Olivia stepped off the stairway onto a polished marble floor the color of a pale, pink rose. Warm light suffused the air, making the small chamber feel welcoming and restful. Opposite the stairs, about five paces away, a cherrywood door with a crystal doorknob awaited her. She glanced around the room, ensuring she hadn’t missed anything, then walked up to the door and tried the handle. It opened easily, swinging toward her and revealing a short hallway that led to a similar door. “Hmm, not locked on this level?”

The next door also opened easily, revealing a room just like the one she’d come from but lacking a stairway. Five or six strides should take her to the next door, so she walked into the room, took two steps, and smashed her face into an invisible wall. “Ow! Damnit!” She backed away, holding her nose, to see if it was bleeding, but it wasn’t—just sore. She looked more closely at the barrier she’d smashed into and realized it wasn’t invisible, just perfectly clear glass or crystal. She tapped it, eliciting a clicking chime as her nails bounced off. Was she supposed to break the barrier somehow or circumvent it?

Olivia contemplated trying to blast the wall with pyrosteam or magma, then wondered if it was designed to be reflective. Out of caution, she stood to one side, aimed her hand at an angle toward the wall, and then cast Pyrosteam Drill. A narrow cone of superheated steam erupted from her palm, hit the crystalline barrier, and reflected cleanly away to smash into the marble wall opposite her, gouging away the rose-colored stone and boring into whatever lay beyond. Olivia halted the spell and held a hand to the crystalline barrier; it was perfectly cool to the touch.

Olivia changed tactics, aiming her hands at the barrier again and casting Wind Gust, but instead of feeding the spell pattern the air-attuned Energy it wanted, she pushed out a thread of water-attuned Energy, twisted into the form of ice. A torrent of frost sprayed out of her palm, coating the barrier.

***Congratulations! You’ve learned the spell: Frost Blast - Basic***

Olivia didn’t bother reading the spell description; she just kept pouring Energy into the spell, watching as frost and then hunks of ice began to coat the barrier. She continued until she’d burnt half her Energy, and a good third of the barrier was encased entirely in a thick sheet of ice. Then she stopped the spell, summoned the heavy, dense hunk of ore from her ring, and threw it at the center of the iced-over barrier with all her might.

The lump of ore hit the barrier with a resounding crunch, and thin fracture lines spread out in a spiderweb from the impact site. The ore fell to the ground, so Olivia picked it up and threw it again. This time, it punched through the barrier, and the spiderweb of cracks expanded, with hundreds of tiny shards falling to the ground in a tinkling cascade. The barrier was broken, and the hole just big enough to step through if she were very careful.

Olivia picked up her ore and walked to the next door. When she opened it, revealing another short hallway ending in an identical door, she moved forward. She was more cautious now, not wanting to bump her nose into another barrier or something worse. Nothing assailed her before the door, though, and she pulled it open to reveal the next room.

Once again, the space seemed empty and, at least roughly, the same size as the first two. Olivia stepped forward and cautiously approached the other door. She was halfway across the room when the floor simply vanished. She began to plummet downward, and panic almost proved to be her undoing. She looked around, started to tumble, and saw a marble floor, maybe a hundred feet below her, fast approaching. Finally, her startled mind got ahold of itself, and she cast Elemental Form, taking her air shape. Her body suddenly lurched upward as the gusts of wind wrapped around her limbs, and she became much lighter.

As she slowly descended the last few dozen feet, she studied the ground below her and saw piles of bones and discarded, rotten scraps of clothing. When she landed, she looked up the long, square shaft lined with smooth marble to the faint opening two hundred feet above her. There didn’t appear to be any other exit from the pit.

Olivia looked around the bottom of the pit. It wasn’t as bright down there as in the top room, but she could see well enough. She counted four skulls among the scattered bones and two complete, mummified corpses. She knew the bones and corpses were old because there was no odor associated with them, and they looked extremely dry. She wondered at the lack of clothing and flesh on most of the bones and then at their age. Didn’t this dungeon open every year? Had it been decades since someone fell in this pit? There was more to this story, and she didn’t think it would be wise to stick around to see it unfold. How could she scale two hundred feet of smooth marble? Was she even supposed to climb out? Maybe there was a hidden passage.

Olivia decided that spending time down in this pit of bones looking for a hidden passage should be her last option. The bones were either evidence of other peoples’ failure to find an exit or some sort of macabre warning, so she figured it would be best to get up and out as soon as possible. She was still in her air elemental form, so she decided to try out an idea she’d had: she pointed her palms at the ground by her sides and cast Wind Gust. A strong gust of air shot out of her palms, and, not appropriately braced, her left arm was pushed to the side with the force of the wind, and her brief upward trajectory turned to a sideways slide through the air. She slammed into the marble wall about ten feet off the ground and slid slowly back to the floor. “Oof, time to revise that plan a bit.”

Olivia moved to stand in one of the corners of the deep pit, putting her back into the corner. This time, she held her hands in front of her, angling them toward the ground. Carefully locking her elbows and bracing her shoulders for the pressure, she cast Wind Gust again. This time she managed to keep her arms straight when the air began to stream out of her palms, and the force of it on her light, buoyant air elemental form pushed her slowly up the smooth marble walls, her back sliding along, wedged in the corner.

Her spell started to sputter out when she was about a third of the way up, so she recast it, pushing Energy into it as quickly as possible. She dropped a few feet but then started to surge upward again. When she had recast the spell for the fourth time, she found herself bumping up against the marble ceiling. She was about five feet away from the closed door, with no floor to stand on.

As carefully as she could, Olivia angled her left palm so that she started to slide along the ceiling toward the closed door. When she was just above it, she ended her spell, turned, and grabbed out with both hands for the doorknob. She fell slowly, thanks to her form, and was easily able to get her hands around the knob. Face scrunched with effort, she twisted the knob and pushed against the wall with a foot, pulling the door open to flop back and forth over the pit trap. Olivia pushed against the wall again, making the door swing wide, and as it flopped back to close, she thrust her feet into the tunnel beyond, sliding on the marble, panting from the exertion.

Despite how worn and tired she felt from the effort, Olivia couldn’t help laughing as she lay on her back, catching her breath: she’d actually flown! She lay there thinking of the possibilities; what if she combined the effects of the Elemental Form spell with a variant of the Wind Gust spell? Could she make a spell designed to truly allow flight? Not to mention, she only had the basic form of both those spells. “I definitely have some experimenting to do when I get out of this place!” That said, she flopped over and looked down the hallway, noting the identical cherrywood door. She scrambled to her feet, made sure her Energy stores were well above half full, walked to the door, and opened it.

When Olivia saw the interior of the next room, she smirked; here was a challenge she was meant for. The entire floor of the next room was covered in flaming hot coals. Thick smoke rose from the flames, carried on a draft up through a narrow ventilation hole in the center of the ceiling.

Olivia sat outside the door, waiting for her spell to come off cooldown, then she used her Elemental Form spell to take on the aspect of fire. She strode through the coals, crunching them under her feet, not even noticing their temperature. Olivia held her breath going through the room—she didn’t know what sorts of fumes her Elemental Form protected her from, and she didn’t think it was a good idea to experiment in the middle of a dungeon. Trying to tamp down her smugness, she pulled open the next door and stepped into the hallway. If her count were correct, the door just ahead of her should open to the last room on this floor.

Olivia let her Elemental Form wear off, then she sat down in the middle of the short hallway and rested. She wanted her entire Energy pool, and she wanted her form spell to be off cooldown before she went through the final door. So far, she hadn’t seen any sign of her competition on this floor. She wondered how many made it through that first room with the spiders, and once again, she wondered if there were other starting rooms. Was it possible that some students were ahead of her using parallel paths? “Nothing I can do about it right now. Just gotta keep moving!” She stood, stretched, and opened the door.

The final room was shaped exactly like the previous four, the only difference being that it was four times the size. Smooth, rose-colored marble surrounded a large, low-ceilinged space, and at its center, coiled around a large wooden chest, was a giant serpent. Olivia entertained trying to slip past the thick snake, but it lifted its head and stared at her, malevolence, real or imagined, Olivia wasn’t sure, lurking behind its eyes. The snake was probably as wide around as one of her thighs, and it had to be twenty or thirty feet long. It didn’t look docile, though, and its coloring worried Olivia; it had shiny black scales with vibrant yellow circles evenly spaced down its spine.

Olivia took a step into the room, still a good ten paces from the snake, but its head rose from its coiled body and hissed at her, revealing a bright red mouth with a set of long, dripping fangs. She froze in place, and the snake didn’t move; it just stared at her. Objectively, the snake didn’t seem as significant a threat as some of the other things she’d already killed in the dungeon. The fact that it was the final guardian of this level gave Olivia pause, though. Perhaps it was exceptionally fast, and its poison was deadly. Did she have any defense against poison? The fire Elemental Form allowed her to heal quickly, but would it extend to poison or internal damage? She’d rather not find out.

One thing that had worked for her so far was the old adage, “The best defense is a good offense.” Olivia knew snakes were cold-blooded, at least on Earth, so she primed her Arcfrost Cascade, put one foot out the door into the hallway behind her, ready to flee, and raised her hands to the guardian. Just as she launched a crackling torrent of freezing, electrified air, the Snake erupted, dodging to her left.

She tried to track it with her blast, but it was so fast that she only caught the last couple feet of its tail. It was enough to elicit a shrieking hiss from the creature, though, as the electricity of her cascade surged through its flesh. The colossal serpent spasmed, and though it thrashed and convulsed, it couldn’t straighten itself out to strike at Olivia. She stepped forward, re-aimed her hands, and fired another Arcfrost Cascade, fully engulfing the upper half of the snake. Frost formed along its scales, and electricity buzzed and zapped along its length, and though the unfrozen portion of its body continued to twitch, the snake’s mouth widened in a death gasp, and its tongue, flash-frozen, broke and shattered on the marble floor.

Olivia cautiously approached the snake, pressing one foot against the frozen portion of its neck, just below the head. Tiny cracks spread through the icy flesh, and a remnant surge of electricity tickled her foot, almost making her stumble backward. She was thinking of throwing some fire at the frozen creature, just to make sure, when motes of golden Energy erupted from the corpse, swirling into a stream that poured into Olivia.

***Congratulations! You’ve achieved level 16 Elemental Archon. You have gained 10 Intelligence, 10 Will, and have 8 points to distribute.***

Olivia didn’t know if she was leveling fast, but it sure seemed like it. According to everyone she’d spoken to, she’d have a chance to refine her class at level twenty and be considered “tier-two.” What would happen if she advanced to tier-two while still in this dungeon meant for tier-one students? Surely they’d thought of such a possibility, and it wouldn’t be a problem. “At least I hope so,” she muttered as she walked over to the big wooden chest the snake had been guarding.