Despite the deaths, the survivors were cheering. People in this world were weird that way. Death was too common and we all knew the risks. The time for mourning could come when we got back to the surface. But my shout caught their attention.

"What?" Hector shouted. "Another boss?"

I banged on the doors. "No!"

"George, what's wrong?" Kara asked.

Their reaction confirmed it to me. They weren't getting the sassy System messages I was. I didn't elaborate. I just had to wait. When the doors swung open, we saw nothing but an empty room.

"Stay with the corpses!" I ran. Hector and the Pikemen came with me.

“Fucking hell!” Hector cursed. “The damned wheelbarrows! Our supplies!”

The lordling was pissed while the two surviving porters were clearly embarrassed.

“They are gone,” I said. “We abandoned them.”

"No way, you fucking sleuth! You two!"

Hector turned on the two surviving pikemen. I jumped to intercept him.

“No, don't you dare!”

Raising a hand to touch him on the right shoulder was all I needed to make Hector flinch. No way in hell I would let Hector berate the two men who saved us with that idea to toss crockery to distract the vines.

“Out of my way!” Hector roared. "I trusted you, George! They abandoned our supplies and need to be punished!"

We faced off against each other. Did I feel bad for almost beating a crippled man? At the time, no.

“If they hadn't come up with the brilliant idea of distracting the vines with crockery, we would. ALL. BE. DEAD.” I punctuated. “So, no. They became combatants. If there is one non-combatant in this group…”

Hector got in my face and almost headbutted me. “Don't finish it.”

I didn't back off. “I won't. My point is made.”

Hector screamed. He shouted and wailed, kicking at the ground and throwing a tantrum. The others had heard the argument and were dismayed. We lost everything that wasn't on our people. Our food, the water tank, supplies, spare weapons, clothes, tents, the enchanted waste barrels, and our supply of potions. I still had the club-chest with my stuff. And Hector probably had a spatial item on his person. But the others? They only had their dirty clothes, weapons, and armor. Nobody carried a backpack.

I had my quiver and one of the club-chests. I carried enough supplies, including rations and ammunition for myself. I also had huge chunks of smoked crab meat for Sleepy and William. I doubted the meat was still safe for human consumption. But with these many people, my supplies would last only a few days. I wasn't about to reveal that I had these supplies for them.

The easiest way to cause us to fight among ourselves was to reveal this stash. In my mind, they would steal it from me and then we would be doomed down here. We had no idea how deep the Dungeon went and how many more floors we would have to clear.

Was I being selfish? Yes. But at the moment, I had half a mind to take Kara and my pets and just get the fuck away from there.

“We have no water!” Hector shouted. Then he vented a stream of expletives that would make a whore blush.

I returned to the boss room to see if it had dropped any loot. Spoiler alert, it did.

*

*

Minutes passed before Hector calmed down. He returned to the room. Kara was sitting on the dirt with William by her side and Sleepy on her lap. The two pikemen were guarding the stairs to the third floor while the surviving knights prepared their dead for cremation.

I stood in the middle of the room with a spherical green Core with a diameter equal to the length of my thumb. It was worth anything from twenty to a hundred gold coins, depending on the purity. I was not a mage nor an alchemist. I had no idea where in that range it fell. But I was sure it was a fucking nice find.

Hector came and I kept my cool though at a great cost. My wits were at their end.

“We need to go deeper,” Hector said, breaking minutes of silence. His voice didn't have any certainty. Or perhaps it did. But it was tainted by the resignation of a condemned man.

“My Lord, we should retreat,” An older knight suggested.

“Nonsense!” Hector scoffed. Then he turned to me and did the most childish thing to establish dominance. “Give me that core!”

I complied without questioning. What good a thousand gold would do to me if I was about to die down here?

Hector crushed the Core. “It's a fake!” He whined.

“Sir George,” the elder knight appealed to me. “Don't you agree we should retreat?”

All eyes were on me. I stood up and shook my head. “No. We cannot retreat,” I said bitterly.

“Why not?”

I pointed at the opening leading back to the rest of the second floor, the moss tunnel. “The Dungeon has respawned the Venomclaw Mantids. I can hear them from here. We do not have the fighting power to cross that tunnel again.”

The old knight shook his head. In his defense, he wasn't thinking straight. None of us were. “Impossible! Back in the city, the Dungeon does not respawn monsters on an occupied floor.”

I recited. “Tame Dungeons, those who do not fear being destroyed by humans, may be persuaded into making concessions - Advanced Dungeon psychology, Adventurer's Guild publishing, seventy-fifth edition.”

I let it sink in before continuing. This was knowledge privy to only a few select individuals, including Guild Officers. “The Lord has an agreement with the Dungeon. It should be a poorly kept secret. But this? This is a wild Dungeon. Few rules cannot be broken. Spawning monsters on top of people is possible, if there's enough room above said people. You saw it happen outside. While we were in the boss room fighting, the Dungeon did more than just steal our supplies; It also respawned the Venomclaw Mantids.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Bloody hell!” Hector parroted my own interjection.

What I said was true. Everyone's faces showed how much they liked our current predicament. We didn't have the manpower to fight the Mantids to open the way back. We didn't have enough food and water to hunker down until Alice decided that we had taken too long. We were tired, stressed, low on resources, and wearing our nerves over our clothes.

I surprised myself with how easy it was to say the next few lines.

“I have to agree with Hector. Our only way out is by breaking the Core. Without the Core, the monsters will rush outside, get defeated by Alice, and we will waltz to the surface. We are in crunch time, gentlemen. We either crack that Core and kill the Dungeon, or we die here and become its food.”

*

*

“Let's descend, now!” Hector said.

We would, eventually. After burning our dead, we just needed to solve a little problem. We had two combatants that had no armor or weapon but four sets of armor in varying states of conservation. And we had a lot of equipment salvaged from the knight corpses we couldn't carry around. They couldn't carry around. Nobody asked me to stow that equipment yet and I decided I wouldn't give them the chance.

“Give them the suits of armor!” I insisted.

The elder Knight and Hector were shocked at my suggestion. “Absolutely not! These are the city army's property!”

Fucking morons. The city army could go burn in hell. Everything we wore would become Dungeon food. But again, antagonizing the people I had to rely on to keep the Dungeon from swarming me with monsters and bloody murdering me wouldn't advance my position. I changed my wording.

“Okay, then let them borrow the weapons and armor. Or leave them here to feed the Dungeon. We aren't going to carry these armors with us.”

“You can put them in your storage!” Hector suggested. Fucking finally.

I sighed and shook my head.

“Dude, do you want that Dungeon Breaker achievement? It seems so but why you can't compromise on using what gear we have left?”

Hector gave it some thought. Then, he conceded the point. The pikemen donned the dead knights’ armor, with salvaged replacements for damaged parts. It wasn't a good fit, it wasn't perfect, but so weren't we.

We went down the irregular stairs. Two pikemen, five knights, Kara, Hector, my bonds, and I. Down from the nineteen people and two monsters who descended.

*

*

The staircase twisted and turned. It had over two hundred steps and messed with our sense of direction, and time, and also with our emotional state.

The steps were irregular, with a few too short and others too tall. It also had several false landings on its lower half. We would come around a bend in the stairs. Hope that it was over would rise only to crash back down. It was a cruel ploy by the Dungeon to wear us out. The worst thing was, it worked.

Delving a Dungeon was strenuous in the best scenarios. But this? It stretched our willpower to its limits. People were getting thirsty and just a little peckish. Hours passed. I stopped counting at five hundred steps. Exhausted, we reached the third floor only to see nothing. Before us, an endless expanse of open air, with a pitch-black floor to match.

"Nobody makes a sound," I warned in a whisper. Usually, one could shout to test where it would reverberate or form an echo but in here? A shout could lure a thousand monsters to us. The fear of the unknown kept us humble and timid. Even the light from the helmets was bad. But there was no other choice. The darkness would favor the monsters more than the light made us easier to locate. Anything we did could become our death. But doing nothing yielded the same results with 100% certainty. The trick was to know what to do and what not to do.

These people relied on me. With a hand gesture, I ordered Sleepy and William to stay behind. I moved ten meters out and stopped. I tried to see but could only see the black rock on the floor and up the walls the staircase opened up to. The stone merged with the darkness up and to the sides. I didn't go far but the fear of triggering a trap formed a knot in my throat.

Back with the group, I explained our options. "We can go straight to the middle, walk close to the left wall, or go along the right wall."

"Which choice do you recommend?" Hector asked.

Thank goodness he was calmer. We all had a lot of time to think while we descended the stairs.

"We follow the right wall. We will use a pole to check the floor for traps and pits. The way it is set up, it will be hard to see these. While we move, people must keep an eye open for monsters coming from behind and from the middle. The wall will cut one avenue of approach, at least."

"Why not the left wall, then? Isn't it the most used rule?"

"Yes, but I suspect the Dungeon was once a delver. Probably an Adventurer too. This Dungeon is too smart. Too devious."

Hector nodded. "We will follow George's instructions. He is in command. Get in formation and move out."

I stayed at the front this time, searching for traps, clues, or monster signs. The floor was spotless and clean. Not a single speck of dust or irregularity. It was oddly plain and smooth but it wasn't polished. It didn't cast a reflection and most of the light got absorbed by it. It was darker than obsidian.

At one point I thought the room was a donut. Such a huge empty spot wouldn't support the weight of the rock above us. While magic could be involved and I knew the Dungeon had access to magical environments because of the illusionary dust, this was a waste of magic. If it was indeed a huge room without support pillars. We couldn't tell since everything was black.

It was very effective at miring our sanity. One hour after arriving, the pikemen and one knight were getting jittery.

We had no reason to stop, though. No food and no water save what I had hidden in my quiver. I still didn't tell anyone but Hector already suspected. When we stopped to catch our breath, he mentioned it and gauged my reaction. I was a bad liar this time.

I had food but not enough to feed ten people for much longer. It could be seen as cruel but I would only share food with them after the next combat. I wasn't hoping for deaths but they might happen. And we needed to ration the little I had. No. Let us eat on empty stomachs. That little extra motivation might be what saves us.

Three hours from the start, we returned to the staircase. I was measuring the wall curvature and it felt perfectly circular. We did make a full turn. Which meant our goal was in the middle. I still didn't believe how big the room was. Three hours walking. We went at a slow pace to give me time to make sure the path didn't hide any surprises but still.

"What now?" Hector asked. He was way less pliable than before.

"We go straight to the middle. What we will do is keep a lantern pointed at the opening here. Then we will move along, keeping the opening in sight."

"Will it work?" Kara asked. "We lost sight of the entrance after a while. If the room was completely circular and flat, that wouldn't happen, right?"

Hector nodded.

"Not necessarily. Light fades with the square of the distance. And just because it has to reach the entrance and bounce back, means it is four times weaker than if a light source remained at the entrance. When our eyes are close to a bright light source, we stop seeing weaker ones."

"Ah," she mumbled. "Sorry, I asked."

"That's okay," I tried to smile. I was sure my lips instead curled into a smaller frown.

"Let's hurry the hell up, then!" Hector said.

He produced a bottle of liquor from his storage item and took a big swig. The fact the bottle appeared out of nowhere confirmed he had one. What was it, I had no idea and no interest to find out. Maybe he also had some food he was hiding from us. Some knights felt eager to ask for a sip but they didn't. I wasn't someone who drank much alcohol but even I wanted something to take the edge off of my nerves. I could smell the strong liquor.

We moved as straight as I could. Hector kept drinking, chugging on that bottle despite the knights advising him not to. I said nothing. Hector, to me, was better off dead. I would trade him for an able-bodied man if that wouldn't jeopardize the mission. I even thought that Hector's condition invalidated the contract since he wasn't a combatant. We were expected to escort the mighty Wolfertinger Slayer to become a legend, not this crippled drunk. I didn't act on that thought. Nobody was known for making smart decisions while under duress.

The entrance vanished from our sight after half an hour of travel but we backtracked as soon as nobody could see it. Then I learned why. All I had to do was to take a spherical marble. I placed it on the stone floor and it rolled away.

Damn. The ground wasn't flat. It had a slight curvature, something almost nobody would notice. But it was enough to cover the line of sight after all this distance.

"Ahhhh!" Hector shouted to vent his distress. "Where is the exit!"

I heard a squeak. It wasn't a sound either of my bonds could make.

"Silence. There's something…"

"I DON'T CARE!" Hector hollered. "Let the monsters come. We will paint the floor with their blood!"

Don't make such wishes in a Dungeon.