Nathan double checked the map.

  He double checked it again.

  Then he double checked it a third time. Or would it be triple checked at this point?

  He tore his eyes away from the map and stared in front of him. Where there was supposed to be the final chamber, there was nothing but a blank brick wall.

  "I don't mean to judge your navigational skills," Chad said. "But what I'm noticing is a distinct lack of, like, anything at all?"

  "Yeah, I'm noticing that as well," Nathan said.

  He wasn't quite sure what to make of it. The map had been exquisitely marked, pointing out possible enemies and puzzles and also their solutions. He would think that the map would've included a final note if there was something like this blocking the way to the final entrance.

  But there was nothing.

  According to the map, there should've just been a door going to the final chamber.

  "Is it some sort of puzzle?" Emi gasped and covered her mouth. "Like those blocks. Maybe there's a secret door!"

  Nathan scratched the back of his head. "It's possible. But if there's supposed to be a puzzle here, I don't see it."

  Nathan stepped forward and ran his hands along the brick wall. It was coarse, tough. His fingers scraped against the hard stone, scratching the tips.

  Was it an illusion? Was he supposed to just barrel his way through, like he had done in one of those other weird mind maze things?

  "Someone blindfold me," Nathan said.

  Chad adjusted the livestreaming window. "I already know where this is going."

  Bjorn stepped forward and pulled a piece of cloth out of a back pocket. He wrapped the cloth around Nathan's eyes.

  "Spin me around in a circle," Nathan said. "And then throw me into the wall."

  Bjorn's lips thinned. "This seems like a rather poor decision."

  "Yes."

  Bjorn grabbed Nathan's shoulders and spun him around. And around, and around, and around. For the first minute, Nathan didn't feel anything at all. Then a lightness hit him like he was suddenly being carried by dozens of birds. His stomach rolled inside of his chest.

  And then his feet left the ground.

  His head collided with a hard object and stars lit up the world.

  Pain bloomed across the back of his neck, sharp and white before it transformed into a much harsher throbbing.

  Nathan tore off the blindfold and dug his palms into his forehead.

  "Right—" he winced at the pain. "Let's not try that again."

  "Anyone have any more bright ideas?" Chad pointed the camera in the direction of Mara and Bjorn. "If any of you wants to try that again, I'll give you a hundred bucks."

  "Why would I require that much venison?" Emi said.

  "No, not that kind of buck—"

  Nathan filtered out the sounds from around him.

  Okay, so brute force isn't gonna cut it, he thought. At least, not using my body as a living weapon. This isn't an illusion, there really is a wall. So what next?

  Nathan activated [Astral Fishing]. The air in front of him shimmered like water.

  He pulled out his fishing pole from his inventory. With a quick motion, he threw his fishing rod into the water and it slipped into the void without a single sound.

  A tug on the other end.

  He instantly pulled back. His fishing hook flew backward and slammed into the wall to the left of his head.

  Dust settled in his hair. He brushed it off and pulled the line from the wall.

  Attached to the hook was a brick that had somehow gotten tangled in the fishing line.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "Great, so that won't work," Nathan said.

  Mara stepped over to the wall and took a closer look.

  "What if we just blew it up?" she asked.

  Nathan opened his mouth to respond with an answer before he slowly shut it.

  "Actually, that really isn't a bad idea," he said. "You don't happen to have any explosives, do you?"

  Mara's eyes shone. "Nathan, I always have explosives."

  The group stepped away from the wall, giving it a decent amount of room. Mara pulled out an entire RPG and pointed in the direction of the wall.

  "Fire in the hole!" she shouted.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The rocket-shaped projectile blasted forward and crashed against the wall. It exploded into thousands of metal shards, a huge puff ball of fire and smoke detonating from the impact.

  Nathan waved away the smoke and coughed. "What—what does it look like?"

  "I can't make anything out," Emi squinted her eyes. "It's all smoke and brick debris."

  Chad pulled his sword out of his inventory and did a quick slash. A blast of wind came from the sword and instantly dissipated the smoke. He blew on the tip of his sword like it was a gun.

  Nathan snorted under his breath.

  Show off.

  With the smoke dissipated, they could see that there had been a door behind the brick wall.

  Or, at least, the remnants of one. It had been warped and twisted by the force of the explosion, more resembling a piece of the wall than an actual constructed item.

  Nathan stepped forward and tugged on the handle, a handle which had somehow looped around into a perfect circle.

  The door didn't budge.

  He pulled again and the entire door fell off the hinges.

  "Neat," Nathan said.

  He threw the door to the side and stepped into the room.

  The lights turned off.

  Darkness in every single direction. He turned around. Darkness there as well.

  “Emi?” he said. “Bjorn, Chad, Mara?”

  A sudden chill went down his spine. It was like somebody had sucked the warmth directly out of his skin. He rubbed his arms in an attempt to generate some friction.

  Bizarrely, he could still perfectly make out his own body, despite the darkness.

  “This is really strange.” He dropped his voice. “Lily, are you still with me?”

  For a heartbeat, no one responded, and he thought he was truly alone.

  “I’m with you,” she whispered back.

  Nathan let out a breath. “Thank goodness. Looks like whatever separated me from the others wasn’t able to separate me from you.”

  “I’m attached to your arm. I would’ve been a little bit tricky for them to pull me off.” Lily pulsed on his shoulder. “Where are we anyway?”

  “Supposedly, this is some kind of key room,” Nathan said. “Where we get the final object needed to finish up the Sixth Circle.”

  “I don’t see any keys.”

  “Me neither. And there’s something about this place. The cold is unnatural.”

  Lily shivered. “I thought it was just me. My vines aren’t constricting the way they would in real cold. During nighttime, when it gets chilly, I paid enough attention to notice what that feels like. Right now, it’s as if I’m feeling the sensation of cold without the actual physical cause.”

  Nathan stared down at his hands. They’d turned a bright red from when he’d rubbed them together. He flexed his fingers and noted the fact that they still moved like they were perfectly warm. In spite of that, he still felt a strange sort of resistance when he made the motion.

  “It’s the sensation of cold without the actual physical cause. You’re absolutely right," he said.

  Anyway, cold probably wouldn’t affect Nathan anyway. With how high his Constitution was and how warped his body had become, he was extremely doubtful that anything short of being thrown into space would be enough to seriously harm him, at least when it came to temperature.

  “Let’s try walking,” Nathan said. “With any luck, we’ll come across our friends.”

  Lily hummed in response, which he took to be affirmation.

  Nathan’s feet stepped out in front of each other, one at a time, over and over. He couldn’t even hear his own footsteps. What was he even walking on?

  This has to be an illusion, he thought. I don’t know what else it could be. But unlike before, where it was just brief visions, this illusion is so strong that they managed to trap me entirely within my head.

  He could only hope that his friends had managed to avoid his fate.

  If that wasn’t the case, then he’d need to find a way out, and fast. The monsters they’d come across up to this point weren’t super dangerous, but that had been while he had been conscious.

  Maybe there was a chance he’d wake up or something in the middle of that attack, propelled by the shock of being bitten into or having his arm sliced off, but he’d rather not risk that.

  After a few more minutes of walking, he slowed to a stop.

  “This isn’t working,” he said.

  “What else can you do?” Lily asked. “I’m not sensing anything at all. It’s like we’re trapped in some sort of void.”

  “I have one more trick up my sleeve.”

  [Astral Fishing] came to life. Normally the air would warp in front of him. Perhaps it had done so just no. The problem was that Nathan couldn’t see a single thing, so he had no visual indication to be sure.

  Based off of the way his gut had rolled with the activation of the skill, he was like, 75% sure that it’d worked.

  He pulled his fishing rod from his inventory and ran his hands over the pole. Like his body, it was still visible despite the darkness surrounding him from every direction.

  He reared back the pole and cast his fishing rod into the air.

  The hook disappeared with a plop. Vanished from existence, and presumably into Nathan’s [Astral Fishing] portal thing.

  Nathan waited for a tug on the other end of the line.

  But none came.

  After waiting a little bit longer, he reeled back in his fishing line and stared morosely at the obviously empty hook.

  So the ability works, but I’m not getting access to anything from outside this plane, maybe? He thought. This is making my head hurt.

  Then again, Nathan was assuming that this had actually happened in reality. He was still fairly certain that this was nothing more than an illusion.

  Nathan rubbed his eyes.

  He’d tried everything he could think of.

  He really was rather useless without his friends to back him up. All this strength, and it turned out to be meaningless in the face of whatever this was.

  A breath from behind his left ear.

  “Giving up so soon?”