The survivors of the battle against the Wolves deep inside the labyrinth that is the sewers of Melusarej, head to the back of the room where they find another door leading forward. This one is made of iron and has a handle on the left-hand side. Kayde opens it and stands off to the side in case of an axe, but none falls.

“It’s so weird how only half of these doors seem to be trapped,” Kayde comments, annoyed that he is putting in extra effort to be cautious when it isn’t needed some of the time.

“Hold on. The door opened to the right. Some of the other ones opened to the left. What if... every time the handle is on the left, the door is fine, and if it is on the right, an axe swings down,” Xander reasons.

Alcaeus thinks about all the iron doors they have come across before and agrees, “I think the kid has figured it out. I remember it being that way too”.

“There are the mosaics as well,” Kayde points out, remembering that every time they come across a depiction of the god of the desert, Gwyn, some sort of trap has sprung.

“Yeah, I think everything down here follows a pattern so the Wolves know how to navigate while keeping others out. It’s pretty clever actually,” Xander finds himself complimenting them.

They continue forward, finding themselves, yet again, in another hall wading through sewage. Kayde catches Alcaeus looking over at him.

“What’s up buddy? Do I look that irresistible to you?” He jokingly asks.

“What the fuck? No, I don’t, no offense but you’re ugly as fuck,” Alcaeus is confused, not sure why Kayde would say something like that.

“You are staring at me,” Kayde points out what his quip was in reference to.

“Alright, you caught me. To be honest I was expecting you to be at least slightly devastated. Didn’t your girl just die? You don’t seem to feel down about it at all,” Alcaeus observes.

“We had fun, but she never really meant anything to me,” Kayde explains almost cheerfully.

“That’s cold man, even for me. I mean sure it’s not like I’d be completely broken up about it... but I’d at least feel down until I could find something to drink,” Alcaeus shakes his head and walks ahead of Kayde.

Xander halts the group when he sees mosaics on the walls again. Alcaeus, who has a keen sense for these things, gives the mosaics a closer look and notices there are holes in the eyes.

“Look there, at the eyes. Something probably comes out of them, if we just duck below them we should be able to pass,” he informs the others. They follow his direction, moving low past the mosaics. Arrows come firing out of the holes, flying just over their heads.

“Good eye Alcaeus,” Kayde tells him.

Not far past the mosaics stands an iron door with a handle on the left-hand side.

“So according to the pattern this one shouldn’t be trapped,” Xander notes, eager to confirm their suspicions about the system.

“Either way I don’t trust it. I’m going to pull it open with my whip,” Alcaeus tells them. They stand back and let him catch the handle with his whip and pull the door open. Nothing happens just like the pattern would suggest.

They find themselves in another long hallway, of course, filled with sewage.

“I’m getting tired of this smell,” Alcaeus comments as they walk, barely able to bear the constant stink they’ve been stuck in.

“I’m surprised the Wolves can hang out in this kind of place all the time,” Xander agrees, not fond of the smell either.

“They do what they have to. A bad smell shouldn’t change anything,” Drakthar chimes in, the pungent aroma nothing that even comes close to bothering him.

On the walls hang another set of mosaics, signaling to the group that there must be some other deadly device waiting for them. Alcaeus takes a look at them but doesn’t see anything like the eyes on the last ones.

“I’m not sure what this one is going to be,” he alerts the others.

“Fine, I did want to take a nap with this, but it seems like I have no choice,” Kayde complains, grabbing the pillow he had been carrying since the room with the cots and throwing it out in front of them. When it lands in the sewage spikes come out from the ground and the ceiling, cutting through and tearing the pillow to shreds.

“Well, that’s excessive. My innocent pillow was just brutally murdered,” Kayde comments in horror as he watches the loose feathers now floating among the sewage.

“There’s a gap between the spikes and the wall, let’s slide through there,” Drakthar notices. They stick to the wall and safely make their way past the spikes.

At the end of the hallway is another iron door, its handle on the right-hand side.

“So there’s an axe right?” Alcaeus asks, noticing the position of the handle.

“Yeah, if we’re right about all this then there should be,” Xander notes as he pulls the door open standing out of the way. The axe swings down causing some sewage to splash onto Xander.

“Great,” he looks down, irritated that his relatively clean shirt is now covered in sewage.

Through the door is a set of stairs leading upwards and around the corner.

“At least we aren’t walking through shit anymore,” Alcaeus points out in consolation.

When they round the corner they see two directions, to the right is a wooden door and to the left is only darkness, which Kayde’s torch doesn’t seem to be able to illuminate.

“That’s weird,” he thinks to himself out loud as Alcaeus and Xander inspect the door.

“Hey, the door doesn’t reach all the way up to the top of the door jamb,” Alcaeus observes, running his finger along the top of the door.

“You think there’s something up there that’ll fall if we open it?” Xander suggests; that being the reasonable assumption given the gap.

While they are having this conversation, Kayde is still waving his torch trying to light up the path to the left. As he does he hears a soft growl, quiet enough for him to question if he even heard it. Leans towards the darkness, he starts to squint to see if there is anything out there. In that instant, he sees a pair of green eyes staring back at him.

“Guys ...” he tries to get the attention of the others.

“Not now Kayde, we are trying to figure out what is up with this door,” Xander dismisses him.

“GUYS!” Kayde reiterates more loudly and frantically this time.

They all turn to look at the darkness and see the same terrifying eyes glaring at them. Whatever is looking out at them lets out a loud roar.

“Run!” Xander pushes the wooden door open and they all begin to sprint through it.

Behind them, the darkness follows as if it had a life of its own.

Kayde calmly points out, “That thing is made of shadows and it's chasing us”, as they run.

“I see a door,” Xander lets the other know, spotting it at the end of the hall. It is made of iron and has no handle. They don’t have time to check it so Xander pushes through the door. Once it opens torches shoot out of the walls and the darkness that was following them ignites, causing the entire hallway to fill with flames. Xander’s cloak begins to catch fire as he hurriedly rewinds time.

Xander is now climbing up the stairs out of the sewage with the others, muttering, “Man I’m glad that was ready again”.

Alcaeus gives him a confused look, “What are you saying? What is ready again?”

“Nothing, now listen to me, once we get up there we are going to run through the wooden door as fast as we can,” he tells them frantically.

“Okay… why?” Alcaeus seems uncertain. “It’s another puzzle the Wolves have down here. Just follow me okay,” Xander responds as he shoves the wooden door open and everyone runs after him.

The darkness has yet to move and they manage to reach the iron door without even seeing it. When Xander opens it, the torches shoot out into the hallway, but nothing catches on fire. He closes the door behind them with a sigh of relief.

“I don’t see why we had to run back there,” Alcaeus comments, a little irritated that they exerted themselves for what he thinks is nothing.

“If we didn’t the darkness would have followed us and lit us all on fire when those torches appeared,” Xander explains.

“And how exactly do you know that?” Alcaeus asks, skeptical of Xander’s information. Xander continues forward, his tone becoming deadly serious as he responds, “If we ever get out of this place, I will tell you”.

Xander stops the group as they move down the next hallway.

“What now? Another trap you magically know how to navigate?” Alcaeus is kind of annoyed by constantly having to listen to this kid’s orders.

“Shh, listen ... do you hear talking?” Xander asks, listening intently himself after thinking he heard someone talking. They instantly go silent and begin to hear muffled voices, “Why do we have to even be here? Nothing is going to happen”.

“You know why. It’s because of who is in that room. So stop complaining and just stand with me okay?” They listen closely.

“The gang leader must be in a room nearby,” Drakthar points out, having been able to make out what the voices are saying.

Xander agrees, “Yeah, we need to quietly approach and assess the situation. We need to know their numbers before we act”. None of the other three realized it, but Kayde is already doing so.

“Hold on, where is Kayde?” Alcaeus whispers to the others, the first to notice his absence.

They spot Kayde peeking around the corner up ahead. He makes his way back to them, “There are two guards standing in front of a door”.

“We can’t just rush in there and knock them out, the people inside will know we are coming and the gang leader might be able to flee. We need to be as quiet as possible and somehow get them away from the door,” Xander warns, trying to make sure they don’t screw this up.

“I have an idea. I’m going to lay down caltrops at the corner. Then, we can make a noise to lure the guards towards them. Once they step on the caltrops, we knock them out,” Kayde suggests.

“That sounds good, focus on covering their mouths first so they don’t scream when they step on them,” Xander suggests.

Kayde sneaks forward and lays down caltrops. After throwing down the last one, making it bounce a couple of times before it comes to rest among the others, he backs off and gets in position.

“What was that?” “I don’t know, check it out and I’ll wait here,” they hear the two guards say.

Xander moves up to the corner next to Kayde. The guard walks forward; he carelessly steps on a caltrop, cutting his foot open. Before he can even cry out in pain, Kayde already has his mouth covered.

The guard, still at the door, can see what is going on for only a split second before, suddenly, he feels restricted, finding himself in Drakthar’s muscular arms and a bell sitting on the floor where he used to be standing. Drakthar snaps the neck of the guard Xander delivered to him, while Alcaeus helps Kayde knock out the other one with the hilt of one of his pistols.

Kayde gathers his caltrops before the four of them approach the iron door, its handle on the left. Kayde slowly pushes it open knowing there is no axe that will swing down on him.

In the room, Kayde starts to panic as he sees a man in a purple robe holding a knife on top of a ragged looking man wearing glasses. The others notice what is going on over Kayde’s shoulder, and Xander recognizes the man in the glasses as the scientist who had framed him in the Sacrosanct Empire.

Once the door opens more, a corpse in the corner of the room becomes visible to them, a man they know from the wanted posters as the leader of the Wolves.

As the robed man starts to bring the knife down to stab the Scientist, Xander screams out, “WAIT!” The robed man stops and looks back at the four of them standing in the doorway.

Alcaeus, his whip readied, strikes at the man, trying to knock the knife out of his hand but all he accomplishes is enough of a distraction so that the Scientist can wriggle his way out from under the man. Xander tries to run towards the Scientist but trips over Kayde’s foot. He looks up and sees the Scientist in the opposite corner next to a lever.

“Hold on…” Xander doesn’t get to finish his request, the Scientist already having pulled the lever. In an instant, the room turns black and Xander, Drakthar, Kayde, and Alcaeus pass out.