Logan and his cohort checked their DCGs for their schedule, and of course, the Terrible Twelfth would be going last. First Marko at six a.m., which was a recipe for disaster, then Logan and Inga as soon as the simulated dungeon was cleared and reset, which generally took an hour. Then Treacle would go dead last—a sign that the gnome lord turned minotaur insisted was a bad omen. But then he sort of thought everything was doom, gloom, and bad omens by the bucketful. The days leading up to the exam were hard, and some cohorts had a hard time staying focused.
Not the Terrible Twelfth.
Marko was handling the stress relatively well. Yes, he’d been spending time with the Gelatinous Knight—drowning out his worries—but he’d also worked in the library, sketching out the dungeon for his exam. Meanwhile, Treacle spent untold hours at the World Forge, crafting gear. Logan and Inga hunkered down on strategy and cultivation. There was very little chance that Logan could advance to Rank 6 before the exam, but he certainly tried his best. Any extra bit of Apothos he could access might mean the difference between success and failure for the pair of them. Time seemed to pass in a herky-jerky fashion, both too fast and too slow all at once.
The day of their Placement Exam dawned bright and hot, turning Arborea into an oven, which Treacle also insisted was a bad omen. It only got progressively more bizarre from there. Logan had been tossing and turning all night, restlessly worrying about both his own survival and that of his teammates. Although the Placement Exams and the Winnowing were individual tests with individual results and consequences, the Terrible Twelfth had spent nearly every waking moment together. Working. Studying. Bonding. Logan felt responsible for each of them.
So, at a quarter to five, Logan headed into Marko’s room, fulling expecting to have to drag the satyr out of bed... Only to find the goat man not only awake but alert, a book spread out on a narrow wooden desk while he gently finger picked at a lyre he’d crafted.
Stranger still, Marko was sober.
The satyr seemed remarkably clearheaded—he’d skipped drinking the night before, which never happened—and excited about the exam. Over breakfast, which consisted of a loaded omelet for Marko and decaying vegetables for Logan, the satyr confessed that he and the Gelatinous Knight had actually been studying for the past month instead of drinking. Marko had been too embarrassed to ask for help. Besides, Logan and Inga were so busy he hadn’t wanted to impose, and trying to get Treacle to leave that damned forge was the next best thing to impossible—though the minotaur had helped him craft the lyre.
Still, GK was rather accomplished so long as he was sober, and Marko felt like he actually had a decent chance to pass.
Unfortunately, Marko’s good attitude had vanished when he stepped out of the Tartarucha Cells several hours later. The man looked deeply shaken, his hair wild, his eyes strangely hollow. He mumbled a few vague words to Logan and the others before taking off to Vralkag. He left what remained of his broken lyre lying on the floor. The tests were proctored by the professors, so students couldn’t watch what happened. Since Marko wasn’t talking, there was no way for them to know what had gone down inside his test.
Logan wanted more than anything to chase his friend down and demand some answers, but he had less than forty minutes before his own exam began, and he couldn’t risk taking off for Vralkag. Everything was riding on this, and Inga was depending on him. He wanted to help Marko, but not at the expense of his other friends. After sharing a few quick words with Treacle, the minotaur lumbered up the Stairwell of True Seeing in pursuit of the satyr. His own exam wouldn’t start until around 8 p.m., so he had the time.
Logan’s thoughts were still lingering on Marko when Professor Rockheart appeared like an avenging specter, ushering them into the Tartarucha Cells with a sneer.
Doing some simple deep breathing techniques, Logan cleared his thoughts, banished his worries, and became fully present in the moment.
They had to jump in and get to work.
Logan and Inga were used to rushing through their hour each Monday night, barely having enough time for Brandybutter to run through their creation. Six hours of prep time seemed positively stress-free by comparison. But they had far more to do this time around, Logan reminded himself as they worked. They weren’t going up against a single dungeoneer, but five, all of them far more powerful than anything they’d faced before. Thankfully, he and Inga had already workshopped this scenario a hundred times over and knew exactly what to do. At this point, it was just grit and elbow grease.
After assuming control of the simulator, Inga broke off to carefully build the inner sanctum, while Logan created the antechamber that had killed Sir Rosencrantz Brandybutter so many times before. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was an adage Logan still adhered to. From there, they added a minion room, a funnel with a kill room, and a nonstandard trap room, which was nearly an exact copy of the swiveling walls chamber that they’d stumbled into in the Slaughter Pits. Logan also added a trapdoor in the ceiling, which would send three giant centipedes cascading down into the room if the raiders weren’t killed by the spiked walls or the grenade mushrooms.
While Logan and Inga had improved drastically over the past months, they still didn’t have a ton of Apothos to play with. They both had many brilliant ideas, but they didn’t have the space or resources to craft them all. Every creation, every crafted item, took precious energy from their gem cores.
So, they kept the design simple but efficient, as all good tools were. Sure, it would’ve been nice to have something a bit more elaborate, but a meat cleaver did its job well enough even if it wasn’t particularly fancy.
They positioned the entrance at the top of a corkscrew staircase that would dump interlopers into a hallway that split off to the left and right—that was Inga’s idea. She wanted to see if they could split the party. Logan was against it. But partnerships were about both teamwork and compromises. She wanted the T-juncture, so he conceded.
The hallway to the right led to a small room with an enticing lure set out in the open. A gleaming silver sword. The sword wasn’t magical—neither he nor Inga had managed to inscribe runes yet—but it was an Exogenous manifestation that would fetch a pretty penny. The only problem was, there was an artfully concealed trapdoor, which would send the hapless heroes plummeting into a kill room full of gleaming spears of spun moon glass sharper than any scalpel. However, if they somehow survived the fall, there was a narrow corridor that led to the antechamber with the Mucal-Film floor and the two mushroom-filled alcoves on either side of the short hallway that connected to their inner sanctum.
The sanctum itself was filled with Inga’s Spike Flies and Logan’s Spore Wargs, all tucked away within a veritable forest of fungal growth, which included Ghoul’s Snare and Blister Wart. Logan didn’t have the juice for that forest, but Inga did, and she willingly donated the energy.
Placing the majority of their minions in the inner sanctum was a risk, but it was also something the dungeoneers wouldn’t expect. Their presence not only protected the room, but if things went south, they could also summon the mushroom dogs and flies to help in the antechamber. They could even flood the narrow corridor that led to the kill room with their minions.
Logan was hoping the dungeoneers would take the left hallway, which connected to another staircase. That led to a snaking hallway filled with blind corners, switchbacks, and the conveniently placed swivel-wall trap room. Eventually, the hallway doubled back, through the minion room, then around to the front end of the antechamber. In essence, they had five rooms, including the sanctum, which wasn’t that many. What they lacked in space, they made up for in triggers, traps, and minions. And given that Inga was Inga, they had contingency plans for their contingency plans.