My throat have gotten much better over the last few days and was able to run a bit without making it worse. More importantly, I became ready enough to try to take on the operation that have been going on in the Central Park.

Making sure that I'm armed, I carefully hid the gun so that the people won't notice. Then I got onto the subway train where I would spend time making several line exchanges in order to get to the station close to the park. As I got out, a crowd of people rushed into the train, pushing me back in and I wasn't able to get to the close as it closed just out of my reach. Because of the crowd, I had to wait several more stops before the train eventually clears out enough so I could get out and take a ride back to the park.

At first I had trouble finding the headquarter of the operation since I didn't paid attention when I escaped. I knew I couldn't ask anyone or the reaction is either:

a) "Why are you looking for an oversized shack? You're not doing something suspicious like creating a meth lab are you? If you then stay the hell away from me, I don't want to get dragged into the drug war or something."

b) "Why are you looking for an oversized shack? What's wrong with you? There are certain groups of people who would want to find it, that includes the bums..."

c) "You knew of our operation didn't you? Sorry but I'll have to kill you!"

It's way too risky and I knew it's something I'll have to find all by myself.

Remembering that it wasn't that far from the entrance, I decided to search around that part of the area where I would trip on a horse carcass that was there for some reason.

Not wanting to have anything to do with it, I backed away from the dead horse and ran off. Not long after the discovery, I found the oversized shack, the headquarter of the illegal operation to bring down the city.

First, I had to find a way to get inside.

Then the door opens and I waited behind the tree to see how many people were there, thankfully it's only one. Just as the man was digging into his pocket with a unlit cigarette in his mouth, I quickly subdue him, dragged the unconscious person, bound and gagged with a rope and duct tape, and hid him behind one of the bushes. Then I made my way through the door and it turns out to be a much different building inside than it is from the outside. In fact, it doesn't look anything like a shack...the marble floor is polished and the hall...I couldn't find a word to describe it other than how huge it is.

The shack is in fact a cover to disguise itself so people won't notice.

As I went to look for the stairs, I came across the kitchen and helped myself to one of he sandwiches prepared on the table. After finishing the food, someone covered my mouth from behind and pulled me out of the room.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

I turned and to my relief, it was Coop, an old friend I knew from Newgrounds (though he became much more strict ever since his promotion as a moderator).

I was about to ask Coop what he was doing when...

"Shush, I was send here to go undercover so I can find what these guys are planning and bring them down." he whispered.

"For fuck sake, what the hell are you doing here? It's bad enough that you have a habit of making things worse by putting yourself into trouble and ruined things for everyone, now you're trying to play hero like Zimmerman?"

Then we heard someone coming and we both tried to find a place to hide but it was too late as the two thugs I met few days before and a short old man saw us.

"You! I remember you!" one of them yelled.

"You're the guys who got us beaten few days ago, you're dead now!" the other growled.

Coop pulled out his gun and said, "Dennis, you better stay out of the way, last thing anybody needs is having you to screw things up in a time li-" as he suddenly disappeared.

I looked down and to my horror, I saw a pile of clothes and a gun lying in front of it. Almost immediately after, I saw something inside of Coop's shirt started to move and a frog came out.

I looked up and saw the old man smiling and said, "Your friend is nothing more but a pitiful creature waiting to be squashed!"

Just as he was about to cast a spell on me, I dove out of the way and pulled out my weapon as I fell. I fired blindly and soon, I could hear "Oh my..." followed by a thud and two men screaming.

"No, Pops!"

"Pops, speak to me!"

When I got up, I saw the old man lying in a puddle of blood.

One of the men turned to me and said, "You bastard...not only you've helped humiliated us...you shot pops!"

Then a soft voice said, "Calm down...it's better this way..."

"Pops, why are you saying this?"

"Truth is...the reason why I joined because I've figured that if an intruder comes in, I can finally die at last as I have lived far too long." he said.

"Pops, don't say that!"

If it weren't for the fact that those two enforcers worked for Monsanto, I would have felt a little more sympathy for them.

"It's okay...boy, come here..."

I moved forward.

"Now that you have defeated me, I am free...but there's one thing I have to tell you...the overlord in charge of this...the truth will shock you, be prepared."

Then he coughed out blood and stopped moving.

"What happened?"

I turned around and saw Coop putting his clothes back on with a confused look on his face. Turns out defeating the wizard breaks the spell that was casted on Coop, kind of convenient.

"Can anybody tell me what happened?" he yelled.

I was about to tell him when he said, "You know what? I don't want to know."

I'm with him on that.

The two hired goons looked at me and said, "You go on ahead, we don't care anymore now that Pops is dead, I hate this place!"

Seeing that they were beaten with a belt, can't say I blame them.

Coop called the police and told me to stay put since getting to the person in charge of the operation to wreak havoc onto the city may be too much for us to handle. He had a point, if this person manages to hire a friggin' wizard, what might lie beyond this level?

Then as the goons were about to leave, one of them said, "Before we go, there's something we need to tell you, the boss is planning to create a citywide black at 3:30 p.m. this afternoon."

"What 3:30?" Coop asked.

"The reason is that when school ends at 3, kids would rush home to watch their favorite cartoon shows, just imagine their disappointment once the TV blacks out right in front of them."

"To get to his room, there's a stairwell right next to the entrance that leads to the room, but beware, there are series of death traps that only he can get through, no one else made it past those!"

Then I remembered something, I prerecorded my favorite show at 4!

I ran down the hall and head to the stairwell.

"Where the hell are you going? The tykes crying over their cartoons isn't mean the world will end, come back here!" Coop yelled.

I stormed up the stairs and darted right into the upper floor where everything suddenly dimmed. After few steps into the corridor, something whizzed right past my face and I felt something warm leaking down my cheek. I turned to see an arrow sticking on the wall right next to the door and looked down to find myself standing on a large button that set the trap off.

After carefully navigating myself through the first corridor, I looked carefully to see if there's buttons on the floor as well. Decided that it's safe enough to enter, I stepped into the second corridor and there was a loud slam from behind, the entrance back to the first corridor became sealed shut!

I started to feel nervous but knowing that recording my favorite show is at stake, I couldn't just give up and even if I do, there's no turning back because of what happened.

There was a squeaking sound and I looked down to see a mouse running around when suddenly a bunch of spikes shot up right in front of me!

Once they retracted back to the floor, I fell back and sat there with my body shaking like I have Parkinson's.

Knowing if I try to move forward, I could get skewered, how could I make it through? If the mastermind of this operation somehow made it through, then there's got to be a trick, but what and how?

Looking at the floor carefully, I noticed how the holes from which the spikes would shoot out were inches from each other, I could navigate through them. As I carefully took a step at that part of the corridor, the spikes shot up and I freaked out again. However, I was able to regain my composure and slipped right past the spikes before they could retract back into the floor.

Making my way to the entrance to the next room, I took a deep breath and prepared myself what trap could lie in this area. I walked up the stairs and came across a seemingly empty room. The encounters I had in the last two corridors made me weary enough to know that something might have been up so I picked up a pebble and toss it into the room. At first, nothing seemed to happen but remembering what happened in the second corridor, I waited for a while and soon I realized that if I stand there for too long, the city will experience a blackout like what happened in 2003, so I was ready to move when suddenly...

BOOM!

The ceiling just slammed right into the floor and I nearly fell backward down the stairs.

My heart was pounding faster than ever and felt that any more of this I might die from heart attack.

Once the ceiling was raised back up, I would eventually calm down and knew that to have a chance of getting past this one, I would have to time the trigger. I threw another small piece of rock into the room and looked up while counting the seconds it would take for the ceiling to slam down. Because I didn't have a watch with me, I had to guess the timing of how the seconds would go by and mentally counted to somewhere around sixty or seventy when the ceiling slams down once again. Once it retracted, I sprinted across the room and down the third corridor while mentally counting seconds at the same time. The count went down to fifty seconds when I begun to close into the next entrance and for a while, it felt like everything slowed down and by the time it reaches sixty five seconds, I dove toward the entrance and screamed over the top of my lungs.

Then the ceiling slammed right behind me!

Sitting on the stair step, I breathe so hard that I felt my lungs are on fire and fell into a coughing fit. Knowing that those three corridors took a lot out of me, I decided to rest for a moment before proceeding onto the next area.

Once I enter the next area sometime later, to my surprise, there's a short man at the stand selling something.

"I'm amazed my boy, only one other person made it that far and it's the overlord who runs this place!" he said with a cheerful smile.

Overlord?

I shook my head and figured that it's probably just what some people refers to their leader or something, I mean what are the odds that it could be the same one Chris Beer tried to tell me about?

I went to take a look at what the vendor was selling and saw bottles of strangely colored liquid.

"Wondering what these are my boy? This one here is a healing potion, restores your health after your tough journey from the first three levels of this place!"

I became interested and nodded.

"This one is the revival potion, you can use it to bring back your knocked out comrade but be warned, it doesn't work on the dead."

"Now this one here can cure burns, aches, minor sicknesses, and paralysis, but it doesn't cure major diseases like cancer, A.I.D.S., ebola, and so on, sorry that we couldn't get that far yet."

I sadly nodded in agreement.

"This one...the personal favorite of the overlord's and the most expensive, remember the previous potions I showed you? This one does what these three does and more importantly, it taste like cranberry juice, because it's made with cranberries!"

Impressed, I decided to buy one but then I stopped as something about this bothered me.

"Don't trust me? Well, I can't say I blame you, especially after what you have been through so here's a proof!"

The vendor took out a small cup, took a bottle of red liquid and poured some into the cup. Then the vendor picked up the cup and said, "Cheers!" as he drained the container of the red liquid.

"That's the stuff, good enough for you?" He said.

I took the potion and drank all the way down to the last drop, it does taste like cranberry juice.

"Now that would be twenty pieces of gold please!"

I fumbled and nearly dropped my wallet, twenty pieces of gold?

"What's the matter, you have the money or not? It's just twenty pieces of gold, much better deal that what you could have gotten at the village I came from, so please just hand over the gold." he demanded.

Seconds later...

"Hey, come back here, you're not leaving without paying!" the vendor yelled.

He's crazy if he expected me to pay twenty pieces of gold, I'd be lucky to have even one!

After escaping the potion vendor and making my way to the next corridor, as before the stone door sealed itself shut to make sure that I wouldn't be able to turn back. I could here a pounding from behind the door as the vendor yelled, "Open up over there, I'm not done with you yet, you still have to pay, open up!"

I went to proceed to the fourth corridor and saw half a dozen of blade pendulum swinging, each of them in opposite direction of each other. Knowing that one slip up can get me sliced into two, I stretched my legs and took a deep breath. I waited until the time was right and once the blade swung to the right side, I darted toward that side just as the blade began to pull back to the left. Then I had to made a abrupt turn, nearly twisting my knees in order to get past the second blade and narrowly avoided getting hit by the third because I forgot to make a turn, but at least it enabled me to get past the fourth blade much more easily.

By the fifth blade, I started to slow down and tried to move past it only to slip on the wet floor. Seeing the blade coming toward me, I rolled as far as possible only to be stopped by the wall and could only watch as the pendulum swung directly at my direction. But then the blade stopped just inches away from my torso before swinging away and I had to wait for a while to calm down, letting few more swings go by before I could get up and made my way past the sixth and final blade.

Feeling dizzy from what happened, I sat just outside of the entrance for a moment before going into the fifth level of horror. As I sat there, I wondered how the person in charge of this was able to afford all of these. The fact that the "overlord" was able to hire a wizard was bad enough but those death traps and the potion vendor is ridiculous as hell, it's like an RPG game.

I remembered it was around two when I entered the dungeon which gave me about an hour and a half to stop this operation from succeeding before it's too late, but the problem is this, how many more death traps do I have to go through before I could reach the overlord's room? At that point, I wouldn't be surprised if the room turns out to be a lair because he seems to want to live his life of fantasy of the RPG game but still, how did he get through all these? To think that he might have done this every single day, some more elaborate than the other.

Not really sure how he managed to get the potion vendor in there since from what I remembered, the overlord was the only one who made it in and out. Either there's a secret passageway that we all have missed or the vendor was assumed to be dead. I could understand how the vendor can survive for a long time without food, especially when you have potions like these, there's no need for food supplies.

Maybe there's a potion that deals with the bowels as well, I could really use one myself.

I finally decided that it's long enough so I went to make my move to the fifth level of torture.

If it weren't for that potion, my legs would have gave out at that point and they're already wobbling as I got up to move into the fifth corridor. To tell you the truth, usually the traps would have been in the room as far as I know aside from certain occasions in the RPG game but in this particular case, the small room each connects the corridors filled with traps now that I think about it. Then again it makes it much more dangerous as I have to go through all these corridors and as I would soon learn, much more has yet to come.