Hans felt cold, dust-covered stone against his face. When his eyelids fluttered apart, he saw only darkness, but he felt his eyes adjusting. Slowly, the faint outlines of a room with a broken stone chair came into view.

  Though he could discern basic shapes, they were fleeting shadows that faded to black the moment he stopped focusing intensely. He might be able to move if he was slow and careful, but if he had to do anything more complicated than that, he might as well have been blindfolded.

  He didn’t need light to recognize the smell. The perfume of terathan webs was close by. He ran his hands along his body, expecting to find himself ensnared in ropy, sticky silk. Instead, all he felt was his oiled leather armor and the texture of studs holding metal plates in place beneath it. His sword was in his sheath, and his foot bumped into his shield as he sat up.

  Was this another nightmare? Or were the armorbacks the nightmare?

  No, that pain was real. He had no doubts about that.

  But what was this?

  For a moment, all Hans did was search his own body with his fingers. He found no wounds or broken bones. He felt only leather and the stiffness of his brigandine.

  When was the last time he wore a brigandine?

  Feeling around for more clues, Hans found a pack. The buckles and straps were familiar enough that he fished through a side pocket to find the small lamp he knew to be there. He adjusted the wick in the dark, dug out his matches, and lit it.

  He slowly played the light around the room. It was no larger than a servant’s nook, a place for the help to disappear out of sight for a meal or a rest before returning to their master’s work. In addition to the broken stone chair he saw before, he saw part of a stone table tipped over in the corner. A narrow metal door was shut a few feet away from him, and it flaked with rust.

  The rest of the space was covered in dust and cobwebs. Except for Hans and his things.

  He knew that pack. And he knew this armor. Hans had lost both in his final attempt to get a Diamond boon. By the time he returned to Hoseki, the leatherworker who made the armor had died, and Hans never found a craftsman with that level of skill. From that day on, he never again enjoyed a truly perfect fit to his armor. Other craftsmen got close, sure, but the armor he wore now felt as natural as skin.

  He loved that armor.

  Hans pulled the pack closer and rummaged through its pockets and compartments. This wasn’t like the pack he packed for his Diamond quest. It was the pack. Every item he brought with him for that attempt was in its place, just as it was back then. He had a pack of Cure Poison potions wrapped in thick cotton, a batch of Nightsight potions, three Greater Heal potions, a whetstone, a first aid kit with bandages and sutures–It was all there.

  Next, he inspected his sheath beneath the weak light of his lamp and then the sword within it. It was the same sword. He knew it well.

  His heart stopped. The lamp had caught an even more unusual detail. Hans held his left hand up to the light and rotated it, inspecting every inch.

  He had four fingers and a thumb.

  The pinky he had lost to frostbite was no longer missing. He spent far more time confirming that reality than he did the sword or the pack. But it was there. He could move it. It had the sensation of a normal finger.

  The same hand moved slowly toward his face. His eye patch was gone as well.

  But his eye wasn’t. The socket was empty no longer, and he needed another several minutes of moving the lamp about to fully believe it. He had two eyes. His full sight was restored.

  If this was a dream, it was the most lucid dream he had ever had. Despite all of the improbable discoveries, Hans was sure this was real.

  Yet, he was equally sure that he died. His injuries were not survivable, even if four White Mages with Theneesa’s skill discovered him immediately.

  Hans moved the light around the room again, expecting to find a fae with a bargain to offer. But he was alone.

  “Hello?” he asked softly. Nothing replied.

  If this wasn’t fae or Merchant magic–and he was still unconvinced that it wasn’t–perhaps this was one of the hells? A torture built from the blueprints of all his fears, a warped plane where he got to relive his nightmares for an eternity.

  It could be that, but it was quieter than he expected the hells to be.

  Hans took a long inhale and an even slower exhale. That smell was terathan silk. The room around him matched the ruins of the castle where the terathans built their hive. He was outfitted for his Diamond quest. Whatever reality he had fallen into, he was certain of where and when he was.

  He had six Nightsight potions. He drank one and grimaced as the door hinges screeched.

  The smell was stronger now, and the architecture was as he remembered.

  The terathans used the castle ruins as a sort of fortification for the entrance to their hive. Instead of using the castle itself for their nest, they dug straight down through five floors and built the hive underground. With their spider bodies, terathans could ascend and descend the web-coated pit as easily as a human strolled down a hallway, but Hans obviously couldn’t move like a spider monster.

  To get to the hive originally, he had to go down several floors of castle before descending the last twenty feet by rope. That was the same way Hans did it when Izz, Thuz, Bell, and Lee ran the hive with him in the dungeon, before he replaced it with the Fire Fields.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Moving slowly and quietly, Hans searched the floor he was on. A few minutes later, he heard the unmistakable clacking of drones coming and going as well as the hisses of terathans communicating with one another. With that confirmed, he just as carefully retreated to the room where he woke.

  Risking his limited supply of lamp oil, he dipped the corner of a rag into it and wiped the door hinges. They still creaked as he closed himself in again, but the sound was far less extreme. Hans also knew that wasn’t a long-term solution. Lamp oil evaporated quickly, and his supply was limited.

  He needed animal fat to silence hinges permanently. A terathan had to have a little bit of fat somewhere he could render, he thought.

  Hans sat in the corner, drinking from his waterskin as he debated what he should do next.

  In that time, he realized something else was different about himself. He rotated his shoulder and bent his legs before straightening them again.

  He felt good. He felt strong. He felt like the version of himself he used to know. Nothing ached or twinged or ground against its socket. His senses were sharp. And youthful energy coursed through him. He hadn’t felt this good since… Well, since the last time he was in this very place, if not two attempts prior. Before he failed those runs and then this one.

  If this wasn’t a dream, this had to be the machination of something far more powerful than he. It could be the fae. It could be the Merchant. It might even be Devon’s god running another experiment just to see what a human would do. If any of those were the case, they had intercepted him somewhere between life and death. As much as he tried to convince himself it wasn’t the case, he knew that he died at the hands of armorbacks.

  With all of the mysteries around him, he was most uncertain of what he should do next.

  After eating a serving of rations and thinking for some time, Hans had a plan.

  First, he needed to be more deliberate about how he used his supplies. With Create Food and Create Water at his disposal, basic sustenance was not a concern. Nothing else he had, however, could be replenished. He was down to five Nightsight potions, for example, and he cursed himself for using the first so frivolously. Everything else in his pack, like his matches, his lamp oil, his Cure Poison potions, and his Greater Heal potions, was equally precious.

  Hans knew what it was like to run out of Cure Poison potions against terathans. Whatever this was, he was determined to not experience that feeling ever again.

  With a commitment to be more selective about what he used or didn’t use, the next step in Hans’ mind was to gather information. The terathans might have rebuilt after Devon slew the matrons, but the only real way to know if this was in the frontier or not was to poke his head above the surface and see.

  After a great deal of internal debate, Hans opted to leave his pack behind. One of his more persistent regrets about his Diamond quest was how he managed his gear. He never wanted to be far from his supplies, so he carried a good bit with him when he delved into the hive. That made him slower, a bit less stealthy, and hindered him if he needed to make a quick dodge or shift. Such as when a glob of terathan venom hurtled toward him from out of the darkness.

  If he could leave, he’d come back for his things or rough it on the frontier if he couldn’t. That would suck, but he’d be alive, and he had the skills to keep himself alive in that wilderness.

  Hans climbed up two castle floors before encountering a stairwell blocked by debris. He knew from the size of the rubble that he wouldn’t be able to dig his way out, so he searched the rest of the floor for another way up. The two other stairwells he found had caved in. If he had a pickaxe, he might be able to break through, but he was more likely to shift the collapse just enough that more fell–on him, most likely.

  And that was if the tings of a pickaxe striking stone again and again didn’t draw the whole hive right to him. They definitely would.

  With no easy way up, Hans searched for the terathan tunnel that cut down through the castle. The climb would be vertical, but he might be able to shimmy up a rope with a lucky rope toss. There was no time of day when drones weren’t coming and going, so he would have to somehow defend himself and climb at the same time. When he found the tunnel, he couldn’t get close enough to look directly up. Getting that near to the terathan highway, with the shadows of monsters going up and down, was too big of a risk for a scouting mission.

  Hans knew the castle had five floors. He had gone up two before his way was blocked.

  So he went down. The journey took some time, but he determined that his camp room was one floor above the castle’s deepest basement. The blocked stairs above him were one floor beneath the surface.

  Back where he started with the door shut, Hans pondered alone in the dark with a piece of stale bread in his hand.

  The most likely explanation, as strange as it was for him to articulate, was that this wasn’t the hive on the frontier. This was some god’s or being’s recreation of it, and he was some kind of rat in a maze. If Devon’s boon was something akin to that, why not whatever Hans was living now?

  Attempting the climb to the top was only worth the risk if an escape was actually possible. Twenty to thirty feet up a rope stuck to the side of a terathan highway? Even as good as Hans felt now, he could never cover that distance quickly enough. He’d be spotted and overwhelmed.

  If this wasn’t the real terathan hive as he suspected, whatever something put him here wasn’t likely to let him walk out. So all that shimmying to get to the top alive could be pointless regardless.

  Fuck you, whoever you are.

  Hans sat quietly in the dark for some time more and only occasionally heard the faintest echoes of active terathans. They didn’t have much need for the rest of the castle, so they weren’t likely to stumble across him unless he gave them reason to. He hoped.

  He thought and thought and couldn’t escape the idea that knowing the truth of his situation was the key to his strategy.

  If this were the real terathan hive on the frontier, rebuilt after Devon’s run through it, then getting to the surface and away was the smartest decision.

  If this was the construct of some bored deity or some kind of hell, fighting to the surface was futile. If something went through the trouble of putting him here, Hans doubted that an exit even existed.

  What he chose to do in that scenario didn’t really matter. He was meant to entertain or meant to suffer, and whoever he was doing that for had already decided how this would end. What Hans wanted wasn’t a factor.

  That got Hans to pause.

  What did he want?

  He might not be the ultimate arbiter of his fate, but his decisions were still his own. Hans could choose not to participate. Just sit there and starve himself to death if he wanted to, a final spit in the face of the gods and their cruel games.

  If he was wrong about that, though, he would be killing himself for no reason. If the gods were watching that, some devil would cackle for an eternity about Hans choosing to die slowly when the door out was a few floors up.

  The truest peace Hans had ever experienced suddenly washed over him, putting a smile on his face and joyful tears in his eyes. He was dead. This wasn’t his body. The memories of that pain still echoed through his nerves, as did that final moment, that definitive last page of his story.

  I don’t want to die.

  Too late to change that, but he could take another shot at the hive. Hans was smarter now than he was then, and he had the body to put that knowledge to use.

  He didn’t give a shit what the gods wanted. He was going to do this run for himself.

  Knowing that he could do it, that he could make Diamond, would be a nice memory to have as his soul drifted into the void.

  Final Quest: Finish your Diamond quest.