The puzzle chamber was a relief after the emotional devastation of the first trials.
Dante entered a room of pure geometry, its walls covered with interlocking symbols that shifted and rearranged as he watched. The floor was marked with concentric circles, each inscribed with more symbols. The ceiling displayed a complex mechanism of crystalline gears that turned slowly, grinding against each other in patterns that should have been random but weren't.
\"THE SECOND TEST,\" the dungeon announced. \"THE CHAMBER OF PATTERNS. SOLVE THE ARRANGEMENT. ADVANCE.\"
He studied the symbols with eyes that had seen things like this before.
Floor 60 had featured similar puzzles, ancient mechanisms left behind by the Tower's original builders. His old team had spent three days solving one of them, losing two members to traps triggered by wrong answers before finally finding the correct sequence.
Here, alone, he didn't have three days.
But he had something better than time.
He had memory.
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