The dwarves were examining the jungle of glass I had woven over the ravine, and swiftly decided they wanted nothing to do with it. It was a good choice. The fisherman spiders were already beginning to crawl through the tangle of glass, weaving their own webs across the spars, and no dwarf would willingly try to scramble over rail-thin bars suspended in the middle of the bloody air while spiders tried to bite off his head.

No, the self-respecting dwarf stuck to solid ground. And that meant descending into the ravine.

One of them leaned down, digging a stick of incense from his boot. I braced myself as he lit with a firestone pendant. “Oh ancestors, remember this unworthy child and guide him still.” He mumbled, and the rough prayer combined with the rising smoke of the incense sparked a wave of magic, sweeping out across my territory.

I was restrained, my ethereal cloud of Mana rendered inert. And being a passive observer while filthy little insects crawled closer to my core was never my idea of a good time.

I’d promise to kill them, but I was going to do that anyway. I added ‘find some fates worse than death’ to my checklist of things to do once these pests were out of the way.

Holding the burning incense high like a talisman, they pushed and prodded the orc towards the edge of the cliff, forcing him to go first. His participation in this was clearly less than voluntary, but with a crossbow pointed at his throat he had no choice but to begin scrambling down the slope, his clumsy feet sliding and upsetting stones from the loose dirt of the cliffside, sending little avalanches of dust puffing out as he struggled downwards.

I was curious, though. He wasn’t like the dwarves or humans I’d met before. They had dense, complex webs of Mana within them, too complicated for me to memorize and recreate. His inner workings were relatively simple and the Mana within him was Dungeon Mana- dirtied with background aether and other sources, but undeniably the clear ethereal energy of a Dungeon.

His struggling was like a dinner bell ringing to the spiders that lived in the caves and crevices. They came crawling out, eruptions of skinny limbs that hauled dark fat bodies from the dark reaches of the ravine’s sides. There was the song of a crossbow string and a bolt flicked through the air in a trail of silver, piercing into a spider’s abdomen.

Now the dwarves came, sure-footed on the slopes and brandishing clubs, short broad-bladed swords, even a rusted pickaxe. They were clumsy tools and wielded by clumsy warriors but they got the job done. Vile yellow blood splattered as the pickaxe cleaved through a spider’s head. Bludgeons broke limbs, knives slashed open eyes.

The fisherman spiders were no fighters. They were forced back, step by step, and began to break and retreat. The dwarves pushed through the remaining resistance into the next leg of the journey, entering the green zone at the base of the ravine were enormous ferns and miniature trees made a miniature jungle, thick with still water, the air humid and buzzing with flies.

The orc was leading the way again, being cuffed across the head and shoved forward when he tried to slink to the back of the group. Fear and sweat were clear on every aspect of his bloated pig-toad face.

I wondered what Dungeon would make its servants so ugly.

It was a long, tense journey across the bottom of the ravine. As they trudged through the mud and flora, the spiders were always shadowing them, always waiting for a chance at revenge. And the dwarves knew it. I could almost taste the fear in the air as they marched unknowingly towards the location of a sleeping sporeback, steadily approaching the first real hurdle. From a distance it looked like a mossy rise in the earth. Bright birds sat atop it, pecking aphids from among the fur and spore.

But there was a complication that interrupted my savoring their unwitting march towards death.

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On the far side of my domain, a second set of intruders had arrived. Adamant had spotted them from his usual post sitting hidden among the trees, dipping his feet into the water. They were moving among the crowd gathered on the shore of the lake, and through Adamant’s muddy vision I could see bursts of frantic motion that could only have been fighting.

And they were blue. The inhuman tint of their skin was the first sign I was facing more than a simple attempt on my riches.

As I watched through Adamant, three of them broke off from the rest and dived into the lake, scything through the waters gracefully. The closer they got the more I could make out. They had long fins on the backs of their legs, and fans of translucent material cresting their heads. Long tendrils swept out where hair would be.

They moved so elegantly under the water. As the schools of belligerent reelfish neared, one of them hurled a harpoon at the largest of the fish, skewering it in the blink of an eye. With a single kick of its long legs the merfolk lunged forward and ripped the harpoon free, wielding it like an axe to hack through two more reelfish.

Behind him, the other two launched their own offensives, one of them diving into the heart of the swarming fish with two blades while the other hung back, their fingers dancing in a way I had come to associate with magic. But not human magic. No golden letters burst into existence around his hands. Instead, the water itself obeyed him, shooting forward in a stream that cut through flesh and bone as if it was butter.

These were no clumsy fools with more greed than sense. These were warriors.

But I couldn’t pause to appreciate them.

Lying in the gardens, Vaulder Claith coughed and groaned as he came back to consciousness. I beamed displeasure at the noise until the Contract shut him up. After a few seconds in which the flimsy meatling began to turn blue, I gave a mental sigh, and silently swore not to be too annoyed by his breathing.

He gasped as the Contract loosened its grip on his lungs.

A scream echoed through the Dungeon. I returned my attention to the dwarves, unwilling to miss a moment of it as they made contact with the first of the sporeback sloths.

The birds had exploded into the air, swarming in all directions. They pecked and scratched with vicious glee as the invaders tried to shield themselves. The scream came from the dwarf without a nose, who was now missing something else as well, clutching a hand to his bleeding face as a bird landed atop a nearby tree with his eye held proudly in its beak.

It titled back its head. It gulped. The eye was gone.

The sporeback sloth rose.

Unlike the one I had sent out into the world, which had to be able to navigate the cramped sewer tunnels, this one was the size of an elephant. It let out a long, lethargic cry, almost drowning out a dwarf’s scream of ‘Not this fucking thing again!”

And then, as the dwarves struggled to fight off the flocking birds with their flashing feathers and slicing claws, the sloth swept out one long arm. Claws the size of scythes smashed into an unlucky little bastard and tore him into a spray of gore. Another was merely clipped, and bowled to the ground, screaming as he clutched a wound that swept across the entire length of his chest.

It wasn’t long before he was dead too, birds descending upon him until all that could be seen was a small hill of feathers and wings.

“Retreat!” The leader screamed, but the fisherman spiders were right behind them. One of his number was already gone, dragged silently back into the forest while his comrades were distracted, nothing more than a wriggling sack of silk now.

As they turned and ran on their short little legs, the spiders pounced. One of the dwarves was slower than the others with a bad leg. The swarm sensed his weakness and chose him to die next. A lucky swing of the pickaxe fended off one, but another spider landed on his back, toppling him, and venom-laden mandibles sunk into his neck. He let out a gurgling cry of agony, the sound bubbling the blood that poured from his open throat into a froth of pink.

The orc, although adolescent, was larger than any of them already. He ran forward, surging towards the lead. That was when one of the dwarves stuck his leg out.

The boy tumbled to the earth, letting out a desperate wail as he lifted his mud-streaked face and saw the spiders closing in.

But, I was feeling more curious than hungry. Four deaths had sated some of my appetite.

From above, observing it all, my chosen nacre-spider dropped on a line of silk, landing with him between its eight bladed legs. The boy nearly frothed at the mouth with horror, but he was being saved- the spider let out a chittering cry and the swarm of fisherman spiders parted, bowing to their more fearsome cousin and choosing to chase after the fleeing dwarves.

I had questions for this one.