I squirmed my way out the route I expected to take with Lacie and stood at the entry to the corridor. With the upgrade potion, I was at 8 find traps, but I wasn't exactly sure how to make it work. I mean, I was looking at the floor, but I didn't see any traps. Did that mean the skill failed, or that there were no traps?

  I started edging forward, stepping on various tiles, wondering if something was going to happen. I really wanted to get moving, but I wasn't really sure how to do that safely.

  I spent probably fifteen minutes just edging forward bit by bit, finding nothing. Then massive spikes shot out from both walls. I shot clear, and could see that my dodge improvement had triggered.

  I screwed up and triggered my uncanny dodge on a trap, which saved me from a bunch of spikes jabbing through my arm. I'd rather have saved the ability and drank a potion, but I was glad I knew what it felt like, as I'd been too focused during battle to notice when it triggered while fighting Luxury.

  Looking at the spot, I still saw nothing. I sat cross-legged and stared intently. I slid a hand slowly forward.

  WOAH, WATCH OUT THERE! The notification appeared in the middle of my screen.

  Great, a notification. I focused, and realized I could see the trap. The instant I picked out where the pressure plate was, it was like a visible object.

  I hit it quickly and withdrew, watching the spikes shoot up. The instant I did that, the trap changed. I looted it, then tried again and found nothing.

  This seemed like a really bad way to find anything.

  Pacing a bit, I backed up to the end of the hallway, took out my fancy new steel baseball—the decorative rivets mimicked the seam pattern on a standard ball, so my pitching grips were finally normal—and sent a fastball ricocheting down the passage. I managed to have it bounce and hit seven tiles.

  If I was practicing, I figure I should practice everything. Traceuse had given me a truly excellent new skill, one that was going to make my fastballs actually powerful, for once.

  Flippy Shit. You can add rotational momentum to your damage. For each 90 degrees you flip between starting and finishing an attack, it deals 5% additional damage per level of this skill.

  A steadying breath, braced into a low stance, and I leapt into a sidewards spin, coming out into a fastball throw. With my tumbling and light on your feet skills, I barely had to try to do a preposterous six twists in place from a standing jump. With a level 5 skill, that should mean +600% damage.

  The steel ball shot forward, hit the center of a wall, and sent the shards of that stone block hurtling into the darkness. An aggrieved screech sounded. This wasn't a dungeon of solely traps, it seemed.

  Devouring Megapede. Level 35.

  It has 118 arms, two huge mandibles, and a taste for blood. It'll eat you, but it won't be satisfied, so it'll spit up your corpse and eat it again, repeating the process until you're too much of a puree to chew. Ick.

  Maddy: Christ, they have level 35 mobs just running around in here.

  Lacie: Run away.

  Maddy: No can do. The tunnels back are so narrow it would catch me. Don't worry, there's only like three of them. I'll be fine.

  Stolen story; please report.

  I was already testing the effectiveness of the Heavy Steel Ball for fastballs, and it was super effective. In some ways. I hit the first megapede, the one halfway down the hall, and it got pushed into a looped-over pile at the far end of the hallway distant.

  Its health bar, unfortunately, did not appear. It proved easy to keep the three megapedes penned up at the far end of the hall, but no damage was being dealt. All I got was a sharp thud as the ball ricocheted off their chitinous exterior.

  Once I had the rhythm down to knock them back faster than they approached, I mixed in a few throws of the Extremely Sharp Knife, but it just made a noise like nails on a chalkboard as it scraped across their chitin.

  After some more of that mindless flailing, I thought more carefully and aimed properly. They were all writhing about, so it took a while to get a direct hit, but I could in fact slice off their antennae, dropping their health by about 1%.

  All that mattered was that I did damage. The second antenna ripped away and left some green-black ichor oozing up behind it, a rupture appearing on that one. On to the next, both its antennae caused a rupture. The third, neither did.

  I went back to just pinning them at the other end, waiting for the first two to bleed out. It took about four minutes for the one with only a single rupture. Finally, only one remained.

  I did the obvious and used my fancy new ability. They called it flippy shit, but it only required rotation, not flips. I threw a solid fastball, then started using skate to turn a small circle right where I was. I had to throw two more fastballs to keep it away while I figured the motion out. Finally, I got into a wide turn, then tucked evenly in and started a spin.

  I'd done figure skating from when I started hockey until age nine, when Mom decided I was much worse at the elegance of dance than the aggression of sports and overruled my request to keep doing figure skating. I still knew how to get into a tight, vertical spin.

  If I started raising my leg for the windup as the spin started, with the Heavy Steel Ball in my hand, it qualified as "starting" the attack. As long as the leg stayed kicked up, that was still part of the attack.

  In the time the megapede made it halfway down the hallway, I managed twenty-four full rotations. I dropped my leg, threw the pitch, sliding that leg out as I dipped into a low, crouched spin as the momentum carried me.

  The heavy steel ball slammed into the megapede from about two meters away. It rocketed down the corridor, taking a another stone block as it punched back through the wall. It's health dropped by 25%.

  Maddy: What's the flippy stuff do for like 24 total rotations?

  Lacie: Seriously, it's not that complex. At 5 skill, it's +100% damage per full rotation. Did you just do a +2400% throw?

  Maddy: Looks like it.

  As it struggled to escape the debris, I sent a flurry of sharp-knife breaking-balls tracing across the flesh exposed by its fractured armor. By the time it was moving properly, it had a nine-stack of rupture. I fast-balled it back to the end of the chamber a few more times, and then it died.

  Maddy: Wow, I gained two levels just from three easy mobs.

  Lacie: Easy? You were fighting for like fifteen minutes.

  Maddy: Yeah, I'm not very quick. But that still doesn't mean it was hard. Anyways, I'm back to trying to figure out traps.

  Lacie: Be careful!

  I was careful. I figured out that I could hurl my steel sphere in a skipping motion with a breaking ball and hit every tile in a row, and in doing so I triggered two more spike traps. It took about a minute to throw those along all the tiles of the floor, walls, and ceiling of the passage.

  That wasn't great, but it was doable. Well, depending on how big this place was. Then I started forward, to try removing the trap, and got a WOAH THERE, PARDNER warning just a second too late. A leap sent me clear as a cloud of gas formed around a trap I hadn't triggered.

  Note to self: Always hold your breath while unsure of traps. Probably make sure the hitai-ate stayed closed, too. All the better to protect the head from threats.

  After the gas cleared, I approached again. I still couldn't see it. Of course, the light from one torch on the floor three paces back was basically useless. I went back, returned the torch to my inventory, closed my hitai-ate, and approached again.

  It still didn't show up until I was right there, but I could see the trap. I tapped the floor and leapt clear, keeping an eye on it. As soon as the gas was gone, I darted in and snatched the trap up.

  The next two, triggerable with any impact on their pressure plates, were easier to snatch. I headed back in, already worried about how we were going to get through a deathtrap like this place.