Lacey shook out her hands, trying to keep her restlessness down. The goblins were shuffling around too, like children who’d been told to wait for dessert. The adventurers that were left were taking too long, and Lacey’s mind had all sorts of dire warnings for what was delaying them.

“I should go back and look,” she told Colt, more to stop herself from doing it than because she was going risk her position.

“Nope,” Colt replied. “I have two more floors before I can go be your eyes.”

Colt was disarming traps on two other levels of the Tomb just in case they missed on this one. Lacey chewed on her lips, trying to stay still. He should have been done by now. The party should have gotten to this tunnel by now. Her mind whirled with all that could go wrong. She toggled her overlay on and off again just to make sure they hadn’t ducked back out of the dungeon. What Lacey didn’t want was to just sit there and think about things. The fact that the goblins were as restless as she was made her feel stupid for being so fidgety.

“He didn’t back out of the dungeon,” the leader was saying.

“Then where is he?” the mage challenged.

“There aren’t a lot of traps anyway,” the leader replied. “Whatever was in here before, it’s changed so that we don’t need Bagatoll as much anyway. Maybe this Hughe fellow was just exaggerating.”

“Then why haven’t we cleared the dungeon by now?” the mage insisted, and now that Lacey could see them, she could see that the cleric was just as dubious as the mage. They were bunched up together in the tunnels even though the tomb left plenty of room.

“You know what I think?” the cleric stuck his nose in the air from his spot in the back. “I think he ducked down into one of these side tunnels with that girl and they’re doing tickle/widdle, if you know what I mean.”

“He wouldn’t dare,” the leader grit out angrily.

“We’ve been running this dungeon for ages,” the cleric muttered to the mage. “I’m not sure I blame the guy.”

They were passing the first set of traps, but Lacey didn’t dare set it off with as close as the three of them were standing to each other. While the smart thing to do was to take the cleric next, it was also the most obvious ploy. The party wasn’t suspicious, at least they didn’t seem to be. Lacey would have been. At least she thought she would have been. Then again, she and Colt had gotten sloppy too once or twice.

“Will you two shut up,” the leader barked at them, stalling the group to listen.

The way they shut up so quickly made Lacey hold her breath. Could they be pretending to be careless? She might. She watched them carefully, but when the mage rolled his eyes at the fighter’s back, she let herself breathe again.

“Where are the mobs?” the fighter asked the silence.

“We just fought a herd of birds,” the cleric protested.

“Not that they were any challenge,” the mage complained. “And it’s a flock of birds.”

“I always wondered why they called a herd of sheep a flock,” the cleric pondered. “They’re not birds.”

“Shut the flock up!” the fighter turned to raise a fist at the two.

They passed the section she could see from the current periscope, and Lacey used their distance to quietly move along the tunnel to the next one.

“How am I supposed to listen for ambushes if you two are yammering constantly?”

“Sorry, boss,” the cleric ducked his head, but the mage just frowned and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What do you think you’re going to hear?” the mage sneered at the fighter. “Traps don’t have sound warnings. They don’t whisper along the tunnels saying – watch out!”

Lacey wanted so bad to whisper, “Watch out,” but she didn’t dare. As it was, she had to press her lips together to keep from huffing out a laugh.

“You think you’re so smart,” the fighter poked a finger at the mage.

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“That is my job,” the mage raised an eyebrow. “I’m the smart one. You’re the big dumb ox that keeps me from getting hit. And Grimbol is the one who keeps you alive. Bagatoll was the one who kept us out of traps, but he’s more interested in romance than his job at the moment.”

“Don’t push me,” the fighter growled.

“As if I could push you and your bulk anywhere,” the mage scoffed, sliding a derogatory eye down to the cleric’s ample girth. “Either of you.”

“You’re just sour at the fact that Bagatoll got her into a dark corner before your pathetic charm could work on her,” the cleric sulked.

“If either of you had a wit of sense, you’d know that none of that makes sense,” the mage leaned against the wall where Lacey’s dart holes were covered with only the barest layer of dust to hide them. “With Bagatoll gone, I’m the only one who can open locked doors with my spells. Unless you’d like to try to bash stone doors down with your head.”

Lacey wanted to let the dart go, but she knew that the cleric would just heal whatever damage she might be able to do, even with the poison.

“This is pointless,” the cleric threw up his arms with a clatter of clanks.

“Neither of you will remember my insubordination anyway, so I see no reason not to speak my mind,” the mage sounded smug. “You need me to get anywhere, so you won’t kill me, even if Mardox is waiting to take my place.”

Mardox? Did the guildies have others to take the place of the ones she and Colt managed to kill?

“I always knew you were a prick, Kaleef,” the fighter slammed his fist into the wall next to the mage’s head, but from what Lacey could tell, the mage didn’t flinch. Lacey had. “Keep up the attitude though and I’ll find a way to smack you around just enough that Gimbol can heal you.”

“Try it and you’ll find out which is higher, your hit points or my mana pool,” Kaleef leaned away from the wall.

“Must we fight?” Gimbol gave a weak little laugh, like they were kidding. Lacey was pretty sure they weren’t kidding.

“We’ve been at this for weeks and for all we know, it’s all for nothing,” Kaleef stalked away from both the fighter and cleric in a way that made Lacey really want to pull the lever on that guy first. “The main skills going up have been Bagatoll’s trapsense and lockpicking. The only thing that’s been going up in my stats is some idiotic puzzle-solver skill that we’ve never seen before.”

“Your puzzle skill is going up,” the fighter stalked up to the back of the mage, turning the mage to face him. The cleric scuttled right up behind the fighter, making Lacey curse silently. “Maybe you’re the reason we’re not clearing the dungeon. Maybe you want to clear it yourself and claim the rights to it.”

“Like the guild would let me,” Kaleef tried to push the fighter’s hand away, but couldn’t make it move. “As soon as this term is up, I’m leaving for a real guild, one that appreciates mages and isn’t run by a bunch of meatheads.”

“I think I just found my new trap detector,” the fighter shoved the mage down the corridor.

“Unbelievable,” the mage skidded to a stop. “I’ll report this behavior!”

“For a smart guy, you forget yourself,” the fighter snarled. “If I won’t remember your shit, you won’t remember it either. Shut up and walk.”

That worked for Lacey. With the mage in front, the cleric was bringing up the rear. Not only that, but the swearing that the mage was doing covered up the scuffle as the cleric fell into a very deep pit. That wasn’t to say that the others didn’t notice.

“Use levitate!” the fighter insisted.

“After what you just pulled?” the mage crossed his arms over his chest again.

“Idiot!” the fighter lay down to try to reach out to the cleric, but the clanking and squealing continued as the cleric hit the sides and slid all the way to his own personal hell. “He’s the only thing keeping either of us alive.”

“I guess you can’t use me as a trap sensor without a healer to keep me alive,” the mage gave a nasty laugh. Lacey wasn’t sure how these guys had made it so far all the other times without killing each other.

“I can still use you any way I want,” the fighter turned a vicious glare on the mage. “I think I’d rather have Mardox than you anyway.”

The mage wasn’t stupid enough to misunderstand that statement and shot off what could only have been a fireball. Then again, he couldn’t have been as bright as he thought he was. He cast that fireball in an enclosed tunnel that was about 10’ wide by 40’ long before it turned a corner. The fighter, having more health points than a single fireball could take from him, rushed toward the mage.

A blade clashed against the mage’s invisible shield, but the fighter’s strength was higher than the shield and the mage took damage. Lacey timed her darts carefully for when the mage’s shield was down or when the fighter got hit with a spell of some sort. She knew better than to distract them from each other, but it was hard to resist getting a dose of poison in here and there. They’d turn on her in an instant, back-to-back against a common foe if they noticed that the traps were being set manually.

She didn’t dare dump either of them into a pit in this section of the tomb because she and Colt had set the pits here to all go to the same place for the cleric. If she trapped either of them, she’d just be reuniting them with the cleric and that wasn’t what they wanted to do.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Lacey told Colt under her breath.

“I’m almost back to the control room,” Colt replied.

“The idiots turned on each other,” Lacey laughed to herself. “Once the cleric wasn’t around to mediate, the fighter and mage started attacking each other.”

“As in they could kill each other?” Colt asked, dubious.

“We couldn’t be that lucky,” Lacey sent back. “I can’t see their health, but the mage threw a fireball, and the fighter is throwing punches. We may have bigger problems though.”

“Couldn’t be easy, huh?”

“I think they have backup outside the dungeon,” Lacey told Colt what she’d overheard. “If they just replace this group with another one…”

“Then we’ll never get the tutorial done,” Colt finished for her. Lacey thought it might be worse than that.