Chapter 30: You Must Be This Dumb to Proceed

  I don’t remember when I started talking to myself.

  Maybe it was the moment I realised I was never truly alone.

  Seth’s soul, memories of his privileged life ignited something deep inside me.

  A slow, smouldering fire I hadn’t seen coming.

  A fire that would consume everything.

  The universe was watching.

  Which meant they were watching.

  My world.

  My rulers.

  The architects of the lies that shaped my life.

  And the ones like me—who lived and died by them, blind.

  But not anymore.

  Now they’d hear what I’d uncovered.

  Every word, a fracture in their illusion.

  Every syllable, a chisel blow to the masks they wore.

  I didn’t know if I’d survive this nightmare.

  Didn’t know if I’d ever get to drag those bastards into the light and make them bleed.

  But this much was certain:

  They couldn’t shut me up.

  I would speak.

  I would unravel their lies.

  And people like me?

  We’d burn their fucking world to ash.

  ***

  The staircase was the same tight spiral as the one that had brought us here. I took my time, inspecting the pictograms and hieroglyphs that adorned the floor, walls, and ceiling for any sign of a trap.

  I needn’t have bothered. The trap, when I found it, was obvious enough that the average kindergartener would have spotted it.

  It was so blatant that I spent a few minutes double-checking it wasn’t bait for something nastier.

  Swooping condors carved into the ceiling had little holes drilled into their beaks. And a tripwire set at ankle height about halfway down the spiral served as the trigger.

  We backed up to the previous trial chamber to discuss.

  “Seems simple enough, eh lad? Stay in the gaps, or hold a shield over our heads, and we shouldn’t have any dramas,” said Paddy.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Yeah, I dunno,” I said, frowning up at the birds. What if a liquid or gas pours out?”

  Paddy looked unsure, while Ariel nodded.

  “Oui, the holes.”

  “What about the holes?” The Irishman asked, squinting at them.

  “Smaller,” I grunted. “Vertical, not like the previous trap.” I gave him a toothy grin, “I’ve got an idea.”

  I had plenty of crap in my inventory—but nothing that did exactly what I needed.

  Time to experiment.

  I popped open the build menu. Ever since it had unlocked, I’d been itching to mess with it. I used to print plastic electrical housings with a unit in the back of my truck. This was better. Like a magical 3D printer powered by garbage.

  Ariel had made delicate glass flowers. Paddy was halfway through crafting a guitar. Me? I mostly just stared blankly at the options, lacking whatever gene gave the others creativity.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Alongside the team BP we used to build up our castle, we also had personal BP—usable anytime to create or modify gear on the fly.

  Lucky for me, I was a compulsive cleaner.

  Since landing on this nightmare world, I’d scooped up everything in reach: corpses, vines, shattered branches, alien junk, chunks of rubble. If it looked loose, I’d probably bagged it. Shovelled it into my inventory with barely a second thought.

  Growing up, I had this neighbour called Gareth. He was a hoarder. As a kid, that was fantastic. His kids and I played all summer long amongst the junk heap that filled his yard, inventing games and building the kind of unsafe contraptions that all little boys do.

  One day, a pile had fallen and one of the boys was crushed. Not badly. But enough to break a bone or two.

  Enough to scare the shit out of us.

  He’d screamed and screamed, but try as we might, we couldn’t pull him free.

  My implant had erased that memory. It only returned to me now.

  But remember or not, ever since that moment, I’d hated mess.

  Maybe that was why I compulsively collected all the crap left around this world.

  Didn’t matter.

  I opened the inventory and building tabs and chucked most of the random stuff into the menu, exchanging mass and material for points. By freeing up about a dozen slots in my inventory I gained 97 BP. The construction menu was intuitive, and after a few moments of mental manipulation a timer appeared—counting down from 10.

  “You guys ever been bowling?” I asked. I hadn’t. Seth had. I withdrew three bowling balls, handing one to Ariel and the other to Paddy. Tyler stood by himself, and I left him to his thoughts.

  We rolled the balls down the stairs, they thundered away with the sound of stone on stone. A moment later, darts rained from the ceiling.

  “Strrrrrike!” cried Paddy and we all chuckled.

  I froze, and flicked a glance at Tyler as shame burned through me. Here I was, laughing with Paddy while Tyler’s sister was in the ground.

  His eyes were dark and dead. I didn’t know if he’d even heard me.

  Didn’t help.

  I had to be better.

  Most of the darts had snapped upon impact, but not all. I collected the lot as we descended and they separated helpfully into a stack of broken and unbroken in my inventory.

  As expected, they were poisoned.

  The next trial chamber was a puzzle, I guess. Kind of. Like the trap on the staircase, it was insultingly obvious.

  Four podiums. Four symbols carved into their tops. Four slow, dumb obsidian statues shambling around like drunk mall cops. We tripped them, smashed them, and yoinked the symbols we needed from their right hands.

  Puzzle solved.

  It was starting to feel like the game had pretty low expectations for our collective intelligence.

  And that got me thinking.

  Back on the first floor, when I’d fought our alien “competitors,” I’d noticed something odd. Four out of the six hadn’t even bothered with weapons or armour. The Gosporian bugs, the Uzbeki tail-riders, the slug-like Golopsi, and those ball-sack-headed stick creatures—the Huevos—they’d all been terrifying to look at, sure. But also dumb as bricks. I’d mowed through over seventy of them like a weed-whacker at a garden party.

  The camouflaged Shii had shown some initiative—throwing knives and rudimentary armour—but they weren’t exactly Einsteins of ambush.

  Only the elf-like Lutantha had used real strategy: formation fighting, cover, coordinated strikes.

  Which made me wonder…

  Just how smart was the average alien out there?

  Priorita had gone on and on about how fast we’d progressed since they first checked in on our civilisation. Made a point about how surprised the galaxy was that humans had started looking outward.

  Maybe they’d expected us to struggle with the trials, to fail them in comedic fashion.

  Maybe the average alien really was a dumbass.

  The trip down to the next chamber was much of the same.

  A simple trap, leading to an easy fight and idiotic puzzle.

  Hell, I’d be embarrassed to die as a result of this crap.

  With my superhuman senses and strength, I barely had to pay attention.

  The idiotic challenges meant I could put more focus on my team, and the fractures that had formed upon Tammy’s death.

  I tried to coax Tyler from his sullen silence, but the big man was having none of it. Every now and again I’d catch him from the corner of my eye, staring. It made the back of my neck itch, so I strained Stormsense to monitor his movements at all times.

  Ariel tried to help too, no doubt reading from a script that some shrink back on earth had written. But the words, and wisdom sounded ridiculous coming from her. She gave up quickly. What the hell could a fifteen-year-old-kid say to a grown man who’d just lost his sister?

  Paddy tried too, and he was good at it. His Irish brogue was smooth and soothing and he had some of the wisdom that Ariel lacked. But the fiery haired man had no patience, would get frustrated or distracted and wander off when he saw something interesting.

  He’d mentioned a medication he was prescribed on earth which he could no longer access, said he was hopeless without it.

  We cleared the fourth trial, looted the enemies and I was leading the descent to the fifth—and final chamber of this wing where the boss would wait when I heard it.

  Click

  Ah fuck.

  I should have been paying more attention.

  The stairs flattened into a slip and slide and I zipped down the stone spiral like a turd flushed down the dunny.

  Music started.

  A reel straight out of Benny Hill blaring to life.

  Assholes.

  I looked about desperately, searching for a way to arrest my slide and caught a glimpse of Ariel before I flew around the corner. She was glued to the wall with one of the sticky fruits from the previous stage, Paddy and Tyler tangled up with her.

  At least she’d saved the rest of the team.

  My inventory was open in a flash but I spun and rolled dizzyingly and couldn’t get my mental finger in the right spot. Ebonrage appeared, and spun away in a shower of sparks—nearing taking my damn hand with it.

  A limp Gosporian, missing most of its legs, popped like a massive zit beneath me, coating me in its custard yellow lymph.

  A spray of poisonous darts scattered, missing me by millimetres.

  I couldn’t focus on the fruit. Couldn’t summon it.

  Soldertouch was in my hotlist, so I closed my inventory and activated the spell with a thought. I tried to sink my red-hot fingers into the stone. That worked about as well as expected. Which is to say, it didn’t work at all.

  My hand bounced from the stone slip-and-slide with the crackle of broken bone.

  I cried out in agony as my burning hot hand slapped against the side of my head. Something flew free with a sizzle and whiff of BBQ pork. I was pretty sure I’d just torn my damn ear off.

  I stabilised just enough to see the trapdoor open.

  It yawned at the base of the stairs, a black pit to nowhere.

  My inventory opened again just as I flew through. With a thought, a sticky-fruit squelched into the palm of my hand.

  I swung for the lip—and missed.

  And I fell, screaming, into the dark.