Piercing through the illusion of the massive, bound dryad statue with Esmerelda carried in his arms, Deacon heard surprised, echoing shouts from his friends somewhere ahead and below him.

  The hell? Deacon thought in surprise as his eyes went wide as he realized there was no longer a floor beneath his feet after piercing through the illusion — only what looked like a sheer drop into darkness, with no footing or inertia to kick off from or use to redirect his momentum.

  However, just as he was about to form a mana ptform beneath his feet, one that could support both his weight and Esmerelda’s, a sudden, immense pull of gravity seized him.

  Deacon plummeted downward, instinctively curling his body to use as much of his mass as possible to shield Esmerelda while she remained cradled in his arms, his mind already racing through every option he had to minimize the impact that was inevitably coming.

  Less than five seconds into his fall, his body smmed into a sandstone brick surface, revealing itself to him to be a dark tunnel he fell into, with enough force that the impact reverberated through his armor and bones despite his enhanced physical attributes.

  The tunnel was barely illuminated by a green glowstick he’d tied to one of the left-side belt loops of his leggings hours earlier, just before they began activating the pressure ptes in the room they had just completed.

  While the room above had been lit by torches and braziers, he still gave the order for the Party to keep their glowsticks on their person, as he didn’t want to risk anyone getting injured if the lights were suddenly snuffed out, as they had been in the hallway.

  That kind of risk, in a room filled with pressure ptes, was just asking for disaster.

  Though right now, he was regretting that decision.

  While the impacts against his body weren’t particurly painful thanks to the protection of his armor and his physical stats being what they were, the experience was incredibly jarring. The constant flipping through darkness, combined with the harsh contrasts cast by the green fluorescence, made it more of a hindrance than any real help in seeing where he was going.

  Along with the green fluorescence scrambling his senses, his head kept striking the tunnel walls as he tumbled downward, each impact sending stars across his vision. Without a full and proper helmet on his head and just the filtration mask covering the lower half of his face that he had gotten from his uncle, there was nothing to protect his brain from being rattled around in his skull like the st piece of ice in a cup.

  Feeling Esmerelda bury her head deeper into his chest, her free left hand, the one not pinned by the princess carry, began clutching tightly at the fabric of his armor as their fall continued.

  Feeling her grip tighten, Deacon worried he wasn’t protecting her as well as he should have and twisted his body as they fell, hunching over even further to wedge himself between her and the tunnel walls so he’d take the brunt of every impact rather than letting her be tossed around like a pinball.

  “I got you, Esmerelda!” Deacon shouted, though he could barely hear his own voice over the shouts of Jass, Sam, and Bonehead tumbling ahead of him, his ears popping constantly from the rapid descent and the pressure changes that came with it.

  During their continued tumble, the voices of Sam, Jass, and Bonehead suddenly went quiet as Deacon and Esmerelda kept falling down the passage.

  “Guys?” Deacon shouted just as he registered that he could no longer hear his friends. In the same instant, the walls of the tunnel he’d been tumbling through vanished entirely, and his eyes were assaulted by bright lights that forced him to squint after so long spent in the tunnel’s dimness. He slipped into open free fall, and as he fell, the immense pull of gravity on his body abruptly disappeared.

  Forcing himself to ignore the pain assaulting his eyes and head, Deacon managed to gather his bearings and realize that he was now dropping through open air with Esmerelda still clutched in his grasp.

  His mind raced to judge the distance of the fall and whether he would be able to brace for impact properly — when both of them were suddenly enveloped in what he recognized as a Gust spell. The magic killed their downward momentum in an instant and began lowering them gently toward whatever y below.

  As he fully opened his eyes, he and Esmerelda descended calmly toward a small, circur ptform that hovered in the center of a massive, empty chamber. The darkness was so absolute that no hint of the floor below was visible, leaving only an endless void of night stretching in all directions, as though the ptform floated alone in the heart of an eternal abyss.

  On a raised, circur ptform that seemed to be suspended in the middle of a sea of absolute darkness, he saw Jass, Sam, and Bonehead already on their feet and looking retively unharmed despite the tumble they’d all just taken.

  Contrast with the other two on the ptform who were scanning their surroundings, Sam stood with his staff raised toward Deacon and Esmerelda, the one responsible for casting the Gust spell that was carrying them safely down to the ptform instead of letting them hit the ground.

  To the far west side of the ptform he was descending on, Deacon could make out what looked like a square gss case just hovering at eye level with the floating circur ptform, and inside it was something that looked like a golden neckce with a rge amber gem set in its center.

  Is that the amulet we need to retrieve? Deacon thought to himself as he got closer and closer to the ground.

  "Everyone okay?" Deacon shouted as his feet touched down gently on the ptform's surface, his voice echoing strangely in the oppressive darkness that surrounded them on all sides.

  “Nothing a painkiller wasn’t able to fix,” Sam grimaced.

  “Speak for yourself,” Bonehead grumbled as he rubbed his left shoulder. “I think I need to find myself a new shoulder.”

  Chuckling as he nded on solid ground for the first time in what felt like hours, but was probably only a few minutes, Deacon let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding before gently lowering Esmerelda from his arms onto her own two feet, supporting her weight as she took a few moments to regain her footing and bance.

  “You okay, Esme?” Deacon asked as he steadied Esmerelda.

  Instead of replying aloud, she gave him a slow nod, her gaze fixed on the floating gss case that held the supposed object of their journey, her hands wrapped around her midsection.

  Holding back a sigh, Deacon turned to give Sam a thankful nod for the save with the Gust spell, already mentally adding that he owed him a drink.

  The mencholic look on his face softened into a growing smirk as Sam blew him a kiss as he holstered his staff, clearly trying to lighten his mood. Deacon shook his head, quickly swapping out his empty quiver for the backup in his Spatial Sling Bag while scanning their surroundings to get a better sense of the room they’d nded in.

  Scanning the walls and ceiling of the room with Blood Sense being cast, Deacon detected no signs of life other than his Party members, which should have been reassuring but somehow just made him more nervous about what kind of trap or puzzle they'd tumbled into, because there was no way this was going to be straightforward.

  Turning off Blood Sense, Deacon looked around the ptform he and his Party nded on and saw that there was a raised, ceremonial-looking altar in its center that reached up to about hip height.

  Immediately, he knew it would py a key role in whatever they needed to do to progress through the room, given how it was positioned as the focal point of the ptform they’d nded on.

  Approaching the altar cautiously with the rest of his Party, Deacon saw that its basin was filled with sand, and along the outer rim of the altar’s basin were words written in Common.

  “What must be given to move forward, but cannot be recovered by turning back?” Deacon repeated aloud what he’d just read along the outer rim of the altar’s basin, his brow furrowing as he tried to make sense of the riddle he’d just read.

  "The hell?" Jass muttered as she moved closer to examine the altar to see if that would help in making sense of what she just heard and read.

  What type of bullshit is this? Deacon himself felt equally confused by what he'd just read, his mind turning over concepts and ideas without nding on anything that felt like the right answer.

  "Time?" Sam offered after a few seconds as he circled around the altar to get a better look at it from different angles while trying to make sense of his answer. "You move forward through time, and you can't go back to recover it once it's passed."

  "That makes sense," Jass said slowly, though her tone suggested she wasn't entirely convinced. "But it feels too abstract – I think it might have to be reted to something with an altar right? I mean, like, how would we give time to an altar? Just stand here and wait?"

  "Youth could work too," Bonehead added, tapping his skeletal finger against his chin. "Same concept really — you age as you move forward, can't get younger by going back. There are stories of people doing rituals of sorts, sacrificing their lifespan to gain power."

  "Or purity," Sam said with a slight grimace, clearly not thrilled about suggesting it but feeling obligated to put the option on the table. "That's something you give to move forward in... certain contexts, and definitely can't get back."

  "Please tell me this dungeon isn't asking us to—" Jass started, her face twisting in disgust at the implication.

  "I doubt it," Deacon cut in quickly, shaking his head as he stared down at the sand-filled basin. "But given how weird everything has been, I’m unsure..."

  The group fell into silence for a few moments, everyone lost in their own thoughts as they tried to puzzle out what the riddle was actually asking for, the weight of uncertainty hanging over them like a physical presence because getting this wrong might mean they'd be stuck here with no way to progress and antlions potentially flooding in behind them at any moment.

  "What about trust?" Esmerelda said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper as she spoke for the first time since they'd nded on the ptform. "You have to give trust to move forward with people, and once it's broken, you can't just go back and recover it."

  "That's... actually really good," Sam said, his eyebrows raising as he considered it. "Trust fits the wording better than most of what we've come up with, better than purity at least."

  "But so does innocence," Bonehead said after another moment of thought, the word finally clicking into pce in his mind as he worked through the logic of it. "You give up innocence as you move forward through life and experience things, and once you've seen or done something, you can't un-see it or undo it. You can't turn back and become innocent again."

  "…Innocence,” Deacon repeated to himself as he mulled over Bonehead’s words. “It does fit and go along with this whole altar thing."

  The group mulled it over for a bit longer, everyone running through their own logic and trying to think of alternative answers that might fit better than what they'd already suggested, but after several minutes of debate that went in circles, they eventually just shrugged and agreed that Innocence was probably their best bet given how well it seemed to match what the riddle was asking for.

  Standing directly in front of the basin with his arms crossed, Bonehead spoke clearly and with emphasis, "Innocence," but the altar didn't react in any way — no glowing runes appeared along its surface, no rumbling mechanism activating beneath them, no indication whatsoever that his answer had been registered or accepted by whatever magic was governing this pce.

  Confusion rippled through the group as they stared at the unresponsive altar, none of them sure what they were supposed to do now that simply speaking the answer hadn’t worked the way they’d expected.

  Sam and Deacon eventually ducked beneath the altar, searching for some kind of hidden mechanism or instructions carved into its underside, like there had been in the Huitzilopochtli Temple, that might reveal what piece of the puzzle they were missing.

  Both of them were careful enough not to touch the sand in the basin, just in case disturbing it triggered a trap or reset whatever progress they might have already made.

  Do we need to sacrifice some kind of innocence here? Deacon asked himself in confusion as his hands traced the smooth stone of the altar’s base, finding nothing useful carved into it. His mind began running through increasingly disturbing possibilities of what “giving innocence” might mean in a practical sense, and whether this dungeon was about to demand something from them that they weren’t prepared to give.

  As the party leader, a growing sense of worry settled in his mind, knowing that the responsibility of giving up that “Innocence” would fall to him.

  Esmerelda tilted her head slightly as an inaudible whisper brushed past her ear — something so faint and ephemeral that she couldn’t make out any actual words, yet compelling enough to draw her forward.

  She took a step toward the altar’s basin until she stood directly before it, her movement drawing everyone’s attention, including Sam and Deacon, who got out from beneath the altar to see what she was doing and whether she’d discovered something the rest of them had missed.

  Without saying a word or giving any indication that she understood why she was doing it, or what had prompted the action, Esmerelda pressed a single finger into the sand filling the basin. She then began to trace letters slowly and deliberately through the fine grains, her movements careful and precise as she spelled out the word “Innocence” in Common.

  The moment she finished tracing the final letter and lifted her finger from the sand, the altar began to rumble and sink into the ptform.

  As it lowered, the sand that had filled the basin vanished as if it had never existed at all. In the empty space it left behind, a palm-sized red gem was revealed.

  Esmerelda reached out and grabbed the gem before the altar could sink completely out of reach, her fingers closing around its smooth surface just in time. As she did, the circur ornate sandstone ptform beneath them let out a deep, grinding groan.

  At the same time, from the darkness below, a ring of sandstone brick rose as if lifted by invisible hands and fused seamlessly to the ptform, expanding their safe footing by several meters in every direction and giving them far more leg room to work with.

  Along with the newly risen rim that had fused to their ptform, another altar appeared on the expanded section of the circur ptform they stood on.

  Thraksius