Chapter 92

Liz had always known this in an abstract way, but the events of yesterday, and now today, confirmed it with absolute certainty.

The dungeon was a wicked, wicked creation.

“N-No way,” Liz said. “Is that—it can’t be—it doesn’t mean—?”

“I knew this would happen,” Natalie said, her face covered with her hands. “Gods, this is so embarrassing.”

Liz stared at the pillar sprouted from the ground. After a good hour cutting their way through the dungeon, they’d found a special encounter room. Not quite a puzzle. The directions the dungeon were providing were clear enough. It even came with swirling, cursive writing tucked beneath the drawings—instructions that left little doubt.

But Liz still failed to understand what she was seeing.

There, engraved onto the stone pillar, laid three pictures. In the first, a woman sat straddled against a rounded block. She had a spectator. In the second, the block was clearly vibrating—moving back and forth. A heart with an x-mark through it was beneath the woman. Finally, in the third picture, a checkmark followed by an arrow leading to a lootchest and a sword.

In case they couldn’t understand the pictures—and Liz almost couldn’t from its sheer absurdity, despite how clear the depiction was—a numbered list was scrawled into the stone, almost comically elegant and refined when compared to its content.

1. Accept the challenge, and a spectator.

2. Resist the temptation to finish

3. Claim your reward, a weapon tailored to the challenger.

“It can’t be saying what I think it is,” Liz said dumbly.

The dungeon expected someone to be pleasured? On that rounded, cylindrical seat? Which apparently vibrated?

More than that, while being watched?

And winning gave a weapon tailored to the challenger???

“I hate my class,” Natalie said, face still buried in her hands. “I really, really thought it would be kept to me.”

“Why does it need a spectator!” Liz shrilled.

The other stuff was weird, okay, but why did they have to be watched while it happened?

And Liz had decidedly not missed how the dungeon had offered this challenge right after Liz had been robbed of her weapon. Was it implying something? That she was supposed to take this challenge up? To earn a new wand so that she could give Ana her orb back, and the team could operate as they had before?

“You know,” Sofia said, “I believed you, Nat, but seeing it in action is something else.” The white-haired girl peered at the diagram, as if looking for some clue, then glanced at the accompanying device: the cylindrical ‘challenge seat’. “Only you could get a class like this.”

“And what does that mean?” Natalie growled, finally revealing her flushed face. The poor girl seemed mortified, but to be fair, all five of them were blushing.

Well. Four of them. Liz seriously envied Ana, sometimes. But really, the fact she seemed intrigued more than anything was ridiculous. Like this was merely an interesting deviation of the dungeon, and she only cared about it from a scientific perspective.