World Keeper

Chapter 997: Maze Madness

Within the Admin Room, Lifre emerged in the living room with a sullen expression. She was just looking forward to starting a grand new adventure, and she discovered that her first obstacle is a complete roadblock?! According to Petra’s estimation, they could have thousands of people all working together to try and create portals to the next floor, but there was every chance that it would take decades to just happen to get the gate that they wanted?

How would that even work with planning the locations for Gate’s Rise and Gate’s Rest on that floor? Since everywhere could be considered a gate, what would they have to do? When Lifre looked around, she saw Aurivy sitting on the couch. She ran over, jumping to lay across Aurivy’s lap while her arms and legs flail about. “Rivy! The newest floor of Fyor was mean to me! Can you go beat it up?!”

Aurivy yelped, startled by the sudden slime girl flopped across her lap. “The… floor was mean to you?” She blinked in confusion, grabbing the remote for the TV. When she flipped the channel, it brought up a map of the sixtieth floor, zoomed out. “Oh… wow.”

Lifre turned her head to look, pouting. “See?! I wanted to go have a fun adventure, and then that happened! Beat it up for me, Rivy!” She pleaded, looking wide-eyed at the halfling goddess.

The sixtieth floor wasn’t entirely covered by the black stone maze. In fact, only eighty percent of the floor was covered, with the remaining twenty percent being centered around the mana pillar. Sadly, it didn’t look like the gate heading up existed within this twenty percent.

Aurivy simply chuckled. “You know I can’t beat up a floor of Fyor, Lifre. Still, this is surprising…” She flipped back through recent history, reviewing the footage of their experiments. “And concerning…”

“Right?!” Lifre huffed indignantly. “Can you pass a message to Thelsa, then? Petra said that if she holds the gate open and lets someone through, Petra can find them through their shadow connection.”

Aurivy nodded her head, observing the map. “Yeah… and it looks like there’s only one path that leads to the ‘exit’ of the maze. You’ll have to either get lucky to find it, or open a gate on the outer wall.” As she said that, she was already transmitting the message to Thelsa, as requested.

“Well… are there any monsters that we need to worry about? Petra and I didn’t really see anything, but we weren’t there long.”

When Aurivy heard that question, she ran a search, before shaking her head. “I’m not seeing any signs of life on the entire floor. Since anything this high up would have to be an energy-based lifeform, I’d guess that the black stone walls prevented the energy from condensing enough to form any kind of life.”

“There’s not even a boss monster to fight…” Lifre groaned, her limbs sagging onto the couch and starting to liquify. “But I need an adventure!”

Aurivy simply rolled her eyes, a playful smirk at the corner of her lips. However, a moment later, her eyes widened. “Give me a minute… I’m going to try to make something for you.”

Lifre turned over, looking up at Aurivy with wide, blinking eyes. She didn’t know what to expect, and just saw a look of contemplation on Aurivy’s face. A few moments later, the scene on the television changed, showing a blue sphere resting on the ground in one of the many halls of the mazy. “What’s that? The level sphere? I mean, we were going to look for that on our own, anyways…”

Aurivy snickered mischievously. “No… this is different. It’s something special I just bought for the world. Once you put this in the central spire, you’ll unlock the ‘Fast Travel’ option for the world. Anyone will be able to open a gate from any black stone wall to any other black stone wall that they’ve visited in the past.”

Lifre blinked again. “So… kind of like your priests?”

However, the halfling goddess quickly denied that. “My priests aren’t limited to only using the gates as their destination. That’s something that I want to keep just for them. This is an add-on to the system rules for Fyor. But, it should help you navigate the maze more easily. Besides… although there aren’t any monsters, there are other things to find on this floor.”

Lifre immediately perked up, flipping herself over to sit upright in Aurivy’s lap. “Can I have it, pretty please? I’ll write a special romance novel just for you and Julia!”

Aurivy had the decency to flush slightly. “I was planning to give it to you, regardless. I’m sending it to Petra’s location now, and Thelsa should be on her way.”

“Yay! Thanks, Rivy! You’re the best!” Lifre lunged forward, wrapping her arms around Aurivy and rubbing their heads together. Afterwards, she jumped to her feet to return to Fyor, where she found Petra looking at the blue crystal orb in confusion.

“Aurivy brought the level sphere to us already? I guess she doesn’t want us to explore yet?” Petra asked with a faint sigh. “We’ll need to find a way to keep the gates open permanently. Otherwise, I guess we’ll just have to write off this floor once we get a priest to the next one.”

“Nope!” Lifre beamed, reaching down to pick up the orb. “This is… fast travel!” After saying so, she explained the effects of the orb that Aurivy had created, causing Petra’s eyes to widen. Of course, a look of contemplation appeared on her face a moment later.

“That’ll make it easier to move around, and also make getting in and out of the Shadow Guilds easier.” Lifre tilted her head at Petra’s words.

“Are people already using the Shadow Guilds again?” She asked in confusion. She though that it would take at least fifty years before people began to rely on those spaces after the previous conflict.

“Not as much as they used to, but they have come to the conclusion that it was an isolated event. For the moment, they’re unwilling to put their most sensitive materials inside, but will keep a small branch open. Right now, they’re more like black markets than anything else.”

“Ahh… either way! This will let us explore the maze as much as we want, and we’ll never need to worry about not being able to get back home!” Lifre grinned happily, hugging the sphere against her chest.

Petra simply chuckled, glancing around. “Right, but we’ll need to be careful. We don’t want to draw too much attention from anything that could be watching us.” She still remembered the crystal maze, where a native race was manipulating the maze to harm them.

“Oh, that’s not a problem! She said that there’s no life on this floor. Something about the energy being disrupted by the walls. But there are other things! That means there has to be treasure! Special materials that even got her attention!”

Petra blinked in confusion, slowly nodding her head. A second later, she glanced to the side. “Sora’s here. Let’s go. We’ll come back after we turn that over to the central floor.” As soon as she said that, her shadow reached up to wrap around herself and Lifre, transporting them across the floor to appear before the dark-haired lightning magus, Sora Sparks.

“Hey, Sora!” Lifre waved a hand, Sora chuckling and returning the wave.

“We’re here to break you kids out. Come on, let’s not wait to get trapped again.” After Sora said that, she let the two hop back through the gate, Sora herself passing through a moment later. 

I sat at my desk, watching the terminal flash with different windows. Tsubaki had established a connection for the Head of Research to work with the Deckan researchers, but I still made sure that she included a way to monitor that connection. We couldn’t have him trying anything harmful behind our backs. Although both Terra and Tsubaki had taken steps to ‘deter’ him, it wouldn’t surprise me if he came up with a loophole that allowed him to survive.

Thankfully, for the moment, he only appeared to be submitting schematics for a void barrier prototype after studying the existing technology. As I was looking through that, I felt Aurivy speak up in the back of my mind. Hey, Dale! Two things!

What’s up? I blinked, sitting back in my chair to focus on my conversation with Aurivy. If she was getting in touch with me right now, there was probably something big going on.

First off, did you get any kind of notification a minute ago? I bought a plug-in for Fyor, and wanted to see if you’d be alerted.

When she said that, I thought about it for a second before shaking my head. No notification here. Everything good?

Yup! Just a fast travel system, nothing major. I’ll have Ashley run a thorough debug of Fyor’s system here soon, just to make sure that the plug-in didn’t mess anything up. Other thing! There’s a really cool material on the new floor of Fyor that Lifre found.

I couldn’t help arching a brow when I heard that. What’s the material?

According to the system identification… Osmosis Stone. It can adapt to and accept the properties of nearby materials. We’ll need to test how it works, but right now… it’s surrounded by black stone walls.

My eyes went wide at that implication. Those walls were the most durable material in the world. In fact, it was to the degree that the system labeled them as indestructible and impervious to any energy. However… I calmed down after a few moments. If they obtained the full properties of the black stone walls, we won’t be able to forge them into anything. We’ll be lucky if we can even mine out a few chunks.

Well… I’ve got Lifre on the job. She should be able to get results sooner or later. Though, we won’t be able to reach the sixty-first floor for quite a while.

I arched my brow when I heard that. Admittedly, we had been making fantastic progress. But, if Aurivy was saying that, there must be some major obstacle. When I asked, she explained the layout of the floor to me, and I let out a long sigh. Sure enough, there was painfully little that could be done to resolve this situation, aside from waiting for them to luckily hit the jackpot.

I got it. Let me know if they get lucky. At the very least, it sounds like the floor is safe, once the new system is installed.

That’s right! Aurivy agreed readily. The only real problem is the level of gravity, but we have ways of dealing with that. The total circumference of the floor is nearly a lightyear, so that’s a lot of space that we can safely inhabit, once the gravity wards are up.

I let out a soft sigh, nodding my head. At the very least, this was additional space that we could evacuate people to, if it looks like we can’t hold out for the invasion. Especially given that the walls were significant enough to block out void travel. Though… that also meant that it would block out other means of void portals, such as network cables or the void core powering Olympus. For the network cables, they would need permanently active gates, but there was simply no way around the fact that Olympus wouldn’t be able to exist on the floor.

I thanked Aurivy for the update, and reminded her to first send any new plug-ins for her world through Ashley. In order to make it easier, I expanded everyone’s territory to include Ashley’s testbed world. That way, there was less of a risk of new systems causing a clash that could potentially crash the entire world. That would be bad. It would be very, very bad.