The real problem was that all that extra water hadn’t made the charge last any longer. Maybe he was mistaken. Noah's sense of time in these caves was a mess, but lately he’d done little else but watch YouTube’s time stamps. According to them, the tablet was still draining at the same pace as before.
An arithmetic bump in bucket count didn’t sound dangerous—at first. He could fill and haul two buckets in about eight minutes; seven if he pushed it. So ten buckets took thirty-five to forty minutes. Nothing special. He had oceans of time.
But now he needed fourteen buckets. Seven trips at eight minutes apiece, plus an extra sadomasochistic climb to earn the bonus two points—that one took about three times longer. Still manageable: an hour and twenty overall. Plenty of free time left.
But if he blindly dumped every point into Power, then after twenty points the job would stretch to three hours. Twenty more points - to four. With a hundred points invested, a third of the day would be wasted to refill his charge. Another hundred, and he’d be working more than half a day, until his charge began to fall faster than the water flowed from the pump.
If he wasn’t wrong, the point system was a trap for anyone who chose to play the admins’ game on autopilot. At first, the time sink seemed trivial, but soon the greedy player wouldn’t have time to reach the far end of the cave. Noah had no idea how long the whole labyrinth truly was if he unlocked every set of black doors. What if getting to the exit alone took a full day?
And there were more unknowns. Did unlocking new black doors also increase the number of buckets required? If so, he should hoard points until the very moment he could open every door in one push and put the exit—if one existed—within reach. Noah preferred not to contemplate eternity here, underground. Thoughts like that drained his will.
* * *
He spent the next hours as usual: watching the big-ass grotto and hoping the cage would reappear. Noah also tracked the hours more carefully to verify the drain rate. Perhaps the charge really did last longer, and he simply missed it? He knew long hours of vigil turned him glassy-eyed. He probably missed plenty of new comments...
Unfortunately, the latest replies either traded conspiracy theories or praised his “special effects.” Only Naked Guy tossed out a few ideas—and they were useless at this moment.
Right now, Noah was conducting a slow, stubborn experiment—posing like a stone statue and watching the timestamps.
* * *
At last, twenty-one hours and thirty minutes later, the tablet chirped:
Beep-beep!
“Warning! Only 10% charge remaining!”
Still the same, he thought, scowling at the timestamps.
Just as he’d suspected, reckless point-spending was a cunning trap. Even so, he meant to burn the last two points on another power bump, recharge again, and prove the theory beyond doubt. After that, he’d save every point for a rainy day. Black doors only, nothing else…
A shrill metallic clatter speared through the cave. Noah, already turning toward the buckets, froze and stared up at the massive chains between the abysses.
They were finally moving.
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, as if winding a colossal clock. High above, in the upper abyss, a second white beam lit, casting a strange grid-like shadow across the floor.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Then the cage appeared, shackled to the chains with huge iron rings. Even before it fully emerged, Noah saw a figure inside. The machinery around the cage was idle for the moment, so this time he studied it more closely.
He learned little. The device was a tangle of linked cogs and clockwork drives. Almost every piece was etched with indecipherable signs—like the magic inscriptions you see in video games. The symbolism felt wrong, repellent, as if warning any rational creature to stay away—or else…
Noah stepped closer to see who was inside.
This time it was a woman. Her arms were wrenched behind her and somehow locked to a metal post that pierced the center of the cage. Her head drooped, long hair veiling her face and shoulders, so he couldn’t guess her age. She wore a thin, knee-length white tunic...
And she was unconscious.
Losing consciousness here was a very bad sign. Especially with no one nearby to scream about “ten percent remaining.”
The cage came to a stop with a thud, about half a meter from the edge. Noah noticed the cage’s front was wide open, as if made for easy entry.
Or to make it easy to lure in whatever waited beyond the next black doors.
The clockwork didn’t stir, as if awaiting command. Noah remembered how the previous prisoner had had time to wake and curse the “damn admins” before the device spun up.
Five minutes, maybe?
Not wasting time, he leaned over the abyss and rapped hard on the cage frame.
“Hey—wake up!”
The woman’s shoulders flinched. A moment later, she drew a deep breath, straightened her knees, and tried to free her hands. Then panic set in, and she tried to look around.
Noah finally saw her face: a bit older than him, perhaps thirty to forty, if the faces of dead people could be trusted. And yes – she was attractive.
But he noticed something strange: she was undeniably cute, yet he felt no instinctual pull toward her. Only a simple curiosity—which, after a month alone, made perfect sense. He craved conversation, another mind to trade notes with. Sexual desire, though, had evaporated without a trace.
So that’s how Noah’s sex life ends—before it ever properly began, he thought, bitterly amused.
The prisoner looked at him with wide, fearful eyes.
“Are you… Are you the ad… the administrator?” she stammered.
“No,” he shook his head. “I’m probably the same as you. My name’s Noah. What’s yours?”
“Gaudemunda,” she murmured, glancing at the bars and the dreadful mechanism beyond them. Seeing the abyss under her feet, her eyes flew wide and her whole body trembled. “Did you… chain me here?”
“I’m guessing the administrators did. Do you remember anything just before you ended up in the cage? Did you do something that might’ve pissed them off?”
“What? No!” she shook her head—though not convincingly. “I… I don’t know? When I woke up by the abyss, I had two buckets, a pole, and… and a computer. The handheld kind kids can’t put down. I got a message—no, wait… two messages. One said I was dead, and the other mentioned rules… I don’t remember exactly.”
She inhaled sharply, the words tumbling out in a near-breathless stream. She hadn’t learned yet that breathing wasn’t required here. Noah guessed she’d arrived much later than he had—maybe only days ago.
“At first, I thought it was a joke. Me, dead? But then I watched the video and remembered—there’d been a huge crash and…”
She fell silent and glanced up at him, skittish.
“We really are dead here, aren’t we?”
He nodded.
“What happened next?” he pressed.
“After that… I went down some stairs into a corridor and found a small room with a bed. Everything was dark and quiet; no one was around. I replayed the administrators’ video a few times, still hoping it was a prank. That maybe I’d just fallen asleep and would wake somewhere else. Maybe in a hospital, where they’d revive me. I figured it would be faster if I just fell asleep in that room myself…”
Ah.
She’d gone to sleep in the bed… and probably never woke, leaving the tablet somewhere away from her. The charge had drained, time had run out, and the admins had kept their promise by ending her existence. Noah gritted his teeth. Damn admins.
“And then I woke up here,” Gaudemunda finished uncertainly. “Why am I over an abyss?”
Noah opened his mouth to answer, but then the cage’s machinery roared to life without a warning.
Symbols on the cogs flared a sickly blue. Every gear spun at once—faster, faster—until the whole cavern thrummed with the rising mechanical howl.
“Oh, shit!” Noah swore.
Forgetting about safety, he planted a foot on the rim and sprang into the cage.