t moving fast enough.

For a second, he was back on a baseball diamond as a thirteen year old, watching his first home run sail into the stands.  Longing washed over him.  He wanted to go back.  Just one more time back on-

The tentacle flew past him, uncontrolled and spasming, the last two feet of it sizzling and completely burned through by the fire.  It landed on the square behind him.

The back of his neck tingled, and with a ‘foomp’ the air around him grabbed hold of Bruce and tried to rip him from the Labyrinth’s floor, dragging him back a foot or two before the rush subsided.

He stood up.  The illusion of the rainy grassland gone, the enchantment destroyed by the eruption of the traps on either side of him.  Where the pillar of fire had been, the monster was on its side, shell blackened and all of its tentacles burned completely.

It rocked gently, still alive but evidently unable to interact with the outside world after the damage dealt to it by the explosion.

“By the Void Mother, a captured singularity and a starfire beam,” Kassar remarked with a low whistle.  “The Labyrinth is playing for keeps it seems.  Those are the sort of traps that can level an entire party if they aren’t careful.  Only the truly powerful deep travelers could survive something like that unscathed.”

“Great,” Bruce croaked back.  The skin of his face and arms was warm to the touch, as if sunburnt.

“Now summon your hammer and finish the labyrinth snail,” Kassar responded with a dangerous rumble.  “If you tip it over onto its side, you should have access to its soft underbelly.  Unless I miss my guess, the starfire should have burned a good portion of its foot off.  It might outpower you greatly, but that isn’t a real concern while it’s injured and helpless.  Don’t think of it as an opponent, think of it as a source of EXP.”

Bruce walked over to the snail’s side, the force of the trap that had crippled it long spent.  The monster rocked back and forth, able to sense but not react to his approach.  He reached out, touching his index finger to the monster’s shell.

His skin hissed as it burned.

Bruce yanked it back, sticking the appendage in his mouth.  “Ith hwt!”  He exclaimed, eyes watering.

“Of course it is,” Kassar replied, voice strained as if he were lecturing a child.  “For a brief second, the Labyrinth unleashed the power of a star’s corona onto the snail.  If your real body were here, it likely would have gotten a fatal dose of radiation poisoning.  The surprise shouldn’t be that the snail’s shell is blistering hot, it should be that the shell was able to withstand that blast of heat and electromagnetic radiation of that level without fatal damage.”

“Fwne,” Bruce said around his finger.  He brought his shield up to his left shoulder, relying on the crackling purple energy of the psychic construct to absorb the heat rolling off of the monster as he flipped it onto its side.

There was still enough to make him sweat, but he managed to knock the monster over without any further damage.  Once it was on his side, killing his opponent was a simple matter.

Of course, simple didn’t mean quick.  Even with the amount of damage taken from the trap, Bruce was on the sixth floor.  It took him almost five minutes of repeatedly bashing his hammer into the creature’s quivering underside for it to finally go stiff and begin fading away.

The rush of EXP was worth it.

Two hundred.  Not exactly enough for an unlimited shopping spree, but a lot more than he had earned before meeting Kassar.

“You’re smiling like an idiot,” the alien remarked.  “Are you really going to let a couple hundred EXP go to your head?  If you’re actually going to take up my mantle and get my revenge, this is a drop of water in the ocean of EXP you’ll need to collect.”

“God,” Bruce replied, straightening his back as he dismissed both of his weapons.  “For someone spending his entire day on the beach drinking tropical themed cocktails, you sure are a downer.”

“That’s because kids these days don’t have any work ethic,” Kassar grumbled.  “They just want someone to hand them EXP so they can buy flashy new flight patterns and impress girls.  None of them want to put in the time pounding shades to death with their bare fists needed to earn their way to the top.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  Bruce waved his left hand dismissively, his injured right carefully cradled at his side.  “It’s all right Dad.  Just wait a second for me to wade through these illusions on my way to the sanctuary.  Then I can visit you on your island and feed you your tapioca pudding.  Maybe if we have the time we can play a little shuffleboard.”

The alien grumbled through the next ten minutes as Bruce hopped from square to square.  He had to stop once atop the illusion of a fantastic castle’s battlements in order to let his mind recover a bit from the strain and tension of dealing with the rapidly shifting phantasms.

Finally, he flopped down in the sanctuary, sitting only for a second before he laid down entirely.  Bruce stared at the ceiling for a second before lifting up his right hand.  It was still red where he had burnt himself, but other than that, it didn’t hurt anymore.  Whether that was due to natural healing or the psychic equivalent of nerve endings being seared from the wound, he didn’t have any idea.

Rather, Bruce closed his eyes.  He reached deep inside himself, feeling his consciousness slip into the darkness between thoughts.

For a second, he was lost, suspended in an endless void.  Then, Bruce sensed a spark of light.  He pushed his perception toward it, letting the emptiness rush past until features began to appear in the light.  First an ocean, than a jungle island came into view as if the miniature world were creating itself under his very eyes.

He dove toward it, and light flashed everywhere.  A second later, Bruce opened his eyes.  He was laying on his back, sand all around him and the roar of surf coming from his left.

With a grunt, he stood up, noting that his ordinary tattered clothes were gone, replaced by a swimsuit covered in cartoon cats in sunglasses surfing on bright blue waves.  Some twenty or thirty feet away, Kassar was crouched over a long wooden table, a round red circle tiny in his massive white paw.

“Welcome human,” the alien grunted without turning around.  “I know you suggested that we play shuffleboard as a crack at my age, but once I saw the game in your memories, I couldn’t dismiss the idea.”

“How is it coming?”  Bruce asked, shading his eyes against the sun as he walked across the sand toward his towering mentor.

“Poorly.”

Bruce leaned forward, squinting at the table.  A thin layer of sand covered its surface, not quite obscuring the lines that marked scoring zones that had been burned into the lacquered wood.

“It looks like you made it right,” Bruce said slowly, circling around the side of contraption.  “The length is fine and it looks like you got the size of the goals correct.  What seems to be the problem?”

“That your species are weaklings,” Kassar replied with a grumble, motioning with a furry hand toward where a half dozen red and blue pucks that resembled the one in his hand were buried in the dunes some twenty to thirty feet away.  “I have no idea how you manage to get the pieces to stop on the board.  The entire idea is absurd.”

Bruce started chuckling, ignoring the glowering simian as he walked up to the table.

“Anyone can just chuck the stones.  The key is to have some touch.  You have to use the sand to let them slide to a halt.  Remember, this is a game for the elderly.  You have to be able to play with bad elbows and wrists.”

“You will teach me.”  Kassar’s voice was firm as he turned and towered over Bruce.  “Go and collect your new abilities, but when you return, I demand a lesson on how to play this pitiful game.”

Bruce just rolled his eyes before walking to the three sand bars and inspecting the sea shells laid out before him.  He didn’t bother to travel all that deep.  He’d seen the cost of the patterns around Eyes of the Void, and even if he could afford one supreme skill, it would probably drain his mental focus dry in one go.

What he needed instead were a broad range of improvements and abilities.

After about an hour of sifting through the hundreds of options available, Bruce narrowed his choices down to a handful of abilities that he could use and afford.  Unfortunately, as much as he wanted to start raising his affinities, Bruce was buried deep in the Labyrinth.  Affinities would pay dividends in the long run, but for now he needed to improve his abilities as quickly and drastically as possible.

One point in every ability was non-negotiable as was an upgrade to Hammer of Justice.  He was too weak to fight anything around him, and it was clear that his damage output simply wasn’t up to par for the sorts of monsters he would be running into.  He needed to be stronger, hit harder, and fast enough to escape from any trouble he found himself in.

He also needed to be able to map the areas he had explored.  There was a pattern called Explorer’s Map that promised to automatically record anything he saw, either in person or through Eyes of the Void.  It cost a little more than a standard mapping pattern, but Bruce suspected that the payoff would be more than worth it.

That left just enough EXP for one more entry level ability.  Something that would actually give him a bit of an edge beyond simply being a fast and strong man with a really big hammer.

Shockwave I would work with fists or his hammer, and for a small amount of mental energy it would create a burst of force that would buffet nearby opponents, not doing any damage but disrupting the air and shaking the ground enough to hopefully knock a nearby target off balance.

Gravity Hammer I would also work with any bludgeoning weapon, and its effects were straightforward.  It would simply double the weight of an attack in the fraction of a second before the blow struck home.  It used more mental focus than Shockwave, but it also would directly increase Bruce’s combat strength.

The final option was Solar Flare I.  Even with advancing his Will, Bruce would only be able to use the pattern once before resting, but that one attack would be overwhelming for anyone near his level.  The skill would wrap his entire body in flames and send him hurtling toward a target.  When coupled with his shield, it would let him slam into an enemy with the force of a truck while also setting them on fire.

All three of the abilities were appealing, but ultimately, a measured pace was probably his best bet.  Shockwave I, while cheap to use, likely wouldn’t do much to powerful enemies but buffet them with a light breeze.  On the other end of the spectrum, Solar Flare I was impressive, but Bruce didn’t want a one shot ability that would drain him completely dry.  If he didn’t manage to take his opponent out in one hit, it would leave him reeling and suffering from a migraine in the middle of combat.

Selecting Gravity Hammer I, Bruce glanced back at where Kassar was screaming his frustration at the shuffleboard table.

He sighed.  Something about the alien warrior’s temperament hinted that this was going to be a long lesson.

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