Messing around with the first three trapped tiles suggested there might have been a trick to it. The resets had a pattern. It was the order they’d been tripped, so nothing overly complicated. Thus the primary solution became clear. Just avoid setting off any traps, sure, no problem.

  My first idea came down to testing for the next trap, popping the one after it and then leapfrogging onwards after the cycle finished. Throwing another handful of wooden cubes revealed the presence of a general trigger tiles however. Those set off all the traps and reinitiated the chaos cascade. Witnessing the visual violence anew drew forth my customary deep sigh.

  The general trigger functioned as an origin point for sequential waves, in both directions. There was some randomness to reactivations, give or take anywhere between zero and a couple of seconds. This was especially egregious mindfuckery as it caused doubles or triples to linger. On the positive side, the spikey stuff and company weren’t quite as unreasonably fast compared to my first encounter underneath the bunnycrab dome. Alas, an unwillingness to ditch my possessions discarded the option of dancing through the madness.

  The traps also varied a fair bit. Aside from spear traps, I saw the familiar rising tile one too, along with a cartoonish waist high horizontal shiny-black buzz saw. Of course, there was more bullshit, like darkly fluorescent reverse guillotines and pendulum traps appearing seamlessly out of the walls. The guillotine blades ascended from between the tiles instead of descending from the ceiling, hence the moniker. Most eerie was the silence of it. All the traps were noiseless except when the occasional rising tile destroyed a wooden cube and sent splinters flying, which naturally triggered yet more traps.

  The ones which shone with vague light were the most haunting. They reminded me of touring a nuclear power plant once upon a time. The reactor rooms had an unsettling blue ambiance, inspiring a vague sense of wrongness. Here the unnatural glow further amplified the effect, as they emitted light that was somehow black. It was clearly some magical bullshit and stressed my frayed nerves even further. Out of ideas, I resorted to vandalism.

  Unlike with the original Deathtrap, damaging the corridor actually worked. Successfully widening a seam inspired me to wrench out tiles one by one, but leveraging them out proved impossible. Poking the spear holes in the walls led to no outward effect and peering in had similar results, even when assisted by a lighter flame. Some of the traps had very obvious locations while others were impossible to spot.

  Anchoring between the walls and trying to shimmy across might have worked. Rising physical endurance had done a lot for my smokers’ lung but concerns about my stamina remained. A single fuck-up was likely to be fatal, and leaving all my things behind appealed even less. So the second plan went out the window, probably unrealistic even after ditching the extra weight.

  Navigating all this turned into a conundrum. My only experience with traps stemmed from games. But games were designed to be beatable, which turned their traps into disguised puzzles. Fortunately cold hard logic picked my side for once since this gauntlet likely hadn’t been devised with a solution in mind. The thought sparked further consideration. What even is the point of this? The corridor made for an effective roadblock but seemed too obvious and out of place to serve any real function. Not the time for idle contemplation.

  My dwindling food supplies put me on the clock and I wasn’t in the mood to backtrack. Even though the situation resisted justification, there might ultimately be some kind of solution. My choices were reduced to figuring it out, starving to death or taking my chances across ludicrously hostile wasteland. A wealth of options; did I want to unravel a brainteaser, die slowly, or die quickly?

  The thought of being forced to solve a puzzle with my life on the line pissed me off.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  And that was the perfect solution. The adage proved true after all. If violence didn’t fix all my problems, it meant I wasn’t using enough of it. Swiping at the spear trap severed it, causing it to dissolve into smoke.

  Another handful of thrown dice bounced off floors and walls. Resetting didn’t repair anything. Excessive vandalism looked like the way forward. Destroy everything. My mistake had been to think of this too much like an encounter and too little like someone’s day worth ruining. Yet caution prevailed.

  It might also have qualified as procrastination because who the hell didn’t delay walking down a hallway of doom for as long as possible. My current excuse consisted of seeing if the traps would repair. Twenty or so minutes of refining my artistic talent confirmed they did. Self-repairing traps were bullshit, but so was everything else. It was just the current zeitgeist. Why couldn’t we get a nice, survivable apocalypse, like radioactive wasteland or zombies? Fuck monsters, fuck darkness and fuck traps.

  Despite my previous reservations, time was a wastin’. The universe finally found something that could make me hurry up, the promise of a particularly unpleasant death. So I hardened my heart, and then reconsidered a couple more times until finally letting my inner soccer hooligan loose. Unleashing obliteration proved incredibly satisfying.

  Every slash, slice and dodge brought me one stop closer to freedom. Evasion was necessary, as swiping at a magical trap chipped my blade. Magic shit breaks magic shit. Happy that I got the hint on one way reality had been twisted, my progress continued until another snag presented itself. There were branching paths. Shimmying across would’ve gotten me killed here. With no way of knowing what led where, old fashioned way of trying out all options prevailed. The mind-compass helped me keep a southerly orientation at least.

  This led to a lot of back and forth along with scratching on walls. Of course the dead ends and deviations were just long enough to give the terror tools time to regenerate. The shadows chased me, forever stuck at a ten meter distance while my breath ran ragged and heartbeats pounded in my ears. There was enough leeway to steal a few minutes of rest here and there but eventually my persistence was rewarded with a stairwell.

  Normally a stairwell would have been excellent news, but this one led down. At least the room wasn’t trapped to the tits. Like the previous one, this was a T-split, offering ways ahead towards the south and west. My cat-like curiosity fought a losing battle versus newly developed survival instincts and thus down was ruled out early. It felt a little too early to call it quits for today and impatience nearly drove me to continue ahead heedlessly, guided by gamblers fallacy.

  Beware the bullshit. Having collected those of my wooden cubes still while along the way, another underhanded throw and more repeated the previous experiments. It turned out to be pointless. This automatic assault corridor functioned similarly to the last.

  My mana had topped up when I finally made it out, fortunately still heading south. The recent experience ranked quite high on my personal leaderboard of shittiest things I spent ten hours doing. Determination had been supplanted by weariness, which resulted in a short break augmented by a batch of cantrip sourced heart disease concentrate.

  At least nothing attacked me on the 30 minute romp towards the next, thankfully upward staircase. My inner fluffy feline finally won and urged me to have a careful look at where this secret spiral might lead. Unlike the other staircases, which were at least sort of hidden, this just ended up in an area of tall, yellow, two-thumb-thick tundra bamboo - whatever that might be. My old earth and mostly forgotten biology classes failed to prepare me for such an eclectic mix of biomes. Regardless, the fresh air relieved the stench of labor sweat and the gentle rustle of bamboo sounded like music to my ears.

  A magic-green stalk right at edge of the familiar stone circle caught my attention, and a few hours of serious effort cut it off. Most of it wafted away in familiar streams of ethereal smoke, but a thirty centimeter hollow tube remained behind and joined my other earthly possessions in the purple backpack.

  Dusk hadn’t quite turned to night yet. Looking around barely showed me anything however, as the multi-meter wild-growth prevented me from seeing shit aside from shimmering treetops in the distance. They bugged me for some reason and an Errant-check revealed why. Well, fuck that. Can’t fight no trees.

  As much as the open air appealed, I elected the safe stairway for my campsite. Even though treating myself once more to some higher odds of coronary mishaps should’ve helped me sleep, insomnia reared its ugly head. Sheer boredom drove me to spend hours drawing on the same old plate until a yawn finally surfaced. This time my interface remained open before blissful oblivion took hold.