Level One

  Many years before he ever thought about hijacking an airplane, Cooper spent some time in the Army. Not long. A bit less than six months, after which the Army politely suggested he might be happier someplace else. Most of that time was spent digging holes, or marching around in circles, or doing the other pointless shit soldiers have to do all day, but what little free time Cooper had was spent talking with the other buck privates in his unit. And if there’s one thing young soldiers love to talk about more than anything else, it’s what it feels like to kill a man. Some guys thought it would be a huge rush, like getting laid. Others said they knew guys who got all depressed afterward. But they had all been wrong in the end, because right now Cooper felt nothing.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. He was annoyed at the man he’d just shot. Clearly he’d been out of line. Sure, Cooper had been trespassing in their weird-ass underground bakery, but that’s no reason to punch a guy in the head and then choke him with piano wire. If you go around pulling shit like that you really can’t complain when someone eventually puts a couple of bullets in you. But now that the dude was dead, there was no way to explain any of this to him, and that was what truly annoyed Cooper. He regretted having been forced to kill the kid in the Spartacus getup before he had a chance to call him an asshole.

  Cooper glumly finished the piece of flatbread in his hands, scanning the floor for another. He frowned. Something about the surrounding scene bothered him. Aside, of course, from the fact he had just shot an invisible gladiator for trying to strangle him in a medieval bakery. Even once you get past all that, it was still weird. One of the bullets had caught the guy in the throat, so it made sense that there was blood everywhere, but why was there flatbread everywhere? The kid had a satchel over his back. Any reasonable person would have put the bread in there. Instead, it was as if the kid had piled up all his piping-hot flatbread in a stack and thrown it up in the air just as he died.

  Beyond that, there were the marbles. Cooper hadn’t noticed them right away, collected, as they were, in a little clump right next to the dead man’s left ass cheek. They probably weren’t marbles obviously, but they were little round chunks of glass or plastic or something, each about the size of a dime, so to Cooper they looked like marbles. Most were metallic, which was weird, but the rest were solid colors: black or blue or green. Despite the pain in his rib, Cooper carefully bent over and picked one up. It wasn’t glass. It was made of some sort of bright blue stone with little flecks of glitter inside. It was definitely one of the prettier marbles Cooper had ever seen, though not pretty enough that he would carry it around as a grown man. Again, not necessarily the weirdest thing he’d seen that day, but on the list.

  Cooper was right in the middle of examining the blue marble when he heard a sound from the hallway that made him reach for his .28. It was a sort of hurk, like someone choking on a chicken bone. Up until then Cooper had forgotten about the other prick, the one that had laughed at him while he was being strangled to death, but as he sat with his back against the wall of the bakery, revolver raised to eye level, listening to a sound that was clearly ragged breathing coming from the hallway just outside, it occurred to Cooper that maybe Laughing Boy didn’t get far.

  He slid to the end of the wall, peeking around the corner. Sure enough, there was another blood pool right in the middle of the hallway. Also, on either side of the pool, two oversized wooden arrows had appeared, their metal heads buried half an inch deep into the floor. Also also, the enormous tile with the beehive-like oven on it - which had previously been raised just above the level of the rest of the floor - had now sunk down just below.

  “Anyone there?” Cooper asked as he stepped out into the hallway, the .28 at his side. There was no response. The ragged breathing had stopped. As far as he could tell, he was alone.

  “Look,” Cooper said reasonably, “if you want me to find you some help, I can-”

  He was interrupted by a sharp pain in his shin. He stumbled backwards with a shout, firing the .28 twice. Cooper had no idea what he was shooting at, but in the end, that didn’t matter. After the second shot, another dead gladiator suddenly appeared at Cooper’s feet, as if by magic. This latest corpse had a bullet wound in the center of his forehead, plus an oversized arrow sticking out from between his shoulder blades, so there was no question he was dead. Still, Cooper gave the guy a few swift kicks to the balls just to be sure.

  The sudden appearance of a dead gladiator out of thin air would have shaken Cooper even if he wasn’t a little rattled to begin with, which he was starting to be. Taking a deep breath, Cooper forced himself to inspect the scene around Laughing Boy. It wasn’t quite as weird as the one inside the bakery, but it wasn’t that much better either. No flatbread this time, and the clutch of marbles near the dead man’s ass cheek was slightly smaller, for whatever that was worth. Also, there was a spatula now. It was almost six feet long and narrow, with a little square of wood at one end exactly the right size to fit the hole at the top of the beehive oven. That answered the question of how they got the flatbread out without burning themselves, though it raised other questions, like how Cooper had failed to notice the spatula the moment he stepped into the hallway, or what kind of freak runs around an underground maze wearing a toga and two-handing a giant spatula. Still, all that was just a sideshow. The thing that really bothered Cooper was the knife.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  It was long and medieval-looking, and the blade had a zig-zag pattern on it that reminded him of waves on the ocean. It was lying on the ground next to Laughing Boy’s outstretched hand. It was also glowing. Not like a lightbulb or anything. Just a sort of green tinge, like the magic potion the evil stepmother drinks in Snow White. Cooper looked down at the right leg of his suit pants, which had been slashed open. There was a shallow gash on his right shin just below the knee. It was basically just a scratch. It wasn’t even bleeding, though for some reason that didn’t make him feel any better. Cooper picked up the knife and put it in his duffel.

  He had been going back and forth on whether or not he ought to take anything before he got the hell out of there. On the one hand, he was missing some shit, like his map and compass and so forth. On the other hand, robbing the dead men would make things much harder if he ever got picked up by the local cops. But he wasn’t leaving that knife behind, and he definitely wasn’t leaving the flatbread, so Cooper decided to spare a few minutes to go through Laughing Boy’s satchel to see if it held anything useful.

  The main thing he hoped to find was a wallet with some ID in it. In that, he was disappointed. The only things in Laughing Boy’s satchel were an old-timey metal canteen, a coil of rope, two dowel rods with a length of metal wire between them, and a piece of crumbly cheese wrapped in leather. That was it. No wallets, no pens, no lighters, no car keys, and certainly nothing that helped explain what the fuck was going on.

  Annoyed, Cooper moved on to Laughing Boy himself, checking the kid’s body for tattoos or jewelry, anything that might explain who this freak was. Again, nothing interesting, except for a ring on the dead man’s right pinkie finger. The ring had been carved from a single piece of some black, glassy stone. The band was undecorated, but the top had an image of some crazy naked chick with four arms waving a bunch of swords in the air while she danced on a pile of skulls. It was ugly as fuck, but it also looked expensive, so Cooper decided to examine it more closely. Maybe it’s creepy to try on a ring you just pried off a dead man’s finger, but it’s also natural when you already have the thing in your hand, especially when you’re just trying to figure out what it is. So yeah, Cooper put the crazy naked chick ring on. And as soon as he did, his hand, the ring, and the rest of his body up and disappeared.

  It probably would have blown his mind if, again, he wasn’t already trapped in a Caesar’s Palace-themed maze somewhere under the Cascades, full of murderous gladiators who will strangle you over a piece of flatbread, and who apparently carry marbles loose in their hands instead of putting them in a marble bag like a normal person, but at this point Cooper was starting to roll with the punches. So instead of getting all wide-eyed and saying “oh wow!”, or “golly gee!” or “how is this scientifically possible?”, he simply took the ring off again. His hand reappeared. He put it back on. His hand re-disappeared. Off, visible. On, invisible. It was impossible, sure, but not complicated.

  Still, Cooper donned and doffed the ring a few more times, just to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing, and it was good that he did, because it took him a few more reps to notice the side effect. Any time he had the naked chick ring on his finger, the lights in the maze around him dimmed slightly. Then when he took the ring off again, they went back to normal. Cooper walked (stiffly) back into the bakery. Then to the end of the nearby hallway. The same thing happened in both places. He had no idea how far the effect reached, but it was at least 100 feet or so. For all he knew he had been making the lights across the entire maze strobe on and off for like 2 solid minutes. And that meant it was time to leave.

  Cooper spared a few seconds to go back through the bakery, painfully gathering up the flatbread and stuffing it into his duffel. Then he left, traveling in the same direction he’d been headed previously. As he passed Laughing Boy’s corpse - being careful not to touch the beehive tile - Cooper slid the naked chick ring onto his own pinkie. Then walked, quietly and invisibly, off into the maze.

  * * * * *

  Name: Cooper of Vancouver

  Gender: Male

  Affiliation: None

  Age at Entry: 29

  Current Level: The Labyrinth (1)

  Jing: 5/10

  Qi: 7/9

  Shen: 0

  Status: Injured, Poisoned

  here.