“Flee to the corner!” Phatagin called out to Josephine as he used some of his stored inertia to put on a burst of speed, allowing him to cover an incredible amount of ground with every step. Despite his largely quadrupedal morphology, the pangolin was actually quite capable of running on only his back legs, which he employed to great effect when needing a burst of speed. The Attendant, also moving bipedally, held up her skirts with both hands as she hustled to catch up.

  Charlemagne reached his destination and screeched to a halt, facing the trio of accusatory knights. As one, they turned toward the rooster as he inhaled deeply. The ambient magical energy in the room hastened to obey Charlemagne’s command as he began to gather it together, mixing with the fiery mana that flowed from his Ember Core and forming a blue and white ball of heat and destruction in front of his open beak. So much energy was pulled in from the environment that the lights dimmed and began to flicker, and the room’s temperature spiked as waves of excess heat roiled off the newly empowered attack. Then Charlemagne’s Skill, Inferno’s Embrace, activated, bathing the rooster in an aura of dense, red energy that emitted even more heat.

  “What are you doing?” shouted one of the Knights, reaching for its non-existent scabbard.

  “You’ll kill us all, you fool!” another yelled, turning its helmet to face the rooster.

  “Hey, you broke the stand-off! You must be an illusion,” the third cried, moving to accuse the second knight with both hands.

  Sweat attempted to bead on Phatagin’s snout and belly but evaporated almost instantly as even the corner the pangolin had cowered in became too hot for comfort. Next to him, Josephine wiped her face before looking in confusion at her dry hand. And yet the heat in the room still rose.

  Finally, Charlemagne released his attack, engulfing the knights in a conflagration backed not only by heat but by burning mana as well. The flames completely obscured the trio and lasted for what felt like an eternity. Phatagin began to sag from heat stroke, while Josephine summoned a bottle of water from an extradimensional space and gulped it down, looking refreshed but nervous once she had quaffed the entire bottle in one go.

  Just as Phatagin’s whiskers began to singe, the fiery attack cut off without warning, leaving behind a plume of smoke in the air.

  “Bawk,” the rooster announced, apparently satisfied with his handiwork.

  The temperature in the room finally began to creep back down as the smoke cleared, revealing three very scared but very unharmed knights. Not even their armor bore any traces of the searing flames that had covered them moments before.

  “I’m…I’m alive?” one of the knights gasped.

  “If I lived through that then…” another added.

  “I must not actually be here. I AM one of the illusions!” the third finished.

  The trio turned and saluted the rooster before vanishing into thin air.

  “Bawk,” the rooster added.

  The System confirmed the rooster’s triumph a moment later.

  “Bawk!” Charlemagne protested as he processed the notification from the Squiggles. Even though he’d quickly solved the problem with a minimum of effort, he had been marked down as having barely passed the Challenge.

  “That’s probably because you forced me into the Delve with you,” Josephine suggested as she and Phatagin slowly approached the rooster, taking care not to get too close to the still broiling rooster.

  “But we cannot be certain,” Phatagin objected. “Perhaps the goal of the Challenge was to use our wits rather than brawn to resolve the issue. Although I confess that I cannot think of how we might have accomplished that.”

  “Bawk!” Charlemagne retorted.

  “I do agree that you used your intellect to solve the issue. Unfortunately, the System might not have agreed. Perhaps it will give you a direct answer if you request a breakdown of your score.”

  The rooster spent a few long moments yelling internally at the Squiggles, demanding to know why they had penalized his grade. But there was no response.

  “Bawwwk,” he sadly reported.

  “Well, that would have been rather convenient,” the pangolin lamented. “I would suggest that you dismiss Josephine and attempt the next room without her, but I fear that, if you allow her to depart, she will not be allowed back in now that we are properly inside the Delve.”

  “We could try it anyways!” Josephine was quick to add.

  The rooster thought about his options for a moment before deciding that he preferred to have the Attendant around. It was only fitting for him to have multiple servants helping him, and the long months on his farm had accustomed him to the presence of humans. He could always decide to jettison her later if she really did prove herself useless. That last thought triggered a dim memory of past events, and Charlemagne was momentarily reminded of another servant that was no longer around, but he couldn’t recall what had happened to her.

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  Shaking his head to push away any irrelevant thoughts, the rooster looked around the room to determine his next course of action. A doorway that had not existed previously had appeared, allowing the group access to the next room. Charlemagne marched forward confidently and disappeared over the threshold. The other two hurried to catch up.

  Upon arriving in the next room, Charlemagne found that it was quite a bit smaller than the previous area had been. The floor, ceiling, and walls were similar to those of the Delve’s entrance, but the room had much better lighting. Two large wooden buckets, one a good deal larger than the other, stood in the middle of the small room. At the far end of the room, there was a gray rectangular box lying on the floor. Finally, there were large troughs set into each wall, filled with a clear liquid. Sniffing the air, Charlemagne guessed from the dank atmosphere that the liquid was most likely water.

  The Squiggles arrived with a message explaining what to do.

  Charlemagne was deeply confused. Why did he need to do this? How did putting water into containers solve anything? He could understand the point of the first trial…his foes might possess any manner of tricks, and it was important to develop countermeasures to prevent himself from being fooled by a Skill or Special Ability.

  “Well, this is an easy one,” Josephine suddenly announced from behind him. “And the System isn’t restricting me from helping you. That’s actually pretty neat. Although I still object to being forced into this strange and certainly dangerous Dungeon.”

  “Bawk,” the rooster reassured her.

  “No, it doesn’t make me feel better that most of your Party members haven’t died ‘permanently’. I imagine that dying, even in a Simulation, is not very pleasant.”

  “It is indeed not,” Phatagin confirmed.

  “Bawk, bawk,” said Charlemagne.

  “At any rate, since our dear Attendant seems to understand this particular puzzle, I vote that we allow her to complete it,” the pangolin suggested.

  The rooster looked expectantly at Josephine, who sighed dramatically.

  “Yes, let’s just ask the lady in a nice dress and heels to haul water instead of the crazy strong Knight,” she huffed.

  “Who has no hands,” Phatagin noted.

  “Fine, fine, I see where this is going,” the Attendant said as she stomped over toward the buckets before suddenly falling over. She yelled something that neither Charlemagne nor Phatagin could understand before pushing herself back up to her feet and yelling more incomprehensible phrases. Josephine finished the tirade by hiking up her skirts, removing her shoes, and then throwing them one by one against the wall. Thankfully, neither of them landed on the scale.

  “Stupid heels!” she grumbled as she grabbed the larger bucket and hauled it over the trough. She submerged the bucket and waited for a moment as it filled it to the brim. The tendons in her hands and neck tightened as she lifted the much heavier bucket with both hands, but the Attendant showed no other sign of distress as she hauled the larger bucket over to the smaller one.

  “Honestly, you two,” she complained as she used the larger bucket to fill the small one to the brim, “should know how to solve something this simple. If you had sat around and thought about it, the solution really is pretty obvious.”

  “Bawk.”

  “I must agree with my Knight,” Phatagin added. “Neither of us were born with great intelligence. It sounds like you might be a sapient supremacist.”

  “Bawk?” the rooster asked.

  “It means that she thinks native-born sapients are better than those who acquired greater mental faculties later.”

  “Bawk!”

  “That’s not true!” Josephine objected. “I only meant that you both are fully capable of solving this puzzle. A child could do it!”

  “There it is again,” Phatagin said to Charlemagne. “Comparing us to sapient infants.”

  The Attendant gave up while she was behind, and continued her labors, dumping out the container that she just filled up onto the floor. Phatagin rolled into a ball and used a Special Ability to float off the floor and keep his claws dry, while Charlemagne paid no heed to the water flowing past his feet.

  “Are you perchance giving up already?” the Squire asked. “Should Charlemagne and I muster our mental powers, as feeble as they might be?”

  “Look, this is how the puzzle goes,” Josephine snapped, losing much of her southern drawl in her anger. “You fill up the 5 Unit jar, then pour as much as you can into the 3 Unit jar. Now the big jar has 2 Units left, right? It’s simple math, 5 minus 3 is 2. So we pour those 2 remaining Units into the little jar.”

  The Attendant paused her explanation to demonstrate, pouring the remaining water from the big jar into the little jar.

  “Now the big bucket is totally empty, while the little one has 2 Units, right?”

  “Seems logical,” Phatagin agreed, following Josephine’s actions with great interest.

  “Now we need to refill the big one, because we have two Units in the small bucket but we need more water, right?”

  “Ah, I think I see,” the pangolin agreed. “Are you following the next step, Charlemagne?”

  The rooster said nothing. Phatagin wisely chose not to press the question as he watched Josephine refill the 5 Unit bucket.

  “Now comes the payoff, Ser Charlemagne,” the Attendant noted with sarcastic deference. “I’ll fill the small bucket from the large one again. But there are already 2 Units of water in the small bucket. So it will be full sooner, yes?”

  “Bawk,” the rooster agreed.

  “So now I’ll stop once the small bucket is completely full,” Josephine explained as she poured. “And….there. Do you see what I did?”

  “Bawk!” Charlemagne cried as he realized that 5 minus 1 was equal to 4.

  “Very good, sir!” Phatagin praised as he and Charlemagne waited for their unwilling porter to carry the bucket contained exactly 4 units of water over to the scale. As soon as the bucket was placed onto the shining metal, a pleasant chime rang through the room.

  “And there we have it. It only cost me my favorite pair of heels,” Josephine said.

  “You know, I wonder what this particular challenge looked like to our myriad viewers,” Phatagin mused as the group waited for the System to reveal their grade and the room’s exit. “From their point of view, the buckets simply moved all by themselves. I wonder if I could actually develop a Skill or Ability that would let me do that.”

  “Bawk” Charlemagne chimed in.

  “If you could have done everything by manipulating mana barriers, why didn’t you?” Josephine practically yelled.

  Charlemagne was about to respond rather rudely when the Squiggles arrived with a congratulatory message…and his score.