Today's Earth date: January 13, 1992

It turns out the fights in the pits are to the death. Horcus said he thought that was obvious, but myself, Rathain, and Wilmond expected it to be exhibition matches. I don't want to kill anyone. Ever.

The promoter was on to us being overpowered from the start, which was lucky in the end. Instead of fighting a bunch of matches in disguise, Horcus is doing one battle against ten people who were arrested for murder. A bunch of former mercenaries, apparently.

Horcus says we don't have to watch if we don't want to.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

***

Hearing Sammy and Vanilli talk about the view from the top of the Lighthouse confirmed for Wayne that waiting to explore the basement levels was the right call. Neither of them could believe the world could be so big. Their pure appreciation for the moment seemed to help the older, more world-weary Zeroes see the full beauty of the experience as well.

After two nights and one full day of rest, the Zeroes packed for an extended journey and returned to the Lighthouse before the sun rose. The guard on duty looked the other way, courtesy of Fergus' foresight. The scholar used his great deal of downtime on the tour to get to know the guides. By the end of the trip, they were more than happy to help the party make arrangements for a private tour.

In short, for a single gold piece the guard acted like he didn't see five adventurers carrying heavy packs walk by his post.

"I see what you meant by feeling disoriented," Fergus said, looking around the upside down room.

Armond, meanwhile, looked at the hole down to the second basement floor, or B2 for short. "I don't enjoy what Rise does to my stomach, but climbing up fifty floors like this would be agony."

"That's a lot of rope to manage also," Margo added.

The cleric whistled. "Yeah, it definitely would be. I'd already be complaining about my knees if we didn't have the system. Dropping down should be easy enough with it."

Once the party left the stairs of the second floor behind, the mind-warping effect of being in an upside-down room was far less powerful. Walking on the ceiling wasn't all that different from walking on the floor. The hallways ended with the top of a door, forcing the party to step over, but otherwise, the disorientation didn't truly return unless they were in one of the few rooms or hallways with vaulted ceilings.

Walking down a vaulted hallway felt like walking along the bottom of a ditch, the sides too pitched for anything but a single-file formation to be convenient. Vaulted ceilings were like small, rolling hills in most cases. At their worst, they were like deep pits, forcing the party to throw a hook up over a doorframe to reach an exit attached to the ceiling.

Unlike the upper floors, the basement levels were decorated. The party didn't find any furniture, but they did find statues of sea life–from octopi to mermaids–mounted throughout the second floor. The design seemed intended to give the statues the appearance of "floating" in the room as though it were full of water.

That meant statues were mounted on every surface and from a variety of angles. For example, the mermaid statues at major junctions had their tails connected to the ceiling, and they bent backward to put their eyes on the same plane as the party's. Elsewhere, starfish ran down a wall or a shark "swam" overhead.

Coral formations, like those in the Cuts, wove throughout the floors like vines reclaiming one of the wagons in Mudsville. This coral, however, was dead. Instead of vibrant reds and yellows and blues, all of the coral in the basement levels was a pale gray. Its presence impacted navigation significantly. Passages that were open in the version above the surface were blocked with thick growths in the basement levels, making a whole new labyrinth out of the same layout.

Fergus took charge of adding the coral to their inverted map. As far as they were aware, these floors were an entirely new discovery. Detailed maps would be valuable for Blackwell's excavation team or for whomever secured the rights to the land beneath the Lighthouse. Fergus believed Iomallach would attempt to claim ownership since they were the stewards of the Lighthouse above, but no matter whose hands the maps ended up in, they would pay extra for this level of detail.

Other than coral and statues, the party didn't find anything of interest on the second floor.

But Wayne did find a potential use for his Let's Draw skill. He sketched a set of stairs, which Hector guessed easily. The plaster stairs that printed were the same dimension as the screen over Wayne's head, making the entire print about twelve inches tall. Wayne sketched the stairs again and added a person for scale this time.

He told the system where to place the stairs, and a wonky but usable set of plaster stairs formed in the room. Instead of having to scale a wall to get to the next doorway, the party could walk up makeshift stairs instead.

That routine lasted for three rooms. The process was slower than just using a rope, and they learned from the penis print in the Blackwell yard that anything produced by Let's Draw was temporary. By the time the celebration of Wayne's win concluded late that night, most of the print had dissolved, so any stairs they printed in the Lighthouse basement were essentially single-use structures.

So the hiking and climbing continued until they found the stairs down to the next level.

That was where the fighting began.

As soon as Wayne landed on B3, Probe lit up his HUD with red dots. None of the enemies were immediate threats, but they were just on the other side of the wall. Wayne let his party know via Voice to maintain any stealth advantage they might have, and began leading them to the first encounter.

"Stop!" Margo shouted via Voice. She pointed at the ceiling over the next doorway. It was an iron grate with several sizable circular holes. "Prism has it highlighted. Could be a trap."

Linebacker.

Wayne sent the football robot toward the door, taking the same path the party would when they crossed the room themselves. Right beneath the grate, one of the bricks under Linebacker bot's rolling treads sank and clicked. An excessive number of spears, as if someone spilled a box of toothpicks, rained down on Linebacker bot, destroying him instantly.

The spear trap didn't seem to automatically reset, making it harmless once it was tripped, but the party didn't take any chances. Armond stood by ready to use Deban to save a party member if more spears rained from the ceiling. None did, but no one was willing to assume every trap they encountered moving forward had only one charge.

Slowing their progress even more.

Then they encountered the toad people.

It was the first sizable chamber on the third floor. The way forward was on the opposite wall, and a large column of coral filled the center of the room, running from floor to ceiling. Having heard the party set off traps, the enemy was ready when the Zeroes entered.

The monsters looked like muscular toad humanoids. Their heads had the flat noses and big bulbous eyes of a toad, sized up to human proportions. Their hands had long fingers and their feet were wide and webbed. Their skin was rough and bumpy instead of smooth like a frog, and they were yellow, each wielding a trident.

When Wayne saw that their armor was fairly sophisticated–scale mail forged from opulent, shimmering green-blue scales with coral-pointed pauldrons in lieu of decorative spikes, he raised his hands to show he wasn't a threat.

"We don't want to fight. We were–"

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

A trident bounced off of a Deban air barrier that formed directly in front of Wayne. The toads' dots stayed red, and Emverdoo populated Wayne's HUD with their health bars. It said that these were "proelium bufos."

All signs pointed to the bufos being enemies. If they were sealed in here as it appeared they were, they were leftovers from another scrapped dwarven dungeon project.

The bufo who threw the trident sprayed bubbles, casting the shower over the whole of the party.

Wayne cast Defense on the Zeroes, but Armond wasn't fast enough with his next cast of Deban.

The bubbles coated Wayne.

He couldn't move.

Blitz and Easy Out wouldn't work either.

The same bufo launched himself forward with his thick frog thighs and punched Wayne in the ribs with four swift alternating blows.

-20 hit points.

-20 hit points.

-20 hit points.

-20 hit points.

The attack destroyed enough bubbles that Wayne could wrench himself free, but the bufo was already out of range. Wayne hadn't seen the monster move, but it stuck to the wall and filled its ballooning throat with more bubbles.

Running Back.

Blitz-Blitz.

A trident pierced Running Back bot from above seconds later, but Wayne was grateful the trident wasn't aimed at him.

Before Wayne could launch his counter attack, Fergus used Twine Time to entangle the bufo stuck to the wall, locking its mouth shut with vines. At the same time, Armond buffed Hector with a speed boost from Ner.

"Up!" Hector called.

The barbarian jumped and Wayne hit him with Upsidaisy. Hector smashed into the bufo on the ceiling with his sword and used Breaker Breaker to completely shatter its armor. When his sword bit into the monster's chest a moment later, a mist squirted out from unseen pores all over the bufo's body.

Hector yelled and started trying to wipe it off.

The spray was acid.

"Stick to ranged attacks if you can!" Wayne said to the party.

Right then, Margo activated Arrow Arrow to double her attack speed and shot six laser arrows up at the bufo like they were burst-fired from a machine gun. Two connected, but the bufo jumped clear so swiftly that the next four missed.

Between Hector's sword and Margo's arrows, the bufo had lost only one third of its hitpoints.

As the bufo on the wall broke free of its bindings, Fergus cast Rot. A necrotic black sore appeared on its head and spread rapidly. Next, Fergus froze the bufo in place with Freeze Please, but the ice barely delayed it. The toad shrugged off the spell and was back to full mobility in less than a second.

Wayne focused on the same bufo and activated Chicken from It Came from the Desert.

From experimenting on goblins, he knew what came next. A translucent tunnel of white light appeared between Wayne and the bufo, visible only to him and his mark.

While Wayne was in the tunnel, his strength and agility were increased by fifty percent of their base values, but that only applied to a hit against the opponent at the other end. He couldn't activate Chicken and use that bonus to attack something else right next to him. Doing so would forfeit the game.

He believed the same buff and rules were also applied to his target, but that was more difficult to confirm.

The losing party was the one who moved backward or left the tunnel first. Wayne didn't need to charge headlong into his foe in one reckless sprint, though. He could move forward and stop as many times as he wanted without losing the game. A single step back or outside the light to the left or right? He lost.

Losing the game meant a fifty percent reduction in the loser's base value strength and agility. That was the penalty Wayne incurred in his testing, so he assumed the penalty was the same for his target. From watching a monster's movement after losing Chicken, he was pretty confident he was correct.

Though he hadn't yet nailed down all the specifics, he found that activating Chicken from farther away increased the total of his buff. Since leaving the tunnel for any reason meant losing the game, the risk of failure increased substantially with distance. Trip and fall? You lose. Dodge the axe swinging at your stomach by shifting left? You lose. An obstacle appears between you and the enemy that you can't go around? You lose.

As for what happened if neither party in the game of Chicken flinched, Wayne didn't know. He had yet to encounter an enemy that held its ground. Most of the overworld fodder was quick to flee.

And so was the bufo. It jumped from the wall to the ceiling, its round eyes stretching wide in astonishment as it felt its stats drop. Instead of smoothly perching, it bungled the landing and flopped to the floor. Wayne applied Super to Missile and pelted the monster with a hose of projectile spells. He ran forward under that cover and activated Blitz and Two by Four in rapid succession.

He cleaved a piece of the toad's head off as he flew by. His intention was to avoid acid spray, but it looked like a killing blow didn't trigger the ability. The bufo simply slumped to the floor.

Fergus timed a fireball with Margo firing an arrow at the remaining bufo. When it dodged the arrow, it moved into the path of the fireball. The direct hit caught the toad warrior off guard. In the briefest of pauses, several more arrows and fireballs struck. The bufo fell and didn't get up.

"Oh nice," Hector said. "Did everyone else just level up?"

The other Zeroes checked their Diaries. They had indeed.

Hector picked up one of the bufo tridents. "I'm going to give this a try. Being that close to the acid sucked."

"Four of those would be a problem," Armond said. "The way they can stick to walls will make it tough to outmaneuver them. Even getting them bunched up for easier targeting will be a challenge."

Wayne looked around the room, replaying the battle in his mind. "If we're spread out too far, our backliners are in danger of tridents. If we're too close, we're all vulnerable to getting bubbled. These angles are a pain in the ass."

Armond thought for a moment. "Okay, so when we enter, I'll call a target. Wayne, you pick a second target, preferably toward the outside. If we're hitting enemy two of four, you going after one of four puts our attacks between you and the two untargeted enemies. The trick will be dropping Running Back to distract the other two without him or you taking crossfire."

"I'm the one moving. It's my job to not enter someone else's line of fire. I can manage."

"If we're lucky, Freeze Please can hit two at once," Fergus added. "Open with that and then follow with Flame?"

"What about Gifoi?" Gifoi was a Phantasy Star II spell that enveloped a target in fire.

"It's weaker."

"But it isn't directional, so it's faster. Getting it occupied buys time for arrows, then go back to Flame."

Fergus nodded.

"Margo, you just heard your job," Armond said. "Hector, you and I are on trident and bubble duty."

"You got it."

The next encounter was another pair of bufo's armed with tridents. With a little more insight into what to expect, the fight went much more smoothly. Fergus caught both in ice and that was pretty much the end of the battle.

Then they fought three and finally a group of four. Hector took a pretty nasty trident injury to his shoulder in the fight against the three, and he and Wayne both took bubbles and tridents in the fight against four.

Hector got the worst of it in that last fight. He ended up in the middle of two acid sprays, and Armond had to activate his Vampire Proxy Pearl to save him. With that item, he essentially gave Hector his own hitpoints, and losing hitpoints always hurt. Armond didn't complain, however.

The party decided to call it there for the day.

While they settled into camp, Wayne pulled up the Tunnels & Trolls unlocks his party received for leveling up a few fights ago.

Fergus learned: Elemental Water – Allows the caster to summon a water elemental to use as a servant for one normal round.

Armond learned: Rock-a-Bye – Puts monsters or foes to sleep for one to six combat rounds.

Hector learned: Wall of Iron – Creates a wall of iron between the caster and their foes for one normal round.

Margo learned: Darkest Hour – Darkens the whole Combat Field for two combat rounds.

Wayne was tempted to switch the party over to Buck Rogers for their next level ups, but the Tunnels & Trolls unlocks had been really good. Fergus was a level ahead of the other Zeroes, leaving him with one more ability to learn from that game while the others all had slots for two.

He decided to see Tunnels & Trolls through to the end. If the sixth unlock was the most powerful, Wayne had high hopes for what his party members would get.

"That was a tougher run than we've had in a while," Margo said, heating up some soup she brought down from the inn. It wouldn't be good for much longer if she didn't eat it now.

"You guys did good, though," Wayne praised.

"It's a solid start," Armond agreed. "Everyone should get their rest. The next floor could be tougher."

"Bring it," Hector said.

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