As Seth fell through the portal, Hera, out of reflex, reached out to grab the guide and stop him from getting away. There was a part of her that knew that this was a bad idea, that she would probably not be able to do so, and if she did, there was a good chance that it would cost one of her strikes.
But she couldn't just let him go after he dropped that much on her lap. There were too many questions, there were too many things that she needed to understand, and she couldn't just let the guide leave without saying anything.
But unlike what she was expecting, the moment her arm went for the peacock, she grabbed around his neck and he let out a "BAWKA!"
Like that of a chicken.
The portal underneath him closed and Hera was still inside the cocoon, holding the guy by the neck.
"Did you just stop me from leaving?" Seth asked while struggling to get free, "I may not feel pain like you do, but it doesn't mean that being grabbed by the neck is comfortable."
"Sorry," Hera dropped the guide, who fell back into the water.
Seth looked around even more confused than the Empress and asked, "How did you stop me from leaving?"
"I don't know. I wasn't trying to hurt you or anything. But I just really needed to ask questions about what you just told me," she protested.
"You don't grab someone by the neck to ask a question!" Seth rubbed his neck, but Hera could tell he wasn't really upset. It was more the surprise than anything.
"Well, okay, but can we talk now?"
Seth looked around, trying to understand what was happening, before he paused and gasped. "Oh, holy shit. You have a skill that lets you keep your court inside of you, don't you?"
Hera nodded. "Yeah, the Empress Palace."
"Okay, okay, this makes a bit more sense. This cocoon is kind of acting like a miniature palace, which in its own version acts like your private room."
Hera looked around. "So this is a bootleg version of my private room? I'm bypassing the whole need for a space that's really my own and I can talk to you?"
"Technically, it's a bootleg of a bootleg, but yeah. I think so. Try sending a message to one of the guides. You can usually only do that if you are in your private room, right?"
Hera nodded and pulled up the messaging app on her tablet. It didn't take long for her to be able to find the guide messages. And that was something she could only do if she was in her private room.
Still, to make sure she tested it out by sending a single message to both Peaches and Capri, which both replied right away. They were asking where Hera was because they couldn't sense that she was sending the messages from the right place. She gave a quick reply that Seth would explain things for them later, but turned towards the peacock guide with wide eyes.
"Okay, so are you still bound by my skill?"
Seth looked around and said, "I don't think so. Ask me a question."
"What's your favorite food?"
"Fried chicken," Seth replied, getting a strange stare from Hera.
"It's not. I was trying to see if I can lie to you. I don't like chicken. I'm a peacock. I don't eat it."
"Oh, okay. But yeah, I can lie to you. So this is not forcing you to stay or forcing you to answer my questions. But we can still talk without a problem?"
"Pretty much, yeah. This is kind of amazing," Seth smiled.
"But one amazing thing at a time," Hera added. "Do you mind if I ask a few questions about what you just told me? Because that story is wild."
"Of course. I wasn't expecting you to just drop it. I had all the intention of sending you a text so we could talk later. But I didn't think that this was going to be it right now."
"Again, sorry for grabbing you like that. I just… it was just a reflex," the Empress scratched her cheek with her claw.
"You have some strange reflexes, but don't worry about it. That's fine. Now, what do you want to know?"
"The wings are the mountains?" Hera replied with the most eloquent question she could come up with.
Seth nodded. "Yeah, there were the wings of the Azure bird."
"Okay, so how is it possible for those wings to have fallen into a different room?"
"The doorways were not always there," Seth said.
"What?" Hera asked.
"That happened a very long time ago. It was basically before doors were a thing, before a lot of things were a thing. We're talking very early moments of the MAZE. When everything still was very experimental and there were a lot of mistakes happening everywhere. That's why the fights could happen in various places, because when you reached the invisible walls of the room, you didn't stop. You just went to a different one."
"So, like you could just walk across the wall and continue to whatever you're seeing beyond it?" Hera asked.
"Not exactly. The walls always took you somewhere different. But basically, if you reached the doorway, you could go. If you reached an invisible wall, it was like a doorway to a different room. But there were various places like that."
"So there were only six rooms connected to one at most? Or am I getting that wrong?" The Empress imagined the six walls that formed the rooms.
"Actually, no. The number of rooms that one room was connected to had absolutely nothing to do with the number of walls. You could be walking in one direction and end up in a different room, and if you took five steps to the left or right and hit the invisible wall, you would go to a different one."
Seth created a transparent cube with a sticky figure inside. The figure moved to one wall and appeared in another cube. Then another figure went to a place a bit to the side from where the first stick figure touched the wall and they appeared in a third cube.
"At the same time, no matter where you tried to go, it would always send you to the same two or three rooms. It was like as if every single invisible wall was a giant doorway that could take you anywhere that room was connected to. And that's why at some point the system changed that and made it so that if you wanted to transfer, you had to pass a doorway. That way it could control where you were going and drop anything, and we'd stop people from dying well, not people, but monsters from dying the moment they arrived in a different room."
"So that's why doorways were created?"
"Pretty much. I think it's also easier for the system to only keep track of a single area where people depart from one place to another. Otherwise, it needs to spend a lot of resources tracking anyone who gets close to an invisible wall and figuring out where they're going to end up."
"Okay, but you also said that the monsters could grow unimpeded, right?" Hera changed the topic.
"That's right. Yep, back then they could. No matter what, no matter when, no matter how much, they could grow as much as they wanted if they managed to. There wasn't anything stopping them."
"So there were no level limits anywhere? Not even after the doorways were created? But even then, what was the devil supposed to be? At least from my understanding, devils are creatures that can grow without level limits."
"That's not entirely wrong, but it's not entirely right either. You see, devils are more than just monsters that can grow. Although likely, that's generally what they are. They can also be considered monsters that have a drive to destroy everything. The way that I've seen a few guides explaining is that devils are the equivalent of serial killers in the world of people. They take I'm not sure if pleasure is the right word, but they take some sort of beneficial response to destruction. And because they grow without having to worry about levels, the stronger they get. Then, when they get stronger, they can destroy more, which makes them grow even more. It ends up creating this really nasty feedback loop, you know?"
Hera nodded in understanding. It's like devils craved destruction. The more they killed, the more they destroyed, the better their skills would get, allowing them to destroy more and so on and so on. Like Seth was saying, it was a very nasty loop that only benefited the devils themselves.
"But not all monsters that can grow are devils. There are some that are not. They just can grow, you know?" Seth continued.
Hera paused for a moment. "Like Guardian beasts?"
"Yeah. That's a name for them. Guardian beasts can grow and they are not devils. It's the same thing. Some monsters, especially back then, most monsters could grow as much as they wanted as long as they worked for it, and they didn't have to worry about levels. As a matter of fact, back then levels," Seth looked to the side before nodding and turning back to the Empress. "Yeah, I can't talk about that. But you might be able to figure out what I was trying to say."
Hera just stared at Seth for a moment. The one thing that came to mind was so impossible that she couldn't fathom it as being real. Was the guide really about to say that there was a time in the MAZE where levels were not a thing? Could that really be it? Could a world like that, a world without levels, really exist? She couldn't say it herself and she was not willing to speak the words out loud in case the system would abruptly cut their conversation short.
"Anyway. And that's how this room came to be. By two colossal beasts fighting each other."
Hera paused. "Hang on, what about the MAZE walls? Were they around? The ones splitting the layers."
Seth smiled. "I'm probably going to be pulled away as soon as I answer that, so are you sure you want to have that question now?"
Hera shook her head, but then she nodded. There was just so much going on in her head that she didn't know what to do. She needed time to process everything. But she had already asked and she wanted to know the answer.
"Yes. I want to know."
Seth smiled. "Back then, there was no need for walls."
The moment he said that, the portal appeared underneath him and this time Hera was sure that even if she wanted to grab him, the system wouldn't let her, as her entire body froze up the moment the portal materialized underneath the peacock guide.
She had just been told about the history of the MAZE. A history that maybe no one else knew about, a history that maybe no one else was supposed to know about. Yet here she was with this knowledge in mind. But at the same time, what could she do with it?
Knowing that creatures that big existed changed what, exactly? She didn't know what to do with the information and she didn't know who to talk to about this. There was no questions she could pose to anyone in order to discuss this type of thing. How could she even start to process the existence of a world without levels?
All this because she asked why were the mountains that pretty shade of blue. And all this because she apparently could create a private room whenever she wanted to.
She dismissed all the skills that she created to block anyone from listening and sank into the waters. Together with her entire Court. They were all staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the information they just received.