Rather than immediately reveal her suspicions, Cal asked us for a bit of setup first. From me, all she wanted was a small stone, an easy ask given my Summon Pebble cantrip. From Verin, she simply tapped on her thin glacier, asking her to get out and join us. The noble cautiously complied, climbing from my back while she took in our new environment. At the same time, Cal reared back to throw the stone I’d given her.

  “Kind of hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure…” She gently lobbed the pebble forward, only for it to disappear about a meter ahead of us. Before I could ask her what had happened, a sharp yelp came from beside me. With a hand rubbing at the back of her head, Verin turned about, bewildered.

  Sitting there on the ground was the exact pebble Cal had just thrown. Somehow, it had looped around us to hit Verin from behind.

  “Score! Oh. Did I say that out loud? Sorry. I meant, oops?” Not looking remotely as guilty as one might expect, Cal gave her most winning grin to Verin, even as the latter began to form a suspiciously sharp-looking icicle in her hand. Hiding behind me, Cal did her best to distract Verin with an explanation.

  “Pebbles and entirely accidental injuries aside, did you see that? Pretty much only one explanation, right?” By now, I was fairly certain I was on the same page as her, but Cal voiced her thoughts all the same. “We’re in a spatial mana region! I think most directions just loop back to the same spot we’re in.”

  Spatial mana. If she was right, we’d been teleported here, and then space was all bent and twisted to keep us from going back? That was… less than ideal. Even without any monsters immediately attacking us, how did one even handle something like that?

  Seeming to understand the gravity of the situation, Verin dismissed her icicle with a frown. “Is there any chance this revelation of yours comes with any bright ideas to get us out?”

  With entirely too little shame, Cal once again hit us with her widest smile. “Nope! No ideas at all. We’re totally stuck. Neat, huh?”

  Before even attempting to escape, the very first thing we did upon understanding our predicament was to link ourselves together. With teleportation and spatial twisting at play, it was entirely possible that one of us would take a step in the wrong direction and end up separated from the group. For Verin in particular, as the only one of us who still required food, that could be a death sentence.

  Luckily, the Necrolord’s Unending Army came in handy once again. After unspooling enough bandages from it, I made two short ropes to tie us into a chain. It wasn’t entirely foolproof, but it would be enough, I hoped.

  From there, we spent the next few hours trying everything we could to escape.

  Much to Verin’s dismay, pebbles were once again the name of the game. Most directions seemed to loop back directly to where we were standing, but if there were any directions that didn’t, theoretically we’d be able to find them with a few quick tosses.

  As the one with the most Dexterity, it fell upon me to be the pebble tosser. Rotating only a few degrees at a time, I gently threw each stone forward. As expected, the bulk of them flew back at us, often from entirely unexpected angles.

  Twenty throws in, we had our first success. The pebble in question soared through the air, disappearing much like the rest. As a new twist, however, this one didn’t return.

  “Maybe that’s the way forward? It could be something else, but there’s a good chance that way leads somewhere else.” Double checking that it hadn’t been a fluke, I tossed another pebble at the exact spot I’d thrown the last.

  It was, then, not entirely appreciated when that same pebble fell from the air, tapping me on the head.

  Wait, why? I repeated the experiment several more times, and even though I was certain I was targeting the exact same spot I had the first, each time, the pebble dropped from atop me.

  Was the first one a fluke? An even worse possibility quickly struck me: If there was an exit, it might not be static, shifting around or switching positions whenever something entered it. I groaned. The entire setup was bad enough without the path out being nondeterministic. Still, we could work with that, couldn’t we? It just meant that rather than using projectiles, we needed to rely on something longer.

  I summoned a spear of mana, making it as long as Arcane Armament would allow. Rather than throwing it, I slowly extended it forward, pushing it into the warped space the many pebbles had disappeared into moments prior.

  By all rights, the tip of the spear should have disappeared, curving around or passing through a portal to poke out from some strange angle. Instead, it acted like an entirely normal spear, showing no signs of there being any spatial trickery at play.

  Is it just not long enough? I had a decent supply of bandages saved up in my storage, and in short order, I cut and tied them together to make a several meter long span. Making sure to keep one hand attached to the rope, I threw the rest of it forward. Much like the spear had, it acted entirely normally, extending into the distance before flopping to the ground.

  Seriously? What gives? Trying out the pebbles again, I quickly discovered that the “bubble” we were trapped in had expanded. This time around, the projectiles only looped back around after I threw them past the cloth rope on the ground. There was something strange about their flight, though, as it seemed they passed certain areas faster than others.

  With a start, I realized I knew exactly what had happened. It looked just like when something moved through the air after I used my Mold Space skill.

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  So we’re trapped in a bubble. If we go too far, space twists around and spits us back where we started, and if there’s an exit, it’s constantly shifting. If it senses that we’re trying to map out which direction to go in by using larger items, it just expands the space around us and makes the bubble bigger.

  I thought through exactly what that meant for us before coming to a singular conclusion. Finally feeling like I’d figured out enough to share with the others, I divulged my findings.

  “Yeah. Pretty sure we’re fucked.”

  Naturally, the hopeless nature of the region didn’t mean we gave up. Originally, it had only taken twenty throws for us to find what we thought was the way out. Sure, it had immediately shifted afterwards, but nothing was keeping us from stumbling upon it again through sheer dumb luck. So with no better options, that was exactly what we tried to do. As a collective, we simply kept walking forward, over and over again.

  Each time, we found ourselves right back where we started, all of our stones and cloth still scattered on the ground where we’d left them. Seeming to take offense to the mess, it was Verin’s idea that we tidy things up, and I quickly threw everything into my storage save for a single pebble. For the better part of thirty minutes, that pebble was the target of many muttered curses as it kept greeting us over and over again.

  It was understandable, then, that it took a moment for it to register when at last the pebble disappeared. We simply walked forward for the umpteenth time, and our persistent placeholder wasn’t there.

  The significance wasn’t lost on any of us. “We’ve moved,” Verin whispered. “It worked! Quickly, put another marker down. Something new this time.”

  Not feeling a need to change things up, I opted for two pebbles this time around, placing them side by side. We left them there and moved on, but much to none of our surprises, in a few steps, we’d returned once again, the two pebbles eagerly awaiting our arrival.

  Still, it was proof of concept. For hours, we marched on, forging through the seemingly endless twisted domain. Our exact goal was unclear, but each of us believed that if we simply traveled far enough, we’d find a way out. A day passed, and then two, forcing us to stop for meal breaks and eventually get some rest along the way. Not once did anything attack us on our journey, but that was little comfort, all things considered.

  After enough jumps, our simple pebble markers grew increasingly cumbersome as I was forced to summon ten and then twenty and then thirty before moving on. To simplify things, I began to tear off strips of bandages, carving numbers into them with a knife instead. Soon, we’d traveled to well over a hundred different spatial pockets.

  And then, on the third day, it finally happened.

  Just like every other time, we moved forward. We reached a new pocket.

  Except, in this case, something was different.

  Rather than being empty like all the others had been, there was something waiting for us.

  There, as if taunting us, sat a lone, singular pebble.

  On spotting it, not even Cal could come up with a cheery quip. Instead, we all just stood there, stunned.

  After days of traveling, we’d ended up right back where we’d started.

  A few repeat attempts later, all three of us were willing to admit that we weren’t getting out like this. No matter how many different pockets we discovered, we always ended up backtracking, often losing days’ worth of progress. That wasn’t to say we’d entirely given up on escaping, but at the very least, we knew we needed to switch things up.

  Unfortunately, there was only one of us that had even the slightest connection to spatial mana, and it was me. I wasn’t willing to risk Spatial Stepping off in case I got separated from the others, but theoretically, I might be able to straighten things out with enough casts of Mold Space and Bend Space.

  At least, that was the plan. A few unfruitful hours of blindly bending, stretching, and compressing space got us absolutely nowhere, and while I didn’t give up on the strategy, I didn’t have high hopes for it.

  The real issue was less the spells themselves and more my lack of ability to know where to cast them. How was I supposed to know which way to twist space when I could see which way it was already twisted in the first place?

  To my great shame, the possible answer to all my woes only dawned upon me a full week into our stay. After all, I did have an ability specifically geared around visualizing different phenomena: Arcane Vision. I couldn’t be certain, but there was a chance I might be able to figure something out if I just activated the skill with some spatial mana.

  Which would have been great, if I could. Attempting to do so brought up a single error line.

  Arcane Vision cannot currently be used with Advanced or Composite mana types.

  Much like many of my other class skills, Arcane Vision could only be used with basic mana types until I completed its class trial. The problem was, I hadn’t managed to clear said trial in the full year I’d had access to it.

  Well, no time like the present, I guess? And hey, most of my attempts had been before I’d healed my mind. With my citadel walls back in action, I was new and improved. In fact, with how much I’d practiced the trial by now, there was a pretty good chance I’d clear it in a single go, right?

  Not wasting any time, I dove into my class space, entering the Arcane Augmenter chamber and moving to the pedestal for Arcane Vision. After removing the oxymoronic pair of monocles from their resting place, I returned to the central room of my armory, discovering that the previously flat floor once again sported a now-familiar set of stairs leading down.

  The bottom opened up into a long tunnel, and as soon as I took a few steps in, I grunted in pain as the trial’s restrictions clamped down on me. Not allowing me to breeze through the challenge with my superior stats, my class space had forced my stats back down to their natural baseline of 10 each. The only exception in this case was my Endurance and Wisdom which had been set to 25 to allow me to last through what promised to be a long slog.

  Wish they’d let me keep my Perception, though. Feels cheap to restrict my vision for what’s essentially a glorified vision test.

  Well, no matter. It was a pain, and sure, I might be a bit rusty after not running the trial in a while, but that was neither here nor there. The trial was split into ten sectors, and to date, I’d cleared a full seven of them on my best run. I suppose it wasn’t entirely certain whether or not I’d succeed today, but I could at least get a full eigh-

  Before I even realized what was happening, a spear of wind shot through my chest. Robbed of both my resistance skills and my Constitution, my death was almost instantaneous.

  As my corpse fell to the floor, my very least favorite notification greeted me once again.

  You have failed a class trial!

  Class Trial locked for 12 hours.

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