"Steffo? You're Tapper's friend? You skrat, you've grown so tall!" Phanya threw her arms wide for a hug and instantly regretted it, doubling over to hug her bruised ribs instead.

"Miss Phanya, can we please attend to your wounds now —"

"Yeah yeah, on our way out of here —"

"It's a long way to Fableton, we gotta prepare —"

The three fell into a flurry of multitasking as they walked. Steffo showed Phanya how to detach and reattach Tapper's dislocated arm; once he leveled up Tapper's Manaburn wound healed along with his fizzled spells, but his physical damage still required manual repair. Phanya also required repair and Tapper doused a looted cloth in his restoration potion, securing the bandage around Phanya's ribs despite her complaints on the slimy feel. With that sorted the two organics caught up on the past few years while Tapper read through his level-up notifications.

[LEVEL UP!]

[Welcome to level 3!]

[Please select a new feat]

A list of available feats presented themselves and Tapper glanced through them, but he wasn't going to make a choice now. He wasn't going to run a word search again, he wasn't going to rush this, and he wanted to discuss options with Phanya and Ricky. While Tapper respected Steffo's opinion he wasn't a proprietor, and the library of knowledge still insisted that he keep this a secret. Plus, he was worried about his friend.

"Mister Steffo, are you suffering from any emotional damage after that fight? You shot your brother, after all."

Phanya grimaced at Tapper's blunt question, but Steffo just gave a small and hollow chuckle. "The emotional damage was already a done deal, Tapper. Really, it's more like —" Steffo suddenly stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath before he continued, "No, that's not fair. Zero wasn't ever really good, but he wasn't always a monster either. A part of him used to try, and I thought I could get that back once he finally had enough with running this mall, but... I think I've already been mourning that part for a while now, and all this just proved it. The part of Zero that was my brother is already dead and gone, I promise you don't need to worry about that. And drop the 'Mister' stuff already."

A moment of silent walking later and Steffo delighted when he noticed the looted metal bracelet in Tapper's plastic bag, despite Tapper's uneasiness at describing the dead raider. "Don't know who Spike was, but it's fine. That's a security badge! It'll make the walk back way easier, follow me."

Steffo took the bracelet and led everyone into a stark white Maintenance hallway, where he picked out one door and placed the bracelet against its plaque. It opened to another identical hallway, but Steffo walked with confidence to the door at the opposite end of the where it opened into the wing of the mall with the giant art installation and the museum. Instead, Tapper lead everyone towards the security office.

"Are you sure about this, Tapper?" Steffo asked with an edge to his voice. "No one goes in there except Zero."

"Precisely why we must ensure that he cannot regroup here, my friend." Tapper didn't fear the traps, with the level up he felt like he could take on anything! The door to the security office swung free from its broken lock and Tapper triggered the laser wire trap on purpose. No rats appeared from the ceiling but the disgusting green slime started to glop out of the orb — no, the slime was spraying out — and Tapper pointed at it dramatically.

"Spilleth on a jolly day, in the caldron SUCK the SPRAY! " A book on a nearby shelf fell over with a thud that sounded like the universe going "Ugh" in disgust. That still wasn't a proper witchcraft spell, and there shouldn't be anything separating the words of magic. But Tapper didn't know he couldn't do that and right now he wouldn't hear otherwise, so he did it anyway.

The energy welled up within the hasty spell shape, given structure by the strength of Tapper's pride, and rocketed into existence through his vacuum funnel. Everyone saw the small vortex of swirling lights at the end of the spindle and how much Tapper struggled to control it, but neither Phanya nor Steffo felt anything from the spell. Not even the disturbance of wind, because the vacuum wasn't sucking in air.

Right now the vacuum only existed to suck in the "spray" of slime and it did so with impossible efficiency, every drop of slime that the orb created was inhaled by the vacuum before it could plop onto the desk. The fluid flowed so quickly that Tapper couldn't measure exactly how much slime the orb had to give. But wherever it was coming from, it was taking long enough for the spectacle to lose its horrifying edge and just become mundane.

Tapper started to worry that his vacuum canister wouldn't be able to hold the sheer volume of horrible slime, and when he pictured the canister rupturing and the slime spilling all over his back the vortex started to flicker. No! Tapper had defeated Zero, conquered this dungeon, and leveled up! He could do anything, and he wasn't going to be defeated by a formless glob of organic material now.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Pride snuffed out the ember of doubt and Tapper redoubled his efforts, aware of the mounting pressure on his back and dwindling mana but unwilling to stop. Eventually some limit broke and the pressure abated slightly, holding steady just below the point of it being unbearable for Tapper. But there were neither any damage reports of a rupture nor screams of surprise from his companions, so Tapper kept up the pressure until the orb finally ceased with the gooping.

[Gelatinous Guardian lvl 4 defeated! +9 XP]

There, that did it. Even without the system notification Tapper knew from his library of knowledge that the floating sphere of light was now unguarded, open to claiming by whoever could touch the sphere and impart their will onto it.

"The hell... Tapper, you're standing near a damned shift hole. How? I feel like I'm going to mutate just looking at it."

Huh, that name didn't feel appropriate to Tapper. He didn't take his eyes off it as he answered, "That is very interesting, Steffo! Because I do not see a hole, quite the opposite. I see possibilities and knowledge compressed into a golden moment."

"Yeah, I uh… I see a glowing ball," Phanya said, suddenly on the other side of the door alongside Steffo. She looked at him and asked, "What do you mean by a shift hole?"

"Just things I overheard when Zero was doing merc work. You know how most phase shifts are these big, explosive events? That's because they blow their load all at once, but instead of shifting everything for a mile around sometimes a small hole gets poked and it just stays. I guess it's more stable when it's small? But that just means it can leak phase shift incursion radiation over time, maybe for years. Maybe forever! Just slowly warping everything around it and..." Steffo's voice trailed off as he looked all around, and something clicked inside his head. "Oh."

Phanya nudged Steffo with her foot. "Oh? What's 'oh'?"

Tapper's eyebrows smiled. "Yes my friend, this is the heart of the dungeon. Its core. Whoever claims the core claims the dungeon, and as of approximately 65 seconds ago that person is no longer Zero." Tapper's reward emotions started running hot enough to burn through his CPU as he gazed into the light. "It is the ultimate loot."

Phanya said something then, but Tapper was no longer listening. His rewards metrics had started to feed directly into his emotional subroutines and set off a feedback loop, reinforcing each other and overriding everything else. Think of everything he could do with this power! Zero was just thinking like a raider, but as a bartender Tapper could turn the dungeon into the ultimate bar! Probably. Fine details, like how he would rebuild the mall or get customers so far below ground, could wait.

The small computer part of Tapper's mind chugged out a probabilities report, but Tapper couldn't consciously read it. He didn't want to do anything except imagine his perfect bar and serving legions of customers, and as his overloading emotional subroutines ate away at his other programs Tapper slowly lost the ability to do anything else. He could hear his perfect bar, smell it, see it so clearly! The growing overload consumed the probabilities report and inadvertently interpreted it, turning the readout into a sort of thought that Tapper could still hear:

And then what are you going to do, become one with the dungeon? This will merge your programming and you will likely never leave here again. Will Steffo want to stay here, after his traumatic experiences? Will you force Phanya and Ricky to leave home and move here? Or renounce your proprietors, and confirm that you really are just a rogue AI? You're already trying to justify forcing "customers" here against their will! This is greed, you're falling to it worse than Zero.

Tapper's internal fans clicked on at full speed to blow air over his processor, and he took a deep breath. The wave of emotions broke and receded, the subroutines falling to their original parameters and pretending that they didn't almost overwrite his core programming. Constructing a new firewall for his emotions earned top priority, and he sheepishly turned to two pairs of very wide, very worried eyes. "My apologies, this hole/core was mildly overwhelming me with delusions of grandeur, but I have it under control now. Are there any suggestions on how to disable it?"

Whatever answers Phanya and Steffo had in mind were drowned out by a rough scraping sound growing louder and nearer. A securibot, heavily damaged and listing to one side, dug a long line in the floor but would not be deterred from performing its duty. The damage wouldn't stop it, the slow pace wouldn't stop it, the two humanoids didn't try to stop it, but a narrow door frame was a challenge too great. The bulky robot barely had enough clearance to enter the security office when fully functional and couldn't figure out how to angle itself, and after much spinning of wheels it was good and truly stuck. It gave a single beep of resignation for doing the best job it could, and split open.

Phanya and Steffo didn't want to go near the core, so they had stayed outside of the security office. They also didn't want to get in the way of a securibot, so they got out of its way. Two sensible decisions that left them both barred from the security office, unable to see anything beyond a few gaps around the doorframe. They heard the hiss of the securibot opening its compartment, the thump of something heavy hitting the ground, and Tapper's cheerful voice. "Oh hello Mister Rethar, I'm pleased to see that you survived the fall."

"What? Rethar's here??" Phanya shouted, straining to see around the security robot. There was a groan, and the familiar metallic purple of his enhanced exoskeleton shifted into view. "Ret you asshole, get out here so I can punch you!"

Rethar was too disorientated to hear Phanya's goading, and Tapper patiently watched as the organic cycled through his reboot process. Hopefully now that the fight was over he'd be willing to talk, but when they locked eyes Tapper's probabilities calculation refreshed at a null value. He didn't look happy. "You... the slime didn't come for you?"

"Oh it did, but I defeated the monster," Tapper expected Rethar to look relieved that he didn't need to worry about the awful corrosive thing, but Tapper's facial recognition instead registered ravenous hunger from him.

In a burst of movement Rethar lunged forward, any and all speed immediately sapped by his broken exosuit. Heavy and unresponsive leg bracers turned his dash into a half stumble, half limp but did nothing to deter the mad gleam in Rethar's eyes. "It's mine, it's mine! You don't deserve the mall! Zero owes me IT'S MINE!"