The underground maintenance tunnel appeared newer than the rotting old surface docks. All doors were locked, so when the tunnel turned a sharp right the expanded party had no choice but to follow.

  “Chamber widens ahead,” Mikail said, putting his Scout senses to good use.

  Sure enough, the chamber opened into a round arena of sorts. There was no telling what use it had served in the Old Docks. Light streamed from broken windows far above.

  “Think we’re in a sinkhole,” Zilara said. “Built this pit around it, then built a warehouse fa?ade up there. Save money on excavating the basement, for sure.”

  “Stay alert,” Jelena warned.

  The sinkhole had collapsed the ground floor of an ancient warden’s office at some point when the docks were still ocean-facing. The new basement was adapted into the layout of the building. A set of pegs along the far wall that could have been a vestigial remnant of a stairwell.

  “Whole floor is covered in pressure plates,” Zilara said. “We could tip-toe around them, but…”

  There were doors on the ‘ground’ floor above, with no way to get to them. Otherwise the chamber was a dead end. Either they turned around and left the dungeon, or they tripped whatever ambush was so carefully devised for this room.

  “No choice. Do we know what we’re up against here?” Jelena asked.

  Calaf shook his head. “It’s never come up.”

  “There’s a divot in the center of the floor. Bet something's going to pop out of it,” Zilara said.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be,” Jelena said. “Calaf, dear, press a plate.”

  Pressure plates were handily outlined with Calaf’s Thief’s Lockpick-infused perceptive abilities. Calaf pressed one down with his heavy boot. A dozen simultaneous clunking sounds echoed in the chamber as every pressure plate dropped at once. The central divot did indeed open, and out of it…

  A towering automation filled the chamber, rising clear to the termite-riven ceiling. Buzzsaws popped out of its chassis at multiple elevations. A sea of spikes deployed at its base, preventing them from cutting the totem down like a piece of Deepwood lumber. Not that they’d have time to do so with an array of dozens of flamer units circling the chassis both clockwise and anticlockwise.

  Slender bursts of flame set the ground floor ablaze. Meanwhile, a stairwell emerged from a divot on the far wall.

  “We’re in a wooden building,” Calaf said. “It’s going to burn it all down.”

  “It’s probably enchanted,” Jelena said. “Just look for an opening. Whole dungeon’s built with a series of big encounters like this. It wants us to stick to some script and notice some pattern.”

  Right. This was all an elaborate play by which Scout-type classes could earn the right to rank up. It was designed to be beaten by an at-level team with great rapport. Here they had a party and a half. That was more than enough.

  Still, the dungeon seemed rather dangerous for a simple test of skill.

  The group moved clockwise around the totem, as that’s the direction the flame belchers were tracking. Riordan sent out a smoke bomb.

  “Don’t think that’s going to work,” Mikail said.

  The flames yet pursued them.

  Jelena pushed Zilara to the stairs, the one place these ground-based flamers lacked the range to scald. She motioned to the rest of the group, and they all ran up the stairscase.

  “Okay. Zil. Fist full of lightning!” Jelena said as they ran.

  Zilara cast her lightning spell. Electricity arced along the totem, and along the floor below. But the mechanical beast was not stunned like the mobile variants.

  “It’s because it’s grounded,” Mikail said. “Rooted in place.”

  They hadn’t even made it to the first proper floor before the totem swiveled to track them. Buzzsaws slid down divots in the chassis. They stopped at-level with the party’s necklines, tracking them around the semicircular stairs with some sensor, and jutted forward. Calaf parried a set of three away with his shield, while Yonah took a minor nick from a saw at the front of the pack.

  ”Exhilarating!” Riordan proclaimed. “Every Scout has to survive this gauntlet? That’s so…”

  The totem swiveled about, its ‘face’ tracking them. Then, twin doors popped out of the chassis as six mechanical stalks and a proboscis emerged.

  Mikail jammed some Scout ability to heighten dodging and decrease detection. Riordan opened his Menu to do the same… only to find himself hoisted into the air on those slender metal feelers. He was dragged into the metal chassis, and poked by the proboscis as the doors slammed shut with a sick gushing noise.

  Blood flowed through the totem within clear, minuscule tubing. The totem swiveled faster, still, with additional flame units and buzzsaws emerging.

  A fleet of vertically-aligned buzzsaws started at the base of the stares and swiftly ascended. Just then, the party reached the top of the stairs… with no apparent access.

  “Where do we go?” Jelena asked.

  There was a conspicuous keyhole in the wall.

  “It – it’s the key from the riverbed chest,” Yonah said, still looking back and expecting Riordan to be there.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “The river was flooded!” Calaf said.

  They were at a dead end – saws coming up the stairs and utterly exposed to the flamers and grabbers of the central totem. This wasn’t a test of a Scout’s skillset; more an endurance gauntlet to check one’s defensive stats.

  “Not for us it wasn’t,” said Mikail. He summoned forth an overlarge key from his Inventory and selected [Use].

  The key took, and a smaller new flight of stairs appeared. An entire new floor made of wooden floorboards and ready-made supports assembled itself ahead. The remaining party rushed to relative safety with Calaf

  This new ‘ground floor’ consisted of a series of walkways. It didn’t cover the entire level as there were plenty of holes in the floor. No further stairs appeared, and the top of the totem was still two stories above them.

  “Gah,” Mikail said, biting his tongue. “Riordan had the other item.”

  No further word had been heard from Riordan since disappearing into the totem. The prognosis was not good.

  A series of flame belchers on long stalks chased the group around the walkways. Though they could be chopped off at the slender wire, there was always another to take its place.

  “What does it look like?” Enkidu asked.

  “The item? Big puzzle block,” Mikail responded, still running from a buzzsaw.

  “Stay alive for… twenty. No, thirty seconds.”

  The ‘coffin’ section of the central chassis followed them up the totem via some unknown mechanism. Enkidu stood conspicuously close to the center until the automaton noticed him. The armored coffin opened… and Enkidu leapt in prematurely.

  The totem swiveled, on the lookout for additional prey.

  “We’re rapidly dwindling in numbers!” Mikail said. “Yonah, to me. I’m going to use an Escape Rope. Better to live and have an opportunity to restart than…”

  “Give him a moment!” Jelena said.

  The twin doors shuddered before bursting open unprompted. Enkidu appeared, simultaneously holding a gore blob while grappling with multiple mechanical arms.

  “Take it,” he yelled, then chucked the gore-blob to Jelena. No sooner did this key item clear the totem than did the doors slam shut once more.

  Their intrepid relic thief caught the object. She dodged three buzzsaws and a flamer to run this blood-covered puzzle box to Mikail.

  The Vanguard solved the issue of fishing this Item out of the gore pile remnants of Riordan’s corpse by throwing it all into his Inventory. He nimbly dodged a set of vertical saws and kept a keen eye peeled for the next divot.

  “Vanguard guy. Over there.” Zilara pointed.

  Another set of indents in the wall indicated their path upward. An indent in the wall contained a small divot, like a keyhole custom-built for a strange jewel.

  It was good that Mikail’s team collected all these items for us, Calaf thought. Theoretically, you could scale the walls without the keys that open the next floor. But doing so under literal fire was nobody’s idea of a good time.

  The automated totem initiated some defensive maneuvers. Flamers lit up the area ahead of Mikail. Yonah’s robe caught alight at the hem and she wheeled back.

  “Cast your burn healing spell,” Mikail pleaded.

  Too late! Yonah backpedaled into a pit. Mikail tried reaching for her but could not afford to stop his beeline for the far wall. Down she fell, back into the basement.

  The Interface-compatible wall socket awaited. Mikail pulled his Menu out early and placed the puzzle box in the socket.

  A loud splashing sound rose over the din of battle.

  “Guys? The basement is flooding.” Zilara was looking into one of the pits. “Fast, too.”

  “It wants me to solve some weird ball puzzle!” Mikail said.

  “Better hurry up then!” Jelena said. “Zilara, go help him out.”

  Calaf stood on the walkway leading toward this puzzle interface. He blocked and parried all manner of blades and flame belchers. They seemed designed to home in on this position growing more numerous by the second.

  With a hefty clang from within the interior wall, the stairs began to assemble themselves. They needed no signal to retreat up each step as soon as they manifested.

  The totem’s HP was decreasing ever-so-slowly. It dropped fifty points in the time it took them to climb to the next floor.

  “What’s hurting it?” Calaf wondered aloud.

  He realized even as he said it that it was due to Enkidu, still stabbing it from the inside. No further blood-based buff was applied to the totem.

  They were rapidly running out of room. Wide glass windows let in the late afternoon sun while significantly increasing the humidity. This was, finally, on the ‘ground floor’ of the building. While there was a second floor consisting of more walkways over elevated rooms, the way forward was locked and the totem’s ‘head’ was now leering at them at eye level.

  The head of the towering, rooted automaton was curved into a bronze dire-bull’s face and horns. The mouth was open, while steam from an interior furnace vented through the dire-beast’s nose and ears.

  Calaf ran forward and tanked the jet of flame that burst from the totem’s mouth. Flame reduction on the kite shield turned a deadly blow into something more survivable. Zilara aimed a heal or two his way to keep the one viable tank operating.

  Water lapped at the stairwell. It was filling up faster, now. What would it do when it reached the ground floor? Surely the entire customs house was not watertight. If it was, they’d rapidly run out of floor space to walk and air to breathe.

  A great clanking sound from within the totem coincided with a dozen HP shaved off its Menu designation. The dire-bull head went lopsided, then fell clear off with a weld-shatter screech.

  It was Enkidu, run through with a dozen blood-sucking proboscises but with no time to bleed.

  Interior wiring revealed a network of tubes and containers that made the head-mounted interior furnace and flame-belcher. It was all tied around a whirring gear-core.

  “The weak point is here,” Enkidu declared.

  Stab and jab though Enkidu did, the tight nest of gears remained intact. Too dense to penetrate. HP dropped from the automaton at a steady but glacial pace. Water levels continued to rise. Even Enkidu, he who dismembered a demon bare-handed, would not be able to damage it before they were underwater.

  “Plunging attack,” Zilara said.

  “You’re sure that will kill it?” Jelena asked.

  The holy child nodded. “I’m reading the metadata. It’s the expected method of clearing this.”

  Jelena turned to Calaf. “Over the top, honey. I’ll give you a boost.”

  Mikail started scaling the stubs and rubble along the walls when he heard Zilara’s analysis. The less-dexterous Calaf had to make do with a ledge just a bit higher than his arm span could reasonably reach. Jelena helped him up.

  Onward, Calaf climbed. The totem had no defenses up here. Neither were there any traps. The threat instead came from the precarious walkways. Calaf’s boots barely fit on the catwalk, which groaned under his weight. This would be an easy victory lap for a Scout, but madness for a Paladin.

  Regardless, Calaf trudged onward. Mikhail reached the drop-off point – a dead drop at the center of the room, over the totem, and plunged. His knives struck the core, exposing a central ‘brain’ of gears and pincushion circuits within. A second strike from above would be required.

  “Water’s up to our boots,” Jelena announced.

  With its weak point exposed, the totem pulled out new implements. Sparking prods popped out of divots just below where the bull’s head used to be.

  “It’s going to shock the water!” Calaf said, still rushing as swiftly as he could along the narrow catwalks.

  Jelena tossed Zilara up to the high catwalks, then jumped up on a now-floating box. It would provide some protection, but likely not enough. Enkidu, still grappling with the machine’s internal security deep in the chassis, reached up and grabbed the live wires himself. It bought crucial time, at the expense of having all those sparks flowing through him instead.

  If they didn’t have a second-party member ready to dive, this encounter would be perilous, indeed.

  Calaf jumped. He angled his spear downward. His kite shield was also out, to deflect any last-minute blows.

  Gravity and plunging attacks were not, strictly speaking, covered by the Menu. Gravity did compound formulas for various damage calculations. Some Battlemage would know the exact damage bonus. Regardless, Calaf’s heavy redstone spear-tip plunged into the now-exposed gearwork of the turret totem. A full two-thirds of the contraption’s HP disintegrated in an instant. Heavy armor and a particularly powerful weapon did more damage than Mikail’s entire sortie.

  Unlike a living organism, the creature shut down the moment its HP reached zero. There was no negative value, representing decay. Maybe if they rusted for years the health bar could eventually dip to -1, but there were no old husks left about the docks to test that out. Wherever did they go?

  A thermal vent deep within the totem died down. The internal engine died. The totem began to sink into the waters.

  Before Calaf could jump off, something grabbed him. He looked down in time to see Enkidu clambering out of the rapidly-flooding chassis.

  The pair fell into waist-deep water. They stopped moving – there was no way to determine where the holes in the floor would send them plunging into a basement full of water.

  No sooner did the bare ‘face’ of the totem disappear into the water than did a dull thunk sound from deep in the basement. The water began to sink back from whence it came.

  “Doors are unlocking up here,” Zilara said.

  Jelena pushed her box to the nearest ledge as soon as the receding water levels allowed. Mikail was over in a corner, trying to find high ground to avoid the electric shock that never came.

  “That seems a bit too intense for a church-sanctioned class-based final exam." Acoustics caused the holy child’s voice to reverberate throughout the chamber.

  “Maybe it detected there were more of us than typical for a standard party and it entered some kind of enhanced mode?” Calaf suggested.

  The question hung in the air. The totem sunk back through the divot in the floor, and the water flowed with it.

  Once the water sunk into the divots on the basement floor, a familiar voice rose over the vestigial din of machinery.

  “Everyone. Did we win?”

  Down in the basement, Yonah still lived! She waited there, water-logged robes weighing her down.

  Before she could return the ground floor, the stairs retreated into their divots in the wall. The area was resetting itself.

  “We’ll have Enkidu come and rescue you,” Jelena suggested, much to Enkidu’s chagrin.

  Just as the path into the basement removed itself, the paths and doors to the second floor opened.

  Mikail wasted no time in heading up. This would be the reward room, no doubt.

  “C’mon.” Jelena offered Calaf her hand. “We still need to find this hidden stash Gustavo’s laid out. Job’s only just begun.”