As soon as I finished speaking, Jonah grabbed the collar of my robes and slammed me against the Gate Podium.

  He was fast. I didn’t even realize what was happening until Jonah had pinned me down against the gate podium with his hand pressed against my chest. It even took me a couple of moments to notice the tips of his trident pointed at my chin.

  “Jonah!” said Ruth indignantly, with more than a hint of horror in her voice. “Let Aaron go. Now.”

  I appreciated Ruth coming to my defense, but Jonah completely ignored her. He leaned toward me with a hostile glare in his brown eyes, gazing at me with an intensity I felt I had sensed somewhere before, though I couldn’t place the feeling.

  All I knew was that perhaps the Verdant Seal was the least dangerous thing at the moment compared to Jonah.

  “Listen, Aaron,” said Jonah, his voice hard and low. He pressed his hand against my chest even harder. “I know we are in the same Party, but I’m not interested in your opinion about tactics or strategy. Or should I remind you that you didn’t even know what a dungeon theme was until a few seconds ago?”

  I gulped. “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “My point is, Aaron, that I’m the Party Captain and you aren’t,” said Jonah. “I don’t know how things work out here in the middle of nowhere, but where I am from, you have to respect authority even when you disagree with them. And if you keep insulting me to my face like that, then you can say goodbye to our chances of getting out of here and taking care of Wolfbrand.”

  I bit my lower lip, but I still didn’t look away or show any weakness. Even if I did find Jonah intimidating at the moment, I didn’t want to let him know I was intimidated by him. That would be a mistake. “Which is why I was criticizing your earlier strategy of just rushing to the end of the room without even discussing your strategy with us. I get that you are the Party Captain and all that, but that doesn’t give you the right to risk everyone’s lives because you are too impatient to solve these rooms correctly.”

  Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “You think that I was just risking everyone’s lives for no reason? You can believe that if you want, but it doesn’t make it true.”

  I shook my head slightly because Jonah’s trident was still up in my face, and I didn’t want to accidentally impale my own head on its tips. “I don’t think you were intentionally trying to get us killed, but I think we need to develop better communication in the future. That way, we won’t end up winning only at the last second like we did this time.”

  I almost added ‘And because the Codex decided to be nice to us this time,’ but I held off that last part because I still hadn’t told Jonah or Ruth about my quest to end the Codex Wars. And perhaps I was wrong and the Codex wasn’t actively trying to keep me alive, but that was my best explanation for why the Codex ruled in our favor this time.

  There was no guarantee, however, that the Codex would always rule in our favor if we ended up in a situation like this again in the future.

  Jonah seemed to be thinking about what I said. He kept an iron grip on my neck, and his grip on his trident didn’t waver, but when I looked into his eyes, he looked significantly less angry than he had just a few seconds ago.

  Then Jonah took his trident away from my neck and let go of me. I fell on my bottom at the base of the gate podium as Jonah stepped away from me, while Ruth and Nimbus ran over to me. Ruth knelt beside me and started checking me over for injuries, but I waved off her concerns as I looked at Jonah. I was this close to telling Jonah off for trying to injure me, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to do that.

  Nimbus hopped in between me and Jonah and glared up at him with surprising anger. “What is your problem, man? I know that Aaron is pretty annoying and is really only redeemed by his ability to purchase bananas from the market, but threatening his life like that with your trident? That’s a new low. Seriously inappropriate.”

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  Jonah glared at the cloud rabbit. “I don’t listen to rabbits lecture me about being polite.”

  Nimbus sat on his hind legs and raised an ear. “Well, maybe you should. We Cloud Rabbits know a thing or two about teamwork. It’s like Aaron said—if we are going to get out of this dungeon alive, then we all need to work together. And that means not threatening each other’s lives, even when we are really annoying each other. That’s what the dungeon wants.”

  Jonah bit his lower lip and looked away from us. “You don’t understand. None of you do.”

  I slowly rose to my feet with help from Ruth, never taking my eyes off Jonah as I did so. “What don’t we understand? Is it about your friend, Sheminith? Are you worried about him?”

  Jonah grunted and glared at me, though this time, I saw something that looked less like anger and more like hurt in his eyes. “Sheminith can take care of himself. I have something else I need to do, something else other than defeating Wolfbrand and saving Sheminith, that I can’t do while I’m locked away in this dungeon with all of you. That’s why I want to get out of here as quickly as possible. I’ve got a deadline to keep, and every minute I waste in here is another minute not devoted to meeting that deadline.”

  Ruth pursed her lips. “If you told us what you’re rushing to do, perhaps we could help you.”

  Jonah shook his head and turned away from us. “None of you can help me with it. It’s something I have to do on my own. If anything, I suspect that any help from you guys would just make it harder to complete my mission. It’s not really any of your business, anyway. Once we get out of this dungeon and deal with Wolfbrand, we’ll probably all go our separate ways and never see each other again.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the door to the next room before looking at Jonah again. “Even if we can’t directly help you with whatever your mission is, we’d still appreciate knowing it. If nothing else, it would at least help us understand you better so we can all work together as a team more efficiently.”

  Jonah looked over his shoulder directly at me, raising a questioning eyebrow. “That’s rich coming from you. You are clearly keeping secrets from the rest of us. So, unless you want to spill your secrets for all of us to hear, then I don’t have to tell you or Ruth or Nimbus anything. It’s not necessary if we want to complete the dungeon.”

  I hesitated upon hearing Jonah’s words. Did Jonah somehow know about my Codex Quest to end the Codex Wars? I didn’t see how. I hadn’t told him or Ruth about it. Yet Jonah must have figured it out somehow. He was smarter than I thought.

  But I had to admit that he had a stronger point than I liked. I couldn’t ask him about his private quests if I wasn’t willing to share mine with him and Ruth.

  And right now, all I could think about was the warning from the Codex about revealing my Secret Codex Quest carelessly. Though neither Jonah nor Ruth seemed like bad people, that still didn’t mean I should tell them everything just yet. The Codex had implied that it would be dangerous if too many people knew about my Secret Codex Quest, so I had to be pretty circumspect in who I let in on the secret.

  Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t demand that Jonah tell me about his secret. And while Ruth had already told me about her quest to find the Harmonic Genesis, it wouldn’t surprise me if she also had some secrets of her own that she hadn’t shared with us yet.

  I guess it really was like Jonah said. None of us were really friends just yet. We were mostly just strangers brought together by fate to survive a specific situation outside of our control. We might not even see each other again after all of this.

  So I took a deep breath and said, “You’re right. We don’t have to know everything about each other to complete the dungeon or even defeat Wolfbrand. But by that same token, we do need to at least start planning and working together better going forward. The only way we are getting out of here alive is if we work together as a team, if not necessarily as friends. What do you think about that, Jonah?”

  Jonah was silent for a moment, turning his gaze away from us, before he finally nodded once. “Fine. We can work out a plan before we enter the next room. I promise not to recklessly run into danger again like I did in this room. My uncle always used to chide me about my recklessness. That’s a lesson I should have remembered.”

  “Your uncle sounds like a wise man,” said Ruth in a kind tone. “It would be nice to meet him someday.”

  Evidently, something in Ruth’s words seemed to relax Jonah, who let his shoulders drop and nodded again, though still without looking at us. “Wisest man I know. Wiser than my father, or even worse, my mother.”

  On that vague note, Jonah stomped off toward a corner of the room, probably to review his own stat gains from the rewards we received for completing the first room.

  But something in Jonah’s words and the way he had glared at me earlier reminded me of someone else I had met not too long ago.

  Herod.

  He reminded me of Herod.

  But I was grateful that Jonah wasn’t anything like Herod. Otherwise, we all would have been in grave danger for sure.

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