The rogue died of blood loss as they’d expected. The cleric knocked himself out and was still unconscious when Colt found and killed him. That much had been easy. The fighter had beaten the mage unconscious but had obviously intended to keep his party member alive. The poison that the darts had delivered had pushed the unconscious mage over the edge, but the fighter stomping the corpse to a pulp hadn’t helped. The fighter obviously got notifications that his party members were dead and every time it happened, he kicked the mage’s body again. Then he sat there on a trap-free square in the Aztec Tomb and swore and complained.
Lacey sat near and swore silently right along with the guy. She was pretty sure that he could just walk out and there wouldn’t be much she could do about it. She had a few places that she could try to catch him into the same pit slides that the cleric had died in, but the guy didn’t look like he was going to move.
When the fighter started to snore, Lacey sent the elites out after him, but he had really good reflexes, waking almost instantly at the sound of the footfalls. The elite squad had barely made it back into the tunnel before the fighter had rounded the corner. Lacey had lunged for a trap mechanism, but the fighter had leapt over the pit with inches to spare.
“We should just kill the fighter,” Colt suggested. “We can get him to chase the goblins into enough traps to take him out.”
“I don’t think so,” Lacey countered. “At least not yet. If he dies, I just think we’ll get another group in here and the whole thing will start up again.”
“The devil you know and all is one thing,” Colt’s text scrolled across her display. “But I’m done with this siege. I’m ready to just kill anyone who comes in until they get the message that we need some down time. We can make a 100’ pit out of the first bat cave and just make it impassable.”
“The last mage had levitate,” Lacey texted back. “But I’m with you on the fatality rate. We may not reset after a group wipe, but if we wipe them out early enough, it won’t matter. I’m ready to decimate their whole guild.”
“Murder hole ambush,” Colt brainstormed. “We make the first room a pit where we have a hundred goblins all shooting through the ceiling at anything that moves. They’ll die eventually and it’ll level up some goblins.”
“Again, the mages screw up that one,” Lacey argued. “They just need to cast into the murder holes to kill all the goblins.”
“Landslide, the falling ceiling, or…”
“Why don’t I just put a note on the door like we did before?” Lacey rolled her eyes at the idea, but it was as valid as any of the other methods. “Are you sure there isn’t a way to close the dungeon for a specified number of days?”
“Yeah, but…”
“It’s on the other side of the tutorial,” Lacey guessed and wanted to bang her head on the wall. “Stalemate.”
“We’re smarter than this lunkhead,” Colt replied.
“It’s not going to matter if there’s a platoon of his guildmates out there waiting to take up his place,” Lacey dug her hands into her hair.
“No use worrying about what we can’t know,” Colt told her. He’d returned to the control room and could only sit there and watch.
“I could go look,” Lacey suggested.
“No way, Lacey,” Colt sent back via their text. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that he was worried.
“I’m the only one who could,” Lacey sent. “We aren’t going to get another chance.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Colt countered.
“If we could kill this guy, I’d agree with you,” Lacey reasoned, trying not to sigh loudly. “But all he’s got to do is walk out of here or wait out the timeout and he’s got us trapped again.”
“If he catches you out there,” Colt was saying.
“It’s only the last huge bat cave that would be the real problem,” Lacey closed her eyes and focused on the image in her memory. “Everyplace else has a hidey hole I could duck into to avoid him.”
Lacey was wildly oversimplifying the situation. Were there hidey holes? There were hiding places, but if this guy got serious looking for her, she was toast. There was no way she could defend herself from him in a face-to-face attack.
“It’s too dangerous,” Colt texted her. “Please Lacey, don’t do this.”
He knew that she would. They both did.
“I’ve got to know.”
Lacey used George 13 to exit the maintenance tunnel and head back to the previous maintenance tunnel where they’d ambushed Helluna and Hughe. The fighter was far enough away that Lacey was sure he wouldn’t hear her, but she was quiet anyway. She’d left two elite goblins to harry the man if he started to move around, but the rest came with her.
Lacey climbed the stairs up to the first level, where the fighter and his party had already decimated the entire population of baby beetles. It was messy, but quiet. She swore to herself that she’d install maintenance tunnels in every room from now on, but until then, she had to content herself with the fact that Colt was watching. He’d let her know if anything odd happened.
The reason the bat cave entrance was the only sticky spot was that it didn’t have any escape valve at all. If people came into the dungeon or if the fighter came up behind her, there was nowhere to hide. The floor of the bat cave was littered with bat guano and charred bat guts. The mage had sniped the bats off the ceiling as they’d stirred.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
As much as Colt had worried, Lacey’s journey was quiet, but at the cave entrance, she got nervous again. Could more come in now that some were dead? Would anyone out there know that their guildmates had died?
Taking a deep breath, Lacey stuck her head around the corner of the entrance to peek outside. The daylight burned her eyes, but as she blinked it away, she saw the truth. There were at least two other groups waiting for entry to the dungeon. They sat around little campfires where they were cooking food and drying meat.
“There’s half a guild out here just waiting to take that asshole’s place,” Lacey reported to Colt, having seen enough. “And they have the rest of Hughe’s party out there.”
“Even if we kill off this group, there’s another one waiting.”
“Yeah,” Lacey backed away from the entrance.
“Adam go out and fight!” Adam told Lacey, but she shook her head at him.
“Even if I could sneak you out there, you’d never be able to gather a tree’s worth of wood, a basket of berries, a dozen pinecones, and kill a woodland creature for meat to bring back,” Lacey patted the goblin on the shoulder. “If they didn’t kill you on the way out, they’d kill you on the way back in and then where would we be?”
“Is there a way we can make another exit to the dungeon?” Lacey sent to Colt.
“Maybe,” Colt replied. “But I looked that one up and a second entrance allows for a second party to enter.”
“So, we make it on the other side of the mountain,” Lacey got up and brushed the dust off her pants as quietly as she could.
“That could work.”
“Do we have any rooms close to the surface on that side?” Lacey asked Colt. “I’m wondering if we can tunnel to the surface with workers before this incursion times out.”
“It’d be easier if we just rearranged the rooms,” Colt answered. “But maybe the fourth Aztec Tomb level.”
“If Ginger’s in the control room, we’ll need someone else to head up the workers,” Lacey walked back to the Aztec maze with less trepidation than she’d had coming out.
“Ginger’s actually in the water cavern,” Colt told her. “She was bored with hiding under the bed and delegated the task to another lazier worker.”
“Go get Ginger from the water cavern,” Lacey ordered one of the elite goblins. “Meet me at the second Aztec Tomb entrance.”
“What about the fighter?” Colt worried at her.
“He’s penned down even if he does finally decide to get off his ass and try his hand at the first maze all alone,” Lacey shrugged, watching the elite hustle off to do her bidding.
“I’m liking the new brave Lacey,” Colt texted.
“I think it comes with nothing to lose,” Lacey admitted, more to herself than him, though she sent the message.
Lacey felt her shoulders loosen in a way they never had before. Was this what people without anxiety felt like every day? Could people like Colt just walk around not worrying about all the things that could go wrong in every corner of the room? And why had it happened just then? The stakes were still as high as they’d always been.
Lacey was amazed that her fear could be shrugged off. She’d spent her life trying to get out from under the constant fear of being a failure or doing things so wrong that she screwed up everything for everyone. She kicked at a rock and watched it skitter away. That was why she’d played a lot of video games. If you screwed up in a video game, you just started over or went back to the last save.
Had she finally realized that this was just a video game? Had she finally let that sink in enough to let it go? Her mother had believed in psychologists and sent Lacey to three or four over the years. Her dad, not so much. He’d been of the tough-it-out mindset. The last psychologist she’d seen had been at the mandatory counseling they’d sent her to at the college, but the staff there was graduate students with almost no experience. They’d been better suited to dealing with homesickness than anxiety at Lacey’s level.
No matter how many times or ways that Colt had told Lacey to relax, she’d always wondered how that worked for other people. It was a video game, and they really didn’t have a lot to lose. The worst that could happen was that they became players in the game. Or maybe the absolute worst was going back to their shitty apartment with the running hot and cold water and jobs where the only bullies and goblins were the people in line, or the managers. At least they could leave work stuff behind when their shifts were over.
Lacey thought about the worries she’d had in her old life. She’d been worried that she was a failure, or if they had enough for rent and one more escape room, and whether Colt’s mom would bake pie or cake for dessert on Sunday. It didn’t seem like a lot, but it had been for Lacey at the time. Would it be now?
Ginger ran up to Lacey, the elite huffing and puffing to keep up with the industrious little goblin. The adventurer entrance to the second Aztec Tomb was a secret door that only opened once the altars had been covered in the blood that could be gotten from the blood wells throughout the maze. The blood soaked into the porous stone of the altars and down onto pressure plates that slowly triggered a stone knife to fall down the middle of the mural on the back wall. When the knife hit the sacrifice, blood would burst out and cover the floor as the mural split in two to allow passage to the next level.
“Hey, Ginger,” Lacey said, bypassing all that with a judiciously placed George, stepping into the second Aztec tomb’s long first hallway.
“What Lacey need?” Ginger wrung her hands and Lacey wondered for a moment how she wasn’t doing the same. Lacey was the worrywart. She should be more worried and yet there was a looseness in her that was foreign but welcome.
“It’s about a quarter of a mile to the surface at about a 45-degree angle from that fourth Aztec Tomb,” Colt’s text told Lacey. “That’s the one we trapped specifically for a blood overflow in case everything else failed.”
“We need to get a bunch of workers up here to tunnel to the surface,” Lacey explained to Ginger, walking the long corridor where she held the George open for Ginger to enter the next Tomb.
“But adventurers in here?” Ginger looked around in confusion.
“Only one left and he’s sulking in the first Tomb where the elites and I are going to keep him busy while the workers dig,” Lacey explained.
“Adventurers dumb,” Ginger clucked her tongue. “They have moonshine?”
“No,” Lacey chuckled and included Colt on the thought, “but that’s not a bad idea in the future. We should definitely add moonshine as loot in the treasure boxes.”
“This is why I love Ginger,” Colt texted back.
“So Ginger,” Lacey put a light hand on the goblin’s shoulder and pointed from one end of the front hall of the Tomb to the other. “How long do you think it would take for workers to dig out a tunnel 10 times as long as this hallway, but going uphill like this?” Lacey held her hand at about a 45-degree angle.
“Oh,” Ginger set a finger to her lips and tapped it there for a moment. She walked the hallway twice, then ordered one of the elites to send for 10 of her best digger workers and 10 of her runners. “Take less than one day but more than time Colt sleeps.”
“Any way to speed that up?” Lacey winced at the time. She really wanted to finish the tunnel before the current incursion timed out. “Can Eve help?”
“Eve more trouble than worth, but maybe speed up with blasties for hard spots,” Ginger shrugged at Lacey. “Eve hard to get to work now that she big magic goblin!”
“Get Eve and her entire team up here now,” Lacey ordered another elite. “Tell her that I sent for her and if she’s late, I’ll be pissed.”
The elite paled a bit but nodded very fast and left to comply. All that threatening had done wonders for obedience in the upper class of goblins. They might feel above the workers, but they were respectful of Lacey and Colt. Maybe respectful wasn’t the word as much as scared to death of them.