Not long after entering the second layer, they encountered their first monster of the day. Before them stood the skeleton of a large lizard of some sort. The thing had noticed them and was quickly skittering towards them. Narro unsheathed the skysteel sword and prepared to meet the monster head on, while Evran launched a few probing stone shards to stall the monster’s approach.

  “It’s not the skull!” shouted Kaila. “Aim for its left humorous.”

  Narro looked back, confused. “The hell is that?”

  “Big upper arm bone, left side. Its left side!” she repeated.

  Shrugging his shoulders, Narro dashed towards the charging skeleton lizard. After ducking below a swipe from the monster’s bony tail, Narro countered with a single graceful sweep of his sword. He cut the arm bone in half, and the rest of the bones fell harmlessly to the floor.

  “Maybe fighting skeletons isn’t so bad?” Narro quipped. “Anyway, Kai, how’d you know which bone it was?”

  “Just a feeling,” she lied.

  For the sake of his own ego, Evran insisted to himself that Kaila was a talented liar. After all, if she could fool him, then she must be. However, Evran also knew the girl liked to keep secrets, and there was one secret in particular the two of them shared. Evran activated his aurasight. After a quick glance at Kaila, he turned his attention to the remains of the skeleton lizard. The two halves of the severed humorous both had small wisps of black smoke emanating from them.

  “Well, that took you all of three seconds to figure out,” she said, purposefully bumping into him.

  Evran gave her a wink to let her know that her secret was safe with him. He was also a bit frustrated that she hadn’t mentioned that extremely important use of that ability the day before. Then again, all the skeletons they’d fought died with the destruction of their skulls, so maybe the need hadn’t arisen. “Jade, by the way,” he added, hoping to impress her by not simply saying green.

  “Is that some colorful rock?”

  He chuckled in response and dug out a jade bead from his bag to show her. It wasn’t a particularly vibrant sample, but it was a close enough approximation. Kaila held it up to her white hair, trying to imagine what Evran saw.

  “Not exactly my color, is it?”

  “I think it looks beautiful,” said Evran. The compliment earned him a kiss when she returned the bead before skipping off down the tunnel.

  The second layer came with its fair share of challenging monsters, though not nearly as many as would have been fought by the adventuring party the day before. Besides clearing out the monsters in their path, they’d completed a few puzzle rooms, too. Most puzzles, once solved, would remain so forever, while some would reset after a time. They’d almost made it the whole way through the layer without issue, until they came across the final room, and, sure enough, its puzzle had reset.

  Evran entered a massive dome-shaped room with a large magic circle inscribed on the floor. Within were three smaller circles, each about half as wide as he was tall. Though they ought to have contained the spell’s major runes, the circles were conspicuously empty. Around the wall were around fifty stone disks, each the same size as the circles, and on each was a single major rune. The goal was fairly straightforward. They just had to analyze the circle and move the three correct runic discs onto their appropriate slots to activate the spell and lower the magic barrier blocking the exit on the far side of the room.

  The magic circle itself was the most bizarre formation Evran had ever seen. Regardless of the correct solution, about three quarters of the pathways were red herrings, or stabilization arrays to make the red herrings not explode when the wrong runes were used. It was not simply an incomplete magic circle, but an honest-to-gods puzzle designed by a veritable genius. Despite its extreme over-engineered complexity, the solution had to be a simple one. Otherwise, how could adventurers be expected to solve it?

  “Ugh, that should have worked!” Kaila grunted, having failed their fourth set of runes. “I’m telling you, it wants to annihilate the barrier by harmonizing a second inverted barrier on top of it, nullifying the force effects.”

  “I agree,” Evran began. “But none of the runes we have to choose from can do that. That last one was overloading the secondary displacement array over here. It might have worked if we had a certain rune… you know, the one that looks like a wedge with a weird hat?”

  “Damn it, Ev, we’ve been over this! We don’t have a Vesh rune as an option. Maybe we should try to create a feedback loop instead, using the overload to fry the original barrier instead of ours?”

  “You’re both wrong,” said Narro, with a smug look on his face. “What, you think the sword-swinging meathead can’t figure this out, just because you two can’t?”

  “Narro, we can’t just try every single iteration until one works. That would take forever!” Kaila joked.

  “Nope, I have a solution far more simple than that.”

  “At this point, I’m willing to blow ourselves up with Narro’s choice,” said Evran.

  “Rude! And I was about to compliment you, seeing as how it was mostly your idea.” Narro teased to his captive audience. “You see, Ev, if you don’t have the right rune… just make it yourself!”

  “Damn it, Narro, be serious!” Evran shouted. “This has to be solvable with the discs, otherwise, how would adventuring parties that don’t understand complex magic circle theory be able to get through? It…”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Interrupted by the sound and sight of the magic circle activating, Evran looked over at the barrier as it glowed more brightly. Then it disappeared. An exasperated Kaila stood over a freshly transmuted runic disc now displaying the aforementioned missing rune. “Gods, that should have been obvious. If not for the discs, I think we’d have solved it in under a minute. All in favor of never speaking of this puzzle ever again, say Aye!”

  “Aye!” said Evran, patting Narro on the back.

  “No way, I’m never letting you two live this down!”

  “I’m sorry, Narro, but the Ayes have it!” Kaila exclaimed. “From now on, it is forbidden to speak of this puzzle room.”

  A familiar chill invaded the second layer challenge room from deeper within the dungeon. With the barrier disabled, they could once again sense the approach of the very monster they were desperately hoping to avoid. The osteomorph lay ahead, and it was quickly coming closer.

  “We don’t want to fight it here; it’s too open! Let’s go take the fight to it,” Evran commanded as he jogged toward the exit on the far side of the room. Narro and Kaila followed close behind. Right as they entered the corridor at the end of the second layer, the osteomorph came into view at the far end. Once more, they would have to fight the relentless creature, but this time, they were ready for it.

  Their first fight had cost Narro an arm, and the second cost Indon his life. Having suffered a severed spine on their last encounter, Evran believed their enemy to have gotten the better of their group so far. This time would be different. It had to be. Though they were now only three, they each knew what had to be done in order to defeat it. And after their lengthy puzzle solving session, they finally had the mana to pull it off.

  The osteomorph went about its business as it had before, letting out its terrible screech and charging up the corridor. This time, Evran wouldn’t be able to rely on turning the ground to mud to stop the charge, as the flagstone floor made the spell more difficult to pull off. That, and the monster had clearly learned from their previous encounters, so he needed to switch up his attack pattern.

  After allowing the monster to get sufficiently close, Evran shot an earth lance down from the ceiling. Rather than have the lance erupt directly in front of the charging monster, Evran angled it slightly, encouraging it to dodge left, directly into the path of Kaila’s fireball. This time, the elf was far more moderate with the power of her spell.

  Having lost its momentum narrowly avoiding the earth lance, the osteomorph could only raise its scythe arms to protect its skull from the incoming fireball. A small explosion filled the confined hall with thunder and dust. Evran quickly followed up with a gust of wind magic to reestablish a visual on their opponent.

  Just like that, it was missing one of its arms, and the other looked badly burned. Though it was not nearly as lethal as her previous fireball, at least this one didn’t consume all her remaining mana and leave her unconscious again. Evran estimated she could launch two or three more fireballs of similar strength before her mana ran out.

  While the opening attacks had gone in their favor, they hadn’t yet struck the decisive blow. Narro sprinted toward the stunned osteomorph, eager to do just that. As he had done in their last few encounters, he threw himself at its legs, hoping to immobilize the monster. The osteomorph moved not to block the attack, but to counter it, gladly willing to sacrifice one of its legs to land a lethal strike on its prey.

  At the last possible second, Narro planted his foot and pivoted hard, barely dodging a swipe of the osteomorph’s remaining scythe arm. As the blade sailed past his face, he swung his sword up in a rising strike, cutting the other arm off the attacking monster. The scythe blade continued with its momentum, flying off and embedding itself in the labyrinth wall. Narro’s feint had worked flawlessly.

  With the creature disarmed, Evran worried about what else the osteomorph had in store for them. When it retaliated with ineffective kicks from its forelegs, that worry quickly subsided. Narro dodged and parried the weak attacks with ease. As terrifyingly lethal as the monster had been before, it was surprisingly harmless without its scythe-like arms. Evran and Kaila sat back and observed, waiting for Narro to give them an opening in which to attack. None came, as Narro was holding his own and chipping away at its legs with every counter.

  The osteomorph grew frustrated with its failing attacks and leapt backwards a few times, distancing itself from its prey. Then it charged forward in an attempt to simply ram Narro. This was ultimately a mistake, however, as those attacks, ineffective as they were, were all that prevented Narro from jumping up and striking at the monster’s skull. Had the monster been only slightly shorter, he’d have already been able to reach it with a normal attack.

  Both Narro and the osteomorph charged down the corridor at one another. Evran had full confidence in his friend, though he could see that Kaila was nervous about what was about to transpire. Narro arced his approach toward the right of the creature, pulling the creature toward that side of the hall. Right before they met, he performed a momentum-defying sidestep before launching himself to the opposite side.

  The two opponents collided in a quick exchange of blows. The splintered stump of the monster’s right arm locked into place and speared Narro in the side, while his sword found purchase deep within the skull of the osteomorph. The monstrosity of bones crumbled into a pile as Narro crashed and tumbled along the labyrinth floor. Evran rushed over to Narro to see how badly his friend had been hurt by that attack.

  “Ugh,” Narro moaned. He let out a few coughs, wincing in pain at each one. “I’m gonna feel that one for a while.”

  Evran inspected Narro’s side, only to find a deep scratch in his leather armor. Aside from a few scrapes from the fall, he wasn’t even bleeding — at least not externally. Narro almost certainly had a few broken ribs, and would definitely have a nasty bruise there. Thankfully, he was good enough at healing magic to deal with both.

  As Evran cast a healing spell on Narro, Kaila wandered over carrying two of the monster’s bones, each a different size. She’d talked about running an experiment to help them predict when the osteomorph would be revived. While they had no hope of preventing it from happening by taking the bones, as they would eventually dissolve back into miasma, they might learn a thing or two based on how long that process took. The different sizes were for comparison, to see if the process was by volume or percent.

  “Well, we did it. We beat it without suffering any major setbacks. Why don’t I feel any better about our situation?” Kaila asked, desperately trying to stave off her despair.

  Evran knew the answer, of course. It’s because they got lucky. They were still relying on tricks to fight against it, not their own strength. The osteomorph was learning just as they were, and eventually Evran would run out of clever solutions. They just had to catch up with the adventurers before that happened.

  “It’s because you finally think we’ll survive this mess, and everyone’s gonna find out you’re with Evran now,” Narro joked. “Some might say a gruesome death is preferable, but I, for one, approve.”

  Though she reflexively rolled her eyes in protest, the look on her face betrayed her true feelings. Kaila seemed genuinely relieved and hopeful about their prospects. With a few simple words, Narro had managed to change the girl’s mind. They were actually going to escape this place. Now, all they had left was a perilous journey through the third layer.