The lights changed from red to blue as the smaller party left the dungeon. They were smaller by half. Half a person. They had dragged the top half of the mage all the way to the entrance, but as they’d tried to pull him outside, the dungeon itself had balked. Lacey hit the reset on each of the rooms that had been turned red and noted the gains they’d gotten, wondering if breaking even was the best they could do in this situation. Surely the mage had left something worth the trouble. They’d only killed one of them, so maybe they’d even be back. What ratio of death did a party expect for return on investment?
“He didn’t even look below before he tried to climb down feet first,” Colt shook his head.
“Come on,” Lacey urged Colt, who wasn’t half as enthusiastic as Lacey was to go loot the mage’s lower or upper half.
“The dungeon didn’t let them pull the top half of the mage out?” Colt wondered. “That’s just weird.” Colt had started on another cup of apple cider sometime around when the adventurers had decided to prop a stone on the trap door and drag their friend out of the dungeon.
“Don’t care,” Lacey tugged on Colt’s sleeve. “I want to know what loot he dropped!”
“Then again, why did they want to pull half a mage out of the dungeon?” Colt mused on, allowing himself to be tugged.
“You’re delirious,” Lacey let go of his sleeve. “You should get some sleep. I’ll be up until dawn anyway just resetting traps.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Colt plopped back down on the table and tugged off his boots. He wasn’t tipsy so much as just tired and discouraged by human nature. “Maybe they wanted to bury him.”
“We know he isn’t really dead, Colt,” Lacey leashed her desire to see the loot and walked Colt over to the bed. “He’ll respawn just like Hughe did.”
“Will he?” Colt was saying, but he let himself be tucked into bed.
“Yes,” Lacey told him, then muttered, “we aren’t lucky enough to be rid of idiots like that so easily.”
“Yeah, he’ll be back,” Colt assured himself as Lacey rushed out of the control room.
Lacey scampered as fast as her aching muscles allowed all the way to the top of the dungeon to find Adam and his crew standing around the lower half of what was left of the mage. Lacey had known the goblins were there waiting for the adventurers who couldn’t follow directions, but she’d worried that Adam might not be up for fighting a whole group that was higher level than he was.
What was left of the lower half of the mage looked too realistically like it had been run through a meat grinder. Around the …meat… were six grinning goblins with bloodied axes and Adam with his sword still dripping. If Lacey had been hoping for loot, she ended up not having the nerve to even touch what was left of the lower half of the mage. She just hoped there was more left of upper half.
“Good job, Adam,” Lacey patted the chief on the shoulder, and he puffed up a bit. Adam had gone up a level and was now even with the dead mage. The grinning axe squad had leveled up to level one. The dungeon had leveled up to level two as well.
Lacey was glad, she thought as she let Adam boost her up through the trap door. The stairs had been removed and the tunnel between levels had been increased so that even if the mage had stuck his head down into the hole, he wouldn’t have seen much. The result was that one would have to come down blind with the safest way being to simply drop. It was more of a suicide hole than a real secret door. They’d be ready for it next time though and Lacey felt the pressure to do better.
The upper half of the mage was also disturbingly realistic, but Lacey found herself gritting her teeth and searching the body for everything it had. The robe was ruined. There was a wand, but it didn’t seem to do anything for Lacey. She tucked it in her back pocket thinking she’d give it to Eve. She stripped off a shirt, but the poor guy didn’t have anything else, or if he did, it had been shredded in the goblin axe blender.
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Lacey rocked back on her heels, severely disappointed. It wasn’t enough to make it worth it. Sure, they’d leveled, but what did that really do for them? It made their summoned mobs stronger to start with, but unless they made a ton more in credits, they couldn’t afford to summon all new monsters, could they? Again, Lacey cursed under her breath at a numerical system that she couldn’t read. Maybe she was reading the numbers wrong, and it was worth it somehow.
Lacey was lowering herself down into Adam’s arms when she heard Hughe’s hollering. How had he gotten there so fast? Had he been waiting for his buddies to come out?
“Colt!” Hughe was yelling and he was approaching fast. Lacey waved the goblins back. They might have been able to make quick mincemeat of a level 2 mage, but Hughe would be tougher to defeat. “Lacey!”
“What!” Lacey yelled back.
“What the hell!” Hughe shouted. The trap door opened and Hughe stuck his head into the hole only far enough to flinch from the pile of …meat… that was a backdrop to Lacey’s head glaring back up at him.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve!” Lacey stormed back at the guy, her arms crossed over her chest.
“What’s with these shells?” Hughe demanded, tossing a black shell down the hole to plop unnervingly in the pile of …meat…
“You wanted beetle shells,” Lacey threw up her hands and rolled her eyes. “We carted a ton of beetles up here for you and you sent in a party of adventurers instead of coming yourself.”
“The beetles won’t help me level,” Hughe brushed off her concern and went back to his own rant. “The shells are all black! What’s the big idea? Do you know how much I got yelled at because of you?”
“Of course, they’re black,” Lacey shrugged. “And how come it’s okay to send whomever you want into the dungeon now without letting us know you’re changing it up?”
“I don’t answer to you,” Hughe growled back angrily. “The shell you gave me has glowy stuff in it. The shells they looted are all plain black! They’re complaining not only that you killed one of their party, but that you also pulled a bait and switch on them.”
“It’s my job to kill them,” Lacey argued, but she was wondering why the shells were black. They hadn’t noticed it on the monitor because it was black and white, but the new beetles did all have black shells. Only the shells from previous beetles that Colt and Lacey had pulled out of the old beetle nest had that shimmer of glow. “And maybe the glowing shells are a rare drop. Or maybe they only come off of higher leveled beetles.”
“I told them that I’d killed a beetle and gotten the glowing shell,” Hughe complained again like she was beholden to him. “Now they think I’m a liar.”
“You are a liar!” Lacey shot back at the guy, her hackles rising at his continued entitled attitude.
“All they should have had to do is kill a few beetles and they’d have been happy, but no, you had to go switch up the shells and kill one of them off!”
“You lied about killing a beetle and now I’m the bad guy?” Lacey’s voice dripped with sarcasm, though technically she was the bad guy and was supposed to be the bad guy.
“How did you even kill off Maldory with beetles anyway?” Hughe was on a rampage and while his face had disappeared, she could hear him stomping around and destroying the room, a room she would have to reset because a toddler threw a temper tantrum.
“He didn’t listen to the warning to stay at the topmost level like we warned you!” Lacey yelled back up, but she was wondering why she was putting up with any of it.
“It’s out of my hands now,” Hughe was saying, and she could hear his voice going further away as he said it. “When they come to burn it all down, don’t blame me! I warned you that you couldn’t mess around with me and now you’ll see why.”
“Hughe,” Lacey called out and hated herself a little for having done it. “What are you talking about? This is your fault, not mine!”
She didn’t hear his reply. Lacey crossed her arms over her chest again and backed away from the hole, shaking a bit of Maldory off her boots. Like she cared what stupid Hughe thought of her. She looked around at the goblins that had worked their way back into the room to stare at her.
“He’s the one who lied about killing the beetle and promised shells that glowed,” Lacey muttered at the goo on the floor. “He doesn’t own me. He’s a punk kid with entitlement issues.”
Lacey tried to think of what he could really do but found herself with very little to go on. They knew so little about how the world outside the dungeon worked. For that matter, they knew very little about how things worked inside the dungeon. Lacey blew out a breath and waved her arms at the goblins.
“Let’s clean this up and get to work on some new traps,” Lacey told Adam, who waved to more goblins, who went to fetch more goblins. Lacey was more worried about how to make some of her favorite traps without trip wire. Without a lockout, Hughe or his buddies could be back anytime with who knew what or who knew who.
The more she thought about it, the more Lacey was convinced that winning as the dungeon just wasn’t winning. The dungeon didn’t lock people out so they could reset in peace. They didn’t make a lot of money or experience while they waited for the inevitable incursion. It was infuriating. Why would anyone want to be a dungeon anyway? At least with the escape rooms, people paid for the privilege of wrecking your room and if they busted stuff up, you got to charge them twice the damages for doing it.