Stage 6
By the time I stood before the Wellspring portal again, I had been questioning how helpful it really was for people with both of the Sigils to escort people who don’t have them. I had expected to escort, like, enough for us to make a party, but there were nearly 2 dozen people. I mean, come on—if as many as that couldn’t simply totally overwhelm a mere two Elite NPCs of equal level in succession, what chance would any of them have in the later Areas?
This conviction only got stronger once the blackness that closed around me after faded. I found myself in a round room, probably about 20 yards or so from one end to another. All around me were walls of pure white marble—or, something which, through haptic feedback, felt rather like polished marble but was completely pale white—that stretched upward higher than any building I’d ever before seen inside the game or out (not counting the Tower of the Underworld itself, but even so.) until I couldn’t even clearly make out the sky above even craning my head.
The floor below was pure black, except for lines of light from nowhere that danced on its surface making it seem like glass. The room was well lit, but from no apparent light source. This was not unheard of in the Game, but it was much more unusual than buildings that were larger on the inside. The only possible egress was a crack in the white wall directly across from me encompassing a portion the size and shape of a door. As I drew closer, I saw a black square that shone like the floor at about eye level on the shut aperture. As I got closer still, text began to appear on what I decided was a crystal monitor in the same gold script that had greeted me on my death.
This is the Great Maze. Do you want an explanation?
Then a pair of touch-screen buttons appeared, “Yes” and “No.” Of course, I tapped “Yes.” The buttons faded, and more text wrote itself on the monitor:
In order to move higher into the Tower of the Underworld, you must reach the center of the Great Maze. Along the way, you will encounter puzzles, traps, and guardians both lesser and greater that you will need to overcome. For conquering obstacles, you will be awarded Crimson Spheres. To open the Gate of Wisdom to access the center of the Great Maze and take on its final challenge, you must gain a total of 2,500 CS.
Your current location is one of the Great Maze’s rest areas. The circular chambers are guaranteed to be safe to engage rest in. The Maze has countermeasures against any spells or other measures you might use to increase your safety, so any rest outside them is purely at your own risk. When you need to leave the Game, either return to this Rest Area or another that you enable in the course of exploring the Maze.
There are many other aspects to the challenge the Great Maze presents to those who seek True Return. However, you will need to discover the rest on your own.
Then, two last words appeared in much larger text on the monitor: Good Luck. Then the monitor went black and the “door” simply vanished, revealing a corridor with one turn to the left close by, and a single turn to the right further along. I opened my map screen. As I expected, the Great Maze was treated as a Wild area, meaning the map would only fill in places I had already traversed. However, portions of the map that had yet to be filled in would still indicate whether they were PvP enabled. It seemed the vast majority of the maze was not.
I proceeded into the maze. It was slow going, since I kept checking my map to make sure I’d be able to find my way back to the rest area. But no matter which direction I went, I shortly ran into dead ends. It seemed I was trapped in a relatively small section of the maze. But in the last place I possibly could have checked, it was still a dead end—but the far wall had another one of those crystal monitors. And as I got close, it changed from black to an image that looked a lot like the interface that was used in the main Game to play CPU opponents or distant opponents in MS over the internet.
Finally, I took a close look, and saw that the displayed Player 1 was me, Veralix, and Player 2 was listed as “Win This Turn!” both in the same golden cursive script seen on the last crystal monitor.
So, this was one of the puzzles I’d need to solve to advance further into the maze and acquire Crimson Spheres. Even at a glance, I could tell that I had solved much more difficult MS Position puzzles just for fun.
Once I solve it, the monitor glowed red and ten Crimson Spheres shot out of it, automatically adding themselves to my total. Then, just like before, the wall slid up, revealing further passages of the maze.
From there, the maze began to branch out much more. Puzzle monitors began to appear not just on doors leading deeper into the maze, but on treasure chests. These were color coded from red to purple by difficulty, and usually contained Crimson Spheres, but sometimes contained equipment. There didn’t seem to be any restriction on what the puzzles could be, either. There were math puzzles, rebus puzzles, visual puzzles, straight riddles, MS Positions, Triad[1] puzzles—puzzles based on all the major subgames in fact, and one time I even had to turn away from exploring one potential route because I was unable to figure out the solution to a chess puzzle.
Incorrect solutions were also penalized. On my first attempt at opening a Blue chest, I made a mistake in the order of Triad plays I needed to make, and a small bolt of electricity shot from the crystal monitor, sapping roughly 2% of my health. When I opened it on the second try, it contained runic leather armor that would give a major boost to my physical defense.
Occasionally, I would also encounter AI monsters, but they were no more difficult than the normal enemies in the Inferno area. After about 3 hours, I had done quite a bit of exploring, but it seemed like I still had much more to traverse. Every time I got far enough into the maze that portions of what I had already explored already would be off the screen, my map window automatically zoomed out. By now it was zoomed out enough that for it to zoom out again, I would need to explore three times much as what I had already, and the next zoom level I saw had its notch exactly halfway along the zoom bar. But after solving a relatively easy puzzle that was more like a math drill, solving ten progressively more difficult math problems in a certain time limit, I emerged into another round room. This one was much larger than the room I started in. And the moment I entered, a wall slid down behind me, and I saw another, similar one at the other end of the room.
Text appeared on the monitor on the wall that had slid down behind me. This is a Rest Area. You may rest here, but to leave back into the maze, you must win an Arena battle. Arena opponents may be chosen from any currently existing instance of the Great Maze who have also currently reached a new Rest Area. If no match is found in ten minutes, an NPC opponent will be generated. If another player in this instance of the Great Maze reaches this Rest Area, you will automatically be matched against them, or a match will be scheduled automatically for a time that will allow both combatants to fully rest.
Then below that was a button marked “Begin Matchmaking”. I had managed to use hardly any of my Power so far, and for my HP, I still had the 20 Recover scrolls. Even so, I chose to restore the 20% HP I had lost through bad puzzle answers through rest…because this was the first PvP action I’d be seeing in a long time, and I needed to prepare myself mentally. With so little to recover, it would only take about an hour and a half anyway.
Nobody came in that hour and a half, and nearly eight of the ten minutes of matchmaking passed before another player appeared in the arena. They seemed to be a warrior type, wearing heavy metal armor with their own Cloak of the Condemned over it—silly looking, but effective, and a sword with a black hilt that I guessed was a Sword of the Condemned.
We took starting positions, indicated by spotlights of a sort—or rather, sections of the black floor that changed, glowing circles appearing like the floor was a giant crystal monitor. Then both of these circles dispersed in a pair of pulses that reverberated through the floor, and PvP was now enabled.
The opponent advanced on me slowly at first, then faster as my first Bolt[2] spell struck him. I got off another just before he reached me, and judging by his meter, his HP was already down by about 1/4th. His swing was oddly clumsy, and I was able to dodge even though I hadn’t cast Fleetfoot. I did then, and fired a cantrip attack which pinged off his armor.
Now he was the one with his back against the wall, and I had plenty of room to maneuver. How could this be so easy? He used maneuvering skills to try and close on me, but I was easily able to stay out of melee range. He tried a special move to grapple me from a distance and pull me toward him, but his execution was oddly slow and telegraphed, and I avoided it without trying. Using a moment of vulnerability created from one such attempt, I nailed him with another Bolt spell. He kept trying, but his movements were clumsy, seeming mechanical, whenever he tried to take action against me. Was this actually happening?
“Wait, you can’t be serious. You’re using all auto-attacks?” Auto attacking was a feature of the Game that I saw mostly as a holdover from its earliest versions. You could enable auto-attack for different types of attacks, everything from swinging a sword to using a skill to casting a spell, and have your avatar perform actions when you more or less pressed a button instead of making the gesture to begin to perform a technique or cast a spell or what have you yourself.
This mode came with serious drawbacks. First, your actions would be massively telegraphed. Second, skills and especially spells would take significantly longer to perform. Overcoming any opponent more sophisticated than a non-Elite NPC enemy would be virtually hopeless. How long had this person even been playing the Game? In the Society at least, only children still learning the very basics of the Game ever used auto-attack. And until now, I’d assumed this was true for the rest of Humanity. “Are you serious, guy? Who even uses auto-attack for a basic sword attack?”
“Plenty of people,” my opponent shot back as we stared each other down and warily kept our distance from one another constant, “it’s way too much work to disable it, I don’t want to learn how to actually sword fight.”
“For your basic attacks, you don’t need to learn how to actually sword fight. You could be waving that sword around like a feather-duster and it’d still be at least slightly harder for me to avoid than the auto-attack animation. My advice is to at least give it a try on the enemies in Respec and Inferno. Then maybe progress to disabling auto attack just on the abilities you use most frequently.”
“Who talks down to somebody in the middle of a fight?”
“I’m not talking down to you, I’m telling you something really basic. You’ll see results if you try. And anyway, I’ll eat my words and admit that you don’t need to disable auto-attack if you can hit me even once.”
I backed off from him again, casting a series of Impediment[3] spells to try to build up enough distance to cast a certain Circle 5 spell. Eventually, I figured I could risk it. For about 8 seconds, I called the Circles, and ended with the chant, “Quell the cosmic flow!” “Slow!”
If he had been moving clumsily before, now he was downright comical. Just before he reached me, I dashed out of the way of his sword and all the way across the arena again. This time, I cast a much stronger Shockbolt spell, then followed it up with another Bolt. Finally, seeing his armor bar was nearly depleted, I cast Gatling, Armor Breaking then ZOing him just as the Slow effect would have worn off.
As he lay prone on the arena floor, I spoke one more time. “Like I said, basic attacks are no place to use auto-attack. Swing your sword like a monkey brandishing a stick if you have to, just as long as you swing it.” Then, I nailed him with my usual finisher—I formed a cantrip starburst in my right palm, but instead of releasing it, I held it right at his head—and in seconds, his face melted. Crimson Spheres burst forth from the body, about 300 or so which added themselves to my total. His equipment wasn’t retrievable—his Condemned stuff had vanished and the rest had been damaged too much in the fight, but searching him did produce a strange black card, which seemed to have almost as mirrored a surface as the maze floor.
Both exits from the room were now open, and after a quick map check to make sure, I went through, deeper into the maze. This time, I figured I wouldn’t stray too far from my newly liberated Rest Area—I’d used up quite a bit of Power in that duel, and I could use a break anyway.
Not long into the exploration, I found the first purple chest I’d seen. Or at least, that’s what I thought. The small monitor on it didn’t activate as I got close, and as I tried to lean in to see if something was wrong, it immediately opened—and there were teeth in the opening. A Mimic! Shit! Panicking, I finally thought to dislodge it from me with a Circle 1 Push spell. I fired cantrip after cantrip, not daring to try for a Gatling—Mimics were extremely fast as well as being tough and mean. They were one of the worst non-NPC baddies you could run into, in fact.
After about a minute, I finally put it down—but then saw some other minions of the maze had come, attracted by the commotion, and were now cutting me off from both sides. Not good. I doubted I could get off even a Circle 3 spell before they were on me, and advanced casting was impossible while you were being beaten on in melee range. And Circle 2 spells couldn’t beat them in time. My only chance was Phase Shift. By the time I got far enough to give them the slip, I was down to only about 300 Power points. Fortunately, I was also close to the rest area. But as I rounded a corner, I saw that it was blocked off! “Oh no, now what?”
“Now you shall pay for your cheating ways,” said a voice, “cowards have no place in the Great Maze! I, Spiir the Youngest, 4th of the Thirteen Devils, shall exact penalty with your life!”
Two thoughts went through my head at that moment. First, Aww crap, and second, wait, the fourth Devil?
He was a minotaur, and unusual for one. He was only slightly larger than Dwarf size—but the massive spear he wielded magically extended as he drew it until it was at least 3 times as tall as him. No chance of not getting melee mauled here. I considered busting out my Recover scrolls…but they only would have delayed things. I was ZOed, and could only watch as he leapt lightly and drove its point into my hapless skull.
Well. This was a problem. The Maze has countermeasures against any spells or other measures you might use to increase your safety. So, Invisibility, Phase Shifting, almost certainly even Haven were off the table—unless I defeated Spiir. And it didn’t look like I was going to be able to do that with my usual tactics, especially since I was willing to bet he had a hard counter if I tried to maintain a Phase Shift or use Dimension Render.
It was time to take what Respec had to offer more seriously. There was one major change I had in mind in particular. See, my character wasn’t actually a human. Veralix was a Naga, the more human-looking counterpart of Lamias that I mentioned earlier. When I first made him, I never even disguised him at first. I started using the spell Self Illusion: Race to look human when I got tired of dirty looks from NPC townsfolk all the time. Then, I kept it up when it seemed like I wouldn’t be able to drum up business for Leyline very well otherwise. Then, because I liked having a secret identity. Then, out of basically nothing but sheer habit, until I didn’t even explore Wild areas without a Self Illusion: Race disguise. But today seemed like a good day to finally put a stop to the practice.
I looked at myself in 3rd person view, having respawned in the same spot in the plaza containing the Gate of Rebirth/Resolve in Respec Town. Truth be told, except for the glistening yellow coils (once gold and iridescent, but I had that aspect of Veralix’s appearance respec'd long ago because it was way too gaudy) that I could lengthen or shorten at will, and violet eyes that would change to snake slits whenever I called the Circles to cast spells, there wasn’t a great deal of difference in pure appearance. More importantly, I confirmed that the two Sigils I had gained before remained on my Cloak of the Condemned.
I exited 3rd person view and tapped the first NPC I could find on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said, and when they turned around they didn’t seem as surprised or disgusted with me as in the main Game. It wasn’t a surprise that in a place like this they’d be more used to unusual races and classes. “Could you please tell me which shop lets me redistribute Ability Points?”
“Ability points? If I remember, it’s the one marked with a large green orb on the sign, just over there.” She pointed roughly a bit to the left past the far side of the Gate.
“Thank you.”
She gave me a nod and continued on her way. On my way there, I opened my Abilities screen and selected the Racial Abilities tab. As one of the more unusual races, Nagas had more potential for racial abilities than a lot of them, potential I’d been ignoring. Like all unlockable abilities, they were arranged in a progressive tree.
My heart skipped several beats as I looked on. My eyes had been immediately drawn to a skill node that was larger than the others, and not connected to the rest of the tree. This was a Secret Skill, a skill that could be enabled at any time. However, that was provided you fulfilled the requirements. Usually, any special requirements for skills were revealed as long as you’d activated an adjacent Skill, Ability, or Stat node. But no nodes were adjacent to Secret Skills or Abilities, so their requirements were only revealed once you had already fulfilled them. And without exception, those requirements would be orders of magnitude more difficult to fulfill than any normal node.
Both Nagas and Lamias had two Secret Skills on their racial trees. One of these was known, listed as Stone Gaze, the advanced signature ability of snake-kind, on the game’s knowledgebase. It necessitated an extremely specialized build to unlock, requiring a player desiring it to unlock the Mesmeric Gaze ability, an Ability Node at the very top of the skill tree which required strong magic skills and 100% natural Mind resonance which was itself ineffective in most situations, to the point it practically was only ever learned to get at Stone Gaze. Then, you needed to gain 100% natural Earth resonance, which was even harder for Nagas to attain than Mind resonance. Finally, you needed to be able to cast Earth resonant spells of at least the 6th Circle. Only a bare handful of job classes would allow Nagas to fulfill all of these requirements—usually Druids, but a few more obscure ones as well. But even if you faced a Naga or Lamia Druid and so could be assured that the player was using a Stone Gaze build, it was still very difficult to counter.
That wasn’t what caught my attention though. The other skill was one that no one, at least according to the knowledge base, had ever unlocked, and so it wasn’t listed what it was. Only two of its three requirements were listed: Achieving 100% natural Beast Resonance and reducing your power to 1% or less of its maximum before resting 200 times in a row. The third and final requirement, the second one listed, was blank.
But on my skill tree, it was filled in, fulfilled. Slay 500 or more Elite or higher class NPCs in 1 year. Well, no wonder the skill hadn’t been unlocked before, if that person I’d faced in the Great Maze was representative of the attitudes of many players. To me, taking down an Elite was no great undertaking, but if the Multiverse outside the Society Cluster was populated by large numbers of players who couldn’t even be bothered to disable their basic auto-attacks even after reaching Level 50, I was the exception, not the rule. And even I had to really dedicate myself to grinding them to kill that many in a single year. I had done it the year before the most recent Assessment I’d taken, to see how many I could and to see how effective it would be for level grinding. It had turned out that as far as being effective for leveling up it was pretty darn, as I’d grown all the way from the mid 60s to the upper 80s, no small thing for a single year even for a veteran player on their 20th character. I’d even gotten in the Top 10 of a stat tracking leaderboard for the most solo Elite kills that year, with a grand total of 712—an average of almost 2 every single day.
Most of the rest of that list had been players from the Exploration Hub, and I had to wonder if maybe some of those colonists had unlocked this skill and simply not revealed it. But I was definitely going to go for it now. The other requirement—using lots and lots of Power consistently—I had also fulfilled long ago in the course of running Leyline. As long as I respec’d my Racial Skill Tree enough, achieving 100% natural Beast resonance would be easy, if time consuming.
The only problem was that many of the skills that would increase that Resonance through repeated use relied on Veralix’s Strength stat, which as a caster class was very low. But there were ways to increase it—I could respec those points too, but what I more had in mind was one of the ways the Game interacted with the real world. In the Multiverse, your character was an idealized you, so if you took on a fitness regimen and built endurance and muscle, your character’s Strength stat growth rate would increase, and the stat itself would retroactively go up to reflect the new rate.
Currently Veralix’s Strength growth rate was E, which was still better than usual for a caster class, because I’d long taken to jogging so as not to turn myself into a fat slug, as well as allocating a single point to it when I first created him to raise the rate from H to G. But now, I’d need to do it more often as well as take trips to the local fitness center (one of a good number of public facilities found in many towns that was not Tier restricted at all) because to make effective use of most of the snake attacks, I’d need at least a rate of C, but ideally B or higher. The Society provided exercise regimens which were guaranteed to be intense enough to get your character to the growth rate you wanted, which you could sign up for at any fitness center and have your faithfulness to that regimen tracked.
After nearly two hours, I was finally satisfied with my new Ability Point build and began the process of learning to effectively use the new physical attack moves I’d unlocked. One that seemed particularly useful was Tail Sweep, as it enabled me to knock enemies in melee range away from me. It was already effective enough to move a Medium enemy a few yards, and I felt it would be an excellent distance-getter once I’d improved my Strength enough.
Another move of note was Constriction. It was only good against a single target, but from what I’d found out about it, at its maximum potential there were ways to prevent even Strength focused player builds from escaping the grip of the attack. It cost Power, but only a trickle and only if you sustained it for more than 5 seconds. The real drawback was that it would immediately end and leave you vulnerable to counterattack by the target if you were attacked by someone else, and you didn’t have many options for stopping that from happening if someone else was around. But for 1v1 duels and trying to take down Elites, it would be an exemplary deterrent to stop them from bum-rushing into melee with me immediately. I guess if I had tried to look into it for more than 30 seconds I’d have figured out that was why nobody ever tried that with Mathezar in the Arena.
With the addition of these and a few more minor 0 cost serpentine techniques, I raised 100 Crimson Spheres to get back to Inferno by the end of the day. The next day, I took it slower, making contact with the local Fallen contingent of the instance, beginning to advance the idea of me helping lead a group to the Graveyard Zone to fight the zombies and help people get their Crimson Spheres for the area quickly. But not yet, let’s not do it just yet, I told them—because I had an ulterior motive.
My build still didn’t allow me to clear the enemies of that region enough to reach the crypt inside—I could handle them, but in the process when I tried, I used up too much Power to be confident that I could take down its resident, which I now suspected was the Third Devil. It was possible they also had another role in the Great Maze, but I thought the crypt was much more likely. What else could it be for?
Mostly, I took it easy, not letting myself get too overeager to advance at any cost. I easily cleared 500 Crimson Spheres, and got still more, gradually regaining the equipment I had previously acquired in my last trip to Inferno. The Ring of Power Amplification in particular I kissed once I’d purchased a replacement. Then, not long before the next Assessment was due to start, it was time to put all my practice and preparations to the test.
[1] Another of the more popular “Sub-Games” in Masters of the Multiverse, based on combining lane-based online trading card/figure games with a Gacha system. Most Triad figures are based on non-character AI monsters, and by using the extremely rare Triadmorph spell (Arcane, 4th Circle, Veralix has so far been unable to acquire it) it is even possible to transform actual monsters into Triad figures. High achieving in Triad grants enhanced rare monster encounter rates and higher rare loot drop rates in the main game through the Triad Tamer subclass, and also grants benefits to the Summoner subclass.
[2] 4th Circle, Arcane, 40% Air and 40% Light Resonance, the conjunction of which makes it effective against defenses having low levels of Metal Resonance, such as heavy metal armor.
[3] Arcane, Circle 2. Temporarily roughens terrain in a small specified area.
