Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Bruce paused for a moment, keeping track of the three smudges of brown on the very outside limits of Eyes of the Void that marked labyrinth snails.  He wasn’t sure whether it was the extra point of will or simply his additional familiarity with the layout and traps of the floor, but tracking down the staircase had only taken him three days of careful travel and rest.

He stepped into another illusion, ignoring the image of a battlefield covered in rotting and partially dismembered bodies as he walked toward the square’s exit.  Crows took off, cawing and circling overhead.  The entire tableau reeked of both menace and rot, but that didn’t stop him from jumping into the next zone.

“Two more,” he whispered to himself, the false hallway that hid the staircase glittering a tantalizing bright green in his enhanced vision.

Around him, the world shifted to an ocean.  Bruce was standing on a raft, the triangular fins of sharks cutting through the shallow waves in a tight circle around him.  No land was in sight, but Bruce stepped off of the ramshackle platform of wood and onto the water.

In the distance, he tracked a labyrinth snail as it trudged through the maze’s corridors.   It was about five hundred feet away, but a couple of walls kept the creature from being able to directly see Bruce.  Still, given the number of surprises the Labyrinth had unleashed on him so far, Bruce wasn’t going to dismiss the possibility that one of the monsters had an ability like Eyes of the Void that would let them track a traveler through solid barriers.

He hopped onto the top of a skyscraper.  Far below him, the wind rushed and cars honked.  Bruce pushed them out of his mind and walked into open space toward the final illusory square on his left.

Another jump brought him into a dark forest.  Animals hooted and stirred the underbrush, but Bruce brushed past all of them, instead walking up to the wall of the corridor and walking straight through it.

The headache that had been building over the last two hours of traversing the floor’s traps began to fade away as he spotted the staircase.  Bruce walked over to its base before plopping himself down and crossing his legs.

Behind his back, the Labyrinth’s wall was cool and smooth.

“Hey Kassar.”  He broke the silence.  “When do you think I’ll be able to start fighting monsters?  I just got a new pattern, and I swear my hands are feeling a bit itchy from all this skulking and running.”

“Not on the fifth floor, that’s for sure,” the alien replied, his voice filtering up from the recesses of Bruce’s mind.  “Every five floors the Labyrinth has a cleaner, a sort of boss monster.  The first cleaner isn’t terribly hard to avoid, the accord prevents that, but it is enough to wipe out a lower level party of travelers if they aren’t careful.”

“Okay,” Bruce said slowly as he tried to parse his mentor’s statement.  “Now what does that mean, and what in the name of baseball and apple pie is the accord?”

“Relevant to the present moment?”  Kassar asked.  “It means that you will see a number of weak and EXP rich monsters.  They will still be a bit difficult for you given how weak you are currently, but you must not fight them.  The minute one is slain, the reaper will know your location and seek you out.  It is faster, stronger, and much more resilient than you.  I doubt you will be able to escape its attention.”

“The accord is a discussion for another time, but the basics are fairly straightforward.  When the galaxy was young, the Great Labyrinth was all but impassible.  The predator did receive the psychic energy it desired, and species were bound to their own star systems, only risking the depths of space in large plodding generation ships.  The Void Mother, the only entity strong enough to interact with the Great Labyrinth as an equal, interceded.  The two of them struck a deal.  The levels of the labyrinth were separated by difficulty with strict limits on how powerful a monster could be per floor.  In exchange, the Void Mother visited the various races, granting us the ability to absorb EXP so that we would have an incentive to journey into the maze.”

“So this Void Mother is an actual entity that you can interact with?”  Bruce questioned.  “I thought she was a metaphor or something rather than a being of flesh and blood.”

“Well you can’t interact with her,” Kassar replied wryly.  “Also I never said she was made of flesh and blood.  She rarely makes contact, but when she does the Void Mother is an energy construct about the size of a moon.  You can’t exactly touch her, but she can and absolutely has spoken to every individual in an entire species simultaneously from orbit.”

Bruce shivered.  “Okay, as real as taxes and strong enough that I can’t actually conceive of her abilities.  Got it.”

He stood up, leaning his head to the side to crack his neck as he looked at the staircase.

It stood still, six steps resting malevolently in front of him.  Bruce couldn’t see or feel any of the signs of the tyrannical pressure that he knew would assault him the second he put his foot on the first step, but he knew that the staircase’s looks were deceiving.  As non threatening as the inanimate object looked, actually climbing it was as taxing as a five mile run through the mountains.

Bruce took the first step, body groaning under the familiar pressure.  He made it up two more steps in rapid succession before his bones began to creak under the weight.  Still, it was nowhere near as bad as the previous floors, and he was stronger.

He hardened his will against the psychic force, taking one step and then another.  Bruce’s ascent slowed as the Labyrinth battered him from all sides, but ultimately, by the time he made it past the sixth step, he was only winded.

Once the pressure from transitioning floors faded away, he quickly re-activated Eyes of the Void, and the world around him lit up in a rainbow of auras and colors.

“Ff-” the curse caught in Bruce’s throat as he began running.

Two brown spheres, banded with ten or so rings of violet sat atop a webwork of roots that clutched at the not-stone of the maze’s floor.  More importantly, a long vine stretched from the back of each of them, disappearing deeper into the labyrinth where they were connected to… something.

“Oh God,” he grunted between wheezing breaths, “They can move, why in the hell can the plants move?”

Behind him, both of the bulbs had spun open revealing eight petals with razor sharp edges as their roots pulled themselves free of the floor.  They weren’t traveling exceedingly fast, about as quickly as a slow jog, but the tendrils of plant matter were constantly moving, dragging both of the bulbs toward Bruce’s retreating form.

“Are those vines-” he began, only for Kassar to cut him off.

“Yes.  Save your breath human.  They are connected to the reaper.  There are too many deathblooms for it to track all of them at once, so it is very unlikely that it knows your current location, but if you were to kill one, that would send a priority signal right to the master plant.”

“Unlikely?”  Bruce squeaked, all dignity gone as he leapt over a streak of red aura on the floor.  “Are you sure you don’t mean ‘it absolutely doesn’t know where you are?’  I prefer that interpretation by quite a bit.”

“If you do not want it to find you,” the alien replied smugly, “simply let its buds spot you less.  On that note, you should probably turn right here.”

Ahead another ball of brown and purple sat in a cubby.  It wasn’t exactly visible from the main corridor, but anyone trying to escape down that passage would be in for a rude surprise when their path took them so close to the dormant monster.

A sanctuary beckoned, but Bruce knew better than to take the bait.  Hidden in the floor in a circle around its entrance was an all but impenetrable layer of traps, and even if he survived those, another deathbloom stood just on the other side.  Even if he didn’t kill it, the explosion of the traps would likely finish it off, bringing down the wrath of the floor’s boss.

Bruce turned again, pressing his body to the wall of the labyrinth to scoot past a trap that took up most of the hallway.  Another two hundred feet and a left turn to avoid a fifth sleeping monster, and he came to a halt, hands on his knees and heaving for breath.

“Good job,” Kassar said, his voice heavy with approval.  “There will be some patrolling monsters as well, but for now I believe you’ve lost the deathblooms that were guarding the entrance.  That was a rather nasty trick.  Unless a party could overwhelm both of them and flee down the stairs in short order, killing one would call the sweeper.”

“Why does it sound like you admire the Labyrinth?” Bruce asked, his voice barely a croak.  “It just almost killed both of us.”

“But it didn’t,” the alien replied.  “With each disaster you avoid, you are becoming more familiar with your strength and abilities.  Even if you don’t gain another point of EXP before you exit the predator’s maw, your control over Eyes of the Void will reach an expert level.  I’m sure you would prefer an easy ascent, but this is making you stronger, and rest assured Bruce.  When the time comes for us to get our revenge, you will need to be strong.  Much stronger than you are now.”

In the distance, a ball of brown aura appeared in Bruce’s perception.  It skittered through the hallways, climbing onto the walls with ease to pass the periodic traps that covered the floor.  The creature wasn’t coming right toward him, but it was heading generally in the direction of the stairwell he had emerged from.

“Ah,” Kassar remarked.  “A symbiotic monster of some sort.  The combat pheromones of the blooms must have drawn it in.”

Bruce groaned, righting himself and walking in the opposite direction of the prowling creature.  He was still breathing heavily, but nothing had actually spotted him yet so there was no real reason to run.

“Do you know what it is we’re dealing with?”  He asked, tracking the creature as well as another three or so dormant blooms that blocked various twists and turns of the maze.  “It’d be helpful to know if it can spit acid or see through walls or something of that nature.  I don’t want both of us to die just because I underestimated whatever the heck that thing is.”

“Sorry,” Kassar replied, untroubled by Bruce’s concern.  “I’ve been dead and haunting the bottom of this section of the Labyrinth for thousands of years.  Periodically, the Great Predator changes the psychic constructs in its gullet to keep people from getting too comfortable.”

“Plus,” the alien continued smugly.  “I was strong enough that I simply ignored small fry like this and simply beat the reaper to death directly.  The heat from my flame aura killed most of them before they even had line of sight on me.”

Bruce stopped, letting Eyes of the Void map the upcoming passages for a second before turning around and backtracking.  Far ahead, all of three of the corridors that split off from the hallway he was using merged together in a room with four of the deathblooms, a massive illusionary aura, and a trio of nasty looking crimson auras that marked traps.

“I don’t suppose you have any advice for me on this level?”  Bruce questioned, picking through the various passages sprouting off from his hallway until he found one that would carry him past the trap room.  “Traversing this nonsense sucks, and it would be nice if my mentor would step in to offer me some sage wisdom that would clear this mess up.  Any minute now.”

“You’re doing a good job,” Kassar responded.  Bruce could practically see his white, furry shoulder shrugging.  “You are outclassed, and Eyes of the Void is the perfect tool for avoiding encounters that could maim or kill you. With every floor, I can feel your senses sharpening.  Truly, this is much more effective training than having you chase energy wisps.  I should have thrown you to the wolves from the start.”

Bruce jumped up into the air, grabbing a bar that was hidden from sight by a green aura.  One hand traversed in front of the other, dragging Bruce incrementally forward, his hands clanking with each grab as they slapped against the metal pole.  Foot by foot he pulled himself toward the end of the hallway, muscles bulging as he passed through the air above the large pit of angry red light.

Traps.  Wall to wall, and in some cases covering the wall themselves.  This corridor was probably higher difficulty than the other path he had spotted, but it had one major advantage.  No monsters to tip off the reaper.

Finally, he dropped on the other side, chest and shoulders slightly sore from the exertion.  Another scan of his area pinpointed a pair of deathblooms, and yet again Bruce changed his course to avoid them.

Unlike the other floors, Bruce didn’t have to stop for constant breaks to replenish his mental energy.  Eyes of the Void was active at all times, but other than that, it was a simple matter for him to avoid traps and confrontations with the dormant blooms, allowing Bruce to conserve almost all of his energy.

After about five hours of patrolling, pausing only once to sneak past another roving monster, he found the floor’s exit, once again hidden behind a false wall of green energy that glowed brightly.  That said, flanking it on either side-

“Hey now,” Bruce grumbled.  “They’ve already tried this trick once.”

“And it was effective then,” Kassar replied with a chuckle, “just as it is now.  Two deathblooms means that if you are to fight them, it will be hard if not impossible to kill both of them before the reaper arrives.  Now Bruce, you have been learning how the Labyrinth works.  It does not present problems that are unsolvable.  How do you plan on getting past these foes?”

He thought for a moment.  Based on his experience with the labyrinth snail, it would take everything he had to kill even one of the plants.  Two was suicide even if the reaper wasn’t hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles.

Still, as nice as the EXP would be, that wasn’t really his goal.

“With a little razzle dazzle,” Bruce responded, extending his left arm and summoning his shield.

Before Kassar could reply, he broke into a run, turning the corner that separated him from the dormant deathblooms and sprinting toward both of them.  He was too far away to catch them by surprise, likely something intended by the predator that designed the labyrinth.

Running as fast as he could toward the two of them, Bruce could only watch the tops of the orbs open and slide outward, revealing flowers made of razor sharp petals, all at about his neck level.  The plants whirred slightly and the petals began to spin in a circle, too fast to see individually as they turned into impromptu chainsaws.

“Bruce, what are you-”  Kassar shouted in alarm, but he ignored the alien.

He dropped to his back, holding the shield up and letting his momentum carry him toward the false wall.

Both of the plants leaned downward, petals buzzing angrily as they struggled to track him.  It was just as he thought, their attacks were optimized for targets between three and seven feet tall.  They could hit things near the ground, but the deathblooms would have to rotate their entire body in order to track his rapidly skidding body.

One of the whirring petal fans hit his shield, a high pitched squeal as almost a dozen blades ricocheted off of his defenses in the fraction of a second it took for him to slide past.  Bruce immediately felt a spike of pain in his head as a webwork of cracks appeared in the crackling violet energy, but it hardly mattered.

He was through.

Both of the plants turned to follow him through the illusory wall, evidently they could still track him despite the barrier, but that wouldn’t be a problem for long.

Bruce sprang to his feet, dismissing his shield and a portion of the headache that came with it as he jogged toward the staircase in front of him.  Only five stairs.  He was getting that much closer to home.

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