by Nick Harrow
“It’s exhausting to be this excited for so long.” She illustrated her point with a wide yawn. “I’m not doing any of the fighting, and I’m beat. I bet the wahket will sleep like babies tonight.”
“I hope so. They deserve the rest,” I said. “They did good work.”
“There’ll be more tomorrow,” she said. “I might bring in a new set to pull the ropes, keep them fresh. What do you think?”
“That’s a good idea,” I agreed. “We’re not doing rocket science here. It shouldn’t be difficult to train the rest of them to trip the trap.”
“What will you be doing while the rest of us are sleeping?” Nephket asked. “I could stay, if you like.”
I would’ve liked that very much. But I didn’t have the time to spare, and I didn’t want Nephket to give up sleep to be with me. She’d burn herself out like that, and I needed her fresh. There’d be time for everything else once we had sent the raiders packing.
Plus, the dungeon was my lair. Nephket and the rest of the wahket were welcome to visit and work here, but this was no place for them to live. The cat women deserved to be on the surface for at least some of the day.
“I’m going to get help for the rest of you,” I said. “I think I have enough ka for that.”
“New monsters?” Nephket asked.
“Oh, yes,” I said with a sly grin.
Chapter 7: Maneater
AFTER NEPH HAD GONE home and I was alone in my dungeon once again, I leaned back in the cobra throne and readied myself for a deep dive into the subtle art of summoning ferocious monsters. If I wanted to go after more experienced treasure hunters, I needed to understand all of my options.
I called forth the Tablet of Guardians and reviewed the list of creatures available to me. It had expanded significantly now that I had gained a level and racked up more than a couple motes of ka.
The new list had some fancy new options. Rather than just the monster names and their challenge rating, the Tablet of Guardians also showed me each monster’s encounter difficulty level, and it let me adjust the number of monsters I wanted to summon.
I tapped a monster at random, the oddly named bearded devil, and the tablet showed me that a single one of these creatures had a challenge rating of three, would cost me an investment of six motes of ka, and would be a hard encounter for a party of four second-level raiders. A quick adjustment to the party level shifted the encounter difficulty to “Deadly+plus” for first-level raiders, while it was only a moderate encounter difficulty for third-level raiders.
I pondered this new information and considered my options. Investing ka into weaker monsters would give me a swarm of defenders, but at this low level they’d be useless before long. A first-level group of guardians could probably hold off a second-level raiding party, but against third-level adventurers things looked bleak.
On the other hand, a level-three guardian was expensive, and it was just one monster. If clever raiders managed to get around the big boy, they’d have a clear shot at my core.
I turned my attention back to the Tablet of Guardians and frowned at the expansive list of monsters. With so many new critters at my disposal, I worried it would take hours for me to review them all. If this was a problem at second level, at higher levels it would make finding the right guardian impossible. There had to be a better way to do this.
I’d gotten here by being a hacker. Maybe those skills would pay off now that I was a dungeon lord, too. What would Hacker Jesus do with a giant pile of data that needed to be analyzed?
I concentrated on the tablet and thought, “Sort by encounter difficulty.”
The golden hieroglyphics blurred, shifted, and reformed themselves under four tidy group headings: Easy, Moderate, Hard, and Deadly. Next to each group heading was its cost. An easy encounter in a second-level dungeon would cost me two motes of ka, moderate four motes, hard six motes, and deadly would eat up a whopping eight motes of ka.
These new groups also made it easy to see that I could combine multiple different creatures into a single group of guardians. That expanded my options tremendously, but I wasn’t ready to tackle that much complexity just yet.
My current guardians, the scorpions, did a great job softening up the raiders and making them easy prey for the other tricks I had in store. The wahket had proved quite adept at triggering the trap to finish off the raiders. But as my dungeon level increased, it would attract more experienced raiders who’d come with powers and magic of their own. The simple one-two punch that had taken out the first-level chumps might not be as effective at dealing with those who had more levels under their belts.
I decided the best option was to invest in a single badass monster. A deadly encounter at second level would still pose a hard challenge for a third-level party and would be an average encounter for a group of fourth-level raiders. And I could always add a few smaller monsters later to help bolster the new kid.
For the moment, my swarm of scorpions could run interference if the raiders outmaneuvered the big bad, and the wahket could help distract or redirect intruders until the tougher critter could circle around and deal with the raiders. It wasn’t the most elegant plan, but I didn’t have time to dick around. In eight hours, there’d be another set of bad guys banging on my door.
I needed to be ready to murderize them.
There were a bunch of intriguing monsters under the Deadly encounter heading. Banshees, a black ooze, something called a shadow demon, and even a few devils all apparently presented a real challenge for raiders. There were others, too, but none that really caught my eye.
I wanted something unique, a cornerstone monster I could build the rest of my dungeon around. I focused my attention on each of the guardian names in turn, and then stopped and blinked.
The word “unique” sat at the very bottom of the tablet, just beneath “succubus.” Had that always been there? Maybe I’d just missed it when I skimmed the list the first time. I shook my head and tapped that option with my fingertip.
A cool mist formed around my throne, and the tablet vanished from my hands. In fact, the whole damned burial chamber had disappeared. All I could see were swirling white vapors that raced across a shadowed plane ahead of a chill wind.
“This place needs an owner’s manual,” I grumbled.
When nothing else happened for a few moments, I stood from my throne and took a step forward. I glanced back over my shoulder. The throne remained where I’d left it, and the orb in the cobra’s jaws gleamed like a lighthouse beacon.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s find a monster.”
I headed out from the throne with a determined stride. For the first few minutes I checked over my shoulder every ten seconds but was reassured each time when I saw the core’s light still gleamed as bright and clear as the North Star on a moonless night. Confident I could find my way back without trouble, I picked up the pace and scanned the horizon for signs of monsters.
Landmarks finally emerged from the surrounding mist. In the distance ahead of me, a rocky outcrop rose from the shadowed plane like a giant’s upraised middle finger. Off to my right I spotted the edges of a wide thicket and thought I saw the small black shadows of birds hop from branch to branch. Far to my left lay a grove of skeletal trees with their naked branches raised toward the sky like clawed hands. None of those three looked at all inviting, but they did look like they’d hold a good selection of badass monsters I could use to stock my dungeon.
I headed off to my right and the dark thicket with its crown of birds. The shadows turned out to be ravens that cawed and croaked like drunken hecklers as I approached them. Their beady black eyes glinted like orbs of polished steel and stayed glued to me as if they couldn’t decide whether I’d make a tasty meal or not.
By the time I reached the thicket’s edge, the number of birds had tripled. They were also far larger than any other ravens I’d seen, and loud as hell. Their racket made it hard to think, which I supposed was their purpose.
As much of a distraction a
s they were, though, a bunch of noisy birds didn’t seem like a deadly threat. Maybe the big boss bird was deeper inside the thicket.
I marched up to the edge of the thorny bushes, and the brambles parted before me like the Red Sea vamoosing out of Moses’s way. The ravens croaked and squirted sticky streams of ghostly white shit onto the ground beside the trail as the bushes shifted beneath them.
“Piss off,” I grunted. “I’m the boss here, you overgrown parakeets. You poop on my sandals, I’ll roast you for dinner.”
The overgrown corvids went silent at the threat, and a smug grin spread across my face. It was good to know being a dungeon lord carried some weight even in this weird place.
The passage between the bushes led me to the thicket’s overgrown center. A single blackened tree, its red-leafed branches covered in normal-sized ravens, crouched in the clearing. The air smelled like old blood and damp rot, and an unpleasantly chill wind stirred the leaves above me.
“All right,” I said. “Enough of this bargain-basement Halloween bullshit. Where’s the real monster?”
The ravens unleashed a hellish racket as they dove from the tree limbs. The flock crashed into the ground in a spray of feathers and black blood that filled the air with a dense cloud of gore. A whirlwind sprang to life and whipped the carnage into a churning spiral that reeked of death and decay and made me wish I’d picked a different path.
A man’s creaky, raw voice emanated from the whirlwind of bird corpses. “I am the one you seek.”
The man himself emerged from the twister of corpses a moment later, and the wind died. He was tall, but scrawny, and wore a skull that had to have come from a bird much bigger than even the ravens who’d just suicide-bombed the ground. He was naked to the waist save for a cloak of black feathers pinned to the flesh of his shoulders by a pair of iron clasps. His pants were tanned leather of some sort, and someone had spent a lot of time stamping intricate designs into their thigh panels.
“You are?” I asked him. “Why would I pick an old man to guard my dungeon?”
“I am not old, I am ancient,” he croaked. “And I have at my disposal a conspiracy of shadow ravens who can spy upon your enemies and deliver messages to your allies.”
“Yeah, I’m not so sure that’ll be useful,” I said. “My allies are pretty limited, and my enemies keep showing up on my doorstep spoiling for a fight. Do you kick ass?”
“My ravens and I can confuse and bewilder your enemies,” the bird man said, but I’d already lost interest. Pinchy and her pals handled confused and bewildered just fine on their own.
“Save your breath,” I said. “Maybe I’ll sign you up later, when I have more territory I need to keep an eye on. For now, though, I want a fighter. You know any?”
Bird Boy was clearly miffed I didn’t pick him, and he sniffed at my question before he broke apart into a cloud of ravens that flew back up into the trees. They squawked and made themselves generally obnoxious, and I flipped them off.
“Fine, be an asshole,” I said.
“Wait—” he called after me as I headed off in search of another monster.
I left the thicket, annoyed that I’d wasted time, but I made a mental note to check back here if I ever needed messengers or spies. One thing I learned as a hacker was that it never paid to throw away tools you might need later.
I marched toward the stone outcropping next, my fingers crossed that this monster would be more effective than a bunch of whiny birds. Other hazy landmarks had begun to appear beyond those I’d first seen, but I ignored them for the moment. I didn’t have all the time in the world to hare off after every new shadow that popped up. If these three didn’t turn up anything good, I’d go farther afield.
The smell of roasting meat greeted me long before I reached the stone finger. Was that beef or pork I smelled? I couldn’t tell, but it annoyed me either way. Now that I couldn’t eat, everything smelled so damned good I seriously considered how much ka it would cost for me to incarnate just long enough to eat a meal.
Let’s say twenty minutes to wolf down a steak and a giant baked potato loaded with sour cream, cheddar cheese, and chives. At ten ka per minute, I’d need two hundred ka to finish the meal. Even if I didn’t chew, it’d still take at least ten minutes for a halfway decent meal, and that’d cost me a hundred ka. A party of second-level raiders earned me three ka. Best-case scenario, I’d have to murder one hundred and thirty-odd people to enjoy a steak.
Dammit.
“Who dares to approach the war camp of Gnawskull Bloodhammer?” a gruff voice called just before I reached the stone finger’s base.
“Clay,” I called back. “Your friendly neighborhood dungeon lord.”
An enormous warrior emerged from around the stone with the haunch of some beast clutched in his oversized fist. Molten fat drizzled onto the rocks at the monster’s boots, and the aroma made me want to slaughter him then and there.
“A dungeon lord?” he asked. “I don’t remember asking to work for anyone.”
“I don’t remember you getting a choice,” I barked back. “Come down here and let me get a look at you.”
The big boy took a bite from his roast beast, chewed thoughtfully, and then shrugged. He clambered down the incline around the stone finger and walked right up to me.
I was tall, but this guy was seven and a half feet if he was an inch. His shoulders were broad and muscled like the hero in a Frazetta painting, and his skin was a gray-green color that reminded me of a moldy lime. Fangs jutted from his underslung bottom jaw, and his eyes narrowed into slits as he surveyed me. He had an upturned, piggish snout that snuffled the air and leaked a pair of oozing snot lines that killed my appetite. He looked an awful lot like the asshole who’d dragged me out of bed and started this whole business.
[[[Gnawskull Bloodhammer, Orc Warchief, Challenge Rating: 4, 90 Hit Points]]]
“You’re only level two,” he noted. “My challenge rating is four. Are you even qualified to recruit me?”
“I’ll recruit whoever I want,” I said. “If I’ve got the ka, and you’ve got what I need, there’s nothing stopping me from bringing you on board.”
Despite this guy’s attitude, he was a certifiable badass. His hit points would soak up plenty of damage from raiders, and he looked strong enough to crack their heads in return.
The orc ripped off another mouthful of beast meat that was raw in the middle and charred black on its edges. He gulped his food down without a second to chew. Grease dribbled off his chin and onto his naked chest where it joined the remnants of previous meals. From the look of him, this guy spent most of his time eating and the rest of it pumping iron.
“I can fight better than anyone you’ll find at your level,” he said. “I’m also happy to eat whatever I kill. But I need a steady supply of lady flesh to keep my morale up.”
“That’s a pretty big ask,” I said. “How about I throw some gold your way instead?”
“What would I do with gold in your shitty little dungeon?” he asked. “Nah, just bring in a few fine-looking women every month and let me do my thing.”
I considered what the orc was offering and what he was asking. He looked like a bigger version of the Inkolana assholes who’d kidnapped me, so I had no doubt he could handle himself in a fight. He’d carve a path of destruction through low-level adventurers like a fat kid plowing through a bucket of Halloween candy.
But the idea of turning any woman, even that bitch dark elf Kezakazek, over to this orc did not sit well with me. Even if I could find someone willing to do the dirty with this ugly bastard, she probably wouldn’t survive the process.
I wanted to protect my dungeon and the wahket, and I didn’t get the feeling that the bastard would be able to do both jobs. If he saw any of the cat women, he’d try something stupid, and then I’d have to banish him or kill him or whatever dungeon lords did to obnoxious pieces of shit who couldn’t follow the rules.
“Hard pass,” I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. �
��I don’t need you that much.”
I turned and walked away, and the orc took another big bite of his meal. As I descended the incline and started my trek toward the tree on the horizon, his hateful eyes burned holes in the back of my neck.
Whatever.
Before the smell of the roasting meat had vanished from my memory, I reached the last of the landmarks. I crossed my fingers and hoped whatever hid near the big dead tree would be my dream monster date.
The landmark turned out to be a whole ring of dead trees. They were all tall and leafless, but I couldn’t see any evidence of rot in the wood. The ground was covered with a thin layer of dry leaves that crackled and crunched under my feet with every step I took toward the grove’s center. Maybe it was just autumn here.
Wherever the hell here was.
“Hey, Guardian, I don’t have time to play hide-and-seek with you,” I called out when I’d reached the middle of the circle. “Come on out and let’s have a chat. I don’t bite. I promise.”
Something stirred under the leaves ahead of me. It scuttled around in a circle, but all I could see of it was a raised mole trail of dead leaves and gray dirt left in its wake. I turned to keep it in sight, and when it completed the circle and reached its starting point it went still.
“What do you want of me?” a woman’s suspicious voice asked. She sounded young, mid-twenties maybe.
“I’m a dungeon lord. Name’s Clay. I’m recruiting dungeon guardians,” I said. “You’re next on my interview list.”
A tittering laugh emerged from beneath the mound of leaves.
“I am Zillah, Death’s Shadow,” she said. “You dare to come before me?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see what you’re working with.”
A sudden flurry of agitated movement kicked up the leaves all around me. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything through the veil of dead foliage, and then a shadowed figure burst through the leaves and thrust her face into mine.
I stepped backward, and my khopesh appeared in my hand as I reacted to the sudden threat.
