Get killed and get your stuff taken.
We didn't get a global notification that our world have joined the system or any other such variation of the warning that the books people had written often showed.
No one was given a class.
The first thing I knew about what had happened was when a little demon thing came flying through the open door of the security booth.
“Congratulations, you’re the boss monster.”
I looked around from behind the chair I had picked up to keep the thing from flying up close to me
Staring at it while it stood on my desk in front of the computer screen, I had the chance to get a good look at it.
It was a Barbie doll sized, bat winged, arrow tip tailed, little person with a pair of horns. It was covered in thicker light blue patches rising out of its darker, almost moist looking skin, and had a set of slightly glowing green orbs in place of its eyes.
"There isn't time to explain or to answer any of your questions. You got a group of six adventurers who just stepped out of a gate with a mission to kill ten dwellers in this dungeon each, and out of all the people here, you're the only one who looks like he can put up a fight. So stop staring at me and go help your people."
So, yeah. I did have some questions. But I didn’t take the time to ask them considering what he said next.
Flicking his fingers at me to get me moving, he added, "Get going, several of your people are dead already."
Now Bramer Dental Supply had contracted my security agency to do gate control at the employee gate during the day and to send out a night watchman during the nights and weekends. I was doing two twelve hour shifts on the weekends since the place was normally empty and it gave me plenty of time to study for my classes without distractions.
While getting paid.
But for the last few weeks, they had been having a special Saturday morning shift to get caught up on everything for Monday. There were a few older production guys there to run things, and a bunch of Temps to do the unskilled labor. Mainly broke students like me trying to earn some cash while going to school.
I had been up near the front entrance to the property, so I could neither see nor hear what was going on in the building. But I could see people heading out to their cars in a panic.
After pushing the button to lift the barrier bar and lower the spikes, I got the key out to lock it in the open position so It wouldn’t close again after each person headed out.
The first person heading out did so at speed. A big red truck with a guy at the wheel whose white shirt and face were dabbled in red spots.
He must have been doing forty five when his truck hit the open gap in the fence and came to a dead stop. The front of the truck sort of crumbled in with the sound of tearing metal and breaking glass.
I could see his airbags go off, I hoped he was okay, but I wasn't in a position to go check yet.
The one car that came up behind him tried to curve around and then hit the unseen barrier at a much lower speed. It rolled back after it hit something and broke a headlight.
The other cars came to a stop while the winged creature sighed, crossed its arms, and began tapping its foot. "Dwellers can't leave while Adventures are in the dungeon. You either have to kill them or wait or them to leave before you can exit."
I glanced back at it with some questions, but then I saw the adventurers.
Not elves, not dwarves, not even a human.
A scaly behemoth came running out into the parking lot holding a huge ax over its shoulder in both hands. Then it swung it into the passenger window of a car backing out of a parking spot.
A big gray wolf leaped into the broken open window and tore into the driver before she could get out of the driver’s side door.
Something in a hooded cloak and worked leather armor with the face of an ape with fangs strode out of the building, glanced at the wolf, and began shooting arrows from its tall bow painted with black and green stripes.
A short blue reptilian one with horns in tattered robes covered in pouches appeared next. Raising its hand, fire appeared between its fingers, and then with a twist of its wrist, the flames went flying off to splatter harmlessly against someone's windshield.
Two more little blue lizard men with knives raced after some people who were running for the front gate on foot. They were followed by another fanged ape man, this one in a blood orange colored robe who walked over to the body hanging out of the driver side door by its seat belt after being abandoned by the wolf. He began picking up something from the ground below her.
From the looks of it, the dead were dropping coins.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Some people came running for the security booth, which was small, and utterly incapable of holding up to a swing of that ax.
So I grabbed the big mag light, the one built to be used as a club, and then headed for my car which was parked in one of the two spots next to the booth.
There were another two gates to get off of the property, one for management, and another in the back that lead to an area between this place and the one behind it with rail tracks between them. But I doubted I would have any more luck getting out of here, in my car, or out of it, than the first two people did.
On the way to my car, I did point at the wreck and yell out. "Somebody get the first aid kit from the security building and go check on that guy, and someone call 911."
Who knows, maybe someone even did one or both of those things. Me, I decided I should do something about the creatures killing people out in the parking lot.
Not because I'm brave, or out of a sense of duty, but because there was nowhere to run and if these adventurers were anything like the guys I had once played dungeons and dragons with, there would be nowhere to hide.
I was worth experience points.
Besides I was armed. Not the flashlight. My Ford 150.
Not the heaviest of trucks, but more than heavy enough to take down a psycho lizard with a big ax.
Most everyone was on foot now or had driven off to either crash into the unseen barrier blocking the way out of the manager's gate or to just drive around the building looking for another way to escape.
I was looking for a target.
The wolf had stopped to tear into someone else but was still further out from the rest of them than anyone else.
It had started to chase down some other people when it looked over at me at the sound of my engine revving, and at first, it tried to run away. But it didn't take much effort to swerve to catch it on the front bumper when it dashed to the side as I closed in on it.
The fanged aped guy with the bow seemed pretty upset as I sent its limp body flying, and unlike the little blue lizard guy, his arrow was able to break the glass of my driver's side window just fine, just not well enough to get me as well.
Circling the two other little blue lizard guys scampered out of my way beneath a hatchback, but a sharp turn lined me up with the guy in the orange robes. He was still looking for somewhere to go to get out of the way when I ran him over, feeling both the front and back set of tires go over his body.
I think he didn't understand how fast a car could accelerate.
The guy with the bow had figured out that he could shoot at my tires, just before one of the production guys in a Cadilac took him out. But even on two flats I still had enough speed to catch the fire throwing blue lizard person as they stood in front of the employee entrance trying to figure out how to open the door without a pass card.
They looked up just before they got crushed between the door and my front bumper.
When I got out of my car to do something, maybe finish off the wounded, or check for survivors. I'm not sure what I was planning, but I didn't want to keep driving around on two flats.
Or sit there in my car, that hadn’t worked out too well for anyone else. That’s when the other two blue guys got me.
One cut the tendons behind my right knee, the other one cut my throat as I fell forward onto my hands.
I could hear gunshots, then there was darkness.
Until there was light. The light of my work computer screen with a "Do you want to continue." Box over the video player in the browser.
The little demon was there, and I was unhurt.
"Congratulations, you got two of them. The wolf was a pet, so you didn't get a point for it, and you lost one point when the core decided to recall you as a named creature. You can spend your other point to bring one of the others back to life or keep it to rank yourself up when you want. Right now you're just basic dungeon fodder so anything you buy could help."
I stared at it. “I died.”
The demon thing nodded at me. “Yeah, and then you got brought back at your spawn point. You now got twenty and a half hours in which you can leave the dungeon. But once that time ends, if you aren't here when a new portal opens up for the next group of low level trash, you get spawned again right here in this spot, with only what you have on you right now.”
I only had my clothes and the flashlight. But at least the cut at the back of my knee and the blood stains were gone.
“Oh, and the core fixed your wagon thing, same with the ones that the other two dwellers who got kills with them used.”
I was able to get out of it, that of the thirty eight people who had been at work that day. Twenty eight had died. Me and nine others that had fought back, or at least had tried to, had gotten brought back to life.
“What about the others who died, what about them?”
The demon thing spit in disgust. "All they did was run or try to hide. Worthless. The Core might bring them back as workers when it can spare the Vim, but it's tapped out for the moment, and any more Vim it gets between now and when it's open for another group is going toward improvements."
“Improvements? Explain.”
It shrugged, "Well for starters, lights. You, humans, can't see all that well in the dark, and the guy that took out the archer said putting in torches would be bad since there's some kind of smoke detecting things that will set off something like rain inside the building. But glow lights take a lot more Vim, but at least there are a lot of big rooms in there. You guys don't need that much light.
Holding up a hand, it started counting off fingers. “So lights, for when your electricity fails. Water, for when that fails. Then a magic pantry to feed you guys for when your economy crashes.”
Finishing off with the last finger on that hand, he switched to the other. “A workroom, for traps and repairs. A library, for research. Then a fighting pit, to train you guys up.”
He looked up from his fingers and pointed at me, “But that’s for me and the core to figure out, you just have to kill adventures so the core can rank up. It shouldn’t be all that hard, this place is still just a starter dungeon.”
Between my car and the crossbow I had built from a kit from home, I managed to get five more kills that week, while only dying twice more. After the first group, which Kip the Imp had informed me would respawn just like we did but on the other side of the gate, each new group seemed more and more informed about what we had to defend ourselves with both inside and outside of the main building.
So we had to get creative.
Walkways between the warehouse storage racks so that we could reposition ourselves above the orcs, goblins, kobolds, darklings, dragonspawn, and other Adventurer races.
Pallets balanced precariously on the edges of their shelves to be tipped over onto adventure's heads. Hand soap spread out in areas they would try to run through to get to us to send them sprawling. Stacks of loaded up pallets and chemical containers moved around to block off walkways between the shelves to change up the layout for each new group.
By the end of the week, I had also spent one of my points to buy a large trailer from a Dungeon Imp working with the core of a trailer park and set it up on the neighboring property behind the guard building near the entrance.
I wanted a place nearby to live in that wasn’t in the Dungeon where adventurers could loot it, and I moved what I wanted to keep from my apartment that I could fit in the trailer.
The reason I moved was because as Kip the imp foretold, things fell apart pretty quickly. Cities were classified as higher ranking mega Dungeons, and Military bases ranked high enough for adventures that had dragons for mounts to show up.
Me, I convinced my coworkers to limit spending our points at first to just get into shape. Younger and fitter, but not strong enough to get our dungeon ranked as a higher challenge before we were ready.
Instead, we got tools and seeds while they were still available, and turned the nice front lawn in front of the fence of the building into some big vegetable gardens to supplement the gruel the dungeons pantry had for us. Then we trained with the weapons we got off the adventure's dead bodies.
Magical stuff got soul bonded to adventurers and vanished when they died to reappear when they got returned to life, but starter weapons and armor were lootable by us.
If anything though, our efforts just made our dungeon more popular. While our rating didn't rise that fast, the experience they got from killing us was higher than in most places.
It would be nice if we could go through their gates, to go and kill them and get levels.
But it doesn't work that way, we are here for them to kill, for them to level up from.
At least not until we get a hundred points. Then we get a class and can go adventuring in other worlds.
It's something to look forward to when I get killed by an orc barbarian for the twentieth time.