Kifeda hunched over, panting and exhausted from the fight with the land shark. The creature was dead. Kifeda was sure of it. Still, he hadn’t felt the beast’s experience flow into him as it died. He pulled up his Player status to check.

——

Name: Kifeda Ogeto

Race: Human

Age: 24

Level: 49

Experience: 2

Class: Thief

Profession: Woodworker

Stats: 0

STR

23

END

13

AGI

52

DEX

56

VIT

52

CON

13

INT

8

WIL

7

CHA

52

LUK

97

Skills: [Hide], [Backstab], [Steal], [Sprint]

Equipment: [Twin Fangs of the Viper], [Gambeson]

Achievements: [Dungeon Diver], [Assassin], [View From Above], [???]

——

Sure enough, he hadn’t gained anything from the battle. That, more than anything his interface had told him, convinced him that this wasn’t a space of Yggdrasil’s creation.

His ire at the Aesir who had thrown him here unwillingly began to rise back up.

For better or worse, he wasn’t given enough time to truly build up to anger.

‘Well done, aspirant! Hodr shall surely reward you for your accomplishments and fervor. However, this is no time to rest.

Trial three begins! Conquer the maze!’

This trial began even more abruptly than the last. A distant rumbling quickly grew to a full blown roar. Featureless gray stone walls shot from the ground in the distance and quickly closed the distance. Before Kifeda had enough time to react, he found himself enclosed in a long, ceilinged hallway.

The wall at his back formed so close that he felt it brush the back of his shoulders.

Kifeda silently groaned as he stared down the hallway now before him. He hadn’t been this active in over a year, and right now he wanted nothing more than to curl up and take a nap.

If not for the threat of permanent death for failing these trials, he might have done so.

He sat for a moment, cursing Hodr silently, until the now familiar voice spoke up.

“Do not—” it began, drawing a snarl from Kifeda as he began marching through the corridors of the maze.

He didn’t pay much attention in the beginning, choosing turns at random. After a few minutes he encountered the first room.

It wasn’t particularly large as rooms went, smaller than many rooms in the palace. There was no sign of an exit anywhere. In the center a small pedestal resided, with a wooden sculpture resting on the top of it. A shiny metal plaque was affixed to the front of the column. Engraved on its surface were an extremely simple set of instructions.

‘Bring me to ruin.’

Kifeda examined the sculpture for a moment. He had played with toys like this as a child, and fondly remembered figuring out which pieces would need to be pushed or pulled to disassemble the puzzle. His nostalgia was no match for his current ire, however.

With an almost casual motion, Kifeda drew one of his daggers from his inventory and brought it screaming down on the puzzle.

Kifeda thought darkly, a cold smile on his face.

To his surprise, the puzzle shattered like finest crystal when his blade landed. Pieces went spinning everywhere, pinging off the walls and floor. A whirring noise came from the plaque and its surface rolled upwards, clearing the previous text and revealing a single word. A portion of the wall behind the pedestal smoothly slid into the floor at the same time.

‘Proceed.’

Still stunned, Kifeda looked around the room in confusion. He didn’t find any answers, but he did notice the pieces of the puzzle turning into smoke before disappearing. Shaking his head, he walked out.

he thought to himself.

These and several other questions rolled through Kifeda’s head as he walked further into the labyrinth. When he came to the next room he shoved them all down, writing it off to the insane whims of a being that had been around since the creation of the Nine Realms.

This room was significantly larger than the last, equal to the largest ballrooms in the palace. Additionally, the hall that Kifeda entered through was the only connecting feature. In the center of the room was an ankle high cylinder. Words floated in the air at chest height above the step.

‘Find a solution.’

Kifeda walked around the room this time, examining the walls more carefully. He didn’t see even a seam that would indicate an exit from this room, and eventually approached the cylinder. As he drew closer, the words shifted and changed before him.

‘Step up.’

He obeyed the prompt with a shrug, and the room drastically changed. The dais rose underneath him until he was suspended above the room like a chandelier in the ballrooms that had drawn his comparison. Small openings appeared on the two walls perpendicular to his entrance.

Slowly, two groups of strange animals emerged from the holes. The first group looked like boars that had plowed through hay bales. They snorted at the air in the room cautiously, like they were entering it for the first time. The second group resembled large bears, though they were covered in crimson scales instead of hair. There were fewer of them, and they plodded along slowly while sniffing at the ground.

A stream burst from the floor and bisected the room, surrounding Kifeda’s pillar. Next, the room exploded into a riot of blue as all manner of foliage burst from the ground as well. The walls faded away into the same inky void that Kifeda had first seen upon arriving in these trial grounds.

Kifeda studied the room for a few minutes, quirking his head to one side or the other as he did. The wind shifted with each movement of his head, though he failed to notice.

A scene played out not long after the room's transformation.

One of the ‘hayboars’, as Kifeda decided to call them, found the river and squealed to the rest of its kind. The hayboars came running excitedly, crowding each other as they reached the banks of the stream, drinking deeply. The ‘scalebears’ heard the commotion as well, however.

When they reached the stream, the hayboar's squeals of delight turned to screeches of terror. They backpedaled from the stream, fleeing from the oncoming predators.

When they reached the previous boundaries of the room, they found out the walls were still there.

Their burrow was not.

Less than ten minutes later, the hayboars were nothing more than corpses. The scalebears lounged about on the carcasses of their prey, eating at their leisure.

The room froze.

‘Failure. Two attempts remain. Room will reset in one minute.’

“What?!” Kifeda exploded. “How exactly am I supposed to ‘find a solution’ here?!”

As he waved his arms in anger, the ground all around him rose and fell in a mirrored performance. Kifeda froze too then, mind shooting into overdrive. He slowly lifted his right hand, and a hand-shaped cliff rose on the right side of the room in response. When he brought his hand back down, the cliff lowered with it.

Kifeda furiously experimented for the next forty or so seconds. He found that nothing happened when he moved his legs, so he could freely turn to face one side of the room or the other. His head movements controlled the wind, and he could make the stream larger or smaller through leaning forward or backward.

‘3…

2…

1…

Attempt 2, begin.’

Just as the countdown finished, Kifeda frantically thought , trying to buy more time. When he did, he felt the changes that he had made to the terrain lock into place.

The inhabitants of the room hadn’t obeyed his mental command like the terrain. They began filing out of their tunnels once more. The walls transformed into their realistic backdrop depictions. The hayboars were already making their way to the river.

Kifeda’s arms began rapidly moving up and down. He worked as quickly as his body would allow him. He managed to finish just as the scalebears approached what was now a cliff. The hayboars and the river resided now at the top of that cliff. Contact between the two species was now impossible.

As Kifeda watched, time accelerated around him. The hayboars flourished, water and food plentiful while nothing could threaten them. The scalebears quickly died off from dehydration or malnutrition.

‘Failure. One attempt remains. Room will reset in one minute.’

Kifeda cursed violently for most of the minute, trying to figure out the goal of the room. He was sure now that he was intended to create some form of stable ecosystem. He had no idea how to do it. Anything that left the two species exposed to each other would clearly result in the eradication of the hayboars.

Time started back up as Kifeda struggled to come up with an idea.

Then, luck or fate intervened.

A young hayboar playing in the river failed to pay enough attention to the foliage shrouded ledge. It tumbled from the cliff, squealing the whole way down. Its cries quickly drew the scalebears, who feasted.

Thinking quickly, Kifeda formed his hands into forks. He drove holes through the riverbed, curving the holes down to emerge from the bottom of the cliff face in front of the scalebears. Whirlpools quickly formed in the river, and a new stream formed at the bottom of the cliff.

Time sped up once more, with the occasional careless hayboar being sucked through the whirlpools. These unfortunate victims became food for the scalebears, keeping them alive.

‘Solution accepted. Room cleared.’

Kifeda sighed in relief as the room quickly scaled back to its original dimensions and appearance. A door opened in the back wall. Kifeda walked through it resentfully, fully expecting a host of other challenges.

Instead, he found himself face to face with Hodr once more.

“Well done, slacker,” the blind Aesir said. A mocking smile was pasted on his features. “If only true death could be used as a threat against your kind more often. It staggers even my immense imagination to think of the possibilities.”

Still shocked to be out of the maze so quickly, Kifeda warily stared at Hodr. He felt wind at his back and turned around to see the maze sinking into the ground once more. He had scarcely been inside for an hour.

“That’s it?” Kifeda asked.

Hodr let out a surprised guffaw.

“You break the record time for my maze, and you want more?” he asked in surprise. “Is there secretly a hard worker hidden under all that wasted talent?”

Kifeda didn’t respond. He just stared mutely at the Aesir in his immaculately tailored suit. He didn’t bother floating here, Kifeda noticed.

Kifeda thought.

“Let’s head back,” Hodr said, shaking his head in exasperation. He snapped his fingers and Kifeda found himself flying through the air towards a portal in the air once more.