Lacey returned to her place near the fighter in time to wake him up with a poisoned dart. She’d given up on the idea of not letting him know that she or at least someone sentient was near him in the Tomb. The floor vibrated, and while the fighter didn’t make much of it, Lacey knew that it was Eve blasting through a ton of dirt and every vibration took them that much closer to the end of the tutorial from hell. Lacey was very glad that Eve was scared of her makers enough to go all out.

“What the hell?” the fighter plucked the dart out of his neck and stared at the wall where it had to have come from.

“Sleep on your own time, asshole,” Lacey snapped at the adventurer.

In the time it had taken for Ginger to organize the goblins, Lacey had decided that if this was the way dungeons were run, she’d rather be a player. At least she’d try it. If being a player was as bad as this, she and Colt could just quit. The decision had freed her from the need to survive.

“You’re one of the dungeon masters?” the fighter gave a huff of a laugh. “Oh, you’re dead!”

“Big words from a guy who’s lost most of his team to this dungeon master,” Lacey drawled back.

“But now you’re out here in my arena and I can kill you,” the fighter levered himself to his feet and drew his sword.

“You’d have to be able to get to me first,” Lacey let another poisoned dart fly.

“Now that I know where you are, that’ll be easy,” the fighter beat the dart out of the air.

He approached the wall and felt around the little holes where Lacey lobbed another dart straight into his palm.

“I’m not afraid of your little darts,” he pulled the dart out of his hand and tossed it to the ground.

“Come and get me then,” Lacey taunted the guy.

He took a step and almost fell into a pit. Now that the cleric was good and dead, she wasn’t worried about dumping the fighter down a few levels. It would keep him away from the excavation that Lacey could feel happening as the ground vibrated again. She’d been assured that even if Eve ran out of mana, one of her team would take her place and create more “booms.” Lacey had watched a single blast, and the resulting tunnel would be huge, but the workers were clearing it faster than they could dig it using 20 goblins.

“You can try to kill me, but I’m not as stupid as you think I am,” the fighter laughed at her pit, but that was okay. She was just toying with him.

“I’m Lacey,” she introduced herself, triggering another dart that missed the fighter’s butt by an inch. “The mage was Kaleef. The cleric was Gimbol and the thief was Bagatoll, but I never heard your name. They just seemed to call you asshole a lot.”

“Funny,” the fighter took a running start and jumped over the pit, only to skid to a stop as another one opened up in front of him. He barely managed to pivot and grab onto the wall to keep from falling down the slide. Lacey figured he had to have a decent dexterity to be a fighter. “I’m Montgomery.”

“Nice to meet you, Monty,” Lacey said, resetting both traps.

“It’s Montgomery,” the fighter ground his teeth, making Lacey smile. “And even if you kill me, there’s a whole guild camped outside waiting to take my place.”

“But you’re the leader, right?” Lacey called out. “I heard the mage call you the meathead leader.”

“I am Lord Montgomery, and I am the leader of this guild,” Monty sounded far too snooty to be a dumb meathead, but here he was being meaty of the headedness.

“Oh, I get it,” Lacey snapped her fingers. “You’re a legacy boy. Had your title handed to you with that silver spoon?”

“I am neither a boy nor have I had my title handed to me with or without a spoon,” Monty protested, taking another running leap to jump over both traps. “I’m about to earn myself a brand new dungeon with which I plan to train my troops.”

“Not without Hughe,” Lacey poked at him to get information. Meatheads were often really good at villain speeches. “I thought you needed him to take over the dungeon.”

“Are you a woman?” Monty blurted out the non-sequitur after landing past both traps.

“No,” Lacey teased the man by using a very low voice.

“You are a woman,” Monty became utterly amused as he strolled around the little hallway that led away from and then returned to the wall where Lacey could get to him. “How like a woman to resort to stalling mechanisms instead of providing traditional monsters. It reeks of cowardice.”

Lacey laughed, moving to the newest set of traps that were at the end of the maintenance tunnel as his path led right around it in a u-turn.

“You find my insults amusing?” Monty drawled out like he was talking to a child.

“I find it amusing that you think I’m dumb for outsmarting you so many times,” Lacey quipped back, launching the spring-loaded spears.

“These traps of yours cannot kill me,” the fighter easily knocked the spears out of the air, but one managed to do a few points of damage.

“A friend of mine used to play Magic, the Gathering,” Lacey explained, winding the spring mechanism back into place. She and Colt had played the game obsessively for a few years, but the cards had gotten to the point that she had them organized in file boxes. Colt had convinced her to sell them all one year in exchange for what ended up being enough for a weekend escape-room builders convention. “He had this one white deck, and it didn’t seem to do a lot of damage.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“I know nothing of these magic systems you speak of,” Monty scoffed, dodging a swinging log full of spikes that suddenly filled the hallway.

“Anyway, this deck might not have done a lot of damage on a single turn, but he’d filled it with all these protections too,” Lacey explained as he turned another corner. “You just couldn’t do enough damage to him through these protections to kill him, but he’d always take off one or two points every single turn and if he played you long enough, he’d dink you to death. We called it his dink deck.”

“Is this supposed to be an amusing tale?” Monty hopped over a low axe and then barely ducked the axe that split down the middle of the hallway. “It’s like these puzzles of yours. They simply aren’t amusing either. They are annoying.”

“Yeah, so was that dink deck,” Lacey huffed as she rewound the mechanism of the axes.

“Your aim is to be annoying?” Monty chuckled. “I believe you have succeeded.”

“And what’s your ‘aim?’” Lacey reached to rewind the second axe’s mechanism, but Adam had done it for her. She gave him a smile.

“I have told it to you already,” Monty blotted at a small slice on his wrist from where one of the axes had grazed him. “I aim to make my guild powerful and then rich by securing this dungeon.”

“I’m all for power and riches, but you’d be at the mercy of Hughe,” Lacey flipped a switch to turn off the next water trap. She wasn’t actually aiming to kill him, though she did wonder how he would deal with a 30’ deep pool of water in the armor he was wearing.

“I can deal with the likes of Hughe,” the man sneered.

“You could have dealt with us too,” Lacey tried, though she didn’t want to work with the asshole any more than she’d ever wanted to work with Hughe.

“Are you bargaining for your life already?” Monty gave a snide laugh. “There is very little space left for you to hide. I shall find the entrance to your lair, little mouse.”

Lacey laughed, almost regretting not drowning the man in the pool. Guys didn’t have to be like this any more than girls had to be catty or bitchy. Colt wasn’t like this. That’s why the girls liked him so much, Lacey thought. Even when he was saying goodbye to a girl, he was respectful and kind.

“You find your impending death funny?” Monty wasn’t insulted by her laugh, like he really should have been.

“I find your arrogance annoying, but my death is not as inevitable as you assume,” she loosed a blast of fire that she aimed for his pompous head, and snickered as it lit his coif on fire.

“You cannot hide forever, little mouse,” Monty growled. He was more intent on patting out the fire on his head, so Lacey forgave him for the lame comeback. Monty strolled up to the well of blood at the end of the passage of traps. “Is this the entrance to your little hole?”

“Oh, no!” Lacey gasped dramatically. “You’ve found the secret passage into my hidey hole. Whatever shall I do?”

“Women are so predictable,” Monty shook his head, tapping the bricks one after another. “You really think a secret door will protect you from me?”

“Without Bagatoll, I doubt you could figure out the latch to your own backpack, much less find the entrance to my lair,” Lacey taunted him with a giggle.

“The mistake you made is in thinking that I need to find the mechanism to open the door,” Monty gave the wall in front of Lacey a stern look and then threw himself at it.

Lacey laughed again, knowing that the 3’ thickness was more than enough to keep out the meathead. He’d tried this kind of thing before. It was the whole reason she’d beefed up the walls.

“If it’s a door, I can bully it down,” Monty insisted, throwing himself at the wall again. “It will eventually give way.”

“You think you haven’t tried this before?” Lacey continued to laugh as he did more damage to himself against the wall than she had with most of her traps. “Do I sound afraid?”

“No, but you will be,” Monty doggedly threw himself at the wall again.

“I really won’t,” Lacey chuckled, admiring his determination. It was 3 feet of solid wall unless she threw a George on it.

“You’ll be happy to know that I’ve wisely resisted using Georges to let him barrel through both walls and back into the other side,” Lacey told Colt.

“Thank you,” Colt responded. “I’m showing that the tunnel is nearly a third of the way through the mountain. Eve’s spells are making quick work of it.”

“It would have been funny,” Lacey complained lightly, her mood lifted by the greatly decreased wait on their escape hatch.

“Foolish,” Colt texted back.

“But funny,” she bantered, liking new Lacey, who almost didn’t care.

“Funny, but only if you don’t do it,” Colt countered.

“I’ve been having a conversation with the jerk down here,” Lacey stuck her thumb at the wall next to her where Monty was still throwing himself against it. “He’s not half as amusing as our made-up dialogue was for all of them when we couldn’t hear this.”

“Anything revealing?” Colt asked.

“Not at all,” Lacey frowned. “Why is he so stuck on the idea of working with Hughe though? Couldn’t he have cut out the middleman by dealing directly with us?”

“Not really,” Colt answered her. “The dungeon will revert to Hughe next and while they can kill him and take over the dungeon, they can only cash it out for money.”

“Then why does he keep saying he can use it to level up his entire guild and then make money off of it?” Lacey asked. “We have to be missing something.”

“Not unless he’s nobility or something,” Colt said.

“He is a Lord,” Lacey snapped her fingers. “Does that make a difference?”

“That would do it,” Colt texted back. “Nobility can quick-claim a dungeon, but the dungeon has to submit willingly. Otherwise, it would be slavery.”

“You think Hughe knows that?” Lacey asked.

“What do you mean?”

“So, let’s say witless here talks to Hughe and finds out that Hughe is an idiot who doesn’t know the rules,” Lacey pondered in text to Colt. “He tells Hughe that he has to turn the dungeon over willingly, a little fudging of the real rules, and Hughe thinks he’s giving up the dungeon altogether in return for membership in this Lord’s guild. But Monty here really means to enslave Hughe as the dungeon master. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to deal with us.”

“He figures we know better?” Colt considered it.

“Maybe at first he didn’t figure that way, but once he didn’t defeat the dungeon right away?” Lacey fingered the George in her pocket. Monty had slumped down the wall to rest, but there was another vibration beneath her feet that let her know that her side of this equation was still on track.

“He’s thinking we’re not such noobs after all,” Colt mused. “But what’s with the incursions? If we were out of the tutorial, we could just close the dungeon for a few days or maybe even a few months. Do you think he doesn’t know?”

“I’m guessing this guy knows more than we do about all of this,” Lacey muttered under her breath. “He’s a silver spoon. That means he’s been schooled on the rules his whole life. There’s some loophole he’s counting on or something. This siege is too organized and methodical. Why go through all that if we could just shut it down when we’ve had enough?”

“Maybe he knows we’re still in the tutorial?”

“If he doesn’t know it, he’s guessing something like it.” Lacey rewound the key to the fire trap, dribbling what little moonshine they had left into the fuel tank. Adam hadn’t touched the tank or the key, a guilty look on his face. He and his elites were helpfully resetting most traps, but they wouldn’t touch the ones with moonshine. Lacey just rolled her eyes and imagined someone like Monty running a dungeon. It was madness.