Chapter 20: Burn

NOTE: Don’t worry! This isn’t going to become a dual-POV story. I just couldn’t figure out how to tell this bit from Thomas’ POV. Since this is a short chapter, we’ll be back to him later today. That’s right, it’s a double-chapter day!

Zach

Zach screamed as the floor gave out under him. It was only when the cut wood paneling flashed by him that he realized he’d stepped through a trap door. Just when he’d finally struck down the mimic dining table, too. Totally unfair.

He hit the floor beneath him in a crouch and sprang up again, but the door above had snapped shut, practically disappearing back up in the ceiling.

Just another thank-you gift from the Brighten family.

“No! Shit! No!” He looked around. The room was so small the light from his fire reached to all corners. It was some ancient butler’s storage, only with a couple of chairs that were almost certainly mimics. No ladders or way to get back up.

He’d just left Thomas alone in the dark with the last of the mimics he hadn’t managed to kill.

Zach leaped, but though he was fit (if he did say so himself), he would have had to be an NBA All-Star to reach the high ceiling, much less pry the flush trap door loose with his fingernails.

“Crap, crap, crap. Thomas! Dude, if you can hear me, there’s a trap door. Come down here! Thomas!”

He strained his ears, but there was no sound from above. This wasn’t a real house where there would be creaking floorboards and muffled sounds between walls. This was a dungeon with magic partitioning the sections.

Zach’s imagination filled in what must be happening up there. Unfortunately, he’d always been an imaginative guy.

It was a truism that dungeon deaths were rarely peaceful, but getting slashed or chewed to death in the dark like that…

Fuck.

He should have said something the moment he recognized the Brighten Estate, should have told Thomas to back the hell out. But Zach had a funny intuition that he’d need a healer by the time this was all done with, and his intuitions almost always panned out. Plus, Thomas had already proven more resilient than most healer archetypes.

Now he’d just gotten a healer—a natural healer at that, who’d found and stacked healing mana crystals like it was no big deal—killed. He’d had the pleasure of meeting higher-level healers before. Getting a baby healer killed was about the equivalent of drop-kicking a puppy.

Guilt and rage threatened to swamp him. Letting out a shuddering breath, Zach reached for training he’d long ago rejected as a lifeline. Zach used it to set the unhelpful feelings (like grief, pity, and empathy) aside and figure out how he was going to get out of here alive. God, his family were dicks. Who did that to a kid?

No, he couldn’t get lost down a rabbit trail to the past. He had to focus.

Trusting that the mimic chairs wouldn’t move on him until he went to that side of the room, Zach dropped into a cross-legged meditation sit. He only kept a small ribbon of fire juggled back and forth in his hands out of pure necessity to see. Otherwise, he cleared his mind to think.

His situation wasn’t great. This was a level 1 dungeon in name only. It hadn’t been completed in so long that the mimics had multiplied beyond reason. The National Guard was right. This place was just about to blow its top, then overflow nightmare mimics all over Carson City. The National Guard would try their best, but the mana would short out their weapons and these mimics could look like anything. It’s not like a dungeon stopped overflowing once it started, too. Someone still had to go in and clear it out.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

In addition, the Brighten family, who had always been a bunch of weird, sadistic fucks, had clearly altered it. No way this darkness was part of the original dungeon. Not on a level 1. Depending how they did it, there was every chance this dungeon would bring the darkness with it.

Okay, so that was the bad. What was the good?

The mimics died easily, and there were a lot of them. Blunt damage affected them so-so, but they burned.