by DB King
“They would trap adventurers? Not kill them?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Ella. “And the few times it happened it was not pleasant. Trapped adventurers would go mad themselves inside the ever-changing dungeons. That’s why the other dungeon masters would come together to try to get the chaos dungeons under control. But they didn’t get all of them. There are still certainly some chaos dungeons out there in the world.”
“Well, when it comes my time, I hope I have the chance to shut my dungeons down carefully, and avoid leaving such a dangerous legacy.”
They had arrived in front of the cliff-face while they were talking. Now, a silence fell between them. Marcus sat down in the grass for a while to digest everything he’s just learned.
He wondered if he wanted this, really wanted it. There seemed to be a very dark side to this power, if it were misused or allowed to get out of control. But it was like Ella said—power was just power. What mattered was how you used it. Like anything, he thought—like a sword, or money, or wine. Anything could be used for good or for evil. It was about the quality of the man, not the quality of the thing the man used.
He nodded to himself. I have been given this, and I’ll use it. I’ll use it for the betterment of those around me, and eventually for the betterment of all of Kraken City.
A thick mat of ivy covered the entrance to the cave. Feeling sure of his own intentions now, Marcus focused on the task at hand—testing out the dungeon. He reached for his spell to check the status of the dungeon’s evolution.
Crucible: Gestation phase complete
“Excellent! Crucible: unlock!”
The ivy was swept aside like a curtain, as if an invisible hand had pulled it away. Yesterday, there had only been a small crevice in the rock. Now, there was a stone door on massive iron hinges. It was slightly ajar.
Marcus touched the jeweled dagger at his belt. He had put his old iron dagger into the dungeon as an ingredient for the evolution process, and now the iron was his only weapon. He was the Master of Evolutions and had started the dungeon, but did that mean he would be safe from whatever monsters were inside?
He put the question to Ella, and she shook her head. “No,” she said, “but you don’t have much to fear from the creatures in your own dungeon. The dungeons will be tied to your level. As you evolve, so they evolve too, but they will never be at a higher level than you. Unless you were to do something really stupid, you’ll always be a match for the dungeon creatures. That’s not to say it will necessarily be easy—you’ll have to use all your abilities when you fight a dungeon—but you can be confident that there’s never going to be anything in there that you can’t handle if you're careful and keep your head.”
“That sounds fair to me,” said Marcus. “Let’s go in and have a look.”
He’d put a pebble, some gold, and an iron dagger in the dungeon before. What would they have transformed into?
Marcus stepped into the dungeon entrance warily, but Ella stayed behind. When he glanced back, she shook her head. “I may be hard to kill, but I’m no fighter, not now anyway. I might change or evolve, but for now the dungeon fight is something I don’t want to participate in. I’ll stay here—fighting dungeon monsters is not my role.”
Marcus felt slightly disappointed for a moment, then changed his mind. Fighting was something he’d always been good at, but Ella was the source of his dungeon power—as she’d said, they were linked now. She was the vector through which his power flowed. If there was going to be violence, he would take the brunt of it, he resolved.
With that thought, and a last glance at the pleasant, peaceful grove, Marcus plunged into his first ever dungeon fight.
* * *
Beyond the door, he found himself in a narrow, high-ceilinged corridor that looked as if it had been cut roughly out of solid rock. The corridor snaked forward in a winding, meandering way, so that quickly he was cut off from the view of the grove behind. He couldn’t see Ella anymore either, or the light shining in. The corridor was dark and cold. He felt his senses sharpen, ready for any threat.
As he rounded a corner, he felt a brush of air against the back of his neck. Before he had even had time to be fully conscious of it, he leaped forward and out of the way. A trap! Behind him, heavy rocks fell from the roof, crashing into the ground where he had just stood. Catching his breath, he warily approached the rocks and looked closer. Each one was half the size of his head.
When he crouched to look more closely at them, he laughed in sudden understanding. They were each scaled up versions of the pebble he’d placed during the initial evolution stage of the dungeon’s progress. The stones could have caved in his skull, he thought, as he looked up at the shaft from where they’d fallen.
He bent and picked one up, hefting it in his right hand.
There was a sound from along the corridor. Marcus whirled. His dagger flashed in his left hand, the jeweled hilt gleaming red in the gloom. The dagger’s edge was incredibly sharp—so sharp he could almost feel it pressing against the very fabric of the air around him. He stood, poised, not breathing, listening with every fiber of his being.
Clank, clank, came the sound. Clank, creak.
It sounded as if metal gears were turning somewhere up ahead, and metal weights thumping in an uneven rhythm on the stone floor. Marcus crept forward again, still holding the heavy round stone in his right hand. He froze again.
A low, hollow moan echoed up the narrow corridor, “uuuuurrrrrgggghhhhhhh…”
It was alive. There was something alive up there, something heavy, made of metal and gears, and it had a voice. Whatever the dungeon had created from the gold and iron Marcus had put in, it was monstrous.
Watching for traps, Marcus tiptoed toward the noises. He kept in mind what Ella had said, that the dungeon would only create monsters that were within his ability to fight. That gave him confidence.
His newly evolved body felt lean and strong, and the dagger balanced in his left hand felt like something alive. At a corner, he stopped. A glow of firelight was shining around the corner and illuminating the rough stone of the wall in front of him. Whatever the monster was, it awaited him just around the corner.
Looking up and down, Marcus looked around the area for traps. He couldn’t see any, but he hadn’t seen the trigger for the falling stone trap either.
“Time for some magic here, I think,” he said. “Ward Detect.”
Ward detected: none
Trap detected: impale
The trap detection element of his Ward Detect spell was not something he had ever used before. In fact, he had sometimes wondered why exactly the Ward Detect had trap detection built into it. If people could afford to hire a mage to work the spell, they tended to guard their houses with some kind of magical ward or other, but he had never known anyone to guard their house with a physical trap. So, he was used to the trap detection readout being negative.
This time, the effect was different. A glowing light seemed laid over his vision for a moment, and then it coalesced around something low down near the ground, drawing Marcus’s eye. As the short-lived spell wore off, the glowing light faded, but he could see it now. At the foot of the corner wall, and mostly hidden by shadow, a tripwire glinted softly in the torchlight.
Gotcha, he thought.
Spell: Ward Detect level 3
Level increase: 3%
Current progress to Level 4: 38%
Marcus smiled. That was the first time that spell had gained experience in a while. To tell the truth, of all his spells, that was the one that got the least use. Now that he was the dungeon master, he suspected that was something that would change.
He turned his attention back to the tripwire. There was no sign of what would happen when the wire was activated—no cleaver suspended above his head or rocks balanced precariously above the wire, but all the same Marcus backed off and waited.
The thumping noise came again, followed by the same low groan. It sounded like something big and ungainly
stomping up and down a long room. Well, he wasn’t prepared to try stepping over the tripwire—that seemed too risky. Instead, Marcus hefted the heavy, round rock in his right hand and then rolled it across the floor toward the tripwire.
The wire snapped as soon as the rock hit it, and instantly the trap was activated.
Impale, the trap detect spell had said, and it was exactly right.
From each side of the wall, on either side of the tripped wire, massive blades came out from the stone walls. Eight in total, four on each side, they punched horizontally through the air toward each other, meeting in the middle. Marcus had a glimpse of huge, cruel barbs on the blades, before they pulled back into place in their hidden niches inside the walls on either side.
If he’d been standing where the tripwire was, they would have stabbed into him in eight different places, then likely torn him to bits when they had retracted again. There was a loud click as they vanished from view in the walls.
Woah, I’ll need to watch my step in here, he thought, but so far, he had been up to the challenge of the dungeon. It didn’t seem likely that anything but the tripwire would trigger the blades, but he hurried as quickly as possible past the spot, taking care not to touch the limp ends of the broken tripwire.
He was approaching the end of the corridor. Light shone from around the corner, and the creaking and groaning noises were louder than ever. He steeled himself for the challenge, gripping his dagger in his left hand and keeping his spells at the ready. Now, he would face whatever the clanking metal beast was that had been created by his first dungeon evolution.
“Ultimate Stealth.” He mouthed the words in barely a whisper, but they took effect, and he felt the comforting glow of the magic washing through him. For the next few minutes, at least, he would be almost undetectable.
Spell: Ultimate Stealth Level 1
Level Increase: 11%
Progress to next level: 34%
He allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction at seeing the increase in the spell’s progression. Though the increase was one point lower than last time, it was still a generous push forward.
Creeping as stealthily as his newly activated spell allowed, Marcus made no sound at all as he crept up to the corner and stuck his head around. There was a crunching, thumping noise, and a wheezing like pneumatic gears, and then, at last, he saw it.
The chamber was long and low, and lit by lines of torches up and down each wall. The entrance Marcus was looking out from was placed at one end of the long hall, so he had a clear view of the whole space.
At the far end, a figure loomed. It was humanoid, easily eight feet tall, with four arms coming out of its shoulders. It stood upright on two thick legs, and its head was low, sticking forward out of the middle of its chest. The face, Marcus saw with a shiver, was an expressionless mockery of a human face.
It was a golden flat sheet with two eyelets and a down-turned slit for a mouth. It swung mechanically from side-to-side on a short, stubby neck, and with every swing there was a creaking, hissing sound like steam-driven gears. The arms, legs, and body were thick constructions of hinged metal beams, gold and iron pieces mixed together with no attempt at order or aesthetic. The feet were flat, round plates of iron.
But it was the hands that drew Marcus’s focus. Instead of hands, it had massive iron swords at the ends of its arms. Four arms and four swords. Two of them were raised high above the creature’s head, as if poised for a downward blow against an enemy, while the two lower sword-hands were held up like lances, ready to skewer any foe who got too close.
And that was when it saw Marcus. Despite his spell, the monster had spotted him.
The horrible expressionless metal face glared at him, and the creature froze, its bladed hands swirling around in the air slowly as it anticipated killing him. Marcus was no coward. He’d seen—and fought—some crazy things during his life in Kraken City, but never anything like this.
“Courage, Marcus,” he said to himself, and the monster seemed to understand him. It laughed, a terrible mechanical sound like metal plates being ground together by giant hands.
“Kiiiillllll…” It moaned, and began to lumber toward him.
It was slow, he saw now. Slow and awkward because of its size. Speed will have to be my number one defense against this monster, if I’m going to kill it, he thought. Then he questioned himself. Could he kill this thing?
“Definitely,” he said out loud, then to the monster he shouted, “Come on then, bladehand! If you want me, you’ll need to be swifter than the wind! No one has caught Marcus the Exile yet, and today’s not going to be the day it happens first!”
With that, he leaped forward into the long chamber. As soon as he was in the chamber, a metal grate slammed into place behind him, blocking his exit. There was no other way out.
He was trapped.
He could tell that the monster’s handicap—its slow speed and ungainly size—was balanced by the narrowness of the room. The monster would have the reach on him, no doubt about it, and its arms would be able to reach from side to side of the room, making it almost impossible for Marcus to slip behind it.
Well, there was no getting away from it. Ella had said the monster would not be a match for him with his newly evolved speed and strength.
It was time to find out.
Marcus dropped and rolled, halving the distance between him and the monster in one dive. It didn’t look any better up close. Chunks of metal stuck out at odd angles from its body, and the huge blades that swung menacingly around it were razor sharp in the torchlight.
Two of the creature’s bladed hands were gold and the other two were iron. They looked heavy enough to crush a man’s skull with a single blow, even without their razor-sharp edges.
But it was slow, and Marcus was amazed at his own quickness. These evolutions really were something else. He’d always been quick, but this was a level of rapid movement and agility he’d never imagined. He ducked to one side and then the other as the bladehand lumbered up the chamber toward him.
He leaped back and forth, touching the wall on either side each time. Yes, he was certain of it—the bladehand could not move quickly enough to follow him. As he moved back and forth across the narrow room, getting faster and faster, he suddenly felt something happen. It was as if a tight cord had snapped somewhere inside his mind, and a sudden rush of magic flooded him.
Spell: Fleetfoot Level 1
Level Increase: 4%
Progress to next level: 4%
A new spell! Marcus was amazed as he felt the new progression pathway snap into place. He’d never heard of such a thing before. The spell had just appeared out of nowhere! Was gaining new spells something that happened when fighting within the dungeon? He would ask Ella about it once this was over. If simply fighting in the dungeon could grant him new spells… the possibilities made his head spin, but he kept his mind on the task at hand.
The monster thundered up the room toward him, leaving less than a quarter of the room’s length left for Marcus to move in. Soon, he would have to close with the monster.
It put on a burst of speed, lumbering up to close the distance between Marcus and its whirling blades. Time to try out his new spell.
“Fleetfoot!” he cried, and a sensation like wind came under his feet. Speed rushed through him, though instinct told him that the boost would not last long at all. He must make the most of it.
Marcus dived as quickly and accurately as he could, through the wide gap between the monster’s legs. He felt the ground move as four swords thudded into the sandy floor with incredible force, but his massively enhanced speed carried him through.
He rolled forward and sprang to his feet like an acrobat, then turned and leaped up onto the monster’s back. As he landed, he felt the Fleetfoot spell wear off.
Spell: Fleetfoot Level 1
Level Increase: 4%
Progress to next level: 8%
Satisfaction at seeing his spell increase made him grin, and he ste
adied himself on the monster’s back. The huge metal-plated shoulders rolled under his feet as he wobbled on them, looking for some mechanism he could break—but there was none. The monster was encased in many heavy metal plates, more like a skin of interlocking plates than a suit of armor.
Then he saw something.
The heavy plate that covered the spot where the arms met the shoulders was dark iron with gold stripes across it. The gold gleamed red in the torchlit chamber. But at the edge of the plate, there was a gap, just big enough for a man to get his fingers in.
Without hesitation, Marcus grabbed the edge of the plate and pulled.
He didn’t expect it to move, even with his newly evolved strength, but as he strained, a second new spell appeared, flashing through his soul like a blaze of light.
Spell: Hero’s Might Level 1
Level increase: 0%
Progress to next level: 0%
Marcus didn’t hesitate. “Hero’s Might!” he gasped, and immediately felt new strength pouring into his arms and chest as he hauled on the plate. Suddenly, it moved, then tore upward with a rending sound.
The sudden release of the plate nearly caused Marcus to fall off-balance, and he wobbled dangerously for a moment, letting the plate fall to the ground with a clang before he regained his balance.
Spell: Hero’s Might Level 1
Level increase: 4%
Progress to next level: 4%
The bladehand roared in pain, flailing its swords about, but it couldn’t reach Marcus. Its arms could hit anything that was in front of the creature, but not anything that was behind.
In the gap where the plate had been, Marcus now saw a complex and messy arrangement of gold and iron mechanisms—cogs, wheels, thin wires, spinning spheres, and small levers transferring force from one part of the creature to another. It’s as complex as the inside of an animal, he thought as he looked at it gleaming in the torchlight. Not a machine at all, really, but a monstrous creature encased in an exoskeleton of iron and gold.
