“Well, on the good side… the whole castle, if you can call it that—is visible,” I said, addressing our incredibly confused group. They weren’t the only ones. I still struggled to understand what I was seeing.

  The ‘castle’ was composed of hundreds of honeycombs, curving around to form a sealed environment. It was like standing on the inside of a balloon. Or a beehive, if it was entirely hollow. It was hard to tell how big each honeycomb was—some were larger than others—but on average, I’d say they were about half a football field or so. Pretty tiny. Each one seemed to be its own biome, and rarely did two adjacent cells look even remotely similar. It made for a dazzling display.

  “Looks like each of those things is its own ecosystem,” I said, looking out at the expanse. “And I’m guessing they each have their own localized gravity.”

  “Sorry?” Philip said, frowning in confusion. “Localized gravity?”

  “We’re standing upright,” I clarified. “Guessing we’ll be able to stand upright in the others, too, even the ones facing us on the other side.”

  “Well, yes… why wouldn’t we?” Philip asked.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but then realized that the association between mass and gravity, that stellar bodies create their own gravity, probably hadn’t been made on Axius.

  “Well, it won’t be an issue,” I said, shrugging. “Problem is, it looks like we’ll have no weight while we’re in the center of this huge space. Assuming we can even jump that high, of course.”

  Our honeycomb’s glass walls only seemed to rise about thirty feet—low, but still not quite jumpable. Luckily, ours had a bunch of trees in it, so I figured I’d be able to jump off a high branch to vault myself.

  “I’m sorry,” Philip said. “I don’t believe I’m understanding your plan. “You want to somehow jump across the void to another area?”

  I nodded. “Exactly. We pick out a honeycomb from here—one that looks like it’ll have a good shot of having the ores we want—then Rogar and I jump over, do some mining, then jump back…”

  My friends were not convinced. “What are the chances you’ll land on the right one?” Richard asked. “Or that you’ll make it back to us, for that matter?”

  “Fair point,” I said, looking up at the hundreds of unique biomes. “I’m pretty confident I can get close, but sticking that landing’s gonna be rough.”

  “What of the actual landin’?” Rogar said. “You sure you can survive that?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem for me,” I said, looking over the blacksmith. “Don’t worry, I’ll shield you from any impact. You’ll be fine.”

  I looked around our own biome. “Well, sounds like we have some homework to do before we can attempt this safely. Rogar? Stay here and look for possible candidates. Biomes that look like they might have Voidsteel or Aurorium.”

  “And what will you do?” Philip asked.

  I glanced at the nearby wall.

  “Test something,” I said, stepping closer to it.

  “Yep, that’s gonna be a problem.” It was a single sheet of opaque pure glass, all the way up. Couldn’t see a thing through it. And like the Trial maze’s walls, it was impenetrable. No chance of carving out handholds, even with Aerion’s strength. Which meant we’d need another way.

  “Any ideas?” I said. “If we could scale these, it’d give us some margin for error. Rather, I don’t think we should even attempt it unless we can.”

  Aerion already confirmed there was no invisible ceiling by throwing a rock as hard as she could—it sailed over the walls and never came back, drifting away to some far-off honeycomb.

  So the concept was viable. If we could just solve this one problem…

  “Have you considered digging?” Richard asked, surprising us all.

  “I… doubt that would work,” I said, scratching my head. “But, I guess it’s worth a shot?”

  Turned out, it was. The wall ended about three feet down—far too short for a real wall. It wouldn’t have been stable. But this was a pocket world in a world with magic, so I barely paid it any mind.

  “I admit, I didn’t think it would be that easy,” I said, having crawled under the wall to the other side. The biome immediately adjacent to ours was a desert, and the sweltering heat made my clothes stick to my skin.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  We returned almost immediately.

  “Any bets this is another way the gods make Trials easier for us?” I said. “No way this would fly in a Cataclysm dungeon. Remember the ice maze?”

  Richard and Aerion nodded darkly.

  “Whatever the reason,” Philip said. “It sounds like we now have a plan of action?”

  “That we do. Rogar?”

  “Found several spots that ought to have Voidsteel, and a handful that might have Aurorium. Found exactly one that looks like it might have both. Can’t promise anything, of course. Not until we’re closer.”

  I grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about that. Just point me in a direction and tell me where to go.”

  “I can point you to the ore. I can show you how to smelt it. There’s no need for me to go,” Rogar said, edging away from me.

  “Sorry, Rogar, but you’re necessary on this one. Now c’mon. Just think of how much favor you’ll gain with the Trial. Look at Philip over there. He’s green with envy.”

  Rogar glanced at Philip, who looked away. “He doesn’t look anything like that.”

  “You’re just not seeing it,” I said. “Now, we’ve wasted enough time already. Let’s hop over there, mine what we need, and hop back.”

  Rogar whispered something under his breath. Something about how he was going to die, and how he never asked for this.

  Sorry, Rogar, but you kinda did.

  With the short blacksmith strapped onto my back, I hauled my way up a tree Aerion had picked out earlier. It was tall and healthy, with big sturdy branches that would bear our combined weight.

  I didn’t climb all the way to the top, of course—those branches were too small—but thanks to my Vigor and Dominion, I didn’t have to. I could jump a decent amount higher than the average person, and I only needed a few feet to clear the ceiling.

  The bigger question was aim. I took my time after getting to my target branch, holding the trunk for support as I stared up at the dizzying array of honeycomb cells.

  “Time to see if that Grace makes a difference,” I muttered.

  “What did you say?” Rogar asked, staring down at the ground some twenty feet below.

  “Nothing. I’d tell you to hold on, but I know you’ll do that, anyway. Alright, here goes. Three, two, one…”

  Taking the best aim I could, I launched. And it was only when we passed out of our honeycomb into the gravity-less space that another, much more pressing concern came to mind—air.

  I instinctively held my breath, but Rogar’s breathing from behind me told me I didn’t have to worry. There was air here. Just no gravity.

  We proceeded to sail across the expanse in what was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I felt like an astronaut performing some insane EVA, jumping from the surface of a planet to try and land on a passing spaceship or something.

  Both Rogar and I fell silent for a long while, until our destination loomed larger and larger.

  My aim had actually been pretty decent, but the problem was our location wasn’t perfectly on the opposite side of the honeycomb. It was more off to the side. And that meant we weren’t going to drop straight down onto our target. We approached it at an angle, skimming across the tops of nearby cells, until it became obvious that we would miss our target.

  I was about a half-dozen cells off. Realizing this, my brain flew into overdrive, mapping exactly where our target was, relative to the cell we’d end up in.

  Orienting once on the ground would be a problem, but the cell we’d land at was about four away from the target, with a tundra biome being the first one that led in the right direction.

  With that memorized, I focused on our landing—or rather, our crash-landing.

  It was a good thing our biome was a desert. No trees to get tangled in, or bushes to crash into. God forbid rocks.

  As it was, I ate a mouthful of sand, while Rogar went tumbling, rolling to a stop.

  “Still alive?” I asked, spitting out a mouthful. Sand was among the most godawful things to get in your mouth. Like many others, I hated sand.

  “Just about…” Rogar said.

  “Good. Then let’s get moving,” I said. Thus far, the biomes we’d entered had been devoid of life, but I didn’t dare assume that would continue to be the case. I kept my head on a swivel and Light of the Fearless in hand, ready to deal with anything that jumped out of the ground.

  Our tumble left me disoriented, and seeing how I couldn’t see the neighboring cells from my vantage, I just picked a wall at random, digging a tunnel beneath it to the other side. The sand stopped under the wall, giving way to loose dirt.

  For a moment, I wondered if we’d ended up in another desert, but no. The biome on the other side was a tropical oasis, with a beach, lapping waves, and some palm trees. Overall, very nice. Just not the one I needed.

  Returning to the biome we landed in, I tried another wall and tried again. That one led to a swamp, but the third was tundra—the same biome I’d spotted as we were falling.

  I’d just missed noticing one tiny little thing.

  As my head poked out of the hole I’d dug and I looked around, I saw something just a couple of feet away that tingled my spidey senses. Hooked and almost metallic, it looked like the beak of a bird, but there were four of them.

  Four birds? All with their beaks perfectly parallel?

  Then it moved, and when all four ‘beaks’ moved at the same time, something clicked in my brain, and I recognized what they were.

  Not beaks, but claws. Oversized claws belonging to a pure white paw. A paw of an oversized polar bear that saw me and reared up on its hind legs, roaring.

  “Well, shit.”