What precautions could they have taken?

Ren and Baekho wished them good luck and that was that.

The trio stood at one end of the longest straight corridor they had found so far, giving Junior a distance of about a hundred meters to do the deed of unfathomable destruction. Minhyun was convinced they would be safe. After all, they just had to wish to stay in place and so it would be. Even a black hole couldn’t move them from the spot. Probably. Briefly, he wondered how much it would hurt to be wrong.

There was no reason to hesitate and Junior seemed to think so as well. Something happened down the corridor. Space warped, bunching up at the middle between the walls. Vines were torn off their bricks and disintegrated before forming a thin, glowing ring around the tiny pitch black sphere that grew to fist size, then to head size, then filling out the corridor.

Whatever the walls were actually made off, the impossible material ultimately wasn’t meant to be completely physics defying, even in dream logic. Bricks came lose with audible vibrations. They, too, disintegrated on their way into the accretion disk. A particle jet escaped from the middle of the nothingness, shooting plasma down the corridor. If this had been real life the boys would have been killed by it. But, Minhyun reasoned, if they encountered a black hole in real life they would probably have been about to die anyway.

More bricks broke off, creating holes in the walls. They only revealed more corridors, but those also broke apart under the gravitational force.

With loud clacking, entire segments of the maze tore themselves from the structure and fell piecemeal towards the hole.

Minhyun summoned a shield around them. The force field kept fragments from crashing into them while their surrounding fell apart. Already, the hole had exposed four or five levels of the labyrinth and more became visible as pieces broke away.

It was as if the whole thing wanted to come down but some unseen power did its best to hold everything together. The maze collapsed into the hole, a seemingly infinite supply of bricks streaming from all sides. There was a cavity in the structure with a diameter so large it became difficult to see details on the opposite side. Pieces the sizes of skyscrapers fell into the tear in spacetime.

“There!” Aron yelled through the link, unable to get through the clacking noises. He was pointing diagonally downward at a segment that had been exposed a few hundred meters away. “This is different!”

The golden corridor down there was holding up well against the destructive force. A red door at its end was unimpressed by everything happening around it. Even though it was brightly colored, it looked fairly dull surrounded by the shimmering metal walls.

Junior desummoned the black hole.

Silence so thick it was difficult to adjust fell over the boys. Minhyun hadn’t even realized how loud the destruction had been. Probably the sound of several jet engines starting right next to him. Another thing that would have killed them in real life. Oh well.

***

Aron reached for the doorknob, but froze. The red portal looked remarkably ordinary. Just a wooden, run of the mill door.

“Junior, will I explode into a million pieces if I touch this?”

“Nope.”

“Alright.”

The American boy moved to grab the knob.

“Only a thousand,” Junior said.

Aron flinched back and spun around with terror in his eyes. Junior’s grin grew wider, then he broke into a short giggle fit.

“You,” Aron said with a low voice. “You little…absolute…I’ll get you back for that.”

Minhyun did his best to keep a neutral expression, but was aware he probably failed. Levity was exactly what the situation had needed. He checked back with the outsiders who had nothing to report and by then, Aron had calmed down a little. The boy even smirked a tiny bit, but did his best not to let Junior see.

Defiantly, he grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door open, revealing…

Another corridor. At least this one was normal looking - almost mundane, as if taken wholesale from an upper-class hotel. Big, checkered floor tiles, shining with polish. White walls lacking décor. Neon lights. Lots of red doors – a dozen or so.

Junior sighed as he scratched his neck. “It seems we’ve just found another maze. I wouldn’t be surprised if all these doors led to more corridors. We traded one situation for the exact same one again. Maybe the structure is self-repairing. We destroy one labyrinth, it makes a new one.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic,” Aron said. “We haven’t tried any of the doors yet.”

With confidence the American stepped into the room and–

“Wait!” yelled Junior.

–and fell upward.

Other than the labyrinth, this corridor had gravity. Just the wrong way. Aron plummeted to the ceiling, smashed into it and groaned from the confusion. Minhyun followed him carefully, as did Junior after a second’s trepidation. They stood between the industrial neon tubes.

Aron tried one of the other doors. He found them all locked.

“I could blast them open. I’m just concerned about what’s behind them. We could turn one to glass first. Or to dust.”

Junior stepped up to the door next to which Aron was standing and took one look at the lock before materializing the key in his hand. “You know you can just get whatever you want in your dreams, right?”

“Right. Like that?” The American pulled a pillow from behind his back and pummeled the leader.

“Seriously,” Minhyun said, inserting himself between them. “We have a soft deadline looming over us. Save the pillow fights for waking life. I’d really like to get somewhere before it’s time to go.”

He was all for fun and games, but they weren’t actually making any appreciable progress and his heart grew heavy at the idea that his search was going to end up as fruitless as all the other leads. Not when he seemed so close to a reveal.

Junior slipped the key into the lock, turned it and – with a dramatic look back at his companions – swung the door open.

“Great,” he said, “more of those.”

A corridor like the one they were in was visible through the frame.

Aron threw his hands up as he turned around. “Maybe that’s all this is. The center of the scape is a huge maze. Why should there be anything to find? Maybe it’s all some giant dream clusterf***. Maybe it has no purpose or order. Why would it?”

The leader ruffled his hair. “We need a different approach. I’m still not willing to split up, though.” He tugged at the infinitely elastic band that kept them tied together. “We’re wrecking this place, too. And maybe the one after that. If we just find more labyrinths we give up and continue the search out in the scape. Objections?”

Once again it fell to Minhyun to keep the outsiders informed, while the other boys prepared a slightly less cosmic demolition than last time. If there was a room they didn’t want to destroy it, too. No, this time it was going to be refined by comparison.

Aron constructed cannons – crude, cartoony versions of the war instruments. Junior filled them with special projectiles. Minhyun moved them into position with a wave of his hand. One cannon per door.

On the count of three, dozens of weapons fired simultaneously.

The cannon balls broke through the doors they had been pointed at and kept flying through their individual corridors. They split into identical clones at every junction and smashed every further door they passed. The sound of splintering wood grew more and more distant as the projectiles travelled endless distances, never losing momentum like physics would have demanded.

Nothing revealed itself – until Minhyun saw motion at the far end of the very corridor they occupied. A ponytail? He wasn’t sure. It had been too quick, too far away.

He called his two friends over the link, since the unphysical self-replicator-projectiles still made noise as they kept wrecking doors further and further away.

The trio hurried after the thing Minhyun swore had been there. Climbing over the doorframes – they were upside down after all – the boys made their way through a few adjacent corridors.

They got to the spot.

They found a room.

They looked inside.

They went mad.