Chapter 3 Part 2: Confirmation, and Next Engagement
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Chapter 3 Part 2: Confirmation, and Next Engagement
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.
“Same,” she said quietly, not as reassurance but as a confirmation.
Ethan nodded and adjusted his grip on the shotgun before angling 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 this time, 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.”
That mattered more than the numbers. She took several pictures without comment—one straight-on, one angled, and one wide enough to include the surrounding chamber for context. Ethan did not object. This was what they had deliberately decided to make part of their routine: confirm, document, and move on without lingering.
“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 aside with the same muted resistance they had felt before. Beyond it stretched a corridor carved from the same gray stone as the chamber, its dimensions matching what they had already measured the night before. When they passed through, the door slid shut behind them with a soft finality that made the space feel narrower despite its size.
They paused and listened, but the corridor offered nothing in response.
“Alright,” Abigail said, already moving, her tone practical rather than cautious as she fell into step beside Ethan.
He lifted the shotgun slightly, barrel angled downrange, 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 20 yards 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. “Same rules either way. Core.”
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.
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. Blue motes burst outward and faded as quickly as breath on glass.
They waited a beat, then stepped forward together—cautious, but not hesitant. 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. He 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, echoing her earlier phrasing as he reloaded. “Wide spread, low reliability.”
“But forgiving,” she countered, and tapped the side of her helmet light. “Which matters if there’s more than one.”
They moved on and came to the spot they had fought yesterday, where the left wall opened into a side passage. Ethan slowed out of habit, and Abigail’s light tracked across the opening.
“Interesting,” she said, cocking her head sideways. “There is no shot laying on the ground, and there are not scratches on the wall.”
She quickly went into her photo album from yesterday and looked at the picture she took of the manacite drop, then exclaimed excitedly, “It repaired itself! Look there were birdshot pellets on the ground and scratches on the wall yesterday.”
Ethan nodded along, though not as excited. “If it repairs, that means explosives may not help make permanent shortcuts, not that we know where we are going yet anyway.”
Looking down the passage to the left and seeing it turn again to the left near the end of her light, Abigail said, “Left-hand rule says we take this passage."
“We take it,” Ethan said, already reaching to the side pocket of his pack. “I just hope it doesn’t repair this before we come back.” He stepped up to the corner and drew a simple arrow on the wall pointing into the left-hand passage. Beside it, he added a rough “1.”
“First decision point,” Abigail said after he was done, taking out her notepad to start a rough map.
“First decision point,” Ethan echoed.
They checked their spacing, then turned left together and moved into the side passage.
