A peculiarity past participants had picked up on about the aliens, other races, or outsiders as I liked to call them was that they liked to spew bullshit about honor and duty if they said anything at all. The habit sounded pretty hypocritical to me when they’d jumped the frontrunners mid-fight but I figured it was just good tactics or an opportunity not worth passing up. Nonetheless, they were very gung-ho about it, so it made sense to go full tilt in the opposite direction - fight smart, not fair and all that. Supposedly, a fixation on knightly virtues was a trademark of warrior societies.

  It made sense in the grand scheme of things since we suspected the outsiders had been dealing with the Errant a lot longer than we had. Other signs pointed the same way. For one, they had a lot more knowledge about the System and what could be done with it in general. They also seemed to be relatively… poor. Elias noted all of his victims only carried one or two good pieces of gear and a few consumables each if any, whereas we refused to take a shit if the toilet paper wasn’t magical.

  Unfortunately for me, I spotted a standing bird in one of the ten transparent starting rooms after accepting my invite to the games. The yellow avian stood out like a lighthouse in the dark compared to all the others and even me. Weirdly enough, outsider body language proved quite readable so I confidently asserted that everyone collectively shat themselves upon spotting the oversized goldfinch – nicknamed as such for all the yellowy feathers around its full-body armor, it was hard to see details from here. It didn’t stop the others from sprinting down the stairs and I did the same, for about ten steps. After which I sat down and then prepared a smoke to pass some time.

  Pretending to be in a rush was just a bit of misdirection in case any of the others were paying attention. From here on the strategy forked three possible ways. One went out the window immediately, any hopes of allying with other humans dashed as there were none. The other two involved waiting for close to a full hour until the uppermost layer was due to collapse, safely behind the entry portcullis. Either I progressed very slowly, just barely ahead of the collapse, or moved horizontally in hopes of merging my path with someone else’s.

  Of course, I wasn’t having any of that. Well, stalking my neighbors appealed, to get some revenge for the frontrunners and give the outsiders a taste of how it felt when someone jumped you in the middle of a hard fight. They also liked collecting stuff, both time consuming and dangerous even if very rewarding. It seemed smarter to let them work for me and spend my own time prowling, made me harder to find too with no trail of disturbed rooms. Taking stock revealed my crystal supply had dwindled from ten to five thousand. Apparently five coins just disappeared upon my entering of the games. A major bummer because I needed to hold 1000 energy in reserve for my secret weapon.

  I tapped out my pipe. My long smoke meant roughly 30 minutes had passed and it was time to get a move on. The starting positions made a circle, my position somewhere close to the bottom-right. Following my compass to the north-west would lead me towards the center. The birdperson had begun on the third position to my left, a bit too close for comfort. Thinking about birdy sparked an uneasy feeling, so for starters I’d aim to go down one floor and then veer off to my right in search of prey while avoiding what looked an awful lot like a predator. The solid stone portcullis opened, then closed behind me and familiar shadows shifted at more than twice the usual distance.

  At least the walls weren’t grey. Instead they reminded me of sandstone but with a stronger hint of yellow to them. What’s with the fucking color theme today? The hallways were similarly wide as in the Underway, but with arching instead of flat roofs and the same held true for the rooms, high ceilings further accented by the dome style design. An experimental sword-scratch confirmed the environment as indestructible. I regretted spending all my time so far in the stairway since the artwork here was ridiculously intricate. At a glance, the embellishments looked like random lines on the walls and a large overhead mosaic in the rooms, but a proper stare revealed patterns.

  The seemingly random crisscrosses were in fact overlaid outlines of images and squinting allowed me to pick out individual scenes. One showed a person in something like flame wreath holding hands with a watery form, right on top was another with a star of five stick figures in a bowl or strip mine, once more collaged by a circle inside a triangle, the points thereof accented by spheres. Profound stuff, probably.

  All the ceiling renditions were very rough, oddly shaped but vibrantly colored and suffered similar clarity issues. If I had to guess, my starting room depicted a forest, a bunch of brown sticks capped by green squares. The sketch on top was maybe a cluster of solar systems, vague multicolored orbs with contrastingly colored patches in orbit around big central unicolor balls whereas the ‘background’ tiles were all black with many small white dots scattered about. Finally, I recognized the spiral shape of a galaxy as another layer. So the combination depicted a forest spread across a bunch of solar systems and space in a galaxy. A bunch of wasted fucking effort, what a mess.

  The first stairwell down was always easy to reach, so I headed on over and after five minutes left my first yellowed beige and extensively decorated hallway behind. My current room had a different mosaic, even more chaotic than the last. After descending the steps, I set off down a northward hallway and quickly encountered my first real room. Apparently Ikea furniture followed some kind of cosmic design principle because everything here looked like it came out of a box. There was a bookshelf filled with piles of dusty crap, some chairs, those low square tables and a locked trunk. I tried to lift up the lid with a controlled blade, in vain. These rooms had hidden treasures, the allure of which brought me to the bookshelf.

  A force field stopped me from sweeping the dusty piles onto the floor, keeping everything on the shelves – not entirely unexpected. We were likely supposed to either search slowly and safely or apply copious amounts of violence. The last option was wrought with hazards as it had a chance of spawning Solo’s level Errant. Thoroughly searching every room felt like a waste of time my curiosity got the better of me and I promised myself ‘just one, to check’. The trunk had a better temptation factor going for it, and less dust.

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  A keyhole on the latch drew my attention and I peeked in past the flame after illuminating the inside mechanism with my zippo. What the hell is this? There was definitely some kind of mechanism but it was like trying to grasp the inner workings of a fancy high-end watch. There were gears, pivots, arbors, springs, little colored gemstones and whatnot. A lock picking puzzle? I made a mental note to get a really tiny sword… actually… three. The best way around a problem was through, so my pipe alighted once again to a backdrop of high pitched latch sawing. A pile of ash landed on the floor and the tension dropped. No Errant spawned in as a response to my clever workaround. There was also nothing inside.

  Now I really felt like killing something, a taste of the rush didn’t help either. An astute observer of the self might have considered it somewhat worrying that my urges were getting increasingly volatile. But I have things under control, more than before at least, maybe.

  I declined going centerwards and continued on to the north, past another hallway, and then stopped at the familiar sight of 60x60 tight-ass tiles all over the floor. Breathless’ offhand mention of teleport traps cured my littering habit and no handful of dice clattered across. A sword-tap found a live square, a magical reverse guillotine. Waving my arm over it didn’t cause a trigger, re-tapping did. Different reset mechanics, bullshit.

  Satisfied, I deca-launched myself through the booby-trapped room and sprawled deep in the opposite hallway without setting off anything. Still can’t stick the landing from rest. The energy expenditure was overkill considering the short distance, but it was mental shorthand. Ten launches were an effective standard for dashing or flight, stored as a MS sub-process for ease of mind-flick - as opposed to active thinking about the number of activations. Every action counted. At least I rolled well enough to avoid making too much noise.

  The next room was another case of world’s most boring treasure hunt so I skipped it and passed a staircase. I tried to catch a glimpse of the collapse, the timing worked out, but the floor above just turned into a black void like someone pressed the off button on a screen, scary stuff. Checking the arena-ward direction led to an untouched treasure room but the northward hallway rewarded my efforts with someone else’s tail.

  There was a desk filled with books, they had pages and pages of nonsensical writing on them, no auto-translation either. I couldn’t lift them off the tiny but stacked table and there had been one open in the middle of it with an empty hidden compartment cut-out, along with a pile of literature to the left and right of it. It was a pain to move the doorstoppers around because an entire cover had to be touching either the very small desk or another cover at all times and in its entirety, else they wouldn’t budge. I wasn’t sure whether to call this a puzzle or just an exercise in patience.

  Regardless, I’d achieved a core objective. There was a lot to be said about pathing strategies. Just going at it randomly was incredibly stupid, although teleport traps and the one challenge reward we knew about seemed to actually reward recklessness. Like my neighbor was now doomed to learn, evidence left behind was asking to get jumped.

  Mixing my own path with someone else’s wildly complicated any attempts to track me down, a real concern with birdbrain possibly rushing folks while they were still easy to find. For the same reason, it was best to delay the start as much as possible. We also had something of a time limit, which facilitated laying down false trails and such. Not that effective individually, but exploring a groups carefully laid misdirections shifted the time balance to either impractical or exhausting. Take your pick, waste your time or arrive weak, preferably both.

  In an ideal world, a person now hid and waited out another full round of the clock. Alas, the only available option was standing in a corner, slightly out of sight from the hallways, and intently listening for footsteps. Reverberating echoes suggested that sound carried very fucking far here. I followed in my neighbor’s footsteps at a jog, occasionally checking adjacent rooms, and eventually ended up descending again. It didn’t take me long to resume the chase, first blindly through a corridor, then a disturbed extra dusty room. Exploring backtracked footsteps led to a challenge room - a stroke of good luck since it allowed me an avenue of escape, albeit a risky one. I even considered just taking it on straight away. Yet my journey continued, ever behind my oblivious target.

  I’d been cursed with time to think and the universal reaction to the shiny sack of feathers had me a little on edge. If everyone distanced themselves from the walking beacon of magic then we’d all be conveniently bunching ourselves up even before the inevitable meeting in the middle. Unfortunately I tended towards grasping the known during times of uncertainty and thus wasn’t a fan of randomizing my location, instead picking up the pace. This empty room showed signs of struggle.

  There were some scraps of leather, chips of metal and what looked suspiciously like a jacket button spread around. Splashes of colorless liquid soiled the floor here and there and a faint scent of ozone lingered - so lightning powers, a mage perhaps? I presumed the watery stains to be alien blood, since it would support my conclusion. A lack of perceived fighting noises implied some distance between us still and I wanted to at least fight one dude to get a feel for things, even if it was a little reckless.

  This went on for a while until I came across a puzzle room, already solved - something with dominoes laid out on the floor and an outside layer with tiled shapes. A quick study revealed the outside shapes dictated which ones had to appear on inside rows. It would’ve been a children’s game if there weren’t more than a hundred tiles to the whole thing. Whoever solved this was a lot smarter than me. Should I start to worry? Nah. Another collapse neared, forcing me to abandon my escape plan as I went down a layer.

  Two false starts caused me to run at speed after my quarry, going vaguely north along an ironically sideways stair-step shaped path. Although in this case the steps were rather uneven because my target tended towards two lateral rooms for each medial one. The distances between stairs grew in length, which made no fucking sense whatsoever because the longest paths should’ve been on the outside. Well, shouldn’t complain. So far my games are a breeze. Suddenly, my mounting anxiety faded in favor of calm excitement. I heard two something’s, and then stopped to listen while catching my breath in an untouched furnished room. The bastard nearly threw me off with one of these before, it occasionally skipped one.

  Silence.

  The noises had been something of a short exchange or maybe someone smashing furniture. Both had happened almost simultaneously. The hallways carried sound exceptionally well indeed, as they clearly originated from different places. I gave my gear a once over, and then prepared to take advantage of what was all too likely to turn into a clusterfuck, but in my favor for once.

  It was time to find out if I’d successfully transformed myself from bumbling idiot to someone a little bit more dangerous.