Lacey pushed Hughe to the side of the pedestal, putting his back to the door, and glared at the screen. The screen hadn’t changed.

“No need to get greedy,” Colt placated Hughe. “I’m sure we can find treasure for you.”

“I can’t get into anything,” Lacey complained, swiping through screens, most of which were locked. “It’s like it’s locked down because of him being here.” She didn’t think that, but it might make sense and she was really just trying to distract him and keep his attention on the screen.

“No use trying then,” the kid’s face hardened in a way that made them not consider him as kidlike as they had before. Had something alerted him to danger? “I’m not a complicated guy and I’m just level 5. It’s probably just best if I kill you and let you respawn in some other place.”

“Hang on,” Colt’s tone got a bit more tense as he backed up toward their table. “What if you just come back tomorrow? I can guarantee we’ll have something for you by then. It’s just that the controls are probably locked out while we have a combatant in the dungeon. I mean, that makes sense, right?”

“What do you mean respawn?” Lacey ignored the danger to ask, bringing Hughe’s attention to her and not the goblin sneaking in the door behind him.

“Adventurers respawn back at their hometown, or their last guild,” Hughe paused in drawing his sword to say. “I’m sure dungeons respawn too. We lose some experience, but you don’t have any anyway if you just got here yesterday, right?”

“What if dungeons don’t respawn?” Lacey interrupted, sending a glance around the room behind her, looking for something in the almost empty cave to help her out.

“I’m sure they do?” he assured them, stalking toward Lacey while keeping one eye on Colt who held his hands up, trying to look helpless.

“Why?” Lacey asked, stalling for time as she saw a very large goblin sneak very quietly into the room behind the boy. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy goblin or a girl goblin. She didn’t care. Lacey was just glad it was a large goblin.

“Because I would respawn back at town, so I’m sure you would too,” Hughe insisted, becoming annoyed in a way that Lacey had a habit of doing to normally sane people. The sound of his sword sliding from the sheath at his waist didn’t sound at all like it did in the movies. It was quiet and deadly.

“Would I respawn with my shoes?” Lacey asked, edging back from the young man with the sword and toward the bed.

“What do you mean?” Hughe asked, his focus on Lacey, not Colt, who was leaning against one of their splinter-infested chairs as the goblin crept slowly closer.

“I got up so abruptly that I didn’t get a chance to put on my shoes,” Lacey reasoned. “At least let me put them on before you kill me so I’m not barefoot at our next respawn.”

“Uh, okay,” Hughe lowered his sword slightly and cast a glance back at Colt, which was their undoing.

Several things happened at once, belying everything Lacey had learned about fighting from DnD. The goblin darted forward, swinging a pail full of coal at Hughe’s head. Hughe lifted his sword to block the bucket as he spun to face the goblin. Colt picked up the chair and swung it at Hughe. Lacey chucked her shoes at the back of Hughe’s head like she was Colt’s mom when one of the boys got too big for their britches.

The sword blocked the pail of coal, which rotated around the fist of the goblin, dumping half the coal on the floor. Hughe continued his swing of the sword in such a way that it headed toward the chair aimed at his head. Lacey lunged forward to sink her teeth into Hughe’s shoulder so deep, the guy would have been very sorry he had turned his back on her. Unlike their schoolyard fights, Lacey didn’t just aim to startle her opponent. She bit hard enough to draw blood, or at least she would have if she hadn’t missed and bit leather armor instead.

The goblin turned all the way around, building momentum with its half-full pail of coal as it aimed again at the adventurer’s head. Hughe struggled to reverse the momentum of his sword and bring it up against the chair in Colt’s hands. Lacey wrapped her arms around Hughe’s neck, throwing him off balance so that the chair grazed his temple. She then shifted her bite to the back of the guy’s neck and got a mouthful of hair and ear that tasted disgustingly of sweat and grime to begin with and then filled with blood in a way she’d never experienced in school fights. Then again, she’d never fought this hard on the schoolground.

Hughe lunged one way to duck the circling bucket, but Lacey was pulling the other way. The result was that the bucket clocked them both a little, scattering what was left of the contents of the bucket. Lacey’s wide eyes met the goblin’s just as Hughe recovered enough to slide his sword toward the goblin’s bulging stomach. Hughe, so focused on the goblin and girl, totally missed the fact that half a chair was aiming to brush his teeth for him.

Teeth, splinters, and coal flew and scattered. Hughe shrugged to try to loosen Lacey or because he was staggered by the chair. Lacey couldn’t tell which. Colt, having experience in hitting foes while not hitting Lacey, had landed a solid blow, but now only held two chair legs, one in each hand. Hughe’s sword slid across and into the goblin’s stomach. He’d had Eve’s eyes, that goblin. They were red and somehow still expressive like Eve’s had been. Lacey gulped back the thought and regretted it immediately as blood went down her throat as she had not let go of Hughe’s neck and ear. She was pretty sure that the lump in her throat was a piece of his ear and tried not to think about it.

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Hughe tucked his chin into the crook of Lacey’s arm that was choking him and then he shook like that could dislodge her. Lacey clenched that elbow. She’d learned self-defense in college. They had free classes for that. He wasn’t getting away that easily. With her other hand, she locked her elbow into position and applied pressure. The goblin fell to his knees, trying to hold its stomach closed. Colt stabbed out with his splintered sticks, only managing to completely destroy his weapons as they shattered against the leather armor.

Hughe bent his knees and started to lean forward to flip Lacey off his shoulders, but she countered by wrapping her legs securely around his waist and locking her ankles. The kid wasn’t that big. He just had a sword and armor that wasn’t going to keep him from passing out from lack of oxygen. Colt swept out with a side kick he’d learned from one of his older brothers who had taken karate. There was a horrible crunching noise as his kick connected with a knee. Colt wasn’t pulling punches either.

This is where the movies would have shown Hughe’s eyes rolling up into the back of his head and passing out. That was what Lacey had been ready for. What she wasn’t ready for was Hughe flinging his head back into what might have been her nose, if she hadn’t had her teeth clamped on a new piece of sweaty skin at his neck. Hughe’s sword swung wildly in front of him, missing everything, but blocking Colt from getting another hit in.

The following ninety seconds was a parody of errors as Hughe tried to buck Lacey off while blocking Colt and not slipping on the goblin guts on the floor at his feet or the lumps of coal, or the shattered chair. He fell when his wounded knee buckled as he tripped from lack of oxygen on a rounded leg of the chair that was coated in goblin guts. Rather than lurch forward, Hughe toppled backward on top of Lacey, who oompfed as the air was violently expunged from her lungs. Unfortunately for them, this caused Lacey to release her grip of Hughe’s neck and waist, which resulted in 2 seconds of gulping air before Colt slammed the sole of his foot into Hughe’s solar plexus and returned the lack of oxygen to new heights for the poor kid.

Lacey was still seeing stars as Colt dragged her out from under the body of their foe, her back scraping against coal and splinters and her shirt soaked in blood. Colt tutted over her until Lacey sat up, alternating between gasping for breath and spitting out the foulness that was in her mouth. Colt checked for a pulse in the non-bloodied part of Hughe’s neck and shook his head at Lacey, who paled.

“It was him or us,” she breathed out, trying to wipe at her mouth with some clean part of her arm. There wasn’t a clean spot. It was all gross.

“He’ll respawn,” Colt told himself.

That goaded Lacey into action as she scrambled over to work on stripping Hughe of everything on his body. Colt only paused a moment before joining her. The red lighting pulsed one last time and then faded back to the blue they’d gotten used to.

“Sword, leather chest and legs, a pouch with some coins, what looks like crackers and cheese, leather boots,” Colt inventoried what he’d taken off Hughe.

“Cloth pants, underwear, socks, cloth shirt, one ring, leather helmet, and a tooth on a leather thong,” Lacey listed off what she had taken.

“I appreciate the extra pair of socks,” Colt gave her a lopsided smile, “but the underwear?”

“For Eve,” Lacey replied, and Colt’s eyes lost their shimmer of amusement. “And he pissed me off,” she continued, and his sparkle came back.

“Are you sure you didn’t just want to see him naked?” Colt teased her.

“Uh, no,” Lacey raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “Jailbait.”

“Yeah, he was young,” Colt’s eyes got a bit of shadow that Lacey didn’t like.

“He’ll respawn,” Lacey reminded Colt.

“Probably naked,” Colt pressed his lips together as his eyes danced.

The goblin dissolved before Hughe did. Lacey skittered back on her hands when Hughe started to disappear. The mess they left behind did not dissolve, at least not all of it. Anything they hadn’t taken of the body dissolved, including the blood and guts. Only Lacey’s clothes seemed to retain enough of the blood to be a mess of bodily fluids. Lacey levered herself to her feet even as Colt glanced balefully at the mess of coal and splintered wood.

“Three chairs is probably enough,” Lacey tried to distract him.

“Yeah,” Colt puffed out. “And next time we’ll have a sword instead of a rickety chair.”

“Next time,” Lacey said low and made herself look at the pedestal.

Colt made his way over to the ruined door as Lacey touched the message in the middle of the screen.

“Full dungeon wipe,” the voice said out loud, so she touched the next line of runes. “Entrance closed until dawn for reset.”

“At least we have until tomorrow morning,” Colt said, picking up a chunk of wood that used to be a door.

“That could be two hours or two minutes away since we can’t see the sun to know what time it is,” Lacey complained.

“But it’s something,” Colt said purposefully.

“But it’s something,” Lacey repeated dutifully, hitting the next line of what looked like notices.

“Level 5 fighter defeated,” the voice said. “Level up. Congratulations, your dungeon is now level one.”

“Okay,” Lacey breathed out heavily to clear the disgust that seemed stuck in the back of her throat with the taste of blood that didn’t seem to be going away. “I guess we really were a baby dungeon.”

“Wipe summary:” the voice went on with the bad news. “121 level 0 goblins destroyed. 598 level 0 beetles destroyed. 204 level 0 bats destroyed. 93 level one worms destroyed. 72 rooms looted.”

“Maybe not so baby?” Colt countered.

“How did we get so many monsters?” Lacey goggled at the display that still didn’t make sense.

“I don’t know, but we need some more,” Colt replied, pointing to the pedestal with the sword that he now carried with him. “You work that thing, and I’ll go check out some rooms. Maybe I can figure out how we expanded overnight.”

“I can see the map,” Lacey called out to him.

“Maps don’t tell a story, and we need the story as much as the schematics, don’t you think?” Colt called back over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Lacey said to herself, flicking through screens.