Kaldalis and Balrim finished exploring that room - finding one other cog - and worked their way up the stairs back to the previous room. Halfway through checking that one, Myrin and Haldir met back up with them, and all together, they finished their sweep and pooled their results. They had five identical cogs in total, perfectly intact and shimmering like new under the thin layer of dirt clinging to them.

They returned to the mechanism on the gate, and Balrim took a minute or so to slot the gears in. Four of them were required to connect the upper gears to the lower ones, and once they were in place, Kaldalis took hold of the chain and pulled.

This time, the chain had some resistance behind it, and he had to put his weight into the work to move it. As the gears within the panel turned, the stone gate inched open, and soon the way forward was clear.

Once fully open, the gate locked in place, but the gears they’d installed wouldn’t budge. The decision was made to leave them behind, like they could have done anything anyway. As a group, they continued forward with only one of the little gears remaining for future barriers.

Through the gateway was another large room with a standard trash pack. Three vendragoras, one leviabeetle, and no surprises. The damage output of the vendragora was high, but Balrim’s healing and Kaldalis’s movement got them through the fight smoothly.

After that pack, Kaldalis found himself at level 6. No one else experienced a level up though. Instead, everyone took a brief pause to search the room for more of the little gears. Once they were satisfied that there were none here, they moved on.

At the far end of the room was another staircase that curved down and around. Kaldalis’ memory told him that they were now moving away from the ocean again, but he was starting to think he was losing track. He usually felt pretty confident about his sense of direction in general, but the stopping and searching had him turned around a little bit, and so he wasn’t sure if he should even be trying to keep track anymore.

All he knew is that they were at least fifty feet below the ground now, and despite the depth, the air was getting drier, not wetter.

The next room had four mobs again - two leviabeetles, one vendragora, and one of the firemicids - and it might have been a deadly challenge, if they’d managed to force their way through the previous firemicid group without learning their lesson. They tackled it the same way they handled the last one, focusing all their attention on the firemicid to minimize how many adds piled into the fight.

This was the first fight where Balrim was able to enact his kiting strategy, running around the group, and Kaldalis saw that it was incredibly effective. Balrim’s move speed just barely outstripped the miniature firemicids, keeping the healer safe, while Kaldalis got the opportunity to grab the attention of the little monsters one at a time as soon as the summoner firemicid was dead. It wasn’t too long before the whole group was mopped up without too much trouble.

“If it weren’t for the kill speed needed for the firemicids,” Kaldalis said as they were searching the room for cogs, “then I think I could probably do this all alone.”

Myrin snorted. “Alright, we’ll just let you handle the next pack on your own, hero.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” Kaldalis said with a grumpy huff. “It would take me forever to handle one of these packs, but I only have to take damage because I need to attack fast enough to keep aggro. If I could just dance around and only attack on openings, I could grind these fights out eventually.”

“Technically, any of us could solo our way through the trash in here with infinite time and skilled movement. As a bodyguard, you do have the best odds of success,” Haldir added quickly. “But that’s because the margin for error is larger for you. With more hit points, you can afford way more mistakes than we could.”

“Right, that’s all I’m saying.” Kaldalis found himself nodding. “I’m not saying I’m better than any of you. Not by a long shot. Just that it’s possible-”

“But,” Haldir went on, holding up a hand to stop Kaldalis, “once we get to the first boss, you’ll see that we all need to work together to get through the dungeon as a whole. Maybe the first one doesn’t have any mechanics that need multiple people, but the final boss at the end will definitely be beyond soloing for anyone, no matter how quick they are on their feet. Even if the mechanics don’t require multiple adventurers to enact, a boss’s stats will make it a numerical impossibility without help.”

“So what can you tell us about boss enemies?” Balrim asked. “Even the tutorial glossed over them.”

“Nothing specific,” Haldir said with a grimace. “Bosses are unique. I could tell you about what mechanics I have heard of, but there’s no guarantee that any of them would appear here. Or if visually similar mechanics that we do see might work very differently.”

“We’ll just have to keep on our toes,” Kaldalis said. “Not like we didn’t learn that from what we’ve already seen. Any mechanic can be deadly if we don’t handle it right.”

The group finished searching the room, finding another shining cog beneath the moss near one of the corners. After that, they continued on. For a change, the hall at the end of this room had no stairs, and continued straight ahead for longer - about a hundred feet - before curving to the left. It didn’t arch all the way around, but instead stopped at a ninety-degree turn, and then went another fifty feet forward or so. Kaldalis mentally determined that they might be beneath the League encampment, if his sense of direction was to be trusted.

The hallway opened into a room, but this one contained no monsters.

As a group, they took a moment to search the room, first quickly, to make sure that there were no monsters hiding for ambush, and then a bit slower.

The room was smaller, about fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long. The ceiling was lower than the other larger rooms, only about twelve feet up. There was less ruin in this room, as well. The walls were smooth, and only a few smaller lumps of mossy rubble scattered across the floor. They set about searching for cogs, hoping to make it a quick search before moving on.

“The walls here are weird,” Balrim observed after a few moments. “They’re just flat stone, no columns.”

“The halls are the same way, though,” Kaldalis observed. But before he was finished speaking, he frowned and squinted at the nearest wall. “But why?”

“Less asking, more doing,” Myrin announced, pulling out her sword. She ran the edge of the blade across the wall, scraping off a large swath of moss.

Beneath the green surface was a brilliant multicolor smear. Myrin kept at it, clearing about half of the wall before she stepped back to admire the handiwork. The wall was still mostly stained that same greenish color, and carved with delicate patterns, but that was the backdrop of an abstract scene that had somehow endured beneath the carpet of moss.

Geometric shapes with rounded corners were stained in different colors, and the whole image was actually quite stunning. Parts of it evoked vague humanoid figures engaged in various activities. On the left side there appeared to be several figures gathered around a central, larger figure. On the right side it looked like two people either wrestling or engaged in inappropriate activities. It was impossible to tell even what race these figures were supposed to be, or even if they were there at all - it was possible that he was only seeing things in the assemblage of shapes because it was human nature to see patterns even when there were none.

One thing he was sure of was that the whole mural depicted a strange face. There was a long section along the bottom with many rounded triangles, clearly meant to be teeth. Parts around the upper corners suggested rounded eyes and the broad curve of eyebrows.

“Wow,” Kaldalis said, nodding appreciatively. “That’s pretty good.”

“What was this place?” Balrim asked, reaching out and running his hand down the wall. “Big spacious halls, and small cramped rooms with murals. Seems inconsistent. I’m not sure what purpose could be served by all this.”

“A school?” Myrin guessed. “Stuff like gyms and lunchrooms, but artsy-fartsy murals everywhere. That tracks, right?”

“I don’t know if this is a school-appropriate mural,” Kaldalis said, squinting at the wrestling figures on the right side, trying to reassure himself that there weren’t any shapes there that might be construed as genitals.

“Why?” Myrin asked, following his gaze. “It’s just shapes, right?”

“Look, though,” Kaldalis reached out and tentatively traced out one of the humanoid figures. “This is a person’s back. And there’s an arm here.”

“Nope,” Myrin shook her head with a grin. She reached out and pointed. “This is a triangle. And there’s a trapezoid here.”

“Fine, fine,” Kaldalis said. He focused his eyes a little and the figures he thought he saw did indeed vanish, breaking into geometric shapes. “But you can at least see the face, right?”

“What face?” Myrin asked, leaning in close to roughly where Kaldalis had pointed. “Where?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Balrim asked. “The whole thing is a face. It’s plain as day.”

“The whole thing?” Myrin took a step back and squinted at the wall. “Give me some perspective. Where?”

“Right here is the eye,” Balrim reached up and poked the rounded shapes. “With the eyebrow right above it.”

“Nope. Right there is a semicircle. And a hexagon.”

“I really can’t read any of you at all,” Haldir said with a sigh of frustration. “Is this a joke? You’re not serious and are just messing with them, right?”

“Not even a little,” Myrin said. “It really is just shapes to me.”

“But it’s… It’s clearly a face,” Haldir walked over to the wall, gesturing around, “the eyes are there, these rows of triangles are teeth, and then this is the nose.” He reached over and touched a triangular shape in the middle.

From where he stood, nearly five feet away, Kaldalis could hear a mechanism in the wall click at Haldir’s touch.