Running was exhausting, especially when it came at the end of an already very long day of walking. It was doubly tiring for Asadel because this particular chase came with a significant shortage of hitting things with his sword. Instead, he was carting around pounds and pounds of sword and armor over a dumb wasteland with an always-on sun. It wasn’t fun, but he had no choice. Killing the demon lord was the only way out.

At first, he kept up just fine. His high DEX meant that his baseline running speed was faster than the demon lord’s, except that the demon lord never seemed to have to stop running. Asadel did. VIT only did so much to stop the burning in his legs, and he’d periodically have to give up some ground to stop and let vitality clear the lactic acid from his quads before he continued.

Even so, he would have been gaining ground except for the evil one’s dash skill. At first, his own dash skill and speed were enough to slowly close the gap between them. Later on, he was enraged to find that the demon lord was just toying with him. The demon lord kept squeezing more and more distance out of his dash skill as time went on. Asadel suspected that the demon lord could actually get away any time he wanted to.

Why? Why let me keep following him?

Either the demon lord was strong enough to kill him, in which case he should have done it already, or he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t, why wasn’t he getting away? There was plenty of wasteland to disappear into. It didn’t make sense, and Asadel didn’t like puzzles. Even if he did, there was only one way off this planet and on to his new future, and that was slaughtering the bad guy.

He kept running.

“Matt, this is a bad idea. We should just keep going. We can start again somewhere else. You don’t need to fight.”

Matt and Lucy made record time running back to the bunker.

It turned out that the secret to leveling Matt’s dash skill was to use it as intended, fleeing from overpowered foes with Matt’s life on the line. But even though the dash became more effective, Matt was still losing ground. His attacker was just too fast.

What saved Matt were the sheer amount of breaks that the other reincarnator took. Every time he got close enough, he’d stop, rub his legs, and watch as Matt sped away. Matt wasn’t sure, but he strongly suspected that his attacker’s VIT was higher than his own. Yet, there was something different. Matt could keep running, the new guy should have also been able to keep running. But he didn’t.

Matt’s legs hurt. They had gone from being strained to numbness to flares of pain. But it wasn’t like the pain of getting them bitten off, or broken, or chewed on. He still had to stop and rest a few times, but nowhere near as frequent as the armored monster who was chasing him. He ran as hard and as fast as he could, dealt with the burning, and used Survivor’s Dash to leverage his STAM bar. Eventually, this paid dividends. He slowly reached a point where he not only kept ahead of the swordsman, but could increase the distance between them if he wanted to. It gave him time to think.

“It’s just some stupid project I did, Matt. It’s not worth staking your life on. We can run.”

It hurt Matt to see Lucy frantic. Most of the time, she was wearing her tough-girl game face. It didn’t matter that they both knew it was fake. Matt was okay with it. It was how she felt safe. He got that. As often as he could, he made sure that it only slipped because she was happy. This wasn’t that. This was some asshole coming into their lives and making her worry.

It was true, they could run, at least for a while. But they weren’t going to. Lucy was visibly suppressing little holographic tears, and that didn’t make Matt scared. That made him angry.

“Lucy. Listen. Yeah, we could run. But we might have to run forever. We have no idea what the system gave him. He might have unlimited food. We don’t. He might be able to do that gold glow thing again and catch up. We don’t know. We can’t make that bet.”

“We can hide in a dungeon!”

“We could, but can you guarantee he couldn’t just follow us in there? Some of the dungeons are small, Lucy. They have other problems in them too. There’s no predicting how that might pan out.”

In the last few hours, Matt had poured every saved up resource he had into getting as far ahead of Captain Stabby as he could, knowing he’d need a few minutes to get everything ready. As he ran, he clued Lucy in on his plan as best he could.

“Even if we couldn’t, you know what? I want to use your room, Lucy. It’s insane. It’s incredibly dumb. It’s Looney Tunes bullshit, and you know what? I love it. It’s going to work. If it doesn’t, we can figure something else out.”

“Okay, Matt. If you say so.” Lucy tried valiantly to pull herself together. It mostly worked.

“I do. It’s going to be okay, I promise,” Matt said between breaths.

Matt had finished most of his preparations during the conversation with Lucy. Previously, when he was excavating the bunker, he had dug a trench around the building. Now, he poked his head out of the trench and looked back in the direction of the garden, where armor-guy was rapidly approaching. He climbed out of the trench. There wasn’t much time now, and the last thing he wanted was his enemy approaching at a leisurely, calm pace. He drew his Survivor’s knife and set himself into a fighting stance, taking swipes at the air, and trying his best to look like he had nothing planned.

It worked. Armor-guy had been jogging along at a good pace. Now, he sprinted. Matt waited patiently as he approached, looking as menacing as he could. The guy pulled his massive sword from his back, gripping the handle with both hands over his shoulder, ready for another one of his massive swings. Matt gulped back a very recent memory of the giant blade swishing through the air inches from his head. He stood on the massive berm of dirt he had produced around the entire bunker during the previous excavation, and waited.

The new reincarnator had to climb the hill to reach to Matt, but he arrived in record time. With one foot planted ahead of him, the new guy skidded towards Matt as he swung.

Matt attempted to parry with his knife, a task made impossible as the bigger sword absolutely shattered the blade and jerked his knife clean out of his hand, deviating just enough in trajectory to miss Matt’s neck. The sword immediately came around for another blow, glowing an angry orange color as it traveled towards him.

Rather than sit there and get cut in half, Matt leaped back, dropping into the trench in front of the bunker’s door. Just as planned, his foe dropped into the trench directly after him. Matt was counting on that.

He spent the last few minutes digging out a cavity in the trench’s wall. He didn’t have enough time to dig as deep as he would have liked, but it was enough to get a running start of a couple of steps. Carrying the biggest rock he could lift, Matt bashed into his enemy’s back, pushing him into the doorway.

Lucy’s death room was built on a couple of key rules.

The first was that the first traps should be the weakest traps the labyrinth had to offer. If whatever got into the room wasn’t a real threat, they wanted to take care of it quickly with the first few traps. For anything bigger and stronger, the hope was that the weak traps would create a false sense of security, one that later traps would exploit.

As Asadel entered the doorway, his foot caught the first tripwire and sprung those traps. These were relatively simple wood-spiked whip traps, buried in the shallow dirt trenches outside the door. It took forever to set them up at just the right angle, but once the trap was tripped, they came out of the ground at an angle leading directly to the back of a foe’s legs. They barely had enough juice to punch through Asadel’s skin, but the surprise was enough to make him reflexively jerk forward, leading him into the second of Lucy’s Rules for the Complete Trap Room.

The second rule relied on the assumption that anything strong enough to need the next traps was also probably strong enough to make a mess of the room’s infrastructure and traps. It was important that they didn’t get the chance.

As Asadel moved into the room from the first trap, he stepped onto a section of shelf that was broken off from one of the bunker’s original shelving units and laid on the floor. It was raised only slightly by a round stick in the middle, sitting between it and the floor like a teeter-totter axis. Stepping on it threw Asadel off-balance. More importantly, it sprung something that Lucy affectionately referred to as the pinball traps.

During their trap room resource dungeon run, Matt had almost passed on one of the loot items. But Lucy swore up and down that she needed it, and Matt was happy to get it for her.

Trap Springs

These are powerful steel springs for traps. Each spring comes with a clip that barely holds the springs closed when compressed. Use your imagination on how that might be useful.

They experimented with whole walls made of spikes, but eventually opted for the much easier big-rocks-on-springs option, which Asadel now experienced firsthand on the side of his face and hip.

The combination of bad footing and rock impacts sustained a long stumble to his left, where he engaged with a new trap type: the spring step. These were, again, simple shelf sections supported by the floor on one end and springs on the other. As Asadel stepped on the first shelf, it shook loose the spring clips, which pushed the step up and drove Asadel forward, where he met with the second and third spring steps, building momentum all the while.

Lucy’s third rule was that potential was meant to be spent. If someone was off-balance, she said, that should be for something. In this case, it was for letting Asadel use his own momentum to run flat-out into a wall made of trap spikes, letting them do whatever damage they could.

Lucy’s fourth rule was that physical balance was not the only balance you can take away. When Asadel hit the spike wall, it hurt him slightly, but also allowed him to regain his footing for the first time. He could have left the same way he came, but Lucy knew he wouldn’t. She correctly predicted he’d be too busy figuring out what that pinging noise was.

Crashing into the spike wall, Asadel also loosened a carefully balanced stone, sending it careening into a series of ramps made out of shelf units. Eventually, it’d reach the floor, right around the time when Asadel had cleared himself from the spike wall. Dropping to the ground, it triggered a trip wire for Matt’s personal favorite from among the new traps: the hammer whip.

The hammer whip combined various branches and trap poles with one goal in mind: to hit an enemy with a big rock as hard as possible. This one was set to release in an upper-cut vertical trajectory, which resulted in a hard bash to the side of Asadel’s knee, sending him careening into a new section of hallway.

He was tripping plenty of wires as he did. Every stumbling step represented a new chance to regain balance, before being spoiled by a series of smaller hammer whip traps. That momentum built up, resulting in a sort of full-sprint stumble as Asadel ran into one last hammer trap, this one coming from the other direction and slamming directly into Asadel’s chest, badly bruising him but finally allowing him to regain his balance.

Asadel was not critically injured. He belonged to a high VIT, armored Combat class, and though all these traps hurt, they weren’t enough to actually put him in real, lethal danger. By design, he was meant to weather bigger, meaner hits than the traps were currently dealing, even if each one had shaved off a significant amount of HP.

That led into Lucy’s fifth and sixth rules: anyone can get rattled by people trying to kill them, and anticipation of danger is a danger all its own.

Asadel now looked to his right at what appeared to be a perfectly clear hallway. There were no shelf sections on the floor. There were no tripwires. It was to all appearances a perfectly safe thoroughfare back to the door, which he could clearly see from this third, return-direction hallway back to his starting point.

Facing a choice between apparent safety and cutting his way back through multiple hallways of sprung traps, he opted to walk through the apparent safety. His first step failed to trigger any traps. So did his second. Eventually, he made it entirely down the hallway, to the pinball trap adjacent to the door. Nothing had happened, but each step had been a kind of stressful agony. Lucy’s anticipation-building had done a kind of damage all its own.

Lucy’s seventh rule of trap rooms was, Matt argued, not just a rule of trap rooms but a rule of life in general, however little it might come up.

It stated, clearly, that nobody thinks about what’s happening outside a trap room while they are in it. By the time they get through a loop of wacky dangers and see the light from the door, the door is the only thing on their mind. They move towards it instinctively, never suspecting you’ve been at work the whole time.

More succinctly, Matt’s interpretation read, “Nobody expects you to drag a big catapult made out of sticks, trap poles, and your only cooking pot to the door while they’re in the trap room and for you to load it with a basketball-sized rock.”

Matt argued that his version of rule number seven could have better grammar, but was successfully outplayed by Lucy’s “it’s funnier this way” counterargument. He further argued that they had no idea how catapults worked, and that it would be impossible to aim it.

Lucy had pointed out that big rocks don’t need to be aimed, as long as they pack enough energy and the hallways they’re launched down are narrow and indestructible enough. This turned out to be true enough, as the rock whipped off the ceiling and a side wall before bashing into Asadel’s right leg, flipping him into the air and pushing him back down into the bunker before he crashed into the ground.

As fun as all these rules were, Matt’s favorite of all was the last. She was almost bursting with excitement when she had told him just a few days before.

“Wait, another rule? These are taking like a day apiece. It’s not that I’m not enjoying this, but we do have to water the plants eventually.”

“Don’t worry. This one is zero work. I promise.”

“Fine. Lay it on me.”

“Get this: Lucy’s eighth rule of trap rooms is … we don’t call it a trap room because it’s full of traps.”

Lying on the floor, Asadel was suddenly filled with the deepest, most profound rage he had ever felt. He no longer cared about the mission or the rewards. In that moment, all he cared about was stabbing his sword directly into the demon lord’s eyeball and twisting until it popped out of the back of his smug, ugly skull.

His face red with pure, unadulterated anger, he rose to his feet. Just in time to see Matt finish closing the bunker’s door.