The Maze of Tadeas

John's eyes snapped open, and he scrambled to sit upright on an unfamiliar floor. The school had vanished... as had the Cabalist. Replacing John's familiar surroundings were four cold stone surfaces. The walls, consisting of tightly packed, gray bricks, were lit by the dim glow of flaming braziers that hung overhead from their mounts. John fixated his spinning vision on one of them: polished gold bowls glittered and cast round shadows against the wall and floor. The floor, which John was thrown to lay flat upon, was a polished white marble; the ceiling, its opposing twin, in polished black.

John sat up and saw that dozens of these braziers lined the ways before and behind him, each glittering and revealing the path until they broke into crossroads or odd mixtures of hallways and stairs. John slowly stood as he tried to make sense of it... and a high-pitched laugh echoing down the hall snapped him back to the urgency of the moment. He patted his body down and eyed his interface; he found no damage yet and no loss save the mana he burned trying to pummel the halfling for crits. The air is... stifling. What did she say...? The Maze. He switched the function on his Eye to read barriers.

Maze of Tadeas, Level 4
Creator: Juniluny Snickerbottom
Population: 283
The Maze of Tadeas is a permanent, mobile trap barrier that is attuned to its creator and moved via ritual by the same. Its properties are mutable based on the creator's additions, enhancements, and edits.

A blind spot: he always had the Eye looking at the information of individuals by default... but had he just thought to periodically swap to the barrier view, would he have seen this before getting trapped in it? But Hell, why would he do that? Most incidents with barriers involved them being created at the time he ended up pulled into one. Getting real tired of not knowing shit like this exists-

"Sorry for the rough landing," came the seemingly omnidirectional taunt of the hobbit, "but then, you've only yourself to blame, don't you?"

Her words vibrated down the length of the hall, and the lights seemed to flicker in fear. He looked closely at the stones of the western wall: despite being of rougher stone than the ceiling or floor, he found no cracks, no pores, and no gaps in the mortar. He knocked on the wall; it was solid and thick.

The Gamer pressed his hand against the stone... and something large seemed to step or fall, sending the faintest tremble up John’s fingertips before he withdrew them.

I need to get a lay of the land if I'm going to be able to use my powers... but without gaps, that means exploring... or...

"I'm talking to you, Mr. Newman." The voice was close. John glanced up and down the hall but found nothing.

I have to keep her talking... at least until my mana's back. “Why are you here?” he called out, his eyes searching the ceiling.

“Why indeed,” she cooed. He spun to face the north; again, he found no sign of his foe. “I should just leave you here to stew... make you think about all the bad things you did while you meet the neighbors... and maybe get yourself nice and tender to become my property...”

Mana: 578/1,308

“But you are still here... so now what?”

“Now what, the boy says! Hoo hoo hoo!” He couldn’t place her voice no matter how hard he focused; it seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.

“You obviously have me trapped... so let’s negotiate: face-to-face.”

“Oh, please,” she chided. “You surprised me once—no, the Prismatic Sea take you, twice!—but that’s as far as I’ll underestimate you.” A single step, of bare skin on stone, behind John. He spun around, but only just caught sight of a tiny foot vanishing into the eastern wall.

Was... that real? Was that her?

“Still, such inspired growth... are you her apprentice, then? Or her experiment? Or are you really such a prodigy that you got this big in a week’s time?”

Mana: 698/1,308

“Who’s the ‘she’ you're talking about?” John took a few cautious steps to the south, his eyes narrowing into the confusion of corridors that awaited him.

“Don’t play coy, boy... but... no, I suppose you aren't playing, are you? As much as she seemed to play me, I can’t imagine she’d let me take her apprentice... besides, a witch taking a boy to learn her ways? Silly, silly thing...!" She laughed haughtily once more at a joke John didn't know. "No, you’re really a natural, aren’t you?” As John’s head turned right... just as Juniluny's face crossed the threshold of the bricks to smile at his back. “All the more reason-“

Her face vanished as his hand crashed uselessly into the wall, registering 0 damage.

“... to keep you here until you submit.”

Mana: 818/1,308

“What if I never submit?”

“You’re still human... hunger or thirst, sleep or fatigue... your guard will whither, in time.” She paused her taunting for a moment... “Why are you smiling?”

John cleared his throat. “Mm, who, me? No, no, I’m... not smiling at all.”

“... You've overcome such needs, too? Hoo hoo hoo... oooh,” the Cabalist sighed. “Well, that’s fine... I don’t like to wait, anyways. It’ll be messy as it is... and slow..."

Mana: 1,038/1,308

"That... could be really good or really bad for me," John muttered, "just based on how the past week's gone..."

"Silly boy... I'm talking about how I'm going to eat you up... bite... by... bite...”

If she's coming through the walls like a damn ghost, then all I need to do... John kept himself at the center of the stone path. It was wide enough, he reckoned, to keep her stubby arms from touching him with that power she had used on his classmate just moments ago. He faced the wall he knew she was behind and readied to quickcast his every strike into her again.

A chill ran through him, and he glanced behind himself to see naught but his own shadow. Wait... Something about that shadow, one of the four being cast by the flames overhead, seemed odd to him. It seemed to grow darker, John realized, and he looked back and down at it just in time to see that it was... and to see that, from that shadow of his ankle, as if rising from a pool of ink, extended a small, stained forearm whose eager fingers caressed his shin.

Juniluny’s soul sip restores 30 of her soul points and steals 30 of your maximum mana!

John's confidence snapped in two, and the world became grayer. No-

John's heart skipped a beat, and a year slipped from his life as horror clutched at his chest. Something tore within him, never to be mended. It was not the Game, it wasn't mana, or power... something of him was what those fingers had plunged into, dug through, peeled apart and plucked away from among the raw, sticky bits of him, and his core screamed. No! Metaphysical screams became real as ****, echoing terror saw John blink down the hall, coming to the nexus of paths up, down, and in four cardinal directions. Fear drove his feet two more steps before he blinked again with a quickcast, his voice finally falling back under his control as he stopped his animal screech.

John slammed his back into the nearby wall, now hundreds of feet from where he had been attacked, as he struggled to catch his breath. His body shook; something was taken from him, in some ugly, inherent way. His mind raced in a panic. She... she really did it?! Did she take some of my soul? What does it mean- God... damn it, this hurts! Fuck, this is painful... pain... this is... just 30 mana? What if she...? John stared at his bountiful mana bar... and a small noise escaped him. No... no, she can't-! John's fists clenched until they paled. Had Gary felt this? Did her "cloak" strangle his reaction to this... suffering? John hadn't known this sensation, not like this, and he couldn't imagine going through it again.

Bite by bite. Her words echoed in his mind and were punctuated by a mad giggle from somewhere far. The laughter, in steps, in pauses of seconds, seemed to draw near. Too near.

Moira leaped the last flight of the stairs, her shield still shrunken in the event anyone might see it before she could meet the intruder... but said intruder had already vanished, leaving only the almost suffocating presence of a foreign barrier. The Warden fixed her skirt as she started down the hallway... only to flinch as the sprinklers came on and the fire alarm sounded. Surprised screams and **** scrambling soon battered against the classroom doors as Academy youths, more concerned with their electronics than the threat of flames, tried to fill the hallway in great burps of human bodies. Moira cursed as she neared an empty classroom... and, inside, saw the clearest signs yet of the intruder's nature.

"You've got to be-!" The Warden didn't bother finishing her frustrated yell as she threw open the door and found the scene of the enemy's disappearance. The wall to her left, and much of the floor nearby, had been blasted and blackened, leaving embers and a few single, loose licks of hellfire that struggled to keep under the sprinkler system's ****. All around the flames, otherworldly molds began to flower and bear mushrooms, each one some poisonous variant of an awful fungus that grew only in the Abyss. She'd have to call the Order mages in again to clean and quarantine the room, the floor, and wherever else the spores could travel.

Hellfire, but from a spellcaster, not an elemental. The lesson had been a basic one under the Sage's tutelage. There are few who would dare such dangerous magic, except...

"A Cabalist."

"It's.... gotta... b-be... somethun... huff..."

Galley and Layla arrived at the Academy's entrance just as the fire alarm began to sing and start the exodus. Galley grumbled under her breath and tightened her grip on the jacket. Layla, nearly out of breath trying to keep up with the pixie-mohawked woman, rested her hands on her knees as she gasped.

Galley's eyes narrowed at the entrance before scanning the building as she inhaled slowly.

"The aura was... terrible, but Ca... Cabal?"

"I know their stink," the taller replied shortly. "Go home, or let me do my job."

"I'm not going home-!"

"Good, because I got a job to do."

"That's not-!" Layla's words caught in the sudden absence... He's gone! He's... Layla exhaled and tapped into her ritual-less senses, opening herself to barriers and seeing their formation. That beautiful, perfect soul had vanished, along with the cancerous wretch just next to him... and apparently at the same time. Above them, around them, for seemingly miles, extended a barrier of a heinous aura to match the thief of her time with her future husband. It must be this damnable barrier! What are they doing to my love in there?!

Without a word, the blue-haired bodyguard began her dash towards the school and then along its sides as she sought an exit no one would use. The indoor gym, Galley realized. They'd want the kids moving to the fields and skipping the indoor gym hallways. With only the strategic map of the Academy in her mind, the Order mage dashed for the gym.

Layla had not followed her. Uncaring for witnesses, Layla had already vanished into the barrier.