By dawn, Lacey’s eyes were burning again. They’d spent an alarming amount of their capital on the improvements. Was there magic in the store? Yes. Yes, there was. But magic was very expensive. Still, it had made just enough of a difference that Lacey and Colt now had a stable societal system for their goblin tribe, which they had repopulated to about half of what had been there before.
A small worker girl goblin was sweeping an already spotless floor, and breakfast was the leftovers of a side of beef that had been part of the celebratory feast after they’d crowned Adam as chief with Eve as his high shaman. If the cleaning goblin had been able to wash the grit out of Lacey’s eyes, she’d have been in line as the next shaman. As it was, Lacey was rubbing her eyes when the lights in the chamber changed from the calm blue to red.
“Colt!” Lacey called out over Colt’s snoring. At least he’d gotten some sleep. Lacey had been afraid to go to sleep for fear of causing another of those 100-year sleeps. “Colt!”
Colt snorted awake and took too long to shake his sleep off. Lacey found her controls shut off except for the map option, which still blinked an ominous red, at least in the first room near the entrance. Lacey touched the pulsing room on the map and was surprised to see a close up appear on her screen.
“What are we looking at?” Colt watched the pedestal from an upside-down position.
“The entrance room,” Lacey answered, not that she knew much more than Colt at this point. It was like they had a black and white surveillance camera in the room.
“Hughe’s back,” Colt commented unnecessarily.
“We knew he would be,” Lacey drawled out. Hughe was stomping into the dungeon in some armor that looked a little worse for wear and holding a sword that was only a third his height instead of half.
“He looks pissed,” Colt raked the fingers of both hands through his hair, still trying to wake up his brain. Hughe was poking at corners with the smaller sword, his scowl not much different from Colt’s I-don’t-want-to-wake-up face. Lacey just rolled her eyes
“You have about two minutes to wake up, buddy,” Lacey growled at Colt, who gave her a befuddled look. “I’ve been awake all night setting traps. You, at least, got a few hours’ sleep.”
“He’s not going to make it all the way to here in two minutes,” Colt complained, but he moved to put on his leather armor anyway. Lacey hadn’t taken hers off. She was more likely to slice off her own toes instead of poking an opponent with the sword, so she left the extra sword on the table, but wearing the armor was the least she could do.
Hughe didn’t spend much time exploring the first room. He just broke enough furniture to turn the room that dull red and moved on once the room seemed as deserted as he’d left it. Lacey fumbled to follow him on the screens. It turned out that there was a back button, not that she could do much more than watch. It was a little like owning an escape room in that now that she had set the room, she was stuck here in the control room to watch helplessly as whoever was going through the dungeon tore apart her stuff.
“What?” Colt hustled a little more at Lacey’s wince as she watched Hughe tear up a second room, breaking furniture that she had just fixed.
“He’s moving to the third room now,” Lacey told Colt quietly, grateful that the alarms weren’t sounding.
“He’s fast,” Colt frowned, moving back to watch over Lacey’s shoulder.
“And foolish,” she shook her head and flicked to the next room.
“Good for us,” Colt nodded, reaching around her to tap Hughe’s image on the screen.
“Fighter, level 5,” the system’s voice bloomed to life.
“What the hell?” Lacey swore. “It didn’t do that for me!”
“I just tried something, Lace,” Colt shrugged. “Don’t hate me because it worked.”
“That’s why we both need to be doing this stuff,” Lacey growled out. “We need to be a team, so we get all that stuff that the other one doesn’t see.”
“Fine,” Colt raised his eyebrows at her, which she ignored. “Then you should come out with me the next time I explore the cave system. You’ll see stuff I didn’t.”
“Fair,” she admitted reluctantly. “We didn’t need to leave so many rooms unoccupied after all. He was convinced that the dungeon wasn’t repopulated by the second room.”
“It’s worth it,” Colt insisted, watching Hughe plunge into room 6 and do just enough damage to turn it red. “How does he seem to know just how much damage to do to turn it red?”
“Maybe he gets a notice for defeating it?” Lacey suggested.
“He must,” Colt nodded. “He isn’t smart enough to figure it out like that every time.”
Lacey flicked ahead to room 7 to watch Hughe storm in recklessly only to be surrounded by two dozen goblins armored and armed well enough to have him skidding to a stop. There was dialogue that they didn’t hear and then chaos. The screen had an overlay on it that was three quarters green and one quarter red. They could still see through it.
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Eve cast a spell from the back of the pack of goblins and each goblin grew by two inches. Two front goblins dove swords viciously at Hughe, who could only pull back to avoid them. Rather than engage them, Hughe did something smarter than Colt or Lacey had given him credit for. He backed out and back into the tunnel behind him.
“Don’t fall for it, Eve,” Colt muttered to himself.
But goblins weren’t all that bright. The two gruntlike fighter goblins followed Hughe forward, where he only had to fight one at a time. Two goblins fell before Eve pulled them back.
“At least she’s learning,” Lacey worried at the skin around her fingernails.
“I should be down there,” Colt fidgeted with pulling the breast of his armor down.
“By the time you got there, it would be over,” Lacey argued, not wanting to try to figure out whether she could resurrect Colt. “Look, she’s already recovered.”
Eve was casting at Hughe, who looked like he was swearing as he backed up down the corridor.
“Is that the poison dart spell?” Colt asked.
“It looks like it,” Lacey said, tapping Hughe’s picture again.
“Fighter, level 5, wounded, poisoned,” the voice told them.
“That’s handy,” Colt said, but as Lacey looked behind her, she realized that he was headed for the door.
“You can’t go down there,” Lacey argued with him, turning from the screen. There wasn’t much she could do but watch anyway.
“Our goblins are dying,” Colt shuffled backward to the door with a shrug to Lacey. “I can’t just sit and watch.”
“She has it handled,” Lacey pleaded as his hand hit the door handle.
“I’m going,” he insisted, and her heart sank.
The door didn’t open. Colt tugged on it and swore. He’d sworn more in the last few days than the last year. Lacey started to relax, but Colt’s eyebrows lowered in a way that kicked her alarms back up. When Colt got stubborn, he was nigh unreasonable. Lacey rolled her eyes and turned back to the screen even as Colt slammed his shoulder into the door. It was just another thing she’d have to fix once it was over. Which happened quickly. Two slams of Colt’s shoulder was all it took before the lights changed to blue.
“Dungeon invasion repelled,” the system told them, and Lacey whooped with joy even as Colt fell forward through the now-open door. “Dungeon experience awarded. Goblin shaman Eve has gained a level. Goblin chief Adam has gained a level. 2 unnamed goblin fighters have gained a level. 2 unnamed goblin fighters defeated. 6 rooms defeated.”
Lacey quickly tapped Eve’s image on the screen.
“Goblin shaman, level 1,” the system replied.
“Adam wasn’t even in the room, and he got experience,” Lacey called out to Colt, but he was gone. “Colt?”
Lacey turned from the screen and bolted after where Colt had disappeared to. She’d had her eyes glued to a screen for what could only have been a day and full night. Her vision blurred a bit as she forced her legs into more exercise than she’d had in what might have been a hundred years. She figured maybe she was lucky she could run at all.
“Dungeon entrance compromised. Please restore entrance to attract more adventurers,” she heard the dungeon tell them even though she was two rooms away from the control room.
Maybe it was the blood flowing all throughout her body or maybe it was just that her mind was thinking slower than normal, but Lacey felt like she was missing something important again. She darted into another room full of worms and nearly skidded out of her own skin backpedaling out of it. Wouldn’t that be just like her to get lost in a dungeon she created, not that she’d done all this digging.
“Colt!” Lacey called out, realizing that she didn’t really know the layout as well as she should. She tried to remember the map in her head, but a map looked different when a person was standing in the middle of the 3d version of it.
“Dammit Colt!” Lacey backed out of the worm room and slammed the door only to find a worker goblin boy standing behind her.
“Colt?” the worker goblin asked, his head cocked to the side and hand held out tentatively.
“You can take me to Colt?” Lacey asked, not used to the goblins talking to her. Sure, they’d all starting out saying, “Greetings Masters,” but that had been followed by mostly grunted pointing and posturing.
“Colt with Eve,” the goblin nodded and waved her away from the worm cave.
Lacey took the goblin’s hand and let him lead her to a little trap door in the ceiling of the previous cave. Again, Lacey could have kicked herself for not looking up. Still, it was like the whole dungeon was keyed against her. It wasn’t an escape room. They didn’t have access to puzzles or even a lot of resources and there were a ton of rules that everyone seemed to know but her! She hadn’t seen the footholds because they were chipped into the side of the stone wall like a bookcase. What escape room did that? If they’d climbed the bookcase in an escape room, they’d have been yanked out of the experience for being unsafe.
“Thanks,” Lacey told the goblin as she climbed up the stone bookcase and pushed on the trap door that didn’t budge. It was only made of stiffened furs so she could have ripped it, but there had to be a way that wouldn’t cost her something to fix.
“Knock 2, knock 1,” the goblin at the base of the stairs told her, tapping one fist against a flat green palm in the secret knock.
Lacey knocked and shook her head. She didn’t give the goblins enough credit.
“Thanks again, Herbert,” Lacey named the goblin with a wave. She was pretty sure that they could only revive goblins they named and a goblin like him was one she wanted to keep.
The fur above Lacey lifted up letting her climb up into a new level. Another worker goblin helped pull her up and lowered the sleeping furs behind her. Had Hughe found that secret door to get all the way to them the first time? Maybe he wasn’t so stupid, but then again, he’d had a week.
“Colt?” she called out again, but this goblin didn’t move to help her find her partner this time. She wandered four rooms before finding another not-bookcase to climb up. The password was the same as was the pile of sleeping furs that hid the hole in the stone floor. Lacey realized that Hughe didn’t have to be all that smart to figure it out when it repeated. Was that something she could fix? Colt had been right in that she had needed to explore the actual rooms to get a feel for what was being done and how they could improve it. That didn’t mean she was going to tell him that, especially after he’d made her trek all the way up what felt like a hundred levels to find him.
Lacey looked up at another bookcase and groaned. She looked back at the furs on the ground behind her.
“Why am I chasing his butt anyway?” she asked another worker goblin, who started sweeping faster rather than answer. “I could be sleeping. He got some sleep. I could just curl up on the trap door and then he’d have to pass me. He could wake me up instead. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’ll take a nap.”
Lacey let her eyes drift closed; a dozen furs piled on top of her in a bed that was much more comfortable than she’d thought it would be. She’d just take a quick nap.