Chapter 144: Puzzle [Bonus]

[Bonus Chapter thanks to castle from Chronotitan <3]

The Golden Fleece players remained gathered near the Drowned Willow Dungeon while the rest of the clearing slowly returned to its earlier noise.

None of them looked particularly interested in entering anymore, and the man who had identified Jaxir kept staring at the whirlpool as though something might come back out at any moment. After another short exchange, the oldest-looking member of the group shook his head.

"We wait." He looked toward one of the others and pointed away from the crowd. "Call the leadership and tell them Jaxir Chance entered Nightmare alone, then ask what they want us to do if he comes back out."

"You think he actually will?" The younger man glanced toward the whirlpool, then seemed to remember exactly who they were talking about and rubbed the back of his neck. "Never mind, I guess that’s why we’re asking."

The group moved away from the entrance and settled in where they could still keep an eye on anyone entering or leaving. None of them wanted to make the decision themselves when Jaxir had already dismantled one Golden Fleece branch and turned everything surrounding his name into a mess.

If he somehow cleared this place alone, charging in afterward without orders sounded like a very good way to become the next story people passed around.

...

Jaxir fired another Cast through the mouth of a Swamp Crocodile and watched it stumble backward into a Mire Lash behind it. Two more crocodiles were already coming from the other side of the chamber, while vines crawled across the walls looking for an angle to spit their toxin from. He moved between them without much urgency and kept firing.

[-57]

[Critical Hit!]

[-39]

[-41]

Forty-three minutes had passed since he entered the dungeon. His map looked almost completely filled in now, a dense knot of passages packed inside a roughly square region, yet he had accomplished little more than killing enough creatures to make the swamp population regret spawning near him. Every route that seemed promising eventually folded back into something he had already seen.

Jaxir wasn’t particularly worried about it, though. He had spent enough time wandering around to start learning what the maze was actually doing.

The first thing was simple. The maze never changed in front of him, no matter how long he stood around waiting for it. Jaxir had tested that several times after realizing the walls moved, and not once had a root shifted enough to change a passage while he watched it directly.

The second realization took longer. Distance mattered, and not by a small amount either, since a section of the maze remained stable even after Jaxir turned several corners and lost sight of it. He couldn’t simply duck behind a bend, wait for the dungeon to think he was gone and catch the walls moving when he peeked back.

That should have made the first movement he noticed impossible, though. Jaxir remembered it clearly, though, the subtle writhing of roots that had made him double back in the first place. If the dungeon refused to rearrange anything near him, then what exactly had he seen?

A Mire Lash snapped a vine across the passage and Jaxir ducked beneath it, sending two Casts into the dense bundle beneath its leaves. The creature folded inward while one of the crocodiles lunged past it, forcing Jaxir onto a thick root running along the wall. He landed, pushed off again and caught the crocodile beneath the jaw.

[-38]

[-40]

[-59]

[Critical Hit!]

The answer came while he watched another vine retreat into the wall. It didn’t disappear, nor did anything grow to replace it after it withdrew. The same length of vine slid through the tangled mass and vanished somewhere deeper inside.

"Oh, I got it.." Jaxir grinned as he killed the last Mire Lash and looked around the chamber again. "You’re recycling."

The maze wasn’t creating new material whenever it changed. Roots and vines were being pulled out of distant sections, carried through the walls, then fed somewhere else to close one path and open another. What Jaxir had noticed the first time wasn’t the passage around him changing at all, but material moving through it on the way to somewhere farther away.

That gave him something concrete to watch. Jaxir continued through the maze for another five minutes, only this time he stopped caring which tunnels looked new and started paying attention to where the roots moved instead. The map became far more useful once he stopped treating every line on it like a permanent road.

Then Jaxir stopped walking.

A grin slowly spread across his face as he enlarged the map and stripped away most of the individual passages in his head. The maze changed constantly, but the overall footprint never did. No matter how many tunnels closed or opened, the entire structure remained one large square.

More importantly, the movements repeated. Almost every region he had crossed contained roots being borrowed, replaced or shifted sooner or later, yet two sections had remained completely untouched through every rearrangement he had witnessed. They sat on opposite sides of a thick tunnel wall, almost perfectly aligned with one another.

"Now why would you do that?" Jaxir started toward the closer one and kept the map open beside him. The dungeon responded by throwing another cluster of enemies into his path.

Five this time.

Three Swamp Crocodiles filled the tunnel while two Mire Lashes unfolded behind them, leaving barely any clean space between jaws, water jets and whipping vines. Jaxir laughed when he saw them and immediately understood that the dungeon wasn’t just waiting for him to figure things out forever. The longer he remained inside, the larger the groups were becoming.

"Getting impatient?" Jaxir slipped beneath the first crocodile’s water jet and sent Casts flashing through the narrow spaces between them. His firing had become fast enough that the individual bursts almost formed a steady stream, each one released before his smooth mana circulation could accidentally begin Channeling it.

"Me too."

[-37]

[-40]

[-36]

One crocodile disappeared beneath the mud while another committed to a tail swipe, and Jaxir moved directly through the opening it created instead of backing away. He peppered the exposed ribs, curved a second line of Casts around the creature’s body toward one Mire Lash, then jumped over a toxin strand that passed beneath his boots. By the time the last crocodile collapsed, Jaxir was already moving onto his next target. But this "target" wasn’t a creature at all, but rather, a location.

He reached the strange region a few minutes later and finally understood why it had caught his attention. The wall there was thicker than anywhere else he had seen, built from layer upon layer of roots packed so tightly that there wasn’t even moss growing between them. When Jaxir checked his map, the second unmoving region sat directly opposite it on the other side of the thickest section of the entire maze.

Jaxir rested his palm against the wall. Nothing moved beneath it, and none of the roots showed the faint travelling motion he had learned to notice everywhere else. If the maze was willing to tear apart almost every other section to rebuild itself but refused to touch these two places, then they probably weren’t ordinary walls.

The thick tunnel running between them had to contain something. Maybe the exit, maybe whatever controlled the maze, or maybe a particularly angry tree waiting to ruin his afternoon. Jaxir didn’t care which one it was.

He stepped back and raised his staff.

"Let’s skip the puzzle."

Mana poured into the end of the weapon and remained there instead of leaving as a quick Cast. Jaxir kept feeding it, Channel taking hold as the sphere compressed brighter and brighter, then pulled a mana potion from his inventory with his free hand.

The wall remained perfectly still in front of him.

BOOM!

A beam erupted from the end of Jaxir’s staff and slammed into the packed roots.

He immediately hooked his thumb beneath the cork of the mana potion and popped it open.