Chapter 3 Part 2: The Next Engagement and Confirmation
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Chapter 3 Part 2: The Next Engagement and Confirmation
Standing in front of the portal, they took a moment to start their helmet cameras recording before firmly strapping them on. The transition still refused to announce itself in any meaningful way. One step forward, the black surface swallowing the world ahead of them, and then stone underfoot again—cool, even, and faintly textured. The pressure behind Ethan’s eyes returned for an instant before fading, leaving the chamber to resolve around them with the same quiet certainty it had the last time.
Abigail did not move forward immediately. She stopped a few steps inside the room and lifted her phone, panning once in a slow, deliberate arc as if confirming that the space itself had not shifted when they weren’t looking. The obelisk stood exactly where it had been before, rising from the center of the chamber like a black shard driven into the floor. The soft blue lines tracing the stone were unchanged, and the far door remained closed, featureless, and inert.
“Looks the same to me,” she said quietly.
Ethan nodded and adjusted his grip on the shotgun before walking toward the obelisk. They approached together, boots clicking faintly against the stone, the sound feeling small and quickly swallowed by the sheer volume of the room. At arm’s length, they stopped, close enough that the obelisk’s surface reflected nothing of them at all.
Ethan reached out first. The moment his palm made contact with the obelisk’s facet, the familiar translucent display bloomed into view. His eyes moved quickly, scanning carefully rather than with any sense of curiosity. His name, race, and unchanged class status were exactly where they had been before. Health and mana values were the same. There were no new entries, no subtle shifts that suggested anything had happened in their absence.
“Nothing changed,” he said after a moment, lowering his hand.
Abigail stepped in immediately after him and placed her palm against her own facet. She leaned closer, lips pressed together as she read more carefully, taking an extra second to confirm what she already expected to see. When she straightened, she exhaled once and nodded.
“Same as before,” she said. “Party’s still intact.”
She took several pictures without comment, one straight-on, one angled, and one wide enough to include the surrounding chamber for context. “So our party didn’t reset,” Abigail said as she lowered her phone. “Not per entry, at least.”
“And it doesn’t care that we left,” Ethan replied. “We’re still in it.”
They both looked toward the far door, its surface unmarked and unreadable.
“Then this is the one where we actually see how the floor behaves,” she said.
Ethan nodded once in agreement, and they turned away from the obelisk together.
They stopped in front of the door and pulled it open together, the stone doors shifting asideand showing the same passage from the night before, with a passage on the left side about a hundred feet in, as well as the passage continuing past the limit of their lights.
They paused and listened, but the corridor offered nothing in response.
“Alright,” Abigail said, already moving. “Does not look like anything reset in here either. At least we don’t have to deal with a randomly shifting floorplan.” Her tone practical as Ethan fell into step beside her.
He lifted his shotgun slightly, barrel angled down the passage, and led the way forward. The stone underfoot was seamless enough that judging distance by sight alone was difficult. Their lights cut clean cones through the unlit passage, and about fifty feet ahead a translucent orange goo slid along the floor. Ethan raised a hand and stopped causing Abigail to stop as well.
Abigail’s eyes widened a fraction. “Okay, that’s new.” Her voice turned quick with the kind of excitement she usually reserved for being right. “Orange. Fire?”
Ethan kept his shotgun up but didn’t rush the thought. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just orange.”
“Everything in this place is a logic problem pretending it isn’t,” she said, and then she shifted her stance to give him room. “Either way, kill the slime and check the Obelisk.”
Ethan nodded, adjusted his ear protection once more, and shouldered the shotgun. The slime rippled as the light stayed on it, its mass bunching and releasing in uneven pulses as it started moving toward them.
Waiting until it was twenty feet away, Ethan fired. The blast thundered down the corridor, contained but forceful even through their ear protection. The spread tore through the slime’s body, punching dozens of tiny holes straight through it and splattering gelatinous fragments across the stone.
The creature recoiled, collapsed inward for an instant, and then pulled itself back together.
The damage wasn’t enough to take it down. Ethan blinked once, surprised despite himself, as it shuddered and kept coming. “Huh.”
“Didn’t hit the core,” Abigail said immediately, using her radio so Ethan could hear her clearly with the ear protection on.
“Yeah,” he replied the same way and then adjusted his aim. “I guess none of the shot hit it.”
The slime surged closer, a thicker pseudopod beginning to form as its surface roiled. Ethan fired again. This time the body ruptured around a darker center, and the core shattered cleanly. It burst into blue motes and faded as quickly as breath on glass.
They waited a beat, then cautiously stepped forward together. Abigail swept her light low across the stone where the slime had been, then crouched only enough to angle her phone camera close to the floor.
“There,” she said, pointing. A tiny bead sat against the stone, barely more than a glowing pinprick of blue. Ethan knelt and used the tip of a knife to nudge it into a small bag, treating it like the hazardous material it still might be.
“Manacite,” Abigail murmured, saying the word the way she did when she wanted it to stick. “So it really is one per kill.”
Ethan sealed the bag and tucked it away. “That’s three for three,” he said. “Not enough to call it a rule, but it’s a start.”
She made a small, annoyed noise at that, but she didn’t disagree. “Either way, birdshot’ll do it,” she said, glancing back down the corridor, “but only if you get lucky.”
“Or close,” Ethan said, as he reloaded. “Stay under twenty feet away to keep the pellet cone tighter. Otherwise, the spread will result in low reliability.”
They did not linger in the corridor. After confirming there were no additional slimes within immediate sight and agreeing that pushing deeper would only complicate what they were trying to measure, they turned back the short distance to the obelisk chamber. The walk took less than half a minute.
Ethan stepped to one facet while Abigail moved to another, neither speaking until they were in position. They had already established that simultaneous access required separate facets, and neither saw any reason to test that again.
Ethan placed his palm against the surface and focused. The display resolved immediately in his vision. His eyes moved down without hesitation, scanning past the unchanged lines until they reached the field he was looking for.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Ethan Walker │ │ │ │ Human │ │ │ │ CLASS: Not chosen │ │ EXP: 4 │ │ │ │ HEALTH: 21 MANA: 20 │ │ │ │ STR: 12 CON: 11 INT: 10 │ │ MNT: 10 NMB: 10 CHM: 10 LUC: 10 │ │ │ │ SKILLS: │ │ - Archery │ │ - Marksmanship │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘He read the rest out of habit rather than necessity. Health unchanged. Mana unchanged. Class still listed as Not chosen. No visual emphasis suggested any new available action.
“Four,” he said evenly.
Abigail touched her own facet. She read more slowly, confirming each field in sequence before allowing her eyes to settle on the experience line.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Abigail Carter │ │ Huntress │ │ Human │ │ │ │ CLASS: Not chosen │ │ EXP: 4 │ │ │ │ HEALTH: 19 MANA: 22 │ │ │ │ STR: 10 CON: 9 INT: 11 │ │ MNT: 11 NMB: 10 CHM: 12 LUC: 10 │ │ │ │ SKILLS: │ │ - Archery │ │ - Marksmanship │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘“Same,” she said. “Four.”
After a brief pause, Abigail switch to the party screen. She focused her thought basically speaking in her head, Leave Party. The party screen cleared and switched back to her status screen.
“Woah,” Ethan exclaimed, “did you kick me out of the party? My status screen just switched to the party screen and it said I was removed.”
“Well, I just told it Leave Party,” she said. “I guess when you are the last one it automatically removes you.”
“Hmm, problably,” he agreed. They stepped back from the obelisk without further comment.
Abigail jotted this down in her notebook and tucked it back in her pocket. “Alright,” she said, her tone settling back into its earlier focus. “Now we do it again.”
Ethan nodded. They walked together back through the doorway and into the corridor beyond. The last engagement had taken place only thirty feet in, not even out of the light from the Obelisk chamber.
As they walked up to the left passage, no slimes were visible straight ahead, but there was something brown just down the left passage when the turned to look.
“Earth slime on the left,” Abigail said while bringing up her shotgun.
“Brown slime,” Ethan retorted while keeping an eye on their surroundings as she waited for it to get in range.
Unable to key her mic while aiming, she stuck her tounge out at him before focusing on the slime. A few moments later she fired and the slime quickly turned into blue motes.
The brown slime collapsed inward where the shot struck, the darker center fragmenting cleanly before the rest dissolved into drifting blue motes.
They waited several seconds before moving, watching for anything unusual.
Ethan stepped forward first this time, sweeping his light carefully over the stone where the creature had been. A single blue bead rested there just down the left passage where the slime had been.
He crouched and scooped the manacite into his ziplock bag without hesitation.
While Ethan grabbed the manacite, Abigail moved her light slowly across the intersection.
“Interesting,” she said, cocking her head slightly. “There is no shot lying on the ground, and there are no scratches on the wall.”
Ethan glanced up. “What are you talking about?”
She was already pulling up her photo album from the previous day. After a few seconds she found the image she wanted and held the screen toward him.
“Look,” she said, her voice sharpening with excitement. “There were birdshot pellets on the ground and scratches on the wall yesterday.”
The photograph clearly showed the scattered pellets and shallow pitting in the stone from their earlier fight.
Ethan compared it to the corridor in front of them.
The floor was clean. The wall surface was smooth and unmarked.
“It repaired itself,” Abigail said.
Ethan nodded, though without her enthusiasm. “If it repairs, that means explosives probably won’t make permanent shortcuts,” he said. “Not that we know where we’re going yet anyway.”
She considered that and gave a small, thoughtful nod. They documented the intersection briefly, then turned back toward the obelisk chamber. They returned to the obelisk chamber without discussion.
Abigail placed her palm against her facet first.
Her display formed cleanly in her vision. She scanned down automatically, confirming each field in order before her eyes reached the experience line.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Abigail Carter │ │ Huntress │ │ Human │ │ │ │ CLASS: Not chosen │ │ EXP: 9 │ │ │ │ HEALTH: 19 MANA: 22 │ │ │ │ STR: 10 CON: 9 INT: 11 │ │ MNT: 11 NMB: 10 CHM: 12 LUC: 10 │ │ │ │ SKILLS: │ │ - Archery │ │ - Marksmanship │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘She exhaled once through her nose. “Nine.”
Ethan stepped to his facet and placed his hand against it.
His own display resolved.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Ethan Walker │ │ │ │ Human │ │ │ │ CLASS: Not chosen │ │ EXP: 4 │ │ │ │ HEALTH: 21 MANA: 20 │ │ │ │ STR: 12 CON: 11 INT: 10 │ │ MNT: 10 NMB: 10 CHM: 10 LUC: 10 │ │ │ │ SKILLS: │ │ - Archery │ │ - Marksmanship │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘“Still four,” he said.
They withdrew their hands.
“I gained five,” she said slowly. “Which is more than we’ve ever seen at once.”
Ethan nodded. “When we killed them together, we each got two.”
“And now I got five alone and not four.”
He considered that. “So being grouped changes it.”
“Yeah.”
She folded her arms loosely, thinking it through. “Okay,” Abigail said at last. “Then we control the split, that fifty percent on the party screen has to be the epxerience split. If I got five this time, maybe things are proportional. If we set the percent to a sixty forty split maybe we’ll see something other than two each.”
They placed their hands back on the obelisk, reformed the party, and assigning Abigail as leader. The Party field populated again, and she focused on the percentages, speaking in her head sixty percent for Ethan and forty for me.
“It changed!” she exclaimed.
“Sixty for me,” he said. “Forty for you?”
“Well, I got 5 this time, so it is only fair you get more if this does what we think.” Abigail said.
They stepped away from the obelisk together and walked back into the tunnel.
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Chapter 3 Part 2 updated.