“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” Lacey told Colt over text. “Having a goblin roll dice is much better for randomizing than a mechanical method.”

“Focus,” Colt replied. “They’re entering the first Tomb.”

“I’m fine,” Lacey replied, pulling her lucky George 13 marble out of her pocket. “I can hear them swearing on the other side of the wall.”

“Hughe knows about the right path being a dead end, so he should take them down the left path.” Colt obviously wasn’t in the mood for levity.

“Yep, he’s predictable,” Lacey nodded to herself as she watched through the periscopes as Hughe did lead them down the left path. Unfortunately for Hughe, they’d done a mirror version on the maze for this floor.

Lacey waved to the elite squad of goblins behind her. As practiced, they released a small flock of enormous birds out of the secret door at the end of the long hallway. What rounded the corner of the Tomb was a nightmare of feathered squawking

Each one of the six-foot-tall birds had long, skinny, gray legs that ended in bright orange webbed feet. Above their heads was the label Gossowary. They’d named them after an online buddy named RobotSamari, but they’d shortened it to Robosam 1-20. With a bit of change to the original design of the temple, 60 feet of the outside crumbled away to provide their winged warriors the space to fight the party. They might have only been level 16, but they also breathed out a magical cone of psychic damage. Clawed feet scrabbled at the adventurers, while wings flapped behind, and the breath weapon was accompanied by a honk that could have been mistaken for mace for the ears.

“That trap wasn’t here before,” Hughe cried out to the party. “I swear.”

“Just stay back out of the way,” the fighter swore back over his shoulder as they found themselves in a room 60’ by 60’ quickly being surrounded by twenty costly birds.

“Holy shit,” Hughe stumbled back 40’ into the tunnel of traps that Lacey had dismantled. “Do those things have the mouths of a Yautja?”

Lacey quickly enabled all the traps between Hughe and the higher-level party and tossed her George onto the wall. The goblin elites stood by eagerly, having closed up the secret door and locked it into place.

“Yes, they do,” she said as she snatched a very surprised Hughe into the trap hallway.

“Hey!” Hughe started yelling, but it was nothing compared to the cacophony of noise that the Gossowaries made.

“Shut him up,” Lacey grit out, shoving Hughe toward the goblins, one of whom still remembered the slaughter of Hughe’s first forays into the dungeon.

Hughe took a swing, but these goblins weren’t the pushovers Hughe was used to. Adam and his elites had been working hard since their fall from grace and they were on par with the highest beetles they could breed and train out of the arenas. They often challenged themselves on the reset levels between the 6-hour reset and the 10-hour timeout.

“Those big beaks were really well suited to house the enlarged mandibles without compromising their anatomy,” Lacey took on a lecturing tone as Adam swung his green fist into Hughe’s face. “I can’t wait to level them up enough to take on your buddies, but we’re not quite there yet.”

“You can’t win,” Hughe shook his head to try to clear it, but an elite used his disorientation to knock the sword out of his hand. “Hey, that’s mine!”

“Not anymore,” Lacey told him. “Adam is due for an upgrade, right Adam?”

“Don’t take too long,” Colt’s words came silently across her vision. “They are decimating the Gossowaries.”

“Kill him,” Lacey told the goblins.

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“Wait!” Hughe called out, but no one paused. Lacey turned away after watching them slit his throat. They didn’t have time for conversations. Hughe had needed to silently disappear from the party.

“They’re down to two Gossowaries,” Colt reported.

“Hughe’s dead,” Lacey replied silently. “And Adam has a new sword. It looks enchanted.”

“Just stay quiet,” Colt said, and Lacey motioned her palm down at the goblins. They hunched on the floor between trap mechanisms.

“Pathetic mobs,” one of the party was saying.

“Wouldn’t be so bad if they gave even a little experience,” another grunted out.

Lacey balled up a fist.

“Think the feathers are worth anything?” the first one said.

“Not likely,” a new one grunted.

“Stop your bitching and let’s move out,” came a deep voice different from the others. “Hughe!”

“Is that a chest in the corner?”

“If so, it can’t be worth anything,” deep voice chided them. “Hughe!”

“That coward is probably back in the hallway.”

“I told you to leave the chest alone,” deep voice seemed to be getting mad. “Where is that guy?”

“Come on,” the other voice whined. “It could be something.”

It wasn’t, but Lacey wanted the guy to open it. It was full of coal; big old heavy chunks of the stuff. They had started leaving treasures chests full of old junk in an attempt to dissuade the group from their purpose. Lacey just considered it their way of giving them lumps of coal in their stockings instead of presents. Half of the Tombs were full of chests of old junk.

“Leave that thing there and go find the idiot,” deep voice commanded a whining party member.

“Why me?”

“Because he probably got stuck in a trap and you’re going to have to pull him out.”

Lacey could have kicked herself. That would have been a great plot to just dump Hughe in a triggered trap. She made a quick decision and threw George 13 up on the wall and motioned Adam to toss the body out on top of the pit trap in front of her. George 13 was shriveling up the instant Hughe’s foot cleared the opening and they all heard a solid thump as the trap embraced his already dead body.

None of them dared to breath as they heard shuffling and waited. Lacey pressed her lips together. That had been stupid. She should have just left it alone and they’d have been searching for Hughe for a while. Her hand itched to reset the trap and cover up her mess, but the thief would likely see her do it.

“The traps have reset along this corridor!” the thief called out, as it could only be the thief that they’d send to check for traps.

“Did he fall in one?” deep voice got closer to their position.

“Yeah,” the thief said. “He’s a goner.”

“Dammit,” deep voice muttered so softly she almost didn’t hear it.

“You want Grimbal to resurrect him?” the thief asked.

“I don’t know,” the leader replied. “We only get one of those every day and while this dungeon isn’t much of a danger, I’d rather save it for one of us.”

Lacey trembled. Resurrection. She hadn’t even thought of that. She made a vow that she’d spend more time in the dungeon listening in on the party from now on. There was too much they didn’t know, and mistakes would cost them a lot.

“We need sound,” Lacey texted under her breath to Colt.

“I looked and it’s past the tutorial,” Colt told her what she already knew.

“How many more tasks do we have?” Lacey lamented almost to herself.

“Four, but you know they require us to get things from outside the dungeon,” Colt answered, and she could feel him shaking his head at her. “And its stupid stuff. We could get it all in a single night if this party would give us a single night to forage, but they are relentless.”

“Not if we could kill them all,” Lacey grumbled, listening to the leader walk away while the thief stayed to dismantle traps.

“With what?” Colt challenged. He wasn’t being mean, but this wasn’t the first time she’d felt this way.

“Do you think we could kill them if we could separate them?” Lacey pondered, watching the thief through the periscope. “They left the thief here alone because they feel safe. If we could take out just this guy, they’d be susceptible to the traps. Then we could whittle down the party. Break them up. That cleric seems like a pansy without the fighter to protect him.”

“The thief and then the cleric,” Colt’s text scrolled by with three blinking dots like he was thinking. “Hughe was pretty easy, but we expected that. That rogue is going to be wiley.”

“I just found out that the cleric can resurrect one party member per day, but they left Hughe,” Lacey reported. The goblins shifted and she shushed them with a motion of her hand. “But if we dropped the rogue down a trap that then closed over his head while he was out here disarming things, then we could make him do a level by himself. Could he really handle 20 Gossowaries by himself? Then we’d use traps like crazy to get the rest of them.”

“If they give us a chance, it’s worth a try, but how are you going to design something like that from inside the dungeon?”

Lacey looked around her maintenance tunnel. It was a little over 6’ wide but it was crowded with mechanisms. Still, she had the room between traps.

“I can draw as easily here as I can in the control room,” Lacey mused. “I think I’m better used out here than stuck there. I can reset traps that the rogue disarms. I can scuttle between tunnels when you say it’s safe. We’d only need to kill them off once. Then we could finish that stupid tutorial.”

“That’s a lot of risk just to finish the tutorial,” Colt argued, but she knew he wanted it.