The Trash Tier Dungeon

by Kaye Fairburn

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “I can see through you. I’ve known you since you were Xander’s age. I still remember those chubby cheeks of yours.” Evangeline reached over.

  He swatted her hand away. “This is about getting my daggers back and putting the Trash Tier Dungeon in its place. That’s going to be difficult, so we’re going to have to resurrect Micah and Jennifer. Xander’s a cleric. He can open the portals to their respawn quests.”

  “That’s true. I know how to do it,” Xander confirmed.

  “And we’re going to do both of them fast. We don’t need any delays.”

  “How fast are you talking?” Evangeline asked. “There’s only three of us left. We’re gonna need a lot of time.”

  “Days. I’ve got just the perfect scroll for it. It’s a monster summon. It’ll help us clear out the first respawn quest, then we’ll have four party members again. The last quest shouldn’t be a problem after that.”

  “I don’t know if we should rush this,” Xander started to say.

  Whatever protests he may have had ended when a poorly dressed man entered the tavern. His much too large tunic hung off of him, like he’d taken it out of a lost and found bin. Dark spots splotched the sides of his shorts.

  “Smokey! Good man, come over here. I’ve got a lot to go over with you.” Robin motioned for Smokey to join them.

  “Robin.” Xander tried to get his attention. “You should think more about your plan.”

  “Shush, boy. It’s time for some fun with our Kazzipurrian friend.”

  Evangeline offered Xander a shrug. “Let it go. These quests will be good learning experiences for you.”

  Xander couldn’t shake the foreboding feeling he was getting, not just about the quests but the upcoming dungeon run in general. He stayed quiet, knowing none of these people would bother listening to him.

  Chapter 18

  Arden and Minette had a ton of work ahead of them and not a ton of time to do it.

  Smokey hadn’t visited since his last trip, so they didn’t have a pulse on what Robin and his group were doing.

  Arden didn’t know the finer points of skull restoration, but from what little knowledge she’d picked up during her tenure as Bugsy’s pixie, adventurers usually took days to revive. Their skulls needed to be taken to a cleric. Those who didn’t have a cleric with the proper revival skill had to go to a temple.

  Bugsy hadn’t been clear on what happened after that. Through his babbling, Arden understood that the party members had to undergo some sort of spiritual quest to get the skull’s spirit back. Once that was finished, their party member would be revived. That process, along with losing loot and probably a level or two, made it so that most adventurers were loath to die.

  “They’re going to want to fight us as soon as they can,” Arden said, after explaining the process to Minette. “If each one takes a few days to rescue and revive like that, they’re probably going to want to only bring back one of them. It’ll be Micah or Jennifer.”

  “You don’t think they’re going to want to wait for their whole party to be revived? Robin thinks that I’ve got my boss form. I wish I had the real thing, but I don’t. That’s a lot of upgrades away for me.”

  “They’re probably weighing the pros and cons of it. Having everyone comes at a cost. We’d be able to get further ahead. They may not want to take that risk.”

  “Wait, couldn’t they split their party in half to do both at once? Some could do the quest for the mage and the others could do the quest for the warrior.”

  Arden didn’t want to humor that possibility. “Do you honestly think they’d be capable of doing that? Yeah, their archer is great but even she’d have to bail out if she went there alone. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ll come back here with both of them. I’ll bite my tail if they do.”

  Minette hummed thoughtfully. “Hmm, okay if you say so.”

  “Let’s take a look at our current ranks.”

  “We’ve been fortunate that we haven’t lost any workercats. We’re at six. That’s pretty much where the positives end. Every other unit’s dead and our shiny and glowyrm deposits have dried up. Here’s the resource list.”

  [RESOURCES:

  165 shinies / 21 glowyrms]

  “This hurts,” Arden said.

  “We’ve got a lot of rebuilding ahead of us. I was thinking about the good parts of what happened with the last battle.”

  Arden’s face burned. “Yeah, let’s forget the bad parts, please.”

  “Separating the party was a good idea. I think if we’d separated them sooner we would’ve had better luck.”

  “Swarming them was working until they brought in their archer and cleric. I don’t know what kind item they used to sneak them in. It’s almost like they stored them in jars or something.” Arden scratched her fingers through her hair.

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do against them.”

  “Evangeline and Xander are the guild’s saving graces. They rely on them. They’re both reliant on their key items. What’s an archer without her bow? Nothing. What’s a cleric without his book? Also, nothing. So that means we should probably buy…” Arden allowed Minette to finish for her.

  “A spiny lynx!”

  “Maybe, if we find the glowyrms for it, but there’s something else we could do that doesn’t cost that much. Hint: it involves a trap.”

  “The goop, the net, and the snare traps? We can mess them up with those. That’s a good idea!”

  “I forgot to mention Robin. He was wearing specialty glasses. They alert him to our traps. He goes and disarms them every time. That’s a problem. What do you think we can do to neutralize him?” Arden asked.

  “There’s the goop idea again, but he’s probably going to be even more careful now if we try to push him away from the group. It worked last time with the number of cattens we had. He ran off to get some distance on them. He eventually was able to beat them, but by that time he was far away from the rest the group.”

  Glee bloomed on Arden’s features. Strategizing had that effect on her. “That leads us back to our separation idea. How do we get the rogue away from the rest without doing the exact same thing as before? Anything that we did before, they’ll be wise to it. We have to do something new.”

  “I have an idea that might work. It might be a little crazy. We have to get creative with the cattens. It’s going to require a net and some moving around of the traps that we already have down.”

  “Okay, we can get some workercats started on that. What’s the information for the Basic Net?”

  Minette pulled it up for Arden to see.

  [Name: Basic Net

  Category: Snares

  Type: Mechanical

  Placement: Ceiling (Default)

  Health: 5

  Armor: None (0)

  Cost: 10 shinies

  Requirement: Basic Net Blueprints (50 shinies)

  Description: When the floor directly below the Basic Net is stepped on, the Basic net will fall from the ceiling and cover the target. It is weak and easy to slice through, but can potentially slow down adventurers.]

  Arden took note of something about the Basic Net that she had overlooked before. “You would think that the placement would be fixed,” she said.

  “There’s room for creativity.”

  “I see. Buy the blueprints when you’re ready.”

  [RESOURCES:

  115 shinies / 21 glowyrms]

  “Done! Grandis is heading to the Trap Workshop,” Minette said. “I’m going to send Brooke there, too. That way there won’t be any serious delays.”

  “While Brooke’s waiting for Grandis to build traps, you can have her dig out some false paths to trick the adventurers with. We can make little pockets to place cattens in. It’ll throw off Jennifer’s Detection skill, assuming that they’ll revive her instead of Micah.”

  “Ooh, I like that!” Minette cheered. “That’ll confuse them a lot. It
’s like that wall pit trap thing we came up with. You can hide more monsters that way.”

  “I’d be careful doing that seeing how they have that archer Evangeline, or whatever. She may shoot at pit traps as a precaution,” Arden said.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “What about upgrades for units?”

  Minette presented the Boosters for Arden to look at and be disappointed by.

  [BOOSTERS -CATTEN-

  Attack: * / ** / ***

  Skin Density (Armor): * / ** / ***

  Only one star of each can be purchased at this time. Advancements in the dungeon must be made before the others are unlocked.

  The first star in its category will give a permanent +1. The first star costs 500 shinies and 200 glowyrms to purchase. You have insufficient funds.]

  “Yeah, that’s not going to work.” Arden had forgotten how expensive the upgrades were. A word in the description piqued her interest. “Advancements. We haven’t discovered any since the Last Chance one.”

  “Nope. Do you remember any Advancements from your last dungeon?” Minette asked.

  “He didn’t share anything about our Advancements with me. I think I remember him mentioning us getting one for being raided. That was for ten or maybe twenty adventurers being inside the dungeon at once, I’m not sure?”

  “Let’s not do that,” Minette said.

  “If you can handle all of our plans, I can go to the surface with some cattens and see if I can try to discover some Advancements. We can fight monsters in the forest. Even if we don’t discover any Advancements, I’m sure the combat training will be helpful, anyway.”

  “Yeah, no problem. I’ll make some cattens right away. I’ll keep a handle on everything here once you go. Let me know if you find another one of my followers out there.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out. And please, I beg of you, no more surprises while I’m gone.”

  “You got it. No worries!”

  “Thank you.”

  ***

  Arden took Rien and Sprawl, two of the newest cattens with her when she left. They were inquisitive, full of wonder for the surface level. Arden had a difficult time pulling them away from the various bushes and trees in the forest. Their noses were like magnets to the shrubbery.

  Rien’s antics, in particular, nearly had Arden climbing a tree to get him down. Sprawl dug up the dirt, kicking clumps of it into Arden without a care for her well-being.

  She spat out the dirt he got into her mouth. “Nice. Thanks. I always wanted to brush my teeth with dirt.”

  Sprawl flashed his version of a smile.

  “Listen to me, the reason why we’re here is to find ourselves some Advancements. We’re going to be trying a little bit of everything.” Arden rolled her shoulders. “I’m thinking that we do some monster hunting. A good kill count should definitely lead to an Advancement.”

  To their credit, the cattens sat on their haunches and put on the appearance of a listening audience. Arden doubted they were truly paying attention. Because they were feline beasts, total obedience wasn’t exactly in their nature. Feline beasts only liked doing things when it was their idea.

  Arden whistled to get them to follow her.

  It soon became apparent that she was pushing her luck with that. Rien and Sprawl ran in a different direction from her, their long legs allowing them to bound over the forest’s natural obstacles. Propelled by her wings, Arden soared above them. She craned her neck, making sure that no monsters were going to ambush them.

  After all that they had gone through, Arden wanted to avoid losing any more troops.

  Rien stopped running, his hackles raised as he bent his body in a tense upside down U shape. Sprawl wasn’t as cautious. He kept going, heading towards whatever it was that held their attention. Arden waved her arm for Rien to keep going as well. Their numbers gave them strength.

  “C’mon,” Arden urged. She flipped, turned, spun around, and did all that she could to redirect Rien’s attention.

  Sprawl stopped running mid-stride. He clung to the dirt, his body quivering. Rien’s tail thickened, his agitation puffing out his fur.

  Two creatures, moving at a fast pace, emerged from the overgrowth of plant life. They carried themselves on their knuckles, their fists dragging their legless bodies along. The monsters were smooth-skinned with tiny slits for eyes and jagged edges for teeth.

  “Gnarlixes,” Arden said. “So we meet again.”

  At first, they seemed too intent on running to be interested in Arden and the cattens. But that soon changed when Sprawl hissed at them. He basically said with his actions, “I know you were running, and it didn’t seem like you wanted to deal with us. You could’ve passed us by. I know that, but I really wanted to tempt fate here and do some fighting. I could be fighting something as cuddly as a jackalope, but, nope, I’d rather fight you guys.”

  For a catten, he sure was rather long-winded.

  Gnarlixes, on the other hand, preferred to literally cut to the chase. They charged Rien and Sprawl.

  Sprawl leaped at his opponent. They clashed, fangs versus claws in a gnashing and slashing duel. His claws tore through the side of the gnarlix’s face, while the gnarlix bit what he could of him. Sprawl tore away from the gnarlix, then backed up before rejoining the fray.

  Rien opted to dodge the gnarlix’s charge. He threw himself to the left. The gnarlix was slow in its turn to meet Rien. This gave Rien an opening. He jumped onto the gnarlix’s back. His claws ripped into the creature, its screams filling the air.

  Bloodlust clouded in the other gnarlix’s eyes. It wasn’t long before it was extinguished. Sprawl scored a critical hit, his claws slicing through the gnarlix’s throat. It exploded into glitter dust, its partner doing the same a moment later.

  “Okay,” Arden said. She clapped for the cattens. “That’s what I’m talking about! Trash Tier Shmrash Shtrier, am my right? You killed those gnarlixes like they were nothing. Who else in this forest want some?”

  Rien and Sprawl shook so hard that their knees buckled out from under them. Leaves rustled violently. Cracks split the ground open, exposing tree roots. Had Arden been touching the ground, she imagined that she would’ve been tossed.

  Gray sludge sprayed like a geyser out of the cracks. Arden flew back to avoid getting splashed. Both Rien and Sprawl remained where they were. The gray liquid thickened as it slowly formed into a pudgy, humanoid shape. Its face was sloppy and featureless, its big belly hanging low.

  “Clay Doll.” Arden recognized the mud monster. Although it was colored differently from the ones that she was used to, these nuisances used to wander into her former dungeon. “Okay, you’re going to want to break through it to its core. Ignore the Clay Babies.”

  The Clay Doll proceeded to show them exactly what a Clay Baby was. It pulled out a clump of clay from its chest and threw it at the ground before the cattens. The muddy gloop formed into a tinier version of the Clay Doll, complete with a potbelly and a waddle that would’ve tricked a less discerning person into saying “awww.”

  Then, the Clay Baby launched itself at Sprawl’s face. It latched on, covering the catten’s mouth and nose. The catten smashed his face into the dirt. The Clay Baby splashed, instantly turning into a watery substance as it died.

  Rien attacked the Clay Doll. His claws sunk into the Clay Doll’s belly. He scraped off a clump of mud from the creature. The clump turned into a Clay Baby when it hit the ground, which sprung forward and clung to Rien’s front leg. Rien attempted to shake it off, but the vile thing stayed put.

  “Hit it!” Arden shouted. If a Clay Baby stuck onto a surface for too long, they solidified. Solidification bettered their Armor rating. They’d be harder to defeat then.

  Rien smashed his arm against the ground. The Clay Baby broke off.

  The Clay Doll dug its hands into its belly. It brought its arms out, freeing lines of mud. Mud hit the ground that soon became Clay Babies. Their demonic giggles put Arden’s to shame.


  How they could make noises without true voice boxes, Arden didn’t know and didn’t feel like figuring out. She supposed she could’ve paid more attention in Bestiary class.

  Pay attention now! How are you going to kill them?

  Arden counted one, two, three, too many Clay Babies and worst of all, they seemed like they were multiplying. The Clay Doll flung more of the damned things at the cattens. Rien and Sprawl rushed around to defeat them. With her eyes closed, it sounded like they were splashing in water.

  She flew down to the appropriate level, then switched into her humanoid Disguise.

  Daggers equipped, Arden decided to take on the Clay Doll herself while Rien and Sprawl took out the Clay Babies. She slammed the flame dagger into the Clay Doll’s muddy self. The blade went through the creature, her arm becoming trapped in the sludgy material. Arden rotated her wrist.

  Her weapon spun within the creature.

  A clump of goop slopped off of it. It formed into a little Clay Baby by her foot. Arden stomped on it.

  [CONGRATULATIONS! -ADVANCEMENT UNLOCKED-

  You have discovered the “Baby Stomper” Advancement! Units with this special trait can activate and deactivate the “Baby Stomper” perk. Those with the perk do +5% damage to babies of all kind. While this perk is active parents of any kind will be more aggressive towards the affected user, no matter what the user is doing.

  View the Advancement on its appropriate screen for more information.

  You may now research this Advancement.]

  “Really?” The word fell out of her in disbelief.

  The Clay Doll threw out its arm, splashing more goop off of itself. Arden shifted her arm inside of the creature. She searched for the core she needed to destroy. If her memory of her Pixie Academy textbooks served her right, then the core would be somewhere close to her blade. She wiggled her hand.