“Too many webs!” Cuby said as we looked out into the darkness. We didn’t have to clear them, so we agreed to do it the awful way—we jumped over the edge and let ourselves be caught by the near-invisible webbing, Cuby throwing her weapon and making attacks while I cast my one-handed spells and flared my candle-flame to show us the webs ahead. We pulled free, fell, and repeated the process until we hit the lowest floor of the large cavern, at which point—

“Ah! Babies!” Cuby cried as a bunch of chihuahua-sized spiders came out of the dark to accost us.

Jump up, I told her. I’ll be fine.

No, she said, I—I have the flat damage reduction.

Her cleave ability and my Destructive Wave made short work of them, but not before a few dozen crawled all over us in the time between our attacks. Cuby was shuddering by the time we took another doorway toward where I’d sensed the other players, but the next room wasn’t the boss room.

“Oh good,” Cuby said cheerily as we came out into a massive indoor promenade, large stone structures and more doorways to other halls stretching out to either side of us. “It’s just demons.”

A dozen demons, almost half of them morthoths, attacked from where they’d been clustered along the hall—but we agreed through the mind link that we should ignore them for now and simply run on ahead toward the boss room, and each used a Mighty Leap to clear the enemies and run toward the hall that I was sure would lead to our quarry. It was small hall, not wide enough to push a wagon through even if we could walk side-by-side, and as we took to it we could hear sounds of battle ahead of us.

We slowed for a moment so that I could store a Fragmented Supercharged Implosive Missile and give Cuby a Supercharged Haste and a Hardlight Construct. As our feet pounded against the floor, a few players came into view up ahead—launching spells at an enemy that we couldn’t see.

Good, I thought. That meant the boss was still alive, which meant that we could take advantage of the chaos. One of the players glanced at us as we came up on them, an elf man—and his eyes widened.

There was no real warning before the roof collapsed. There was a muffled boom from above us, almost like an overloud cough—then, with no slowly-spreading cracks or continuous rumbling noise to warn us—the ceiling simply fell in, beginning with the end of the hallway that we were sprinting toward but spreading to the stone overhead of us with remarkable speed.

As we both skidded to a halt, I expended my Moment of Mastery, using the mind link to have it effect Cuby, not me, because she was ahead of me.

I had the brief sensation of something slamming into me, then saw lights flash by me at a rapid pace as I heard Cuby shout and got the brief impression of a few snarling demon’s faces—and then I was rolling to a stop on the hard stone of the promenade outside, a great cloud of dust gulching out of the hallway we’d just stood in.

A brief glimpse into the mind link told me what had happened: Cuby had used the Hardlight Construct to try and stop the ceiling from falling in by bracing it, along with the Haste to grab me and drag me passed the demons she’d stunned with Jolting Shout before using her Mighty Leap to throw us back out here. She’d had to use her Flurry of Steel just to use the rest of her abilities so fast.

But how had the enemies set that trap? Explosives?

It didn’t matter: I threw myself to my feet and looked around us: the street we were on was massive, and the buildings around us larger than houses—perhaps this was Mirrakatetz’s downtown. More demons had begun to emerge from some of the buildings around us, and I saw with dismay that spiders were descending from the ceiling.

Stolen story; please report.

The spiders were particularly bothersome—they weren’t threatening by themselves, but if one of them got a lucky paralyze off on either of us while the enemy players were in a position to ambush us, we were doomed.

Cuby was using the last of the Haste spell’s bonus to run the length of the promenade, desperately searching for another hallway to lead to wherever the others had fought the boss—but the only other opening she found had a grand stairway leading upward.

They’d locked us out, at least for long enough that they’d finish their fight.

As we joined one another and started to fight the demons, we spoke:

They’re going to get that boss, said Cuby. If they haven’t already.

We’re four to two for boons, then, I said. We can keep trying to fight them or we can try and go deeper—find another boss. This place hasn’t run out yet—we haven’t even found the Great Machine that supposedly corrupted everything.

They could come in behind us if we do that, Cuby warned.

The alternative is that we set a trap, I said. But we don’t know where they’re going next—best chance is that we try to bait them again with my illusion spell. I shook my head even as I said this. How did they collapse the hallway? How did they know we could come from that entrance when they didn’t even know about the lift to the top of the mountain? We could miss them completely by taking the wrong route, and they could find us using whatever abilities they used to see us coming this time.

We threw out wave after wave as more demons came to us. I’d been a quarter of the way to 14 by the time we’d killed Eradicia, but now I was almost half. Once there were only a few demons left—mostly spiders attacking Cuby while she struck out at them in a panic, using her flurry even though it wasn’t necessary—we leapt past them and began to run along the street, looking for a way further down.

We don’t kill bosses quickly, Cuby said. We’ve got the survivability, and I have a lot more damage now, but Eradicia from 52% took a long time.

I know, I said. But she was at the summit—maybe she’s the strongest.

Maybe, she said. But I doubt it.

I had to grit my teeth as Cuby said all this, and not just because at that moment a spider the size of a horse was gnawing on my hip while Cuby stabbed it to death with divine fire: for the first dungeon, Mirrakatetz was… frustratingly intense. And if the very scant amount of knowledge I had about this place was anything to go by, the machine at its heart was where the strongest bosses would be—and after High Priest Jetfighter and Reaper Beams the Wyvern Queen, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about what might lie below.

The street split and we turned along a curving laneway. Several more packs of demons came running out of the many doorways, and I drank a mana potion as they did, deciding that it was time to start downing one every time the 1-minute resource potion cooldown was done.

Then, as we rushed forward to make sure we’d gotten the attention of all the demons we could, we spotted it: where a building might once have stood, the stone floor was simply gone, a gaping pit with cracked edges that stretched out into the street, red light emanating from below.

That pit looks like it’s glowing with hellfire! said Cuby. We should finish these and jump in!

Something came over me, then. It was just for a moment, but I looked around with a strange sort of detached feeling. There were almost three dozen corrupted gnomes clawing and casting at us, their faces fused with twisted metal and glowing with singular red eyes as their teeth gnashed and they howled with unquenchable rage. Morthoths whipped at us with chains and threw impotent fireballs. Worst of all were the spiders, each of them trying to grab us with their freakish legs and hug us closer to their hideous, chitinous bodies so as to bite us, paralyze us, and eat us alive. I thought: this is my life, now.

And then I agreed with Cuby—we smashed the demons to pieces over the course of a few dozen seconds, then leapt into the gaping pit below.