Welcome, faithful, to the second floor. Calaf wasn’t sure what brought that to his mind, but the thought persisted as his party emerged onto an exterior walkway facing the arid hinterlands. It was late afternoon, with the sun angling down and bathing this western wall in constant, baking heat.

  “No dire-beasts, no weird chimeras.” Jelena looked around.

  “Don’t expect it to be a simple matter of climbing,” Enkidu said.

  There was no railing, just a sheer drop off the reverse pyramid. Zilara walked up and kicked a pebble off the edge. It was cast off into the air, flying through stiff and steady wind.

  “Maybe don’t look down,” the holy child said.

  Climbing the sheer outward-slanted wall, likewise, was inadvisable. There was nowhere to go but along the path. And here they wouldn’t receive any support from their rival/companion party on the far side.

  A turn right would take them along the western wall to the north, where a previous church contingent was attempting to clear the tower. Turning left would take them towards the southern edge, where an even older party once cleared the zone but whose status was yet unknown.

  At Jelena’s insistence, they all turned left. Best to avoid the church contingent. It only took ka single Stalwart or low-level cleric to recognize Jelena’s party from wanted posters. Then their day would be ruined.

  Once again, Calaf took the lead. No sooner had he walked a dozen steps to the southwest than did a wall segment dislodge itself from the featureless wall of stone. Calaf jumped back as the wall shot out like a piston, pushing all in its path clear off the platform edge. The new obstruction remained there for a bit—long enough for anyone hanging off the edge to lose their grip—and then retracted.

  “Good thing you’ve still got those lockpicks boosting your reaction time,” Jelena said with a supportive hand on his back.

  Calaf only nodded.

  Within his Interface, Calaf moved the Lockpicks of the Thief to the top slot. It was an unfounded but common superstition that the primary inventory item was most effective.

  The group passed through this roadblock one at a time. They let the spring-coiled trap trigger twice more, then ran past as it was still resetting.

  Far ahead, similar traps started moving on their own. First one, then another. Then they started moving so fast that not even agility-boosted stats could outmaneuver the death traps.

  “So that’s what’s going on,” Zilara said. She poked Calaf in the side. “See that? At about the halfway point.”

  A switch awaited, embedded in the floor. It would require a fair amount of strength to pull.

  “That controls the traps on the equal and opposite side of the tower. Notice how nothing is moving behind us.”

  Calaf looked behind them to confirm, then looked back down at Zilara.

  The holy child grinned. “Bet those mages have pulled their own lever on the east side. Slowing down the traps on their end increases the trouble on this end.”

  “Nice observation,” said the Squire.

  Jelena and Calaf nodded understandingly.

  “So they’re heading to the south side too?” Calaf asked.

  “Unlikely. Everything’s flipped.” Zilara mimed an ‘upside-down’ motion with her hands. “They’re headed to the northern face.”

  Fair enough. They could group up with the church party. If only there were a way to communicate with the mages to tell them to tone their end down a bit. They should have brought communication snails.

  They still had to reach that lever.

  “Wait here,” Enkidu said.

  The group waited as Enkidu dived through a lightning-fast stone piston. He jumped over the next, then skillfully danced back and forth between two that moved at a steady rhythm.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “He’ll be fine,” Jelena said.

  Battlemages were required to master magic and swordcraft both. The menagerie of artificial beasts helped test a mage’s might in these areas. They wore more mobile robes than the average Paladin, while not being half as swift as a Thief. At quarter-speed, these traps would test a mage’s mobility.

  “Hey, Enkidu! Adjust it slowly. We don’t want to surprise the other team.”

  Moving the hefty lever was no problem for a man of Enkidu’s prodigious strength. The pistons wound down gradually. Calaf rushed through during the next lull, while Jelena and Zilara did so after a second.

  There was little preventing any one group from stopping the traps on their end and rendering the gauntlet impossible for the other party. But doing so would ruin the dungeon climb ahead when further teamwork was required.

  The walkway turned at a dead ninety-degree angle. They faced south, and the immediate environs were bathed in relative shade.

  A span of several leagues of arid, hilly landscape sat between the Battletower and a mountain range jagged enough to prevent access to the plains.

  From this high vantage point, the porous nature of the hinterlands grew obvious. All manner of caves and crevices awaited out in the wilds. The fungal menace that besieged these lands at night was free to slink out from every unassuming hole in the ground as soon as the sun dipped behind the mountains, and then slink back into the dark once dawn arrived once more.

  It wouldn’t be more than a few hours yet before it was evening. The Battletower’s defense mechanisms against the undead tide were yet unseen, but foolproof. They could reasonably surmise that there were no fungal-ridden birds that could attack them up here. Whatever countermeasure the remaining mages had to keep the tide at bay, however, had to be done before the night was through. And so they hurried still.

  The southern face continued with no traps to speak of. What this meant for the church’s party on the north end remained unclear. Stairs upward (and back into the tower interior) presented themselves in due time.

  “Okay. Combat and agility tests are done,” Jelena said. “What more can we expect?”

  Calaf took point once more and emerged into a kaleidoscope scene of hundreds of archways. This chamber was smaller than the first stairwell amphitheater style of the menagerie and split in halves rather than fourths.

  Each archway displayed a different scene. The portal to Fort Duran was present with its ever-golden hues. There was another cityscape from the Olde Capital. Dense green marked some overgrown portal into the river delta. There was even some rolling hills near the sea that marked an archway far east of Riverglen. They were the same archways that covered the exterior walls of the tower at ground level.

  “Okay. A mass portal room,” Jelena said. “Pity the climb is such a hassle. Otherwise this would come in real handy.”

  “I suspect they only work one way,” Calaf said. “We could leave through one, but not come back.”

  In normal circumstances, this would be an apocalyptic event, as the reanimated fungal dead could travel to all corners of the land through the Battletower's portal archways. No doubt that is why they waited outside the tower every night, foiled by whatever countermeasures the Battlemages could concoct.

  A lone stairwell awaited. Jelena and Enkidu ascended without a problem. When Calaf and Zilara attempted to follow suit, however…

  The stairwell split in two with their first step. The next step resulted in four stairwells pointing out in every direction but straight. Each step summoned an exponential number of new stairwells that rendered navigation impossible.

  “Whoa. Hoss,” Zilara said.

  The unbranded members of the party turned.

  “You two okay?” Jelena walked back down to Calaf’s side.

  Calaf closed his eyes and stepped, with Jelena’s aid, straight ahead. When he opened his eyes next, the illusion remained, growing ever harder to make out any stairs against the collage of portals.

  “You two can’t see this…” Calaf squinted at Enkidu and Jelena.

  “Nope. It’s just a simple staircase. Maybe a little wobbly,” Jelena said.

  “It’s an illusion that only affects Branded.” Zilara took to crawling up the stairs with her eyes closed. “Surely, there’s an anti-illusion spell that can circumvent it. But this works just fine too.”

  A nonlethal trap. Stumbling through an open portal into a mid-range region like Autumn’s Redoubt likely wasn’t a deadly error for a mage at-level for the Battletower, but it was a day-ruining error. Possibly a week or month-ruining error, accounting for time to walk back to the tower and try it again.

  “Gotta tell those mages to put this trap first,” Jelena said. “Annoying traps should filter people out first. Then the deadly gauntlets happen after. It’s only logical.”

  The group circumvented this room by using their unbranded members as escorts. Calaf held onto Jelena’s hand as she guided him up the lone, non-illusionary staircase. Enkidu carried Zilara on his back.

  Once the stairs were conquered, the group found themselves on a wide and flat plain atop the pyramidal-hourglass structure of the Battletower. A smaller spire was built into the dead center of this surface of notably cruder stone than the magical tower. Stairs opened up before it, and levers waited at its base. They pulled all four levers (Enkidu helped Zilara with hers) and before long the party was joined by two more.

  Church guards and those journeymen crimson mages trudged up the opposite stairwell. Pulling the levers had disabled the traps for the other quadrants. Both parties had taken quite a few casualties in the climb, however; only three mages remained alongside two church guards.

  “We need four ranking mages to cast the anti-decay spell,” explained one of the crimson mages. “Should still be good, so long as a member from that southern party who went up first yet lives.”

  Zilara pointed off to the south. “Hey, Hoss. Who is that guy?”

  A fourth mage did indeed live. An aged man awaited with well-worn mage’s gear and salty grey hair. He faced south, back to the party, looking over the entire hinterlands from this high perch.

  “Shouldn’t have done that,” said the old man in a gravely voice. “Pulling the levers. Only do it when you’re ready to head back down.”

  Though aged, this man maintained a muscular physique. He stood there, as he had for some time, leaning against his overlarge battle mace for balance. Calaf gasped even before he examined the Interface Designation.