Meta Maze

Just like that, we were already at the teleport station. I followed the year leader, Jue Zhu, and Jong up the steps to the formation, then it was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the year to follow. As the last few members of Senior Class 3 came up the steps, Jue Zhu broke his own silence.

"See you guys on the other side."

Less than 3 seconds after the last student reached the formation, I found myself alone, in what seemed at first to be an open plain near a mountain of brown stone, but I soon realized it was actually a corridor—a maze corridor over a kilometer wide, with brown stone walls that stretched toward the sky, as tall as any mountain.

I picked a direction and jogged down it, looking for any hint of where the exit might be, where the path to the final piece Jue Zhu needed might be, or indeed where the magical beasts were. I was rewarded after an hour, once I reached the first junction I'd come to, and though it was quite a bit distant, I saw a temple-like structure sitting near what, in terms of the maze, would otherwise be a dead end.

I took out my Communication Stone as I began making my way towards it. "Jue Zhu, there aren't any enemies around where I started, but I turned at a junction and there's some kind of building at a dead-end. How are you and the others?"

There was no response. "So much for that plan," I muttered. As the Head Instructor had said, until and unless we actually met up with one another, we were on our own this time. With no further ideas, I went into the temple.

I was set upon almost immediately when I entered. The enemies this time were bugs, but instead of ants like last time, these were more like scarab beetles. They were, as usual, of varying sizes depending on their stage, and they seemed to all be in the mid-stages of the 7th Realm. Only the largest of them were as big as the Metal Ants. In terms of how they fought, they were the Metal Ants' opposite. Those had been very tough to put down, and they definitely had a good offense as well with their large pincers, but they were relatively slow and had to set themselves up quite specifically to do more than superficial damage. These scarabs went down with a single slash of my sword, sometimes I could even cut through more than one at once, and they attacked by biting, with slightly small mouths at the front of their underside—it didn't take as much setup, but also wasn't as devastating if they got it off once or twice. However, they were small enough that if they did manage to attack, they'd latch physically on to me. If I let more than one or two through to that extent at once, I'd be at risk of being overrun.

They were also numerous enough that the risk of being overrun was very real. They didn't drown the floor around me or anything, but I counted my kills at close to 50 before they finally stopped coming. I stopped both to rest and to loot them for parts, and I quickly concluded that only the teeth, that had a strange shine to them, were likely worth extracting. I already knew there would be no cores—earlier that year, we'd had a lesson on insect-type magical beasts, and one major point was that ones that came in colonies or swarms never died with their cores intact. A colony queen or swarm leader, on the other hand, would almost always produce an intact core. Arachnids, like the ones I'd faced in my first year in the canyon, didn't technically operate in swarms, they simply banded together like many magical beasts of like types.

Jue Zhu had greatly benefitted from the Metal Ant Queen's core last year. He'd been embarrassed about it when we connected the dots from that lesson, but I at least thought it was understandable that he hadn't brought it up before. It made sense for the strongest of us to keep something like that, even if we'd all contributed to the battle. Well, I doubted it would be as high quality as that one, but I was looking forward to getting a core from a swarm leader myself all the same now.

Further inside the building was structured as a maze within the larger maze, rather like an old fashioned dungeon crawl. I bemoaned that once again, I was in a situation where I couldn't effectively use my bow. By now in a VRMMO, I'd have special techniques or magic moves or whatever that could, for example, cause a detonation to handle groups at once or induce various crowd-controlling effects, which would make it much more possible to fight more like an archer in this situation, but as Jong had said, this was still effectively the tutorial area. I was, in effect, still shooting nothing but normal arrows, though they were still more effective than truly mundane ones.

Another part of the swarm attacked, rushing at me from around a corner. I fended them off, backing up slowly as I went, careful not to go in a direction that would allow them to easily break off and come at me from behind. Once they were dealt with, I found a stair leading up by checking the direction they came from. The second floor had another maze, and two groups of scarabs. It took some quick thinking to stop them from flanking me, but once I'd maneuvered the two groups to stop them flanking me, I'd gotten accustomed enough to fighting them that I was able to kite and shoot them, instead of having to resort to my sword again.

Above that level was an open room with another several dozen scarabs, as well as the swarm leader. The leader was twice the size of a Metal Ant and had a nasty looking horn as long as Shokoya's black-bladed sword—and probably around as sharp to look at it. Once again, the key strategy was to get them all moving in one group. It was a frenetic process, but doable. Before long, several of my arrows were sticking out of the swarm leader's carapace.

Unfortunately, focusing on the boss drove the rest of the swarm to enough desperation that they started to gain on me. I switched my focus to thinning them out more at that point. I wasn't totally unscathed from the previous two floors, enough that I figured there was a risk of things getting dire if I brought out my sword against the whole group without thinning it first, especially with the boss able to mix it up too.

I got rid of a dozen of them, leaving a bit more than twice as many as that against me when the melee finally started. The leader wielded its horn like a sword, surprising me a little that it seemed to be focusing on trying to parry my strikes to defend the minions. Every time it managed to get the horn in my way, more of the normal scarabs were able to latch on to me that I'd have to quickly deal with.

I wasn't in the best shape by the time I dealt with the last one, but the swarm leader was definitely worse off than me. It may have understood the concept of parrying a sword, but it definitely didn't have the technique of a human either. A few deft strokes, and I was free and clear to take a healing pill.