After sitting in despair for about 30 minutes over how he'd once again managed to stumble upon one of the keys to plot progression, Nathan managed to push himself to his feet and enter the hallway. He moved like a man with a terminal disease—back slouched, hand running alongside the wall for support, eyes downturned.

  "I refuse to activate this thing," he said. "It's pretty obvious that it's not fully on—it's stuck halfway up."

  His footsteps moved one after the other, each one requiring Herculean amounts of effort.

  "That's right," he muttered. "I'll figure out some sort of escape—maybe a vent—and slither my way out by turning into my water form. Yeah, I'm gonna have to leave the clothes and the wig behind and run naked for a little bit, but that's a small price to pay. Hell, maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe there's actually just an exit going directly out of this thing. I'm thinking of this like some sort of dungeon, but this is real life. I bet I'll just be able to walk out of here as soon as I find the entrance, no problem."

  A glimmer of light. Nathan sped up his steps. There it was. His ticket out of here, his exit. All he had to do was show up.

  He came to the end and his face fell.

  The light was coming from up above. The railgun was halfway out of the hill, but had failed to crest the peak.

  Directly underneath it, a glass barrier prevented anything from getting in or out.

  He groaned. "Okay, so that's not going to work."

  There were a few doors to the top and to the left. Nathan looked for one that was labeled exit, but was unable to find any with that particular moniker.

  At random, he selected one of the doors and walked into it. As soon as he stepped through, a door slammed shut behind him.

  He glanced back at the door. "Well that's not good."

  He turned around and a purple explosion of smoke shrouded the center of the room in darkness.

  When it disappeared, a familiar creature arrived. It was that same turret with spider legs that he'd fought in the shrine.

  Its eye lit up and honed in on Nathan.

  His heart rate jumped and he sped over behind a barrier. He pressed his back to the wall and peeked out.

  It looked at him and flashed.

  Nathan quickly slammed his head behind the wall and shut his eyes.

  Nothing happened.

  He poked his head back out just in time for the bucket of bolts to explode into a steaming pile of metal scrap and wires.

  Nathan grimaced. "Seriously? Again?"

  He walked over to it and kicked the remains like a soccer ball, scattering the metal pieces all over the floor.

  Off to the right, a gate that Nathan hadn't seen earlier swung up and into the wall. There was a chest with a gold frame and red walls. Nathan walked over to it and tugged it open.

  Inside was a single giant key with an emblem of a rail gun on the handle.

  Nathan used [Basic Inspect].

  [Boss Key of Doom #1]

  One of four Boss Keys required to activate the rail gun. By using this, you activate the rail gun, and nothing else will happen.

  P.S. The boss moniker is just for fun. Don't worry, it doesn't summon a boss.

  P.P.S. I lied.

  P.P.P.S. Or did I???

  Nathan rolled his eyes and stuffed the key into his inventory. So there were four of these. And they definitely wouldn't summon some sort of boss monster after activating the rail gun. That was great. Just great.

  Nathan wandered his way into one of the other rooms and had to battle his way through a gauntlet of extremely basic box sliding puzzles. In the first room, he had to slide one box. In the next one, he had to slide two boxes. In the third? Nobody would ever guess what this was—it was three boxes!

  Nathan stepped back and rubbed the sweat off his forehead after pushing this third box.

  "I'm really beginning to think that B32 seriously underestimated the intelligence of everybody who would arrive here," he said.

  A door in the corner of the room swung inward. Inside was another chest with the Boss Key. Nathan walked over to it—

  and then the door swung shut right before he'd been about to enter it..

  Nathan jumped back, startled. Once his heart settled down, he stepped over and tapped at the door.

  It had definitely been open. Had he missed a puzzle? He turned around and surveyed the impossible task that had been set before him—the three box sliding puzzle.

  If there was another puzzle, he wasn't seeing it.

  He tilted his head back toward the gate.

  "Wait a second... I've seen this before."

  When he'd been playing Dungeon Master Simulator 3000, the game had bugged and the NPCs weren't able to get to one of his assigned objectives. The door swung shut and Nathan had won the game by default. As the guy designing the dungeon, that was great!

  Being on the other end of it was... a little bit concerning.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  "I'm trying to apply experience that doesn't really apply," Nathan stroked his chin. "B32 wouldn't make a dumb mistake like accidentally creating an unbeatable quest objective, right?"

  Nathan turned his head toward the ground and furrowed his eyebrows together. "Actually, I'm not sure on that one."

  He rapped his knuckles against the door. Hollow. The room was still on the other side... not that Nathan had thought it had moved or anything, it was just nice to confirm.

  He walked back over to the sliding boxes and moved one of them out of position. He slid it back onto the objective, and waited.

  Nothing from the gate.

  It wasn't like Nathan could send a bug report to the developer. He'd killed the developer and currently had the developer's corpse inside of his inventory. This made bug reports problematic.

  Would I even have been able to send a bug report if he was still alive?—Focus, Nathan! You need to get out of here, hopefully without attracting any more attention!

  With nothing better to do, he reared up his leg and kicked the door with everything he had. The gate rattled a little bit, but didn't budge. He reared his leg back and did it a second time. Another rattle. A third time. Still nothing.

  By the fifth time, he'd realized that whatever the hinges were made of were stronger than his feet.

  Okay, I've been soft-locked before, Nathan thought. What did I always do? Easy, I would load back before the game got soft-locked and try to avoid it.

  Oh.

  "I'm on Iron Man Mode! There's no saving!"

  He flopped onto the ground and stared down past his chest at the door. There was a small crack through which he could see the locking mechanism.

  He squinted his eyes.

  B32 had just stolen a door lock design from Earth. It was one of those ones that allowed for easy shutting of a door. The latch bolt would slide back and then snap into place once it had met up with and hit the correct position and straightened out.

  Wait, hadn't Nathan seen a video about these types of locks? He'd read about how hackers would pass a clothesline through the crack or something and then use that to pull on the bar and get it to unlock.

  Nathan pulled out some fishing line and attached a minuscule bob on the end. The only reason it was there was to give it some weight. He swung the fishing line through the crack and it wrapped around the latch bolt. He pulled on it and the door clicked and shuttered open.

  Nathan stared at the open door and groaned.

  "I'm beginning to think that B32 really didn't put much effort into this circle," he muttered as he stepped into the room. He leaned down and opened up the second chest. He reached into it and pulled out the Boss Key, then stuffed it into his inventory.

  "Duh-duh-duh-duh," he said. "You just got the second Boss Key."

  The third one had been in the pool that he'd come from. Go figure.

  With that, all Nathan needed was the final Boss Key. And then he would also need a place to actually insert them, but he was pretty sure he'd be able to figure that out along the way.

  There was only one doorway he hadn't gone into at this point.

  He walked into it and was greeted by a hallway that was impossibly long. After about 10 minutes of walking, he arrived at a pedestal with a piece of paper on it. Behind the piece of paper, the gateway to the chest was clearly visible. Unlike the previous chest, this one used a different style of door design that would make it impossible to cheese.

  He just had to grow a brain right as I managed to outsmart him. Classic.

  He stepped up to the pedestal and picked up the piece of paper.

  He squinted his eyes.

  "What the hell?"

  It was a crossword puzzle.

  There was only one problem with this turn of events.

  Nathan sucked at crossword puzzles.

  There was a pencil to the side of the paper that he didn't notice before. He picked it up and kneeled on the ground.

  This was going to take a while.

  Nathan had managed to get through each one at a relatively steady pace. If by steady pace one meant a single answer every 20 minutes.

  There were about 40 words he needed to do.

  After who even knows how long, he managed to get down to the last one.

  Number 40: The longest non-scientific word in the English dictionary.

  Nathan had racked his brain for the past hour in an attempt to remember. Not that there was anything to remember—after all, he didn't exactly spend his time checking his English dictionary to see what the longest word was. It just wasn't one of his hobbies.

  Maybe there was a way he could cheese it? No, surely not.

  He couldn't imagine how one could cheese a crossword puzzle. There weren't exactly a lot of mechanics to fiddle with in the first place.

  He tried putting in a random jumble of letters, then put the crossword back on the pedestal.

  Total silence.

  He took it off and stared at the paper like it would somehow reveal the answer if he just looked at it long enough. It did no such thing.

  If only I had the internet, he thought. Then this would be a cinch.

  He sucked in a breath.

  He didn't have the internet, but he had the next best thing.

  He opened up Dither and did a quick search for “longest word in the English dictionary.”

  No results.

  It would figure that nobody was talking about that on the apocalypse's social networking platform.

  With no other choice, he made a post.

  [Nathan Lee]: Can anybody tell me what the longest word in the English dictionary is?

  Within a few seconds, he had a reply.

  [SickBurns]: whatever word is used to describe the weight of your mom.

  Nathan nodded. Very classy.

  Another reply came in.

  [NathanLeeFanGirl35]: You're alive? There's no way! What are you, some sort of impostor?!

  [NiceAss]: It could just be somebody who's named the same.

  [NathanLeeFanGirl35]: Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

  [NathanLeeFanGirl35]: I just checked his profile, it's actually him!!!

  [EnglishProfessorintheApocalypse]: It's antidisestablishmentarianism.

  Nathan quickly deleted the post and wrote the letters into the crossword puzzle. He set it back on the pedestal—

  The door at the back swung open.

  Nathan stepped inside and lifted the key out of the chest. Without warning, his inventory opened of its own volition and the other three keys flew out of it. They circled around Nathan and emitted a bright red glow.

  “You know," he said. "Automatic activation of a final boss encounter is kind of bad design generally speaking—”

  He felt the world shift and his body disappear to a different section.

  Nathan was standing on air. Above him was the railgun. Below him was the dungeon he'd just gone through.

  No, he wasn't standing on air. He was on top of a glass platform.

  He took a closer look at the sky.

  A sheen. Another glass layer.

  “So there's no flying out of here,” he muttered. “That about figures.”

  He stepped forward and the glass floor shook.

  A purple cloud of smoke burst out of thin air and obscured the center of the glass arena. Nathan shielded his eyes from the fine particles and coughed in response.

  “What is it with this place and purple smoke?” he coughed again. “Please, get a new gimmick.”

  In the back of his mind, he prayed that that freaking worm wouldn't appear.

  Seriously, if that thing shows up again, I'll lose it.

  The smoke cleared away from a gust of wind that came from absolutely nowhere and made no sense to exist because they were inside of a closed vacuum sealed area, but Nathan probably shouldn't have been paying attention to that because there was a monster, what was that thing—

  It was the turret.

  The one with the spider legs.

  Nathan breathed a sigh of relief.

  Its eye lit up in that oh so familiar fashion and Nathan let out a sigh.

  “Buddy," he said. "You really need to give it a rest. We both know how this is going to end.”

  The turret, of course, didn't respond. It merely continued to charge up its attack.

  The attack which would blow it to shreds and fail to launch at Nathan.

  The light in the eye glowed brighter and brighter. Nathan offered a private prayer in his heart for this useless turret who was about to accidentally commit seppuku.

  And then a laser beam shot out and hit him directly in the shoulder.