Kill the Sun

The conversation between the captured people had told Nick everything he needed to know.

After testing out his hypothesis, Nick immediately turned back into black smoke before he hid near a corner.

He didn't want to tempt fate.

'The lights are manually activated, but what about the corridors?'

'I ran for hundreds of kilometers, and I didn't find an edge. Additionally, I also didn't find this place on my own.'

'Lastly, if this labyrinth truly were hundreds or thousands of kilometers big, what would be the chance of me just stumbling across one of six humans who are captured here? I would need to run around for months, if not years, to find any of these people if the labyrinth were truly that big.'

'This means that the labyrinth isn't actually big.'

'It's just getting shuffled constantly.'

'No new corridors are being created. The old corridors are just being recycled.'

So?

While it sounded great to know all of these things, most Extractors wouldn't be able to make use of this.

They could break down all the walls and randomly run through the labyrinth, and they would still be stuck.

Knowing these things wouldn't help them in escaping.

Yet, these bits of information were the key to breaking out of this labyrinth.

Sadly, only an extremely experienced Extractor who had researched Specters for a long time would be able to combine the clues.

Luckily, Nick had been a Chief Zephyx Extractor for over a decade.

He knew exactly how Specters worked.

All of these bits of information led to one conclusion.

'This is not a Force Specter. Nor is it a building.'

'This labyrinth is an algorithmic construct that keeps generating new layouts by shuffling its corridors around.'

The most important clue had been that Nick had never seen any of the corridors actively being manipulated.

If the Specter only moved the corridors around manually, it would have definitely moved one of the corridors while Nick was close to it since the Specter didn't know that Nick was here.

However, that had never happened.

This meant that the shuffling of the corridors happened automatically, but it could also be manipulated manually.

'Every corridor has to be in use somewhere, but the algorithm keeps shuffling everything in a very unintuitive way, keeping normal people away from the exit.'

'And if any of the people manage to crack the code or come close to the exit on accident, the labyrinth gets shuffled manually, resetting their progress. In the worst case, the Specter can just stop turning on the light, forcing the people to take a different path.'

'This also explains why the Nightmare's influence works in here. The Nightmare's influence doesn't work inside a Specter's body or domain, but it seems to work here. That can only mean that this is neither a Specter's domain nor their body.'

'This entire labyrinth is just the manifestation of an ability. It's creating a space.'

Nick looked down one of the hallways.

'But that also means that this space isn't fully connected to the Specter. The Specter can't feel its touch like it's its own body. It also can't listen to every place at once.'

'And most importantly, it can't look at every place at all times.'

'The Specter can probably only focus on one place at a time, and since it doesn't think that anyone else is in here, it will keep watching the people while searching for new victims.'

'This means it won't look for me.'

'When people search for enemies, they usually don't search for them on their chest. They're too busy looking at their surroundings and the distance.'

'I just have to crack the code without being noticed. Then, I'll get out.'

Nick went back to the door leading to the big hall and went to one of the corners.

Next, Nick placed a tiny bit of his mist there and ripped it off his body.

Nick lost a bit of his Zephyx, and a tiny splotch of blood appeared at the corner.

Luckily, the speed of Nick's Zephyx recovery was insanely fast, and he recovered everything within seconds.

After that, Nick went to the other end of the corridor and did the same thing to one of the corners there.

Nick slightly altered the appearance of the splotch.

The splotch was so tiny that Nick would need to get rather close to recognize its shape.

If this labyrinth were a Force Specter, it would definitely notice the splotches.

However, this was only an algorithmic generator.

The Specter would need to look at the labyrinth with its eyes like everyone else.

The only difference was that it could probably access any part of the labyrinth, but only one at a time.

As long as the Specter didn't look at every tiny bit of dust in all of the corridors, it wouldn't take note of these tiny blood splotches.

Nick entered one of the intersections, marking its middle and every entrance of the hallways he could access.

After doing that, Nick entered one of the hallways and marked its other end before returning.

He wanted to know if the area had already been shuffled or not.

When he returned, he noticed something peculiar.

His hallway and the intersection were still the same.

The hallways visible from the hallway through the intersection were also the same.

However, any hallway that had become invisible after entering his hallway had changed.

While the hallways looked identical, the splotches had vanished.

'The shuffling is based on losing and gaining sight,' Nick realized.

'Now, the question is, how will the shuffling proceed?'

Nick marked all of the new entrances again before entering the same hallway as last time.

After reaching its end, he returned again.

And the hallways had been shuffled again.

Nick proceeded to mark the hallways again before repeating his test.

After the fifth time, Nick noticed that one of the first hallways had returned while the others were unmarked.

'That means there's no set layout. The algorithm creates the connections based on math, not on a repeating pattern. The only thing I can be sure of is that the shuffling isn't random. There's logic behind it.'

Nick proceeded to repeat the same test for over two hours.

And eventually, no more new corridors appeared.

At least, the chance of new corridors appearing had become so small that Nick hadn't seen one after 20 shuffles in a row.

'I marked 97 corridors so far,' Nick thought. 'Now, I need to check how the corridors themselves affect the shuffling.'

Nick went into a different corridor for the first time and went to its end.

When he reached its end, Nick noticed something extremely interesting.

One of his splotches.

'That means the corridors also spin. An exit might become an entrance after some shuffling.'

'That makes things much easier since this means that the number of corridors is actually only half of what I expected.'

Over the next two hours, Nick kept going in and out of corridors, connecting all the markings.

In the end, he counted a total number of 53 different corridors.

'Now, I need to check the intersections and stairs.'

Nick kept traveling through different corridors and intersections for several hours.

Thanks to his powerful mind, he could keep track of all of the different corridors, stairs, and intersections.

By the end, he found a total of ten different intersections and six different stairwells.

Nick had assigned names to all of them, and he had created a mental map in his head.

Nick wanted to take a deep breath, but he was still in his mist form.

'Now, the difficult part starts.'

He entered the first hallway and exited again.

He did that many times, taking note of every kind of hallway that appeared in the intersection.

After that, he did the same thing with a different hallway but the same intersection.

What he found after countless tests wasn't good news.

'There is no repeating pattern,' Nick thought. 'This is like pi.'

'The same numbers will show up if I go for long enough, but things will seemingly devolve into randomness again.'

'The same numbers showing up is nothing but coincidence.'

'There might be an overall value that decides which corridors appear, and the corridor I enter and exit from adds to the value, creating new corridors.'

'However, since the pattern doesn't repeat, it's highly likely that the values are related to prime numbers.'

'I don't think that the values will increase endlessly. At some point, they have to reset and start from the beginning again.'

'But wouldn't that mean that the pattern would start to repeat at some point?'

'What if the ending layout of the corridors creates some sort of seed for the calculation of the new starting number?'

Nick was starting to realize how difficult this was going to become.

'Well, seems like Crimson City needs to live without me for a couple of days.'

'I just hope Aria isn't all that worried.'

Nick just wanted to sigh.