John and Metra were guided into a cell in the dank cellar of a respectably sized, white castle. Cobblestone continued to be the primary building material, making up the majority of the floor, walls and ceiling. It gave the entire dungeon a depressingly monotone look. The chains dangling from the ceiling did not help. The only light fell in through a small window, over two metres up, and sealed with iron bars.

Once the two of them were inside, the guard slammed the cell door shut. With the resonating sound of metal came the third Quest of the Adventure.

“Well, now we have to break out here the traditional way,” John stated, while looking around the cell for anything of use. “I’m not passing up a new Class.”

“Will you ever even use that?” Metra asked, testing the ‘bed’ that had been provided for them. It was a wooden board that hung from the wall on metal chains, with something that could generously be called a blanket and accurately as a grey rag the size of a person.

John shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll get bored of being an immortal ruler sometime and decide to take up phantom thieving for a century or so. Fundamentally it’s always nice to diversify.” He kneeled down and brushed through the straw that covered the floor. “Usually there’s something helpful inside these cells,” he explained, when Metra gave him a questioning gaze. “Honestly, in the Elder Scrolls video games it’s a bit too ridiculous, because there’s usually some kind of secret hatch.”

As much as the entire surroundings took liberal inspiration from those games, there was no answer quite that easy around. After searching through the hay for about ten minutes, John gave up and walked over to Metra. The ‘bed’ creaked dangerously under their combined weight. “Poor thing wouldn’t even survive a prolonged make-out session,” the ancient weapon posited.

“Probably not,” John agreed and considered their options. Obviously, he had to escape today. He had a double date tomorrow and generally he did not care about spending a night anywhere else but in the embrace of his harem. Scratching Metra’s ears while his mind worked was a nice distraction for his hands. Her hair had always been soft, sort of like the mane of a lion. Now it was downright fluffy. In response to the scratches, her legs started to tremble.

If all else failed, they could just leave the Adventure and come back later, so they weren’t in any danger. Even if that hadn’t been an option, either of them could just rip out the door. The materials confining them to this space were regular rock and iron. Both actions would cause the Optional Goal to be disabled though. Teleporting out of the space and returning later was definitely a superhuman thing to do.

Metra returned his touch by caressing his leg. “Any ideas yet?”

“We could try to abuse the bad AI,” John presented the first that came to mind. “I’ll call over one of the guards and freeze them like I did earlier. While they remain motionless, you search them for the cell key.”

“Sounds good, what’s the issue?”

“Depends, how good are you with holding back?” the Gamer asked. “Because I don’t trust myself to not accidentally shove someone so strongly that it’s considered superhuman.”

“I’ve been schooling basic mundanes for generations,” Metra responded with confidence. Then she hummed. “Although I guess just being hit by a sword and not having my skin broken would count as superhuman.”

“Right…” John rubbed his forehead. He was so used to all of his additional senses that the passive effects of his powers barely even registered as unusual anymore. “Gaia seems to be somewhat forgiving about this, after all my eyes haven’t automatically failed the Quest. Better to not strain her graciousness though.”

“So we call the guard over, grab a key or whatever else he has, wait a minute, and then sneak out?” Metra clarified the wanted chain of events.

Confirming with a nod, the Gamer recalled the floor plan. “We can’t go back the route we came from, too much open space. We’ll have to find another way.”

“We’ll deal with that when we come to it,” the First of Wrath said and got up. Leading the way to the door, she grabbed the bars and rowdily rattled them. “Oy, sword amateur!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Swing your ass over here!”

“Stop right there, criminal scum!” it echoed down the hallway, accompanied by the many little clicks and other noises of a man in full armour moving. “You are disturbing these bars!” The man stepped up to the door. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Reflexively, Metra opened her mouth to deliver some kind of snide remark. No words came out, her eyes stayed straight, and their mental communication was silent, while John squeezed himself between them. There were certainly worse places to be snugly fit into than between prison bars and toned wolf girl thighs. The latter was more essential to the situation being acceptable though and John knew he could get that in greater comfort after they were gone.

John didn’t have to search for long – or at all really. A ring with three keys on it dangled with all of the obviousness of a game mechanic from the man’s hips. All John had to do was reach out, undo the little clasp that kept the ring in place, and take them into the cell. That he was obvious about the entire process didn’t matter, the guard stayed still.

With a slap on her ass, the Gamer signalled his partner in crime that he had gotten what they wanted. “Just that you’re an absolute moron,” Metra told the guard.

“I DON’T KNOW YOU AND I DON’T CARE TO KNOW YOU!” the NPC responded with one of the angry lines in his repertoire and then stomped away.

Metra cackled. “You know, this is kinda fun, thanks to how moronic they are.”

“Well, if it wasn’t for that level of idiocy, I wouldn’t be able to disable my empathetic response,” John responded and analysed the keys. One was pure metal, one was metal attached to wood and one was metal attached to bone. The Gamer had a fairly good idea which one belonged to the cell door.

Carefully the two of them listened for any movements by the guard. With Possession or his Unfound senses, John could have gotten the information they needed immediately, but they had to do it the old-fashioned way. When they heard nothing, John stuck the arm out of the cell door and waved. No reaction from anywhere in the hallways.

“Either the guard is not there, looking the wrong way, or they don’t react to waving,” he told Metra.

“They don’t react to openly discussed escape plans either, so my guess is that they’re there.”

“That’s fair, but we’ll have to take our chances.” The Gamer unlocked the door and carefully opened it. Even the squeaking of the hinges failed to create any response from within the castle. Discreetly, he poked his head out. To the right, two guards were sitting at a table, so engrossed in throwing cards on the table that they did not see him. To the left, the hallway continued and quickly took a corner. John was of half a mind to take a chance on the short route they had taken in after all, but ultimately decided to stick with the safer plan. “We go left.”

They made their way around the corner quickly, leaving behind any chance of somehow alerting the NPCs. With each step they took, the dungeon got less hygienic, with cockroaches and rats appearing all around them. The layout of the corridors was nonsensical from a practical perspective, taking twists and turns for no discernible reason.

When they hit a dead-end, the Gamer was less confused about what the architect was thinking as he was resigned that game design like this actually existed. “I guess our way out is in one of the empty cells,” he told Metra.

“How do you know?” the blonde wolf woman wanted to know.

“Just standard game design intuition,” John responded and looked at the cell doors around. “Usually, it won’t be the most obvious, but the second most obvious one. Let’s go for the second door on the left.”

They entered the cell using the same key that had opened their door and had a look around. With the exception of the rats and a skeleton dangling from the ceiling, it was the exact same as their own cell. One of the skeleton’s arms was upheld by metal chains, its hand eternally stuck in a pointing fashion. “Is that the world’s most obvious hint?” Metra’s dry voice accompanied John while he walked to the spot of the wall pointed at.

Searching for anything unusual, he fairly quickly found a bit of rock that stuck out of the wall several centimetres more than the rest of it. He pressed it and the sound of stone grinding against stone betrayed the activation of some mechanism. “Yup,” he responded, while a segment of the wall glided back, revealing a secret tunnel.

Without further ado, the two entered. As with Oblivion’s opening sequence, they found the underground tunnel to lead, after a short while, to fork between a natural cave and the continued structure. Since there was no emperor destined to die anywhere around them, they could just take the natural path. Cobwebs and dust made it clear nobody had been there in a very long time.

For all the planning they had done initially, this segment was incredibly easy. They could just walk on through the dungeon, gradually watch it transform into a catacomb, and only re-engaged in stealthily moving about after they made it through a wooden door. It had been locked but John just used the corresponding key.

They emerged in some kind of family tomb. Various embalmed corpses were resting on niches carved out of the stone, covered in draperies and sometimes jewellery. Because none of this could be taken along, all of the items were made up by Gaia and only proper Loot would remain real after the Adventure was left behind, John just ignored all of it.

Their caution was rewarded when they ran into a couple of Undead that patrolled the dark corridors. They were obviously blind, but reacted sensitively to sounds, as John intuited by their behaviour and confirmed by throwing a pebble. Keeping quiet had kept the nuisance off their back.

And then there was the encounter with the weirdo.

In a particularly large hall, so large that John had to wonder how it even fit considering the depth the dungeon had been at, stood an elf. For a member of that famously fair race, he was squarely average looking. His face was round and pudgy, his hair a slick blonde shape that resembled an upside-down tornado, and the smile he showed was thoroughly empty.

“Hey, I have a quick question, if you don’t mind,” the elf said.

Metra had been ready to cleave the man apart, her hand already inside John’s Inventory. When he raised his hand in a stopping motion, she raised an eyebrow. “He’s wearing pretty conspicuous armour, he’s probably part of the guards,” she said.

“First off, that might be true, but if he is, we’ll just make a run for it because we aren’t done with the Quest yet,” the Gamer told her. “Second off, I already know this reference.” He cleared his throat and told the man. “No, I do not know if necromancy and necrophilia are legal around these parts.”

“For shame… my… friend will be very disappointed.”

Metra retched and seemed determined to actually go ahead and kill the man now. Again, John stopped her. “Give it a second.”

The elf turned around and suddenly the part of the floor he stood on shot up. The amount of energy required to raise a stone block that large was absurd even to the superhuman Gamer, but it smashed against the ceiling at a solid 30 kilometres per hour despite what he thought was reasonable. The elf was squashed between ceiling and floor.

Slowly the floor came back down, showing a remarkably intact corpse lying limp on the stone surface. Even though John had seen this whole ordeal play out many times in videos, it was still funny in person. He snickered, then he and Metra made their way around the edge of the room.

Up through the remaining mausoleum, they went and eventually emerged in a graveyard. Once there, John was finally hit with the penultimate Quest.

‘Alright, alright, we will repent – probably by murdering everyone who comes after us – show me the Class,’ John thought and opened what he had just received.

‘I assume that Presence thing is my presence getting less noticeable. Interesting… and going to stay on the backburner for a while,’ the Gamer thought and dismissed the window. ‘I’d rather invest in my Negotiator Class than Thief whenever I get to concentrate on basic utility Classes again.’

“So, what are our choices now?” Metra asked, actually pulling Rex Magnar back out of John’s inventory. She had put it there when they had agreed to get captured, and now was as good a time as any to get armed again. “Run, hide or fight, right?”

“That sums it up aptly, yeah,” John confirmed. Already he was opening the menu to put on his own battle regalia. With Metra, there was an incredibly slim chance that she would pick something other than the latter and John preferred to prepare for the most likely case.

“Let’s see if this awkward simulation can throw up a fucking challenge, then.” Metra leaned the long shaft of her weapon across her shoulder again.

“Always choosing violence,” John hummed, following her. The graveyard was barren and located in some sort of depression in the highlands, so they couldn’t see where they were. Since neither the elementals nor the Mandala Sphere was with them, they had no aerial overview either.

“I just chose to break out of a prison for our entertainment,” Metra pointed out.

“Touché,” John readily surrendered the point.

There was a sudden change in the sounds in the distance. From silence to the clacking of armoured boots, echoing several dozen times. “Sounds like Gaia is reacting to our intent,” the First of Wrath commented.

“If nothing else, this could be fun,” John agreed, while they climbed the incline of the depression.