Dungeon Runner (Book 1 and 2)

Stepping Up, Chapter 99

Tibs added notes to the paper regarding the sequence of triggers that had led to the boar's crest. The next team would have to verify his work.

As with the lion crest, this one was a puzzle; also a sliding square puzzle. But unlike the other, instead of moving one square at a time, using the empty space, he needed to slide a line in its entirety. The square at the edge vanished into it as he slid it and reappeared on the other side.

"How does it do that?" Jackal asked.

"Essence," Khumdar replied in his usual casual tone.

Tibs felt the essence as he pushed a column down. He couldn't tell all of them, but it had the same overall sense of the doorways as the square moved through it. Tandy didn't know how Sto could use the essence in this way. She'd asked her teacher, but if he knew, he wasn't telling her.

Once he set aside the question of how it happened, moving the square to reform the crest was straightforward. Just like with the lion, the closer to finishing he was, the tougher it became, but this time he wasn't stuck at accomplishing it without undoing the previous work. All he needed to do was find the sequence of moves which gave the appearance of chaos, while actually ending with the tiles he wanted in their proper place.

The last column slid into place, completing the boar crest. Something clicked, and the door slid down with a groan of stone against stone.

The room consisted of a grid made of one and eight square tiles in each direction, large enough for one person to stand on it. It made them roughly half the size of the ones in the lion room.

Instead of lying flat on the ground, they were at various heights, only a few level were with the floor, some pressed against the ceiling, and most somewhere between, but with the gap in height large enough that they would be difficult to leaped.

Gerald's notes on the room told him the sides were too sheer and hard to be climbed, even with tools, and that the columns' height changed each time someone stepped onto one, but his team hadn't been able to work out the pattern governing the changes. On the other side was a lever which, unless Ganny changed how things went, would turn the room 'off'. So if they could get one person to the other side, they'd won.

The door was wide enough he had four tiles to pick from, but two were higher than the top of the door, and one was too close to it for him to be willing to risk it. Gerald had told him the columns moved the moment a person's weight was added, and not always down. With that one, if it went up, he wouldn't have the time to get fully on. The column also didn't go down to where they had started when the person let go. That information also told him all four started near the floor, so the room didn't reset identically for the next team.

Tibs leaped and grabbed the edge of the tile and hurried to climb on it even as it lowered. Half his height from the floor, it clicked and stopped, while the one next to it kept moving until it was level with the ground, and the one on his left move up past the top of the door. Within the room, more columns moved up and down until it was a new landscape of heights.

Tibs sat and looked at his friends. "And that's the puzzle for this room. Anytime one of us steps onto a tile, it, and others, will change in response.

"So you move around until you're stuck," Jackal said, "then one of us goes in until it opens up for you again."

"It can't be that simply," Carina said, then closed her eyes. "The room is square, and eighteen tiles twice is.... Three hundred and twenty-four."

"Eighteen twice is thirty-six," Jackal said.

"It's not that kind of twice," she replied. "It's twice because they're in both directions."

"And this is why I leave numbers to the sorcerer," the fighter said.