Hero's Dungeon: A Superhero Dungeon Core Novel

by Nick Ryder

  “You don’t report to me, you go off alone, and you come back with rewards, but Sampson claims he cleans your halberd and sharpens the blade often because its seen battle and had blood on it.”

  Cara fought to stop her eyes rolling at this lecture.

  “It is impossible to quantify your scores in the wild without witnesses or at least a conversation with me.” He moved to a shelf and removed a random book. Inside was a series of scores. “These make up a system that we use instead of money.”

  “My dad said money was what ruined the world.”

  The Keeper nodded. “It was a problem for many. Now we use rewards, achievements, and scoring in the wild to determine how we live. Each of us has a purpose here. You understand there is a lottery now for the next parents in the village. Our population is sustained by and is part of the scoring we use here. There has to be a finite amount of people for our system of government to work.

  “Your scores as a scavenger allow you to rise through the ranks in the council. We see you as someone who will have a voice once you’ve achieved a certain level.”

  “Is that why Isaiah does a lot of talking, and people seem to listen to him?” she asked.

  The Keeper nodded. Cara saw Isaiah’s book on the shelf, but the Keeper left it there. “He has a high level because he is a sub-boss killer in the wild.”

  Cara made a face and looked to her grubby toes again. She knew Isaiah was a cheat and a liar. But it wasn’t for her to call him out. Someone can only fool the system for so long before it catches up. The Keeper removed a large scroll and unrolled it across the desk.

  “Wilbert Carver is my favorite artist. See how he’s mapped the terrain and your latest kill zone.” The Keeper pointed to the rendering of the arachnids. “See how detailed he’s designed these creatures. There was Cara’s initial next to the score marks.

  “The council has taken testimony from each of the witnesses to your latest hunt.” He carefully rolled up the large map and returned it to the shelf. “You displayed extraordinary skills. We understand there was a Change event as well.”

  The toes on Cara’s feet dug at the thatched floor trying to hide.

  “You must have known all along. You can read my stats.”

  “It’s not my place to disclose what others wish to hide, only to record it when they wish to come forward.”

  For the first time, she gave him a small smile. “It’s really no one’s business.”

  He nodded. “That is your choice. However, because we have special considerations for Changelings, you are now promoted to a higher level.”

  “So, finally a level ten,” she said. “Great.”

  The Keeper looked at Cara in a way that suggested he expected a punchline to follow. “No Miss Cara, you are not a level ten.”

  “I was already a level nine,” she said and narrowed her eyes. “Ten follows nine…”

  The Keeper returned to the desk. He went through Cara’s book. There was a series of scratches on one page. He turned it around to face Cara and put his finger on it. “There is vital importance on the Y random variables when they are applied to the independent and identically distributed with twice differentiable probability density function, and we calculate the maximum likelihood estimator. First, we have a starting point—” He stopped talking and shot a quizzical look at Cara as her eyes glazed over. “Are you alright?”

  She said nothing because it made no sense. And there were a lot of words that sounded offensive, but he seemed straight about it. But Cara thought if the Keeper went at her in the wild with something like that, she’d have cut off his head.

  “The bottom line, Miss Cara,” he said and closed her book. “Based on your continued rewards and achievements, saving lives in the wild, and battling an extraordinary amount of sub-bosses, along with your special ability,” he stopped and took a breath. “You are now a level forty-five.”

  “That’s all because of whatever happened and one special attack?” she clarified.

  “Are you saying you have other special attacks?” the Keeper asked quickly. He fumbled for the pen, his hands trembled.

  Cara turned from the man and ran out of the library.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The creation of an army is a glorious and powerful achievement. While I considered the ramifications of building soldiers from genetic ooze, Ego had an upbeat approach, and I had no face to show the others to convey my concern.

  I was too busy with giving Ego rapid instructions as to how to make best use of the new equipment we’d gotten on sublevel four to explore sublevel five right away.

  Now I had the ability not just to alter an original blueprint, but to mix things together. Elaine had volunteered her iguana to be a test subject once more when I explained to her what good stats it had. Her obedience was immediate in giving her iguana back to the lab. In the specimens Lisa had brought back had been a mutated snake that had adapted to keep itself warm without having to bathe under the sun with the use of fire sacs under its scales. Not much use in the desert, but presumably the mutation hadn’t been one of choice. It didn’t seem like anyone got choice in this day and age.

  Either way, I was adding those same fire sacs to the iguana to see if it would have the same effect. I was still wary of adventuring too much. I’d rather take it slow and make sure I wasn’t going to create something like the bad-brained monstrosity that had almost killed Marie.

  The cats I’d been gestating in the first lab had finished and been moved straight into the new lab. I was trying to add wings to them, from the bird Lisa had brought back. Elaine had her lizard as her defense, and I hoped that by giving these cats wings they would be able to use dexterity as their defense.

  In the basic lab I was gestating more creatures. Simple lizards and birds that I could modify later. I’d used the more advanced lab to create some more basic wolves, too. I was too scared of their potential to start playing around with their DNA, but they were too formidable an opponent to ignore completely. I’d started gestating four. That would be enough to control if their willpower proved too strong.

  My excitement had distracted everyone, and it wasn’t until something appeared in the corridor of sublevel four leading to the lab that Ego’s warning from earlier came back to me.

  “What the hell are those things?” Lisa shouted. She’d been cut, something with a talon that was as long as her forearm, and sharp as a steak knife, had clawed at her shoulder. She continued to press her full weight against the door.

  They’d lost three automatons once the sublevel door breached. But it wasn’t until the thing crawled upstairs to sublevel four before the rest of the team had to fight for their lives.

  “Can I remind you that I reported extreme danger in sublevel five?” Ego said hotly.

  “When?” Marie shouted, “When did you tell us?” She and her rats helped keep the door from opening. They piled over and around Lisa as the wolf was the biggest as a barrier and stronger than the rest.

  “Ego told me,” I said. “It was before you got here.” While I needed to have a conversation with Ego about humans and the capacity for remembering simple things, let alone complex data that pertained to health and life-threatening situations, it wasn’t the time.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Elaine admitted. Her cat body had turned, so the profile showed toward the door. The back arched, the fur stood on end. It was a standard cat pose that bewildered dogs because it was almost ninja in the masquerade of depth.

  The camera revealed something that had black and brown fur. It was mammalian, but there was what looked like black strips of thick skin around its huge spindly front legs, while its rear legs were squat tree trunks with claws so sharp they pierced the grating in the stairwell. The camera on the other side of the door broke off the bracket and swung around every time the creature batted at the opening.

  “We need to let it in here,” Lisa said.

  “But it’s going to destroy everything in the lab.” Elaine looked
at the tubes, each filled with new lives and brains had been installed in each of the new forms. The last of the neuropathways were growing with the aid of the nanobots inside the bodies.

  “I don’t think I can hold the damned closed for another two hours.”

  “one-point-three hours.” Ego was adamant about resuscitation time of their latest round of soldiers.

  “Can you get anything to stab it with?” Marie shouted. A claw dug through the door, stabbing one of her rats. It scurried away and crawled under a gestation tube, bleeding.

  Elaine looked at her paws. The claws extended. While they were formable when it came to her size, the retractable claws weren’t meant as stabbing weapons.

  And as soon as I thought of a solution, I felt a rush of surging energy. It was like the answer had been hidden away in my consciousness, waiting for the right moment to make itself known. There was something physical happening to my thoughts. It was a moment of complete and utter blackness. A time to reflect the possibility that I’d died and still had a consciousness. There was a surge of electrons that blasted my brain. A sense of panic compounded with a sensation I remembered when I had a body.

  Then, for the first time in over twenty years, I, Solomon, opened my eyes. It burned, and the view was too blurry to make out anything more than light. There was a tremendous electrical shock that radiated through my body. My limbs responded. There was a muted thud, and something impeded my limbs from reaching anything.

  Then an electrical hum as I saw a glass lid open around me. I pulled free of the device, the viscous slurry that encased my body began to peel away. I pulled myself from the tube and dropped heavily to the floor. I felt the burning of my lungs as I used them for the first time. The body responding through millions of neuropathways ignited at once. I shuttered from a convulsion as the body woke up.

  I had no time to enjoy my rebirth. I rolled to my knees, pushed up on my hands. There were no fingernails, just digits that flexed as I needed them, wrapping around the nearby tube bed and pulling the body to stand.

  I rocked heavily on my bare feet and put one foot in front of the other as my vision cleared and I moved with a purpose.

  Lights were flashing in the corners of the room. I felt lightheaded and had flashes of vertigo as I slammed a slimy shoulder against a wall. I saw my feet, making them move forward. The same malformations on the toes, no nails, but sturdy and more sure-footed the more steps I took.

  I tried to speak. There was something thick in my throat that threatened to close off my airway. A heavy cough dislodged vast globs of mucus that I spat on the floor as I exited the bay and took the body as fast I as could down the hallway.

  Once in the stairwell, I used the railing and wall to lower each foot downstairs. The next landing, I was able to pull my shoulders from the wall. By the time I reached the third floor, opened the door to move to the other end of the hallway quickly, I felt the legs begin to react, the muscles ignited, propelling me faster.

  The next doorway, I took the steps to the fourth level, two at a time. I searched my head for Ego, but it was the first time I had a thought to myself. Somewhere along the way I realized that free will was a glorious enterprise and not having an artificial intelligence inside me was the best feeling I remembered.

  At the end of the level, I saw the battle on the polished floor leading into the stairwell. A giant white wolf pressed its paws against the wall, blocking the door from opening. There were rolling waves of gray rats, huge and helpful. The fur of all the animals had more red on them than I cared to see.

  It was the moment when trembling legs gave out, and the wolf collapsed at the doorway.

  Before the creature barreled through the close space into the central part of the hallway, I watched the rats pull the wolf from the kill zone.

  The creature that swung open the door, smashing it against the wall, making plaster fall, embedding the handle, had eyes as red as blood. They were huge, nocturnal things and I realized as I ran forward, it didn’t enter the hallway because its vision was impeded by the overhead LED lights.

  I saw the frightened upturned faces of the rats. The enormous cat woman jumped as I sailed by her. She hit the ceiling, trying to cover two attacks from opposing directions. Her claw hooked my thigh, tearing the flesh as quickly as a scalpel through butter.

  I tumbled forward, arms out. Hanging on the wall near the door was a fire extinguisher. I snagged it, redoubled my efforts, ignored the searing pain in my thigh, and let out a noise from my throat that sounded as if it erupted from the depths of a long-dormant well. Air and growls came from me as I hoisted the extinguisher overhead and batted at the skull of the creature.

  I felt the large hooks at the ends of its wings stab into my back as it took me into its leathery embrace. My body weight and momentum propelled the beast back through the stairwell, and it slipped over the railing. I felt the churn of my stomach as I tumbled with it. In its massive fetid grip, I was protected from the hard landing. There was a high-pitched burst from the creature. It's blaring so close to my head. I felt a hot pulse of something inside my skull rupture then I heard nothing on that side of my head.

  My hands found the extinguisher. I pulled it from the body that writhed under me. There was a hook slapping my back. Each time its giant wing moved, it stabbed me. The nozzle of the extinguisher pulled free, and my fingers found the trigger.

  It was a chemical extinguisher, designed for snuffing out oxygen in the immediate area and coating everything with a fire retardant white paste. While the extinguisher was past its prime, the one good burst from its ancient cylinder was enough to shock the monster and make it retreat instead of attack.

  I doubled my efforts on the trigger. It was dead, but the extinguisher became a blunt instrument, and I continued to swing it at the massive black skull. Again and again, I bashed the thing. My knuckles cracked against the bone, breaking them along with the rigid structure beneath the matted black fur.

  Even when it stopped moving, I continued to swat it, smashing it repeatedly until the cylinder cracked and I gouged at it with the twisted opening of the end where the nozzle tore free. Still, I kept going, my limbs burning and trembling. There was hot moisture coating over my body. The liquid burned my eyes. I continued to smash the thing with my eyes closed. The sound that came from me, the gurgle turned into a raging scream. Then I fell to the side, canister rolling from my hands and banging against the wall loudly.

  “Sol?” I heard from overhead. It was a panicked cry of my name and stopped me trying to get back to my feet. Marie’s huge eyes were filled with tears, and then she had her hands on my arms, fingers digging into my muscle but without letting her claws scratch me.

  “Sol you’re going to be fine,” that was Elaine, who moved my head to her lap and stroked my forehead. She was crying. “You’re going to be just fine. We’ll figure something out. I mean, it’s a super military lab, right? You’ll be fine.”

  It was Lisa I was most surprised by, when she laced our fingers together and squeezed tightly. Her face was still stoic, but I traced a single wet line through the fur on her neck. She’d shed a tear for me.

  She didn’t speak.

  I smiled at them, tried to be reassuring, tried to say how glad I was to have met them, but nothing would respond to my commands.

  My hands stopped working. I saw something that looked like thick sausages hanging from the abdominal wall where my belly once was, and then I fell on the guts. And I died, again.

  “You’re not dead,” said the voice. It was inside my head. A sexless sound, blended gender neutral that had a hint of irony and a sprinkle of jealousy, continued with, “Are you conscious?”

  There was a moment that I didn’t want to open my eyes. When I did, the disappointment of seeing from a static view overhead and to the side disappointed me. This time when I watched the bathroom from the CCTV footage, I was able to switch to the laboratory on sublevel four without ratcheting through the other cameras. Somehow my brain rememb
ered the camera sequences like it was just natural instead of something foreign and artificial.

  “What the hell was that?” Lisa asked. She’d recovered from some of the injuries, limping into the gestation bay where Marie’s rats dragged the bodies. I ignored the oversized rodents as three of them gathered in a far corner to preen and lick off the copious blood that collected on their hands and arms.

  “It was an involuntary response to the base under attack.” Ego made a statement that took a while to sink in for the rest of us.

  Elaine tried to elucidate the report. “So, did the base use Sol as a weapon?” She shook her head and then sent a wave through her whole body, shaking the fur and ending with a puffy tail. Long cat hairs loosened and floated like thin wires in the air. Then she sat down in one fluid movement, leaning against her huge iguana.

  The fire sacs had had a curious effect on the statistics of the creature. Ego had reported vaguely that its statistics had shot up, indicating much greater attack potential. I couldn’t see how the sacs could have made that much difference—they were only intended to make it not need to sit beneath a lamp to stay alive.

  I wasn’t complaining, of course. The iguana seemed a formidable foe, and that meant Elaine was much safer, too.

  Marie sneezed and rubbed her muzzle. She went back to tending to Lisa’s more severe wounds.

  “Please don’t poke that,” I asked. The body was in tatters, and Elaine pushed at the shoulder with her paw.

  “I just wanted to make sure it was dead. You scared us.”

  “I’m not dead,” I said.

  “It’s very curious,” Ego said. “By all rights, you should be dead. I will run further diagnostics, but it seems that your brain has something the others don’t when it comes to implantation.”

  “You think the base defense used my brain as a control module for the body we were enhancing?” I asked.

  “I believe you were the first of the adaptations they wanted to use.”