by DB King
Jonah was the quickest of the three, and the others would do what he said willingly. Tyler took the left and Jek took the right, while Jonah charged straight at the monster’s face.
The bladehand was blinded by the flames. Jek caught the monster’s clumsy blow with his whip-thin razor-sharp steel. Tyler spun and deflected a golden sword, while Jonah cut to the right and the left to knock back the monster’s downward strikes.
Tyler’s blade sang through the air as he delivered a ringing blow to the midpoint of the creature’s arm, where the elbow joint was. The blade cut between armor plating and crunched into the fine mechanical components that secured the bladehand’s arm to its body. The arm spasmed and then fell to the ground.
Jek, delivering a flurry of blows against two swords at once, held the monster’s right side at bay, but didn’t do much damage.
His two companions bought him all the time he needed. Jonah flung himself upward into the black smoke and flame that surrounded the creature’s face. He raised his sword like a lance and plunged it through the eye-socket of the bladehand.
The creature bent backward, flinging its hands up into the air. Sudden fire blasted from every crack in its armor plating. The three adventurers were flung backward. Jek and Tyler lost their hats, but Jonah managed to keep his. He had lost his sword, however, but as he stepped back across the floor away from the bladehand, he saw its hilt sticking out of the creature’s eye.
“Ah, my jacket!” howled Tyler. “Help!” Jonah looked up and saw that his friend was on fire. He’d got some of the flaming tar on himself and was now flailing about with flame climbing his back. Jek and Jonah, laughing, grabbed their friend and hauled his jacket off, and Jek flung it into the fire that was consuming the bladehand.
All three men got to their feet and jogged back down the room as the bladehand exploded in a thunderous ball of dirty orange flame and thick black smoke. The noise was deafening, but when they raised their heads, the first thing they all saw was not the wreck of the bladehand, but the generous stack of gold coins that sat midway between them and the pile of twisted and blackened metal that had been their enemy.
“Everyone all right?” asked Jonah. He was pleased to hear that there was no tremor in his voice.
“I’m unhurt,” said Jek, but there was a distinct tremor in his voice.
“Except for my jacket, my hat, one boot, and both my damned eyebrows I’m unhurt as well,” confirmed Tyler in a shaky voice. All three laughed. Tyler was missing his eyebrows, his beard, and a chunk of his curly brown hair as well, but they would all grow back.
“You’re lucky to have gotten off so lightly!” said Jek. “You might have been killed in that blast!”
“True enough,” said Tyler sagely. “And I guess those coins will buy me a new and better jacket, and a hat too.”
“And they’ll buy me a sword also,” said Jonah. “There’s more than a hundred coins here, too, look!”
As the adventurers examined their prize, they found that the amount was closer to two hundred. The coins were heavy and slightly warm, the pictures and lettering on them perfectly clear, as if they had been minted that very day. All three men looked at each other in wonder and excitement as they divided the coins into three piles, then put a tenth into a separate pile to use as their fee to the dungeon master.
“I have an idea,” Jonah said. “What if we offer the dungeon master twenty percent, but on the condition that we are the only duelists who are allowed to run the dungeon? If we have exclusive rights to it among the duelists, we’ll be able to buy better gear and privileges than any of the other men in the guild. If the others are allowed to run it as well, then riches may quickly come to mean little among us.”
The others agreed that this was a good idea, and so they each set a second tenth pile aside to give the dungeon master if he accepted their offer.
“What’s to stop anyone else from coming down here and finding the dungeon anyway?” asked Tyler, who was the youngest of the three.
“Ah,” Jonah said, “you know little of the legends of dungeons. The dungeon master will have control over who can see the entrance. Only those the master decrees may enter. Everyone knows that.”
“I don’t,” protested Tyler. “How can everyone know it if I don’t?”
“You do now,” Jek pointed out. “So now everyone does know.”
Tyler screwed up his face as he tried to work that out. He was a good duelist, quick on the draw and accurate with his cuts, but he was not the smartest man the guild had ever trained.
They found the exit, gold clinking in their pouches as they crossed the threshold.
* * *
Outside, Marcus waited patiently by the door. Ella had reappeared and sat cross-legged nearby him, her gossamer wings folded over and her straw-colored faerie hair as wild as ever. “So you think they’ll manage to beat the bladehand?” she asked Marcus after they had waited for a while.
“The duelists are some of the best fighters in Kraken,” Marcus replied. “And there are three of them. I’m sure they’ll manage it.”
“I’m amazed that worked,” Ella said, shaking her head. “It sounds like such a ludicrous tale, I thought they’d laugh at you and refuse to come.”
Marcus grinned. “You don’t know these duelists as I do. They are taught to recognize a liar as part of their training, and they have such a prickly sense of honor that they can never back down from a fight—it’s just not an option for them. Also, most people have heard about the old legends of dungeons, though fewer have heard about faeries, and I’m sure that in Kraken City you, me, and Diremage Xeron are the only people who know about the connection between faeries and dungeons. That’s a secret that I’ll keep to myself.”
Marcus heard the sound of footsteps, laughter, and chatter coming down the corridor. Ella retreated into the shadows and cloaked herself in invisibility, but Marcus stood smiling as he awaited the return of his adventurers.
He grinned as they came out into the corridor. They looked like they’d had a serious fight. One of them was missing a boot, a jacket, and a lot of his hair, two of them were missing their hats, and Jonah, their leader, had lost his sword. All three had pockets clearly bulging with coins.
“Well, my friends,” Marcus greeted them cordially. “You seem to have done well. Was that to your liking?”
“A most excellent fight!” Jonah declared, pumping Marcus’s hand enthusiastically. “An excellent fight, and a generous reward, as promised!”
He pulled a stack of gold coins from his pocket and made a show of counting them before handing them to Marcus. “The reward was even more than you said it would be! We are very pleased, and here’s your tenth, but now I have a proposal for you, dungeon master.”
Jonah leaned in conspiratorially and spoke quietly, while his men looked on. “I suggest a new arrangement. My friends and I would like to purchase exclusive rights to run your dungeon, and in exchange, we would offer a higher percentage of the proceeds.”
Chapter 11
Marcus frowned. “Exclusive rights? I don’t think I could do that. I could offer you exclusive rights among the duelists, but not among all the people of the world.”
Jonah laughed. “Ah, of course not. And I wouldn’t ask it! No, no, just among the duelists.”
Marcus made a show of thinking about it, and frowned.
Jonah, watching the other man’s face closely, waited for a moment before speaking again. “And to show our commitment to being the elite dungeon runner team that we believe we can become,” he said seriously, “we want to offer you a fifth of our take —twenty percent —on the condition that we will be allowed exclusive rights to be the only members of the duelists guilds who are allowed to run the dungeons.”
“Well, that’s certainly a generous offer!” Marcus said, furrowing his brow and pausing to pretend to think about the deal. It was, without a doubt, one that would greatly benefit him. He hardly needed to think about it, but it never paid to let the other p
arty know that. “I accept,” he said after a long pause.
They shook on it, and Jonah handed over a further tenth of their takings. The other two looked a little wistfully at the gold coins clinking into Marcus’s pocket, but they raised no objections.
“Come here again in a week from now, if you want to run the dungeon again,” Marcus said, and they agreed that they would.
As Marcus watched the three swordsmen walking away back toward the Duelists’ Plaza, Ella appeared behind him, floating at his shoulder as was her usual way.
“I never thought duelists would be so foolish,” said Marcus with a chuckle once the duelists were well out of earshot.
“Why do you say that?” Ella asked. “Didn’t they do well?”
“Oh, they did well all right,” he replied, “but I was going to give them exclusive rights to the dungeon anyway, for the same tenth we’d already agreed. They negotiated their own price up when they didn’t have to.”
He turned and went back to the dungeon doorway. Holding up a hand, the available spells appeared.
Crucible chamber: New elements detected:
Begin Gestation Phase
Delay Gestation Phase
Marcus chose Begin and spoke the spell. The door slammed closed, and there was a rumbling noise like rolling boulders from behind the door. He spoke the spell to lift the dungeon from its place and held out a hand.
As before, the door disappeared and a bubbling, boiling effect washed over the blank stone. A bright light shone onto Marcus’s hand, became intense, and then manifested into the warm, familiar glass sphere.
Dungeon Master: Level 2
Dungeon Chambers: 2
Dungeons Fights: 2
Progress to next chamber: 100%
New Chamber Available!
“Wow!” Marcus said. “We got a serious level increase from that fight! There’s a new chamber ready to be created.”
“I told you that you would get a big boost from having adventurers!” Ella replied.
He tossed the dungeon sphere up into the air and caught it, whistling a tune as he slipped it back into his robe pocket and grinning. “That went really well,” he said to Ella as they started back up the corridor, headed for the Gutter Gang’s base.
After they’d gone on in silent thought for a while, Ella asked, “Why were you planning to give them exclusive rights to the dungeon running? Wouldn’t it benefit you to have more people running the dungeon, not less?”
Marcus shook his head. “I’ve been selling things in Kraken City all my life,” he replied. “You see, exclusivity is as important as the thing itself. Yes, I want people to come and run the dungeons, but I don’t want everyone doing it. I don’t want it to become normal. If it’s just those three, then I have a chance to see what effect I have on the economy in general, and see what happens when word gets out about the dungeons. You’ll notice that I didn’t make them promise silence?”
“I did notice that, yes…”
“We’ll need to be careful, but it wouldn’t do for no one to know about the dungeons. Given the chance, the duelists are terrible gossips. They’ll spread the rumor, and they’ll exaggerate their part in it until we become legends.”
“Still, surely more dungeon runners would be better?”
He looked at her. “No! Not yet, at any rate. We don’t want it to become a fairground. We want to ease in slowly, see what happens. I’m looking for one or two teams, maybe three at most. Once the dungeons evolve and get bigger, well, maybe then we can scale up, but until then I want to progress at a pace that’s manageable.”
Ella didn’t seem entirely convinced about that, but she accepted that he was the dungeon master.
“Well,” she said, “you know the people of Kraken City better than I do, that’s for sure. If you say this is the best way to introduce them to the concept of the dungeons, I’m not going to contradict you.”
“This is best,” he said, glancing at her. “Trust me.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I do.”
They returned to the Gutter Gang’s base without incident, and immediately headed back to the grove chamber. As before, Hammer took his leave of them, joining the guard at the barricade, as had become his custom. The guard welcomed him with a bite to eat and a scratch behind the ears and a kind word, and Hammer accepted all three gladly before settling down at the feet of the guard and going to sleep.
Back in the gray, blank room below Marcus’s old bed-nook, he spoke the spell to reveal the entrance to the grove. He and Ella stepped inside.
It was night in the grove chamber, with a thick blanket of stars across a deep blue sky. A low moon hung above one edge of the grove, and the campfire by the trees was alight.
The campfire by the trees crackled, as if to greet them as they approached.
“I swear this grove has a life of its own,” Marcus said as he looked around, breathing the fresh night air.
Ella gave him an odd look. “Well, yes,” she said. “That’s how it works.” She smiled. “I guess you’re coming to learn that.”
He smiled. “I guess I am.”
The grove had increased in size again while they had been away. This time, it wasn’t so much that the area covered had increased, but everything in the grove had gotten bigger. The two trees had been joined by a third. The original two had increased in girth and height, their white bark shining in the moonlight, their leaves rustling gently in the warm breeze. The new one was smaller, younger, and placed a little away from the first two.
Over by the waterfall, Marcus saw that the rough stone wall that had been there since last time had grown to become a stone platform that extended out into the water. Statues spotted the platform, surrounding a seat. The pool was wide and deep now, and the waterfall seemed broader and stronger too.
Marcus stretched, smiling. “Such a beautiful spot.”
Ella, who was flying serenely around the little camp area, came back over to him and touched his shoulder with a tiny hand. “I agree,” she said. “This is you, here in the grove. This is you that you’re seeing here.”
“Me?” he asked with a twisting smile. They began to walk over toward the cliff-edge where they had placed the dungeon chamber before. “What do you mean, it’s me that I’m seeing here? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Oh, but it does! I keep telling you that it’s your intention, your inner quality, that is core to the dungeons. That’s why this is so wholesome, so good. The entrance chamber, the first chamber, is always a reflection of the inner quality of the dungeon master, mixed with the qualities of the ingredients that went into the entrance’s evolution.”
“Those ingredients being you, of course,” he said.
“That’s right. This chamber is the interaction between your inner nature and my grove element, combined to create this peaceful place.”
“And what about the combat areas of the dungeon? Are they a reflection of myself as well?”
“Oh, no!” she laughed. “No, that’s just pure dungeon mechanics!” Her laughter was like the waterfall, a tinkling, splashing sound quite unlike a human laugh. He smiled fondly at her. Marcus was becoming quite fond of this weird little being.
He was very glad the Gutter Gang had just accepted her too. Of course, the Gutter Gang were good at accepting outsiders, but Marcus had thought that a tiny, flying, insectoid faerie might have been too much even for them. He was glad to have been proved wrong.
When they reached the cliff-face, Marcus placed the dungeon again and checked to see if the gestation phase was complete. It was.
“I wonder what ingredients the duelists left in the chamber to gestate?” he asked.
“They looked as if they lost their hats, some boots, a jacket, and a sword,” said Ella.
“Yes, and some facial hair!” Marcus added. They both laughed. “I wonder what those ingredients will have evolved into then?”
“The hats were decorated with feathers,” Ella said thoughtfully. “Animal ingredients
are always interesting when they are added to a dungeon. You often get some large evolution of the animal those ingredients came from.”
“Really? That’s useful to know. What about adding a new chamber, though? If there’s more monsters in the same chamber, it’s going to get pretty crowded.”
“Ooh, yes,” said Ella. “Check your spells. If I’m right, there should be the option to add a new chamber and rearrange the monsters a little bit. You don’t have total control over what goes where—the dungeon has a life of its own, as you say—but you do get some say in it, particularly when it comes to moving and rearranging the dungeons.”
Chapter 12
Marcus was about to ask how on earth he was supposed to arrange dungeon chambers when a shimmering light appeared in front of his hand. He held his palm out, and something began to take shape below it.
“What in the…?” he asked.
“Just go with it,” said Ella, sounding breathlessly excited.
The light shone up from the ground and down from Marcus’s hand, meeting in the middle to form a swirling cloud of brightly lit particles. The light coalesced into a form—a cylinder four feet thick and four feet high, with a flat top. It shone with an internal light so that they could see its shape even in the moonlight.
“It’s a table!” Marcus exclaimed as the formation process stopped and the object became clear to see. He took his hand away and saw, to his delight, a little model on top of the table. It seemed to be carved out of stone. He leaned closer to look.
“What is it?” said Ella curiously, flying closer.
The realization of what it was hit them both at the same time. “It’s the dungeon!” They said together.
A perfect little model of the space in which they now stood manifested on top of the strange magical table. The grove was perfectly rendered, miniature trees, waterfall, and campfire all in place. And here, at the face of one of the cliffs, a model corridor led to the miniature bladehand chamber.
