by Nick Harrow
“I am Nephket, the last priestess of the wahket, and your humble servant, Lord Rathokhetra,” the cat woman said as she placed the candle back into its sconce. She bowed low and crossed her wrists behind her head in a formal pose that looked uncomfortable as hell. “Thank you for returning from the underworld in our time of need. The raiders have invaded your tomb and will find us soon.”
“The cartel’s already here?” I asked. Wherever here was. I still couldn’t put together how I’d gone from a high-tech office building to this dingy sandpit of a cellar, but I would worry about that later.
If there was a later.
Metal rang on metal, and a woman screamed. That sounded a lot like the cartel and not Domino’s delivering.
“Defend us, Lord Rathokhetra,” the hacker priestess begged me. “We have kept your headdress and khopesh ready for just this moment. Don your armor, wield your weapon, and destroy those who would defile your dungeon and steal its core!”
If I’d had any doubts that this hacker was completely insane, they vanished in that moment. I’d also started to doubt my own senses, because those cat ears and tail looked way too real to be even really good animatronic prosthetics, and dungeons were something you hunted dragons in with your friends in an online roleplaying game.
“Look,” I said, uncertain and confused about what the hell was going on. “I told you, Nephket, my name’s Clay. I’m not your lord, and I’m not here to save you. I’m just a guy trying to survive.”
The clash of metal against stone rang nearby, and its echoes scattered like bats fleeing the light. Panicked shouts and the sounds of naked feet slapping against stone grew louder as people approached.
The priestess straightened from her bowed posture and raised her hand. Dozens of candles and sconces scattered around the room ignited with golden flames. Their brilliance drove back the shadows that had concealed a massive golden throne against the wall to my right. An ornate headdress rested on the throne’s cushioned seat, and a hooked bronze sword lay across armrests carved into the forms of crouching lions. The back of the throne was shaped like an enormous hooded cobra that curled above the seat. The serpent’s open jaws clutched a pearlescent orb the size of a man’s skull. Vivid swirls of purple smoke churned within the sphere, and something about it called out to me.
That orb was mine. I knew it the second I laid eyes on it.
In fact, everything I saw was mine. Including Nephket.
Nephket crossed the room with brisk strides, grabbed the weapon from the throne, and then lifted the headdress with her other hand. She moved with a sinuous grace that reminded me of a stalking tigress, and the coins stitched onto her clothes jingled with every step she took. She returned and presented the gear to me with a bowed head.
“Please, I beg of you, Lord Rathokhetra,” she said in a voice that was nearly a sob. “We need you. Take up arms, defend your dungeon, defeat the raiders before the last of your people perish!”
A vibrant tapestry on the wall across from the serpent throne billowed to the side as a knot of bloodied and battered cat women stumbled into the chamber. Their fur stripes came in many colors, from orange to charcoal gray to a deep, glossy black, but their skin tones all shared Nephket’s lustrous golden hue. The room filled with a powerful, musky perfume that made it hard to think about anything else.
“We’ve sealed the final door, but the raiders are coming,” one of them gasped. Her left ear was notched midway down its length, and a sticky trail of drying blood had found its way through her hair and down the bridge of her nose. Her emerald eyes were wide, but the pupils were narrowed to almost invisible black slits. “They came prepared and will reach us soon.”
I was still confused about where I was and what had happened, but there was one thing I wasn’t confused about. There was no way I’d stand by and let these strange and beautiful feline women get killed. Whoever had put their hands on them was going to be very, very sorry if I had anything to say about it.
I snatched the headdress and the curious hooked sword from Nephket’s outstretched hands. She opened her mouth to say something, but I didn’t wait around to get the user instructions. I slapped the helmet on top of my head and gripped the weapon’s leather-wrapped hilt in both hands. The hooked blade was wide and heavy, but it felt so damned right in my hands.
A wave of sapphire blue flashed across my vision and left me blinded and stunned for a moment. When it cleared, pale blue lines covered the walls, floor, and ceiling of the chamber with a perfect grid of five-foot squares. A small compass rose shimmered in the upper right corner of my vision. It was almost invisible unless I focused my attention on it, and then it showed the current direction I faced, bright and clear.
“Welcome home, Lord Rathokhetra,” a sepulchral voice boomed in my thoughts. “You have acquired the Crypt Crown and Khopesh, dungeon lord.”
A vision of the ornate headdress filled my mind’s eye, along with a short row of fiery red text beneath it:
[[[Armor Class 25; Hellish Rebuke and Eldritch Blast, cast at will.]]]
Before I could fully absorb all I’d seen, the curved sword replaced the image of the headdress in my thoughts. I glanced at the glowing words and a surge of confidence rushed through me:
[[[+2 bonus to attack, 4 to 14 (Average 9) hit points damage, increased attack speed, expanded critical range, possible disarm on critical.]]]
I’d played enough role-playing games to know that these were two very kick-ass items. I didn’t know how any of this could be real, but the similarities to other role-playing games made me wonder if I’d died and gone to nerd heaven.
“Lord Rathokhetra,” the cat women sighed the name in unison and dropped to their knees, their hands clasped across their foreheads. “Our lives are yours. We live to serve. We die in honor.”
“Nobody’s dying today,” I said. “Well, none of you are dying today. Can’t say the same for the bad guys.”
Muffled shouts from beyond the tapestry drew my attention. I strode across the room and flung the embroidered wall hanging aside to reveal a five-foot-square alcove. The ceiling of the small chamber was ten feet overhead, and a heavy stone door occupied the center of the wall across from me. A pair of black iron brackets jutted from the wall on either side of the door, and a thick wooden beam rested across them to hold the door closed.
A low metallic ringing echoed through the alcove as someone on the other side of the door smashed something heavy into the stone. A narrow crack appeared in the door’s surface, and the wooden beam jumped in its bracket. The barrier wouldn’t stand for long.
I held the khopesh at the ready in my right hand and grabbed the end of the wooden bar on the far side of the hinges with my left. I lifted the beam as quietly as I could and eased it up and out of the bracket on that side. Then I stepped back, cocked my sword over my shoulder like a baseball player braced for a home-run swing, and waited.
A split second later there was a loud crash, and the door burst open. A muscle-bound freak of a man clad in a chain mail shirt stumbled through the now-open door. The massive sledgehammer he’d used to batter the barrier open dragged him off-balance, and his boots tangled with the beam still slanted across the corridor just inside the door. The head of the poor bastard’s hammer hit the ground in front of him, and its handle jabbed him hard in the solar plexus as he caught himself on it.
A red aura erupted around the man when I locked eyes on him, and I instinctively understood that it represented his life force. A moment later a string of red text appeared over his head, and I knew everything I needed to know about this intruder in my dungeon.
[[[Sheth, 1st Level Human Warrior, 12 Hit Points]]]
Yep, this was definitely some kind of elaborate role-playing game. I didn’t understand all the rules yet, but there’d be plenty of time to figure that out after I dealt with these jerks.
“You picked a bad day to come calling, Sheth,” I growled.
The warrior’s eyes widened in horror as I stepped for
ward and swung the khopesh at his throat. The blade whistled as it sliced through the air in a metallic blur.
Sheth tried to raise his hammer to parry my blow, but the tool was poorly balanced and too heavy to provide an effective defense. He’d only lifted the sledgehammer to his waist when my weapon buried itself in his neck.
The hooked sword’s cutting edge severed the corded muscles just above the warrior’s mail shirt. Flesh parted around my weapon, and blood sprayed from the grisly wound I’d hacked deep into Sheth’s neck.
The hammer fell from the warrior’s nerveless fingers. He clasped his gauntlets to his ruined throat, but there was no stanching the flow of blood from the canyon I’d carved through his flesh. The light flowed out of his aura just as fast as the blood gushed from his severed carotid artery.
The khopesh was so well balanced and nimble that I had scarcely considered my follow-up attack before the blade whistled through a wicked backhand stroke I was sure would decapitate the warrior.
But as the sword’s curved cutting edge came within a hairsbreadth of Sheth’s throat, he fell to one knee and vanished in a blast of red light. The sheathed sword he’d worn on his hip fell to the floor with a clang, and his chain mail shirt collapsed onto the weapon like Obi-Wan’s robes when Vader cut him down.
Well, that was unexpected.
The vanished fighter’s companions gawked at me with raw terror in their eyes. They raised their weapons into defensive postures and retreated back down the narrow corridor. The nearest of the raiders, a stocky woman with a pair of barbed horns curling from her temples, held a dagger in each hand and shook her head in denial.
“You said there was no dungeon lord here, Kez!” she shouted.
The horned woman scrambled back from me, but the hallway was only five feet wide, and the very short man behind her was frozen in terror.
The little guy tried to back away, but he was too slow, and her leather-clad ass smashed into his long beak of a nose and sent him sprawling to the floor. His weapon, a mace that looked far too large for him to wield effectively, clattered to the stone and rolled behind the last member of the raiding party.
She was short and slender, with violet eyes and long, pointed ears that peeked through the flowing waves of her ebony hair. Where her companions were armored, this one wore nothing but a single strip of tattered black cloth that coiled around her body in a half-hearted attempt to cover her otherwise naked curves.
“The Guild swore there wasn’t one,” the dark elf said. Unlike her companions, she wasn’t stunned into inaction. She held her ground and twisted her fingers in tortured patterns that made my knuckles ache just looking at them. “That just means there’s better treasure waiting for us once we’ve destroyed him!”
“No,” I said with a bloody grin. “It means you’re all going home in body bags.”
Faced with the choice between getting hacked down without a fight like her warrior friend and hoping for a lucky strike to take me out, the horned woman lunged. Her twin daggers flashed like falling stars as she spun them around her fingers in an impressive display of manual dexterity.
No matter how fancy her knife skills, I knew the horned woman didn’t have a chance to land a strike. I readied my much longer sword for an eviscerating thrust that would drop her before she came within knife range.
My attacker must have come to the same conclusion because she whipped her left hand forward and hurled one of her daggers at my face before she was within my sword’s reach.
The deadly weapon tumbled end over end across the short distance between us as it raced on a collision course with my right eye. Startled by the unexpected maneuver, I reacted on pure instinct and swiped the khopesh in front of me. My defensive slash deflected the spinning dagger in a spray of sparks. The thrown blade ricocheted off the wall to my left and tumbled down the hallway behind me where it clattered to the stone floor.
“Too slow,” I said.
A euphoric rush poured into my veins as adrenaline spiked my heart rate and filled my muscles with new strength. I felt calm and invincible in the face of these armed intruders. Nothing would stop me from driving these filthy raiders out of my dungeon. They would pay for what they’d done to my people.
The horned woman stopped in her tracks and clutched her remaining dagger as if it was the only thing that stood between her and a painful, grisly death. She held the blade across her chest, ready to strike if I gave her an opening. Her eyes darted from my sword to my face, then back to my sword.
I watched her closely and tried to judge her skill. She had the poise of a practiced combatant, and the thrown dagger hadn’t been an amateur maneuver. She’d been in fights before, and she could handle herself.
But she’d never faced a dungeon lord before.
[[[Peska, 1st Level Half-Demon Rogue, 9 Hit Points]]]
“First level?” I barked. I jabbed with the spear-like tip of my khopesh. Peska flinched away from the attack but didn’t drop her guard. “You chose the wrong dungeon for your first raid.”
I feinted with a lunge, then swung the khopesh in a blurred arc aimed at Peska’s head. The weapon was a joy to wield and responded to my will like it was an extension of my body. Its cutting edge sang as it sliced through the air on its way to the rogue’s skull.
But the rogue didn’t wait around for the sword to cleave her head in half. She ducked low and lunged forward with her blade hand extended in front of her.
My sword was out of position after the vicious attack, which left my right ribs and abdomen exposed. I tried to defend myself, but even my nimble khopesh wasn’t quick enough to block Peska’s well-timed thrust.
I braced myself for the feel of cold steel biting into my skin, but instead I felt only a faint bump. The dagger skidded off my ribs as if it had struck a metal plate, and the rogue’s shoulder bounced off my chest. She staggered, off-balance, and shook her head in disbelief.
“He has magic armor!” the dark elf shouted from farther down the hall. She’d retreated during my exchange with Peska and had gathered glowing strands of purple energy around her fingertips. “Back off, I’ve got him.”
A string of cracked and broken syllables burst from the dark elf’s lips, and she flung her hands toward me before I could react. The mystical force streaked through the air between us and condensed into a tight ball of twitching purple threads as it approached. Viscous drops of green fluid oozed through the gaps in the sphere, and the little man on the ground screeched in pain as some of it splattered on its face.
I didn’t even try to deflect this attack, but instead flattened myself against the left wall of the hallway. The purple and green orb hissed and sizzled as it flew past me, and I hoped none of the cat women in the next room had been hit.
Peska took the dark elf’s advice and retreated. She hooked her hands into the little guy’s armor and dragged him down the stone corridor behind her. She was faster than I’d given her credit for, and by the time the hissing ball of death shot past me, she had gotten twenty feet away.
The sorceress had retreated to the end of the hallway and had her back up against a closed wooden door. While her companions looked more terrified by the moment, she had her jaw set in stony determination.
“Hold him off!” she shouted. “I’ll bring him down with spells, but I need time.”
“That’s one thing you’re out of,” I said with an angry snort. “Lay down your weapons and leave this place while you’re still on your feet.”
The horned woman responded to my threat by drawing three more daggers from sheathes concealed beneath her armor’s many straps. She flung them in my direction with surprising speed and even more surprising accuracy. I sidestepped the first dagger and swatted the second and third aside with the hooked end of my blade, but the fourth etched a line of stinging pain across the skin of my right bicep.
I glanced down and expected to see a bloody wound, but what I found looked more like a clean slice through a piece of old paper. Black sand, not blood,
trickled from the strange wound and pattered against the floor. The pain vanished immediately, but a faint red circle had appeared in the upper right corner of my vision. A tiny sliver of that circle was gone, and I had the enraged realization that it showed me how much of my life that dagger strike had stolen. It was almost nothing in the scheme of things, but the fact that someone had come into my home, had drawn weapons on me, and then had the balls to cut me?
I’d kill them all.
“That was rude,” I said as I advanced down the hall. I raked the tip of my khopesh along the floor, and it kicked up a spray of sparks with every step I took. “My offer’s off the table. No one gets out of here alive.”
The horned woman struggled to find more daggers, but either she’d run out or she’d forgotten where she’d stashed them amongst the buckles and straps of her black leather armor.
“Do something, Ristle!” Peska shouted. “I’m out of daggers.”
The little man behind her snatched his weapon from the floor, straightened his spine, and stepped forward to face me. When we were ten feet apart, he raised his mace over his head with both hands. Some sort of jeweled symbol on its hilt flared with a blinding white light that stung my eyes like a speck of windblown sand.
I glared at him, and a red aura surrounded the runty bastard.
[[[Ristle, 1st Level Gnome Priest, 10 Hit Points]]]
What was it with these newbs crashing my party?
“Undead abomination, you shall not pass!” he cried, and I had to wonder what, exactly, I looked like. I’d bled sand instead of the red stuff, but was I really a withered mummy or walking cadaver? I’d have to find a mirror as soon as I finished up these invaders. I didn’t think I could go through life with the Crypt-Keeper’s face.
The gemstones on the little man’s weapon flared with rings of light that washed over me in annoying pulses. I felt an unpleasant tug somewhere deep inside me, but I could tell from the look in his eyes that wasn’t what his little trick was supposed to accomplish. He thrust the weapon forward and raised his voice until it cracked. “Begone!”
