They were about a half mile down the tunnel when Aethe noticed the first problem.

"The staircase is gone. I guess that's to be expected," she said.

"Great," Elisa said. "I'll start drawing a map. If this isn't an enchanted labyrinth, I'll eat my hat."

Her map was doomed to stay simple for a long time. After an hour of walking, the hallway had yet to deviate from its course at all, moving forward in a perfect rectangle with no variance from how it had been at the start. Only one thing had changed, really.

“Well then,” Marco said. "I suppose that explains why we are stuck. What should we do? Leave?"

"I don't believe so," Aethe said. "Information is power. If this temple is promising us the inside scoop on what Quill is and can do, then we need to make the most of that."

Marco leaned back against one of the tunnel walls and sighed, letting the back of his head rest on the cold rock.

"There's no dangers here right now, right?"

"Right."

"Then I'm using Captain's Cry. Everyone, be on your guard."

As soon as the power broke from his mouth, everything around them changed. It wasn't a gradual process. One moment things were one way, and the next they were another way, faster than a blink.

"The staircase is back," Riv said. "Oh, no. Is that really what's been happening?"

"Afraid so," Elisa said. She was looking away from the staircase down a tunnel almost exactly the same as what they had been traveling down. The main difference, from what Marco could see, was that this tunnel curved. They had been walking in circles, incapable of seeing any exits or changes at all due to the illusion. "We've been bamboozled. It got us good."

Marco wanted to press forward right away, and so did Riv. Elisa and Aethe talked them out of it. If they were going to push their luck, they said, then they wanted to be as close to whatever center this space had as possible when Marco next dispelled the illusion. They waited almost another hour, then Elisa led them down the once again perfectly straight tunnel for a time before stopping.

"This is the side of the circle almost exactly opposite the staircase," she said. "Pretty close, anyway."

"How could you know that?" Marco asked. "The illusion is still up."

"I calculated how big of a circle we were dealing with based on the curvature of the wall, and I already know how fast we move as a group on flat, reliable ground. It's not exact, but we should be within a few feet of it."

"So we use the cry and rush in?" Riv swung his club to loosen up. "I can get behind that."

"And unless something changes, we go all out," Elisa said. "We have thirty seconds of buff when this thing goes off. If the illusion is going to come back, we need to use everything we have by the time it does."

"Fine with me," Marco said. "Everyone ready?"

Everyone tensed at once. They were ready to run at a moment's notice.

"Good. Go."

Marco let loose the buff, and a hallway appeared just to the side of them, jutting off from the main curved path into some unknown interior section. They ran like the wind, making the most of every second. About halfway down the hallway, that proved to not be necessary for part of it.

The guardians made themselves known soon enough. As they reached the end of the tunnel, a wide circular space opened up before them. In the center of it, an obsidian statue of a man-like thing was placed, its limbs too long for its body by human standards, its head shaped oddly thick around its jaw. Around it were three sculptures of long-winged seabirds, each set on their own jet-black pillar.

"Nope!" Riv jetted towards the beginning as the others started to slow. "Not taking that chance!"

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As he reached the statue of a man, it had indeed started to rise off its platform, taking one slow, creaking step forward before Riv glowed gold, brought his club down, and shattered its leg at the knee.

Forever after, Marco wondered how that battle might have gone if Riv hadn't made that opening attack. There might have been a way to negotiate their way past or else to avoid fighting altogether. Or, if there wasn't, they might have been destroyed as the ultra-fast birds cut them to shreds as the big, tough man-statue bashed them into crew-sauce.

Those futures were closed off the moment Riv swung. Marco and Aethe followed his lead, focusing fire on one of the birds and shattering it before it got off the plinth. The other two birds came after Elisa in particular, but Marco was able to deflect one as Aethe ate the impact of the second, throwing it off and to the side before following it with arrows.

Riv took the entire battle with the statue to himself. On one leg, the guardian was badly off balance, so much so that when Riv managed to shatter its second leg, that almost improved its ability to fight. Each of those hits cost Riv something, but it couldn't have been much, since he was still doing damage to the monster left and right, blocking its huge strikes, digging in, and then bashing at the same few spots again and again. Even unempowered, he was spreading spiderwebbed cracks through the entire glass structure of the statue, slowly but surely undermining the entire beast.

Left to the sole, uninterrupted focus of two ranged fighters, it only took a minute or so to take down both of the birds. Each of them dropped some kind of heavy metal pellet when they died, though the team ignored both of them for the moment as they rushed forward to help Riv.

"My elements don't do anything here," Elisa said. "Not alone. Distract that thing, and I'll try something."

Aethe and Marco ran in, attacking, drawing all the focus they could from the statue as Elisa started to cover it with cold, freezing fog from both her hands. The surface of the man-thing slowly frosted over as she used up her magic power on it. Only when it was as chilled as it seemed to be likely to get did she change to fire.

"Stand back!" she said. "This might get messy."

The flames washed over the statue, and Marco understood what she was warning about a second after. The change in temperature was apparently too fast for the glass this thing was made out of, especially cracked and dented as it was from Riv's big club. There was a sickening groan from the entire form that lasted about a half second before it detonated, sending shards of glass everywhere. The combatant types on the team weathered the attack easily, though Elisa had to immediately begin healing herself from a dozen cuts on her face and neck.

"You okay?" Marco asked. "You’re bleeding pretty bad."

"It's all surface damage. Don't worry." Elisa pulled a cloth from the pockets of her robes and wiped away the blood, revealing a mostly healed surface beneath. "I'm more curious about those metal lumps. Go get them, please."

They nodded, leaving Elisa to the last bit of her healing as they went to where the birds had fallen. Aethe climbed the initial bird's pillar, finding a third orb of shining metal there before they returned to the center of the battlefield. Riv had braved nicks and cuts getting to the center of the man-statue's corpse and dragging out a much larger hunk of metal around the size of a barrel that had been cut in half.

"It's not heavy," Riv said. "And the description is giving me no way to see why."

"So it's good, but again we don't get to know why it's good." Riv said. "So frustrating."

"Don't let it get you down. If we had to choose between tons of this kind of stuff and tons of stuff we knew every detail of, I'd force the team to take this stuff every time. Even if we use it wrong, we should still get a lot out of it." Elisa tucked the three smaller cores into her pockets. "Marco, did you get any skills or anything out of that?"

"Nothing yet," he said. "I guess we could check out the temple. Riv, how weak are you?"

"I'm down 15%," he said. "I thought I'd be conservative for once."

"Then let's go. The sooner we get this done, the better."

The temple was the smallest they had seen, little bigger than a small house would have been. As soon as they cleared the threshold, it was clear it was empty of foes, though a glowing platform in the center still allowed it to stay interesting.