travel to center of city maze in a minute

Despite all my preparations and the fact that I knew it would be important in the months to come, Initiation was kind of a letdown. In fairness, I was a bit over-leveled, was bringing along my similarly over-leveled friend, had completely mapped out the Labyrinth beforehand, and had stacked an entire deck of cards in my favor, but still. When the time came, Adam and I each received notifications in our scrolls directing us towards a specific entrance to the tunnels below, found our places at the starting line, and waited until we were told to go.

And then we went. Moving as fast as I could without losing Adam, I took us along my decided pathway. I guided us around what few traps we couldn’t simply run through and we moved with the speed of certainty. Periodically, we crossed paths with the creatures of Grimm that called this place their home and said creatures proceeded to die, but other than that, there was little we couldn’t simply move through.

I suspected, backed by my awareness of the maze, that the entire test was probably designed so that it would get more difficult later on, once the initiates were all deep in the Labyrinth and vulnerable to manipulations of the maze itself—at that point, those controlling the structure could use it to forcibly guide groups towards one another, as well as towards appropriate challenges that they’d be forced to work together to overcome. At this point in the exercise, however, they couldn’t very well risk some pair of newbies running into a den of monsters and getting themselves killed, so the paths were more forgiving and more dangerous routes were locked off. So were the routes straight to the finish line, of course, but there were ways around that.

End result? We reached our destination in less than a minute. When you already know exactly how to get where you’re going, there’s not much challenge to be had in getting through the maze.