bookworm

I shrugged off his praise, and then realized I didn’t even know a professional when it came to this sort of thing. Margit was unmatched in the great outdoors, but I doubted she knew anything about lockpicking or trap disarmament. Going forward, I’d need to work out the details myself or hire an actual specialist.

Well, as it was a Dexterous activity, I could probably handle even the most intricate machinations. I’d consider it whenever I got more experience points to play with.

As we continued down the hallway, a scrap of paper on the floor caught my eye. I picked up the cheap stationery to find someone had penned a diary entry on it with charcoal. There were traces of someone having bound the left hand side with string, so it must have originated from a full journal.

“No way...”

“Is that the diary we’re supposed to find?” Mika asked, bringing the lantern closer.

Deciphering the chicken scratch, the date at the top indicated the memo had been written nearly sixty years ago. It touched on the weather, the adventurer’s progress on his most recent job, and the interesting bits of the accompanying journey. This page in particular recounted an episode where the goblin who acted as his party’s scout had bungled the seasoning on dinner one night, and how they’d all laughed about watering down their beef stew to make the excess salt manageable.

The dots were connecting. At this point, I was fairly certain I knew who’d spawned this ichor maze.

Creaking wood interrupted our reading time. We looked up in a panic to find that the door forward had opened up, as if to hurry us along. Inside, I could see two shadows waiting in the wings.

“Well, well. Aren’t we eager?” I quipped in an attempt to distract myself from the fear that accompanied a battle with the undead.

“Hey, we might bite, but this kind of hospitality isn’t very popular with the ladies, you know?” Mika added on more banter, easing my mind further.

All right, it’d be rude to keep them waiting. We advanced.

[Tips] An ichor maze is a reflection of its master’s personality.

What is harder to come by than a good friend? One who cares for you—who will draw his blade and lay his life on the line in your hour of need? Nothing is rarer than a true friend.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

Even when he shouted expletives that he would never stoop to on a normal day, mine was dazzling as he danced a waltz of steel perfected through years of practice. Erich of Konigstuhl was beautiful: he’d called me his friend, and he’d let me call him mine.

His flashing blade swung down. Although he’d started his strike later than one of the zombies, it was the undead soul who lost both the exchange and its sword hand. Erich avoided the splattering blood with a flick of his neck, only to gracefully land a kick on the zombie he’d disarmed. All the while, his movements had put him in the perfect place to elbow the zombie that had been trying to jump him from behind in the mouth.

Bolstered with hard leather and metal tacks, Erich’s arm dislodged the creature’s jaw, and it tumbled backward. The one he’d kicked in the gut had collapsed onto its back.

Readying my wand, I recited the incantation I was usually too lazy to chant. Spells and cantrips alike took slightly less mana if the caster carefully tried to convince the world they followed more of the rules than they did. It was a humiliating bit of pageantry by Rhinian standards, but that was a burden I was willing to bear for my best friend.

“Pillars rise from bedrock at every turn; yet their support alone shall not suffice. I ask for a guardian—for ever-watchful eyes.”

I squeezed out my mana, using my ad-libbed incantation to give the cantrip structure. One of the zombies had retreated to the wall, and my magic caused a nearby column of wood to reach out and entangle it.

Many considered oikodomurges to be burdens in direct combat, but there were plenty of crafty ways for me to contribute. By fidgeting with the composition of the wood that made up columns and beams in houses, I could bend the building itself to my will—a favorite trick from the oikodomurge handbook. Personally, I thought our ability to trip up enemies made us relatively helpful in battle, especially indoors.

“Light your pipe and boil your tea—your shift of guardianship shall never end!”

My magical words painted the unliving sacrifice as a true part of the pillar, strengthening the wood’s hold. Undead beings had little resistance to arcane concepts, since they weren’t technically alive, and the zombie quickly melted into the column.

“Thanks, Mika!”

“No problem! I’ve got your back!”

Despite its best efforts, the zombie was almost completely swallowed, taking it out of the equation. More importantly, I was ecstatic to see Erich smile so gratefully at what little assistance I could provide.

This was the third room with zombies in it thus far. Erich had handily conquered the first, and the second room’s three foes hadn’t posed much of a challenge for him either. The way he’d managed to brush off their attacks while rerouting them to hit other enemies was astonishing.

Between each combat trial, we’d worked together to solve a puzzle. I wouldn’t say I’d been amazing, but I think I’d been a real help. The second one, where we had to use four keys in four locks in the right order, had been pretty hard, and the latest one had involved higher arithmetic that made Erich dizzy. Thankfully, my coursework involved a lot of math. I doubted I’d ever forget the wide-eyed praise he’d given me when I’d solved it.

Now, as if to make up for not being able to help on the arithmetic problem, he was showing off his polished swordplay in spades. The number of zombies had increased to five, and they’d been carefully set to surround us as we entered, but he’d instantly cleaned up two of them. I’d summoned a fence to block off a few and tried my hand at binding them when I could, but there was no honor worthy enough to describe the skill needed to do what Erich was doing.

He was risking his life at every moment, all to shield me from harm. My support wasn’t much to speak of in comparison, but the least I could do was keep away the extra zombies...even if that meant enduring the awful headache that came with mana depletion.

Look, he’s done it again! Parrying a spear with a sword was supposed to be extremely difficult, yet time after time Erich stopped enemy thrusts without so much as batting the things away. After bringing a zombie’s spear to a gentle stop with his sword, he locked it in place and dashed forward, slicing through the reanimated corpse’s underarm with the knife in his left hand.

It was truly a sight to behold: his steps flowed like a dancer’s and never stopped until his foes were vanquished.

The zombie’s arm went limp, and Erich lightly pressed the tip of his sword into its left armpit as well. Simultaneously, he summoned an Unseen Hand to recover the spear it’d dropped. What was ordinarily a household spell morphed into a martial spectacle under his command, composed of a beautiful arcane formula.

His Hand lifted the spear high and quivered for a moment before plunging the weapon into its previous master. It pierced the headless warrior’s armor with great force, pinning the zombie to the wall. The cadaver tried to free itself, but Erich simply bent the spear’s shaft to a right angle. Seeing his discretion from an ally’s perspective inspired endless confidence.

At long last, he walked over and dismembered the zombie he’d kicked to the floor with all the dispassion of a butcher readying a hog. With that, we’d managed to successfully surmount another room.

“Phew,” he gasped. “Five... That’s five.”

Erich was the pinnacle of reliability in battle. Although his movements were refined and graceful, they were not flashy; rather, the beauty lay in the fact that every action was perfectly suited for the act of killing.

Unlike the heroes of our favorite sagas, he couldn’t reduce his foes to shreds with a single glorious strike. Bit by bit, he strung together honest attacks to protect me from the enemies he bested. There was something about the way he kept their blades from reaching me that spoke to an image of sincerity personified.

Oh, Erich, my dearest friend. How kind can you be? To call me a friend, to let me do the same for you, and to risk your life so that we might go home together...even though I’m starting to become dead weight for you to carry.

“Mika, you’re not looking so good. Here, have some water.”

“But Erich, we’re almost out...”

“Don’t worry about it. Worst case, we can extract some moisture from the air. Drink up. A little lost water’s better than having you faint on me.”

I knew Erich was tired. He’d been fighting all this time, and I doubted his sword and armor could be considered light. I was sure he was tired, and even surer he was thirsty.

Yet you choose to give it to me...

I indulged in his goodwill and took a single swig from our waterskin, but he waited, encouraging me to drink more. I knocked back another mouthful, and something snapped inside of me—I couldn’t stop. I took a third swig, then a fourth, and by the time I regained control of myself, the pouch felt significantly lighter.

I didn’t mean to... My fatigue was all magical; I shouldn’t have been too tired, physically speaking.

“You didn’t have to leave me any, you know? But thanks.”

Erich took the nearly empty waterskin and downed the remaining mouthful or so of water without so much as a gripe. Without knowing how much longer we had to go, mana was a commodity more precious than gold coins; yet he then cast a spell to refill our reserves with airborne moisture without a moment’s hesitation.

I had to pull my own weight. My headache was still on the lighter side, and rehydrating had definitely helped. So long as I cushioned my mana costs with proper incantations, I would be able to persist.

If you’re going to put your life on the line for me, then I’ll do the same for you. Isn’t that what friends are for?

[Tips] The effects of mana depletion are generally thought of in five stages. First, a light dizziness. Second, a stinging headache. Third, an unbearable migraine. Fourth, bleeding from either the nose or ears. Fifth, inevitable brain death.

For whatever reason, I felt as though Mika’s gaze had become rather fiery since entering the dungeon. This may have all been in my head, but something about the way he’d been watching my back was different from usual—not that I could verbalize what was off, but it was different all the same.

Perhaps it was the heat of combat. The rushing blood of battle degraded my vocabulary—I wouldn’t dare repeat the things I’d been shouting here in front of my parents—so I could understand where he was coming from. I could count the times I’d flirted with death on one hand, but the thrill of the fight was already stamped on my soul. This was Mika’s first time in a dungeon and his first time fighting in close quarters; no wonder the excitement was taking hold of him.

“All right,” I said, “let’s get moving.”

“Sure thing. What do you think will be next?”

That sounded vaguely jinx-worthy to me—maybe I’d heard a similar line in a film or novel—but Mika seemed to be raring to go. I opened the next door and instantly groaned.

Three tables were lined up in the middle of the room. Each had a pile of small wooden knickknacks piled on top.

“Um...” Mika looked the handicrafts over. “Looks like a set of pieces for a wooden puzzle.”

“Yeah,” I said dejectedly. “It’s one of those silhouette puzzles...”

I’d been quick to realize that the dungeon keeper had a penchant for riddles, but seeing this made me want to bury my head in my hands and ignore the challenge.

The rules were simple: we were to combine wooden triangles and squares to match the provided image, which, in this case, had been drawn directly on the table. It hadn’t been a very popular board game in Japan, save for the occasional traditional inn that kept a set in their lobby.

However, it was cheap and easy, making it second only to ehrengarde in the Trialist Empire. All one needed to play were simple wooden cutouts and the creativity to think up new images to make, making it an inexpensive pastime. My brothers and I had spent many a winter day cooped up indoors trying to come up with new shapes.

Each table in this room demanded one image: from right to left, they were a sword, shield, and staff. Annoyingly, the riddle introduced nonstandard rules. Usual sets were composed of five large triangles, five small triangles, a square, and a parallelogram. All the tables had double that, and there was a cheeky hourglass waiting for us to suggest we were on a time limit.

Up until this point, all the challenges had been related to skills that I could see an adventurer needing, but come on! Thinking back, there had been a guy in my old tabletop crew who’d filled his dungeons with handmade puzzles for us to solve out of universe with a real INT or EDU check. Whenever we failed, he’d mist us with poison gas so we’d have to enter the boss fight with debuffs, and it looked like this ichor maze intended on doing the same.

“Seriously?” I said. “These look legitimately hard. What kind of adventurer needs to solve wooden puzzles?”

“Maybe it helps when exploring ruins,” Mika suggested. “They say that ancient lithography slates sell for a ton if you can find all the pieces to put them together.”

I groaned again. Chipped bits of stone that came from antique tablets in games did often come with checks for Dexterity or prior knowledge to put them back together. Even if a quest only involved picking up the pieces for a historian, the adventurer still needed to know which parts were important enough to warrant bringing back. Sadly, this puzzle was actually relevant.

By the way, the particular session that sprang to mind had ended in disaster when I’d rolled to apply my archaeological knowledge to the broken relic. My dice had done their duty, causing the slate to crumble to dust, and the whole party had sat in silence for quite some time... Regardless, there was no getting around the task at hand.

“Ready?” Mika asked.

“Yeah, flip it.”

Mika started the hourglass and we began building. The sword was just four pointed tips, so it wasn’t all that difficult. We still had two-thirds of the sand left—the whole thing felt like about half an hour—by the time we were finished. The only hard part had been making sure every piece had been accounted for.

Working in a pair makes this so easy, I thought. However, my hubris was brought to heel immediately.

“All right, that’s the shield done too, so now—”

“Wait a second! Erich, we still have another piece! Look, one of the small triangles is still out!”

“What the—you’ve got to be kidding! How are we supposed to fit this in?!”

“I think that means it’s all wrong! Argh, this is so hard...”

The rule forbidding leftover pieces was the true challenge. One unused shape indicated a fundamental mistake, meaning we’d need to start all over. As the panic set in, the last grains of sand fell from the top of the hourglass to the bottom...and by the time I noticed, our punishment had already begun.

A door squeaked open and six zombies spilled into the room. Although they were all unarmed, their armor was in better condition than any of the others we’d seen, making this fight far from trivial. Our punishment wasn’t quite as bad as instant death, but this wasn’t anything to be grateful for.

“Dammit... Mika, are you good to go?”

“Y-Yeah, I can fight.”

My wingman’s response was less than ideal; I needed to take care of this, and fast. Going full throttle was exhausting, but it was better than getting hurt. Mana recovered with rest, but lost blood, broken bones, and eaten flesh were harder problems to fix. Neither of us knew much about body-enhancing magic either.

“Heed my call, o loyal blades—my armed champions...”

Imperial magia did not chant out spells. Doing so was flowery, lame, and suggested that the caster needed crutches to bend the world to their will; basically, magia were like high schoolers acting cooler than younger kids. However, I was amateur enough to actually need all the help I could get. Dredging up my real embarrassing memories from my time in middle school was a small price to pay for a bit of efficiency.

“Stand, stand tall before me. Take your swords into your unflinching hands.”

My words reached the bundled-up rags that had slowly piled up with every room. It unfurled itself to reveal my trophies of war—weapons coated with the blood I’d shed from a minor nick—which then floated into the air.

“Go forth and bring me their heads!”

I summoned all the Hands I could muster and equipped each with armaments I’d picked up throughout the labyrinth. A bent spear pierced the zombie vanguard’s neck, driving him into the wall. Not an instant later, a dagger, longsword, and falchion whizzed over to rob him of all his limbs. Fetid blood spewed out with hideous giblets, yet the undying man could not let go of life, and he clattered his teeth in frustration.

The five behind him quickly followed, and I meticulously dismembered them as fast as my technique allowed. Whether they were mensch, floresiensis, cynocephalus, or anything else, the bipedal body plan varied little. A blade stuck in the soft flesh of their joints reduced them to little more than smelly meat.

“Eat dirt, assholes!”

It hadn’t taken long for me to clean up the whole crowd...but the strain on my mana reserves was intense. Going all-out was incredibly exhausting, even with the help of a voiced incantation. I could only unleash my full suite one more time—maybe two. The dungeon was doing a good job of whittling away my stamina.

“Erich, don’t strain yourself like that,” Mika said, running over to me with our nearly empty waterskin in hand. “You could’ve let me help.”

“Who’s the one really straining themselves? I can tell your headache is already setting in.” I glanced up pointedly from on my hands and knees, and he grunted, knowing I’d gotten him.

Looking back at the table, the pieces for the puzzle we’d failed had disappeared. Apparently, the person in charge was willing to let us off if we won in combat. The compassion I felt from the dungeon keeper ironically made me wonder what on earth was wrong with the crazed GMs who insisted on assigning the same puzzle again and again until the party got it right.

“Fair enough,” Mika said. “But you take a break, Erich.”

Just as I tried to get up to go to the final table, Mika pushed me back down by the shoulders. He went and got the hourglass and wooden parts from the table and laid them out on the ground. Then he grabbed my shoulders one more time and forced my head onto his lap.

“Leave the rest to me.”

Stop, you’re making me blush.

Possessed by a bottomless well of determination, Mika’s expression was worryingly grim as he shifted the pieces. In the end, he solved the deformed staff that had looked to be the most difficult of the three images with more than half the hourglass’s sand to spare.

[Tips] Jigsaw puzzles with round teeth only arose in modernity, but the idea of playing with wooden shapes has been around for all of history.

I’m so glad I carry around the bare necessities at all times.

“Ahh,” Mika sighed. “It’s good to get some rest.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “How’s your headache?”

“A bit better.”

Time felt nebulous inside of the ichor maze, but our progress was more certain. We’d just finished another pair of rooms. While the combat hadn’t changed from the original pattern of facing off against skillful armed zombies, the mental exercises were evolving at an unprecedented rate.

Here was the riddle in the room we’d just finished: Hope resides in one of five boxes. Yet hope is fleeting, and oft rolls from side to side. It moves once every day, and so too can you only check a single box once every day. Will you be able to take hold of hope? If so, when shall your paths converge?

Tricky as this question seemed, Mika had crushed it in seconds. I’d still been trying to wrap my mind around all the conditions when he’d answered, “We can find hope, and it’ll be on the sixth day or earlier.”

According to him, moving from “side to side” meant that hope could only move to the boxes closest to its left or right. Therefore, one could determine how long it took to find hope (barring any lucky guesses) by simply numbering the boxes.

How exactly did that process work, you ask? Well, I’d asked him the same question and he’d put a finger to his lips and said, “Try and work it out yourself.”

Damn it all.

Whatever, I wasn’t about to complain when we managed to get through unscathed. The bigger concern was the door that we’d unlocked. It was a large set of double doors that had a different air about it than any of the passageways we’d come across so far—the sort of gateway that usually came with a message that read Are you sure you want to continue?

Our sense of time was totally out of whack and we were unsure of how far we’d even walked, so we decided to rest up for what seemed to be the finale. We traded precious mana for water and boiled it in a metal cup, and I pulled my perpetual travel buddy out of my pouch: crushed-up red tea.

The result was more powdery than the usual stuff, but it served to soothe our weary bodies as we passed the cup back and forth.

Afterwards, we decided to take turns napping, since mana recovered fastest while sleeping. Besides, the physical fatigue was starting to pile up too. Although we couldn’t see outside, we’d picked our fair share of flowers in the corners of some of the rooms, so the time we’d spent here was far more than a couple of hours. Breaks were imperative; any lapse in concentration could lead to a fatal mistake.

Nothing seemed to suggest we had to begin the final encounter right away, so taking this time to rest was the smart thing to do. Mika’s mana issues were worse than mine on account of all the magic he’d cast to help in the combat rooms, so I lent him my lap and offered to let him sleep first.

All things considered, we lived under a pretty poorly defined system of time where a day began when one woke up and ended when one slept, making this a very long day. Not even the corporate slavery of my past life had been this bad. I would have much preferred working until sunrise because of a sudden change in project specifications, even if that also involved going around in the morning apologizing to everyone that was even remotely affected by the changes.

At least that had been work. My coworkers and I had worked those terrible nights out of a shared sense of responsibility—a sentiment that allowed us to clink our beers after everything had been said and done with weary grins, laugh, and cry out at once, “To hell with it! Cheers!”

But this time? This time, I—

“Old pal?”

As I sank into the limitless depths of remorse, a cold hand on my cheek interrupted my thoughts. I looked down to see my pal’s sleepy eyes staring back at me. Even when on the brink of exhaustion, his beauty remained radiant.

“Don’t regret a thing,” Mika said.

My eyes opened wide. How had he known?

Truth be told, I was overcome with guilt for having dragged him with me to this hell. I’d meant for this to be a little adventure. Yet we opened the lid on our journey to unveil a frenzied dance of death accompanied by zombies and gore.

We were marching on a path, unsure if there was a destination at all. Who knew if we could make it out alive?

Had Mika been a fellow adventurer, ready to lay down his life in the name of exploration, I wouldn’t belittle him with this kind of concern. But he wasn’t—he was just my friend. He’d joined me because we’d sworn an oath of friendship the night before, and I’d taken advantage of his excitement to drag him along.

Bringing my kindhearted companion to wade through this river of blood hurt my heart so badly that I wanted to carve it out of my chest. As meaningless as it was, I would have done so in a heartbeat if it meant he’d get home safe.

“I don’t regret a thing, you know,” Mika said. “I mean, I managed to stop you from running into this hellhole alone, didn’t I?”

He flashed me a smile of pure compassion, trying to convince me not to worry because he himself was free of grief. How virtuous must one’s soul be to care so deeply for another, knee deep in the dead? How could he still want to follow me into this ordeal? I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d cried out, damning me with every breath... In fact, some part of me wanted him to.

“So smile, Erich. A smile suits you so much better than a frown.”

“...Yeah,” I finally said. “You’re right.”

I couldn’t refuse a request from my best friend, so I pulled back my lips into a clumsy grin.

Content, Mika closed his eyes and dozed off. I brushed his bangs aside and stared at his weary features before covering him with my cloak.

Gods, I truly have found a lifelong friend.

[Tips] Ichor mazes can warp the flow of time, leading to temporal discrepancies between the inside and outside.

“Shall we?”

“Yep. I’m good to go.”

After a short nap each, we sated our hunger with what little food we had and were then as ready as we’d ever be. The doors ahead announced the presence of a climactic encounter, but we were determined to see this through. We advanced toward home no matter what the world threw our way, prepared to cut down anyone or anything that stood in our path.

The great min-maxers of old had declared that God Himself could be struck down if the numbers allowed. So what was an insurmountable task or two to us? We had no fear of roadblocks; all that remained was to clobber our way past.

Mika and I struggled to push the weighty doors open, but when we did, the world opened up to a vast space pasted together out of scaled-up rooms, their adjoining walls omitted. Despite all the willpower I’d mustered, I could feel my courage shrivel when I laid eyes on the seven zombies lined up to greet us. I’ve had my fill, thank you.

Had these undead monsters been the sort of forgettable mobs who needed numbers to count as a proper unit, I wouldn’t have minded. Those sorts of weaklings were only placed as fodder to prevent players from advancing directly into the backline; they were damage sponges meant to eat hits for the boss.

However, the zombies of this ichor maze were a different breed altogether: they were all strong enough to hold their own. Get your shit together, GM. We have two people in our party!

Taking a closer look, all of the reanimated soldiers before us were fully equipped. While some still lacked a limb or head, their deficiencies had been shored up with the addition of a prosthetic. What was more, their weapons and armor weren’t as shabby as those we’d run into prior.

Every room thus far had introduced more foes or harder riddles. The uninterrupted ascension in difficulty made it impossible not to realize the purpose this labyrinth served: it was a test of skill.

I had long since quit asking myself the questions of who and why. On our way here, we’d picked up a handful of diary scraps detailing the writer’s life with his “beloved sword.” The text made it amply clear that the blade was anything but morally sound.

While the motive remained less obvious, there was no mistaking the blatant trials of strength and wit. We were being observed to see how far we’d make it, and could only hope that we amounted to more than trapped rats in a lab; I prayed this game of chess had any concept of mate.

Anyone who set up an unwinnable game was the scum of the earth. I’d spent all my tabletop career readying campaigns so they wouldn’t require psychic powers to clear...but sadly, this universe hadn’t gotten the memo, because every single enemy I’d come across was out to end my run.

A GM’s job, simply put, was to lose with style. They weren’t too dissimilar to the baddies that a certain bread-faced hero from children’s programming fought off on a weekly basis.

Villains pushed the hero into the corner, stressed them to their limits, and even eked out minor victories after especially excruciating fights—but at the end of it all, they were to cry about their demise as they were sent flying into the stars. The GM had infinite resources, so they obviously could win at any moment, but why would they?

Admittedly, balancing fights on paper-thin margins could lead to close calls that were fun, win or lose. Yet I personally believed that this judgment was one only the players had a right to make, and the GM’s goal remained to be conquered. We who wove the foundations of stories wrote our scenarios to give our players a chance to play a role and enjoy our worlds.

Alas, Rhine and the globe it laid on was full of tryhards without a shred of showmanship. If I hadn’t been an unbalanced character myself, I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes with the kidnapper-mage or the daemons prowling that lakeside manor. Stopping to think about Helga’s strength by any real metric was mind-boggling too. Even my recent run-in with the bandits on our way to Wustrow had been objectively hardcore; they’d been strong enough to hunt down caravans with professional bodyguards. I was convinced the zombies of this maze had all once been top-of-the-line warriors who’d lost their final battle to join their rotting brethren.

And how could they be anything but? They weren’t NPCs being puppeted by an actor behind a screen, but players who considered themselves the protagonists of the world. They had no incentive to pull punches, and that went for whoever—or whatever—gave birth to this pit of ichor.

“Ha ha,” I chuckled dejectedly. “This is...grand.”

“Yeah, it really is,” Mika agreed. “I think I can hear my heart sinking.”

Six of the zombies took their places as unliving ornaments, raising their weapons in two rows to decorate the path to the back of the hall. Although there was no universal theme in their sexes, armors, or weapons, a glance was all I needed to tell that each commanded immense skill.

At the very end of their formation, the last of their ilk sat alone on a chair, resting all his weight on a sword. The man with withered bark for skin and a great white beard adorning his decaying face was the very adventurer we had come in search of. For all the tattered rags on his person, it was apparent that his light plate armor was as well-made as it was well-worn. But more importantly, the blade he cradled in his arms was utterly damned.

The tip had been stabbed into the floor. Its black metal gleamed impossibly in the darkness, loudly announcing a presence that ought not to be. With a blade well over a meter in length, the word that came to mind was zweihander.

By this point, I knew better than to ask what a sixteenth-century weapon was doing here. I’d realized European historical knowledge amounted to nothing in combat when I’d seen Sir Lambert throw his might around. What was more important was how alien the sword was. Its onyx luster and the discomforting engravings on its hilt summoned a pit in my stomach.

Every detail of its make spoke to inherent evil; so much so that I would be eternally indecisive if forced to choose between the sword and yesterday’s tome.

“That’s the root of it all... It’s him.” Mika spoke not to deliver me this obvious truth, but to remind himself that this was the final barrier to our freedom.

The zombie was so particular, so uniquely cursed, that I could see how it had warped space and time to generate this unholy deathtrap. I didn’t want to entertain the idea that he could be just another pawn on the way to the boss.

“I’d rather not imagine anything worse than that,” I said. “Not that I can rule the possibility out.”

Of course, some dungeons brought back minor bosses as fodder for the final encounter, so it was difficult to speak with certainty.

“Come on,” Mika said, “would it hurt you to be less pessimistic?”

“You can’t lower your guard just because the goal’s in sight,” I quipped.

We exchanged our final bout of banter and stepped forward. All at once, the six undead soldiers waiting on their lord turned toward us, their weapons at the ready.

The climax had begun. I’d said what I needed to say, so all I could do was to shut up and win—I doubted I’d get a third sheet if I didn’t.

[Tips] To diffuse an ichor maze, one must destroy or plunder the core upholding it.

Getting to stack buffs like someone reading off a sutra before wiping the floor with an enemy is so incredibly fun. It’s too bad it feels proportionately bad to be on the receiving end.

TRPGs often included a pre-combat phase where combatants could take small preparatory actions. This could range from applying minor buffs to light repositioning—rarely, someone could start things off with an all-in sucker punch—but nothing complicated enough to take too much time.

Regardless of the details, the point remained: the climax had begun with the advantage firmly in the enemy’s grasp. I was possessed by dizziness before I could even raise my sword, and the world around me distorted. By the time I caught my bearings, the two rows of three zombies had shifted into a combat formation.

Plenty of systems included skills to readjust party position before an encounter to start on the right foot, but the zombies’ use of this mechanic was purely poor sportsmanship. The hall was longer than it was wide, and two lightly armored vanguards blocked us off, with heavy swordsmen ready to pounce behind them...

“H-How’d they get behind us?!” Mika shouted.

...And two of their squad had managed to wrap around to encircle us. This was getting out of hand.

“Mika, you’re going to have to break your own fall!”

“What are you—whoa?!”

I immediately used a Hand to grab my partner by the nape and flung him to our left, figuring that splitting up would be preferable to enduring attacks from all sides. Mika could create walls out of typical building materials, but household timber was not meant to withstand a flurry of full-power sword swings. Removing him from the melee would make him less of a target and safer in the long run.

Besides, it seemed like the crowd was keen on clashing blades with me.

“Glub glub...” Less rotten than her peers, likely due to being a more recent inclusion in their forces, a woman whose good looks had yet to decay bolted toward me from her position on the front line. Sickly black blood sputtered from her lips, and she stayed low to the ground as she readied a dagger. Her physical beauty only made the scene more morbid, and her command of all her limbs was offset by a massive gash in her thin neck.

She lunged at lightning speeds. By stretching her frame as she stepped, she made use not just of her arms, but her whole upper body, giving her short blade unbelievable reach. She’d conquered the dagger’s greatest shortcoming to turn a common, handy weapon into a virtuoso’s tool.

As she approached, a floresiensis used her shoulder as a springboard. Half skeletonized, the fellow was even lighter than his already small brethren—though perhaps that was racial insensitivity on my part—letting him float through the air like a feather. Deftly handling his curved shotel, he swung down on me from above.

From behind, I could hear the clattering of armor. The duo flanking me had a spear and greatsword, and I had no doubt they were coming straight for me; I was just grateful that Mika wasn’t their mark, with his whopping zero years of close combat experience.

The situation was rough: I was outflanked on all sides and short on mana and stamina. On paper, I was all but doomed.

But you know, I can’t help but feel a bit underestimated.

“No point in holding back now!” I yelled.

If the enemy was going to set up to their heart’s content, then I’d expend major and minor actions alike to do the same. Lightning Reflexes and Insight made it trivial to discern which attacks were the quickest or most fatal.

On top of that, I had four times as many arms as the average mensch. I would have no recourse if they came at me with truly overwhelming numbers, but this assortment of honest warriors? How could I not oblige by giving them everything I had?

“Blub...”

I began by using a Hand to hammer the knee of the woman leading the charge, and adding another to slam her face into the ground once she lost her balance. While an individual Unseen Hand didn’t have the strength to tear off a mensch’s limbs, it was more than enough to tip someone with a wonky center of gravity.

“Grargh?!” The zombie yelped as her forward momentum turned into a passionate kiss with the floor. The impact left her head attached by a patch of skin. I’d gotten a bit lucky, but the undead categorized lost heads as light wounds; I still needed to finish her off later.

More urgently, I summoned a Hand to catch me mid-leap to intercept the incoming floresiensis. Taking his strike head-on would let him slice my neck or wrists using the curvature of his blade, so I instead knocked it away with the karambit in my offhand.

Letting go of Schutzwolfe, I grabbed his fleshless neck with my newly freed right hand. The force generated from our opposing velocities alone was enough to crack his spine; I ignored the audible splinter and hiss of pulverized bone and pushed through. I dismissed my first invisible foothold and spawned another with a twirl, flinging the floresiensis directly at the spearman’s pointed weapon.

“Bull’s-eye!”

The small zombie landed exactly where I’d aimed. No matter how light he was, the weight of a person was enough to push back the spear and its wielder. Furthermore, the floresiensis’s struggling prevented the spearman from dislodging his ally effectively, causing the tiny fellow to slide deeper and deeper down the shaft. Nice work. Keep it up.

I dismissed the Hand holding me up, planting my heels on the lower back of the woman who’d been sprawled out on the floor like a splattered frog. Innumerable crackles accompanied the satisfying tactile feedback of trampling a tough object into dust. Demolishing her hips robbed her of her body’s fulcrum, taking her out of the equation for the time being.

“Up, down, left, and right. Blend every angle together...” I heard Mika begin to chant in between coughs—I might have knocked the wind out of him with that throw. I felt bad, but apologies could wait: the two heavy infantry had realized we’d broken through the encirclement, and they were starting to move. I needed to deal with the others, and fast.

I’d left Schutzwolfe hanging in the air, so I recalled her for a couple of quick slices to sever the woman’s fingers. The digits squirmed like caterpillars as they finally unhanded the dagger they’d so desperately kept a grip on, offering me another sidearm for my collection.

“See this brambled steel, the symbol of denial,” Mika sang. “From here to there is hither; from there to beyond is yonder...”

Listening to my friend’s verse, I picked up the dropped dagger with an Unseen Hand as I always did. With this, I had three—er, four weapons, counting the fey knife in my left hand. For whatever reason, the karambit felt far weaker than usual.

Sensory illusion aside, I turned to face the zombie wielding the two-handed sword. He had been the only one to avoid my initial trickery, and he engaged with a cautious prod, perhaps to reduce the odds of friendly fire. I gently brushed his sword away with the blunt of my own, sliding into a blade-locked position.

“Urgh!” He was ridiculously strong. Our clashing blades creaked as if he had the raw power to crush steel. My bones threatened to bend and my flesh cried out in protest at the burden; the fact that he could ignore such pain was patently unfair.

Still, I wasn’t about to let this become a contest of might. I only had a bit more Strength than the average person, and I wasn’t even fully grown. I didn’t stand a chance. I had to fight smarter: I wasn’t just any old swordsman, after all.

A dull thunk rang out. I didn’t need to look to know it was the sound of two knives barely piercing the thin underarmor of his left armpit and right knee, because I’d been the one to send them there. No matter how herculean this zombie was, he required tendons to control his muscles, and without them, I could feel his overpowering strength ease up...

Or so I thought, only for him to lean his entire body into the back of his blade. Despite being down an arm and a leg, his thirst for victory made him willing to sacrifice himself to take me down. Are you really dead?!

Being squashed under the load of an adult mensch in full plate didn’t tickle my fancy, so I instantly abandoned the idea of catching him. Instead, I cheated my weight to one side and pivoted around him. Although I staggered a bit, I managed to escape my predicament and left the zombie—

Oww?!

Just as I thought I’d gotten out of harm’s way, a sharp pain took hold of my back. The stabbing sensation had likely come from the point of a spear. My armor had eaten the brunt of the impact, but it hurt all the same. And what was more...

“Clack clack...”

The teeth-chattering bastard had stabbed me with the floresiensis still on his spear!

I felt the small zombie bend its arms at an ungodly angle to grab hold of my collar. As the spearman pulled back his weapon, the floresiensis was freed, and he did his best to latch onto my back. His little hands scrambled for my neck, and I realized he was searching for an opening to bite into my vitals. So this is what it feels like to star in a zombie flick.

“You little—I’m not that easy!” I yelled.

“We are hither; you are yonder! None shall cross this fence!”

Mika completed his Mother Goose-grade singsong incantation. It paired horribly with the dreary atmosphere; I made a note to hear him sing again in a sunny field one day...and to live to do so, I needed to get rid of the stowaway angling for a free ride.

I backpedaled at full speed, sandwiching the floresiensis against a wall. Even fully matured, his kind only grew to be about a meter tall, with a structurally weak skeleton. Zombies gained strength upon resurrection—I had no clue why, but they did—but that didn’t make their bones any denser. This man was already halfway to being a skeleton, and his frame was as weak as a normal floresiensis, if not weaker.

Slamming him between muscle-backed armor and a solid wall was more than enough to get some damage in. I could feel the revolting sensation of bones mashing together with rancid flesh all across my back. The hands around my neck lost their grip, and the pancaked meat slid off me, leaving only a trail of putrid blood.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a fence rise from the ground. The wooden barricade, wrapped in barbed wire, stopped the two armored zombies in their tracks before they could get to me. The fence came to life, entangling the pair in thorny steel.

The zombies attempted to rip themselves free, but the wire only unspooled and coiled around them further. The prickly strands grew more numerous by the second, and the enemies were reduced to metal cocoons in the blink of an eye. They wouldn’t be doing anything until the mana overwriting the laws of reality ran its course.

“Damn, that’s scary,” I mumbled. Friends as we were, I couldn’t help but be disturbed by how malicious Mika’s magic was. This spell was a frontliner’s worst nightmare; how on earth had he come up with something that was one failed magic resistance check away from certain death?

I understood that it had only worked this perfectly because the undead were enemies of the world’s own sacred order, leaving them weak to magic. But personally, the thought of being on the receiving end was terrifying, even if I could reasonably escape. I was fairly certain I’d seen something like this in a death-game thriller film.

My shudder-inducing imagination was cut short by a heavy thud. I turned to see my friend had fainted and collapsed.

“Mika?!”

No response. After parrying an attack from the remaining spearman, I saw Mika weakly wave his hand in the air. He was on his side and couldn’t even open his eyes from his mana consumption migraine, but he delivered the message that he was still kicking.

His headache had to be awful: he’d conjured up the fence and wire out of scant few materials, and bound the two heavies so tightly that they couldn’t move. It went without saying that using true magic to accomplish something like this was mind-bogglingly complex, and the requisite mana to execute the spell was sure to be a massive load. Mystic trump cards were not to be thrown around lightly, no matter the situation. And yet, Mika had paid the brutal price of mana exhaustion to pull out the best in his deck.

I knew how it felt to run totally dry. Once, I’d asked Lady Agrippina to watch over me as I tested my limits. Headaches had set in around the time I felt like I’d gone through half my resources, and the pain had been nigh unbearable when I’d had a quarter left. I’d stopped there, but judging from how it felt, I imagined that I would black out with a sixth or so of my total mana pool remaining.

The death that loomed at the end of total mana depletion was similar to that of the blood flowing through our veins. One couldn’t simply drain all but the last drop and be fine. Magia and mages staked their very lives to fight.

Huh, putting it this way makes it sound like mahjong. Despite the irrelevant thoughts bouncing around my brain, I managed to kick up the fallen floresiensis’s shotel toward the final active zombie. He instinctively batted it away, and I used the opening to sever his hands.

These zombies were strong, but they had a weakness: namely, their reflexes compelled them to act like living foes. Had they ignored the threat of damage in favor of dedicating everything to the attack, I would have had a much tougher time.

Dissecting a lone, disarmed zombie was as trivial as butchering a downed bird. Neither offered any resistance—though it might be fairer to say I didn’t give the former any chance to try.

“All right... Time for the main dish.” I flicked the blood off of Schutzwolfe, and the trusty blade gleamed back at me to say she could still go on.

The final zombie had been patiently watching the brawl from the back of the room, but finally rose in response to my words. He took the cradled sword into his hands and swung it. He handled the blade like its weight was imaginary, and the noise that followed implied that he had split the air so finely and swiftly that no gust of wind followed.

Uh... Wait a second. Is it just me, or is he stronger than me?

Cold sweat ran down my forehead. A mere two warm-up swings was all it took for me to recognize his transcendent skill. I may have been inexperienced, but my eyes were honed enough to gauge an opponent’s abilities.

All my powers of observation agreed: he was strong. As strong as Sir Lambert—no, stronger? The captain of the Konigstuhl Watch was ludicrously adept, but I’d never felt this sense of utter despair facing him. No, no, no, that couldn’t be the case. Sir Lambert hadn’t ever seriously tried to kill me, and the living always induced less dread than the unliving...right?

His overpowering aura nearly shattered my soul, but I gritted my teeth and squeezed down on my father’s sword to piece it back together. This damnable labyrinth was a patchwork of mistakes without a shred of level design or balance to its name, so what did I care that a busted enemy spawned at the tail end?

I’d already known that this wasn’t the kind of dungeon two preteen PCs were meant to get tossed into. My psyche had snapped in two long ago. The least I could do was pick up the scraps and use them as bludgeons.

The final husk approached with confidence; I could feel his will with every step. He pressed his broad blade to his forehead in prayer, in pity, and in solace.

Fine, then.

I readied myself to control this character I called myself with a hearty shout. “Bring it the fuck on!”

Killer GMs, be they accidental or willful, were like old friends to me—literally. What more was I to do than shout daggered expletives and roll the dice with spite?

Everything was going to be fine. It was like we’d always said: all I have to do is crit.

[Tips] Critical successes are miracles baked into the systems that make up a world. The numbers vary: a twelve for a 2D6, one through five for 1D100, etc. When these rare occurrences rear their heads, camels may pass through the eyes of needles. These miraculous odds only grace those who pray for them with all their hearts.

A vision of an old friend sitting across from me at a table flashed back in my mind. “Acting first doesn’t mean anything on its own,” he’d scoffed.

I wondered: if he experienced what I was going through now, would he dare to make light of initiative again?

Our blades collided, the clang echoing around us; the flying sparks splashed our dimly lit battleground with vivid brilliance. The zombie threw around the heft of his steel with no more effort than I would with a tree branch. As I slid back from the force of our clash, I saw that he had not relaxed his guard even as I retreated.

Would it kill you to go easy on me?

Many tabletop games included an initiative system, where character initiative values determined who moved in what order, and only that. TRPGs had to be either incredibly intricate or incredibly garbage to allow more than one move per turn, and advanced content could rarely be cleaned up in a single round, sidelining the mechanic as a whole. Thinking back, that old tablemate of mine hadn’t come to many of our higher-level sessions, but he had enjoyed games with revival features like those of pro wrestling.

On the other hand, in situations where a single hit spelled certain death—like now, for example—speed was menacing in and of itself.

The deceased adventurer had beelined for me as soon as I’d shouted at him. He’d taken a normal step just like any other, but then transitioned into a slash that sent me flying.

I hadn’t seen his approach—he was just too fast, and his strike too heavy. My successful block was no coincidence, however. The crackling itch of bloodlust spilled out in spades, caressing my spine with shivers that had informed me of an impending attack. I bet that the visibly cursed sword that embodied all the evils of the world was to blame.

Forewarning in mind, I’d managed to shake off his attack by flinging myself back and dispelling most of the force in the air. Had I been a moment late or had Schutzwolfe been any old chunk of iron, my upper and lower body would have shared a teary farewell as my guts hit the floor; my backward momentum would have let my disemboweled corpse take a full tour of the entire room. Ironically, this blade that had been pried from the hands of her first master now served as my trusty defender.

Summoning a few layers of Hands to break my fall, I landed still holding Schutzwolfe close to my frame. I knew now that I couldn’t spare any time holding back, so I began weaving spells at full throttle.

I mustered up all the mana I could to fully equip my Hands with add-ons. Reckless abandon exposed the bottom of my arcane tank: my vision flickered a dull red, some otherworldly force squeezed the front of my brain, and the dull throbbing in the back of my skull felt like I’d been kicked by a horse.

I didn’t need a clear head to know my mind was complaining about overexpenditure. The body is a device that applies pain to prevent its squishy master from pushing it too hard, and we, the egos in charge, lack the grit to fight its influence. The delicious flavors of food and the ecstatic rapture of discharge all traced back to this will preceding self.

But I didn’t need that right now. I stamped down the pain through sheer grit and screamed my unconscious inhibitions back into their place to finish casting my spell. Six invisible arms recovered weapons short of masters, wielding each with the proper Hybrid Sword Arts technique.