While a certain household in Erakonir was being torn apart from the inside, life in the Sage Dungeon was tranquil. Almost everyone was gathered on the third floor. Socializing together after closing had become normalized by the presence of the elves.

“Wanna try a new game?”

Archimedes looked at the small box Anther was excitedly holding up. Inside it, he sensed a stack of sturdy paper cards, painted with various colors and symbols. Compared to the games the child had presented so far, this one had a completely different structure to it.

“How do we play?”

“Well, you can have up to six people playing, but I think it’s best with three.”

Everyone promptly split up into groups of three. Anther and Yinether joined Archimedes in the core room. They forced Zemnes to leave the room and join a group too, so he partnered up with Thesia and Theoria right outside the door. Oceanis, the spider spy on standby for the day, as well as Helios and Lilith gathered together in one of the library labyrinth's pocket lounges.

Merina and Alphio were missing a third person. As they were debating whether to join other groups or go up to the second level and play with Deorsa, Minute stepped out of the room where it had been practicing for Anther’s surgery.

“May I join you?”

“I mean, sure, but aren’t you busy?” Alphio asked.

Since the elves started staying in the dungeon a month ago, the Clockwork Golem had changed significantly. The dungeon had increased its rank two times: from Greater Clockwork Golem straight to Superior Clockwork Golem. It was B-Rank now, and so was the dungeon as a whole. This had been done in an attempt to increase the dexterity and precision of the mechanical monster’s hands, but it accomplished much more than that.

The shining bronze construct had many more internal moving parts to it now, increasing its elegance, stability, and especially its complexity. At D Rank, Minute had been bare-bones and fragile, likely to be rendered immobile with just one or two good blows. Now, it had many extra redundancies, as well as more armoring and mass to protect it.

It had grown in size to where it stood a head higher than Anther’s father. Six foot six, in absolute terms. As if to compensate for the difficulty larger hands introduced to crafting, it had developed two additional arms below the first set, which were much smaller and more delicate.

Perhaps most significantly, Minute’s mentality had further developed. It more resembled the other monsters in emotional capacity now.

“No, my training is complete. I have been instructed to preserve my condition from now until the surgery. In other words, I’m free to relax.”

“Then welcome to the team!” Alphio beamed.

“I doubt it’s a cooperative game though,” Merina raised a brow at him.

Meanwhile, Archimedes provided each of the groups with an identical deck of cards and projected Anther’s instructions to everyone.

“So, everybody starts with six cards in their hands,” the boy began. He paused to consider his present company and their diverse anatomy, then revised his statement. “I mean, we each start with six cards. You’re allowed to look at your own cards, but not at anybody else’s.”

The deck of cards contained six different “suits”: sets of cards denoted by different colors and symbols. As Archimedes often observed from the games Anther presented, they were inspired by the world’s races. Three of the suits were patterned with skulls, colored gray, blue, and yellow. Quite straightforwardly, those suits were called dwarves, harpies, and trolls. The other three suits were patterned with hearts and colored green, red, and black. Naturally those were the elf, beast, and demon suits. Each suit contained ten cards: nine marked with ascending numbers, starting from one, and the tenth labeled with an ornate letter ‘G’.

“Your goal is to get at least three of the same number or at least three in a row from the same suit. The God card can go after the nine or before the one but not both. So you can put down “God, one, two” or “eight, nine, God” but not “nine, God, one”. Got it?”

As matches were made, cards were taken away, and their “hands” would gradually empty. The first person to empty their hand would end the round and win thirty bonus points. The rest of the cards scored points based on their number, with God cards being worth ten points each.

There were also rules for drawing cards from the deck and stealing them from other players. It took some time to explain all the rules, because there were a lot of edge cases, but it really wasn’t a complicated game in practice.

Still, it presented a better challenge for Archimedes than pure strategy games. The shuffled deck introduced an element of randomness, and splitting up the deal between everyone playing amplified that. He could estimate probabilities, but he couldn’t know for certain what cards everyone else had until it was too late. Skill and calculations made a difference but wouldn’t guarantee him a win.

This new game, Valley Shuffle, it was called, also presented a different kind of challenge, though. Archimedes had to resist the urge to cheat.

It took careful focus not to peek at the cards in other people’s hands or at the cards stacked in the deck. And the dungeon couldn’t simply move things from point A to point B like most creatures could: he moved the cards by erasing them and recreating them in their new position. Nobody but him would know if a card’s content changed during that process.

But cheating would ruin the game for everyone involved, himself included, so Archimedes did his utmost to play with integrity.

Because of that, he kept losing to Anther’s statistically unlikely good luck.

As Yinether was shuffling the deck for a new round, Archimedes asked something that had been on his mind since they started, “I take it that each of the six races worships their own god, but who are they all?”

Anther’s father shook his head and smiled faintly. “The standard card suits aren’t a very accurate depiction of reality. They were probably simplified in order to keep the suits balanced. For instance, Elves don’t actually worship one god but two great spirits: the Sun and the Moon. And there are plenty more nuances like that.”

“I’m listening.” Archimedes encouraged the elf to continue, since he hadn’t actually been able to get his hands on a comprehensive list of this world’s gods yet.

Yinether smiled and nudged Anther with his elbow. “Why don’t you go join another group? Archimedes and I are going to talk about mythology for a bit.”

The elf child, who had heard it all before, found it boring and left without a fuss. “Fine. It’s not as fun with four people though.”

“Now, where to start?” Yinether scratched his head. “How about I keep to just the basics? We’ll be up all night otherwise. Or I will, anyway.”

“Even just the basics would be helpful,” the dungeon core assured him. “Especially anything you can tell me about the enemy races. I know little about them and even less about their gods.”

“Alright. Let’s start with Bath.”

Bath, the Endless Storm. He was the creator of demonkind and the god they still worshiped to this day, even though he had gone mad long ago.

The Beastfolk were created by a god called Bavet Nroi, God of Beasts, who also created knolls, bugbears, and other heavily-furred races that Archimedes had never heard of before. The beastfolk alone had converted to worshiping Ahm Shulta, God of Mountains and Valleys, when they chose civilization over wild instinct.

“I thought there were only eight sentient races here,” Archimedes confessed. “Elves, demons, beastfolk, dwarves, harpies, trolls, dungeons, and dragons.”

“There are many more,” Yinether told him. “The six races have the most influence over civilization in the world, so they usually overshadow the rest. A gnoll army is nothing to fret about, but a dwarf march is serious trouble. Population and technology play into it quite a bit.”

“I see.” Archimedes pushed down his unquenchable urge to explore the outside world and find out what other secrets it was still hiding from him.

Moving on, Yinether reiterated what he’d mentioned about the elves, that they worshiped the Sun and Moon spirits. But apparently they were originally created by a god called Titania, the Sky Mother, who was dead now.

“How did a god die?” Archimedes had to ask.

“Well, that’s…” Yinether rubbed the back of his head and seemed a little unwilling to go on. “This was tens of millenia ago, even before the friendly races were allies. Take it with a grain of salt.”

Archimedes waited, wound up tightly with anticipation, until the elf continued in a faint voice.

“Supposedly she was felled during the dungeon wars of myth. By a dungeon called the Tower of Babel, who tried to become a god himself.”

Archimedes’ jaw would have dropped if he had one. He had… several questions, but he knew better contacts to ask about them. Babel himself, for instance.

“I see,” he murmured.

“Please don’t worry about it,” Yinether interpreted the dungeon’s shock in his own way. “Most people don’t even know there was a dungeon war unless they specifically studied religion or history. There certainly aren’t any grudges left from those times.”

The dungeon wasn’t sure he was convinced. Perhaps only the dungeons who were alive back then could say whether there were still any grudges. Even the gods might have their own two cents to add. One of them had apparently died, after all.

Either way, “Sorry to derail us,” he said. “Please continue.”

And Yinether continued explaining the basic mythology of Usain, nevermind how he had come to know it.

According to standard myth, dragons and dwarves were both created by Kri-Gorah, God of the Deep Fire, and they worshiped him fervently. Though curiously they didn’t like to be near one another. Perhaps because Kri-Gorah was also considered the god of Pride.

Strökka, God of Writhing Flesh, created trolls as well as goblins and ogres. The latter two had been under the trolls’ heel practically since their creation. They were second-hand citizens at best and slaves at worst. But they were man-eaters, and cannibals, the lot of them, and Yinether emphasized that they deserved no pity.

The harpies were apparently created by Titania, just like the elves. But they were born with wings and considered themselves the Sky Mother’s chosen children because of it. They still worshiped their dead god to this day, heretically declaring that each successive queen of the harpies was her reincarnation.

The final god that Yinether was aware of was Ethra, God of the Ancient Sea, who created merfolk and supposedly many other aquatic races that the elf had never actually laid eyes on. He seemed confident that merfolk were real, at least. They were too few in numbers to come up often in conversation, but they were considered a friendly race who occasionally traded with people on the surface.

Compared to Rachon, where the only outsiders were humans, Usain felt more like a dungeon swarming with monsters. Archimedes was astounded how so many sentient races could exist on one planet and how his previous world’s gods had been content with just humans.

Archimedes thanked Anther’s father for the explanation, and they invited Anther back for another round of cards.

After dinner and some friendly chatting, two very nervous elves did their best to sleep, while the dungeon went over his preparations for the final time.