“Wow… I mean, honestly, I thought you had, like, zero ability to defend yourself in battle.”
“Sheesh, way to be super-mean! You’re talking to the woman they call the strongest demon lord in the world!”
“C’mon, Ramiris. Calm down. Tell me what else you can do with it!”
Upon further prodding, she revealed some more details behind her abilities. Essentially, I had five questions for her:
1. How many floors down can you build your underground labyrinths?
2. How many days do you need to build them?
3. What kind of monsters are inside?
4. Can you change their internal structure at will?
5. What happens if someone dies in there?
For a change, Ramiris gave me sincere answers to all of them.
For question one, there was no strict floor limit, but realistically speaking, she could max them out at around a hundred.
As for question two, one floor takes approximately an hour to complete. This figure remained steady for subsequent floors, so a hundred-floor labyrinth took around a hundred hours to complete. Any floors beyond that consumed exponentially greater sums of magical energy, hence the answer to question number one.
For question three, you wouldn’t find monsters, let alone insects or other creatures, just arbitrarily inhabiting a labyrinth. Her previous labyrinth had “monsters” in the form of spirits—spirits who remained as part of the floor structure, partitioned off from the physical world but able to come and go as they pleased.
However, it was possible to “seed” a labyrinth with monsters for adventurers to test their skill against. Fill a maze with magicules, and monsters would spring to life from them. Adjusting the labyrinth’s magicule density made it easy to predict the strength of the monsters who resulted, as well as restrict monsters to a certain floor or floors. That made it possible to fine-tune a labyrinth’s difficulty level with some precision. I had an idea of how this magicule infusion process worked, so I’d give that some thought once I had the right container for it.
Regarding question four, the sheer power of Ramiris’s Mazecraft skill meant she could change the entire structure of a floor in about an hour, although floors could not be edited for twenty-four hours after the last revamping.
There were conditions, of course. She couldn’t make something—plants or other organic matter, for example—out of nothing, so structural changes would chiefly result in staid-looking mazes of blank walls. However, if you simply wanted to redecorate a floor with some materials at hand instead of changing its structure, that wasn’t too terribly difficult.
It was also simple enough, by the way, to rearrange a labyrinth’s floor order. This, too, was set in stone for twenty-four hours afterward, but that made it no less useful a tool.
And last but not least, question five. Astonishingly, this depended entirely on Ramiris. If she was keeping tabs on things, she could snap her fingers and resurrect the dead inside her labyrinth. I was just wondering how she handled the corpses of monsters and hapless adventurers, but this sounded like nothing short of voodoo to me. Apparently, she wasn’t sure what happened to monsters born inside the labyrinth, since she had no examples to work with yet, but she had already resurrected quite a few adventurers in the past.
This was why she emphasized not being able to move organic creatures inside “without permission” earlier. This “permission” was nothing too formal; what mattered was that the subject in question knew he or she was going into the labyrinth. Without that understanding, any visitors would be refused entry. In other words, when I went into Ramiris’s labyrinth a while back, that was because I actively tried to do so. If I was carrying a sleeping companion on my back as I ventured inside, we would’ve been blown back at the entrance. (One exception to this was infants. Children young enough to not have their own free will yet were essentially treated as “things” by this rule.)
You could drag someone kicking and screaming into a labyrinth, but only at a great burden to Ramiris, so it was impossible if she resisted you at all. “You wouldn’t want to try it,” is how she put it to me.
So there you have it. Essentially, anyone who goes into a labyrinth was under the tyrannical rule of Ramiris—something they agreed to the moment they stepped through the entrance. If they accepted the rules, Ramiris would keep careful tabs on their status.
“And you know how much we like playing pranks, don’t you?” she said, puffing out her chest. “I just like surprising people and seeing their reactions. If they died, you know, that’d kind of weigh on my conscience. So I do what I can to keep ’em alive and set them back on their way.”
Sometimes, there’d be an unlucky subject who really did die on Ramiris, but it sounded like those deaths occurred outside of her labyrinth. At the very least, she didn’t want to kill me when I was in there. That golem who looked ready to stomp me to oblivion was only there because she knew she could fix me up, good as new, if called to. That made sense to me, although it seemed to lower the stakes of what I went through quite a bit.
“So if a band of adventurers goes in on a monster-hacking run, you can revive them if they die?”
“Yep! Once they’re booted out of the labyrinth, I can resurrect them like nothing happened. It’s a bit tougher if we’re talking a whole party at once, though, so we might need to send them in with some of my revival equipment.”
Equip a specified item from her Mazecraft labyrinth, and dying would just transport you back outside intact. That solved my
