Looking at the dungeon entrance, Fife felt like screaming a war cry and charging in. She held back that urge with the weight of experience she had in surviving by not acting like a lunatic. "So, just a reminder, this isn't going to be some kind of bug hunt like you're used to. You stay behind me and—if something comes up behind us—that's your number-one target for offense. If you keep me standing, I will stop anything from hitting you. Oh, and enemy spell-casters are second priority.

"Luddy, you know your deal. Assist me, swap and distract anything that comes up from behind. Huntress, are you feeling up to this?"

"Are you sure my bow will be useful?" Fiddling with her weapon for what she knew was at least the hundredth time, Huntress' confidence in herself was as low as her suitability for the party. "I haven't exactly done anything like this before."

"You'll be fine. You're a dungeon floor boss, so you will appear in your home if anything goes wrong and, after the beat-down Pen gave this dungeon, it isn't going to be too much trouble to deal with. So long as Felna and Nathanial are quick on the cures, we'll not have to worry about our backup plan." Fife looked at Ludmiller and got a return nod from her.

Not knowing the common terms, Huntress asked, "What's the backup plan?"

Adjusting the anti-rot mask Felna had made for her to wear, Ludmiller pondered how she hadn't had to perform the duty many times, but took on the task of explaining what failure would look like. "That's where I make sure everyone's talismans trigger properly, so no one gets trapped in the dungeon by making it a clean kill. Fife, though, will be a problem. You're not easy to hurt."

"You've got that venom, right? Just keep hitting me with that until it works."

"That wouldn't be a clean kill, Fife. The venom works fast, but—"

"Luddy, if you leave me alive in this place, I'm going to haunt you." Fife let out a laugh. "Anyone else got any questions?" When the rest of the group, Nathaniel, Felna, Ogmera, Stratus, and Tom all shook their heads, Fife turned and put her helmet on, drew her sword, and gave her shield a thump with the blade to make sure everything was tight and fitted.

"Have you ever seen her put her helmet on?" Ogmera asked, walking behind Fife.

Felna shook her head no. "First I've seen her use it. But I didn't see the fights between her and the northerner women."

Nathaniel shrugged. "Then let's get serious. Og, you've got resists, I'll take the first stint healing. Felna, feed us all mana and we'll get through this."

There were guards at the dungeon entrance, and the moment they saw Fife approaching, they rushed inside. She looked around for anything that might come up behind them and bottle them up, but there was nothing around. "Okay, come on."

As she followed the group, Huntress couldn't keep from twitching. They'd traveled for the better part of a day and she still wasn't used to the barding that covered her equine body. Despite the work Fife had done with her to buffer parts of it with cloth to quieten it down, each shift of her legs made a soft sound that was slowly driving her insane—or so it felt to her.

It took a moment for Fife's eyes to adjust to the dim interior. Part of her mind took note to get her shield enchanted to produce light on its front. Before the lighting could become an issue, two mana lights flared behind her. "Right. Fire mages. Now I'm remembering why I like you guys. Jack's light is always so pale and small. Make sure to tell him tha—"

Huntress, with her height, could see over Fife easily and spotted the two orcs approaching. Drawing her bow back, she nocked an arrow and fired at the first. She hadn't aimed specifically for the creature's face, but her practice with the bow (along with the ingrained skill from it being her weapon) had led to her hitting what she looked at.

The serrated tip of the adamantine arrowhead—meant to dig in, stay in, and leave as much damage as possible if removed—buried itself far into the orc's head. It cut through bone like it was paper and sunk far in. The goblinoid screamed, reached up, grabbed the arrow shaft, and yanked. A fountain of blood shot out of the wound and the orc wobbled a moment, then fell to the ground.

Wincing a little at the now slumped-on-the-ground orc, Fife stepped forward to engage the remaining one. It was butchery. She knocked its shield and cleaver aside with her shield, checked its movement with her shoulder, and dug her sword into its gut—and drove the weapon upward.

The orc barely got a sound out before she'd gotten her weapon through whatever it used for breathing. It managed another weak swing that she checked on her shield before it too fell to the floor. "I guess it's starting with the weaker stuff. Fine by me, and they didn't seem to have any—" She cut off as both corpses started to burn. Looking back, she saw Stratus smiling.

"They might not look like they're diseased, but they are. Better to burn them and clear the air than let their shaman turn them into fungal factories." Stratus had been working with Katelyn on narrowing his focus from its usual wide area. So far, he'd managed to get things down to a fifteen foot diameter—which he was proud of.

Left staring at the burning corpses, Huntress was surprised at how effective her arrow had been. "Why did it pull it out?"

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"Orcs aren't known for their smarts. That was an adamantine one, right?"

"Yeah. Axel made me a few hundred of them."

"Cool. He's nice like that. Well, if I had to guess, you hit something inside it that was important and it wanted whatever that was doing to stop. Very straight-forward thinkers, orcs." Wiping her sword off on one of the burning bodies, Fife made sure the blade got a good bit of flame on it before she stepped past. "This isn't getting us any floors cleared, though."

Clearing his throat, Stratus said, "Make sure to pause after everything's dead, so we can ensure they're all burned."

"Can you tell I don't normally deal with rot dungeons?" Fife asked, stepping around the orcs as she advanced down the tunnel. Unlike Travis, these were twisting and winding and rough stone. "Uh, Luddy?"

From just in front of Fife, Ludmiller replied, "It's clear for two more turns. I can't find any traps. Maybe it's trying to focus on living defenses?"

"The opposite of your build strategy." Felna was enjoying being back in a hostile dungeon, even if it was one that she could still feel the hate of despite having bonded completely to Travis. "Though, you had living defenses despite being trap-focused, so don't ignore the possibility this place has traps despite being monster focused."

Fife groaned. "Is she always like this in dungeons? We could go somewhere else, you know. That old undead dungeon would be awesomely spooky now."

"She's only trying to be the party's mom when Og isn't talking." Nathaniel was relieved that Fife knew what her job was and, at the same time, was willing to listen to their suggestions without making it an issue. "Ludmiller, you're going to find the stairs for us?"

"Yeah. Also, call me Luddy." Making her way deeper into the dungeon, Ludmiller turned this way and that looking for monsters heading toward her party so she could trace their origin back to the way down.

Fife, meanwhile, was truly living her best life. While Ludmiller poked her head around every corner and looked for traps and a way down, Fife sliced, bashed, and got in the face of every orc and goblin that got before her. Then, at the end of a long, winding tunnel, she spotted something new. "This is a black orc. Tougher, smarter, and with at least ten times the patience of a regular orc. It's probably a floor boss here."

Rather than stretch away from her support, Fife held her ground and let the boss come toward her. Her grin, hidden by the helmet she'd worn for this expedition, turned to a frown when the tips of Ludmiller's glowing green daggers poked out from the orc's throat. "Oh, dammit, Luddy. This was going to be a fun one!"

Pulling her blades back out of the orc's neck, Ludmiller used a scrap of the creature's leather armor to wipe them clean. "The sooner we get past these higher floors, Fife, the sooner we get both our dungeons resources. Plus, you get to fight bigger things."

It was an angle Fife hadn't put any real thought into, but ultimately she sighed and nodded. "Sure, sure. Let's keep pushing." Her hand went to her hip, instinctively, to check on her pistol—that wasn't there. "Wish we could bring our guns in here. I bet I could have cleared all this just with a pistol."

"Fife, we've all been through this. Trav got the ability to make guns by the hundred when one of us held a gun in there for the first time. The damn trolls would dogpile you to get it." Ludmiller poked her tongue out, which lacked impact because she was still partly invisible and had cloth pulled over her muzzle. "I'm heading down. The next floor's stairs are at the end of this tunnel and to the right. This place should be worth a lot of stuff if it's as deep as I think."

"At least thirty floors." It was a surprise to even Felna that she'd spoken. The dungeon knew how deep it was, so she—through her tenuous link with it still—knew how deep it was. "It remembers me. I don't think it likes Travis' hold on me."

"Didn't it hate you already?" Ogmera asked.

"Well, yes, but now it wants to kill me because I belong to something else. A thought I resent. Travis has been nauseatingly walking on eggshells when it comes to the possession thing. He refuses to give me a command." Despite herself, Felna smiled as she recalled the various memories of her barbing him about it.

"You can talk to dungeons?" Huntress asked. When Felna nodded, another question came to her, "Have you ever encountered one that didn't hate you?"

"Yes. Quite a nice little dungeon, actually. His name is Travis, and he squirms when I play with him." Felna couldn't stop herself from purring; just a little.

Huntress, having spent enough time around Fife to learn how to shoot and figure out what is a joke and what isn't, and despite understanding that Felna was making a joke, asked, "You made a dungeon squirm?"

"It's how she flirts." Ogmera smirked and winked at Felna. "She likes to find a guy who won't run away from her, then she talks about uncomfortable things until they're dazed, then she pounces. This is the first time she's tried it on with a dungeon, though. Honestly speaking, Travis is a step up from her usual targets."

Tom did his best not to laugh and replied, "If you ask me, Travis could do better."

"A step up, I'll add, given the last piece Felna chased squirmed too—right into her coin purse. What was his name again? Filch?" Ogmera was struggling to finish before either breaking up laughing or Felna pouncing on her. The latter, she mused, was probably worse for her. She wound up dodging Felna while laughing.

"If you're all done, I think Fife is urging us to follow." Stratus gestured to where Fife was walking past the incinerated orc boss.

"I didn't expect Fife to be the responsible one," Huntress said as she moved with the group to catch up. The way down was a simple ramp, rather than the cut-stone straight stairs that were Travis' preferred or the spiral staircases of her own home. Regardless, she felt inside that it was an accomplishment to make it this far already, and smiled at the little lecture Breath of Spring had given about the importance of tracing these paths: resources.

The floors were not the vast open halls of her own home, nor were they the highly strategic, trap-filled nightmares of Travis', but once they'd gone down four more they resolved into twisting halls filled with nothing but goblins and orcs.

When they reached the end of that twisting, dank floor, she realized how lucky they were that Ludmiller led them in a more direct route to the next ramp. Trudging down, though, she realized it was going to be the norm from now on. "Please don't tell Mixie I said this, but I hate goblins."

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