Victor sat on a large stone block and, groaning and cursing, worked to dig the crossbow bolt out of his armpit. A dozen bloody, broken bolts and arrows already lay at his feet. He’d finally run out of enemies to kill—they’d kept coming in twos and threes out of the ruins, seeking to capitalize on his “weakness” after he’d killed the original crew of ambushers. Those latecomers had soon learned the folly of their ways. Victor chuckled at the thought, glancing around the clearing at the many corpses and pieces of corpses. A few had escaped sans a limb or two.
One thing bothered him; the System had yet to send him any Energy, and he’d been done fighting for nearly five minutes. Did that mean other attackers still lurked nearby? As the bolt finally slid free, following the widened channel he’d made with his knife, Victor grunted in relief, dropping the bloody shaft. He stood and shouted, “If anyone else is waiting for a fight, let’s get this shit done. If not, then get the hell out of here!” His Iron Berserk had worn off, but his voice still boomed from his giant-sized chest.
He heard some scrabbling, some sliding stones, and rapid footfalls, but nobody showed themselves, and the noises grew more and more distant. Had he just frightened off some would-be attackers? He looked around at the corpses. Some were large—giant-sized as he’d come to consider his usual form—others were more human in proportion. None had been close to his titan form. None had been much of a challenge for him, either, not once he’d gotten out of the formation trap.
He supposed it wasn’t quite a fair comparison; these people had been stripped of everything before being sent into the prison. None had much in the way of armor or magical items, and few had any weapons that were worth mentioning. He wondered about that—hadn’t they slain a few fully-geared iron rankers ahead of his arrival? He remembered the loudmouth saying something about giving his armor to someone named Ronkerz. Was there a hierarchy in the prison dungeon? Was there a caste system for divvying out loot gained from the monsters that spawned within? If so, these folks hadn’t been high on the pecking order.
Victor was approaching the “minotaur” to look at his gear when he noticed rainbow-hued Energy beginning to coalesce around the body. He grinned, looking around to see a similar glow around the other bodies in the clearing. “Here we go,” he said, eagerly twisting his hands on Lifedrinker’s haft. A few moments later, an enormous surge of Energy hit him. The influx instantly healed his puncture wound, mending deep tissues that were slower to regenerate than simple flesh. More than that, it filled him to bursting, knocking him senseless as his mind drifted into the ether.
Almost immediately, he felt a familiar presence. It was Golgothoz, the Master of the Axe, who’d put his mark on Victor’s chest. He came near, and Victor felt his approval, though the master said nothing. When Victor tried to speak, he found no voice in his throat. Soon, the weighty presence faded, and Victor’s vision returned to normal. Once again, he stood in the blasted ruins of the death-attuned dungeon, the glowering gray moon high overhead. A System message marred his vision, and he read it quickly.
***Congratulations! You have achieved level 66 Herald of the Mountain’s Wrath and gained 12 strength, 17 vitality, and 12 will.***
“Good,” he grunted, slowly turning, ensuring no one was sneaking up, ready to take advantage of his distraction. The ruins were quiet, though, so he turned back to the minotaur corpse. His spiked mace seemed to be rough black iron, and his shield wasn’t anything much better. Victor stooped and turned the corpse over, hoping that he’d find something worth looting on the inmate’s corpse; after all, he’d come into this dungeon hoping the denizens had managed to pry some treasures from the deeper, more powerful monsters. The man’s clothes were ragged, stinking leather.
Victor stood. “Shit,” he growled. Not only were the inmates devoid of decent gear, but he’d expected to gain more than one level. He’d killed close to twenty attackers, and though they hadn’t felt particularly strong, they were “iron rankers.” Surely, some of them were higher level than he was. If not, how had they managed to kill five strong individuals before him? Was it just due to the trap?
One thought tickled the back of his mind, and, examining it, he saw that he’d been ready to compare his gains from this battle against those awarded by the System in the challenge dungeon. The situations were too different, he decided. The System’s awarded Energy in the Vault of Valor had been a portion of that taken from high-ranking, living cultivators—enough to account for ten levels. Looking around at the broken bodies of his foes, he began to understand just how little the System typically granted for slaying someone.
Victor spat, rubbing his hands together irritably. He’d touched something damp on the minotaur’s fur, and when he looked at the smear, he saw that his hands were covered in ash and blood. He dug a water bottle from one of his containers, poured some over his palm, then rubbed them together before drying them on a self-cleaning towel—he had half a dozen in one of his rings.
He scanned the quiet ruins, wishing he’d marked the time when he’d arrived. He looked at his watch for the second time since the fighting ended and saw he’d wasted another twelve minutes. “Twelve minutes and what? Five minutes of fighting . . . Nah, longer than that with all those guys slinking in after the first group. So maybe twenty-something minutes so far? Gotta hold for forty more?”
“Who you talking to, mister?” a youthful voice asked behind him. Victor whirled to see a lean, impish young man sitting atop a nearby, broken wall, his bare feet kicking up and down as he stared. He had empty hands and wore nothing but brown sack-cloth pants and a rough-spun green shirt. Victor relaxed his stance and lowered Lifedrinker. The kid had a pleasant face, smudged with grime as it was. Under a mop of sandy-brown hair, he had wide green eyes, a sharp, narrow nose, and a pleasant smile.
“Myself,” he grunted.
“Oh! I do that, too. Not many friendly folks to talk to around here, but the Enclave’s better.”
“Enclave?” Victor frowned at the kid. “Aren’t you a little young to be in a prison like this?”
The young man smiled and shrugged. Even atop the wall, he had to look up to meet Victor’s gaze. “Well, it’s not a prison to me. I was born here.”
“Seriously?” Victor shifted Lifedrinker onto his shoulder, holding onto her haft with one hand. He supposed he should have gotten more details about the place from Dar or the council. How many iron rankers had they sent in there over the years? How big was it? If a man and woman managed to survive inside the “prison” for a while and one thing led to another, he supposed it wasn’t so far-fetched to think some kids might be born. In a dungeon, though? Who would want to raise a family in a death-attuned dungeon? “Are there many kids here?”
“I’m not a kid, sir! I’m not strong enough to fight the spawns, but I know how to get around ‘em. I’m allowed out of the Enclave, unlike the children. To answer your question, there are lots of ‘em.” He held up his hands and started turning his fingers down one by one as his face twisted in concentration. “Seventeen in the Enclave, and I don’t know how many in Rumble Town.”
“Rumble Town?”
He nodded eagerly. “Yeah, where Ronkerz rules.”
“There’s a town here? How big is this place?”
“Big!” the kid laughed. “It keeps growing, too. A gap opened in the southern range last year, and my own father found a new valley!”
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Victor scratched his head and turned in a slow circle, surveying the carnage he’d wrought. “You know these guys?”
“Me? No sir! Those are Ronkerz’s people. They attack anyone from the Enclave who comes this far north; that’s why I was hiding.” He rubbed his chin, adding a new spot of soot. “Well, they’d probably capture me ‘cause I’m young and only tier-two. My da’ says they’d put me to work in the mine ‘til I was tough enough to fight the spawns.”
“Tier two, huh?” The conversation had taken on a surreal feel to Victor. He was struggling to believe he was chatting with a random kid in the middle of a dungeon after fighting off nearly twenty criminal inmates. “You know a guy named Rasso Hine?”
“Um,” the boy—Victor couldn’t help thinking of him as such—continued to fidget, kicking his feet up and down, while he contemplated, “I think it sounds familiar, but there’s a lot of folks at the Enclave. My da’ knows all their names.”
“How many people are in this place, kid?”
“I dunno. Hundreds? Maybe more! I’ve never been to Rumble Town or Vasso Cavern. My dad’s gonna be mad I came up this way, but he’ll be happy to hear you thrashed a bunch of Rumblers.”
“You should be more careful,” Victor sighed. “You saw me kill all these people, and you still thought it would be smart to talk to me?”
“They’re bad folks. I heard you try to talk to ‘em.” He lifted his too-large shirt, pulled a crude water skin from his belt, and held it over his mouth, wringing it tight in his fists to get a few drops to fall onto his tongue. “Wish I knew where safe water was around here.”
Victor tossed him the bottle he’d used to wash his hands. “Here. I’ve got plenty.” It was true. He had cases of water bottles and a dozen kegs of weak wine. He had juices, liquor, beer, and mead. He’d go for years before running out of fluids, not to mention his body didn’t really need to drink much at all—a perk of advancing his bloodline into the epic tier and having a body steeped in Energy.
“You’ve got one of them, uh, di-dimension bag things?” the boy asked as he wriggled the cork from the glass.
“Dimensional container, yeah. Some people call them spatial containers. I think it depends on where you’re from.” Victor glanced back to the charred stone dais upon which he’d arrived. “Listen, I’ve got some friends coming in the next hour or two. When they get here, you wanna earn a few beads or food or whatever? You can guide us to the Enclave.”
“That would be great, but you’ll have to pass by the Gate Warden before they let you into the Enclave. He’ll probably just ask you some questions; Duke Brosia will be happy to have a real fighter join us!”
“Duke Brosia?” Victor chuckled and shook his head. “Never mind. What’s your name, anyway, kid?”
“Tyn.” He hopped off the wall and approached Victor. He couldn’t have been more than five and a half feet tall, and Victor doubted he weighed a hundred pounds. Still, he moved with vibrancy and stuck his hand out proudly for Victor to shake. Victor nodded and squeezed the slender appendage. “My first companion should be here pretty soon. You think Ronkerz is going to send more people to attack me?”
“Probably, but the ones who ran will have to get back to him first. It’s a good stretch of ground between here and Rumble Town, with lots of spawns in the way. It’ll probably take half a day for any of his Big Ones to come out here.”
Victor sighed, scratching his hair at yet another new term. “And they are?”
“Big Ones? They’re his . . . well, they’re his head smashers, his bone breakers, his trouble makers. They’re the ones who keep other folks from coming into his territory. My da’ says one of ‘em killed a whole party of folks from the Enclave ‘cause they were farming a spawn in a valley that Ronkerz claimed. That happened when I was six, which was eight years ago. We ain’t had any big fights with ‘em since, seeing as Duke Brosia put strict rules on where the Enclavers can wander—south.”
Victor snorted, shuffling over to the flat stone where he’d been sitting earlier. He kicked aside the arrows and bolts he’d pulled out of himself and sat down. “But you’re here, and this is north of the Enclave, yeah?”
“Well, I’m not supposed to be here, but I can hide and sneak better than most. I got my tier-two Class a while back and, along with it, a pretty good skill. Even so, my da’ will get mad if he knows I came this far, so can you tell him you met me closer to the Enclave?”
Victor grunted, pulling some dried, smoked meat out of his ring. “I barely know you, kid. Don’t ask me to lie for you.”
Tyn moved closer, squatting to sit on a smaller stone near Victor’s seat. “Well, can you at least not mention it?”
Victor shrugged. “I won’t bring it up.” Sitting there, amid the carnage of his earlier battle, he reflected on how it wasn’t such a healthy place for a youngster to hang out, so he gathered a thread of Energy and shaped it into Honor the Spirits. The spell flickered out of his outstretched hand, a tendril of wispy, flickering white flames that jumped from corpse to corpse, flaring brightly as it touched each one. The bodies burned away, reduced to ethereal smoke that vanished, transitioning away from the Material Plane and into the realm of spirits.
Victor must have been frowning as he sat, watching the corpses disappear because the boy asked, “Are you angry?”
“Hmm?” Victor shifted to look at the kid. He ripped the hunk of dried meat in half and offered it to him. “Nah, just thinking about how I didn’t put on much of a show for my ancestors. These guys weren’t worthy enemies. The only thing they had going for them was the trap they’d set up.”
Tyn took the meat and immediately stuffed it into his mouth, biting off a large hunk. The work of chewing the dense, dry meat kept him quiet for a while, and Victor brooded some more. He didn’t like the idea that kids were being born and raised inside of a prison dungeon. The whole thing was a stark contrast to the elegance and beauty of Sojourn. The city seemed so evolved and advanced, yet this prison was disgusting on many levels. Victor could understand banishing iron rankers who caused trouble or committed heinous crimes, but something about this situation didn’t sit right with him.
Sending hundreds or thousands of criminals into the same free-for-all wasn’t justice—there was no way every prisoner was equal in terms of raw strength, so that meant the stronger ones were going to have more power inside. They would suffer less than the ones who couldn’t stand up for themselves. Did they all deserve a fate like that? Even if you could argue that they did, Victor would be damned if he’d hear anyone say the children born inside deserved that fate. Tyn looked like he was starved half to death, which was bad enough, but the kid clearly didn’t have much going for him, even if he could get enough to eat.
“You said there are a lot of kids in the Enclave?”
“Oh, sure! Like I said, I’m a man, but I’ve got a younger sister, and she’s got many classmates at the school.”
“There’s a school?”
“Yessir. Lady Breeze runs it.”
“Lady Breeze?”
“The most beautiful woman in the world, sir.” Tyn grinned while he stuffed another wad of dried meat into his mouth. “You should meet her, but be warned: I’m going to marry her!”
“Oh yeah?” Victor chuckled as he leaned back, watching the stone circle, waiting for the portal while listening for any signs of approaching inmates. Tyn grew quiet as he ate and drank, and Victor lost himself in half-baked plans to help the children in this weird pocket-world. He had no idea what he could do; he had the ability to rescue precisely one other person. He supposed he could argue their case with the council when he got out, but beyond that, he felt like his hands were tied.
His frustrated musings were interrupted by the flare of blue light and the weird wailing sounds of the portal, and then Arona appeared, stepping out of the swirling blue disc of Energy. She whirled, her polished-bone staff held out defensively, and when she saw Victor sitting on the stone watching her, she relaxed and stepped closer as the portal snapped shut with an audible pop. “You did it,” she said by way of greeting.
“Yeah. Almost killed myself with that old lady’s bomb, but it broke the formation.”
“Old lady . . . Kreshta Griss? She gave you a ‘bomb’?” She looked around at the blasted area around the dais. “You set it off inside the formation with you?” Her raspy voice was incredulous as she shook her head. Victor simply nodded with a half-smile. “Who’s this then?” She looked at Tyn with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m Tyn, milady!” He hopped up and bowed sloppily, dragging both hands through the dusty gravel near his feet.
Victor stood and gestured at the kid. “I guess the inmates are building towns and having families. Tyn’s going to show us to one of the towns and, hopefully, Rasso will be there. If not, maybe someone will know where to look.”
“Children . . .” Arona looked Tyn up and down, her slender fingers tapping the polished bone of her staff. “How interesting.” She turned in a slow circle, her brows creasing as she observed the strange world with its black sky and oddly close moon. “The death-attuned Energy is strange here—too thin. I wonder if perhaps the many cultivators are causing a shift in the ambient Energy. The dungeon was created with death-attuned Energy, but that was thousands of years ago, and they’ve sent many cultivators into it since.”
“How many?” Victor asked. “The kid doesn’t know.”
“They’ve been sending a few dozen a year into this place since it was opened. I always assumed that most criminals banished here would have short, violent lives dealing with the dungeon's denizens—it’s supposedly tier-nine. If they’re cooperating and having children, though . . .” Again, she trailed off, probably, like Victor, trying to imagine growing up inside a dungeon.
“They don’t all cooperate. I had to kill a dozen or so people who were lurking outside the trap. They mentioned a guy named Ronkerz, and Tyn says he runs a town called . . .” Victor looked at the boy. “What’s it called, again?”
“Rumble Town, sir.”
“Ronkerz Gatebreaker is a legendary figure in Sojourn,” Arona rasped, and Victor felt a small surge of cold Energy waft off her staff as she gripped it and looked around nervously. “He led an insurrection, trying to overthrow the council two thousand years ago. He breached the Spire and killed four council guardians—all steel seekers. The story goes that Ronkerz was only tier-eight!”
“Great,” Victor said, shifting Lifedrinker on his shoulder and turning to look out over the dead landscape. “And he’s had two thousand years to get stronger.”
“Closer to three hundred—remember the time dilation.” Arona pulled a handful of tiny bones from her robe and scattered them around her feet. “We should get moving. I’d rather not run into him.”
Victor nodded, distracted, thinking about Ronkerz. The story of an iron ranker killing some guards in their “test of steel” was acutely interesting to him, considering Dar’s expectations for him when he went to Ruhn to help his granddaughter. In all honesty, Victor felt a wave of relief hearing about Ronkerz’s exploits—if he could do it, then it was possible. Maybe Dar’s confidence in him wasn’t so unusual. When he saw Arona’s five bone guardians spring up from the stony soil, it brought him back to reality, and he gestured to the stone dais. “We gotta wait for Arcus.”
“Do we?” Arona rasped. “You know he can’t be trusted. Wouldn’t it be wiser to leave him to his own devices?”
Victor chuckled and poked one of the weird, blue-fire-eyed skeletons with Lifedrinker’s blunt axe head. It stumbled back in a clatter and hissed at him like an angry cat. “Arona, no offense, but I hardly know you. We’ve had a few good conversations, and I’ll hand it to you: you were honest when you spoke at the inquest. I appreciate that, but I think I’ll wait for Arcus so I can keep you both where I can see you.”