As they moved toward the newly raised altar on the expanded platform, Deacon suddenly remembered that they should have gained a new racial level from entering a new room in the temple, just as they had before.
He pulled up his System notifications with a quick mental command to confirm what he already suspected.
*Your Race has reached Lv 25 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
Looking at the singular notification he received sometime between him leaping into the illusionary statue, tumbling down the tunnel beneath it, and landing on the circular platform, Deacon saw that he had indeed received a level to his Race.
Bringing his Race to level 25, which meant he'd finally unlocked his first Racial Trait.
Though which trait he'd received remained a complete mystery to him, as he neither received a System Notification informing him what he had received, nor did he currently feel any different.
He did not feel like he could transform into a creature, nor did he feel like he could expand his muscles like his uncle had shown himself to be able to when they sparred.
Does this mean I got Skin of Jötunheim as my first Racial Trait? Deacon thought to himself in confusion. …But I don't feel like I've become more durable.
Surprised by the lack of any sudden surge of power or instinctive understanding of a new racial trait flooding his mind, Deacon began to suspect that the System might be having a momentary glitch. After all, he was nearing the end of a Tier 1 lifespan; it had taken him over three hundred years to reach Level 25, and perhaps the System simply needed time to process that.
However, to confirm whether that was the case, he would need to perform the Status Page ritual again, as the one he'd created not long ago was now out of date after gaining a level. Given the time crunch they were already under, he didn't have the luxury to do so until they found a safe place to rest and take stock of their progress, or escaped the temple and teleported back to the Sovereign Blade's Lounge Room.
As such, he brushed the curiosity aside from his mind with some effort — filing it away in the mental category of things to investigate later, and resumed moving toward the newly raised altar alongside the rest of his Party.
Reaching the second altar, Deacon found its construction nearly identical to the first— its basin filled with sand and a riddle carved along the outer rim. This time, however, the writing wasn't in Common but in Centauri, the language of the Centaur race.
Despite never being particularly fluent in speaking it, lacking both a second pair of lungs and an extra five tonsils required for proper pronunciation, the large, bold script was immediately recognizable to him from his time studying languages at the Academy of Beginnings.
"What does time destroy first?" Sam said aloud as he read the script after taking a moment to recall the Centauri characters that made up the riddle. "Veri– No, no, old man Luis still has a lot of that and he's like a hundred and something."
They similarly began to debate amongst themselves over the possibility of different answers like they had with the previous riddle, throwing out concepts and testing them against the wording to see what fit best, with suggestions ranging from "memory" to "youth" to "beauty" getting tossed around and examined from multiple angles as everyone contributed their thoughts.
This time, however, after several minutes of circular discussion that failed to bring them any closer to a consensus, Jass, who had remained quiet throughout the debate Deacon, Sam and Bonehead had, stepped forward with her arms crossed and a thoughtful expression on her face, suggesting she had a different perspective.
"What about, certainty?" she suggested, before laying out her reasoning. "For nothing is absolutely certain in time. Reason one: What is weak now can be strong later, what is strong now can be weak later. Reason two: age catches up to everyone, but given time even that gets falsified since you can become a goddess or god and those ones are immortal right? But if what Deacon said was true from what he read in that hut back on Floor Two, then even they can be killed, so nothing is truly certain."
"As such, time destroys certainty first, for nothing is certain." Jass concluded.
"Huh," Sam said as he tilted his head, clearly working through her logic. "That's... actually really solid. Memory fades, sure, but you can still have fragments of it. While with time physical youth can go away, one can remain youthful in spirit despite them aging. Not to mention with a skilled enough stylist and makeup artist you can make a hundred year old hag into a beauty, so time doesn't affect beauty."
"Beauty could also be referring to inner self, and that transcends time," Esmerelda softly chimed in, gaining everyone's full attention despite her soft voice.
"I like it," Bonehead agreed with a snap of his fingers. "It's philosophical enough to fit the riddle without being so abstract that we're just guessing. Time makes everything uncertain — I mean who could have imagined a person as ugly as Sam could have been born from the–"
Bonehead was cut off by a swing from Sam that he barely managed to dodge on the account that his Perception stat was slightly higher than Sam on the account of him being an Alchemist while the both of them had the same Agility stat.
Rolling his eyes at their antics, which he assumed were an attempt to distract Esmerelda from her thoughts and the glimpses she'd experienced – Deacon nodded slowly as he ran through Jass's reasoning once more in his head. He tested it against the wording of the riddle from multiple angles and found that it held up better than any of the other suggestions they'd thrown around.
"Yeah, I'm sold," he said after a moment. "Certainty fits better than anything else we've come up with. Let's go with it."
Jass stepped forward, pressing her finger into the sand filling the basin, and she carefully wrote out the word "Certainty" in Centauri.
After finishing the final stroke and lifting her finger from the sand, the altar began to rumble and sink into the ground while a hazelnut brown colored palm-sized gem materialized in the basin as the sand within it vanished into nothingness just like it had with the previous altar.
Jass quickly grabbed the gem before the altar could fully sink into the platform and carry it out of reach. As soon as she secured it in her hand, another ring of sandstone rose from the darkness below with the same grinding sound of stone against stone, fusing seamlessly with the circular platform beneath them.
The expansion widened their safe footing once more, bringing them noticeably closer to the floating glass case that held the amulet they'd come to retrieve. Though noticing that it would take at least two more riddles to be solved, Sam decided to act.
"Why can't we just..." Sam said as he raised his staff and sent out a spear of earth magic outward toward the glass case, clearly testing whether they could bypass the altar puzzles entirely by just reaching out with magic to grab what they needed.
However, just as the earth spear breached the edge of the circular platform they were standing on, it began to dissipate into thin air starting from its tip and working backward toward its base until the entire spell had unraveled and disappeared as if it had never existed at all.
"Ah, so that's why — mana becomes inert beyond the platform we're on," Sam said with a grimace as he lowered his staff, understanding immediately what had happened and why his spell had failed so completely.
Curious about whether the restriction applied to physical objects as well or just magical constructs, Jass reached into her Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out one of the locust corpses she'd collected earlier, tossing it forward in an underhand throw that sent it flying through the air in a lazy arc.
The corpse flew true through the air for the first few meters, following the trajectory physics dictated. But the moment it crossed the invisible boundary at the edge of the platform, it plunged straight down into the darkness below, as if gravity had suddenly increased a hundredfold, or the air itself had ceased to support any horizontal momentum beyond the platform.
"Well, shit," Jass muttered as she watched the corpse disappear into the void and move to catch up with Deacon who was booking it to the next altar that appeared in the southern section of the expanded platform, positioned furthest from the floating glass case.
"Worth a try though," Bonehead said with a resigned sigh as he followed after them with everyone else in tow.
"Is there ever an easy way with these dungeons?" Sam asked rhetorically.
"The only easy thing is your–" Bonehead replied, before getting a backhanded fist to the groin from Sam who cut him off before he could finish his sentence, making the both of them come to a stop.
"Ah…" Bonehead groaned as he clutched his groin in pain. "…How did you know I moved my core there?"
Muttering a string of curses under his breath, Sam resumed his run to catch up with the party. Bonehead took a few seconds longer, shifting his core into his right eye socket just behind his shadow-flame–like eye before following after them.
Reaching the third altar, the members of the Ravenlight Party gathered around it to examine what new riddle awaited them, Bonehead let out an exasperated sound that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh as he read the script carved into the rim.
"What the fuck is that?" he said, gesturing at the flowing characters that decorated the altar's basin. "It legit looks like chicken scratch."
"'I am taken from others to feel clean, and given to others to feel powerful. What am I?'— It's written in Elvish, a more archaic version of it to be exact." Deacon answered after taking a moment to translate the script in his mind, due to its admittedly rather chicken scratch-like design of its characters.
Bonehead scoffed while rolling his newly gained shadow flame-like eyes at Deacon's answer.
"Fuckin' knife-ears— always managing to annoy the fuck out of me even when they aren't even here," he muttered in annoyance before launching into a full-on rant. "It's like I legit can't stop being reminded of just how much I hate them. First they keep trying to strongarm me for my recipes, then they try to start something when they see me putting the moves on the beholders of my eyes — not to mention them straight-up attempting to sabotage my shit whenever I constantly one-up them in Alchemy class."
Jass, Deacon, Esmerelda, and Sam let out chortles at Bonehead's words, the brief moment of levity helping to cut through some of the tension that had been building as they worked their way through increasingly philosophical riddles while knowing that time was running out before the antlions caught up to them.
"Alright, so what gets taken to feel clean and given to feel powerful?" Sam asked, getting them back on track.
"Responsibility?" Jass offered after a moment of thought. "You take responsibility from others to feel clean — like when you admit fault and own up to something. And giving responsibility to others makes you feel powerful because you're delegating, controlling what they do."
"Doesn't quite fit," Bonehead said, shaking his head. "Taking responsibility could make you feel clean, but more often than not you hear it as a burden, and burdens are heavy, not clean."
"What about control?" Sam suggested. "Giving control to others makes them feel powerful, and taking control from... no, never mind."
"Credit, maybe?" Jass tried again before immediately shaking her head in dismissal of the idea. "Never fuckin' mind."
"That feels backwards," Deacon said, frowning as he stared at the Elvish script.
He paused, working through the logic in his head as he tried to think about what answer could be correct.
"What about judgment?" he said suddenly, the word clicking into place. "Think about it — when you take away judgment, people stop looking at others through colored lenses and start seeing them in their purest essence, whether they're a saint or an asshole. And the ability to judge or pass judgement onto others gives people a sense of power."
"And well… it fits the Elvish philosophical tradition," Sam agreed with a shrug. "They're all about moral authority and hierarchies – their blood purity schtick being one. Judgement would be a pretty spot on answer for a riddle written in their language."
"Yeah, I'm convinced," Jass agreed. "Judgement makes way more sense than anything else we've thrown out."
"Works for me," Bonehead added. "Let's get this done before—"
Just as Deacon stepped forward to write the answer into the sand, he, and everyone else, could hear faint chittering and thudding echoing from somewhere above them, the sounds bouncing off the walls of the massive chamber they were in.
Snapping his head up toward the hole in the ceiling they'd all fallen through, what felt like hours ago but was probably only minutes, Deacon cast Blood Sense. His vision of the ceiling immediately became flooded with the red silhouettes of hundreds upon hundreds of tumbling antlions tumbling down the tunnel they all had tumbled down.
"We've got incoming!" Deacon shouted as he hurriedly wrote "Judgement" in Elvish into the sand. The moment the altar began its rumbling descent, he snatched the green, palm-sized gem from the now-empty basin before it could sink out of reach and shoved it into one of the pouches on his belt.
In the same fluid motion, with his other hand he unsheathed Echoform Reliquary from the sheathe on his back and shifting it into its dual short sword form. As both blades appeared in his hands, he turned back around in time to see a torrent of antlions burst out of the tunnel opening above and pour down onto the platform like a living waterfall.
At the same time, the platform beneath their feet groaned and expanded once more as another ring of sandstone rose from the depths and fused with their safe zone, a new altar materializing on the northern edge of the enlarged area — directly opposite where they stood.
"For fuck's sake," Deacon, Jass, Sam, and Bonehead all complained at once.