Edge Cases

75 - Book 2: Chapter 12: Doors

Vex stared at the dungeon that Noram had led them to. "Are you sure this is it?" he couldn't help but ask.

It was just... a hole in the ground. It sloped downwards, opening up into a cave of some sort, but it didn't change the fact that it was one of the least impressive dungeon entrances Vex had ever seen and that was amongst even the low level dungeons he had visited before.

Those usually at least had a door.

"Yup," Noram said, sounding a little embarrassed. He even kicked a bit at the ground. Vex wasn't sure why he was so embarrassed it wasn't like he'd been the one to design the dungeon. "I know it doesn't look like much, but it's pretty big on the inside."

"Does this dungeon have a theme?" Derivan asked, which was probably a more practical question.

"Doors," Noram said. "The main room is just a hallway of doors. Every door inside leads somewhere different, though, and sometimes just touching a door will teleport you inside the room. That's why I didn't think too hard about opening one back when I got separated from the others. We got pushed into different doors by a trap."

"I can't believe it's door themed and it doesn't even have a door for the entrance," Vex complained, and Derivan chuckled, ruffling the frills on the back of Vex's head. The lizardkin maintained his huff for as long as he could, which was a grand total of about two seconds, before he whined. "Derivann."

"Yes?" the armor asked him, his voice teasing.

"I can't complain about things when you do that!"

"I believe complaining about things is Sev's job," Derivan said, still sounding amused. "Perhaps it would help you to know that there are mana signatures coming from the doors within?"

Vex perked up, his dismay about the entrance to the dungeon immediately forgotten. Noram snorted out a laugh.

"You're really into magic, huh?" the other lizardkin asked.

"Aren't you?" Vex asked, blinking a few times. "You're a mage."

"Yes, but actually getting your hands on spell scrolls is pretty hard if you're not apprenticed or part of one of the noble families in Elyra," Noram said with a shrug, and Vex winced a little bit. Noram didn't seem to notice. "It's hard to really get excited about magic when all the good stuff is locked away from me. I'm hoping I can learn more when I join the Guild... Maybe I'll find some cool stuff in some ruins, like you did."

Admittedly, Vex was one to get excited about ruins, as well, so he understood Noram's excitement there but this was the same sort of thing! Dungeons had secrets, too; secrets that could be harvested for more magic. He was being a little too dismissive about magic, in Vex's opinion.

"You can learn a lot from dungeons, too, not just ruins," he said. "And there are mentorship programs."

"From dungeons?" Noram looked a bit skeptical. "I don't know about that. Aren't they all about, I dunno, challenges and traps and stuff?"

"Sure," Vex said with a shrug. "But that doesn't mean there isn't anything you can learn from it. A lot of the time... Actually. Let's go in. It'll be easier to show you."

With that cue, they made their way into the dungeon. Derivan insisted on leading the way, of course, just in case.

True to Noram's word, the dungeon seemed like it was just one long hallway, with an array of different doors alternating with each other on each side. Every door was unique, though, both in mana signature and in appearance. There were the standard doors made of wood, along with heavier-looking doors made of metal. There were doors that were barely doors at all, made of straw or clumped-together grass that was barely holding itself into the shape of a door, for all that it held the appearance of one.

And some of them were distinctly traps. It was obvious from the runic imprint on the doors, but that wasn't something Noram would be able to see without the advanced version of [Mana Sight]; he would have to look at the flow of mana around it instead...

Which made this a good opportunity for teaching Derivan, too, actually. Vex flipped his own mana sight to the basic version, allowing the runic inscriptions to fade from his sight, and guided both Noram and Derivan to the first trap he spotted.

"This door's a trap," Vex said. "Do you see the way the mana's flowing around it?"

"It doesn't look that different from the other doors," Noram said, frowning.

"I am unsure," Derivan said. "There is a confluence of mana at the center of the door, like with all the other doors, but this one has... there are more streams of mana leading into it than out of it, compared to the other doors."

"Exactly!" Vex beamed, even as Noram frowned and peered more closely at the door. "Even if you can't see the runic inscription directly, you can still read how the mana flows to get an idea of what the door is doing. This one is storing more mana than it's releasing it's basically an explosive trap. If the rune gets triggered, it blows up like a shockwave."

The non-trapped doors, by contrast, usually had the same number of 'input' and 'output' streams of mana. The visual noise was enough that it had never been outright obvious to Noram, but he seemed grateful for being told how to read them; less chance of any of them triggering a trap in the future.

But with that quick lesson done...

"Can you show us to the door you mentioned?" Vex asked.

"The doors rearrange every time we come in here," Noram said, hesitating. "I can recognize it, it's pretty distinct, but... This place is a maze. It was a few corridors in, though."

Noram reached out, and after a quick glance at the flow of mana pulled open one of the glowing, white doors; it led down into another hallway. The doors, Noram quickly explained, worked like this: the white doors were doors into new corridors, and the other doors were either traps or would lead to challenge rooms of some sort. They'd never encountered a monster in the hallways themselves.

And so, for the next while, they just wandered the hallways. Vex kept track of which doors they went through, though Noram said that going backwards would always land them back at the entrance; it was more a safety measure than anything else.

He kept in contact with Sev and Misa, too. Sev told him about who he was talking to, and the strangeness that was species that he'd never seen before, the concentration of magical beings; Misa talked about the tunnel they'd found, and her mother's suspicions about Fendal being not all there.

And then they found the door.

A small part of Vex had been worried that they wouldn't find the door that opening it had triggered some condition that would erase it from the dungeon's memory, or something like that. He'd heard of similar things happening in other dungeons. But no, this was definitely the door, and Vex knew it without a shadow of a doubt before Noram even pointed it out.

Because the door had the symbol of the Ashion house on it. The symbol of his family.

It was empty of any mana signature that he could detect, though, even flipping his Mana Sight back to the advanced version; it was, as far as he could tell, magically dead.

"The door looked like this the first time I saw it, too," Noram said. "No mana to speak of. It was one of the other reasons I was so sure it was safe. And nothing seemed to happen when I opened it..."

"But something did happen," Vex said softly. "You recognize that symbol, don't you?"

"It's one of the noble houses in Elyra, I think?" Noram said with a slight frown. "I don't pay much attention to the nobles, sorry. Too stuck-up for me."

"Right," Vex said, opting not to tell Noram who he was, exactly. At least not yet. Maybe if it turned out they had to keep working with him, but that was a can of worms he didn't quite want to open.

Derivan noticed his discomfort, though, and stepped closer to him almost protectively. One hand slipped into his own, and Vex felt his face warming again; he didn't know what had come over the armor, considering how frequently he was now doing this, but it was... nice. Being near Derivan was always comforting.

He leaned in, almost subconsciously, into Derivan's presence, and Derivan didn't seem to mind at all.

"I think..." Vex paused, trying to gather his thoughts.

The door seemed like it was related directly to him. There was a small possibility that it wasn't, but there were other signs that it might be. The way the mana had acted when Derivan had tried to cast. The people Sev had spoken to...

Vex reached out for the door, and sure enough, a box appeared.

Activation of bonus room has failed. Insufficient data at this dungeon. Insufficient units of .

Safeguards failed. Rollback failed. Partial activation of bonus room A World Without A System> currently in place within the limits of region H-72.

"Noram," Vex said, and the other lizardkin perked up a bit at hearing his name. "Is there a trend to these doors? What kind of challenge rooms do they usually open up into?"

"There isn't really a pattern," Noram said cautiously. He could sense something was wrong, clearly; Vex had no doubt that his face was a little pale, and Derivan seemed to be coming to his own conclusions, from the way he was looking at the doors. "They're all... rooms, I guess? Like most of the time they're all places that doors would lead to. Except the weird ones."

There was a door a little further back that he'd noticed seemed familiar the memory came rushing back to him now. He sprinted backwards, to both Derivan and Noram's startled surprise, and they shouted as they ran to keep up with him. Vex was mostly hoping that he was wrong, because he wasn't sure what he would do if he was right.

There was a door back there that looked a little bit like the door to their room at the Sleeping Bird inn. It wasn't a trapped door, either. Vex pulled the door open

and stared at a nearly perfect replica of their room.

"The theme of this dungeon is doors," Vex said. "These doors lead to any place that a door might lead to. But when you opened that door..."

"What is it?" Noram asked, looking worried.

"It was a door to another dungeon's bonus room," Vex said. The words felt heavy; maybe heavier than they should have been, because he was now considering that all of this might be his fault instead; that bonus room had been based off of him, after all. "I think this dungeon copies doors, and the places they lead to. But it couldn't copy that bonus room completely. It just tried."

"It could not create a world of its own," Derivan said out loud. He glanced sharply back towards the door. "You are saying that the dungeon is creating an effect that is removing the influence of the system from this town."

"Pretty much," Vex said heavily.

"But everyone will get system sickness," Noram said, his face pale.

"They might not," Vex said. "Not if the room makes it so that the system never existed in the first place. Not if it makes it so that the system doesn't need to exist. It explains all the magical creatures, and the reason the magic is so upset with us; we're not from this town. Our link to the system is stronger."

"But I have access to the system, too," Noram protested, and Vex looked at him.

"Do you?" he asked.

Noram frowned. And then he frowned harder, like he was trying to call up his status screen but failing. His face went pale.

A message came in through the system, though Vex wondered if it was his imagination, or if the box seemed paler than usual.

[Guys,] Misa had sent. [You need to see this.]