Zoe reached the small stone-lined chamber at the bottom of the ladder. Crik stood there already. Three of the walls were blue-veined stone, but the fourth was a wheeled vault door taller than even Trinch. A small keyhole locked the wheel mechanism in place.

Above them, the chute extended for three hundred feet. The square of light at the top dimpled as guards poked their heads into the hole.

A spear rushed down without warning. Black streak of metal seeking blood. Oriz cut it from the air with a swipe of a grass blade that grew from her hand. She leaned a foot against the far wall of the chute, almost doing the splits as she pulled out a key with her free hand — Miserable Henry’s opalescent key that she had cut from his chord the moment before Trinch tackled him out of the still.

She tossed the key down as the halved spear clattered against the wall and fell.

“Open the door!” she cried.

The opal key flashed in the blue light as it fell. Crik caught it in a gloved hand with a booming laugh. He hurried and inserted the key into the lock as Oriz cut down another spear. The key turned. Tumblers clicked with a resounding thump that Zoe felt deep within the metaphor of her body.

And then they clicked again…

Backward.

Crik shrieked as opalescent light flashed from the keyhole. The lock spat the key onto the ground. Zoe dove for it, but wasn’t fast enough. It clattered upon the stone before she scooped it up.

She needn’t have bothered. A deep crack ran down the length of the once flawless gem, but this had happened before it struck the ground.

Crik tore off his hood and gloves. Red-laced steam billowed up from his festering skin. Bloody tears flowed from his eyes like a horrible caricature of Miserable Henry.

“It burns,” he sobbed. “I can’t turn the key. My Skein…”

Zoe didn’t know what to say. She felt the key in her hand. Heavy as anything she had carried, like a piece of a mountain, but there was no strain in her muscles. The key let her lift it from the floor, but would it let her unlock the door?

She felt locked in a prison of fate. The world closed in, walls of reality, ripples full of stone and allies, choices spiraling down a drain of nothingness. All paths led to death, and some were faster…

Princh landed amongst them. She had stripped the suit and stood in her green-furred glory. Lapis lazuli pipe clamped between her teeth, and black smoke dribbled down.

“Let me see the key,” she said.

Zoe placed it into her hand and breathed easier. Princh turned it, inspecting, and ran a furry finger down the length of the crack. She spat a glob of black phlegm toward the corner as the splinters of a spear rained down around them.

“The key looks like it stores Skein, but it steals it,” she explained. “You didn’t have enough, Crik.”

Shame filled Crik’s eyes.

“I thought…”

“Burned Skein isn’t Skein. You know this. Stop pretending you don’t.”

Princh pushed past him and placed the key into the lock. Lances of opalescent light shivered out from the keyhole. Princh’s fur ruffled as though in a breeze. She clamped down on her pipe so hard it cracked. A single tear of blood welled in her eye, and dripped dow her furry cheek.

The pieces of blue stone clattered on the floor, but the vault door opened.

Princh swayed, and Zoe rushed up. The green-furred healer hung an arm around Zoe’s shoulder. She weighed so much less than Zoe expected.

“The vault’s open,” Princh slurred out a whisper.

They moved across the small chamber toward the open vault. Beyond, the room lay in shadows but Zoe got an impression of an octagonal room with flat featureless walls.

A howl spiked the air. Every hair on her body stood on end. It felt as though someone dragged a broken bottle down a blackboard before placing it against her throat. The world trembled, and rain fell down the shaft as they scrambled for the vault.

Warm droplets landed on the back of her hand, on her forehead, and trickled down her cheek. She smelled iron and understood. It was not rain or condensation. Tears of blood fell upon the vault. Miserable Henry knew they had opened the vault, and he was coming back to protect what was his.

Oriz landed amongst a rain of spears. She dashed for the vault and grabbed the handle of the door, pulling it closed behind her. Princh had taken the key inside. Miserable Henry was sure to have another one, but once they were inside, they could hold the door closed.

A heavy weight crashed into the chamber beyond the door, and the whole vault shook. Zoe and Oriz desperately pulled the door, but something kept it open. A crack of blue light around the open seam. Panic blasted through Zoe’s chest.

They were finished.

“Let me in,” Trinch panted, and Zoe saw the furry tips of his green fingers around the edge of the door. “He’s almost here.”

Hope sparked in her heart as they opened the door wide enough for Trinch to fall inside. Princh dragged him away, and they hurried to slam the door. There was a wheel on the inside, and as they turned it, the lock ratcheted into place.

Zoe wiped blood from her face. It felt wrong, grimy, sad, as though each droplet were a day spent on a couch staring into some inner abyss. She felt it in her hair. Seeping into her skull. She wanted to weep. She wanted to cut it all off and almost reached up to tear it out.

Her body stilled at a command from her brain, but it felt like shouting down a hallway. Was this her fate? To lose control of herself while more powerful beings dictated her emotions? Was she not even allowed to choose how she felt about her fate?

No.

She rejected such predestination. She would reach the heights of power. She would command the earth and free her people from the shackles of the system.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The buzz of notifications, the tingle of the system, was like laughter in the back of her mind. She tried to ignore it, but tears leaked down her blood-streaked cheeks.

Trinch slumped up against the door. Large sections of his fur were burned away. The exposed flesh bubbled a bright and ugly red. He wheezed as he sent his chains out to secure the door. Hundreds of ghostly links closed around the wheels and mechanisms. The door wasn’t held, so much as it was stuck in place.

“That should buy us a couple minutes,” he groaned as bubbles in his flesh burst. Instead of blood, little birds fluttered up from his wound. They sobbed and circled the ceiling. Their reddish glow lit the locked shelves on the eight walls. “Hurry, find the fragment.”

The vault was an even octagon. The floor was bare, and each walls had a single featureless door covering them. Oriz raced, inserting the key into the lock of the wall closest to the door. She turned the key. The ratcheting mechanism spun and clicked, and she hurried around the room from lock to lock while they all waited with dread anticipation for the doors to open.

Miserable Henry landed softly on the other side of the door.

“Breaking and entering, Trinch? Burglary?” His voice teetered between anguish and amusement. Zoe felt her sadness double as each mocking question hung in the air. “Who could have ever predicted such actions?” He leaned against the doorway. Rapped with his knuckles, and the whole vault shook. “What is so valuable about my collection?”

He threw his weight against the door.

Trinch groaned as he pulled his chains tight. More wounds burst into flapping, glowing birds.

Crik sobbed in one of the many corners. Oriz unlocked the last door and stepped back into the center of the room as the first door opened and revealed the shelf behind.

A wall dedicated to a single shelf. It was a display case for a dungeon quest item. Each quest item was a fragment of something larger or an object in its own right that acted as a pillar of reality for the pocket dimension. In this reality, they were little more than baubles. Trophies to be shown off, or harnessed to power something like the still.

Except this shelf was empty.

The sight scooped out Zoe’s guts.

“No,” she whispered.

The others shared her look of horror as the lock mechanisms finished clicking. One by one the doors opened, and each revealed an empty shelf. The vault shook as Miserable Henry slammed his hand against the door.

And cackled.

“Oh, wow, you utter fools!” he sobbed, he choked, he laughed. “You’re standing inside my eight-phase circle of detection. I knew it was you all along!”

Trinch banged his head against the door.

“I hate him. With every cell of my body. Every thread of my Skein. Every link of my chains. I hate him.”

Zoe sat down against a wall as, outside, Miserable Henry continued laughing. She felt weak. No way out of the vault and no way out of this reality.

They had lost.

The vault was now a tomb.

A saltwater breeze filled the vault as Princh healed Trinch’s wounds. The birds popped and their red light faded, leaving them all in the ghostly glow of Trinch’s chains.

“I can stop the bubbling,” Princh said. “But I can’t heal the wounds completely.”

Trinch sent her a brief withering glare.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll all be bubbling into birds soon enough.”

Crik’s sobbing reached a new height.

“Someone shut him up,” Trinch said.

But nobody moved. Nobody could move. Nobody could do anything. Hopelessness pinned them down.

Zoe shuddered as the emotion lapped against her skin like waves eroding a limestone coast. She wanted to sink into those deep tides. She saw the same desire echoed in the faces of the others. Crik had already surrendered. The others were close. Why shouldn’t she?

…

Why should she?

The voice in her mind was small. It trembled. High pitched. Young. Afraid.

And underneath it, the baying of hounds in the woods.

Why should she surrender?

The hopelessness was deep, but it had no answer, and so she stood.

“Trinch,” her voice wobbled, but she spat out her tears. “Trinch, could you suppress him long enough for us to escape?”

Trinch raised a green eyebrow.

“Maybe?”

“Zoe,” Oriz said. “Miserable Henry has many followers, many customers addicted to his products. They will fight for him, and we cannot match even a tenth of their number.”

The scale of the conflict threatened to overwhelm her, but it was just one more wave among many. She knew, knew in her soul, that none of them could face Rue, and hadn’t she set that goal for herself?

She gritted her teeth.

They couldn’t fight their way out, or even fight enough to cause damage, so they had to do something else…

“What was the blue beam?” she asked. “The beacon?”

“What?” Princh shook her head. “It was the byproduct of the dungeon fragments as they powered…”

Zoe nodded as Princh realized the same thing.

“How could they be powering the still if they weren’t in here?”

Oriz snapped her fingers.

“The circle of detection! Each phase cycles power toward the center. It can be used for detection, but if the still stood at the center, it could also collect the power of the fragments no matter where they were.”

Princh reached for a pipe that wasn’t there. She frowned.

“But that just means they’re somewhere in the tavern…”

Zoe grinned, and was unsettled to see the expression mirrored on Trinch’s face.

“Where would Miserable Henry keep his most prized possessions, if they weren’t in a vault?”

Outside the vault, Miserable Henry stopped laughing. Trinch moved faster than Zoe could see. His chains retracted. The ghostly metal scraped against the door before Trinch threw it open and leaped out. Miserable Henry had already leaped halfway up the chute, but ten thousand chains wrapped around the weeping human and slammed him back down to the ground.

Trinch towered above him, but Miserable Henry gazed up with scornful disdain. His chains suppressed his aura, but they did nothing to his personality.

“What do you even hope to accomplish?”

“Shut up.”

A chain grabbed Zoe and hauled her out of the vault.

Trinch pressed fingers against one of the wounds in his side, and with a hiss, dug deep into his flesh. Steaming blood poured out and matted the fur of his hips.

The spears from above no longer fell. Whispers came down the chute from the guards. They sounded alarmed. Confused. Miserable Henry’s eyes widened. He thrashed against the chains, but they tightened like ten thousand starving pythons.

Trinch groaned, and a deafening snap shook the air. His hand emerged, dripping with gore, and holding onto one of his ribs. Silently, he handed the bone to Zoe. Curved, smooth, and jagged at one tip.

A crude dagger that fit snugly in her grip.

“Stab him,” Trinch instructed through gritted teeth as his blood spattered the face of his enemy. “Kill him, and level up.”

Miserable Henry struggled against the chains as Zoe raised the dagger of bone above her head and prepared to strike.

Weeping eyes met hers.

“This will accomplish nothing,” he said.

Zoe gritted her teeth.

“Shut up.”

She stabbed down, and her strike was true. Bone pierced Miserable Henry’s eye and slammed into his brain. Grey matter and blood oozed out of the wound in a ghastly trail of tears.

His whole body stiffened, and went slack.

Zoe sighed, but the relief died when she realized the pressure at the back of her head — the pressure of notifications — hadn’t changed.

The body in the chains bubbled, melted, and flowed away, leaving only a set of silver robes and Miserable Henry’s infuriating cackle echoing down the chute.

“Nobody can kill misery!”

Pressure rippled the air. The scent of blood grew sharp and strong above them. Miserable Henry was preparing a technique, and it would be awful. Zoe refused to look up despite the shiver of fear, because Trinch was smiling through bloody teeth.

“We don’t have to kill you. We have the fragments right here.”

Zoe’s hunger grinned as Trinch handed her the flowing silver robe. She could feel the fragments inside. The power of seven dungeons, but more importantly, the fragment of the Mirrorbell she needed to complete her quest…

But how would she level up before Miserable Henry completed his technique?