With the goblins gone from the second floor, Riven knew his dungeon would be much easier for adventurers to tackle when they entered. That had been his intention from the start—to lure humans deeper into his dungeon with a more manageable challenge. But achieving that goal hadn’t come without a cost.
He looked around, surveying the aftermath of the battle. Broken bones and splinters of weapons littered the floor, and blood spattered the walls, forming dark, ominous stains in the dim torchlight. Skeletons stood motionless, staring at him with the same hollow-eyed, unfeeling expressions, as if they hadn’t just fought for their existence against a horde of traitorous goblins.
Their numbers, however, told a different story. Riven had started the battle with nearly a hundred skeletons. Now, only sixty or so remained, scattered around the portal room and hallways in disarray.
"Man… those goblins were doing numbers," he muttered, rubbing his chin.
‘Maybe they weren’t entirely useless after all. Perhaps I’ll bring them back on a higher floor, somewhere where they won’t interfere with the humans I want here.’
He couldn’t deny a grudging respect for the goblins’ tenacity—maybe even their combat skills.
But for now, the goblins were gone, and that was a problem for another day. He had more immediate issues to deal with.
He glanced around at the portal room, grimacing at the state of it. Shattered bones ground underfoot, and a thick layer of dust coated every surface. Blood was smeared across the walls and pooled in sticky puddles on the floor. Broken weapons and scraps of cloth lay scattered everywhere, remnants of the goblins’ rebellion.
It looked like the aftermath of a brutal massacre… which, to be fair, it was. But that wasn’t exactly the impression he wanted to give future adventurers.
‘Adventurers are cowards at heart’, Riven thought with a sneer. ‘If they see all this carnage right from the start, they’ll be too scared to venture deeper.’
He could already picture some weak-hearted human stumbling upon this scene and running screaming back to the portal, depriving him of precious mana.
He sighed heavily, crossing his arms in frustration. "Damn goblins… creating a mess for me to clean up!"
He could almost imagine the rebellious goblins laughing at him from beyond the grave, taunting him with the chaos they’d left behind. The thought only soured his mood further.
Riven stomped his foot, his irritation building.
‘This is my dungeon! It’s supposed to be pristine—well, ominously pristine. But this… this is a disaster!’
It wasn’t just the aesthetics, either. The mess posed a practical problem. Blood, bones, and debris everywhere would only serve to remind adventurers of the dangers lurking in his halls. It would make his dungeon seem too deadly, tipping the balance he needed to keep them coming back, tempting them deeper floor by floor, harvest after harvest.
‘If I want to make this dungeon successful, he realized with growing dread, I’m going to have to clean it up.’
But it wasn’t just about the realization that cleaning was necessary for the success of the dungeon. Riven knew there was a deeper reason for this.
After all, Sorvax had always made him clean up the messes left behind by adventurers—the blood spatters, the scattered bones, the gear they sometimes left behind when they were too wounded to carry it. And it certainly hadn’t been because Sorvax hated him!
"Definitely not," he muttered to himself, trying to believe it.
‘There had to be a reason’, he told himself, ‘a good reason.’
Sorvax was a practical demon; every task he assigned had a purpose… probably.
True, Sorvax had employed janitors—spirits or low-level creatures that would travel between floors, tidying up between harvests. But he’d always claimed they were too busy to handle every mess, especially after a big raid or a particularly messy battle.
He’d insisted he didn’t have the mana to spare for more help, so the cleanup of the mid-level floors—the floors where adventurers met the most resistance and where the heaviest casualties occurred—had usually fallen to Riven.
He paused, recalling those grueling, thankless hours spent scrubbing dried blood off dungeon walls.
‘But now that I’m in charge… I’m starting to see the logic’, he admitted reluctantly.
A clean dungeon was a functional dungeon. It kept adventurers comfortable and lured them deeper, and it helped the dungeon maintain an appearance of mystery and danger without outright discouraging the next wave of visitors.
But it did spark a curious thought: Why had Sorvax always claimed he didn’t have enough funds for more janitors?
His old master’s dungeon had been far larger, richer in mana, and yet he’d always insisted on being frugal about staffing. Riven frowned, filing the question away in his mind.
‘That’s a mystery for another day’, he decided.
Right now, he had a dungeon to clean up.
Glancing around at the bones, dust, and bloodstains, he got an idea. If he’d had to suffer under Sorvax’s command, why should he spare his own minions from a little hard work?
He pointed at the nearest skeleton—a thin, gangly figure with a cracked skull and an empty expression.
“You!” he declared with authority. “You’re promoted! Congratulations! You’re a janitor now. Get to work cleaning up this mess.”
The skeleton stared at him blankly, its empty eye sockets somehow managing to look both clueless and unamused. It remained still, not even attempting to move.
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Riven huffed, crossing his arms. “Well? Are you going to start or not?”
The skeleton continued to stare, motionless.
Riven felt his patience slipping. “I just made you a janitor, you pile of bones! Start cleaning!”
The skeleton cocked its head ever so slightly, as if trying to process this new responsibility. Its bony hand lifted, and for a brief moment, Riven thought he saw a glimmer of recognition. But then the hand dropped back to its side, and the skeleton just… stood there.
Riven’s eye twitched.
‘Oh, for the love of all that’s unholy…’
“God damn it!” he growled, rubbing his temples.
‘Of course’, he realized.
Skeletons weren’t exactly known for their… adaptability. They followed commands, sure, but they were best suited to tasks like “stand there menacingly” or “kill anything that moves.” Asking one to “clean up” was apparently a step too far.
He sighed, resigning himself to the inevitable conclusion.
‘I’m going to have to do it myself.’
With a heavy groan, Riven bent down, grabbing a shattered femur off the ground and tossing it into a pile with the rest of the bone fragments. Every inch of him rebelled at the indignity of it—him, the dungeon master, reduced to sweeping up after a goblin rebellion. This was not what he’d imagined when he’d taken on this role.
As he tossed another broken bone into the pile, he muttered under his breath, “If Sorvax could see me now, he’d be laughing his horns off.”
Just then, as if the universe were mocking him, one of the skeletons shambled closer and watched him work, its head tilted as if… curious? Or judging, he thought bitterly.
“Oh, don’t just stand there!” he snapped, pointing a bony finger of his own at it. “Make yourself useful! Go—” he hesitated, realizing once again that specific instructions were necessary with skeletons. “Go… pick up that skull over there,” he finished, pointing to a stray skull lying a few feet away.
The skeleton turned its head to follow his pointing finger, shuffling over to the skull and bending down to pick it up. Riven watched as it lifted the skull in its bony hands, holding it up as if unsure what to do next.
“Now put it over here,” he said, gesturing to the pile he was creating.
The skeleton shuffled back, depositing the skull with a slow, almost reverent motion.
Riven sighed, shaking his head. ‘At this rate, I’ll be here for hours.’
“Ugh… well, better get started,” he grumbled. Turning to the next closest skeleton, he snapped his fingers, catching its empty gaze.
“Hey! You! Start gathering the bones… and, I don’t know, sweep them into a corner or something.”
The skeleton stared at him blankly for a moment before tilting its head in what might have been mild confusion. Then, it bent down with agonizing slowness, picking up a single bone fragment, and straightening back up to show it to him as if it were some sort of precious artifact.
Riven sighed. “No, no. All of them. Gather all of the bones.” He gestured around the room, waving his arms in exasperation. “See all this? Collect it. And the dust, too! Try to sweep it together. Do you understand?”
The skeleton stared at him, head still cocked to the side, before bending down again, this time grabbing a second fragment. It straightened up and presented both bones to him, as if waiting for his approval.
Riven groaned, dragging a hand down his face. ‘Great. My cleanup crew is as competent as a rock.’
With a resigned sigh, he turned to the other skeletons.
“Alright, listen up!” he barked, clapping his hands to get their attention. “All of you are on cleanup duty. That means gathering bones, sweeping up dust, and scrubbing the walls. I don’t care if it’s tedious—you will make this dungeon look presentable again, or I’ll… I’ll upgrade you just to demote you back down!”
The skeletons, of course, offered no reaction, but Riven chose to interpret their lack of protest as compliance. One by one, they began to shuffle around, bending down to pick up scattered bones and, in their clumsy way, attempting to pile them up. One particularly enthusiastic skeleton even began dragging a splintered club across the floor, pushing dust and bone fragments into a crude pile.
“Finally,” Riven muttered, watching them. ‘At least it’s a start.’
It wasn’t long before Riven had a few sparsely-distanced piles of rubble gathered, each surrounded by scattered bones and splinters of weapons. His skeleton minions looked much worse for wear, some smeared with the dried, rust-colored blood left over from the goblin rebellion. Bone dust and jagged fragments littered the floor, clumped into crude piles in the corners of the room.
It was quite… astonishing, really, how much of a mess a battle could make. For some reason, when he’d dismissed the goblins from the second floor, even the dead ones had vanished, their mana dissolving back into the dungeon.
Normally, this only happened at the end of the day, when fallen creatures would return their essence to the dungeon’s reserves. But today, the goblins had disappeared immediately, leaving only the carnage of their rebellion behind.
Which, unfortunately, meant that he now had a portal room full of bones and rubble with no convenient way to make them vanish.
‘What do I even do with these?’ he wondered, surveying the piles with growing frustration.
Bones were peculiar in a dungeon. Unlike flesh-based creatures, skeletal constructs didn’t simply disintegrate. Instead, their remains would linger as shards and fragments, taking up space and adding to the clutter. Goblins, humans, and other organic creatures faded into mana after a while, but skeletons? They left their bones behind, a frustratingly persistent reminder of their previous form.
He looked around at the mess and scowled. This wasn’t just an inconvenience—it was a disaster. The piles of bones and the blood-spattered floor made the portal room look like a scene of utter carnage, the kind of thing that would make any adventurer think twice before pressing forward. That might have been fine if his goal were simply to terrify people, but Riven needed humans to venture deeper, to feel challenged… not horrified into retreat.
‘Only something like a maintenance spirit would be able to handle this’, he thought bitterly. Maintenance spirits were essentially dungeon janitors—tiny creatures that could consume bones and dust as easily as air—but he didn’t have the mana to spare for something so luxurious right now.
So… he’d have to get creative.
“EVERYBODY CLEAR OUT!” he barked, raising his voice to address the skeletons who still loitered around the portal room, oblivious to the state of disrepair. “GO BACK TO YOUR POSTS! GO ON, MOVE! I WANT THIS ROOM EMPTY!”
The skeletons stared blankly for a moment, as if his orders took a second to register in their empty skulls. Then, with the slow, jerky movements typical of their kind, they turned and shuffled toward the exits, leaving him alone in the portal room.
Riven stood there, hands on his hips, watching as the last skeleton clattered down the hallway, its bony footsteps echoing faintly. With the room finally empty, he let out a long, exasperated sigh.
‘My dungeon, my standards’, he reminded himself. ‘If Sorvax were here, he’d probably make me do it anyway. And he’d laugh himself hoarse while I did it.’ A small smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth at the thought of his old master’s twisted sense of humor.
Taking a look around the room, he formulated a quick—if temporary—solution. He couldn’t exactly clean up the rubble… but he could certainly hide it. The odds of a human actually making it this far were slim, and even if one did, a little creative lighting could go a long way.
Riven walked over to the walls, grabbing the torches from their brackets and tossing them onto the floor one by one. Each torch clattered as it fell, the flames flickering out in puffs of smoke. With each light extinguished, the room grew darker, the shadows stretching and deepening until the only illumination came from the soft, eerie glow of the portal itself.
Soon, the portal room was shrouded in darkness, with the piles of bones and bloodstains almost invisible in the gloom. Now, any human who made it this far would only see an ominous, shadowy chamber, mysterious and foreboding—exactly the atmosphere he wanted.
Riven stepped back, admiring his handiwork. The mess was still there, but it was hidden well enough to pass. And honestly, he doubted any adventurer would reach this point to begin with. The traps and creatures on floor one would keep them busy enough, let alone any reaching this portal room; this room was hardly a priority.
He dusted off his hands, satisfied. “No human would even be able to reach this point, so it doesn’t matter,” he muttered to himself with a smug grin. Problem solved.