Chapter 71: Puzzles II

  Alex’s footsteps echoed around him with a whisper of rubber soles over stone, he walked into a wide circular chamber lit in shifting gradients of color; red, blue, green, and white. The hues bled across the smooth marble floor like oil over water, flowing in slow, steady waves that mirrored a deep ocean. It gave off vibe that he didn’t like the feel of.

  He stepped in cautiously. Obby made a low, thoughtful hum.

  At the center of the room stood a broad dais surrounded by four tall statues each carved in the likeness of an elemental figure. A flame-haired woman cloaked in ash. A water serpent coiled in an elegant spiral. A stoic, faceless earthen knight, and lastly, a tall sylph of wind whose body dissolved into swirling script. They rotated in a slow, mechanical orbit around the dais like planets circling a dying sun.

  Beneath them was a jigsaw of jagged glyphwork, each part of it glowing with chaotic bursts of elemental light. The glyphs twitched, flickered, and fought with one another with strands of fire lashing out at water runes, earth glyphs cracking under air’s slicing trails. The whole thing looked like a magical migraine trapped in motion.

  In the back of the chamber, a heavy stone bridge hung above a yawning chasm, half-lowered with its remaining side held aloft by chains of crackling arcane light.

  Alex exhaled, rubbing his temple. “Alright. What fresh hell is this?”

  He quickly located the Glyph-port in front of the dais and connected to it.

  Obby buzzed. “ Elemental glyph matrix. It’s an equilibrium lock. The bridge won’t drop until you stabilize the structure. Right now, each element is clashing, trying to dominate the core. ”

  “Why do the elements even care? Can’t they just get along like normal volatile world-forging forces?”

  “Nope. They’re dramatic. A bunch of babies really. ”

  He stepped forward, circling the dais. Each statue was made of the element it represented, but also bore open spots near their base. Shallow indentations etched with broken glyph traces. The kind designed for someone to fill in.

  “Looks like it’s expecting me to patch or rewrite the elemental glyphs?” he said, crouching by the fire statue.

  “Yes, but be careful. If you emphasize one element over the others— ”

  There was a pulse and the floor glyphs surged, a sudden gout of fire hissing up from the central dais, narrowly missing Alex’s right shoulder and forcing him to jump away.

  “— that happens, ” Obby finished.

  “Cool, cool. We’ve got flamethrower traps now.”

  He took a breath and extended his fingers toward the first statue, fire. Already, the broken glyphs called to him, the pattern half-formed in his mind: Destruction, passion, unbound growth, these were the aspects of fire. He didn’t know if it was because fire was his originally attuned element or not, but it was familiar. He could fix it. He could strengthen it.

  But the moment he added even a partial glyph, the matrix at the center of dais flashed and the wind-statue’s body shivered violently, the air around it becoming razor-sharp. Alex backed off, grimacing.

  “Of course. One goes up, the others go down.”

  “You’ll need to balance them, each element affects the others. This is about harmony, not power. ”

  Alex circled again, mentally marking out the sequences. He began adjusting them carefully: fire’s glyph for “rage” replaced with “resolve.” Water’s glyph for “consumption” overwritten with “flow.” Earth’s “dominance” trimmed into “foundation.” Then, Air’s “freedom” focused into “motion.”

  Each change rippled through the floor matrix. The central chaos began to slow down, glitching less violently. But it wasn’t stable.

  A faint click echoed from above. He glanced up just in time to see the ceiling begin to lower like he was in a god damn Indian Jones movie.

  “Oh come on!”

  “I forgot to mention, ” Obby said. “ Stability has a timer. The ceiling is collapsing in five minutes unless you balance it. ”

  “You forgot to mention?”

  “I was reading the fine print. You don’t usually care for the details. ”

  He snarled and ran back to the statues with a newfound sense of urgency. In his rush, mistakes followed.

  His first attempt caused an over correction. The Earth statue locked into place, glowing far too brightly. The platform bucked as jagged stone spikes shot out of the floor, forcing him to dive to the side in order to avoid being impaled through his sternum.

  His second attempt dulled the glyphs too much, getting no reaction.

  Third attempt?

  He tried syncing opposite pairs, Fire with Water, Earth with Air, creating glyph links across their shared foundations. That helped, the elemental matrix slowing to a steady pulse, becoming less erratic.

  Above, the ceiling crept closer. Dust rained down, encouraging him to work faster.

  It still wasn’t enough, it wasn’t balanced. He looked over the statues, at a loss for what to do. He couldn’t mess with his glyphs without ruining the precarious stability he had made so far.

  What’s the trick here? He thought. What do the Sigil-binders want to teach? Their whole order was about evolving [Glyphcraft] to distill the intent behind the skill. Translating the language of The System through glyphs.

  Then he understood. It was intent.

  He rushed to the center of the dais, carefully avoiding elemental bursts along the way. Then he dropped to his knees and carved a central glyph into the dais itself. “Balance.” A pillar of the Sigil-Binder philosophy.

  The floor reacted. A single line of glowing runes pulsed outward from the center, touching each statue and the room went still. There was no elemental backlash, no wild surges, just… silence.

  Then the bridge groaned, its chains cracking apart like glass. The far end slammed down into the ledge with a satisfying thoom!

  Alex laid back onto the stone floor with a wide smile.

  “Congratulations, you didn’t die by ceiling this time. ”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Progress,” Alex muttered. “Inches at a time.”

  “That’s what she said!”

  He rolled his eyes and pulled himself to his feet, stumbling toward the bridge and the now newly opened doorway at the end of it. He looked back at the statues one last time.

  They stood still now, their elemental glyphs softly glowing, balanced, not dominated. Each one contributing just enough to keep the others in check.

  Fire could burn, but water could calm. Earth could anchor, but air could move. Together, not one of them ruled. Together, they became the platform on which the next step forward could be taken.

  Rolling out his shoulder, and crossed the newly lowered bridge.

  ***

  The chamber was octagonal and wide, its black-marble floor arranged into a tiled grid etched with glowing lines of faint gold. Each square was five feet wide, forming a ten-by-ten matrix. At the far end, like a sentinel paused mid-task, a metal construct loomed. It was vaguely humanoid, broad-shouldered, and smooth-limbed like a knight sculpted from alloyed stone. Its head was featureless save for a single vertical slit glowing with an icy violet core.

  The ceiling was a vaulted dome, and inset into its every facet were crystalline traps. Needles launchers, elemental orbs, exploding spheres, and more, all humming with stored aether, and all waiting to be released. Alex immediately located and activated the glyph-port and let Obby poke around.

  “What do you think?” He whispered.

  “Sigil-Binder Control Grid. This room was used for training high-rank glyph-programmers before The System locked down the deeper [Glyphcraft] and other skills into tiers, layers. This one’s been modernized… looks like partial System integration. ”

  At the edge of the walkway was a raised platform, and he could see another panel on it. He approached it confidently and looked over the controls.

  A panel of polished obsidian jutted from the ground like a touchscreen slab. When he placed his palm on it, golden command-glyphs lit up across its surface hovering in the air, some familiar, most alien. The glyphs were layered and complicated, and it took a moment for him to decipher meaning from each of them.

  :: [INSTRUCT]:: [SEQUENCE]:: [ROTATE(±Θ)]:: [STRIDE(n)]:: [IF_TILE( ? ){RETURN} ELSE{CONTINUE}]:: [GRASP]:: [RELEASE]:: [AETHER_ACTUATE]:: [QUEUE_LIMIT: 20] ::

  Alex whistled under his breath. “Okay. This is code.”

  “Very old code, ” Obby said.

  He stared, absorbing the syntax with growing awe. “This… this is an instruction stack. It’s even using logical branches.”

  His fingers danced over the glyphs. Even as the characters shimmered, they resisted his full comprehension, like trying to read JavaScript in Cyrillic. But some patterns were clear to him.

  “Looks like I’m programming the construct to cross the grid without hitting the wrong tiles.”

  “More than that. See those? ” Obby highlighted areas on the walls in his vision. Various holes and slits dotted the stonework at the four corners of the room, pylons glowing a faint red. “ Each incorrect tile will trigger directed attacks targeted at you , not the golem. The control glyphs are keyed to your aether signature. ”

  Alex swallowed. “So, wrong commands equal me getting zapped.”

  “Correct. ”

  “What happens if I fail in a puzzle room? What if I just walk out of here instead?”

  “You get an F. ”

  “Very helpful.”

  “Honestly, nothing. You don’t get dungeon points, and don’t get whatever lesson the room was designed to teach. I’d say you don’t want to give up those dungeon points though. As you are attempting this thing solo, you are rolling in the points with that modifier. ”

  He thought a moment about his options. Were the risks worth it if these puzzle rooms weren’t mandatory? What did he gain with a few extra points?

  “If you want to know what they’re worth,” Obby began, once again seeming to read his thoughts with his permission, “ A dungeon store will commonly have enchanted items, spell tomes or even martial style manuals. They also typically have basic Vital Essence Fragments of each elemental attunement. Those typically cost about a thousand points.”

  “ Seriously?” He perked up at this revelation. He was earning an essence fragment per puzzle room at those prices. If he could get one for each of his friends, he could basically help them leap-frog their own cultivation. A fragment attuned to their specific element would be worth way more to them than any fragment would be to Alex. That knowledge basically made the decision for him.

  “Let’s do this thing then.”

  The construct stood motionless at the far end of the tiled room, waiting. At the opposite edge of the grid sat a glowing crystal cube on a pedestal. At the left-hand edge was a glyph-inscribed plate embedded in the floor. So the goal was simple. Go pickup the target and deliver it to a drop zone.

  Alex cracked his knuckles. “Alright. Time to code.”

  He quickly wrote the commands. It was a short string of code for him to test, his tech knowledge from back on earth helped guide him through familiar logic wrapped in a foreign tongue:

  INSTRUCT:

  ::STRIDE(2), ROTATE(+90), STRIDE(1), GRASP, ROTATE(-90), STRIDE(3), RELEASE, AETHER_ACTUATE

  The glyphs glowed and flattened into the pedestal, then the construct moved. One step. Two. It rotated cleanly, joints ticking like a weighted metronome. It stepped onto the third tile and the floor flashed red.

  A shrill tone screamed, a notification chiming in his vision.

  Alex barely dove aside as a dart of crackling blue lightning lanced from the ceiling and seared the stone where he'd been standing. The heat slammed into his back like an oven door swinging open next to him.

  The golem froze.

  Obby whistled. “ Incorrect tile alignment. This grid must have conditionals. ”

  Alex cursed. “Right. No raw step commands. I need to check tile conditions first.”

  He cleared the stack and started again.

  INSTRUCT:

  ::IF_TILE(SAFE){STRIDE(1)} ELSE {RETURN}, IF_TILE(SAFE){STRIDE(1), REPEAT, ROTATE(+90), STRIDE(1), GRASP, ROTATE(-90), STRIDE(3), RELEASE, AETHER_ACTUATE

  The construct moved again. The tiles lit one by one, first yellow, then green. Everything was looking promising as it reached the crystal, grasping it in it’s metallic hands, turned and advanced.

  Then tile eight pulsed red .

  Alex spun, hurling himself behind the pedestal. A dozen small darts fired from a hidden wall panel, clattering against stone where he’d just been. One of the darts grazed his thigh, searing pain cut through his flesh.

  “Goddammit! That one used conditional checking and still failed.”

  “Probably need a pause between rotations. Maybe aether latency on the golem limb sync. ”

  He stared at the code again, sweat now clinging to his brow. “This isn’t taking a pet robot for its morning walk, this is threading a minefield with bad scouting intel.”

  The next sequence was longer. He added WAIT(t) commands between rotations. Used a STACK_PUSH function to cache directions. Built in a fail-check that looped the golem back one tile if it detected glyph-interference.

  This time, the construct moved perfectly .

  It stepped. Paused. Turned. Picked up the crystal with its hands, turned again. It walked carefully, each tile lighting emerald as it passed. Then… dropped the crystal.

  The receiving glyph pulsed white.

  He finally exhaled. “Holy hell. That was harder than half the fire-fights I’ve been in.”

  “You did better than most students did in ten tries, ” Obby said approvingly. “ You really CAN think in logical structures. Your world’s technology prepped you for this. ”

  “Yeah, well, Earth’s computers didn’t shoot darts at my face.”

  The construct powered down again, standing tall, arms by its sides. It was a tool now idle, waiting for the next mind to awaken its purpose. He glanced around the room, looking and failing to find a new doorway. It looked like it was the end of the road for this side of the floor.

  “Guess we head back up then,” He shrugged and headed toward the way he had come. Alex looked back at the room once before the door closed behind him.

  Glyphs, logic, layers of ancient code preserved through millennia by Sigil-Binders and The System alike. He was beginning to realize something. This dungeon wasn’t just testing his skills. It was teaching him how to build something.

  He just wasn’t quite sure what yet.