(Book 1 Complete!) Side Quest [Isekai / LitRPG]

The stairs groaned with each step Logan took, sounding like the ghostly wails of the dead. "Light, Cassandra?" he whispered over his shoulder.

A glowing orb drifted over Logan's shoulder, and he was fully prepared to meet zombie-Eurelius. Instead, though, the only noteworthy object was a box at the far end of the room. The material was foreign to Logan, but it shimmered and reflected Cassandra's light as if it were a reflector on a construction jacket. The bluish return glare on the hyper-reflective casing made it impossible to see what lay behind the material.

He reached the landing as the others filed in alongside him.

"What is this?" Senna asked, but nobody had an answer.

They spread out to inspect, and Cassandra fixed her light source at the ceiling's center, casting steady illumination over the bare room. Aside from the odd box near the back, the cellar looked disappointingly plain. Rough stone walls enclosed rows of simple wooden shelves, which were empty of jars or even dust-covered tools. They looked freshly installed, unwarped by time, and with no evidence of anything of weight ever causing them to bow. The floor was packed earth, dry and undisturbed except for faint scuffs that hinted someone had walked here at some point. A slight draft whispered through the opening they had entered through. Otherwise, the space held nothing to see.

Logan ran a finger along a dust-free shelf and then faced Cassandra. "That book said something about shelves, right?"

"Yes." She reopened the page. "Hinges beneath the shelf."

Logan bent lower and turned his neck to check underneath the shelf, and Cassandra set a second light source on the floor as others scanned their own shelves too. Logan saw nothing.

"There's a little lever here," said Bromlin.

"Okay," Logan said. "Before we—"

The shelf above Bromlin's head clapped loudly as the support holding it perpendicular to the wall sank into the stone, causing the shelf to slam down and flat against the stone wall. "Oops."

"Hey," said Senna. "That created a little recess behind mine, and there's a lever here too."

Logan turned to check it out, but Senna had already reached for it. Well, nothing bad had happened yet. Alden went next, which created the pocket cranny under Logan's shelf.

"Let's be ready for anything," he said.

Mishki and Senna went up to the top of the stairs to make sure that if the door closed on them, they would have someone on the outside.

Then Logan pulled the lever.

As the flat plank's clapping collapse echoed in the small room, suddenly all four fallen shelves trembled as they shifted back and sank into the wall, now looking more like a wooden inset. Stone shifted from above and below them, creating an inch gap. Logan frowned and bent to check it out when suddenly a spearhead thrust out of the gap.

"Ow!" If he had bent any sooner, it would have pierced his eye, but it only grazed his shoulder. Another spear jabbed from the crevice about a foot over, with another and another after that. It continued at fixed intervals, proceeding to the next wall. The others put distance between themselves and the spear points' range.

"Here," said Cassandra, as she left her wall and laid a hand on Logan's shoulder.

The wound closed as light pooled under her hand, and it illuminated her face too.

"Thanks," he said, and for a second they just smiled.

"You may want to step away from the wall," muttered Alden.

Logan glanced back to see the prodding lineup of metal points had reached his wall again and would jab him once it reached the center point where he stood. He stepped back.

Once the spear reached its starting point, though, it extended further and ended up pricking Logan's back. He had been far enough that it didn't do any actual damage, more like pressing a toothpick against his skin, but it still startled him. As whatever mechanism pushed these spears out continued along the wall, they all extended the extra distance.

"Uh, that doesn't look good."

"We should head up," said Cassandra, turning to leave. "Each time it makes a lap, it will probably just reach further."

Nugget, though, trilled. He had perched on top of the strange box and scratched his claws against the wall. The dragon had noticed faint lines that had appeared at several places above the box.

The spears were reaching Alden, who made a disgusted noise as he summoned a small Permaflect shell barricade to prevent the spearhead from reaching him. A mechanical groan sounded inside the wall, and the spear sequence ended.

Nugget's golden scales glinted in the corner of Logan's eyes, drawing his attention back to the dragon. Another layer of lines appeared on the wall above the box, some overlapping. It still didn't make sense.

A flash of orange light joined the soft pale glow cast by Cassandra's light, and Alden let out a small yelp as a fireball zoomed toward his head. Just before it hit him, though, it struck a quickly formed ward wall.

"Thank you," the elven mage said to Cassandra.

Another fireball formed mere moments after the words were out of his mouth, this time targeting Logan. Nugget was in the line of fire, but his startled chirp as he launched from his perch before the fireball fully formed warned them, and Cassandra defended Logan too.

"How do we stop this?" Bromlin asked, tucking his beard into his tunic with a wary look at the fire. The next fireball targeted Cassandra.

Senna called from above. "I think it has something to do with this clock. The hands are spinning, but they keep pinging with little jerks. Something's jammed in there, and all these gears are fallen out on the ground. Let me see what I can do."

As Senna worked to repair the clock, Mishki helped her. By the sound of it, he was directing the squirrel to climb inside the big clock. He would relay what the squirrel saw in there, and then Senna would instruct the squirrel on whether or not to remove pins or nuts, using Mishki as a translator.

The fireballs didn't stop, though.

They all stood back-to-back in the cellar, Cassandra shielding them jointly under a single ward as the stream of flaming orbs battered at them from different angles. After about a dozen more blasts, the flames petered out. But so too did the markings on the wall.

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And then the spear tips poked out from their crevices once more, but at the lesser distance.

"What do you think? Should we stay in here or leave?" Alden asked.

Logan glanced up at the exit. They weren't locked in here, so they certainly could just move on.

The ring of spears reached the jamming ice ball Alden had left in the wall, and the entire mechanism grated to a halt yet again. No fireballs came, though, and instead the spears started over, still at the lesser distance. The markings over the reflective box didn't reappear back either.

"No. I wanna figure this out. There has to be a reason for this." Logan did not like being stumped. "Alden, remove that blocking point. Let's see how far these spears go out."

Senna continued to tinker above, and Mishki called down to keep them updated.

Meanwhile, the parade of spears completed three circuits before retracting fully into the wall, and the shelves popped back up as if nothing had ever happened. Cassandra hesitantly lowered her ward, still eyeing the areas they had come from.

"There's a pattern here," said Logan. "I know it." And the box taunted him when he looked at it.

"Okay, sorry, guys. I know this is probably repetitive, but let's do this again. Alden, don't jam the spears until they start their second round, like you did the first time. Then let's gather here and just watch the fireballs to see if they have a pattern too."

They parted from the center just to dislodge the four shelves, then returned to safety.

When Alden jammed the spears, the same markings appeared on the wall.

Fifteen fireballs hit Cassandra's ward before the barrage ended. After the first couple struck, Logan noticed something interesting about their targets, though. "That's the same pattern they were hurled at us before. Alden, stand here…" He then lined them up behind Cassandra's shielding ward from tallest to shortest. So, Alden, Logan, Cassandra, Bromlin, and even Nugget.

The last five fireballs indeed followed suit.

"Finished," Senna shouted from above, just as the shelves righted themselves. "Wait, that can't be right. The clock just stopped."

"I think that's tied to the puzzle," Logan called up.

Once they started it over, Senna confirmed that the clock was indeed ticking again. But when Alden stopped the spears to start the fireballs, she had to adjust the timing with the help of Mishki and his furry friend.

"We're still missing something," Logan said as the fireballs continued. Maybe those fireballs were distracting them from something else. He scanned behind them and slapped his forehead. "Guys, look at that."

A weight hung from the ceiling, having dropped from a rope. Logan's Hidden Gleams gave it a label, stating that it was a renewing cord. It reached the floor just as the round of fireballs ended, then it silently snapped back up into the ceiling, which closed over it.

Another round of the puzzle showed that the rope began the moment the fireballs started, and dropped at a steady pace until it reached the floor right as the fireballs stopped. It also lowered in jerky clips perfectly timed to the pendulum swings above, which Senna started counting the beats of.

Logan recalled learning about Thomas Jefferson's big clock at Monticello, and how clocks back then were set with counterweights, and the pendulum played a part in the controls. When he asked the others if clocks functioned like that here, they said no, but Logan still found the similarity too coincidental to be an accident.

After a few more cycles, without noticing any changes, Logan asked Cassandra if he could see the journal. That had to hold another clue.

Hinges beneath the shelves they had seen. As for midnight hours, the clock stopped each time and reset itself after the fireballs, but never reached midnight. Still, the mention of time was too specific to merit mention in this journal and for the clock to be linked to the puzzle. They just needed to figure out the next few steps to get it to reach midnight.

When it came to the weighted cord that dropped from the ceiling, he wondered if that was the thread to be severed at the center.

"Let's do this again. And Bromlin, when the weight falls to the centerline of the wooden inset, can you slash it?"

"What if that prevents us from being able to solve the rest of this puzzle?"

"It's called a renewing cord. It won't give me any more detail, but my guess is cutting it won't eventually matter. The rest of the puzzle always resets, right? And besides, it's not like we're making any progress, anyway."

And so they began again. Once the weight fell in line with the flattened shelf band, Bromlin swung his axe. He had to use an overhead swing to reach the right height.

"Whoa!" Senna shouted from above and something loud clanged. At the same time, the fireballs snuffed out, and instead, high at the corners of the room, eight of the inlaid stones composing the wall jutted out, two per corner.

Senna scrambled above. "The clock hands are flying. What did you guys do? Hey, you wanted it to reach midnight, right? Well that's… now!"

The eight stones snapped back into the wall, and the shelves rose to their reset position. The cord Bromlin had cut stitched itself cleanly and snapped back into the ceiling.

More markings etched the wall since they had progressed further into the puzzle, but they were fading fast. Logan jotted the added lines onto a page in the journal where he had already sketched the earlier series. He stared at it for a few seconds before gasping and calling everybody to huddle around.

"Look, it's a message." Aside from a few missing strokes, they could fill in the blanks with a little imagination. "See this word, tnree? If you add a vertical line to the n, it becomes an h and spells three."

"What in the spheres are you talking about?" Alden asked. "Do you mean adding a dot?"

Logan then recalled that the others didn't see language the way he did since the System automatically restructured text here to look like familiar English characters to him. But that actually made him all the more confident that this was a hidden message. The System was translating whatever letters people normally used here to align with his language. And the fact that the others all saw the same patterning but Logan saw it differently left him especially convinced this was text.

Once they got past that, they realized that, indeed, a single mark would turn that word into their visual equivalent of three as well.

After running through a few options, they solved the text: Use three to hold eight and four to unlatch at twelve.

"Twelve has to be midnight from the journal. And eight must be referring to those stones." Logan tapped his finger against the journal's text, where it mentioned the locks were within the hinges. "I bet once we press all those stones in, we'll have to pull those hinges again."

Senna made a face. "That clock started spinning fast once Brummy cut that rope."

"That's fine," said Logan. "You can stay up there and shout down when it strikes twelve so we can pull on the hinges."

Mishki also laid a finger beneath the words. "But this says hold, not press. If we have to hold the stones in, how can we pull on the hinges?" He glanced up to the corner where Logan had pointed out the eight stones in question. "And I don't think I'll be able to reach that high."

"Nor I," said Bromlin.

"Also fine. Bromlin, once you cut the rope, be ready at the hinge right in front of you. Mishki, you can wait at another hinge, and maybe you can tell this little fella"—he scratched the flicktail squirrel under the chin—"when to pull on the third hinge." Then he faced Nugget. "And you can grab the fourth."

"I suppose," said Cassandra, "that takes care of all four hinges. And it does say use three to press eight. But how can you, me and Alden manage all eight buttons between ourselves?"

Logan smirked. This whole thing seemed oddly specific to them, but Logan reminded himself these were the rambling, cryptic scribbles of an eccentric seer. "You each just handle one corner. I'll take care of the rest."

And so they all got into place. They almost had to restart, since the fireballs now included Mishki and the squirrel as targets in its height-referential scheme and threw them off their routine, but Cassandra had reacted quickly enough and adapted the flow of her wards.

When Bromlin struck the rope, the gong-like clatter sounded above. "Okay," Senna shouted. "Clock hits midnight in fourteen… thirteen…"

"Press and hold," Logan shouted, and he slammed his palms against the stones, driving them flat to the wall. He used way more force than he needed.

Slipstream Mirage!

For four seconds he held his hands in place, the drain on his mana increasing cumulatively for each second. He had enough for at least eight or nine seconds, though.

When Senna called out nine, he darted to the other wall, making a point not to run too closely behind Bromlin's back, and pressed these stones in. The ones he just released grated as they poked out from their position flush against the wall. His mana depleted as Senna's countdown reached three. He glanced behind him and smirked as his afterimage imparted a fraction of the force he had used to press the stones into place. That was the reason he had used so much effort to grind his palms against the stone buttons earlier.

As Senna's countdown ended, Mishki, Bromlin, Nugget, and the squirrel all pulled on the hinges once more.

"Happy new year!" Logan shouted, even if it earned him a few odd glances. He just smiled and said it was an Earth thing.

For a moment, though, nothing happened, and Logan wondered if he had celebrated a little too soon. Then, seams appeared at the reflective box's edges, and blue mist spilled out with a sharp hiss.

Logan gasped at what fell out.