I poked at the pile of books with my foot. They didn't explode or spit poison at us or anything. We apparently had to read to earn points, though if the strange entity Reed explained what we were getting points for, I wasn't listening.

"Do we...just read books then?" Charmaine asked.

"Lillia's smart, she can figure this out," Sai said.

"I'm smart too, what about me?" Anastasia asked.

I was surprised Sai singled me out first, I wasn't sure I'd known them long enough for them to have any sort of opinion on me outside of maybe remembering that my younger sister Lilith is annoying. Anastasia took offense to Sai bringing me up first, and stared down at me.

"You are an ally of Faleur," Anastasia said. She was a lot taller than her sisters, but the familial resemblance otherwise was clear.

"God, here we go," Charmaine said. "Sai? Help? Ana's doing dramatic voice again."

"Why do you always ask me when she does this?" Sai asked.

"You always ask that!" Charmaine said.

"Because I never get a good answer!" Sai said. "Ana, chill out, it's Lillia. She's cool."

Anastasia snarled.

"If you think you can solve this as well, I'd welcome it," I said, pushing my glasses up. "Perhaps you can use your powers to lift the doors while I investigate."

"That's a good idea," Sai said. "Ana, come on." Anastasia kept staring at me until Sai pulled her away. The two tried to use their shadow powers to reach under the heavy lockdown doors, but even they couldn't make a ding in them. I remembered hearing that the lockdown procedures put protections in place against surprise void jumps, so powers were probably out as far as getting through them.

While Charmaine and Esther joined the other devils, I searched through the pile, glancing back to the monitor every few moments. I found a very short preschool grade book and read it quickly, testing to see. Sure enough, as soon as I shut the book,

"Curious, it couldn't detect my eyes actually physically reading the book, could it?" I thought out loud as I bit a nail. "Maybe it's just the time spent reading, and each book is charmed somehow..."

The devils gave up and rejoined me.

"Got anything?" Sai asked.

"It seems as though it can actually track books read," I said. "But I'm not sure if it can actually tell we're reading them or if it just waits for a certain amount of time."

"Well easy way to find that out, half of us read for real and half of us just pretend," Charmaine said.

"This feels like it's making me root against reading and that feels innately wrong," Esther said.

"It is wrong, but you can be for literature and against whatever this monstrosity is," I said. "I'll be one of the readers."

To test Charmaine's idea, she and Anastasia pretended to read while Sai, Esther, and I genuinely read. I poked through for another quick read, freezing at the cover of a junior grade book. It was a sports series, and this volume was about twin sisters that played beam chasers. They didn't look anything like the Matora sisters, but still. I couldn't help but think of Ko, which hit me harder than being trapped in a potentially highly dangerous game by an entity from the void. I tried to keep my expression neutral, but it was hard. The others didn't notice at least. I settled on a different junior grade book and read it in about five minutes.

We all finished the books we were either reading or pretended to read, and got points for all of them. We even got enough to advance to...something.

"So that seems like a big flaw," Sai said. "But I feel like if I actually say what it is out loud that stick guy is gonna kill us or something."

"Then let's not," I said. We had enough points to win the round, but what did that mean exactly?

We got our answer as a door opened behind us.

"Careful," I said. "I have a feeling this could take us into the void."

"If we're not there already." Anastasia said.

Reed's horrible voice rang through, like a miscast cartoon character with an actor who decided loud equaled quality work. "It seems as though we have some winners! Proceed on ahead to the next area. Readers will get puzzle rooms, puzzle roomers will get combat, and combat will get reading rooms! Swell stuff all around. How many freaking times do you think you can get me to say room? Not enough, I'd say. Because room is a word, and words are things you read. You may be hearing my voice, but that is reading too per oral tradition."

"I do respect that he acknowledges oral reading as being just as valid as visual reading, as an avid audiobook listener I appreciate that," I said. "It's about all I appreciated from him so far, but still."

"Pfft. Oral." Charmaine said, getting a punch in both shoulders from Sai and Anastasia, and a kick to her shin from Esther. "Alright, no more jokes from me, fine."

The devils went first into the next room, I wasn't sure if it was to protect me or if they didn't have any hesitation entering another potentially dangerous situation.

"So puzzle room next," I said as I followed.

"I can handle puzzles just fine," Anastasia said. She squinted at the ground. "Wait, no, I hate these."

On the ground was a variant of a sliding tile puzzle, with a square grid and one open space. It was all blocky looking books instead of the usual tiles on the game.

"For those of you entering puzzle rooms," Reed's annoying voice came through a speaker system. "I would like to add that if you fail to solve your puzzle, a very dangerous creature will appear to fight you and maybe kill you! So solve quickly, because you don't want to lose before you even get to a combat room. You can always of course bypass that with my Tension Betrayal System, which would activate the Killing Game Bypass System, and then we'll do a trial to determine who the killer was, and if you win the trial you get twelve and a half points, which adds on to the twelve points you'd already be getting from a killing, and..."

"Ugh, I wish we could just kill him," Anastasia said. "Lillia, solve this puzzle already."