Like the last two chests, the bronze chest offered her different rewards, and when Olivia touched one of them, the other two disappeared. There were only three choices this time: a crystal orb, a red metal ring, and another book. She’d already taken one book, so this time she reached for the ring, not sure why it called to her more than the orb, but she wasn’t disappointed when she bonded with it:

***Ring of Thick Blood - the wearer of this ring will bleed much more slowly from wounds than normal, allowing more time to recover and heal before succumbing to death’s icy grasp.***

“Colorful,” Olivia said, wondering who or what created the description for some items while others seemed to have none. It was a dull red-colored metal that was warm to the touch. She wore it on the hand opposite her new storage ring and briefly wondered if they’d conflict with each other if they were on the same hand.

“I’ll experiment with that later,” she said as she fought through the foliage hanging over the path, trying to find the next door or stairway. She didn’t have to go far; pushing through just a few feet of overgrown trail, she came to another clearing with a long, rectangular stone platform that housed a set of descending steps.

Standing at the top of the steps, looking down into the dark, dusty, cobweb-covered stairwell, Olivia took a moment to take stock of her situation. She was about to descend into the fifth level. Hadn’t her friends said no one had gotten that far in a long while? Or had they said the sixth level? Either way, she’d made good progress, and she’d only been at it a few hours if her perception of the time was correct. She didn’t feel particularly tired, thanks to the Energy she kept getting infused with, and her spells were off cooldown. Nodding to herself, Olivia summoned an orb of fire Energy and began to climb down the steps.

Her smoldering orb of orange flames cast the gloomy stairwell into shadows that leaped and jittered with each of her steps. The descent took a while, and unlike previous levels, the type of stairs didn’t change midway; she came out into a cramped, dusty stone room with thick bunches of cobwebs in all the corners and even long strands extending from the open stairwell to the doorless archway leading out of the room.

Olivia willed her orb out ahead of her to melt away the cobwebs in her path and slowly started to advance into the tunnel. On previous levels, she’d found the next doorway just a dozen steps or so down each little hallway. This one seemed to stretch into darkness, even when she pushed her orb out so far that she began to lose control of it. She continued, though, and was comforted in the cramped, creepy depths by the fact that she hadn’t passed any doorways and so far seemed to be quite alone; no other footsteps marred the thick dust on the stones.

After walking for many minutes, she encountered something new: a T junction. To her left and right, the hallway stretched into darkness. She didn’t know if this would be some sort of maze, so she decided to take a right-hand turn and maintain that pattern on further junctions if there were any. She walked for a hundred feet or so, and then she started to make out an end to the tunnel; a wooden door barred further progress.

When she approached the door, she saw it had a handle, but when she tried to push or pull on it, it wouldn’t move. “We can’t let a little thing like a doorway stop us, now can we?” Olivia asked and had to pause for a moment to wonder who she was talking about with the “we.” She decided to chalk it up to being alone in a deep dungeon for too long. She stepped back a few paces and fired a Pyrosteam Drill at the wooden door, obliterating the wood around the handle and along the door jam. When she dropped her hand, and the steam in the air cleared, the door hung loosely open.

She took one step toward the door when it smashed open against the wall, and a throng of clattering bones and rusty armor surged into the hallway. Olivia had time to register what she saw and utter one word, “Skeletons!” Then, they were on her, and she frantically pushed her fire orb at the pack, pushing as much Energy into it as she could.

Flames erupted on the first two or three skeletons, igniting their crusty, dry clothing and armor, but it didn’t slow them. Just as the lead skeleton was bringing a heavy, rusty mace down toward her, she cast her earth-attuned Elemental Form and held up her arm, blocking the blow. Even with her thick, stony skin, the impact hurt, and she took another step back.

“Enough!” She shouted, holding out a hand and unleashing a Plasma Wave. This attack, the skeletons didn’t shrug off. The force of the crackling plasma tore into the bunch of silent, grasping, clacking creatures, ripping apart their bones, melting their armor and weapons, and reducing the mob of skeletons to twitching, smoldering wreckage. She worked her way through the smoking battlefield and peered through the doorway. Nothing but a plain, square room waited for her with a matching doorway on the left-hand wall. Olivia destroyed the lock on the door with a plasma orb and then continued forward, down another long, dusty hallway.

She ended up having to clear three more rooms of mini-hordes of skeletons before Olivia found anything different. The last room she’d gone through had housed at least twenty skeletons in various states of decomposition, some of them with large portions of their bodies still covered with rotting flesh. When she’d gone through and down another long, dusty hallway, she’d come to a different sort of door; this one was banded with iron and had thick, rectangular bars of steel barring it shut as though to keep something inside from smashing its way through. Olivia could see that the bars were resting in steel brackets and could be lifted free on this side of the door, so the idea that they were there to keep her out didn’t bear much weight.

Olivia pressed her ear to the metal, resting her head between two thick steel bars, and thought she heard the sound of a bellows pumping air and the grind of stone against stone. She’d already determined to go forward, so the only thing she needed to do was overcome her nerves and pull the bars down.

She leaned back against the wall and glanced down the hallway from which she’d come. Nothing moved; nothing stirred the dust or cobwebs still clinging to the ceiling. The air was dry and musty, and as she rested her head against the stone wall, she felt webs sticking to her hair. She could always use her recall token. She touched the cool little disc of metal hanging from her neck. She could recall and say she ran into something near the end of the fifth floor that she couldn’t handle. Surely she’d made it far enough to do the school proud.

Her rewards so far were nothing to sneeze at; she’d gotten quite a few nice magical items and several levels. Was it worth risking an encounter with whatever was behind this door just for bragging rights and a chance at more loot? She remembered what Oylla had told her about how fragile humanity was in this world.

Olivia might not owe the people at First Landing much, but she nonetheless felt a sense of duty. They would need someone to stand up for them sooner or later, and Olivia had been gifted with the ability to manipulate Energy to such a degree that this “proving grounds” dungeon hadn’t really been a challenge thus far. If she backed away now, on the verge of going further than anyone from Fainhallow in recent memory, what did that say about her? “That I value my skin? I really need to stop talking to myself.”

She hoisted the first of the big metal bars out of its brackets, grunting at the weight. She’d just gotten it out of the brackets and was straining from the effort when an idea came to her. She accessed her storage ring with her mind and stowed the bar inside. Grinning, she reached out, slightly lifted the next bar, and stored it as well. She repeated the process three more times, and the door was exposed, ready for her to open it and see what horror the designer of this dungeon had locked within. “Maybe I’m building this up too much in my head. Maybe it’s just another pack of skeletons.” Olivia reached out, grasped the handle, and pulled, careful not to open the door more than an inch so she could peek within.

The space beyond the door was similar in construction to the rest of the fifth floor, with low ceilings and neatly mortared stone blocks making up the flooring, but there wasn’t much dust, and she didn’t see any cobwebs. Looking further into the room, she saw why: a creature that looked like a cross between a rhinoceros and a rotting human was stalking around the room’s perimeter, dragging an enormous stone maul behind it. Each step it took was ponderous, and its breathing was the source of the bellows sound Olivia had heard through the door.

The room was about twenty feet wide but more than a hundred long, and at that moment, the creature was stalking away from Olivia down the long wall to her right. Briefly, Olivia entertained the idea of trying to sneak or run past the monstrosity. She didn’t know what the other door was like, though, and didn’t fancy the idea of trying to monkey with it while this two-thousand-pound creature bore down on her. No, better to deal with this thing on her terms.

Olivia gently closed the door, then, in a fit of paranoia, she spun around and cast Fiery Burst down the hallway behind her. Dust billowed off the floor ahead of the jet of flames, and cobwebs shriveled into smoke, but no lurking attackers were exposed. “Shit!” she hissed, “That little bitch really messed with my mind.” It wasn’t the first time Olivia had whirled around, expecting another Jaliss incident with a rival student sneaking up to knife her in the back.

Gathering herself, Olivia ran through her plan of attack several times, ensuring she had an idea for every contingency she could think of: what would she do if it ignored her spells? What would she do if it charged her and swung that massive maul her way? How would she react if more monsters came out of the shadows? How would she retreat if it became necessary? She thought of these and myriad other possible outcomes, and then she took a deep breath and cracked the door open again.

The monster was coming toward her, so she closed the door and waited. When she felt the ground vibrate with the passage of the dragging maul, she pulled the door open and watched the creature’s back as it proceeded away from her in its strange circuit. She quietly pulled the door open, stepped through, and closed it.

Still worried about people sneaking up on her, Olivia used her will to press an orb of magma into the crack between the jamb and the door, then quickly turned her attention back to the colossal creature still continuing its shambling, crunching gait away from her. She didn’t see any point in holding back, so she fired a Pyrosteam Drill at the retreating back, choosing that spell simply because it moved through the air the fastest. The beam of superheated steam blasted straight through the creature from its lower left back and out through its chest, throwing rotten flesh, hunks of bone, and splatters of black blood out in a shower in front of it.

With a thunderous roar, the undead rhino-man spun around, oblivious to the damage she’d done to it, lifting its maul over its head and smashing it into the stone ceiling in the process. Then it charged, and it moved faster than Olivia felt something that size had a right to do.

She dove to the side, rolling over her left shoulder, and offered up a silent thank-you to Commander Grobak. Unable to see if the monstrosity had turned quickly enough to follow up with a swing of its cudgel, Olivia cast her earth-attuned Elemental Form and scrambled to her feet. Luckily, the laws of physics still somewhat applied to the giant monster, and it had continued past where she’d stood to smash into the wall. Just as it turned around, she regained her feet.

Olivia saw it tense at the knees and knew she was about to be charged again, so she held out both hands and let loose the most enormous Plasma Wave she’d ever cast. She knew she scored a solid hit, even though she couldn’t see through the glare of the crackling blue spray because the monster screamed much differently than it had roared moments earlier. Before she could celebrate, though, the flaming, melting bulk of the rhino-man abomination came barreling into her, driving her backward into the wall, where she smacked her stony, dense skull with a crack that would have opened a coconut. She slipped into darkness, incognizant of the fate of her physical form.