The teleportation circle leaves us in the middle of the mountain, a hundred meters from the entrance of the ice maze. From here we cannot see the summit, which is covered by clouds behind the labyrinth.
We walk slowly on snowshoes. The snow crunches when I step on it, and it brings to my mind the image of Socks, but I avoid thinking about my cats. I need to be focused.
I have my inventory full of healing potions and supplies to get me through several days. We're wearing coats and clothes to withstand the cold, but even so, the sudden change in temperature between the hall of Idrial's mansion and the mountain makes me shiver.
Marcel trembles beside me. Her nose is almost the same color as her mustache, and the rest of her face looks a little pale.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“I'm fine. You know, snow and I aren't really friends,” she says as she stomps the snowy ground with her red boots to warm up.
“Hey, if you're bad, or you feel like it's too much, you don't need to come.”
“You need my scrolls so you can stand a chance against the ice dragon.”
“Well, you might as well leave them with us, and let Hara or I take care of reading them.”
“Yeah, sure. And miss the chance to witness the effects of the Infernal Apocalypse. No way,” she says, smiling.
When we reach the gates of the maze, I see a familiar figure waiting for us. The falling snow blows through him, and his white coat doesn't sway in the wind.
“Hara, Isaac,” Gabriel says. “I see you have figured out how to evade the update, and that you are bent on contradicting me.”
Lance and the warriors take up their weapons. Hara and I stand still in place.
“The board of developers has decided that I should not intervene any further,” Gabriel says, “but I wanted to come and warn you against their opinion. You will not find the solution to your problems at the top of the mountain. You will only prolong the inevitable. I know both the dragon and its labyrinth, and they are beyond your capabilities and those of your companions. Please give up. You are pointlessly wasting these players' money and time.”
I ignore him and walk past him toward the gates.
“Hara, please,” he says. “Talk some sense into him. He'll get nothing but grief.”
“As if you gave us something different,” Hara says. “You've taught us that to live is to suffer. At least here we will choose how to die.”
Gabriel stands crestfallen and looks at us with a resigned face.
“If that's what you want, so be it.” He disappears in a flash of light.
We arrive at the gates. The labyrinth is circular in shape and is located in a plain in the middle of the mountain. The stone walls are five meters high and completely covered by a layer of smooth ice, so I rule out the possibility of climbing them. Snow piles up on top of the walls, making them look sharp.
“Well, here we are,” Lance says. “The maze is made up of enclosures of different shapes and sizes connected by doors. We have to be careful because in most of the rooms there are enemies. In the first, if I remember correctly, ice trolls are waiting us. The problem: there is no way out, or at least we didn't find it the previous time. We spent three days inside the labyrinth. We methodically explored every encloser and yet there was no way to find an exit. In the end we gave up.”
“Did you try to break any of the walls with a fireball?” asks Marcel.
“We tried,” says Lance. “The walls, although covered in ice, are made of stone. We spent a fortune on scrolls and only managed to reduce the wall a few centimeters.”
“Well, then it's time to go through the maze,” I say. “Maybe this time we'll notice something that gives us a clue to find the exit.”
The entrance to the labyrinth is formed by a large stone door with two leaves, flanked by two metal slabs in the wall that stick out a few centimeters, like pushbuttons. I approach one of the metal slabs and push it. The mechanism slowly gives way inward, but nothing happens.
“There's another pushbutton right on the other side,” Idrial says, blowing mist out of her mouth. Her silver hair is pulled back in a ponytail. “We have to press them both at the same time.” I look at Hara, who nods and moves to the other pushbutton.
We count to three and press them. There is a rattle of mechanisms and counterweights, and the doors slowly begin to open.
We enter the first enclosure of the labyrinth, first the warriors, then Marcel and Hara, and finally me. As I enter the doors begin to close. I notice that there are no pushbuttons on this side, so there is no turning back, at least at in this place.
The enclosure is square in shape, with no ceiling, and there are three openings, each facing one direction. Fortunately, the floor is not covered with ice, like the walls, but with snow, which allows us to move more easily. There are no fresh footprints. We make our way to the center of the room as the doors close behind us. As they finish fitting, six level 120 ice trolls appear out of nowhere around us. Lance, Hara, and the two siblings take up positions in a circle, with Marcel and I in the center.
I load two of the incendiary stones into the slingshots Marcel gave me and throw them. They explode on impact in the heads of two of the trolls, knocking them down. The two beasts howl on the ground.
The other four trolls reach the circle formed by the team's warriors. Lance wields his greatsword and Idrial her Warhammer, causing considerable damage to their opponents, and Antaeus with his two axes mercilessly strikes his beast. Although Hara's movements are somewhat clumsier than usual due to the snow and the snowshoes, she has no trouble avoiding the troll's claws. Unfortunately, the difference in levels means that she barely causes them any damage when she hits them with her twin sabers. I load two more incendiary stones and throw them at the trolls fighting Idrial and Lance. The explosions stun them and make it easy for the two warriors to account for them.
The two trolls that fell at the beginning as a consequence of my attacks have recovered and take positions relieving the two fallen ones. Antaeus's is about to die, although the half-giant's life bar has been drastically reduced. I hear Marcel start to cast a healing spell and Anteus's bar increases.
I load two more stones and throw them at the first two trolls. The impact is enough to finish them off. Antaeus finally takes out his opponent, and Lance and Idrial help Hara kill her opponent.
Silence falls in the great square room and we catch our breath. Marcel, who has gained a couple of levels, is busy distributing her skill points on her holo-bracelet.
“Well, not bad,” Lance says, sheathing his weapon. “If we use this same strategy, we will get pass the trolls of the other enclosures the same way.”
“Are there trolls in all the enclosures?” I ask him.
“No, only the ones that are rectangular, and not in all of them.”
“And in the others?”
“In the rectangular ones that don't have trolls, there are fire wraiths, which are much harder to defeat. In the circular ones, there are ice spiders. In the crescent-shaped ones, saber-toothed tigers. And the best ones are the leaf-shaped ones, which are empty.”
Enclosures of different shapes. Rectangular, circular, crescent-shaped, and leaf-shaped. All of them interconnected and arranged in a great circle. It can't be.
“Lance,” I ask, “by any chance, aren't all the rooms arranged symmetrically, as if it were a mandala?”
“Yes, how do you know?”
The mandala! I close my eyes and remember the painting Gabriel has on the door of the waiting room. I can see its layout in my mind as if it were in front of me. Rectangles, circles, crescents, and leaves, each figure a different color.
“Quick,” I say. “I need something to write on.”
Marcel reaches into her backpack and pulls out a piece of parchment and a quill. I sit down in the snow and rest the paper on my knees. I reproduce the shapes of the mandala with my pen: eight squares in each of the eight directions, interspersed with another eight circles; further inward, another eight circles surrounded by crescents; and then eight smaller squares, more concentrated in the center. I draw the rest of the smaller figures that are interspersed among the larger ones.
“Where did you get this drawing from?” asks Lance. “It follows the same layout as the labyrinth rooms. It differs only in that you've put a circular enclosure in the center, and there's nothing there. Otherwise, it's identical.”
“The exit should be in that room, in the center,” I say.
“We assumed that last year, too,” Idrial says. “We tried to find an access to the center of the labyrinth, but there was no way.”
I look at the mandala on the paper. The figures are identical to the ones Gabriel had on the door.
But not exactly the same. I close my eyes and remember again the image of the mandala in the waiting room, with the colors. Purple and orange for the rectangles, yellow for the circles, blue for the crescents, and green for the leaves. All the shapes follow that same pattern.
Except for three.
There are three shapes whose color does not match. They are three squares located around the central area of the labyrinth. At first, I thought it was the artist's mistake, but now it's clear.
“We have to go to these three rooms,” I say, marking the rooms on the sheet. “In them is the key to get out of the maze.”
“How do you know that?” asks Lance. “Where have you seen this map?”
“Gabriel has it hanging on the door that connects the waiting room to Hara's room ...”
I don't finish the sentence. Hara looks down, and Lance snorts.
“The point,” I continue, “is that in that drawing all the shapes followed a color pattern except these three. That must be where the key is.”
“All right,” Lance says. “Well, our goal then is to try to move towards those rooms. Let's get going.”
The next enclosure is circular, and we are greeted by two dozen level 20 spiders emerging from a large crack in the wall. Their white furred legs slap the ice on the walls as they drop to the ground and run across the snow toward us. Their jaws open and close with loud bangs, and they leap trying to reach us. Lance, Idrial and Antaeus get in front and finish them off without much difficulty, while Hara and I cover Marcel. After taking care of the last spider, Marcel starts healing the three warriors to avoid the effects of the poison of the bites.
We then go through a crescent-shaped room where ten level 50 saber-toothed tigers await us, which we also defeat without much trouble. It's amazing to see Lance and the two siblings fight. The beasts fall one by one under the blows of Lance's greatsword, Anteus's axes, and Idrial's warhammer. The tigers move like big cats, and it makes me want to throw balls of wool at them, to see if they will play with them like Colonel.
We regain our strength and go through a couple of unoccupied rooms, after which we reach the first room that was indicated on the mandala with a color that did not match. It is a rectangular room and, according to Lance, two fire wraiths are waiting for us. Before entering he gives us precise instructions.
“The wraiths shoot fireballs,” Lance says, “so we have to split up to avoid getting hit by the explosions several at a time.”
The enemies in this room turn out to be immune to fire, so my slingshot attacks do little damage to them. Lance, who with his level 93 is the highest-level player, gets them to focus their attacks on him. He casts a shield spell like the one he used a couple of weeks ago against Marcel's attack. He stands in the center of the room and tries to prevent the fireballs from reaching him. The rest of us split up and attack from the flanks. The fireballs hit the snow, generating clouds of smoke and steam. They leave undercuts, and in some cases even uncover the stone floor. Lance tries to dodge the projectiles launched by the wraiths, but it is difficult to move on snowshoes.
The first specter falls quickly under the blows of Antaeus's axes, but the second one gives us a scare when it throws a fireball that hits Marcel squarely. She miraculously survives, thanks to the life points she gained from her recent level-ups, but much of her clothing is burned. Idrial then kills the second wraith without much trouble with a blow from her warhammer.
Marcel's clothes are scorched and smoldering. Deep down I feel some joy that she tastes her own medicine, with as much passion as she has for fireballs, especially after seeing that in the end she was okay. Idrial lends her some clothes, but they are too big for her. Marcel trims the sleeves of her coat and pant legs with a knife, and grunts as she fastens Idrial's knee-length coat with a rope.
“Well, here we are,” Lance says. “Now what?”
“Let's try to find some mechanism in the wall that we missed,” I say.
We scatter. We scour the walls trying to find something to no avail. After twenty minutes of searching, only interrupted by Lance's punch and Marcel's healing preventing my update, we finished scouring all the walls. There doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary, and we've checked every centimeter of rock.
Slowly we give up. Marcel sits on the snow and leans her back against the wall, with Hara next to her. Lance and the two siblings discuss what to do in the center of the room.
Then I look at the ground. I see the stone bald spots that have been exposed by the explosions during the fight with the wraiths. I walk over to the nearest one and touch the floor. It is rough, the same type of rock as the wall.
An idea occurs to me. I need a long stick. I notice the greatsword sticking out of the paladin's shoulder.
“Lance, can I borrow your greatsword?” He looks at me quizzically for a moment. He approaches me and offers me his greatsword reluctantly. I hold it with both hands and thrust it into the snow, into an area that has not suffered the effects of fireballs. The tip sinks into the snow and strikes the stone below. It is just the right size to cover the accumulated snow. I cross the floor of the room, plunge the greatsword into the snow, and listen to the sound it makes against the stone. The rest of the team members follow me on my way.
After a few tries the sound changes. It is no longer the dull thud of the sword tip hitting the stone, but a metallic sound. I repeat the operation to check it. I am convinced, in that area the ground is different. I return the greatsword to Lance and start digging in the snow. Antaeus helps me with one of his axes.
Soon we find what we are looking for: a metal pushbutton was hidden in the ground under the snow. It is similar to the one we used to open the main doors at the beginning. I climb on top of it and the metal plate shifts slightly.
“It doesn't seem to do anything,” says Marcel.
“Well,” I say, “but if there are three rooms and in each of them there is a pushbutton …”
“… we can step on them all at once in case it's a mechanism like the one at the entrance” Lance finishes my sentence.
I take out the mandala drawing, and we think about the best route to go to the other two enclosures. Luckily, we find a path that goes through many empty leaf-shaped rooms. After an hour we have visited the other two rooms, eliminated the fire wraiths, and discovered similar mechanisms. The pushbuttons are in the same position in all three cases, attached to the corner facing the inside of the maze, making it easy for us to find them.
“Okay,” Lance says, “to activate them we'll have to split up. Isaac, you and Marcel stay on this button, with Antaeus. Idrial and Hara will go to the second one we found, and I'll go to the first.”
Marcel sits on the snow next to me with her head down. Antaeus is standing next to her, leaning against the stone wall. I can't help but smile at the contrast between the two players. The differences are shocking: the half-giant with his two meters and twenty of pure muscle stuffed in the white breastplate with the emblem of the boar, and Marcel, with her meter thirty height, rather scrawny, wrapped in a coat that reaches almost to her feet held by a rope.
Minutes go by and my blue update bar is about to be completed. Antaeus hits me on the top of the head with his fist, taking half of my life and causing me to collapse on the metal pushbutton. I lose consciousness for a moment, and I recover watching Marcel perform the healing spell on me.
“How's it going with the snow?” I ask Marcel. I think it must be hard for her because of the accident where she lost her mother and her legs.
“Well, I've had better days. It's just snow,” she says, finishing filling my life bar.
I hear a mechanism under the slab. The rest of the team must have already reached their assigned pushbuttons. The ground shakes, like an earthquake. I watch as a circular stone block rises from the center of the maze, rising above the walls.
“The central room!” I point to my companions.
The block continues to rise, it must already be more than fifteen meters high by now. The tremor causes the snow accumulated on top of the walls to fall on us. Marcel and I are inside the hole on the pushbutton, and we risk being buried. I push the dwarf trying to help her out, but she stumbles and falls. I help her up.
The snow already covers me up to my waist, and it reaches Marcel by the neck. She is trapped, her face contorted. I try to get closer to her, but I can't. I crawl out of the hole, which is already completely covered with snow. No trace of Marcel is visible anymore.
The shaking stops and the snow stops falling. I crawl back to where I was and start digging.
I turn around looking for Antaeus with my eyes. He is a few meters away from me, half buried under a pile of snow that has fallen from the top of the wall. Only the boar emblem protrudes from his armor.
“Antaeus! Help! Marcel is trapped!”
The half-giant stands up and approaches with his snowshoes. He kneels down and digs his arms into the snow. He pulls Marcel out, holding her by the waist rope that holds her coat, and leaves her lying motionless on the snow. Marcel's eyes are tightly closed, and snow covers her face. Mist comes out of her nose, but she doesn't open her eyes.
I gently brush the snow off her face and help her up. She slowly opens her eyelids and looks at me with her green eyes. She coughs and spits some snow. She says nothing. She closes her eyes again and lies still, curled up in the snow, hugging her legs.
I watch her shiver. I hug her and try to warm her by rubbing her arms. She rests her head on my shoulder and I feel her sobs.
“It's okay,” I say. “You're safe.”
