The chest had a light coating of frost on its smooth cherrywood surface, but it opened noiselessly on polished brass hinges. It was about the size of Olivia’s father’s old red toolbox, but its contents wouldn’t have gone well in anyone’s garage. Laid out neatly, lined up next to each other in the bottom of the chest were a yellow, cloth-bound book, a fat, blue candle, a shiny, silver pocket watch, and a long, bright-red feather.

“Four items, hmm?” She reached in and picked up the book, and the other three items shimmered and dissolved into blue and yellow smoke. “Oh, damn it!” Olivia hadn’t considered that the chest had been offering her a choice. She supposed the book was a good honest choice, though—somewhere in her mind, she’d been most interested in it, or she wouldn’t have grabbed it first.

She looked at the book’s title and read it aloud, “Tuzrenstil’s Basic Primer for the Efficient Use of Energy to Manipulate Spatial Connections. That’s a mouthful.” She flipped through the little book's pages and found that it seemed to have far more than met the eye. Looking at it, she’d guess it had a hundred or so pages, but as she thumbed the pages in a fan, they just kept coming.

She stopped after a while and saw that she was looking at page 672. “More and more interesting!” Olivia tucked the book into her ring, a warm wave of pleasure washing over her at the thought of digging into it with a big cup of something hot and sweet when she returned to the dormitory.

Olivia walked through the last cherrywood door, through a short hallway, and entered a round, rose-colored marble room with a smooth, matching stair leading downward. Feeling the pressure of having to beat the other entrants, Olivia didn’t waste time and began the descent to the third level.

The rose-colored, smooth marble stairs only continued for about twenty steps, and then they abruptly transitioned to rough gray stone with patches of damp moss speckling them. Olivia was careful not to step on the moss, unsure if it held toxic spores or was slippery. After another twenty or so steps, she came out into a tight gray stone room, a rough wooden door opposite the stairway. So far, each floor had consisted of similar rooms connected via short hallways, so she wasn’t surprised when she opened the damp, swollen door to reveal a hallway lined with dripping, wet stone. The door grated along the stone floor, its old iron hinges hanging loose in the frame.

Olivia walked through the tight hallway, not quite having to duck her head but still feeling the closeness of the ceiling. Drips of moisture tickled the top of her head and shoulders, and she was glad for her long black hair covering the nape of her neck.

The next door was so swollen that she had to wrestle it out of its frame, dragging it along the stone floor, leaving splinters and chunks of rotten wood in its wake. When she’d finished yanking the door open and ceased her own grunting and grinding noise, she became aware of a muffled moaning sound coming from the next room. Cautiously she moved up to the door jam and peered inside.

The room was much like the one with the stairs in it behind her, but in the center of the damp, stone floor, an Ardeni girl was stretched out, softly weeping as she scrabbled against the stone, trying to get purchase to pull her leg free from what looked like a blob of pale green ooze.

The ooze was large enough to fill a fifty-gallon drum, and it pulsed and throbbed in a disgusting, quivering undulation as it hugged the girl's leg from the hip down. When Olivia stepped into the room, alarmed for the girl, a long, thick tendril sprouted from the back of the ooze and seemed to regard her, weaving back and forth in the air. She circled it and tried to get around so she could see the face of the Ardeni girl. The tendril from the ooze followed her movement, looking very much like a serpent ready to strike.

Finally, she was around to the side enough to see the girl’s face, and Olivia saw agony writ there. Whatever the ooze was doing to her leg, it wasn’t pleasant. “Hold on; I’ll help you.”

“Unh,” the girl grunted, “don’t let it touch you!”

“I’ve got to get it off you before I destroy it.” The girl might have tried to answer her, but whatever she said was lost in her choking sobs, so Olivia turned her attention to the ooze. It was green, it was wet, and it seemed to like a damp environment. Perhaps fire was the answer.

Olivia took a breath and cast her Elemental Form, taking on a fire aspect. Hot blue-yellow flames sprouted along her body, and her flesh became like red-hot embers. In the yellow sepia tones of her fire elemental vision, the ooze seemed to look more yellow than green, and it was much brighter than in her normal vision's color spectrum.

She approached the slime, and when she was within a couple of paces, it lunged out with the tendril that had been “watching” her. It seemed like the tendril tried to recoil at the last moment, but it was committed, and when it hit her arm, it sizzled and thrashed and then snapped back into the main body of the ooze.

When it touched her fiery arm, Olivia hadn’t felt any discomfort, so she continued to advance, and the ooze quivered and shrank back from her. She reached forward, pushing the palms of her hands against the ooze where it hugged the girl’s leg. The ooze seemed to hiss, and the surface bubbled a little as her hands got close enough to touch, and it shrank back further, pulling away from the girl’s leg.

Olivia kept advancing, driving the ooze completely off its victim, and when the girl sobbed and pulled her leg up to her chest, Olivia stood up, held out her right palm, and unleashed a Plasma Wave at the creature. Crackling, bubbling, blue plasma washed over the ooze, and it bubbled and popped and screamed and then ceased to exist, nothing but a boiling, sizzling puddle left on the stone floor.

As golden motes gathered up from the cracks between the stone blocks of the floor, surging into Olivia, she turned to the girl and regarded her injury. She wore a black jumpsuit, much like Olivia’s white one, but the material on her left leg was mostly dissolved, and the flesh beneath was red and blistered. The ooze had been digesting her, it seemed. Olivia let her Elemental Form drop and then knelt to look into the girl’s orange-red eyes. “Are you going to be alright?”

“I, I’m not sure. My leg’s on fire.” The girl had tears streaming out of her eyes, and Olivia instinctively reached forward to brush her bedraggled bright-red hair out of her face.

“Do you have any means of healing?” Olivia had a tender heart, but she wasn’t naive. She knew this woman had to be either a test or one of her competitors, so she wasn’t quite ready to disclose her potion of renewal, not that she was sure it would heal the girl.

“I have a salve,” the girl grunted, reaching a hand into the bosom of her jumper and withdrawing a small glass jar. “Is the ooze gone? Are there any more?” She glanced around the room wide-eyed, letting her gaze linger on the wet, slimy spot where Olivia had killed the creature.

“Seems like we’re alone. Here, let me see that.” Olivia held out her hand, and the girl, hesitant at first, reached out and put the jar in her hand. Olivia opened the jar and began to spread the buttery yellow cream on the most badly damaged parts of the girl’s leg. “What’s your name?”

“Jaliss. Thank you for saving me.” She stretched out her leg so that Olivia could see more of it and had to suck air through her teeth to stifle a cry.

“I’m Olivia. What school are you from, Jaliss?”

“Archelide College. What about you?”

“Fainhallow; have you heard of it?”

“Yes,” the girl said through gritted teeth. “Ahh, that stuff burns! I’m glad I got it, though.”

“Sorry it burns, but, yeah, it’s mending the worst of it. I’ve covered the most burned bits, but I'll use it up if I spread it all over the leg. Do you want me to?”

“Yes, please. Even the parts where it barely started to dissolve the skin feel like they’re on fire.” Olivia complied, gently smearing the oily substance all over Jaliss’s leg. “Ahh, that’s feeling so much better now.”

“Good. Now,” Olivia paused, looking around the room, noting that each wall had a door, “I’m assuming you took a different route to this room than I did?”

“Yeah, I’ve not seen you or any rooms you’ve been through, that’s for certain.”

“Didn’t you have a spell that could hurt that ooze? No fire?”

“I have an air affinity, and it didn’t even flinch at my strongest lightning bolt.” Olivia nodded, once again realizing just how lucky she was to have her considerable arsenal of affinities at her disposal.

“Alright, well, I’m glad to have helped you, but we are in a competition, right? How about we each continue through a different closed door?”

“Um, could I follow you for a little while? I promise I won’t get in your way. I can’t defend myself from these slimes.” Olivia was torn by the request. She knew Oylla would tell her to stun the girl, tie her up and move on, but she couldn’t be that ruthless, could she? What if an ooze came along and dissolved her? What would she do if the girl followed her all the way to the next level, though?

“Jaliss, I’m sorry to seem harsh, but I have a duty to my school and my people to try to win this competition. You have a necklace you can use to escape the dungeon, right?” Jaliss reached up and touched the thin golden chain visible above her jumpsuit.

“Yes.” She frowned, a distant look in her eyes.

“Alright, well, I’m sorry, but I’m going to advance alone. Please don’t follow me; if you’re worried about the oozes, maybe it’s best for you to use that pendant now. Good luck.” Olivia stood and picked the closed door opposite the one she entered through to open. She had to yank it over the stone tiles like the last one, and she glanced over her shoulder once to see Jaliss watching her from the floor where she still lay, a slight furrow in her bright red brows. Olivia stepped through the door and pulled it shut behind her. Maybe it was harsh, but she had to be serious right now. “Time to pick up the pace again.”

Olivia strode to the next door, yanked it open, and looked into another room with two big blobs of ooze quivering in the center. Without pause, she held up her hand and fired a Plasma Wave at the one on the left, utterly obliterating it. Sizzling beads of plasma-covered slime broke off the ooze and splashed the other one, causing it to convulse and shudder, hastily quivering across the floor to huddle in a corner.

Olivia stepped into the room and launched a simple Fiery Burst at the quivering ooze, wondering if plain old fire would do the trick. She held the stream of fire against the hissing, shuddering mass of ooze, watching the black smoke rise from the blob until it was just a blackened hunk of something that resembled burnt rubber. Once again, motes of Energy poured into Olivia, but she didn’t gain a level. Still, not wanting to slow, she pushed through the next door, through the hallway, and opened the next chamber.

The third room had, predictably, three oozes, though one was red. “Could it be so simple? Are you immune to fire, Mr. Red Ooze?” Without waiting for an answer, Olivia assumed her fire Elemental Form, worried they might get an attack off before she could finish three of them. She knew that while she was in her fire form, her ice spells were less effective, but she didn’t care—the form afforded her immunity from at least the two green oozes, so she held up a palm and fired a somewhat weakened Arcfrost Cascade at the red ooze.

A torrent of frost crackling with electricity tore into the fat, sluggish creature, and it seemed to scream as its surface bubbled, popped, and then burst apart with an electrical explosion. The two green oozes rushed toward Olivia, but they’d barely started probing toward her with long tendrils when she turned a palm to the one on the left and torched it with a stream of white-hot flames. When the radiant heat from the stream of fire reached it, the second ooze started to squelch away from her, but she chased it down, burning it to a blackened lump. This time, as the Energy motes from her three victims poured into her, she got a message:

***Congratulations! You’ve achieved level 17 Elemental Archon. You have gained 10 Intelligence, 10 Will, and have 16 points to distribute.***

Before charging on to the next room, Olivia took a moment to allocate her sixteen free points. She put thirteen into vitality, then put one into each of her other physical stats, raising them to ten. “Two more rooms, then I’m onto the fourth level,” she said as she strode across the room, pulled open the door, and continued her rampage.