They read the fine print. Their creatures wouldn’t attack them because most of the creatures knew, in some instinctive way, that their existence was contingent on the dungeon masters. Even the Gossowaries, a vicious cross between a goose and cassowary, turned away from attacking Lacey and Colt. Gossowaries were even smart enough not to attack the herder goblins that fed them. Beetles and creatures with very short lifespans had no fear of the dungeon masters, or anyone else for that matter. They knew only how to fight, breed, and die. The system created these creatures with very short lifespans to compensate for their ability to run wild. What they finally figured out was that they could tell how dangerous a creature was to them as the dungeon masters by how long it tended to live.

“So, we can use the arenas to level up creatures past our level,” Colt finally sat back from his long-winded explanation, his chair tilted onto the back two legs. “The beetles can’t out-level us by much since they’ll die off before they reach too high a level. The Gossowaries are safe to level up quite a bit since they tend to live around 15 years, something we learned during our sleep periods.”

“How far do you think we could level them?” Lacey wondered out loud. She knew that their arenas could level up beetles really fast.

“That’s going to depend on how fast we can breed them,” Colt pointed out. Each of the arenas levelled beetles up by at least 5 levels, but the death rate was significant. For every hundred level 1 beetles born, only 5 survived to reach level 5. That was okay since the beetles gave birth to at least 100 babies per hour for every single breeder.

“Gossowaries breed so much slower than the beetles,” Lacey shook her head. “The females get pregnant pretty fast in the breeding pens, but they take a week to lay maybe 3-5 eggs, and another week for those to hatch.”

“And another what 4-5 weeks to grow up?” Colt gave a sigh. “That doesn’t sound like a good turnaround, but it could be worse. I mean, we could get started, at least.”

“What breeds faster than the Gossowaries?” Lacey asked, scratching her head with the eraser end of her pencil.

“Zombies? Goblins?” Colt joked, but Lacey just glared. “Fine, goblins have litters of 1-12 babies, but they aren’t the best fighters. I’ll make a list.”

Lacey bent over her drawings of an updated Reject. She wanted to be ready for when they got the ability to upgrade existing monsters. The newer reject had only 3 goat legs, no antlers, and a lobster claw for one hand. She’d toned down the colors to more natural greens and browns.

“Are you sure you want to draw that back leg that way?” Colt teased her. She hadn’t even noticed that he’d gotten up and crossed the room, so intent was she on the better version of the Rejects.

“What do you mean?” Lacey frowned at the drawing.

“I’m just saying that it’s kind of looking like…” Colt waved a hand and gave Lacey a pointed look.

“Ew, gross, Colt,” Lacey nearly crumpled up the page. “Get your mind out of the gutter. That’s a leg, not a… ah…”

“Whatever,” Colt hid a chuckle behind his hand and waved at her screen. “I made a spreadsheet list and dumped it into our shared file of notes.”

Lacey scanned the data on birth rates and lifespans.

“Wait, is this right on how fast the Velcrabs replicate themselves?” Lacey flicked through the notes. “Maybe we should have figured that out before we summoned a bunch?”

“The good news on that one is that the Velcrabs will only last as long as the cold they give us, which is 1 day,” Colt shrugged. “And that’s only if we lose control of them.”

“They don’t even require breeders as they reproduce through fragmentation,” Lacey’s voice rose in pitch as her mind raced to possibilities. “We summoned the 100 over 4 hours ago. How many do we have now and what level are they?”

“That’s a good question, I guess,” Colt walked back to his desk. “Do you want me to go look?”

“No!” Lacey snapped.

“I can look on the monitor,” Colt waved at his monitor.

“Oh, well, maybe, but this is serious, Colt,” Lacey admonished his flippant attitude. “This is viral. It could… they could replicate, and level up faster than we could keep track of them.”

“They are in sealed boxes,” Colt tried to calm her, but she wasn’t having it.

“This is the same justification garbage that scientists use in the zombie apocalypse,” Lacey shook her head. “Viruses mutate, and then a cold turns into zombified dungeon masters.”

Colt opened his mouth to address it and then clicked it shut. Lacey didn’t like zombie movies much. Colt didn’t mind them. Lacey could tell that Colt didn’t have an answer to that. She was pretty sure that she wasn’t being entirely reasonable, but their Velcrabs reminded her too much of the biggest baddies Stargate had ever come up with. She hadn’t meant to be a mad scientist. She was just drawing up some of her own nightmares.

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“Ginger become zombie-goblin?” Ginger poked herself into the conversation again, leaning her head forward on her hands, elbows on her desk.

“Zombies aren’t smart like Ginger,” Colt raised an eyebrow at the little goblin.

“Ginger no want zombie-Ginger,” she said, immediately losing interest and going back to her work. They’d been discussing the issue long enough that Ginger had transitioned to her writing assignment, using a pencil to dutifully draw the alphabet.

“And because they aren’t smart and have no survival instinct, they couldn’t live very long,” Colt reasoned, pointing his pencil at Lacey, who took a turn at opening and closing her mouth, as she couldn’t find errors in the logic.

“Then we might not live long as zombies,” Lacey shot back several minutes later.

“Then we’d respawn,” Colt didn’t take the bait.

The scratching of pencil on paper came from both Colt’s desk and Ginger’s, but Lacey was frowning at her page, unable to draw something in case it fell into a horrible category of something that could end up eating her for breakfast.

“Adam make good zombie-goblin,” Ginger muttered under her breath.

Colt chuckled but kept his head down.

“This isn’t funny,” Lacey whined. “What if I draw something that destroys the whole world here?”

“Then the system will modify it so that it couldn’t do that,” Colt answered, and Lacey was frustrated by his blind faith in some system that didn’t even like them. “That’s probably why the most destructive mobs have the shortest lifespan. I mean, think about it. If we summoned a million beetles and set them loose on the world, they could still only get 3 days down the road before they all fell over dead.”

“But the breeders would make more,” Lacey countered, insisting on her creation of the impending apocalypse of their world.

“If we didn’t sequester our rare breeders, the beetles would kill them all,” Colt shook his head at her. “They did that in the beginning before we made the arenas. That’s why the whole first generation of beetles died out during our first long sleep.”

“True,” Lacey sulked.

“Even now, if the goblin herders didn’t carefully monitor the arenas, one super-beetle could and has wiped out a whole level on its own,” Colt pointed out, and then cut her off as she took a breath to argue. “And then he would die in a few days all on his own.”

“But,” Lacey held up a finger to object, but her mind blanked on further arguments.

Colt, knowing Lacey well, just waited out the silence.

“Okay,” Lacey slumped over her desk a few minutes later.

“You sound disappointed that you don’t have the power to destroy the world,” Colt joked.

“Not disappointed,” Lacey scowled at him.

“Ginger disappointed,” Ginger put in, and Lacey had to press her lips together not to laugh. Colt didn’t bother and just laughed out loud.

A hiss from Spark had Colt sobering, but a second later, he laughed again. “Looks like Spark needs another Dustapp,” he smiled and nodded at where Spark had begun to oddly bat at something that wasn’t there.

“Ginger,” Lacey called to the goblin with a slightly forced smile, “would you get a Dustapp for Spark? We boxed up a few to keep her occupied and out from under your feet.”

Ginger wasn’t as subtle as Lacey and Colt. She immediately glared at the kitten and then gasped. With a scrabble of chair legs and nervous limbs, Ginger headed to the suite of rooms that Lacey and Colt shared. It was the only place any of them could go, since the dungeon was still red. Lacey narrowed her eyes as she tried very hard not to stare at the place where Spark was spitting tiny sparks.

It couldn’t be one of their own monsters since they couldn’t just come and go any more than Lacey and Colt could. When the dungeon was red, the only entity that could go in and out of the dungeon control room was something or someone from the outside. They’d read the fine print on that too, not that Lacey had thought it was necessary then. She did now.

There was something or someone standing against the wall. If she squinted just right, she could almost see them, but only out of the corner of her eye and she couldn’t make out a shape. They couldn’t be in danger, or the system would have warned them. Whatever it was could hide from them, but it couldn’t hide from the system. The system had chased whatever it was all the way out of the dungeon last time. The system knew it was there.

Lacey quickly scrolled to the help pages on imminent wipe warnings. Wipes only happened when all other dungeon creatures had been destroyed. Hughe had whittled down their dungeon to an imminent wipe soon after they’d arrived. When he’d entered their control room, he’d done it as a combatant who had already destroyed everything else in the dungeon, so if Hughe had then killed both Lacey and Colt, he would have taken their place as dungeon masters.

Colt had tried to warn her. This time, she’d been the one to be too lackadaisical about their danger. Colt had been the one to worry. She should have listened. All those thoughts crashed into Lacey’s mind as she watched Spark chase the ghost into the bedrooms.

“What’s it doing?” Lacey whispered to Colt.

“It left last time,” Colt hissed back to her.

Spark came sprinting back out of Colt’s bedroom and under Lacey’s feet. Ginger walked out of the bedroom with a little box, but she didn’t get a chance to open it. The box went flying out of Ginger’s hands and tumbling to the floor. It was like Ginger had tripped, but there wasn’t anything to trip on.

Lacey reached out and then flinched back as the box broke open and spilled out a mass of Velcrabs, which consisted of whatever had replicated or leveled in the last 4 hours from 100 level 1 Velcrabs. The Velcrabs couldn’t be too high a level, but there were enough of them that they formed together into an odd orange monotone version of Spark. Had they reproduced? Had they levelled? Should she be more worried about the invisible thing in the room or the Velcrabs. The orange version of Spark hissed and charged at the closest thing to it, which just happened to be invisible. Ginger ducked back into the bedroom, probably running to hide under Colt’s bed, which was what Ginger was trained to do in case of an incursion breaking into the control room. They hadn’t practiced it since they’d gotten the suites, but Lacey was sure that Ginger would remember.

Lacey picked up her version of Spark and backed toward the wall of the room as far as she could get from the invisible person in the room. Now that the Velcrabs were attacking it, it was clear that it was in the shape of a human, or at least a humanoid. Colt, his desk further away from the scuffle, took the time to tap quickly on his screens.

“Level 77 Assassin,” the system announced.