There was the usual brief sense of discontinuity – not an uncomfortable feeling, just a vague sensation of a gap in my awareness between walking into the Portal and emerging from the other side. I shook my head slightly to clear it and stepped forward, vacating the space in front of the Portal exit moments before Sean came through behind me. Naomi brought up the rear.

The morning's interminable waiting and anticipation had finally come to an end. We'd returned to the place where Heroes belong – we were inside a Dungeon once again.

Sean and Naomi waved away the identical translucent panels hanging before them, already knowing what the contents of the system Messages would be. Following suit, I quickly swiped through my own handful of waiting notifications with a glance.

New Message:

Transit successful.

You are now entering a Dungeon!

Dungeon: Wyxillwchn Bkk

Level: 5

Next →

There was a reason everybody referred to Dungeons by the location their Portals first appeared, even though they each apparently had a name – as the Message demonstrated, those names were almost always unpronounceable gibberish. "Valley Forge Dungeon" was easier to remember and far less of a mouthful than whatever the heck "Wyxillwchn Bkk" was supposed to mean.

On very rare occasions, Heroes had entered a Dungeon that seemed to be named in an Earth language, but nobody could say if that was simply a coincidence of the infinite-monkeys-on-infinite-typewriters sort, or if there was some deeper meaning behind it all.

This Dungeon's Level of 5 was perfect for our Level 4 party. You'd get some Experience from killing Monsters, clearing rooms and completing Quests in any Dungeon, provided it was within 5 Levels of all your party members, but the rewards were prorated based on the difference.

Dungeons much lower Level than your party weren't a great use of time, especially considering you had to sign up to be put on the waiting list for access to any Dungeon administered by the government... which was basically all of them, unless you were willing to venture outside the country.

Most everywhere outside the United States used the same general criteria, anyhow, dividing Dungeons into five-Level brackets – starting with Category 1, for Levels 1 through 5 – and limiting entry to only Heroes in the appropriate range.

And naturally, attempting to fight your way through a Dungeon too much higher than your party Level would be a dicey proposition regardless, even if you could talk your way into one.

New Message:

Quest complete!

Completed "Tutorial Quest – Stage 3".

Objective: Enter a Dungeon.

Reward: Experience

(This Recurring Quest can be repeated daily while any other Tutorial Quests are active.)

Speaking of getting Experience, just setting foot in a Dungeon had already earned us some by completing one of the Recurring Tutorial Quests. Not much, I figured, resisting the desire to check my Status to confirm.

Recurring Quests gave a diminishing amount of Experience as you went up in Level, but Experience was Experience. Sean, Naomi and I were all fairly close to reaching our next Level – the big Level 5, as I may have mentioned once or twice already – and every little bit would help to get us there.

The Tutorial Quests were a funny thing. You got your first Tutorial Quest the second you awakened as a Hero; "New Quest available" was the very first system Message you'd see. Which makes sense. Starting out with a tutorial seemed to follow the odd (but consistent) video-game logic that governed a Hero's progression.

However, in the six years since the first Heroes awakened – so far as we knew – nobody had actually managed to complete the Tutorial Quest line and move onto what everyone assumed to be the real deal that would follow. If someone had finished it, they'd been careful to prevent that knowledge from getting out. It made the byline each of the Tutorial Quests carried when you looked at them, "Additional Quests and features will become available when all Tutorial Quest stages are completed," seem almost like a subtle bit of mockery.

Maybe I was reading too much into it.

Or maybe not. Pick any aspect of the supernatural rules that Dungeons and Heroes seemed to follow, and there was a debate about what the philosophical implications of them were. Even the origins of the system itself often proved to be a contentious topic.

Was it some kind of natural phenomenon? Theoretically possible, I supposed, but it seemed to me a little bit too precisely-tailored to human expectations to treat that as a plausible hypothesis.

Had it been created by someone? If so, who made it, and for what purpose?

Some even suggested that maybe it was a sort of gestalt psychic phenomenon, arising from human consciousness, and that our collective preconceptions determined the form that it would take. You know, like the "Choose the form of the Destructor" scene, only instead of a giant marshmallow man wrecking the city we get to act out role-playing games in real life.

Wild stuff. All totally unprovable – like any good metaphysical quandary – but still fun to speculate about.

I hadn't just been standing around idly musing on the nature of reality, of course. We were in a Dungeon, and that meant constant vigilance was the rule. I was keeping my head on a swivel, as they say in the training courses, carefully surveying the environs for any dangers, obvious or hidden.

We'd emerged from the Portal into a roughly rectangular cavern, longer than it was wide, the walls crudely-hewn from the same uniform dull-gray stone that most Dungeons seemed to be made of. The ceiling was high, tall enough that I didn't think I would be able to touch it if I was riding on Sean's shoulders, and even more irregular. All the uneven surfaces created alternating pockets of light and shadow that shifted weirdly in the sullen red illumination provided by the Portal.

Aside from the occasional echoing scrape of shoe against ground as we moved around, our surroundings were eerily silent. The whole place gave the impression that it had been chiseled out of the rock using primitive tools – far too orderly to have been created by nature, but just as obviously too primitive to be a product of modern engineering. It was like finding yourself in some sort of abandoned ancient temple.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Despite the aged character, though, I knew this space had been constructed recently; the last time we'd entered, just a few short weeks ago, the Portal opened into an entirely different area.

The room stretched out ahead for at least twenty paces, terminating in a single arch-like opening at the far end. Behind us, the exit Portal waited, the duplicate on this side not freestanding in midair as the entrance Portal had been. Instead it was placed flush to the wall, bounded by a black metal ring that had been intricately wrought into mysterious geometric patterns straight out of a Giger sketch.

Seeing no immediate threat, I signaled Naomi forward, then followed a few steps behind her. Sean, falling into our usual formation for Dungeon exploration, brought up the rear. The two of us took care to place our feet only where she had walked. If there were any traps ahead, Naomi was by far the most likely to locate them first – heightened Agility providing enhanced sensory acuity in addition to improved dexterity and coordination was just one of those quirks of the Attribute system's logic.

Not that the type of traps you would find in a Level 5 Dungeon were likely to be all that subtle.

Still, I'd always insisted that once we were inside the Dungeon, everything we did would be slow, methodical and entirely by-the-book. If you're not building good habits consciously, you're probably building bad habits unconsciously. The techniques we were using to clear this Dungeon today should work just as well for a Level 30 Dungeon, when we finally reached that point, and by then it would be second nature to us.

Neither of them griped too much about it, so I figured they probably understood my intentions. Dungeon runs were a somewhat dangerous occupation regardless, but they became extremely dangerous if you made the mistake of taking them lightly.

I'd seen the figure in one of my civil engineering textbooks that, at the turn of the century, coal miners – a particularly hazardous occupation – had something like a three percent annual fatality rate. That is to say, statistically, if you started with a hundred coal miners, you'd expect three of them to have died on the job by the end of the year, and the same number every year thereafter. Obviously this wasn't even counting injuries, which were far more common, or the long-term hazards of the job.

Being a Hero wasn't quite as dangerous as that, according to the figures the Selective Service System put out, but it wasn't too much safer either. Part of the reason it remained such a (comparatively) safe career in spite of the perils entailed is that it was never allowed to become a free-for-all.

There were regulations piled on top of regulations when it came to Hero work. Newly awakened Heroes went through months of mandatory instruction, then had to complete a licensing exam that included both written and practical sections – all this just to be permitted entry to a Dungeon. And even that was contingent on forming a party and registering for time-slots that were assigned according to some arcane government formula intended to keep recently-awakened Heroes out of Dungeons that would be too much for them to handle, while also minimizing the amount of time that the Dungeon Portals remained open.

After all, only one Hero party could enter a Portal at a time.

The instant the group had finished coming through, the entryway would switch from open blue to locked red; locked meant no Heroes could enter, and no Monsters could leave. It would be closed for the entirety of the run, until (whether they had succeeded or failed in destroying the Dungeon Heart) the Heroes retreated back through the Portal. For a duration afterwards, it would remain closed, apparently based on some relationship between the Levels and size of the Hero party, how long they'd spent inside, how many rooms they'd cleared, and the Level and size of the Dungeon itself.

Through repeated observation, that lock time could be estimated, and as long as the entrance remained closed, it would produce no Dungeon Breaks – catastrophic events where Monsters escaped out into the surroundings to wreak havoc.

The challenge was to balance on one hand allowing the country's Heroes to gain Levels and Items so they could perform their task more effectively, and on the other keeping the Dungeon entrances near-permanently shut to ensure the safety of the populace. All things considered, I felt that they did a pretty good job of it.

Naomi held up a hand, stopping our progress and interrupting my train of thought. I didn't see what it was that she had noticed to call a halt, but that didn't mean anything. It was her job to spot things I couldn't.

We waited patiently as she pulled out a bag of powdered chalk and, with a grimace of distaste at the way the dust clung to her fingers, reached in to scatter a handful onto the ground before us.

With the white powder highlighting it, the irregularity she'd caught was hard to miss. A pair of deep, straight seams ran across the floor, eventually proving to reach from one side to the other as she walked alongside it and continued sprinkling to reveal its full extent.

"Pitfall?" I asked into the silence. My voice bounced weirdly around the bare stone room.

"Probably," she agreed. "Doesn't look like we can go around it."

I frowned down at the offending obstacle. The two grooves looked to be about twenty feet apart. Not exactly setting an Olympic long jump record, granted, but they didn't do track and field events in armor. Surreptitiously, I shot a dubious glance at Sean, then back at the distance he would have to cover.

"Think you can make it, big guy?"

Sean snorted. "Don't worry about me."

"Alright then," I replied, before turning to Naomi and bowing in my best approximation of a butler's sweeping welcome-home-mistress motion. "Ladies first."

She tossed her head in response, making her brown curls bounce fetchingly, then backed up for a running start. Without even bothering to put her Items back into Inventory, she darted forward and leapt. Easily clearing the trap, she landed lightly with a ballerina's easy grace. From the other side she turned and shot us a double thumbs-up.

"Piece of cake," she gloated.

Not quite as confident as she was, I took a moment to place my sword and shield back into my Inventory before starting my own dash. I didn't quite make it look as good as Naomi had, coming down in something like a baseball slide that didn't feel great on the bumpy slab floor, but I reached the opposite side with room to spare.

Now, we just had to wait for Sean to –

Sean hadn't waited. He must have stowed his gear and moved into position before I had even landed, because as I stood back up he was already airborne, legs tucked forward and arms windmilling as he flew.

He wasn't going to make it.

Presumably he'd tried his best, but it just wasn't meant to be. Before I could react, he'd come down, landing hard on one hip a few inches short of the seam. Where he fell the thin flooring crumbled immediately like it was made out of pastry, dropping his whole lower body into the darkness below as cracks spread to either side.

With a lunge, I barely managed to snag one of his forearms before he dropped the rest of the way in.

And goddamn, he was heavy. The pain was immediate, like my arm had been wrenched from its socket, and I felt myself slide forward slightly as he clamped onto me with his free hand. Below the lip of the chasm, I could hear his feet scrabbling for purchase. He didn't say a word, but I could see the quiet desperation in his eyes, and I tried to return an encouraging look even as his bulk pulled me forward another inch.

I prevented him from dragging me in after him, but it was a near thing. Working in tandem, fighting gravity all the way, Naomi and I were able to gradually haul him up to the point where he could lever himself the rest of the way out. We both gave a cheer as we fell backwards with him in tow.

Sean panted on his hands and knees, still visibly pale and obviously shaken by the close brush he'd had. I dusted off my clothes, then walked over and put what I hoped was a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Once his breathing was back under control, he stood, giving me a long unreadable look.

"Thanks," he said after a moment.

"No problem," I replied, trying to summon back my previous confident grin. "What are friends for?"

"Um, guys?" Naomi called. She was balanced precariously on the edge of the now-exposed rift, the tips of her shoes sticking out into empty air, and peering down into the shadows. "I think we may have a problem."

My gaze followed the direction of her pointing finger. The collapse had revealed narrow flights of roughly-carved steps descending from the four corners of the pit.

Something big was coming up those stairs. Apparently the fall had only been the first part of the trap. There were two of them, one on each side, their forms suddenly revealed as they climbed up into the crimson light.

"Formation!" I yelled as I hurriedly re-equipped my weapons.

It was time to find out if all those hours of practice and study we'd put in before this run would pay off – we were about to face down the first Monsters of the day.