Sofia followed the map to reach the chest, noticing paths unexplored by the birds, and explored paths that existed on the map but not for real. This was obviously the work of the moving walls, but they didn’t seem to want to move much if it wasn’t to try to lead her to a dead end. Overall, the path she took was still mostly mapped out already. She found the chest. It was like the first one. Inside, she found a small scroll. I8… E3, I8… There has to be more, so let’s keep going…

Sofia kept exploring and mapping the place. She had almost all of it well figured out now, and she even found three more chest scrolls : T4, X1, and 72.

It was pretty obvious now that it spelled EXIT 7, with the password 31842. Unless it’s just exit, and the password is 318472. Well, assuming it’s a password of some kind. I saw the vault sellers in Hooasow selling number-locked safes, so it could be something like that.

Because if it’s not that, I have no idea what it is. Couldn’t find any other meaning to these numbers.

Now, the only question left was : where was that exit?

And it wasn’t so much of a question either. There was one small corner of the maze she couldn’t explore. The birds going there all died one by one, and there were no paths to get there from the opposite border. What section of the maze was that, exactly? The place where she discovered the lesser Dragon.

Looks like lizard extermination is a part of the job. I suppose the intended way is to analyze its movements, maybe lure it away and sneak past through other methods. Perhaps it’s to do with using the moving walls to create a safe path; use them to corner the beast itself?

Well, I’ll hunt it.

Sofia exercised caution and launched bird assaults on the giant Lizard’s territory from afar. She learned a lot about the place this way. First of all, this corner of the maze was undoubtedly the one with the most moving walls; they were everywhere. Secondly, whenever a bird got within a hundred meters of the beast, it instantly died; always. Thirdly, the thing would keep chasing the birds it detected all the way until it hit the imaginary borders of ‘its territory’. The territory in question being the mostly unexplored part of the maze.

Sofia quickly learned that she had no hope of outrunning the thing unless she could fly, which was impossible due to the restricted space. So she couldn’t get too close. And it likes to hang out near the same path all the time. And it’s the only path I haven’t explored yet, and it can’t loop back to the other side of the map because there’s nothing there.

This has to be the exit.

If it is, I feel like the one-year time limit is much more than enough, even for someone without the same tools as me. Anyone making a map, even by themselves, would end up stumbling upon the same chest twice and understand that something is wrong. The active dangers are the walls and the lesser Dragon, which are both not that bad as long you are careful.

It’s as if the one-year deadline is here to discourage you by selling a more complex task than it is rather than to act as a real time limit. Kind of a twisted thing to do.

Or there’s more to deal with after the Lizard, but that doesn’t seem right. It’s already an unbeatable opponent to most people.

Having a good grasp on the situation, Sofia was now more determined than ever to put her time to good use and hunt the lesser Dragon.

She just couldn’t let it see her and couldn’t go within a hundred meters of it. And it was unsure whether she had the tools to damage it.

Before committing to ‘wasting time’ here, she scouted the path past the lesser Dragon. She sent the birds, half of them to distract the Lizard, half to explore past the uncharted way. It was hard to get precise information out of the birds with the limited orders they understood, but she still more or less understood that beyond it was the exit she was looking for.

The next step was to go there in person, making extra sure to avoid the Lizard.

Sofia ran past the danger zone, and after a few more turns, she found herself in front of nine vault doors made of the hard speckled stone, numbered one to nine. They each had the kind of combination lock that Sofia had expected built in them, made of the same stone.

Exit seven, code 31842. Alright, this seems pretty final. Now I can use the year of free time. Zerei assured me that this trial involved time dilation and that I would be out in, at most, a month. So I can use every second they give me, right?

I’ll still try to exit long before the end just in case there’s a second part but for now…

“Let’s train the bolt.”

Like she had improved the armor, she wanted to improve the [Angel’s bolt], but not only that, she wanted to free the slot. She knew the base spell well enough. If she just managed to make her version stronger from scratch, she could forever get rid of the actual skill.

So she had one particular goal: changing her spell version to accept more mana. As long as it could equal the skill, she would be happy, but to kill the lesser Dragon, more was better.

Four months later. Sofia, on a chair in a furnished room made out of bones that she had built in the corner of the exit room, deleted [Angel’s bolt] from her active skills

That was how confident she was that her spell was so much better that she never wanted to use the original skill again.

It had taken a terrible amount of research into which part of the spell influenced what, but she managed, thanks to the relatively straightforward nature of the spell. Ultimately, she found exactly what she was looking for, the power supply structure.

Spells were, in essence, large ritual circles made entirely of mana, without runes, which happened inside and outside the caster’s body. It was possible to understand them fully. Doing it without prior knowledge of which part did what was an obscure process, but not an impossible one. She had found and analyzed the part that interested her and played with it until she had what she wanted.

Her own version of Angel’s bolt. One without a mana limit. She could send small 50 mana points zaps almost instantly or empty her whole mana pool for a massive bolt, which she hadn’t tried yet. She always had to dispel it with the staff to ensure the explosions wouldn’t alert the Lizard, but the bolt, even with only thirty thousand mana in it, was already a hazard to her safety. The only downside was that the mana expenditure was worse than the original. She estimated it took her about fifteen thousand mana to recreate the power of the original’s ten thousand worth. But getting the bolt to that point took exactly ten seconds like it used to.

And the casting time is proportional to the mana spending now. It’s so flexible!

After getting to that point, Sofia took a last nice sleep in her makeshift bonne room before getting a plan of action on track. First, she had to wait for the Lizard to wander out of the one path that linked the exit room to the main maze, and she sent the birds through. Eventually following when she was sure it was safe. Her next step was locating all the moving walls in the area and carving Sofia-sized paths through them all. Alternating the rats and the birds from the book, she instilled an ‘observer rotation’ so that no walls were allowed to move without her direct input. The book regenerated its fog fast enough that she could keep doing that forever as long as she didn’t summon anything else.

She moved as far away as possible and did stress testing for her new bolts.

The range, speed, and accuracy increased in line with the power and casting time. A small zap was relatively slow and only traveled a few meters. The usual bolts hadn’t changed, and the hypercharged ‘two in one bolts’ were about 50% faster than the original, with terrific pinpoint accuracy and more range than the longest straight corridors of the maze could offer.

Let alone the bigger bolts, because the two-in-one bolts only cost 30 000 mana, but Sofia had 94000. At around fifty thousand mana compressed into one bolt, her arm was no longer burning or melting. It started to disintegrate even faster than the High-priest skeleton could heal it. So that’s the limit of my body, about three and a half bolts into one. However, although it couldn’t protect her well against the heat of her spell, the orichalcum armor held.

I’m not sure a single one of those will be enough to kill the lesser stone Dragon.

But I’m not limited to one.