I reached the Undercroft entrance at 8:14 AM.
The permit clerk, the sa thin man who worked every day and whose life seed to be defined by his daily grind, looked up from his notebook as I laid my D-rank tag on the counter.
"Floor 3 again?"
"Floor 3 again."
He stamped the permit without hesitation. The clerk and I had an arrangent; he didn’t ask what a D-rank with the physique of a supply runner was doing taking down Floor 3 monsters, and I didn’t tell him I was driven by rage and the wisdom of the wiki alone.
Functional relationship.
I went down.
The point about the Undercroft was that there was a logic to it if you learned it. Floor 1 was madness. It was chaos, with skitterers in every corner, inexperienced adventurers making rash decisions, stoneback beetles wandering into the main thoroughfare and causing panic. Floor 2 was quieter but more deadly. Floor 3 was serene if you ignored the fact that everything in it could murder within a couple of seconds.
I stopped caring about that part.
South passage was clear upon my arrival. I made my way down with the shortbow held in my hands, an arrow loaded but not drawn; that was sothing I’d learned how to do on the third attempt to get it done in an ergency situation. The Pattern Recognition II program analyzed everything in the background; it didn’t need to be activated manually by , it gave out all kinds of information like peripheral vision does.
Patrol timing. Ti gaps. Movent vectors.
I made my way into the south passage and got into position there.
Thornback Runner showed up at 8:31.
---
* 14 EXP — Thornback Runner (Weak Point Kill)*
---
The next one appeared about half a minute later. They would always appear in tid bursts while following this patrol pattern, so I knew when to expect it.
---
* 14 EXP — Thornback Runner (Weak Point Kill)*
---
547 EXP.
I advanced further into the passage.
What I hadn’t said to anyone, even Daren, was that floor 3 lower loop no longer felt threatening the sa way it once had. Not because it wasn’t, with a base STR 12 aning one good hit from the Ironback Crawler would be enough to bring down without using figurative language, but because I had done it enough tis that fear was now irrelevant. Calculation was king. The dungeon didn’t care about killing per se; it was simply a process of cause and effect that needed to be learned.
Almost.
I located the first Crawler near the lower loop entrance. Sixty-two feet out, good angles, room with enough headroom for the trajectory of the shot not to be an issue.
Drew. Held. Released.
---
* 55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*
---
602 EXP.
Reloaded and continued.
It’s funny how spending too long in a dungeon, isolated from society, with only one’s own mind and a wiki not entirely trusted for information can have certain side effects.
Thoughts started to form.
Vorn’s flag had been niggling away at ever since the alley. The wiki wasn’t perfect; I understood that, had known it since the wiki first started generating incomplete entries. The wiki was based on canonical ga data, and I had broken the canon badly enough that the generation algorithm was operating on empty and pure guesswork. Even Lyra’s reset had most likely made three or four entries down the line invalid.
But a flag marked as redacted was not the sa as an empty one. The forr was an indication that there were facts sowhere in the database that had been deliberately hidden. An error in the ga’s design. A private mo between developers. Or an Easter egg not intended for the player base at all.
None of which I particularly cared for.
The second Crawler was waiting in the curve. I’d co to recognize how to adjust for the curvature in the corridor — forty feet seed like fifty, and the shot always wanted to drift leftward, so you aid slightly right off center on the joint.
Drew. Adjusted. Released.
---
* 55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*
---
657 EXP.
343 EXP left.
---
CURRENT STATS
STR: 12
AGI: 17
INT: 20
Skills: Friendly Conversation / Moral Support / Observe / Evasion I / Throwing I / Fast Learner / Precision Shot II / Enemy Analysis I / Pattern Recognition II
EXP: 657/1000
Rank: D
---
I located a rest node near the midpoint of the lower loop — a carved recess in the rock face with rune magic still active, one of the special spots the dungeon designers had included for players needing thirty seconds’ worth of not moving. I leaned against the rock and accessed the wiki.
Vorn’s entry ca up.
Most of it I knew. A-minus rank. Patient. Four flags activated. Contact with Daren continuing at 128 and counting. Lyra on suspension. Kai — opposition confird. Direct confrontation completed; next steps to be determined.
I navigated to the flags page.
Flag 1: Lyra — SUSPENDED
Flag 2: Daren — ACTIVE
Flag 3: [generating]
Flag 4: [REDACTED]
Flag three was new. Or more new. Hadn’t even existed previously, as far as I could tell. Now it was at least admitting its own existence, which counted as information in much the sa way that an infection admitting its presence counts as information. Informative, certainly.
I looked down at the redacted one.
This wasn’t just random redaction. I’d done my howork by now and knew how the wiki worked — blanks were blanks, question marks ant uncertainty, generating indicated an active process. Redacted was a category.
aning if Vorn had any secret fourth flag, the ga itself wouldn’t let anyone see what it was coming.
I closed the wiki.
Waited another ten seconds.
Then I got back to work.
Third crawler down in the narrow path, twenty-two feet, low roof, the tricky angle that took by surprise when I first attempted the run. By now, I’d figured out that when dealing with low roof shots, you needed a flatter trajectory compensation, and in a twenty-two feet narrow tunnel, it always seed like ten thanks to wall psychology.
Drew low. Flat release. Joint hit, clean.
---
* 55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*
---
712 EXP.
I was about to complete the bottom loop when the wiki popped up again, even though I hadn’t opened it.
Sothing new was happening here. Never seen anything like this before.
---
WIKI — UNSOLICITED ALERT
New entry detected — generating
Category: External Variable
Tag: [NON-GA ORIGIN]
Status: Incomplete — 12%
Preview: Subject arrived Ashveil [DATE REDACTED]. Origin: [REDACTED]. Classification pending.
Warning: This entry does not match any existing ga character template.
---
I gazed upon this information far too long for anyone standing within a dungeon hallway.
Non-ga origin.
Not an NPC. Not a player character. Not Vorn, not Daren, not Lyra.
A figure which wasn’t a template of an existing ga character.
A figure which was present in Ashveil.
ntally running through the checklist, Vorn was native to the ga; Daren was native to the ga. Each and every other character I had t was tagged appropriately, Role, Rank, Relationship ters, everything as standard. Whatever was creating this entry didn’t have that kind of tagging.
Either the ga had introduced so new character class I hadn’t yet had wiki information about.
Or there was another person here, one who had gotten dragged into the ga like myself.
I stood in the hallway for six whole seconds, which is six seconds more than what’s considered acceptable in the loop, before starting off again because standing in enemy territory in the middle of a crisis of identity is a good way to beco dead and receive your next spawn point notice.
Fourth Crawler. End Chamber. Sixty feet. Clear line of sight. Done this eleven tis already.
Drew. Held two beats. Released.
---
* 55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*
---
767 EXP.
---
WIKI — ALERT UPDATE
Entry: External Variable
Generation: 19%
New data: Subject is female. Arrived [DATE REDACTED] — estimated 3 days prior to current date. Current location: Ashveil. Contact with ga characters: CONFIRD. Identity: [REDACTED].
---
Female. In Ashveil since three days ago. Already made interaction with ga characters.
Three days ago would have been two days before Lyra was reset. And only a day after Vorn had started making his narrowed window assessnts. Around the sa ti as Daren had ntioned — in his usual off-handed manner, at the Broken Crown, in how Daren ntioned things — that there was an adventurer that showed up at the guild asking about the Undercroft map layouts and already seeming to know the answers before he was done describing them.
I’d dismissed this as background noise.
But now, I revisited it in a new light.
Sobody asking questions for which they already knew the answers. Inside a ga world. Not matching any template listed in the wiki.
Only one person ca to mind, and I was staring him straight in the face.
I continued on down into the end chamber, took my bounty marker off the ground rune, and began my trip back to the surface level.
287 EXP left.
One variable, non-ga, unidentifiable sowhere in Ashveil.
And Vorn’s flagged redaction still unexplained.
There was an inkling that the coming days would be anything but peaceful for compared to the lower loop.
---
CURRENT STATS
STR: 12
AGI: 17
INT: 20
Skills: Friendly Conversation / Moral Support / Observe / Evasion I / Throwing I / Fast Learner / Precision Shot II / Enemy Analysis I / Pattern Recognition II
EXP: 767/1000
Rank: D
WIKI — ALERT UPDATE
Entry: External Variable
Generation: 31%
Status: Ongoing
Identity: [REDACTED]
Location: Ashveil — confird
Threat classification: Pending
Note: Subject displays foreknowledge outside of NPC or normal player template paraters.
---
I ca up at 11:47 AM.
The Ashveil before was indistinguishable from the usual Ashveil. The market area bustling with activity, the cloth area open, and the swinging sign above the Broken Crown Inn by the canal.
Sowhere in the midst of Ashveil, there existed another stranger.
I tightened the bow strap across my shoulder and got myself so food before figuring out what to do next because, let’s not forget, I was human too.
Then I’d figure out the rest.
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