"This one... and now, this one, and-" Ryan jumped around, dodging past the large fists on sticks that were being pushed in and out of the walls, ceiling, and floor. At first, it appeared like they were moving in random ways, but each of the fists seemed to have their own individual movement patterns. Ryan wasn't able to keep track of all of them at once, obviously, but he could at least figure out a straight line to move through.

  It would have been pretty easy if his goal had been to just get to the other side of the room, but this one was a combined puzzle and obstacle course. There were a number of buttons set up around the room, ten in total. Above the fence-gate leading to the next area were five lights. Ryan had to figure out the right combination of buttons to press. It was basically a way more complicated five-digit pin code. There were 100000 different possible combinations of these, since it seemed you could use each button multiple times.

  However, now that Ryan had a rough idea of what this place was supposed to be, he could at least filter things out. Each button had one of those briar-like symbols on it, which each correlated to another emotion or 'vibe'.

  In this case, he was seeing this place as a 'violent lashing-out'. A kid that was trying to punch someone around them. There were a few different buttons that Ryan figured could be helpful for this. Buttons that correlated to sensations like 'strength', 'restraint', 'compassion', things like that.

  Ryan tried out a few different things, basically going through things like how he would try to calm down Liam if he suddenly lashed out like this.

  Basically accepting the violence, letting him tire himself out, asking what was wrong, trying to help, and comforting him. As he pressed each of those buttons, the fists actually slowed down, as if the funhouse was reacting to him. With the last button, the fenced gate opened up, and Ryan quickly jumped through. He walked down the hallway in front of him, patting the wall.

  "Don't worry, I'll try to help you out here, yeah?" Ryan smiled a bit. He really had no idea what was going on here, but if this place had emotions somehow, he wanted to respect those. It was a bit weird, since a dungeon was a place that was actively trying to kill them, but still. It felt like the right thing to do, especially knowing the dark history of this place.

  Worst case, this funhouse was the incarnation of some tortured kids that were used as experimental subjects in the past. And also, just logically, playing along was the best way to get through this dungeon. Runar said that you could get the reward from this place if you just made it to the end of the funhouse. But even beyond that, Ryan had to somehow figure out how to actually turn this into a 'perfect completion' as well. Did he just have to be a really good therapist?

  He carefully balanced over a rotating beam in the hallway with a steep drop below it, jumping up when a horizontal pillar shot toward his legs. And then, he finally reached the stairway at the end that lead upstairs. Though, even those stairs were pretty annoying. Each step was moving around independently of the others, waving back and forth and shooting up and down, and there were no railings. Instead, there was just a deep drop onto the pavement below. That... could be dangerous. Apparently, the funhouse just got more dangerous the higher up you got, and this was clearly the start of it getting really dangerous.

  There was some rhythm to it, as there was with everything else in this funhouse. He didn't quite know why, but it just felt natural going through this place, like he knew exactly what to do where and when.

  "Intuition sure is a useful stat, huh?" he grinned broadly. At this point, he was actually finding this place pretty fun. Of course, it was dangerous, but it wasn't half as bad as he thought it was. The few times he was thrown around were really nothing in comparison to all those rollercoasters, and now that he had figured out that this place was like some kind of traumatised child, the puzzles were pretty easy and the obstacle courses felt weirdly harmless.

  That being the case, Ryan knew that he couldn't underestimate this place either. If he slipped off these steps and tumbled down the side the wrong way, he could definitely break something or even hit his head and straight up die. And once he got to the second floor, he also realized that things wouldn't just end with him being thrown around onto, slightly too hard, cushions.

  Up here, though it was all largely the same as before, he was dealing with things that were incredibly decayed. The moving pillars that were a staple in here had their cushions stripped off them, and were now just rough metal poles, moving around even faster and more erratically than down below.

  Though, the only saving grace that came with that was that the pillars were thinner, and in turn the gaps between them were a bit larger than down below. Though Ryan was a bit worried about wearing the Urban Knight outfit here instead of the Urban Harlequin outfit, he was never happier about this. He was wearing metal greaves right now, after all. Getting one of those bars to the shins would hurt like a bitch, and he was really quite happy to be able to avoid that.

  Some more jumping and dodging later, Ryan was met with something new. A crossing. To his left was a long, winding hallway with twisting floors, pistons shooting up and down, balls shooting from the ceiling and slamming into the ground, while to his right seemed to be some kind of puzzle room.

  From the tips that Runar had given to Ryan about this place, it was clear that everyone else would just generally choose the obstacle course. After all, that was a lot more straightforward than the puzzle, which nobody else really knew how to solve. But the obstacle course could be passed as long as you were agile enough.

  So, Ryan chose the puzzle. He stepped into the room and looked around, "Oh gods... a mirror maze?" Ryan sighed and started trying to make his way forward. Every part of the room was covered in mirrors, even the door that he had just come through. Most of them were distorted in some way, like those trick mirrors, but that really just made it harder for Ryan to go through here and really learn to understand the maze. So, he just went with the basics, letting his arm run along the mirror to his right, always following it and never pulling his hand away, so that he would hopefully get to an exit soon.

  The further into the maze he went, things got... weirder. Ryan had expected some kind of puzzle, but it clearly wasn't that. Instead, he was just seeing things that shouldn't be here. Things that were different than they should be right now. And that wasn't just because of the distortion.

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  There was one mirror that displayed Ryan wearing just regular clothes, not the Urban Knight ones. Another mirror that showed him with a black eye, and another that showed his clothes completely torn up. He didn't have Tiar with him in that last one.

  These 'weird' mirrors were interjected in between the regular ones almost randomly. They were hard to look at, like Ryan was staring at versions of himself that could be, if he or those around him had made slightly different choices. In many of them his life was worse, or he looked rougher. But in others, he looked better than he should. There was a mirror where the circles under Ryan's eyes were gone, and one where he didn't seem to have any scars. He was smiling, or crying, or glaring at himself in some of them. They became more frequent as he got deeper.

  And... there were more and more mirrors that were just empty. For a moment, Ryan thought that maybe this was just a trick, and that this was glass and not an actual mirror, but weirdly enough, he could see the reflection of himself in the mirrors opposite to these empty ones, but he couldn't see himself standing in front of the mirror. Even with his fingers touching against the surface, there was nothing. It was creepy as hell. And Ryan also knew what sort of 'alternative' these mirrors showed.

  A world where Ryan died after being shot in the Channel. A world where he was killed by a monster here in the dungeon, or even just earlier by the Roxie unit. A world where he his stepfather just had slightly more to drink that night, and didn't manage to pull himself away at the last moment when trying to choke Ryan to death. Or a world where the coin he threw a year ago came out on tails instead of heads, and he didn't turn away from the bridge and apply to New Riverside University instead of dropping a hundred feet down.

  There were a lot of branching points in his life, and seeing what could have been didn't feel good whatsoever. He was already not feeling good, but this didn't make it better. Though... there were also more and more mirrors where he was smiling from ear to ear. Ones where he was showing off a tattoo on his arm, which Modak, Silvia and him had nearly drunkenly gotten during a night out a few weeks after they met. A mirror where Ryan had given in way earlier to Silvia's fashion advice and looked way more stylish than he usually would. There was good and bad in here. And maybe he was lucky this was the case, but Ryan's mind kept on lingering on the good ones more than the bad ones.

  And then, before long, Ryan got to the end. He was met with ten pedestals, each one had a different button on it. Like normal, each one had a different symbol on it. He really just had to glance at them, letting his body guide himself to the 'solution' for the button. This puzzle was pretty simple, in the end.

  The funhouse... no, the dungeon was asking Ryan if he regretted anything. It showed him the consequences of other choices, of the lives he could have lived, both good and bad. And now, it was asking him if he would have done anything different. And the answer that he was trying to tell the dungeon, though it obviously wasn't in these exact words and more a general vibe like normal, was this:

  "Nah. My life is fine just the way it is."

  The door in front of him opened up, and Ryan could feel the funhouse shudder under his feet. He didn't quite know what that shudder meant, but he sure hoped it was something good. Whichever the case... It felt like Ryan was genuinely being asked for help for some reason.

  "Seriously... just what's the deal with this dungeon..? What happened here in the past?" Ryan whispered. He walked out of the room and continued on. The further Ryan got through the funhouse, the more intense everything became.

  The obstacles were more lethal, and the puzzles were more... intense. Like the dungeon's emotions were going absolutely haywire. Of course, the idea that this dungeon was actually experiencing emotions in the first place sounded a little weird to him, but Ryan had to be reminded of the Forge elemental down in the hidden village.

  From how it was explained to him, elementals experienced similar things dungeons did, just focused on a single object instead of a space. If he considered the Forge to be alive, which Ryan most certainly did, then he had to consider dungeons to be alive as well. Maybe that was why things relating to dungeons were just always called in terms of life, whether intentionally or not.

  The dungeon's core was often called its heart. They were 'born', and didn't just pop into existence. They grew, and changed, and rampaged, and... died. Maybe there was some weird cosmic reason why people had decided on those terms when it came to dungeons, even though what they were dealing with was one of the furthest things from what they knew and understood.

  Soon, Ryan got to the third floor of the funhouse. At this point, things weren't just dangerous, they were genuinely lethal. Jagged spikes and falls from heights that made Ryan shudder just thinking about them.

  "Come on, Ryan, you got this..." he took some deep breaths and pushed on through. He jumped, and vaulted, and dodged. His clothes got cut up, and he got plenty bruised. Frankly, by the end of the floor, he just felt so beat up that he was sure Silvia and Modak would freak out if they saw him now.

  And then, Ryan got to the roof. That last floor barely had any puzzles for some reason. He stood there, at the end. Right in front of him was a long slide that would bring him back downstairs so he could get on his way. In front of the slide stood a small golden statue. Ryan had made it to the end. But even so, he still didn't get the perfect completion award. Did he do something wrong? Did he say the wrong things, go the wrong way, something like that?

  He slowly picked up the plastic statue. It showed the funhouse, deeply exaggerated and whacky, like something that a child would think up. As he held the statue and put it away into the backpack, Ryan sat down on the ground and soon dropped onto his back. He just really needed to take a breather before heading down. He was protected up here. The roof looked like it was out in the open, but it was actually impossible to come up here from the outside. The dungeon forbid it. This was technically a whole other space that just looked like the outside, which Runar had personally confirmed. Someone made it to the end of the funhouse waited up here, while Runar jumped or flew up here, or however he got around. While they were both technically on the roof, they couldn't see each other, so this was apparently just the 'last room' of the funhouse.

  Ryan shot up.

  "The last room? Wait, so... is this..." he pushed himself up and looked around. The roof was surrounded by a fence, but you could still see the whole dungeon from here. However, though parts of the dungeon had to have burnt down and were destroyed before, that wasn't the case here in this version. Also, at some point, the area was surrounded by a thick mist, like the dungeon's regular walls, but this place was on lockdown right now, so that shouldn't be possible. In the first place, the walls were much closer. The dungeon was tiny like that.

  Immediately, Ryan got out the map pamphlet and rummaged around in the backpack for a pen. Double-checking the view from this rooftop, he marked the exact places where that mist-wall was, centring it on this particular funhouse.

  He scribbled on the map and filled out all the 'areas' with black, trying to make it look like the symbols scattered around this dungeon.

  It was just as he thought; this was still a puzzle. The whole dungeon around him, the way it generated, was part of the funhouse's final puzzle. And it gave Ryan a single last 'word'.

  The dungeon felt lonely.

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