March 28, 2026 — 1:37 am

They ate in the garden stone, which had been placed in the big circular area with all the doors. It was a lunch that Mizuki had packed for them, a warm goulash in an earthenware crock, ladled out into little bowls with a wooden spoon. Alfric took his and tried not to eat too fast, though he was feeling nervous. In the back of his mind was the thrum, which was gone now. His body still seemed attuned to it, and at different moments his hands would start to go to his ears or his body would tense, as though anticipating it. The thrum didn’t come though, and wouldn’t have in the garden stone anyway.

“We’re going to be able to get out of here, right?” asked Mizuki. She was picking at the goulash.

“We are,” said Alfric.

She looked up at him, frowning. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Well what’s he to say?” asked Hannah. “That no one can know for sure, and it’s entirely possible that we’re trapped here, and the whole thing scrapped?”

“I just wanted some assurance,” said Mizuki with a small shrug.

“I’m bad at being assuring when I don’t think there’s cause for confidence,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”

“Well I think we’re going to make it,” said Verity. “We’re low on resources, relative to what seems to be left, but we just need to plow on through. Alfric has a neat new sword, we don’t need to worry about the thrumming or the shifting, and we’re a plucky team of adventurers.” She smiled at the group.

“I think we’ve got problems when Verity’s trying to cheer people up,” said Mizuki.

“I’m a bard, we do cheer people up,” said Verity. “And if you’d like, I can weave some lightening of the spirits into the next song.”

“We need to keep it for combat,” said Alfric. “Sorry.”

“In a way, isn’t morale the most significant part of combat?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.

“And why are you in such high spirits, ay?” asked Hannah. “Not that it’s somethin’ I’d complain about, but the circumstances don’t seem to call for it, and you’re down a progressive melody, which means you must be feelin’ it.”

“I don’t know,” said Verity. She’d finished her serving and placed the wooden bowl on the center table. She always claimed that bardic magic increased her appetite. “I think that we’ve been doing well, even with the octopus … thing.” She had a look that Alfric had seen from her before, as though she was lost, trying to find a piece of song or descriptive phrase. “I’ve always compared dungeons to a kind of performance, and we’re gliding through this one.” She shrugged.

That wasn’t even remotely how Alfric was feeling, but maybe it was because he was so aware of the time, and the fact that they might not make it out before he would be compelled to reset. It was something that they’d have to have a discussion about in another few hours. He was hoping that they could make it through another forty rooms in that time, which didn’t seem too absurd unless they ran into something like the octopus again.

Isra was uncharacteristically quiet. She was eating her goulash at a steady pace, not really looking at anyone. Alfric wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what to say. Two of the mice had died, and it didn’t seem like a few of the others would be reclaimed. The way that they had talked about it earlier in the day had been like they were taking these mice on an adventure, and he could sympathize with the way she was feeling. She had been resistant to bringing animals into the dungeons from the very start.

“Alright,” said Mizuki. “I think that the octopus creature with the stone on his back represents Verity’s ability to handle a lot of things at once.”

Verity gave a little laugh. “I was worried about where you were going with that.”

“The rock on its back represents the way she carries the team,” said Alfric.

“Har,” said Verity, but she was smiling, and blushing, just a bit.

“The octopus represents tenacity, obviously,” said Hannah.

Verity smiled again, and there was an expectation in the air that was focused firmly on Isra. She looked up at them, as though only just realizing that they’d been talking, and Alfric opened his mouth to rescue her from having to say that she wasn’t listening.

“Like an octopus, Verity is a very good wrestler,” said Isra with some deliberate slowness.

There was silence for a bit.

“Um,” said Mizuki. “I have so many questions.”

“Is Verity a good wrestler?” asked Alfric.

Isra nodded. “We’ve wrestled together.”

“Before we were dating,” Verity added quickly.

“Why?” asked Mizuki. “I mean I guess if I was wrestling a boy I would know why I was doing that, and why he was doing that, so I guess I’ve filled in the blanks, nevermind.”

“It was innocent,” said Verity, in an awkward, rushing way. She glanced at Isra just for a moment.

Mizuki rolled her eyes.

“But is an octopus a good wrestler?” asked Hannah. “Seems to me that its tentacles would give it a good grip, but a good grip isn’t the major thing when you wrestle, it’s leverage. Hard to see an octopus bein’ able to pin someone.”

“I’ve never wrestled an octopus,” said Isra with a shrug. “I’ve actually only seen them a few times, during trips to Liberfell.”

“Where are octopuses in Liberfell?” asked Mizuki.

“In the river,” said Isra. She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “This big.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.”

“I don’t know if they’re good wrestlers either,” said Isra with a shrug.

Alfric coughed. “If everyone has eaten as much as they’re going to eat, we should get moving,” he said. “Mizuki, the goulash was good, thank you.”

When they came out of the garden stone, they were in the large open room again, where the chest was waiting for them. Sixty doors were arranged in a ring around them, which in theory meant at least sixty rooms. Alfric corrected himself: there were fifty-nine doors, because they’d come in through one of them, the one that the octopus had crashed its boulder into. It was so many doors he almost thought he’d be sick, but there was a way to handle it, which was one door at a time.

First, there was some business that they’d put off until after lunch: the pile of metal that Mizuki had said was an entad.

As far as entads went, it was enormous, with each of the pieces being almost ten feet long, hinged in the middle. There were six in total, shaped and contoured, as thick as tree trunks, though hollow, which meant it was possible that the five of them together could move one. Thankfully the thicker bottoms of them were just barely narrow enough to fit into the chest, but it was going to take some doing, and getting them out would probably take a crane of some kind. There was a pattern to the metal, an embellishment, which made it look almost like the surface was covered in lizard scales.

In the end, it was the helm of flight that helped the most. Alfric had ropes, obviously, and was able to hook them up to Mizuki, making a harness around her. That meant that she could pull directly up, straining against the ropes, while everyone else tried to move a single end of a single jointed tube. Once it was up, it was just a matter of maneuvering it into the chest, which was easier said than done. If they’d had the time, Alfric would have dug a hole for the chest so they could slide the big tubes over and drop them in, but instead they ended up needing to angle the chest and the tube, in a way that needed to be delicate while also handling an entad that weighed hundreds of pounds.

Then they had to do that five more times.

Alfric wasn’t sure that it was worth it. It was entirely possible he’d get them out, have Filera look at them, and she would say that they were worthless. Maybe they made things that they touched blue, or the hollow could be made to produce a bag full of grain. Alfric had hope though, because larger entads were supposed to be better. He was a bit skeptical of that, and thought maybe larger entads were better because if a large entad wasn’t good it would get junked rather than sitting on a shelf, leaving only good survivors, but he was hoping that was an academic point. He thought he might have read it in a book on entads somewhere.

It took them at least half an hour, though without the thrums, it was much harder to time.

<I’ll bet these are awesome,> said Mizuki. <Some kind of giant stilts, maybe?>

<We need to get going,> said Alfric, which was becoming his usual refrain. <If this is what puts us behind schedule … I don’t know.>

<We’ll make it,> said Hannah. <You’ve got that sword now. The shift has stopped.>

The shift having stopped didn’t make him feel any better. From what they knew of the shifts, it was entirely possible that the final shift had locked them into a configuration that didn’t connect them to the exit, something they’d already experienced once. If that happened, it would take them multiple hours to exhaust every door and figure that out, and then they would be left trying to break through walls and find the rest of the dungeon. Alfric was fairly confident that the new sword could slice through wood with ease, but cutting through load-bearing material seemed like a bad idea, and it would be hard to tell what might cause a collapse.

Still, they had hours of time left, and options. Fifty-nine options, in fact.

Alfric pushed open the first door, sword drawn and in polearm form with a footlong blade, and saw a group of furry bear-sized monsters in what looked to be a kitchen. They noticed him, and began to move.

<Fireball,> he called, ducking for cover.

<Kitchen stuff though,> said Mizuki, but even as she said it, the fireball raced forward.

The sound of the explosion was muffled, confined mostly to the room, and it came with a horrible clanking of metal and shattering of glassware and ceramics. There were yelps from the creature, painfully high, and while Alfric had hoped that they were all dead, one of them came racing out. It stunk of singed fur, and there didn’t seem to be more to it than fur, but Alfric brought his polearm down on it, slicing it, then turned to the room, looking for more. None came.

He looked down at the creature, then at the footlong blade at the tip of the long shaft. He had expected almost no resistance, as with the octopus, but the blade had felt practically blunt. He’d compensated, but it hadn’t been what he’d thought.

<Clear,> he said after he’d stepped into the kitchen. The fireball had killed almost everything except that last one, and he had put mortally wounded creatures out of their misery. He did it twice, and there was again that same problem. The blade was sharp enough for the job, but when he’d fought the giant octopus, it had sliced through the chest like it was almost nothing. There was a catch somewhere, and he didn’t like that.

<This poor kitchen,> said Mizuki as she came in.

<We need to keep moving,> said Alfric.

<Let me mourn the plates, at least,> said Mizuki.

<It was the right call, incidentally,> said Alfric. <I had been thinking about the creatures, not the loot. Sorry.>

<I didn’t want to go against what you’d said,> replied Mizuki. <It’s fine.>

There were things to take, and because the room had been over in a hurry, Alfric allowed it. Mostly it was a few plates that hadn’t been blown up by the fireball. Then they were moving on.

Alfric didn’t like having an untested weapon. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was untested in a way that meant he was leaving some functionality on the table, but this one was untested in a way that seemed like it might cause some interference. Testing entads in a dungeon was bad enough, but testing one ‘live’ was worse.

He kept using it anyway. He didn’t really know why. There was something about the new weapon that made him feel more secure, as though he’d acquired a special toy and didn’t want to let it go. It was childish. He made a few cuts against the bodies, to confirm that it was sharp enough for use, then continued on with the polearm.

The next room had humanoid creatures, stringy ones that were seven feet tall and with wrists as thin as broom handles. A fireball greeted them, and three quick arrows took down the rest, without Alfric having to do all that much.

<Small rooms,> said Mizuki. <Less to work with, and I’m trying to suck from too far away.>

<Phrasing,> said Hannah.

They moved on, through the next door. They hadn’t seen any space-warping in the dungeon, multiple skies aside, and Alfric felt better going in a consistent direction.

The octopus had been an aberration. The creatures in the rooms were mostly weak. The rewards in the rooms were weak, maybe even weaker than expected given their elevation and the level of the threat. It was easy to imagine that this might have been how their first dungeon could have been, or every dungeon after that. It was easy to see how people could think dungeons were easy, and even more easy to see how they would give up after having gotten a few weak entads and a bit of junk.

The polearm wasn’t weak, exactly, but it underwhelmed. There was a chance that he’d used a once-a-month ability, or that it needed something big and powerful, or that the sharpness went on a cycle, or depended on specific conditions, or … a thousand things. There was every chance that it was a dud. He really should have stopped using it, but time was ticking down, and it felt like a liferaft, a signifier of things that would be lost if the dungeon was undone. It wasn’t actually worse than the bident, anyhow. He resisted the urge to fiddle with it, at least.

They went through a dozen rooms and eight different fights, though many of them were over before they started. There were natural rooms like caves or canyons, and manmade rooms that looked like they might belong in someone’s house. They had to backtrack, more than once, and eventually they reached a dock under the same dark sky they’d first seen. Fish people with extra flippers on their backs had jumped from the water, and it had been one of the fights that had stressed them, depleting stamina and Hannah’s healing, though nothing terribly severe. The waters were illuminated with their lanterns, and Alfric looked out at them. The dock was simple wood, probably of a sort that could be found anywhere along the big lake. He could, thankfully, see the edges of the room, which meant that this wasn’t an actual lake, just a piece of one.

<Going in?> asked Hannah.

<No,> said Alfric. <We can’t check every single body of water. We’re going to run out of time.>

<Then let’s get back so that doesn’t happen,> said Mizuki. <Come on, go go!>

There was something heartening about that, though Alfric was well aware that their pace was going to be dictated more by their bodies than their hustle. In fact, they’d been in the dungeon for nearly five hours by his reckoning, and most of that time had been moving and fighting, with only a few stops to gather up loot. Most of those small breaks had been to catch a breath more than anything. He could feel himself slower and more sluggish than he’d been at the start. Professional dungeoneering teams on a multi-day dungeon usually didn’t try to push too hard for fear that someone would get sloppy.

They kept reaching dead ends and coming back to the giant circular room where they’d found the octopus. It was maddening, in a way. What they needed to find was just one single room, but it could have been anywhere, down any branch of the dungeon.

<How’s the guild message coming?> asked Mizuki.

<It’s a graph of nodes,> said Alfric. <And the answer is poorly, trying to make a map is really not what this is designed for.>

<Write a letter to the Editor,> said Hannah. Alfric had never heard the expression, but he imagined that it was equivalent to saying that he should go give a sermon to the trees.

The map had grown less and less useful as the number of rooms increased. He wished that he’d put the whole thing to paper instead. They’d consulted it only twice thus far, both times to double-check that they remembered the way, and only one of those two times had the map prevented them from making a mistake.

Twenty rooms came and went. It took another hour. It was fantastic time, three minutes per room, and toward the end of it, Alfric was sweating hard. The only reason they’d stopped was because Isra had gotten a long slash along her forearm that had gone almost straight through the thimble armor. He was glad for the rest though.

<Why didn’t you use the amulet?> asked Alfric.

<I’m saving it for a larger creature,> she said. <You think not?>

<I don’t know, just curious, not judging,> said Alfric. <I’m hoping the octopus was the worst we’ll see.>

<The small wounds are adding up,> said Hannah. <If you get a break, I can still heal it, but we’re approachin’ my limits.>

<Sorry,> said Alfric. He’d been injured twice, both times when something had gotten up into his armor. The fact that the plates didn’t interlock was a problem, mostly when there was something with a lot of vectors of attack.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.