Lacey felt the blood drain from her face. That was a person who could take out both her and Colt and then go out there into the dungeon and completely take over. How long had they been in the dungeon scoping them out? How long had they been planning? How long did she and Colt have before it killed them? Why hadn’t it killed them before now?

It was suddenly so much more important to level their creatures far past their own level. Level 77? Had Bernard sent one of his men into the dungeon to spy on them? Why an assassin? Was this another ploy to take over their dungeon.

Once again, Lacey was struck with how attached she was to being a dungeon master. No matter how much she wanted to explore what else was out there or how jealous she was of their adventures, Lacey didn’t want to lose her dungeon. If she got to keep it this time, she promised herself that she wasn’t going to lose sight of that again.

Now that she knew what they were up against, Lacey was more afraid of the assassin than she was of the Velcrabs. The Velcrabs scattered as if a boot stomped down on top of them and for a brief moment, Lacey got the impression that the assassin was a tall man in dark clothing, lithe of form, and moving like live silk. What chance did they have against that?

The Velcrabs formed back up into a shape, mistakenly thinking that they were stronger together than apart. The boot came down again, not that it made any noise at all. The Velcrabs splashed apart this time, but instead of forming back up together, they melted around the man’s boot. Tiny, almost microscopic beings crawled up the man’s leg as he jumped around in an attempt to shake them off.

Colt backed up and in front of Lacey in a show of valor that she didn’t think would help at all. If Lacey was right, some of those stupid little viral things had grown wings. Lacey was back to being afraid of the Velcrabs. That was only because the man was hopping his way out of their control room, leaving a trail of little Velcrabs dribbling behind him in a cloud of contagion.

Lacey and Colt backed into Colt’s bedroom.

“Zombie-Ginger?” Ginger asked from her spot under the bed.

“Maybe,” Lacey grabbed a few t-shirts out of Colt’s closet and tossed a few to Ginger. Colt was already getting his own. They hadn’t lived through COVID and not learned a thing or two.

“No, we’re not becoming zombies,” Colt grit out from behind several layers of t-shirts clamped over his mouth. “Don’t scare her, Lace. Just put the cloth over your mouth, Ginger.”

“Don’t scare her?” Lacey goggled at him, juggling a mewling Spark with a bunch of t-shirts and stressing about how to keep Spark from getting infected without smothering the small black ball of fur. “Did you not see the flying ones?”

“I saw them,” Colt scowled at her over the makeshift face mask. “You said they’d only give us a cold or something, right?”

“At level 1, sure!” Lacey shrugged, not knowing what the things would do at higher levels. “Did those things still look like microscopic level 1 shit?”

“No,” he admitted, and his gaze scanned the room.

“I didn’t think to draw a can of Lysol!” Lacey backed into the bed and ended up plopping butt-first onto it, Spark wriggling out of her arms. “Spark, come back!”

Lacey’s heart broke at the thought of losing Spark. What had she done? Lacey tried to jerk to her feet.

“Let her go, Lace,” Colt locked his arm in front of her, causing Lacey to fall back to the bed with a grunt.

“Not Spark,” Lacey whined, sitting back up to push against him.

“Look,” Colt nudged his hip sideways to keep Lacey behind him.

Lacey didn’t want to look, so she closed her eyes, telling herself she could respawn her little pet. There were spurts of electricity that almost physically hurt Lacey’s heart to hear as she imagined Spark fighting for her life while Colt held Lacey back.

“Look, Lace,” Colt hissed over the sizzling sounds and muffling t-shirts.

Lacey, against her better judgement, pried her eyes open to look. Lacey’s heart leapt into her throat as she realized that Spark was holding her own. Spark’s little zaps were killing bug after bug. The bugs, not all that bright on their own, kept going after the nearest thing alive, which just happened to be Spark. The irony was that Spark, with her little zaps of electricity, was the only thing in the room that could kill them.

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Spark levelled before their eyes, growing an inch all around in an instant. Her zaps also got stronger, taking out 2-3 of the bugs at a time. Spark would hiss and a bug would fall out of the air. They had to scoot back around the bed to give Spark more room, but that gave Spark room to hop up on the bed and take out even the flying ones.

The air became sharp with the smell of ozone, not that the fight took very long. Very few of the bugs had come their way. Most had followed the stranger. It was enough to level little Spark twice, but that wasn’t hard considering that she’d only gotten to level 3 chasing the Dustapps.

“Good job, Spark,” Colt was saying as the last of the bugs fell.

“Great job!” Lacey enthused, hoping there weren’t any lingering microscopic versions of the Velcrabs left. “You are such a good kitty, and you are going to get a whole bucket of treats!”

“Spark not useless,” Ginger crawled out from under the bed and gave the kitten a suspicious look.

Spark gave an adorable meow as Lacey scooped her up in her arms and showered her with semi-welcome affection. Spark’s purr gave lie to the struggling as Lacey scratched all the best places. They made their way back into the control room, Lacey letting Spark down to sniff out any rogue bugs in the room.

“Aw, she grew up,” Lacey watched Spark stalk and zap another couple of stray Velcrabs.

“She’s still plenty cute,” Colt sat at his desk and tapped the screens. “Pedestal, show level 77 assassin on my screen.”

“It said he was an assassin and yet he’s casting spells?” Lacey walked up behind Colt to see the screen flash to a room several levels up from the control room, where a shadow of a man was casting flashes of fire at the air all around him.

“Looks like it,” Colt agreed.

The battle on the screen was coming to a close, the flames making short work of the Velcrabs. Would they even have a chance of infecting someone at such a high level? Once the Velcrabs were all inert, the man again blended in so well as to become invisible. They asked for updates from the pedestal, and it showed the path he took all the way out of the dungeon.

“Who was he?” Lacey asked the air, like it had the answer.

“It wasn’t Kat or Shadow as they are both elsewhere,” Colt switched screens and followed images carefully.

“How could it have been Shadow?” Lacey protested. “Shadow is a cat. A big cat, but still a cat.”

“We don’t know that Shadow couldn’t take the form of a man,” Colt reasoned, his frown and sigh evidence that he was vexed by the whole thing. “Whoever it was, they didn’t kill us, and they had the chance to do it.”

“That doesn’t mean they are friends,” Lacey scanned the room for more of the bugs, her skin still crawling at the thought that they could still be around. “You think maybe Bernard sent someone in to check us out?”

“And risk the cushy deal he has?” Colt shook his head. “I doubt it. He’s raking in the dough on this. He and his guild make a percentage of everything pulled out of the dungeon and all he’s got to do is sit out there and twiddle his thumbs.”

“Even I don’t think Kat had anything to do with it,” Lacey admitted, running her nails up and down her arms to fight the heebie-geebies she had.

“I don’t want to, but how else did someone get in here?” Colt lowered his head like he was ashamed of his own thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly 10 groups came into the dungeon and 9 of those groups were full,” Colt blew out a harassed breath. “Only Kat’s group had room for anyone. How could someone be in her group without her knowing about it?”

“Oh,” Lacey woofed out her own breath, stretching her mind to think about it. It took her a minute. “But are there still 10 groups in the dungeon?”

This time, Colt asked Lacey, “What do you mean?”

“If another group finished, then a person could come in that entrance,” Lacey was glad that there was another explanation. She really didn’t want to suspect Kat to be any part of this. “I’m showing that one of the arenas finished half an hour ago. That’s plenty of time for someone, who already knows their way down here, to get down here and start poking around.”

“You think so?” Colt looked up hopefully.

“It doesn’t make sense to think otherwise,” Lacey hoped she wasn’t shining him on. “Kat’s been on the level about everything so far. What good would it do her? We’d invite her down here at this point.”

“She doesn’t know that,” Colt didn’t want to believe the worst of Kat, but he would to protect Lacey. It wasn’t like they’d known her all that long.

“Sure, she does,” Lacey got up to walk back to Colt’s desk and put an arm over his shoulder. “It’s not her doing. I’m the pessimist and even I don’t think it’s her.”

They stood there together and watched Kat leap a trap and almost immediately pivot so that if there was another trap beyond the first, she’d have a chance to double-hop past it. When the log swung down from the ceiling instead of the floor dropping out, Kat rolled and almost fell into the third part of that trap. The whole time that the Spunk was trying its darnedest to kill her, Kat was grinning. Hanging by her fingertips on the edge of the last pit, Kat was happy. She wouldn’t risk that for some stunt, would she?

It just didn’t feel right. Lacey was slow to trust, but once she did, she was hard to shake. Lacey trusted Colt and his family. It had taken her a while to get to know that they weren’t like the rest of the people in her life, including a father that had kept her to punish her mother for leaving him, not that her mother had fought that hard for her. It was hard to trust when the people hard-wired to love you turned on you, but Lacey had done it with Colt.

They had only known Kat for a few days, but the girl felt so much more like Colt’s kind of people than Lacey’s family. Was it suspicious that they trusted her so quickly? Maybe. It was a world of magic, and that girl had mad skills that far outmatched her level.

“If you can’t trust your gut, you can’t trust anything,” Lacey answered Colt’s unspoken question. Even in a world full of magic, instinct had to count for something.