“Are you really just going to sit there for 10 hours?” Lacey goaded the fighter, who was dozing lightly in the tunnel next to them.

“I’d explore the dungeon, but you killed my rogue and filled the place with traps,” Lord Montgomery barely moved from where he leaned against a wall that wasn’t in line with any of Lacey’s traps. Out of what Lacey figured was sheer boredom, he’d moved forward far enough that she’d had to change maintenance tunnels to keep an eye on him.

“But you found the sarcophagus and chains puzzle,” Lacey called to him.

While he’d made forward progress through the maze, Lacey had had to move to the original maintenance tunnel, focusing on the traps on the other side of the tunnel. He’d practically tripped into the secret door that allowed him to take the same shortcut she’d used to get to the largest maintenance tunnel before. She’d retraced his steps and used a George on the other side of the tunnel. He now sat on the edge of another blood well, arms crossed over his chest, as he glared at the gauntlet that was the sarcophagus and chains puzzle.

“Where do they find sadists like you to be dungeon masters?” Monty said by way of an answer.

“I’m not a sadist,” Lacey replied, acting offended. “I’m a puzzle-maker and we are prized as those of highest intelligence where I come from.” The truth was that puzzle-makers were easily replaced by AIs for the most part except in escape rooms. The AI computers hadn’t taken over the creativity of that venue yet.

“You must come from the land of sadists,” Monty insisted, and she had to hide a chuckle.

He might have been right about this particular puzzle. Lacey was proud of it. Each sarcophagus held a cross between a plinko board and a pinball machine. The player had two marbles and a plunger. When the plunger shot the marble into the plinko board, it clanked and rattled louder than the rattlesnake that sneaked up behind the player of the puzzle. With other party members, it might have been easy as the fighter cut up the snakes that came out of the bottom of the sarcophagus while someone nimbler or smarter played with the flippers to keep the marble in motion. If the flipper was used correctly, the marble could be flipped into one of five slots, two of which were weight-sensitive to release keys. One key could be used to open the panel where the treasure was and the other opened the lock on the chains across the passage forward. As it was, the fighter dropped the marble down the “no-win” hole every time because he was so busy killing the snake between his legs.

“This puzzle is more fun-and-easy than sadistic,” Lacey insisted. “You play a game of plinko pinball and win a prize and get to move forward.”

“Where one must again play your idiotic game to move forward again,” Monty’s snide reply was bitter and cold. “And I suppose the endless corridor of chains is meant to encourage me to continue? It is an endless hallway.”

“It’s not endless,” Lacey denied his accusation as if it was silly. “There are only five chained doorways. Easy peasy! With your strength, you don’t even need to do the puzzle, right? You could just rip those chains right up!”

“Greased chains,” Monty grumped. He had tried and it had been as funny as she and Colt had expected. He had managed to pull the first chains loose from sheer frustration, but the second set of chains were not just slippery. They were made up of metal-skinned snakes that exuded electricity. Colt had dubbed them E-Cheels, for electronic chain eels. They hadn’t expected the jolt of electricity to transmit through a sword, but that was a nice bonus.

“The jolt wasn’t that bad,” Lacey scolded him. “After all, our wimpy little dungeon can’t cause enough damage to hurt the big, bad fighter guild leader!” The fact that he was covered in metal had probably made it much worse than expected.

“Leave me be, you nattering nincompoop,” he growled at her, probably exhausting his most scathing insult on that one.

Lacey giggled as she relayed the conversation to Colt with lots of little lols littered throughout the text box.

“They’re through to the outside,” Colt’s text seemed to bristle with tension. “Eve and the workers took turns napping to work after their normal sleep cycle. I’m proud of them.”

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“Me too, but tell me more!” Lacey thought back to him.

“It’s clear outside and dark,” Colt told her. “The worker goblins are willing to go out and do the tasks. Can you send a few elites to go with them?”

“I can take them there faster,” Lacey stood up straight, motioning the elites to go through a George exit. She left Adam and one other elite to harry the guild leader. She almost gave Adam a George so that he could move to another maintenance tunnel, but decided against it as she remembered what could happen if an adventurer got ahold of one of their Georges. “Watch Monty for me. If he moves, I’ll head back, but I’m betting he’ll stay put for as long as it would take me to get to the tunnel.”

“It’s further than you might think to the surface,” Colt cautioned her. “But I think it’s pretty safe to say that Monty isn’t getting through 4 Aztec Tombs in the next hour.”

It wasn’t like he could have talked her out of it. He could easily see that she was already halfway through Tomb 3. The dungeon wasn’t as neat as she’d left it once she hit the fourth Tomb where the excavation had started. Workers were still ducking by her carrying buckets of soil. At first, she wondered why they didn’t just dump it outside, but they couldn’t really afford to be detected yet, so she didn’t redirect the workers.

When Lacey saw the tunnel, she waved her escort past her. They scrabbled up a path that had been reinforced with stones hammered in so they were stable. They’d made a crude, wide stairway up the inside of the mountain, not by carving it out of stable stone, but by hammering a few solid pieces into what was otherwise loose surface. The earth was moist in most areas, but not quite wet enough to be mud. It was easy to see that the blasts that Eve could do had made far bigger holes than were necessary. The results were great caverns that sloped up at a daunting angle.

Knowing that she should head back to keep an eye on Monty, Lacey found herself racing up the steps like she was some jock that loved doing stadiums. The path that wound up the slope seemed to follow a vein of the softer soil in places that were easier to reinforce with the stone. Worker goblins parted to allow her to run through until she ran out of steam. Then she could only stand there panting.

“The workers are headed out now,” Colt told her as she was sucking air and cursing her disdain for aerobics classes. “You’re about a tenth of the way there. You’re doing great.”

Lacey had figured that she was at least halfway to the new entrance. How had those goblins gotten up there so fast? She put her head down and coaxed screaming muscles up another stadium’s worth of steep steps, thinking that she hated Colt right then. She hated Colt and Monty and every gym teacher that had ever urged her to consider stadium exercises a blessing to her health. She made up a few people to hate just to get another ten steps.

“Wow,” she read Colt’s text in the moments that she was bent over sucking air into raging lungs. “You made it to a third of the way, I think.”

“Fuck you,” she sent back on a thought, too breathless to say it in words out loud. The walls had narrowed slightly with sloping piles of rock on either side of her.

She got an LOL response and rolled her eyes.

“It’s a quarter mile of stairs, Lacey,” Colt sent to her as she collapsed into a heap of panting.

“That doesn’t sound that far,” Lacey sent to him. She glared at the steps as another worker went past with a bucket of pale-colored crystals.

“In a car, maybe,” Colt replied, more lols floating around the texts. Was the texting system getting more sophisticated?

“I want to see the top!” Lacey ground out between clenched teeth as she got back up.

“Would it slow you down to tell you that Monty is moving again?”

“Is he?” Lacey paused.

“No, but I was hoping it could convince you not to do this,” Colt’s words came back, and she could imagine his wince. “You look miserable, and I hate seeing you that way.”

“Sorry to torture you with my misery,” Lacey growled the thought into the chat that inserted some grr emojis.

“Fine, I’ll encourage then,” Colt’s words flitted across her fuzzy vision. “Go. Lacey. Go!”

Lacey stomped one foot and then the other up those steps, knowing that she was being unreasonable. She wasn’t mad, but mad helped her climb. Her body got numb and her mind cleared of everything but the next step. She passed the point where Eve and her crew were headed back down the stairs. Eve paused to watch Lacey trudge by.

“You can do it!” came Colt’s encouragement.

Lacey made it to the smaller tunnel just as one worker darted past with a bucket of berries. Her muscles pulsed, but they hadn’t hit any real pain yet. She thought, belatedly, that she probably should have stretched before attempting this idiotic thing. She let another goblin with dirt pass her before she squeezed into a tunnel that was barely big enough for a bigger goblin. Luckily, she wasn’t much bigger than Eve.

By the time she reached the modest opening, she had backed two goblins up until they were outside the dungeon. Some part of her knew that this opening would be no different than the main entrance to the dungeon. She wouldn’t be able to get out from under all this dirt just because this one was on the other side of the mountain. Irrationally, she ignored all that and surged toward the dark blue sky beyond.

Of course, she hit the invisible wall.