Ginger crawled out from under the bed, and Lacey blinked at her.
“I hid her there in case they got all the way down here,” Colt admitted. “I was just thinking that even if they killed us, we could still have a chance of them not wiping the dungeon completely.”
Lacey nodded, but she was processing a few things in that statement even as he said it. First, the thought of dying hadn’t really been in her plans. Sure, Hughe had died and come back, but did that really mean that they would? And didn’t that mean that those high leveled guys would be back too? And even if they did come back? What would happen to their dungeon? Could that kind of stunt really work? Lacey shook the thoughts out of her head.
They had higher levels coming into the dungeon and they weren’t as predictable as Hughe and his gang. Lacey watched their balance go down to double digits as she reset rooms, and the fact was that they couldn’t reset them all via the pedestal. Lacey raked her hands through her hair, encountering tangles that just annoyed her further. Just when she’d thought she was getting the hang of it. Just when they’d thought they were ahead of the curve.
Lacey had to choose between resurrecting Adam and the scout or one of the rooms. The scout had stayed behind to open the door for Adam if he escaped, but the level had collapsed onto him. Of course, Lacey chose the goblins, Adam and the scout materializing in front of her as she watched their balance zero out. Zero turned out to be a single line up and down. She’d gone over their balance by a few credits, but the system had allowed the purchase.
“Good to see you, Adam old buddy,” Colt walked up to the goblin and shook its hand.
“Greetings Masters,” Adam beamed his massive grin of pointed teeth at them, none the worse for wear.
“We are now officially broke,” Lacey lamented, giving a lame smile to the two goblins, who were now being patted on by Ginger.
“Adam will always be worth going broke,” Colt assured Lacey, his smile like he hadn’t a care.
“True,” Lacey admitted, not as sure of anything. “But that still explosion was a one-shot deal. We didn’t have the budget to rebuild those rooms.”
“We rebuild,” Adam stuck a thumb on his puffed-out chest. With only a grunt and point, the scout was rushing from the room, grinning just as wide as Adam.
“You can rebuild that trap?” Colt asked, more sure than Lacey but less sure than Adam.
“Adam level up to 1 and 0,” Adam thumped his chest again, then snapped his fingers. “Easy.” By 1 and 0, Adam meant that he’d leveled up to level 10. It was impressive, but it wouldn’t be enough to fight against the level 24-26 group they’d just faced.
“That was a level 29 trap, Adam,” Lacey shook her head at him. They had been lucky that trap was able to knock them out. The way Lacey had rigged it, it was actually three level 29 traps layered on top of each other to all go off at the same time.
“We dig, you trap,” Adam shrugged, undeterred.
“How am I going to make that much moonshine again?” Lacey laid her head on the pedestal and smacked it lightly. “I bought it last time. We just don’t have the funds.”
“It’s only been a week or so, right?” Colt patted Lacey on the back. “And if Adam leveled up, surely we did too, right?”
“Dungeon, level 12,” the system replied to Colt’s tapping.
“We might have passed Hughe and his gang, but we’re still only half the level of those guys who just tore through the best we have,” Lacey pushed away from the pedestal and began to pace. “We blew through a billion years of coal production in a week and even if we had made enough to completely rebuild, they now know our tricks. And we can’t build anything that could even challenge them anyway even if we did have the credits to do it.”
“Okay, that sounds bad now, but we’ll drill down and do our best and that’s the best we can do,” Colt replied, a frown forming as he too scrolled through screens that Lacey knew by heart.
Lacey hated this part of Colt. Optimism was a good thing most of the time, but blind optimism didn’t solve anything. Lacey flopped back on the lower bunk and put Colt’s pillow over her head to muffle her frustrated scream. Why bother to move forward when they were just going to tear it up again in a day, if they gave them that long?
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Don’t panic,” Colt was fussing at the pedestal.
“Goblins rebuild,” Ginger petted Lacey’s arm tentatively.
“Thanks Ginger,” Lacey patted Ginger back, but her lips were pressed together so her smile was tight. “How long do you think it’ll take for them to dig out that section?” she posited to Colt.
“3 hours?” Ginger held up three green fingers with her smile.
Lacey turned away to roll her eyes, not wanting her frustration to hurt the goblin’s feelings. Goblins couldn’t count higher than 3, so Lacey was pretty sure that Ginger didn’t know how long. Then again, if it was going to take more than a day, Ginger would have couched her answer in days instead. If they could dig that out before morning, maybe Lacey could reset the trap, but not without the massive amount of moonshine she’d used before. Even with magic, the moonshine would take days to make and that was if they had all the ingredients already. Even using the pedestal, they didn’t have the credits to buy what they needed.
“What else could we sell?” Colt looked around the room like Lacey had been hiding their salvation under the floorboards.
“We get almost nothing from the coins we have left,” Lacey flopped back on the bed. “I already reused the chests we got. You could sell the jeweler’s kit if you want, but it’s more useful than its worth. What else could we sell? Our chairs?”
A goblin worker was already returning with a bucket of coal and rocks that it dumped into the pedestal. He was quickly followed by another one.
“We could dig and sell traps,” Colt suggested.
“Except our workers are already digging the rooms back out on levels 12 and 13,” Lacey replied, but she sat up and looked around. “How much can we sell the book for?”
“Not the book,” Colt shook his head. “What about the sketches?”
“My doodles?” Lacey raised her brows at him. “You can try, but they’re probably not worth more than the coal.”
Colt took a sketch off the wall of a tiger with the head of a chicken. It was something that Lacey had drawn to make Colt laugh. When Ginger had asked what made eggs like the ones they ate, Lacey had responded with the drawing. She’d since drawn a real chicken, and a real tiger and Colt had explained the way Lacey had combined them and that it was a joke.
“My tigeckin?” Lacey pretended to protest. “Whatever will lay our eggs?”
“You scared poor Ginger with that drawing,” Colt chuckled. Ginger gave a little clucking noise with a roll of her eyes. “She’d only ever seen beetle eggs so she thought it would attack her.”
“The chicken would have attacked her,” Lacey teased him, and Ginger frowned. “Chickens are vicious.”
“Only you could be terrorized by a chicken at a petting zoo,” Colt shook his head.
“Vicious,” Lacey muttered, but Ginger was onto her teasing and shook her head and finger at Lacey, who finally had to smile.
Colt dropped the drawing into the pedestal.
“New creature detected,” the system answered. “120 credits for a creature not previously conceived by this world engine. Would you like to summon your complimentary copy of this creature now or wait for later?”
“No way!” Lacey hit her head on the top bunk lunging to her feet, but she didn’t stop until she could stare at a screen that told her less than the voice just had. She quickly hit what she thought was the button to summon her creature and then cringed as she realized what she’d done.
“Jackpot!” Colt was saying as he rushed around the room to tear pages off the wall.
The creature that materialized was a perfect replica of a baby version of a tiger with the head of a chicken. Since the drawing had been in greyscale, the tigeckin ended up being black and white striped fur with grayish feathers on the head. The system named it a Chicker and while it was level 12, it was only a baby version of it. The little paws and tail were adorable, but the tiny black beak was more annoying than cute, at least to Lacey. It gave a little cheep and rubbed its head against Ginger’s leg. Ginger froze for a moment, but when it didn’t try to eat her, she picked up the little creature and pet it on the head.
“Chicken detected,” the system answered at the new drawing that Colt dropped in. “This is a common creature. It will be added to your choices of creatures.”
“So, no money for the repeats,” Lacey mused, watching the system eat her drawing of a harpy that Colt was dropping in. A harpy was typically a very dirty birdlike creature born of the hatred of a woman scorned. Lacey had made this one more phoenix-like than ugly. She figured that if a woman had been scorned, she likely deserved a little respect with her retribution.
“New creature detected,” the system answered. “120 credits for a creature not previously conceived by this world engine. Would you like to summon your complimentary copy of this creature now or wait for later?”
“We could wait on that one,” Colt said, shuffling through more papers.
“What makes you think we can find it later?” Lacey wasn’t quite over being pessimistic, even with hope in Colt’s hands.
“Lacey, no offense,” Colt pushed her toward the table where she’d left her book and pencils, “but you need to be drawing. The goblins dig. Lacey draws, and we can be rebuilt in no time.”
“Do you think drawing objects would help?” Lacey sat and drew. Her finger flew over what she could remember of what a real still looked like.
“New creature detected,” the system repeated, and Lacey itched to be over at the screen to see what was new and what wasn’t. She wanted to know what they now had access to, but it took time to get the shading and dimensions right. “120 credits for a creature not previously conceived by this world engine. Would you like to summon your complimentary copy of this creature now or wait for later?”
“Any idea how detailed it needs to be?” Lacey worried, but Colt was too engrossed in making more of her drawings come to life. The problem was that he wasn’t making any of them now.
“Mule detected,” the system answered at the new drawing. “This is a common creature. It will be added to your choices of creatures.”
“I’m not sure,” Colt answered her, having to pause long enough to let a small line of goblins put some coal into the pedestal. Colt was practically humming with his signature optimism, but Lacey wasn’t so sure. “And they’re listed right in the same screen as the goblins were summoned from.”