Chapter 423: Mummy Mandates

"Can you relocate, Tom Tom? My neck is starting to get sore having to stare up at you like this..." Ares directed his complaint upwards to Tom Tom who was silently staring back down at him.

"No. I like it up here."

"Ok... Well what's your excuse this time? Last time you said it was because of the lava spurts singing your fur but I don't see any in this room... You just like being in high places above people 'cos you're a cat!"

"Nuh uh! Anyway, what do you want? You completed the room, you're free to leave... Although I do wish you'd give the succubus back. I can't exactly leave the Riddlemyd and go procure another one as I am currently. She was valuable you know!? I mean, I did feel a little bad for her but I did give her a bed and plenty food so it could have been worse! If anything, I trust you to look after her less than I did! Give her back!"

"Nope, she's mine now."

"Disgusting pig..."

"Not you too?! I am wounded that you'd think of me as such a person! I'm not touching the damn succubus! I have other uses for her! Whatever, I can tell by the look in your eye you don't believe me and I don't care! I don't have to explain myself to you or her! What I wanted to actually discuss with you was allowing Aejaz here to skip floors. He's going back home for today but I'm staying here. Next time he returns he'll be able to skip straight to where I'm at, yeah? You'll permit that, yeah?"

"'Yeah?' MY FLUFFY ASS! Why on earth should I let... Never mind, he can skip all the floors he wants..." Tom Tom turned his face to the side and started whistling when he realised how good an opportunity this was. If Ares was going to dart ahead without his brother then only dumping Aejaz on him would slow him down again! Tom Tom would never normally allow this but this was a rare case in which letting someone skip a bunch of floors was actually a worse outcome overall for the opposing party. Aejaz would be given complete freedom from now on to teleport directly to Ares wherever he was at any given time! Tom Tom was just being generous and had no ulterior motives! Definitely not! At the start or end of a floor? No problem. In the middle of one? Aejaz would get an express portal there! Tom Tom would do it in double time amd get Aejaz delivered to his brother pronto if it was a riddle room!

"Pft, I knew you'd come around... Anyway, can you create an exit portal back to the hub room for this idiot? It seems like he has... Personal issues he wants to go and wrestle with and I don't want this pervy nutjob anywhere around me right now. Speaking of..." Ares turned to face a thoroughly embarrassed and red in the face Aejaz. "Stolen Voidwalk ought to last long enough to get you all the way back to the city if you hurry and don't take any detours. It's much safer in the air in Xasca than on land, plus you have your invisibility and the Prowler for good measure, so I don't care how desperate you are to relieve yourself of that succubus' spare energy; don't do it in the middle of nowhere. I hear Stepper voyeurism is a real danger in this country so go back to your room in the palace first for crying out loud. If I hear any rumours about some guy getting caught whacking it in the middle of the desert I'm not travelling with you again until we leave Xasca!"

Aejaz gave a wry smile and said nothing because this topic was just too awkward to comment on for him. He simply trudged through the newly-opened portal and didn't dare look back not even for a split second... He thought he did a good job against the succubus! He'd come up with a clever way out of danger and yet he was still being reprimanded! Some people were impossible to please...

Anyway, with Aejaz gone, Ares turned to face the ceiling cat again and gave him a warning. "You best start coming up with riddles now because I'm going to speed through the next couple of floors! If you need me to wait in a room to come up with one then so be it but don't expect me to slow down to meet your pace anymore!" Ares was true to his word and he activated every single speed enhancement he knew so that he could blitz his way through the Riddlemyd. He vanished from the room leaving a small wind silhouette in his previous location as the air had yet to catch up with his sudden disappearance. He raced down the passageway and arrived at the next room, blowing up any monsters on the path into chunks of blood and torn flesh just by the sheer pressure he put out, before Tom Tom even did! This was how things were going to go from now on and Tom Tom's one solace here was that not every room was a riddle room. During combat encounters he could bombard Ares with hundreds of low ranked opponents, swarming him and keeping him occupied while he devised complicated riddles instead of having to resort to silly puns again like last time. Now that Ares was openly telling him what was to come he could plan around it slightly. This did mean Ares' combat rooms would be easier, even if they took a bit longer due to the number of monsters Tom Tom would throw at him, but now riddle rooms were the only thing that realistically could potentially slow him down until he reached some of the deeper floors!

Tom Tom clicked his tongue and disappeared from the succubus room only to find Ares getting awfully close to his personal space in the next room! He'd swapped to the stone encrusted copy in the next room and removed that outer layer only to find Ares no more than a foot away with expectancy in his eyes and a beaming stare waiting for the room to be activated... This guy was damn fast! It was safe to say he was the quickest person who'd ever trialled this Riddlemyd and Tom Tom was going to have to start moving to rooms ahead of time before Ares even finished them just to keep up! This guy was a headache but Tom Tom would do it! Ares was playing by the rules and so Tom Tom realised he had no business complaining! He unleashed a bunch of tri-headed vultures into the room and scarpered to the next to get ahead of the curve.

As for tri headed vultures, they simultaneously specialised in three different tactics. One head was good at pecking people up and close, preventing anyone from getting near to the other heads safely. The middle head could launch mental attacks that disoriented the target and, last but not least, the third head specialised in ranged attacks. Basically every manner of attack, that wasn't pressure, was accounted for by these birds so putting multiple in a room at once would make it difficult to complete quickly. Lining them up like a firing squad was a tricky formation to advance upon and, to make matters worse, Tom Tom threw a few gatling geckos into the mix for good measure as well! Even if Ares had the means to kill everything he would still have to patiently wait for the onslaught of constant attacks to halt so he could poke his head out from behind a pillar and retaliate before he was capable of finishing the room. This ought to buy Tom Tom a minute or two to himself to think up a riddle!... And, yet, Tom Tom was already being stared down by Ares yet again like he was some kind of stalker ghost! He was poking Tom Tom's nose and demanding another challenge!... Tom Tom felt like crying...

In this blindingly fast manner, Ares raced through floor after floor and, eventually, Tom Tom was forced to resort to puns instead of riddles again even in spite of his plans to avoid such a scenario. Ares was just quicker at dealing with whatever Tom threw at him than Tom Tom was at creating more crap to hurl Ares' way. Questions like 'what do you call a stubborn farmer', with answers like 'un-tractor-ble', were everywhere and Tom Tom wanted a break! Fortunately for him, after Ares made it to the seventh floor, he was assured by the menace himself that he was just going to complete this last one and go home for the day. Ares had spent about ten hours in this place and only stopped to eat lunch. He wasn't on dinner duty today, as the wives were eating out and hadn't requested anything, so he had no familial obligations to tend to. Even still, he'd made enough progress at today such that he didn't have to keep going. He was also considering doing a little reconnaissance and exploring a bit over on the eastern side of the desert before heading back to the Oasis sect so, though Ares could keep going, finishing up this floor was going to be it for now and he'd return at a later date.

According to Tom Tom, Ares was two rooms away from the end of the floor and the next checkpoint so Ares wasted no time in barreling into another combat room to get the party started. Tom Tom was sick of seeing this guy speeding through the pagoda but there was nothing he could do to stop him. The only time Ares was even remotely slowed down earlier, aside from when he was eating, was whenever he ran into another group in the middle of their own challenge but, even then, he simply joined in, eradicated the monsters, or instantly completed the challenge, and swiftly darted towards the next floor without explaining himself to the group. He left behind so many confused adventurers in his wake and even came across Lilly's group again at one point. He was going so fast he didn't even recognise them, though, and wound up unintentionally setting a world record pace for the most amount of rooms traversed in the smallest time possible. Ares was a whirlwind of overwhelming competence blasting through trials without error and making Tom Tom's life incredibly hard. The poor fellow was sweating buckets trying to keep track of Ares and prevent him from moving forwards. Fortunately for Tom Tom, however, Ares had gone deep enough now that he could deploy a few more nasty tricks up his sleeve. This combat room Ares was in would be different from the rest and mark the beginning of a new mechanic that Ares was going to have to contend with! Ares wouldn't be able to break through this room so quickly no matter how talented he was in combat!.. Well maybe. Tom Tom didn't actually have direct control over what was about to happen so it could be an easy challenge or a hard one. He really didn't know what was in store for Ares precisely but he still liked this new trick a lot anyway! What was going to happen could never benefit Ares, at least, so even if only by a second or two, as long as it reduced Ares' pace by even a fraction of what it currently was, Tom Tom knew he couldn't complain!

"From now on, combat rooms that don't feature a unique / tougher opponent will come with an additional challenge!" Tom Tom spoke in a giddy voice because this was his favourite part of the Riddlemyd! If there was one thing he loved more than riddles it was control. Be it control over the universes he created during roleplaying or control over the adventures in the Riddlemyd, it gave him a kick without fail. Even if he wasn't the one directly controlling people's actions he enjoyed seeing his toys control people so what came next was right up his alley! What he was about to introduce, this new additional obstacle for combat rooms, was a personal favourite of his and whenever he got to dump it on an adventurer he always felt good. Tom Tom clicked his tongue and a hole in the wall, directly underneath his big head, opened up and a mummified pharaoh stumbled out of it on shaky legs. There was a barrier around him, meaning this mummy wasn't supposed to be attacked by the average trial-goer even if Ares could possibly do something about it with disintegration magic. Ares figured it was for the best to keep playing by the rules so he listened up to Tom Tom's explanation and didn't rush over to murder the undead. "This is what I like to call 'Siamun Says!'

Pffffffffffffffffft

Ares couldn't help but let out a hearty laugh at the clever name even if it was incredibly dumb. He could see where this was going, and didn't necessarily mind, but the best part of all this was definitely the name. Tom Tom had outdone himself with this one. No wonder he was so excited about this, the kitty was proud of its toy! It was like a kitten fetching a knitting ball and pawing it back towards its owner or an adult cat bringing back a dead mouse.

"Siamun here is going to bark orders at you and if you disobey him you will face a punishment. Punishments in combat rooms can be real mean and I would highly recommend abiding by Siamun's rules if you value your life! Failing to win the fight in the manner he declares can result in enemy monsters becoming poisonous, the floor collapsing around you, lava filling the room, adding more enemies, and even direct intervention from Siamun himself! Even I don't know what punishment awaits you because it's completely random and at his Siamun's own discretion so you'd do well to obey this Pharoah's commands, puny mortal!"

"Ha, sure, whatever you say Tom Tom. I'm pretty confident I could kill him through the barrier if I wanted to but Siamun is funny enough that I'll let him slide. Also, getting ordered around during combat should be a neat experience and be good for training too so maybe he's a good thing and not an obstacle after all... What kind of stuff is he gonna ask me to do anyhow? Pull off a handstand mid-combat? Bite an enemy to death?"

"And so much more! He can restrict your ability to use magic against opponents resistant to physical attacks, he may ask you to kill an enemy with its own magic, or he might tell you to stop attacking and focus on dodging for a minute or two. Again, I have no control over him! There have been some really unreasonable requests in the past but know that it has nothing to do with me and you nay choose to ignore Siamun at your own peril. Is his demand or the potential punishment you'll face for ignoring it worse? I don't know! You'll have to find out the hard way! Ah but don't worry about Siamun here too much, he won't appear in every single combat room going forward. Unique monsters that act like bosses and don't appear again, or appear with a slightly different power level, like the Anubis, won't include Siamun. Sevorus and I thought that was a little too much for poor little Sheryashkan dwellers in this backwater domain! Weaklings, the lot of you!"

"Rude but true." Ares sighed. "Even more so since this place, Sheryashka, got tucked away by the Primordial Blade so I guess I can't argue against it. Is the average cultivator outside the barrier really that much stronger, then? I had a feeling that would be true but not to the extent you seem to be saying it is."

Tom Tom shrugged before giving a quick nod. "I've yet to see a single cultivator, other than a few of the fellahin folk around here, come close to meeting the standards for a 'good' cultivator outside this domain. Being in a lower domain is arguably not the biggest problem ever but being isolated matters a lot, in terms of cultivator development, because there's so much valuable information about cultivation and arts inaccessible to you people currently. I don't blame Sheryashkan for being uniformed and trapped but it's definitely true that the average Sheryashkan is incredibly weak. There are only a handful of standouts bucking the trend here and there, most of which end up becoming domain leaders or legendary existences despite not actually being that impressive in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. your first 'Siamun Says' combat room will begin now and your opponent in this room will be... The 'gaping cobra'!"

"The what now?" Ares question was left unanswered by Tom Tom who quietly sunk back into the wall with an evil grin... Ares quickly rummaged around for his notebook and rustled through the pages to find this new monster and understand it as best he could before facing it because he was vaguely aware of what a 'gaping' monster was and, quite frankly, they creeped him out! Ares could hear something slithering into the room from the wall furthest away from him and, while he was grateful for the extra time it would take the monster to crawl over to him, he was going to have to sift through these pages fast if he wanted the information ahead of time instead of having to figure out things the hard way! He skipped ahead to the snakes section, which was unsurprisingly quite large, and then skipped ahead even further to the 'g's'... There it is... And oh boy is it as hideous as it sounds... Gaping monsters were quite simple to explain as they were just like their ordinary variants with one exception... A giant row of teeth in the middle of their body. This cobra was a large one, big enough to curl its body around the entire room multiple times, but its upper body was where things got truly ugly. Below its mouth was another, huge, vertical slit-mouth where its heart would normally be. Yellowed rows of grim and ghastly teeth, that flicked back and forth like skittish spider legs, lined the sides of it and it honestly looked like this second mouth had a mind of its own. If anything, the hideous mouth was the real creature and the entire rest of the ginormous cobra was simply a vehicle to move it around with. Sure the cobra had a 'head', like any other normal cobra, but it was hardly threatening compared to this second mouth.

Ares could see the cobra's long body making rounds around the corners of the room and circling around the pillars too to get a foothold in this room but he'd yet to locate the head now that he'd put the notebook away. He'd scanned the notes and remembered all the key points so he was good to go but he still wanted to understand where the real danger was hiding. The gaping cobra's tail was a blunt object that could smack him, sure, but he would rather not get bitten into pieces, eaten alive, and digested by this creepy creature. Ares was ready to give this thing his full focus but Mr Siamun wasn't about to let that appen and felt like now was a great time to speak up and give Ares his marching orders. Siamun's voice was raspy, like he needed a cup of water after a thousand year rest, but there was enough clarity in his old and tired voice to understand what he was saying at least.

"While fighting this monster, you will have one minute to answer the riddle from the next room ahead of this one. Sphinx will read it to you and, should you fail to answer correctly, or within the allotted time limit, a second cobra shall be added into the room. If you get the riddle correct, you will not have to do the next room and may skip it to go straight to the checkpoint. You will still need to kill the cobra to progress, however. Siamun has spoken."

A riddle... Now? This was highly inconvenient for Ares! These riddles weren't the easiest thing in the world and Ares greatly appreciated being able to think about them in peace without any outside interruptions... Unless Aejaz counted... But still, having to figure out the answer to a riddle mid combat!? Siamun was a bastard! That was what Ares says! Regardless of any complaints Ares may have had about this arrangement, however, Siamun was in charge here and Tom Tom permitted it so, while Ares kept a watchful eye out for the cobra looking to strike him while he was distracted, Tom Tom read out the riddle.

"Code. Bed. Tender. Bell. All of these words can have another word added to them to make another word entirely different to the original. What is the word that can be added to all of them to morph them into something new?"

A connections game? Did that really classify as a riddle? Were these going to be appearing from now on too? Ares wasn't sure but he was going to have to wrack his brains over this question one way or another... Actually, this game of Tom Tom's could wind up being a massive problem! If a word existed outside the Primordial Blade barrier that Ares was unfamiliar with he would be screwed because he couldn't possibly know it! He would have to look for an answer that was correct for a majority of the available options and then pray it was correct if he wasn't sure about the remainder of the options. Hell he already had one idea in mind but 'code' was being difficult... If Ares' assumption was correct, then the word he could add to these was a three letter one that came before these four words... But he still wasn't sure! He might very well be wrong about this because he had no idea what a ***code was because he'd never seen such a thing! Still, this was a potential guess if he got desperate. He still had another minute to think about this while he tangoed with this cobra. Fortunately, although hideous, this monster wasn't stronger than the Anubis, and considerably weaker actually, so Ares was sure he could kill it with one well aimed attack. He could start hacking away at its main body and severing it into pieces if he wanted it's just that he would be exposing himself to an ambush and, more than anything, he really didn't want that gaping mouth anywhere near him! The repulsion he felt towards it was not as great as the way he felt about spiders but it was definitely up there!

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

"There you are..." Ares caught sight of the cobra's head peeking out from around the side of a pillar but the forked tongue hissing at him was the least of his concerns and Ares knew it. What Ares was really concerned with was the extra mouth sneakily hidden behind the pillar. This cobra thought it was slick, hiding its horrific and contorted body out of sight, but Ares already knew exactly what this thing was! He wasn't going to fall for this snake's bait and go charging in straight to his own demise. Doing so would be playing right into its hands and, besides, Ares had his plate full with the riddle anyway! It was better for him to just flick attacks at this ugly monster from range while trying to work out the answer to the riddle while he wasn't too pressured in close combat. that was the plan, now he just needed to make sure everything fell into place. Who knows, maybe he could skin this monster after killing it and make some stardust outside in the market place!... That or parade its corpse around and spook people at night! Ares was sure his brother would love waking up to the sight of this foul creature on his walls at night!