Back near the shelter, Kivas crouched near the chest with her knees in the dirt, her eyes narrowed.
It sat there quietly, as if it hadn't just spawned out of nowhere and got dragged. Just a box. Wood with metal trim. Rounded top. Classic fantasy nonsense.
She reached out and rapped her knuckle against its side. Solid. No hidden pulse. No whisper of magic—at least, not the kind she could detect by sight alone.
"Alright," she muttered. "Let's assume this isn't just a random chest for decoration."
She leaned closer, inspecting the seam between the lid and the base. There was no keyhole. No latches. Just a seamless divide running horizontally through it. Weird, but understandable.
The locking mechanism—or lack thereof—made it look like the two pieces were just pressed together, no barrier or fastening keeping them shut.
"Not even a stupid padlock?" she whispered. "You're making this too easy…"
Her eye twitched.
She wasn't about to forget the trap-related stats from her Well of the Soul. Detect, Disarm, Evade—all sitting right there like flashing neon warnings.
No lock. No security. Too easy in perception.
Which probably meant it was bait.
Still, if there was something here, she wasn't about to just walk away. With a grunt, she backed off and returned to her shelter, rummaging for what passed as tools.
A stick she'd sharpened earlier. A rock with a decent point. She tied them together into a makeshift pry bar.
"Alright, you mysterious bastard," she said, crouching again. "Let's see what you're hiding."
She wedged the sharpened edge into the seam, holding it steady with one hand, the stick's length giving her leverage. With a slow inhale, she pushed.
The chest groaned, faintly.
Then.
Everything broke.
Her world split.
Symbols she'd never seen before flooded her vision—alien glyphs drawn in flickering light, twitching at the edges of her sight like static on the edge of a corrupted screen.
Her breath hitched.
She blinked—and suddenly, she was two people.
One, crouching beside the chest.
The other, standing—no, running—down a branching hallway made of crumbling stone and flickering walls. Her body was different here. Lighter. More agile. She had no wings. No halo. Her hair was short, tangled. Her skin grayed by fear and filth. Her feet slammed against moss-slick stone as she turned blindly into a corner.
"What the—?!"
She could feel both versions of herself.
The one in the maze. Sprinting. Heart pounding. Breath sharp and ragged.
And the one still in the forest. Hands gripping the stick. Face twisted in confused horror.
Her mind buckled.
It felt like holding a mountain over her head while trying to crawl under a table.
She staggered in the real world, but didn't drop the tool.
And in the other—
A scream was invading her hearing.
It came from the left. She looked in the maze, and there—something horrible emerged from the bend in the corridor.
A wave of flesh and bladed tendrils, red and wet, screeching with impossible pitch, lashing against the walls, carving grooves into the stone like butter. It surged forward like a tsunami of nightmares.
Her body in the maze bolted for escape, a release from this unthinkable nightmare that she was experiencing.
"Is this the trap disarming process!? Getting your mind thrown into a mouse-chasing event, as the mouse!?"
Every footstep was a prayer.
Every corner was a gamble.
The maze twisted. Forks. Ramps. Stairwells spiraling into other halls. Sometimes dead ends, sometimes brief narrow bridges crossing chasms she didn't dare to look into. She didn't know where she was going. Her body moved on instinct, blind panic driving her forward.
Her real body gritted her teeth. She couldn't scream. Couldn't collapse. If she dropped the pry bar, what would happen?
In the maze, she reached another split—left or right?
She chose left.
That was a bad call.
The hallway in front of her began to collapse. A roar echoed behind her. The walls pulsed. That living horror poured in like it belonged there, its fleshy mass clawing at every surface.
She turned back in panic and sprinted the other way, backtracking with the hope that she was fast enough before that monstrous horror reached the intersection.
Heart thundering. Lungs tearing at her ribs. Legs already trembling.
"Aaah! Aaaaaah! I'm fast enough, but now it's tailing me hard!"
The thing was only a meter behind her now. She could hear it breathe—if it breathed at all. She could feel it in her bones, like it was gnawing at the foundation of her soul.
She screamed viscerally—in both bodies.
In the forest, her mouth ripped open, her voice echoing through the misty trees, raw and broken.
In the maze, she screamed in sheer terror, stumbling, dragging herself forward as blood—or something close to it—splashed from her lip.
And then.
A light.
Blinding.
Up ahead, in the maze. Pure white, framed by ornate arches that shimmered with the same symbols that had flooded her vision earlier.
She didn't think.
She didn't breathe.
She slammed her feet and continued on.
Harder than ever.
The light grew. Closer. Closer. The horror snapped at her heels. One of the blade-tendrils sliced open the air right behind her.
She dove.
"Save me!"
Everything slammed shut.
The maze vanished.
So did the creature.
So did the second body.
She was back.
Whole.
Still crouched beside the chest. Still gripping the makeshift pry tool. Her hands were slick with sweat. Her arms were shaking. Her heart felt like it had run three marathons and lost all of them.
The chest in front of her trembled.
Then hissed.
A pulse of energy erupted from the seam—violet, crackling, bursting outward like a magnetic flare.
And then it opened.
The lid creaked, slow and deliberate, as if dragged open by some invisible mechanism. A low hum filled the air.
Inside of it was—
A sword.
Thick. Wide. Short. Somewhere between a dagger and a cleaver, yet robust and tough. A cinquedea-type of sword, or just simply, a cinquedea, if Kivas memory served.
The blade was a soft, lifeless gray, etched with strange red vein-like patterns that pulsed faintly, like the weapon itself had a heartbeat.
Kivas dropped the tool and fell onto her back, gasping. Her halo flickered like a dying ember. Her wings twitched involuntarily.
She stared up at the forest canopy overhead, chest heaving.
"…That was the trap," she wheezed. "Quite an introduction that I have in that aspect, huh."
But she had survived it.
Somehow.
And she had a prize.
A grotesque, alien prize that looked like it had seen war and survived worse.
She sat up slowly, eyes locked on the weapon.
"I don't even know if I can use a sword," she said, reaching toward it anyway. "I can start role playing as a thief now, though."
The process might be scary and maybe life-threatening, but Kivas felt satisfaction and excitement.
"Of course, if the so-called class section of my Well of the Soul even work the way I expect it to be."
She opened her Well of the Soul, hoping that maybe she would get a thief class after this.
Her expectation was responded with nothing.
"Eh, I can just focus on the class thingies later."
The weapon was warm in her hand.
And very, very real.