“It looks like we can wait as long as we like for this one. What do you think it’ll be?” Serenity looked at the others. Roy looked clueless.

“I want it to be more wisp-sparkle-things!” Mandy volunteered.

How old was Mandy? She was bright, but painfully young.

He had to repeat himself in Bridge for Raz, but when he did, Raz shrugged. “I’m expecting a magic puzzle like the last set. I’m not sure what the others are for, but the last one’s clearly the most important. Roy even had to repeat it. I’ve never seen a dungeon like this before. Aki-” Raz stopped. “We can talk later.” Raz was looking directly at Roy when he said that.

Serenity knew Roy couldn’t understand Bridge, but even Serenity could pick up on a hint that broad. There was something Raz wanted to talk about that he didn’t want to say in front of Roy, whether or not Roy could understand him.

When everyone pressed the Ready button, the screens changed to show the inside of the subway car. Serenity’s had a spot pulsing at the front of the car, Raz and Mandy were being sent to the sides, and Roy’s was at the rear. They spread out; when they reached their positions, they could see a circle etched into the subway car’s wall where the spot on the tablet was; on the seat in front of each circle was a dry-erase marker.

Serenity laughed when he saw his marker. It was simply such a mundane thing to find in a dungeon!

Serenity looked back it his tablet; it’d changed back to the same basic firestarting rune as the last Magic trial, but this time there was a circle around it.

Serenity heard Raz snort. “Strange dungeon. It’s making us do things in steps?”

“You got the firestarting rune again, too?” Serenity looked over at Raz.

Raz had one hand in that pouch again, while the other held the marker. His tablet sat on the seat next to him where he could look over at it, but it wasn’t particularly well-placed; there simply wasn’t a great place to set it down. “Is that what it does? Yeah, it’s the same one.”

It was worth asking the others; since two of them had it, it seemed likely they all did. How could Roy possibly manage it? Maybe they’d be able to get by with three and have to kill another wisp or something? “Mandy, Roy, did you get that rune?”

Mandy’s “Yep!” was faster than Roy’s “No, it’s just a dot.”

“Like the first puzzle?” Why would the dungeon give Roy something simpler? He’d been managing something more complex than that on previous puzzles.

“Yeah. Should I be glad it’s easy or annoyed at the insult?” Serenity could hear the squeaking of a marker as Roy marked a dot in the center of his circle. “Hey, I pushed magic into it, why didn’t it do anything? Nothing changed on the tablet, either.”

Serenity looked down at his tablet. The area that showed others’ completion didn’t have anything in it. He wasn’t sure what needed to happen, so he quickly sketched the rune.

Serenity sighed a little. He had to hope he’d gotten it right; he couldn’t see the lines left by the marker. He’d drawn enough of them that he’d probably done okay; it wasn’t a hard rune, after all. Serenity ran mana into it to see what would happen. He couldn’t see anything happening on the wall, but on the tablet his name in the Completion section changed from white to green.

It didn’t have the checkmark it’d had on previous puzzles and when he stopped flowing mana into it, his name went back to white.

If he were designing the UI, that would mean something. “I bet we all have to do it at the same time. Roy, can you push magic into yours and hold it there?”

“I can try.”

Serenity watched the tablet and saw that “try” was the right word; Roy’s name turned green for a few seconds before he lost it. Serenity could hold his rune active for as long as his mana held out, but Roy definitely couldn’t. Come to think of it, Serenity knew he had plenty of mana left and Raz was probably also fine since he was a mage-type build, but Mandy was just a child and Roy was definitely a physical build. “Roy, Mandy, how’s your mana holding up?”

Roy took a moment to pull up the screen. “Oof. I only have ten left.”

“Mandy? Did you get the rune drawn?” Serenity turned to Mandy only to find her sitting in the middle of the subway car throwing sparkles at Raz’s back. Raz either hadn’t noticed or was ignoring her. “Mandy?”

“Aah!” Mandy jumped at his voice then snatched up the marker and her tablet from the floor. “Um oh yeah uh…” She started drawing on the wall. Serenity shook his head. He supposed he was expecting too much out of a kid. At least she’d turned back to what she was supposed to be doing when she knew someone was checking on her.

“My name turns green when I put mana into the design. I guess that means we need to do them all at the same time?” Raz’s question reminded Serenity that he’d forgotten to tell Raz what he’d found out.

“Yeah, that’s what it looks like. How’s your mana doing?”

“I’m still above half, I’ll be good as long as I don’t have to hold it for too long.” It was clear Raz had done some sort of group spell before; he was answering Serenity’s questions as fast as he could ask them.

“Simple plan then. I’ll start, then tell you to start, then have Mandy trigger. Once she’s ready I’ll have Roy hit his. He can’t hold it long enough for Mandy to trace hers or I’d do it the other way.” It was a basic plan, but it didn’t need to be complex.

It was a good thing Serenity had planned to have Raz and himself hold the pattern; they needed the time.

Mandy had more issues with her rune than they’d expected. Her name turned red instead of green the first time she tried it, and Serenity had to ask Raz to look at it; she’d drawn the symbol wrong. Eventually, Raz drew it for her and had her provide the power.

That worked.

Once that snag was taken care of, it took a couple more tries to get Roy to trigger his while Mandy was still holding hers; it turned out that Mandy couldn’t just maintain the rune the way Raz and Serenity could, so Roy had to trigger his dot at the moment she completed the rune. It was tricky, but on the fifth try it worked.

The tablets all flashed a message.

CHALLENGE COMPLETED!

FINAL TASK IN 0:39

Weakness: Fire

Sustaining Fire Runes

The three firestarting runes glowed with heat, even after Mandy, Raz, and Serenity stopped feeding them mana. Serenity had the feeling the next challenge was supposed to be a monster that could be defeated easily by herding it next to one of the runes.

He was tired of waiting, so he pulled out his naginata and charged it with Essence Strike and his Plasma affinity. When the timer hit 0, a wisp the height of the subway car appeared. Serenity simply poked it with his naginata.

The wisp was clearly not prepared for a Plasma affinity. There was a momentary hiss like a kettle and the wisp evaporated.

“You could have done that the whole time?” Roy looked at Serenity, upset. “Those things stung when I punched them!”

Serenity put his naginata back on his Quick Belt and stared at Roy. “Mandy could have used her sparkles spell on the small ones, like she did on the first one. How is me hitting it with a weapon different? You needed the practice, I didn’t.” Serenity didn’t understand people sometimes.

“Then - why’d you kill this one? Shouldn’t you have made me punch it too?” Roy clearly didn’t want to give up.

Serenity shrugged. “The others didn’t delay us when you took care of them. You’d probably have had to herd this one into one of the three fire runes. That’s not the primary reason, though. I’m ready to be done with this dungeon. Hm, shouldn’t there be rewards?”

Mentioning rewards was usually a good way to get people to think about something else.

Serenity looked back at his tablet.

DUNGEON COMPLETE

Rewards (Serenity): 1 Dry-Erase Marker with Mana-Compatible Ink

Rewards (Raz): 1 Fire-Starting Rune sheet (single use)

Rewards (Mandy): 1 Fire-Starting Rune sheet (single use)

Rewards (Roy): 10 Manaburn sheets (single use)

Serenity’s dry-erase marker was sitting on top of the tablet. He smiled and tucked it in his bag. He wasn’t sure how much use he’d actually get out of it; something like that would only work for small temporary runes, and he couldn't see what he marked with it. It was better for him than a single-use rune and he didn’t have an immediate need for manaburn sheets, so he couldn’t complain.

Serenity wondered if the dungeon would teach other runes. If it would, it might become a valuable dungeon; a way to learn even simple mana control and runic magic without a Path at low Tier could be very useful. The rewards themselves weren’t much for the time invested, though they would probably have some value until someone figured out how to make them. If it could teach other runes, the knowledge would be the true prize of the dungeon, not the physical rewards.

“What’s a manaburn sheet?” Roy stared at a small stack of paper as he asked.

“Put mana into it, it chars where you directed the mana. It’s not cheap, but it’s a great training tool for improving your mana control. Sort of like what the tablet was doing. There are a few other things it can be used for too, like writing letters with magic, but that’s fairly expensive. It doesn’t work for runes at all, because it burns up when you try to trigger a rune drawn on it.” Serenity had tried, back when he was Vengeance. Being able to draw a rune with no other supplies using only his mana control would have been useful.

Was it possible for someone to make something like the tablets the dungeon had? That would be an even better training tool, and he’d never seen anything like them elsewhere.

REWARDS CLAIMED

PARTICIPANTS WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE DUNGEON WHEN POSSIBLE

It was another twenty minutes before the dungeon disappeared around Serenity. For a moment, he was nowhere, adjusting the dungeon for the next group of people who would enter. He knew that wouldn’t be for a while; the dungeon was exhausted after the effort of the puzzles.

The next moment, he was standing in the same spot in a subway car that wasn’t nearly as empty. The four of them were all there, but there were six other people in other seats.

The tablets didn’t come out with them. Serenity hadn’t been expecting them to, but it was a little disappointing anyway.

The man sitting across from where Raz appeared shouted “Monster!” and ran to the far end of the subway car.

Raz sat down and made himself as small as possible. The other people in the car stared at Raz and the man who ran from him until a young man’s voice broke the brittle silence. “It’s not acting like a monster.”

“He’s not,” Serenity said. “He’s with us. We were in a dungeon and when we got out, it put us here.”

The same young man spoke again. “Oh, were you in the new Blue Line Dungeon? One of my classmates posted they’d seen one, but I didn’t think it was real.”

“Five hours. We were in there for more than five hours.” Roy was staring at his cell phone.

Serenity had assumed Time was stopped for the dungeon, like the Tutorial. Instead, it seemed that the Dungeon had teleported them off the subway car and returned them to another one when they finished. He supposed that worked, too.

It did leave them with a problem, though. “Mandy? Where are you going on the Metro without an adult?”

Serenity should have thought of it earlier; why wasn’t she in school?