I stared at the empty cage as I rose. The massive white wolf, big enough that its flesh and fur were practically bursting out of the bars, was gone. The creepy, black-silhouetted woman was still there, one tendril reaching out towards me again. But the wolf was gone.

What? What the fuck? How was this adaptive? How was this fair?

It got tired of my bullshit and decided to kill me. I fought back the panic, pulling in deep breaths, mentally listing things that I knew. The first floor bonus was Intelligence. The Second was Perception. Third was—fuck, what was the third?

I pulled up my stat sheet. Audrey tugged at me, sensing something was wrong but not understanding what. I felt her send me an empty thought, tagged with calm.

Level: 6

Strength: 6

Toughness: 4

Agility: 10

Intelligence: 15

Perception: 8

Will: 11

Companionship: 1

Active Title: Jaded Eye.

Feats: Double-Blind, Ordinator’s Guile I, Ordinator’s Emulation, Stealth I, Awareness I.

Skills: Probability Spiral, LVL 9. Suggestion, LVL 12. One-handed, LVL 6.

Summons: Audrey — Omnivorous Flower Hybrid. Bond LVL 3.

Selve: 452 (-100 per week)

<>

I stared at the numbers, trying to make sense of them and remember what exactly had changed. My thoughts were frayed, filled with the image of the massive white wolf snapping its teeth at me on that first ride up the elevator.

Audrey tugged at me again, and I mindlessly stroked her petals, trying desperately to think.

It was—That’s right. It was Willpower. Which for some reason hadn’t hurt much—me or Brett—when we received the bonus. I hadn’t paid much attention to the bonus rewards because they hadn’t perfectly fit. The Flowerfangs were easier to deal with once I identified how to separate them with Perception, yes, but they would have been just as trivial with high Strength or just my own existing intelligence if I was a traditional caster. Agility was a factor in that fight as well.

The third floor was even more coincidental. Willpower seemed like a natural fit because of how it tied into summoning, and Audrey had been a crucial part of my success on that floor. But what if I hadn’t taken the Ordinator branch at all? Rather the long range, or god-forbid, melee options. Willpower wouldn’t have factored at all.

I realized that I was pressing the button for the lobby floor over and over again, and stopped myself, gritting my teeth. I wanted to title-swap already, get the edgy little presence that was out of my damn head. But no. I had no idea what the floor layout would be, and if there were traps, or something about it that wasn’t immediately apparent, I needed to know.

Fuck.

Maybe. Audrey had warned me about the Gnolls when we first set foot on the third floor. I used sending Audrey a mental image of the winter wolf tagged with urgency, hoping she’d seen it before. She visibly shivered, but shook her head.

FUCK.

Okay. Think.

Maybe—

Perhaps the rewards are based on how I solved the floor, not necessarily on how the floor adapted. The bonuses haven’t repeated, meaning each floor tends towards a certain solution, but have several ways they can be solved. What's even left?

Strength

Toughness

Agility

Companionship

My heart sank. Of the remaining possibilities, there was only one I was confident in. Agility. Meaning, I had a twenty-five percent chance of getting something I could probably handle, a seventy-five percent chance of getting something with a solution likely tailored to my weakest stats.

And I already had a clue of what it would be. The albino wolf was huge, terrifying. Likely faster than me. The reward was almost guaranteed to be either Strength, or Toughness.

Wait, how much of this was even me thinking now? None of this had occurred to me while I was using and thinking, rather in depth, about the dungeon.

None of this helps. I’ll be thinking myself in circles until the elevator opens.

Environment. The Gnolls were in a fantasy castle. The Flowerfangs in a verdant field. So, the winter wolf would be…

I stared at Audrey. “How do you do in the cold?”

Audrey, still shivering, sent me back a mental image of the seasons changing and flowerfangs burrowing underground. It was tagged with fear.

“Cold… bad. It slows.” Audrey said.

I made a split second decision, threw on my hoodie and pulled the neck backwards, forming an opening. “Lash yourself around me with your mobility vines. Try not to show yourself unless it looks like I’m in trouble. If I am, I’ll need you.”

Audrey scaled up to my shoulder and hesitated. “But… my thorns…”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said immediately. “As long as you’re not intentionally hurting me, the shielding won’t interfere, right?”

After a long hesitation, Audrey said, “I… think so.”

“Then go.” I gritted my teeth as she crawled down the back of my hoodie. Audrey did as instructed, vines looping around my arms and neck—

“Waist, Audrey, not neck!”

“S… Sorry.” She settled. Her thorns didn’t cut into the armor much, but I could feel the tiny pins of pressure. If I fell even slightly wrong, I was going to be in a world of hurt. But a little pain was better than being without a summon completely.

The doors opened and a frigid, razor-sharp gale of wind blew in, pinioning me against the back of the cage. I squinted through raised arms, checking to see if by some miracle it was still open. I felt Audrey press tighter against my neck as we battled the wind, pushing hard to get even a step of distance. Snow whipped against my neck, my cheeks, my ankles, every tiny patch of uninsulated skin painfully aware, contrasting with the oppressive, creeping chill of frost that covered the rest of me.

The tempest slowed as I pushed out of the lift and into a gray darkness. My eyes adjusted. The arena, if one could call it that, was a flat wasteland of ice, interspersed with mountainous terrain that called to mind the top of a mountain. I tried to circle behind the lift and found that I wasn’t far off, a contiguous ledge continuing on from either side. There was only one viable direction to head in. Straight ahead.

I removed the crossbow from the ring on my thigh. It somehow felt warmer to me now, perhaps some aspect of the magic within.

I pushed through the snow, trying to avoid the deeper section, but still sinking in up to my calf from time to time, my body temperature dropping rapidly as I struggled my way through.

Twenty minutes is all your body can take, not factoring in the time it will take you to get back to the elevator.

It was helpful information to have. And apparently, this situation was dire enough that had deigned to dial down the snark. Still, the idea of lasting even twenty minutes in here was harrowing. And if I was forced to fight in the deepening snow, I wasn’t sure all the Agility in the world could save me.

Without the warning buzz of it’s hard to say whether I would have noticed it at all. I lowered myself into a crouch, hunting for the source. In the past, it had only activated when I was being actively hunted.

Then I saw it. A strangely formed slope where snow accumulated unnaturally, moved with the wind unnaturally. It took a full thirty seconds of staring to realize what I was looking at.

The albino white wolf from the cages. It was curled up in a ball in the center of an embankment. I saw a glimpse of its scarlet red eye from between a barely closed eyelid.

A gust of the ever-changing wind blew up from behind me and felt like it forced its way through, rather than past me. The scarlet eye flicked open. I saw the wolf rise sluggishly, it’s nose panning in my direction as its breast heaved.

And in terms of size, it was really more bear than wolf.

The probably won’t be as effective against this as it would have been against the Gnolls. There’s no way a fantasy-style winter wolf doesn’t have some form of cold resistance. But the more bolts I land, the more quickly the target loses heat. And it’s not like it has opposable thumbs. It can’t just pull the bolts out. I just need to get as many shots on target as possible.

It was possible. It wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t upgraded. The effective range of this crossbow wasn’t much longer, maybe fifteen to twenty feet, rather than the common crossbow’s ten. But it was far more accurate.

And it was far easier to land shots on a target that wasn’t moving.

I reached out to the Winter Wolf with intending to transmit an image of the empty tundra and feelings of exhaustion.

To say that I met resistance would be an understatement. A wave of grief and rage shattered the connection, gracing me with a splitting headache. The wolf stood immediately, and next to the imprint of her body were three motionless pups.

Not good.

She bared her teeth at me. An overwhelming fear rose in my gut, so violently I traded for immediately. Calm fell over me, panic trapped beneath.

With careful effort, I raised the crossbow’s sights to my eye, and fired.