by DB King
In that chamber, the bladehand itself could be seen, a little model of the monster no bigger than Marcus’s thumb. But there was something else in there with it.
“What’s that?” he said, peering closer, but he couldn’t see properly. Something dark was there, a figure, or more than one—they flickered in and out as he looked at them.
“Those must be the new monsters,” Ella said, “but because you’ve not been in and looked at them, you can’t see them properly yet on the model.”
“But what’s the purpose of this?” Marcus asked in bewilderment.
“Well, what’s that at the edge of the table?” Ella asked in reply.
Marcus looked where she pointed. At the edge of the table was a little pile of model chambers. There were corridors, too, and after a moment, Marcus realized what they were for.
“It’s more chambers!” he said, laughing. “This table allows me to add new chambers and rearrange the current ones!”
“That’s how I read it,” Ella agreed. “Though I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this before. All the dungeon lore I’ve ever known says that the dungeon master must go into the dungeons to create new chambers. This is… original.”
Marcus grinned happily at her. “I’ve always loved models,” he confessed. “Miniatures, toy soldiers, anything like that. Love it. That must be why this happened.”
“That would certainly fit,” Ella said. “I wonder what those runes are?” She was pointing to a line of complex symbols that ran round the edge of the tabletop. They were red and green, carved into the black shining surface of the table.
“You don’t recognize the letters?” Marcus asked.
The faerie shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like them before. It’s not any language you’ve seen either?”
“Nope,” said Marcus, scratching his head. “I know a lot of the elvish and human scripts they use in Doran and the orkish scripts of the Gronwold, and even some of the elven scripts from the old days, but I don’t recognize these at all.”
“Strange,” Ella said, “maybe we’ll find out what the letters say in time. Anyway, what can you do with the table?”
“Well,” Marcus said, leaning close. “I think that if I just do this…” He leaned over the table and began moving the elements about, shifting the dungeon chamber outward, adding another one, and connecting them with a corridor. From the cliff beside them where the entrance to the dungeon was, there was a grinding, rumbling noise, like stone on stone.
Dungeon Master: Level 2
Dungeon Chambers: 3
Dungeons Fights: 2
Progress to next chamber: 0%
“Yes!” Marcus exclaimed. “It works! I’ve done it! I’ve added a new chamber and placed the new monsters in that one. Now, you start with the new monsters in a chamber of their own, and then move on to fight the bladehand in a separate chamber. I’m going to test it out!”
Marcus found that he could disperse and summon the model table just by willing it. Unlike other magic, this required no spoken spell. That was interesting, because he’d never heard of magic like that before. Magic was always performed by a spoken spell in his experience. Summoning the dungeon table was more like using a muscle. He dispersed it for now and then turned to the dungeon again and raised a hand to the door.
As before, the door had been covered by a thick swathe of ivy, but this was swept aside by the spell. Marcus plunged in.
The new corridor was broader and straighter than the old one, and it climbed slightly upwards. The corridor was strangely warm, and he wondered what he was going to meet when he got to the end.
Marcus kept an eye open for traps as he went. He hadn’t forgotten how close he’d come to being crushed by rocks on his first dungeon adventure. Sure, Ella said that nothing in the dungeon would be out of his abilities to defeat, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of making stupid mistakes. He didn’t want to be complacent, not ever.
So, when he triggered the trap, he was ready. It was a pressure plate, and he didn’t see it until the moment his foot touched the trigger rune. The ground flipped, a whole section of the corridor’s floor swinging away to reveal a pit filled with deadly spikes. As the section of floor swung away, Marcus leaped into the air, landing on the edge of the pit and wobbling for a moment before getting his balance.
He looked down from the edge of the pit. He caught a glimpse of a ten foot drop down onto a forest of barbed steel, then the panel swung into place again with a thud.
Too close for comfort! he thought. Ella said there had been instances where a dungeon master had been killed in their own dungeons. He didn’t want to join them.
With exaggerated care, he carried on up the corridor. Next time he saw a rune on the ground, he stopped. As before, oil-soaked flaming torches in sconces still lined the corridor. Marcus grabbed one to use to trigger the trap from a distance.
Taking careful aim, he tossed the torch at the rune, and it landed perfectly. There was a grinding of gears, and then a section of the roof slammed down with enormous force. It pressed there for a moment and then retracted back to the ceiling. Flames burst up from the crushed, almost unrecognizable remains of the torch.
“I guess I’d be crushed and unrecognizable too if that had hit me!” Marcus exclaimed. That was significantly more dangerous than the spike pit. As he moved very carefully past the rune, he reflected on how he felt about people being killed in the dungeon. It was bound to happen at some point. When it did, how would he feel about it? He had killed men before, with no compunction whatsoever, but somehow this felt different.
I suppose, he thought, so long as adventurers enter the dungeon knowing that death is a risk, then there’s no problem. He thought of men he had killed in the past—guards, soldiers, bandits or robbers who’d tried to take his stuff. I’ve never killed anyone who hadn’t known they were putting themselves at risk of death.
It was true. That was at the heart of it. Through the dungeons, Marcus would be providing people with the opportunity to gain riches by prowess in combat. So long as nobody ever thought it would be easy or risk-free, he figured he would be able to live with himself if and when people died.
“Eyes on the prize, Marcus,” he told himself. He was coming to the end of the corridor, and he couldn’t afford to be engaged in puzzling out moral dilemmas right now. The new monsters would be near.
He leaned around the end of the corridor. There was a tall, thin doorway here and beyond it a round chamber with a high ceiling opened up. As with the bladehand chamber, this one was also lit with flickering torches placed in sconces on the walls.
But this chamber was different from the bladehand one in other ways. The bladehand chamber was floored with sand, but this one seemed to be made with white flagstones, like the Duelists’ Plaza. And, to his surprise, there were trees here—four trees, laid out in a square. In the middle of the chamber, a statue of a woman rested on a tall stone fountain. Water gushed from the woman’s mouth, cascading down the stonework into a wide pool.
It was like Duelists’ Plaza. That also had trees and a fountain at the center. Marcus looked around warily. Where were the monsters? Were they going to be duelists themselves?
And then he saw them. They detached themselves from the shadows at the base of the trees much like the duelists in the plaza did. Four of them, one for each tree, emerged. They were all armed with long, sharp rapiers that gleamed deadly in the torchlight.
They were duelists, he saw, dressed in flamboyant clothing and high boots, with red cloaks and wide-brimmed hats. But there was something subtly wrong about them. He stepped into the chamber and heard the gate behind him slam closed. That was like the bladehand chamber, for sure. He was trapped in here until he had defeated these enemies.
Marcus began to circle around the outside of the chamber, looking at his foes. They came on lazily, slow, not hurrying. Their faces… he couldn’t make them out at first, but then he realized that it was not that he couldn’t make t
hem out.
They had no faces.
Between the rims of their wide hats and the extravagantly turned-up collars of their brightly colored shirts, there was only an amorphous blackness, a space of shadow broken only by a faint glimmer of red eyes. Their hands, too, were no hands, but just shadows, areas of deep darkness that shifted unsettlingly as the torch light flickered on them.
What have I created here? Marcus thought as he looked at them. But he hadn’t created them—the dungeon had made them. The dungeon had a life of its own.
He would be well advised to concentrate on killing them.
No sword, he thought. It would have been good to have a sword, and yet he felt up to the challenge of taking on these four shadowy duelists. He would only have to defeat one of them to get a sword. In the meantime, he still had his dagger, as well as the torches all around the wall.
The torches. These would be his first weapons. He grabbed one, wrenching it from its sconce. As he did so, one of the four shadow-duelists surged forward, running at him with his sword raised and his shadowy off-hand outstretched as if to grab Marcus’s throat.
Marcus saw that the other three held back, as if watching to see what would happen. Speaking the spell to conjure the Fleetfoot buff, Marcus dodged to the side to avoid a killing blow from the shadow-duelist’s blade. The cutting edge of the razor-sharp rapier whistled through the air, but before his enemy could raise the sword for another strike, Marcus smashed the head of the torch into the space where its face should have been.
The shadow-duelist’s scream sounded as if it was very far away or deep under the ground. The duelist did not relinquish his sword, but he flailed in the air as the oil from the torch caught in the collar of his shirt and singed the edge of his hat. Shadowy as the face might be, there was something there. The head of the torch did not pass through the duelist’s head, and it left a flaming deposit of burning tar where the face would have been.
The duelist screamed again, a horrible, thin sound. The other three were beginning to advance in a line, swords outstretched toward Marcus. He didn’t have much time before they were on him.
“Ultimate Stealth,” he whispered, and activated the spell.
The duelists glanced at each other, moving slowly and seeming confused. Marcus was sure they could still see him, but their image of him would be confusing to their eyes.
He spun around, darting behind the duelist he’d hit with the torch. He dragged the shadow-body around to face its fellows. Then, quick as a striking snake with his Fleetfoot spell still active, he punched his dagger up into the shadow-man’s body, where the heart would have been.
This time, instead of a scream, the shadow-man disintegrated. His clothes fell shapeless and empty to the flagged floor, and Marcus leaned forward and grabbed the rapier from the place the shadowy hand had been.
“Now, you shady dungeon creeps,” he growled, taking up a sword-fighting stance. “Let’s see what you can do.”
The straight sword had of course been part of his training at the thieves guild, but it had never been Marcus’s favorite weapon, nor his best. Now, it felt like it was part of him, an extension of his body that quivered in readiness to respond to his every move. It was more than just speed—he felt like he’d been born to the blade.
This is amazing, he thought. This must be the effect of being the Master of Evolutions. I was always able to fight, but now I feel like I’m a master of the fencing arts!
He balanced on the balls of his feet, circling slowly as he felt the Fleetfoot and Ultimate Stealth spells wear off. The three shadow-duelists moved around him. Marcus didn’t immediately cast another spell—after his last fight, he had realized that casting too much magic tired him out. He would save his spells for critical moments.
Marcus gave ground as the duelists circled him—there was plenty of room, and he wanted to see how these three would attack. Would they work together? How intelligent were they? How tactical?
Step after step, he moved away from them, circling so that they would not back him up against a wall. A rapid glance behind him showed that he was moving toward the center of the plaza, approaching the fountain and the four trees. That was all to the good—perhaps he would be able to find some way of using the environment against them.
In the moment that he glanced back, one of the shadow-duelists struck. It moved silent and swift, the blade leading. Marcus danced to the side to dodge the flurry of blows it aimed at him.
The other two, as before, hung back, and Marcus wondered why they did not attack together. They seemed to be watching. One moved up on his right, and the other on his left. He gave ground, trading blows with the one that was attacking him, inching back toward the trees.
And finally he realized what was happening. They want me to go toward the trees, he thought. They’re herding me toward the trees like a sheep toward a corral!
With this realization, Marcus immediately changed tactics. He had been content to see how these shadow-duelists fought up to now. He charged in at his attacker, dealing its sword a ringing blow and knocking its blade aside. The shadow-duelist took a step back, seeming unsure how to deal with this sudden change, and in that moment, Marcus plunged his sword into its chest.
The other two attacked immediately, one from either side, and just a moment too late Marcus saw what he had missed before. The trees were surrounded by a ring of runes extending fifteen feet away from the base of their trunks. His foot slipped over the edge of one of these rune-circles as he pulled his sword from the collapsing shadow-duelist, and the tree was activated.
The runes flashed, a blast of searing light shone up, illuminating the thick leaves and tall branches with a ghastly glow. There was a harsh scream, somewhere between the cawing of a raven and the laugh of a woman, as something rushed from the branches.
It had the face of an old crone, long nosed and pointy-chinned, with blazing eyes and wild gray hair, and yet there were big, feathered wings coming from its back. From the neck down, it had the body of a massive gray bird. Vicious clawed feet with talons like steel spearheads raked the air as it came rushing on.
It was a harpy, and it screeched with battle-fury as it got free of the tree.
The feathers! Marcus thought. The feathers in their hats! This is what they have evolved into!
The harpy was horrific, a terrible thing to gaze upon, and it looked fast and deadly to fight as well. There was a faint sound of laughter as the remaining two duelists closed on him.
Marcus flung himself away, grabbing the sword that had fallen from his last defeated enemy. Wielding two swords now, he moved like the wind, using every ounce of speed and strength he had to fight off the rain of blows coming from every side. These two shadow-duelists at least were working together, and even with his enhanced abilities, it took everything Marcus had to keep their swords at bay.
The harpy screeched and flew over, beating its wings to hover above the spot where they were fighting. It was too big to drop down and join the fight without risking hurting one of the shadow-duelists, so it hung above them, screaming down at them as it waited for an opening.
Time to finish this.
Marcus dropped and rolled, tucking his swords under him and activating Fleetfoot again as he did so. He was fast, and the unexpected move bought him the momentary delay that he needed. From the ground, he swiped a sword at the legs of the nearest shadow-duelist, who screamed and collapsed into emptiness as the blade sheared through its garments and severed the shadowy flesh.
Marcus rolled and leaped to his feet. As the harpy dashed for him, he slashed upward, deflecting blows of the steel claws while catching a strike from the last shadow-duelist’s sword with his other blade.
He bulled into the shadow-duelist, activating Hero’s Might with a shout. His speed carried him in under the duelist’s guard, and he slammed his forehead into the center of the duelist’s face with all the strength of Hero’s Might. There was a crack of bone against bone, and the shadow-duelist reeled backwa
rd, his free hand rising to his face.
The harpy dived at Marcus’s back, but he was too quick. He turned, swiping upward so hard that he knocked the monster off-balance. For a moment, it flapped, trying to regain its equilibrium. Marcus slashed its head off with a single sweeping blow.
Dropping his second sword when the harpy crashed to the ground, Marcus turned just in time to catch the last duelist’s blow, turn the blade, and drive his sword through the shadow-duelist’s chest on the backswing.
One clang, then another as he felt the spells run out. Marcus looked around. The gate he had just come through had opened at one end of the chamber, and at the other end, another gate had opened. From that other one, Marcus heard the clanking of the bladehand.
“Not today, my friend,” he muttered, thinking of the bladehand. He wiped sweat from his brow, glancing at the corpse of the harpy. He felt he’d had quite enough fighting for one day. Yes, he’d won, and the fight had been within his abilities, but only just.
Spell: Hero’s Might Level 1
Level increase: 5%
Progress to next level: 13%
Spell: Fleetfoot Level 1
Level Increase: 10%
Progress to next level: 26%
Spell: Ultimate Stealth Level 1
Level Increase: 12%
Progress to next level: 46%
The advancement he’d gained on his spells made itself known as he caught his breath, and he nodded in satisfaction. He had made good progress, using them at critical moments in the fight so that they had made all the difference.
Then something else happened: his dungeon master progress updated.
Dungeon Master: Level 2
Dungeon Chambers: 3
Dungeons Fights: 3
Progress to next chamber: 100%
New Chamber Available!
“Wow!” Marcus said. “I increased a whole dungeon master level in one fight!” That must be because he was still at a relatively low level. Once he got up past level 5, there was no way it would be so easy to level up and get new chambers. For now, he was happy to wait. He would save this one until he had some interesting ingredients to put in.
