The party worked their way out of the trapped area as Lacey planned. She and the elite goblins had no trouble scurrying out of the maze once the party was well into it. Knowing that Hughe wouldn’t be back before the party was ousted and back into the dungeon helped. That party would have to go back in without Hughe’s knowledge and that could make them vulnerable.
Once Lacey was back in the control room, she had 2 hours before they would time out. That was 2 hours to draw a set of traps that could split the party and pit each party member against their weaknesses. Lacey scribbled and Colt made a list of supplies and mobs to take with her. Their funds were running low again, but they still had a little to put into the pit. That final war ground was their last resort.
“Here,” Lacey fumbled the paper to Colt, and he dropped it with the rest of the stack over the pedestal as the lights turned blue. A dozen goblin workers gathered up their supplies and tucked them into two backpacks. Faster than a mom got her kids out the door for the bus, they were both out in the dungeon. Colt wouldn’t be there long, but Lacey needed him to set some things manually as she made her way up to the very top with her elite guard.
“Does it work?” Lacey tried to talk with Colt using the system.
“Yeah,” Colt replied, and they both took a great breath of relief. They hadn’t tried using the communication texts with both of them outside the control room and they were glad they wouldn’t lose each other. They wouldn’t have eyes on the adventurers from the start, but they hadn’t deviated in so long, they didn’t expect any surprises on who came in.
“Cool,” she scurried up another set of stone steps. It was a good thing she’d been active. Back in the beginning, she’d have been huffing and puffing halfway up through the dungeon.
“Gossowaries are penned up and Ginger knows what to do,” Colt texted as she hit the halfway point.
The dungeon turned red. Lacey hadn’t really expected to be able to get all the way to the top by the time the incursion began, but she’d hoped to be closer and have a little more breath by now. She picked up her pace, triggering off the red overlay. Her mind was imagining that the adventurers had changed everything on this pivotal run. She imagined that they had 20 party members even though she knew they had a maximum of 5 at a time. She imagined that Hughe had miraculously respawned faster than the 16-hour timer and had warned everyone.
She focused on the timing instead to calm her mind. It took no less than 25 minutes for the party to mow through the first level. She, and the goblins grunting in time behind her, had time. They’d left that level alone, but now they had a level of Aztec Tombs on the second level with specific traps that dropped all the way down to levels that were tooled against specific adventurer types and their unique weaknesses.
She slipped her George 13 out of her pocket and held it open while the goblins behind her squeezed into the maintenance tunnels on what was now level 2.
“Thanks George,” Lacey smiled at the creature as she closed up the entry and slipped it into her pocket. No new Georges had been made with the new iterations of the Aztec Tomb, but she was okay with that. Too many Georges weren’t good for her in the long run. As it was, she had 3 in her pocket and Colt had another 3 in his. They were their last-ditch escapes and Lacey hoped they didn’t need them.
Lacey manned the periscope, too nervous to follow their first idea. Adam was supposed to be watching, but he stood behind her nervously shifting from foot to foot. She was just too wired to sit at Adam’s feet and draw something for their next effort. She got her first glimpse of the party and gasped.
“They have Helluna,” Lacey told Colt silently.
“They replaced Hughe with Helluna.” She didn’t have to imagine Colt’s swearing.
“I have to kill her, right?” Lacey asked.
“Yeah,” Colt answered.
Lacey waved the goblins to the end of the corridor where they would repeat the release of the Gossowaries.
“Did you hear something?” Helluna asked the party.
“No,” the deep-voiced leader was the same gruff person.
“It’s creepy,” Helluna shuddered, and Lacey held her breath as the party turned right down the trap corridor. “It’s like something is crawling in the walls.”
“I checked this way for traps,” the rogue reassured Helluna with a rakish smile that made Lacey roll her eyes. “You’re safe with us.”
“Hughe wasn’t,” Helluna snapped at him. “Besides, I don’t know why you want me. I haven’t even been through here once. I can’t help you.”
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“You’re the backup plan in case he gets his ass killed again,” the leader growled at her. “Now shut up and stay out of our way.”
Walls crumbled away just like they had previously. Gossowaries thundered out of their pen in a cloud of feathers and sound. Helluna screamed, but she didn’t run back down the corridor like Hughe had. Instead, the rogue gallantly shoved her behind him as they fought the birds. Lacey cursed.
“That was a waste of 10 Gossowaries,” she muttered to Colt. They’d used fewer because it had been so easy to distract them from Hughe before and this trap had only been in case someone like Hughe was used again. They didn’t figure on Helluna acting so differently. “She stayed with the party. She got spooked by the sounds in the walls that no one else noticed!”
“Gaslight her,” Colt returned after a pause. “Call her name in a spooky voice.”
“That’s lame,” Lacey grunted, but she didn’t have another idea.
“Did you hear that?” Helluna hissed, grabbing the arm of the rogue who rolled his eyes. “Someone called my name.”
“I’ll call your name all night long baby, but let me fight here first, okay?” the thief drawled out.
Helluna dropped his arm and backed away from him. To be fair, Lacey figured that he’d gotten a bit more creepy than Lacey’s call. Lacey waited an anxious moment, inching toward where Helluna was pressed against the wall. With a quick application of George, Helluna fell back into Lacey’s arms.
“Lacey!” Helluna started to say only to have Lacey’s hand clamp over Helluna’s mouth and press a finger to her own lips. Wide eyes met hers as Helluna noticed the goblins behind Lacey, all armed with nasty-looking swords.
It was a tense set of moments as the fight died down outside the tunnels and Helluna’s eyes narrowed. A hundred ways that Helluna could betray them flitted across Lacey’s paranoid mind in a single second before she drew her knife and slit the woman’s throat.
“She’ll respawn,” Lacey chanted into her own mind. “I didn’t just kill a person. She’ll respawn.”
Lacey shook her head to clear it and moved to the periscope to watch.
“Where’s the girl?” the leader asked after checking the perimeter for more mobs.
“She was right behind me,” the rogue shrugged and headed toward the huge chest of coal that sat in the corner.
“What was her name again?” the leader hissed to the cleric who stood next to the leader, eying the 60’ by 60’ rock-lined room.
“I don’t know,” the cleric replied.
“Helluna,” the mage answered for them.
“Helluna?” the leader called out down the hallway.
“You remembered her name?” the cleric teased the mage. “I thought Bagatoll was the one that was sweet on her.”
“Whatever,” the mage crossed his arms over his chest.
“Where is she?” the leader clomped in his plate armor toward the traps that Lacey hovered over.
He wasn’t the one she wanted to send down this trap. She was waiting for the rogue to get there. Lacey’s palms itched to pull the lever with the fighter on top of it sitting there so prettily and ready to be dumped. Instead, she took a very quiet breath and stilled.
“This chest is heavy!” the rogue tugged on the handles and dragged it a few feet. “It’s not trapped or anything, but it’s just full of coal.”
“Leave it and find Helluna,” the leader barked out, thankfully walking over to the chest to check it out.
“Whatever,” the rogue spat on the ground, but obeyed.
The leader upended the huge treasure chest to find nothing but coal, kicking pieces all over the place, just to make a mess. The rogue edged down the hallway calling out to Helluna and her name sent a jolt of guilt into the pit of Lacey’s stomach. She let the rogue pass the trap, wiping her hand on her jeans.
“She’s not down here,” the rogue called out.
“Check for traps down that way,” the leader demanded. “Maybe she fell into one.”
“I already checked this corridor, but sure, maybe she fell into a non-existent trap and disappeared into the mists,” the rogue slurred out sarcastically, then making a woo-woo sound like they were in some horror movie.
He walked back over the trap and barely gave a yelp as he fell hundreds of feet down into darkness, his hands grabbing at the walls to try to stop his inevitable fall. Where his hands touched the walls, Chucks took little nibbles of his flesh. The screaming was muffled as the heavy stone lid to the trap fell over his head. It not only kept the sound down, but it would also crush the adventurer once he hit the bottom, which was the very very bottom of the dungeon. Maybe the Chucks wouldn’t kill him, but then there was the fall damage followed by the 4-ton stone block “lid” that would. If he was still alive after that, they were betting that he’d bleed out without a cleric to heal the holes of the spikes that took up most of the last 10’.
“The rogue is in the hole,” Lacey breathed out to Colt. “Why didn’t we try this from the beginning?”
“We were too busy being clever with puzzles that earned us a bunch of levels,” Colt replied.
“Sorry about Helluna,” Lacey backed out of the corridor to hit the second of 3 maintenance corridors in this Aztec Tomb.
“She’ll respawn,” Colt said.
“She’ll hate us,” Lacey scuttled around the edges of a Muck, waving to the Chuck above the Muck.
“No loss,” Colt might have sounded cold, but he was right, and she needed to hear it.
“I should have asked her for information on the guildies,” Lacey hit two bricks to open a secret passage the group would never find now that they’d lost their rogue.
“No worries,” Colt’s text said.
“I’m in the next maintenance tunnel,” Lacey tried to distract herself. “I’ll have a dozen chances at the cleric here.” They’d linked all the traps along this corridor so that they slid down into the same pit. That pit opened up into a dungeon section that was more traps than mobs. They hoped the clanky cleric, in his plate mail that had to be extended over a tubby belly, would kill himself there. If not, the area was traumatic enough that maybe he wouldn’t want to come back again, not that he’d remember it. All the traps along Lacey’s current track in the Aztec Tomb were disabled so that Lacey got to manually choose when and who to trap. They wanted the cleric next.
Lacey sat back at the periscope nearest to where the party should emerge. They’d closed off a lot of the optional ways through this version of the maze to better control the timing, but they just couldn’t plan for everything. She wondered if she should have stayed to listen to more of their conversation.