“Looks like you’re a close range fighter then,” Graham said once the dust had settled and the last mob had been pummeled. Shards of pumpkin littered the ground. “Unconventional weapon,” he added, nodding to the chunk of siding Laura had pried off the shed.

  “Yeah. I didn’t actually expect that to work to be honest.” She went to stash the club of wood in her inventory. The system glitched again momentarily as the item disappeared. It felt like a literal hiccup. She breathed a sigh of relief when the club finally showed up safe and sound in her inventory. But it came with a message.

  Note: This method of creating weapons has been patched.

  She pulled the club out of her inventory again and gave it a test swing. It still felt solid. She stored it away again. The system must have grandfathered it in. Or maybe once something was created it couldn’t be taken away. Either way, it was one more foot firmly in the camp of close-range fighting.

  “You know,” Laura said to Graham as the group gathered themselves and started walking back towards town, “short range fighting is what I keep falling back into because I’m trying to get away from the danger. Doesn’t it seem counterintuitive to put myself in more of those situations on purpose?”

  “Long range fighting does seem more like your comfort zone,” Graham agreed.

  “Meaning…?” Laura read between the lines of what Graham was saying. It had agreed with her without really giving an answer as to which direction he thought she should go in.

  She was now a Level 8 thanks to that little killing spree she’d just gone on, which meant she finally had another stat point to spend. This could be the tipping point that would cement her decision to either stick with long-range fighting or jump into where she seemed to continually be driven and focus on short-range fighting.

  “Meaning,” Graham continued, “the question is whether sticking to a comfort zone in a place like this is a smart choice or a potentially deadly one.”

  Brett was particularly insufferable the whole walk back to town, although Laura hoped it meant a change in the tide of how proactive Brett might be during fights.

  Back in town Laura peeled off from the others to stop by Charlie’s. She claimed pregnancy cravings, but really she needed a moment of quiet, in the fresh air and sun, to make a decision.

  It didn’t mean she couldn’t also eat a hot dog while she made her decision.

  “Did you know that technically I’m not supposed to be eating this,” she told Charlie around a mouthful of food. “Listeria. Same with deli meats. Potentially dangerous.” She wiped some mustard off her mouth. “Funny, isn’t it.”

  She also debated ordering a regular soda, of the non-magical variety. She was simply parched in the way that only a fizzy drink could cut through.

  “Tell you what, I’ll throw in another hot dog if you get the soda,” Charlie said, sliding one across to her. “Sometimes you have to live dangerously around here.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  Charlie tilted his head, questioningly.

  “You seem like you’re helping me out, but you’re part of this place right? Like part of the whole thing. You’re either a creation of the same whack job who put us here or you’re here to make money off it. Either way why would you be trying to help me?”

  “Maybe I have a soft spot for you.”

  “Because I’m pregnant?” Laura asked, her mouth full of more hot dog. At this point she was past caring. It was sunny, for once she had something to eat right when she wanted to eat it (and her stomach wasn’t rejecting it), and nothing was currently trying to kill her. This was as good as it got at the moment.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Charlie shrugged.

  “So you think I need the help? How screwed am I really?”

  “Let’s play along for a moment with your earlier line of thinking. Say I am part of all of this. The setup. The game. Wouldn’t I want to keep it all going as long as possible?”

  “Which means helping out people who need it?” That seemed too optimistically altruistic of an answer.

  A light glinted deep in Charlie’s dark eye sockets. “Or backing people who’ll end up kicking the game up a notch.”

  Caroline slapped Brett’s hand. “Don’t touch those jars unless you want to burst into flames.” Caroline had set up shop by the window, covering a table with multiple open jars. Next to it were several spell books open to various pages.

  Caroline was working to recreate the jarred fire she’d found in the puppet master’s office. So far one jar had exploded, nearly setting the curtains on fire before Oliver had tipped an entire pot of tea on it, dousing the green flames. After that she started to get the hang of it, but it was still slow and delicate going.

  Brett backed off and sat down. The sitting room at the Rest a While was getting crowded now that Russell and the rest had joined them. They were all sitting crammed into the same room now, experiencing what Laura felt was fast becoming a routine lull before launching into the next big attack.

  The maze.

  They couldn’t really put it off much longer. Graham and even Caroline were starting to agree with Oliver. “We’ve pretty much strip-mined this place of most of the experience we can get,” Graham had said as they had walked back to town. “Waiting too much longer might just lead to unnecessary nerves.”

  There still was some strategizing that needed to be done. The scarecrow’s weakness was fire, so Oliver had recommended gathering up every method of fire they could manage. Caroline, actually agreeing with him yet again, was focusing on jarred fire, which wouldn’t take much constitution from her during a fight as opposed to producing fire with a spell. She also was preparing some fire spells just in case.

  Agnes had taken her insecticide canister and filled it with some of the gasoline they’d found in the shed. That plus a lighter created an ersatz flame thrower, although maybe not one as powerful as they’d like.

  Laura sat, resting her chin on her hand and watching the others. She found herself over analyzing where Agnes was sitting, how she interacted with Graham and Caroline and the others. Had she been bothered at all to have been left out of the loop in the conversation about Oliver? She just hoped Agnes understood why. While Laura had no love lost for Oliver, she would have taken Agnes on her team in a heartbeat.

  Laura fidgeted with her tea cup, organizing and re-organizing the few weapons she had in her inventory. She had spent several minutes after talking to Charlie, just standing in the square and taking out first the shotgun, and then her club, balancing them in her hands and digging deep to see which felt more natural, if either of them did. The chainsaw also sat tucked away, still out of reach, but waiting to be used.

  The difference had been surprisingly visceral. With the shotgun she felt prepared, but it still felt vaguely foreign, unwieldy. When she held the club on the other hand—someone would have had to pry it out of her cold dead hands before she’d give it up. It felt like a lifeline.

  Once she made her choice, she acted fast before she could talk herself out of it. She put her stat point into strength, bringing it up to 3.

  It was still low for a supposed Level 8 short-range fighter, but her dexterity was all the way up to a 5, so she could focus on just building up her strength for now.

  “How are you going to carry all those?” Oliver asked Caroline, who now was steadily churning out fire jars. She’d raided the inn’s cutest collection of mason jars and had filled at least half of them.

  Caroline pointed across the room. A picturesque looking red metal wagon sat in one corner. Oliver squinted at it. “Isn’t that meant to be a decoration?”

  “Not anymore,” Caroline said.

  “Do you think that lady behind the counter is going to mind that we’re basically ransacking the place at this point?” Mitch said. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “And does anyone have any use for a stitched throw pillow? You could probably bludgeon someone to death with whatever this is stuffed with.”

  “Well,” Caroline said, firmly securing another jar. “The way I see it, either we’ll be dead and it won’t matter. Or we’ll be through and on to the next section of the park. In which case it won’t matter. So, seems like a win-win.”

  Laura flinched as the wagon hit another pot hole. The jars clanked together loudly.

  “That seemed predictable,” Oliver said.

  “You know what I like about you,” Caroline said, yanking off her jacket and stuffing it down around the jars, “how solutions oriented you are.”

  The road ahead of them sloped up away from town, and Caroline leaned forward, putting her weight into yanking on the handle of the wagon to get it rolling again.

  Oliver was deliberately keeping an even pace next to Caroline. Probably attempting to be more of a team player. Agnes meanwhile had fallen to the back, behind Nate and Brett, to chat with Russell and his group about what they could expect and to prepare them as much as she could. The hope was that Russell’s group would be able to make it through the maze with them while only minimally needing to engage any of the mobs they might encounter. Anyone Level 7 and up would take on the bulk of the fighting. Apparently the mobs in the maze were fewer but more powerful. It seemed to take the quality not quantity approach.

  Laura remembered the deer they’d encountered the first time they’d seen the maze, and their razor sharp pointed antlers. They all might be coming back several levels higher than before, but Laura had no doubt those deer could still do some hefty damage to any one of them.

  The group crested the hill just as the sun started to burn away the fog. Some lingering mist clung around the entrance to the maze. Corn stretched endlessly to either side of the deceptively understated looking opening into the maze.

  They all crowded up to the entrance, and stopped. Oliver in particular looked unusually unsettled. Of course she had to remember that he and Agnes had been in there once before, where they’d had to witness one of their party getting brutally murdered before managing to escape.

  A large crow called out nearby, and seemed to break the spell everyone was under.

  Caroline shook off her nerves, took one tentative step forward, and then crossed the threshold into the maze, pulling her little red wagon behind her.