Batman and Superman stood in the central energy control room. He stared at the light sources on the wall, and the shadows they cast, as if trying to infer something.
"Batman, I just remembered something." Superman looked at him and said, "In the previous stage, you kept staring at the ceiling for a long time. What was on the ceiling?"
"Some symbols," Batman said. "After I discovered those symbols, I checked the other rooms and found that in places where the lights were very dim, those symbols seemed to appear as well."
"Symbols? How come I didn't see them?"
"They're all in the deepest shadows of the lights," Batman said. "And they seem to only be visible from certain angles."
"What are they?"
"Not quite sure yet," Batman said. "But I think they might be related to a hidden storyline. Or maybe it's not even a hidden storyline; that depends on whether we can actually find anything here."
"So what are we supposed to look for?" Superman asked.
"Anything. Anything out of the ordinary." Batman looked around. "Maybe above, maybe below—there should at least be some kind of entrance. Maybe… inside the shadows."
Batman pointed to the very center of the central energy control room, to the top of that massive energy core device, then said, "Go up and take a look. Clark, see if there's anything up there."
Clark nodded. He was still in decent shape and climbed up using both his hands and feet. When he reached the top, he found that in the densest patch of shadow, a brick was missing.
"There's a brick missing," he shouted down. "Should I stick my hand in and try it?"
Before Batman could answer, Superman had already stuck his hand in. No one knew what he groped, but the ground suddenly trembled slightly, and a hidden trapdoor appeared beside the core device.
Superman jumped down, saying with some surprise, "There really is something. But isn't this a bit too easy?"
Batman shook his head and said, "First, we had to infer from the plot that there's a third party. Second, the darkest spots in any room are habitually most people's blind spot. If you don't notice anything off there, you probably won't even think of looking for the mechanism in this room. So taking everything together, this isn't exactly easy."
Superman thought it over and felt that was true. If it had been just him, it would've already been hard enough to infer from the story that there was another faction involved, because he honestly hadn't noticed anything.
"Wait," Superman reacted again, "this shouldn't be a normal access route, right? Following the regular stage progression, we weren't supposed to show up here at all."
"This is an employee passage too," Batman said. "Secret rooms need maintenance as well. They probably just didn't want someone to accidentally open the door, so they specifically designed a switch—and we happened to find it."
The two of them walked down and quickly realized this really wasn't a normal passage, because the ladder ended halfway and they had to jump the rest of the way. Superman jumped down first, then waved up at Batman and said, "You jump, I can catch you."
Batman was clearly a bit hesitant. He said, "Take a look at what's down there, Clark. I'm not going."
"I'm afraid that won't work, Batman," Superman's voice came from below. "This place is full of all kinds of terrifying text and patterns. If you don't come down, I can't even understand them, let alone describe them to you."
Batman had no choice but to jump down. Superman caught him perfectly; though he was knocked to the ground himself, he kept Batman from getting hurt.
After landing, Batman found things were indeed as Superman had said, and exactly as he'd suspected: this place was a Cultist den, with Arrays and Runes written in fresh blood everywhere. And then Batman realized he really had found those same symbols he'd seen on the ceiling.
Batman matched the patterns in his head with those on the Array one by one, but still couldn't find anything. It wasn't until Superman brought over a scroll of notes and Batman unrolled it that he saw written on it: "Ten thousand hands for one God—Ritual of Flesh and Blood Sacrifice."
In the stage with the skylight, everyone sat in their own rooms waiting. Even though an extremely, extremely long time had already passed, they were still patient. For no other reason than that the ones who'd gone ahead were Bruce and Shiller.
Even if they hadn't known each other's identities before, by this stage they could communicate, so everyone knew who had gone in. And those two being slow to clear a stage was perfectly normal, since they might go through a whole pre-clearance sequence of going nuts and stabbing each other, mutual harm, verbal attacks, and so on. Even if they played around in there for a whole day, nobody else would find it strange.
All you could say was that a few nested bugs had started running smoothly. Bruce and Shiller, those two stubborn mules, flatly refused to compromise with the stage design, convinced that their own ideas were correct, so they just stood there theorizing and analyzing, without taking any action at all.
The others, because they knew the two of them very well, weren't anxious in the slightest and simply let them be stubborn there. Whether acting or waiting, not a single person felt any anxiety. As a result, they kept dragging things out like this until Batman and Superman rushed over.
Bruce and Shiller were still discussing the Cultist storyline.
"In the earlier stages, even though they could hurt your body, they were clearly not this violent or gory," Bruce said with a frown. "Whether it was the clavicle ring or the way you donated blood, everything felt very restrained. You could even say the designer kind of hates the sight of blood. Otherwise, in that blood-donation stage they could've just provided a fixed blade, instead of such a gentle method as a needle tube. The organizers even designed a device to flush the pipes with running water—you could practically call it a cleanliness obsession."
"But there is scientific research showing that the probability of psychopathy is slightly higher among people with OCD," Bruce said. "If the level designer is a psychopath, then him being a neat freak isn't strange at all. Of course I'm not saying you're a psychopath, Professor."
"You could've left out that last part, thanks."
"Would someone like that really come up with chopping arms with blades and guillotines?" Bruce kept speculating. "The previous level was splattered with blood everywhere, severed fingers all over the floor. That clearly doesn't fit a neat freak's aesthetics. Even I felt a little grossed out."
"Even putting OCD aside, from a practical standpoint, they wouldn't use this method either, because cleaning up afterward would be too much trouble. Can you imagine having to hoist a cleaner up on a rope to scrub the ceiling well's walls? The company would never do that!"
"And this kind of excessive pursuit of violence and gore usually shows up in rituals related to Heresy sacrifices. Like needing specific organs, needing to splash a lot of blood, needing to burn or drown people. Only those abnormal Cultists can come up with this kind of method," Bruce said. "So I feel the last two levels are very likely the handiwork of Cultists. They slipped in their own stuff into the levels so they could use the players to complete a sacrifice."
As soon as he finished speaking, they heard a faint sound coming from inside the wall next to them. The two immediately froze and dropped into fighting stances. But aside from the sound, nothing else happened.
Bruce carefully edged closer, then stopped. He bared his teeth, sucked in a breath and said, "Professor, this is all your fault for telling me that idea earlier."
"What?"
"You said you'd put a mechanism in the drawer so that as soon as I got close, a steel needle would go right through my brain or something…"
Shiller couldn't take it anymore. He shoved Bruce aside, walked up to the wall himself, leaned against it, and listened. On the other side of the wall came a regular tapping sound.
The sound was very faint, so he mainly judged it by the vibrations. Shiller quickly realized the other side was tapping Morse code.
"Level, fake, sacrifice, hand."
"Batman?" Shiller tapped back with the crowbar.
"Yes," the other side replied.
Shiller quickly figured out what was going on: Batman and the others had probably been squeezed out of the slots by Stark, but they hadn't quit outright and had instead gone to find the Cultists' lair.
With Batman's skills, of course he'd be able to find it. They'd probably found more direct evidence about the Cultists there, and that evidence pointed straight at their suspicion—the previous level and this one both had problems. They weren't set up by the company, but were Cultists sneaking in their own content. And the point of smuggling in that content was to use flesh and blood as a sacrifice.
"Hand, god," Batman tapped again.
Shiller thought for a moment. Batman was probably saying that the god these Cultists worshiped might be related to hands. Otherwise they wouldn't be messing with arms in both levels. Still, the world is big; people can believe in anything. A god of ten thousand hands wouldn't be surprising.
But if this level is fake, then where's the real level? Shiller thought. Batman's Morse fundamentals still couldn't compare to Anatoli's—or maybe he just wasn't willing to use Morse to deliver long speeches. Anatoli was different; he could literally work and chat with Shiller by tapping Morse code on the table with his fingers at the same time. This stuff was basically etched into his genes.
Even so, Batman still gave the clue as succinctly as possible—"Above."
Shiller instinctively looked up at the ceiling, then suddenly realized that it didn't mean the "above" of this room, but the room above the ceiling well.
Shiller relayed the clue to Bruce. After thinking for a bit, Bruce said, "The Cultists probably don't have the ability to create a large mechanism from scratch right under the company's nose. So they most likely modified an existing mechanism. In other words, the room structure of the previous level was designed by the company, and the winch and iron chains were also made by the company. The Cultists tinkered with it a bit, which changed the so‑called way to clear the stage."
He paused, then said, "But why did that infiltrating organizer also say we needed to get the key?"
"Because that organizer is the level designer," Shiller finally dropped this earth‑shattering secret. "That was Tony Stark."
Bruce's eyes went wide. He gestured with his hands, then said, "So those organizers are…"
"All Dojo Administrators," Shiller said. "They're not NPCs created for the game. They're the actual level designers behind the scenes."
Bruce opened his mouth, took a moment to digest this shocking fact, and then understood why Stark had also said that was the way to clear the level. Because under normal circumstances, the Cultist plot was probably a mandatory part of the run, so from the God's‑eye perspective Stark would think this level had to be cleared that way.
"Wait." Bruce found another inconsistency. "So he deliberately barged in just to block Batman and the others outside? That's some serious self‑sacrifice, isn't it?"
Shiller shook his head and said, "Do you remember what the punishment was for losing the lantern level?"
"Uh, didn't they say it was execution?"