“They know,” Colt breathed out, and Lacey let him have a moment of panic. They’d been a team long enough that Lacey knew he’d only take a moment. They had hours. Even with an army of Thieves, there was no way that they’d get through all the mazes.

“We’ll save the menagerie for the residential levels,” Lacey reasoned once she’d figured he’d had enough time to snap out of it. “We wait until they’re at least halfway through the maze trap levels and then loose the whole hoard into the residential areas.”

“Why aren’t we closing the dungeon again?” Colt repeated his question. She knew that he’d keep repeating it and that was a good thing.

“Because we have hours and hours before they even have a chance at breaking through the line,” Lacey pursed her lips in determination. “And I want to see. I want to see if we made it well enough. I want to see if they can get close. I want to see how close. I want to know how long it takes an army of Thieves to break the Spunk levels.”

“How are you so calm?” Colt challenged her, and she realized that she was calm. Not only that, but her calm was abnormal for her.

“I don’t know,” she turned from the screens on the wall to face Colt, knowing she had the time to figure this out. “I think it’s because, I think we did it. I think we built something that can withstand the invasion. I think I’m right and that whoever thinks they can get here in time… they’re wrong.”

“You sure?” he pushed it.

“No,” she threw up her hands. “Not in the slightest, but I…”

Her words had sputtered out. Why was she so sure that she could win this time? Why didn’t she just close the dungeon, and have it done? She could be safe. They could close the dungeon and take their time churning out dungeon levels until they were Tier III, and then she could be really sure that they could be invulnerable to any incursion. Why was she risking it?

“I’m tired of running!” she admitted, her hands clenching at her sides. “I’m sick of being scared. I’m sick of being smaller than the bullies. I don’t want to hide anymore!”

Colt watched her carefully and she knew that he had a coupon in his pocket, ready to close the dungeon. He didn’t say a word.

“I think we can do it,” Lacey lowered her voice to say. “You’ve stood between me and the bullies each and every time. When they came after me at school because I was awkward and small. When the university came after me for not having my anxiety documented. When my dad said I had to stay in college or else.”

“Always,” he whispered in the pause as she took a breath.

“I’m not small this time,” she turned to pace. “The dungeon isn’t small, but they underestimated me, or they wouldn’t even be trying to do this. If they knew what I’d prepared for, they’d have walked away. This time feels different somehow.”

“I believe you,” he told her. “I believe in you. I always have.”

“It’s just like with Hughe or even Monty,” words came tumbling out without thought, something she could only do with Colt. “They thought they could take me, us. They thought they could take what we’d built. But I was smarter. I built something with everything I had and this time they couldn’t take it. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I like having something they can’t take from me.”

“The coupon accomplishes that,” he pulled it out of his pocket. “You know it does. You knew that the bullies at school could be dealt with if we just went to the teachers or something. But you never knew how to take the easy way out.”

“And you always stood by me in that,” Lacey put herself between him and the actual pedestal that he could drop it into. “I loved that about you. It wasn’t about getting it to stop. It wasn’t, even though we probably thought so at the time.”

“Maybe,” he lowered the coupon, and they both knew he wouldn’t use it until she asked him to do it.

“When the college started with the garbage about me being a distraction to other students, and that I had to at least act normal or they’d kick me out,” she felt her eyes burning and ignored it. “I didn’t even know where to begin to fight it. There was no fighting that bully. Nothing I did worked. I begged them all to listen. Lawyers, reporters, anyone who would listen.”

“I was there,” Colt nodded.

“Even our parents told us I had to buck up and shut up to get that degree,” she gulped.

“They were wrong,” he ground out.

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“But this one I can win,” Lacey waved a hand over the screens where Thieves ransacked their main dungeon levels faster than they should have been able to do it. “We can win this one.”

“They’re cheating and we can use the coupons to defeat them too,” he reminded her.

“We could do that,” she deflated a bit, but not because she was ready to quit, not this time. “We walked away from the college because I didn’t need them to tell me I was smart.”

“You are smart,” he insisted.

“We walked away,” she repeated. “But using that coupon wouldn’t mean I was smart, just that I was rich enough to afford to kick them out. It’s us cheating right back to use that coupon. And I don’t want to. I don’t think we need to do it.”

“You don’t need this to prove you’re smart, Lace.”

“Need is a strong word,” she hedged. “I don’t need it, but I want it. I want to win this one, Colt. I want it so badly I can taste it. I want to prove that what we did was enough. If we can do that, maybe my brain will have something to hold onto when the doubts try to drag me down. Maybe it can be something I can point to and say, there! I’m smart.

“Because, Colt,” she went on too quickly for him to talk her out of it. “Whoever is on the other side of this fight is smart. They are. They thought of testing us out. They thought about what it would take to get through the active levels, and they rounded up the people to do it. Then, oh my god, Colt, they didn’t just rush in to take us on, but they took their time to delve deeper and plan even smarter. They figured out that we have much more stacked up against the takeover.

“This person isn’t like Monty or even Hughe,” she scoffed. “Those guys. They were just bullies, and we stood up against them and we won, but they weren’t smart like whoever this is. They just weren’t. And it felt good when we took down Monty and his entitled title. It did.”

“It also hurt both of us like hell to do it,” Colt argued gently. “I had to watch you out there resetting traps manually, collapsing tunnels, playing bait. It was hard.”

“But worth it,” she took a good long breath and his silence was agreement. “It gave me back a little of the confidence I had before I got beat up by college. There college was, another authority figure telling me that I’d never be good enough, normal enough, professional enough. Sure, I walked away, and we both told me that it was because they weren’t worth it.”

Colt made to interrupt, but she held up a hand to stop him. “And they weren’t. They aren’t worth it. No piece of paper can tell me I’m stupid any more than one can tell me I’m smart. I guess the dungeon can’t either, but it started to help. When we beat Hughe the first few times, it was satisfying. We didn’t become the bullies, but we sure as hell stood up against it with just our wits and the whole system against us. Then we did it again with Monty. With our wits. With our friendship. On our, on our own merits!

“We did that, and it started to make me feel like I was worth more than minimum wage and a shitty apartment,” Lacey ranted on. She knew she was sounding crazy, but there was something in the essence of what she was trying to say if she could just get to it. “I don’t care if it wasn’t supposed to. I don’t care if I was supposed to be strong enough to stand without a win. I wasn’t and…”

“No one would have been, Lace,” Colt tried to step closer, but she backed up, not ready to stop or be comforted yet. He gave her space.

“I wasn’t enough for my dad or my mom, and I wasn’t enough for college,” she hiccupped and was startled to find her face wet. “But I’m enough. We did enough. We did that.”

“Probably,” his mouth quirked with a little smile despite how her tears jerked his heart around. She could tell because his eyes had gotten red along the edges, even though he was a macho guy and didn’t cry easily.

“I’m just saying that we don’t need to run from this one,” Lacey pointed at the coupon still clutched in the hand that hung down at his side. “It’s there if we need it, but I don’t think we do.”

Colt shook his head, looking up at the ceiling and she knew that he was thinking about it. “What about Ginger and Adam and even the Spunks and Rejects? They’re going to fight for our egos here. Is that fair?”

“Ask them,” she challenged him, pointing behind him.

They’d gathered a crowd. Goblins stood shoulder to shoulder with Trugs, Spunks, and Rejects. They were lined up outside the glass wall watching their dungeon masters fight over whether to fight an invasion. Some of the Spunks were squeezing by to reset traps and maze configurations, but they left representatives behind. Colt and Lacey wouldn’t have questioned them. The Spunks knew their jobs and if they spent prep time learning what they would be fighting for, then they obviously thought it was worth it.

“Goblins made to fight,” Ginger shrugged like it should have been obvious.

“And the thing is, Colt,” Lacey interrupted the movie script that the denizens were all obviously willing to play out for them. “If it comes down to it, and it means our friends here fighting… if it looks like we can’t win… if they really have the upper hand with their measly 105 army of Thieves, then and only then will we use the coupon to stop it.”

“You know what that means, don’t you?” Colt asked the denizen army behind him.

He was met with confused looks. They were dungeon creatures, not rocket scientists, so Lacey forgave them for not knowing what Colt had on his silly mind.

“It means you all need to make sure we win it before they get here,” Colt told the crowd of dungeon denizens that had all labored to build the dungeon for just this cause.

“Thanks, Colt,” Lacey sighed out.

“I mean,” Colt rocked his head back and forth with a roll of his eyes. “What did we build this thing for if not to test it against an army?”

“Silly humans,” Ginger shook her head and shooed monsters to go do their jobs, not that they needed a lot of prodding. Trugs scratched their heads, the least aware of the meaning of the words being thrown around. Spunks dashed between Trug legs, dragging a few extra Goblins to help out. Goblins and Rejects headed back to the settlement in the backyard, probably to gather the livestock they’d just herded out there back inside.

It wasn’t like Adam and Eve hadn’t been running drills for this all along. Everyone had a job to do, including two very emotional dungeon masters that were too busy crying to do their jobs. Lacey and Colt took a good ten minutes and then they too went back to work.