by Hugo Huesca
“I wasn’t aware the Endeavor’s victory was decided by the public. And truth be told, if I was up against one of those things I would run too.”
Those who knew about the history of the Factory knew that those were Lord Saint Claire’s creations, built out of the same magic that bound the imp-like drones to a Dungeon Lord’s Mantle. Saint Claire had been good with that kind of thing. In the golden days of the Factory of Nightmares he had employed a score of gnomes and dwarves to build his war machines and man his forges.
Of course, few knew or remembered that sort of detail. Their attention was on the present—eyes glued to the illusionary screens. “Vaines wouldn’t have run,” someone said with distaste. “She would’ve destroyed those toys!”
She would have, and had, in fact, many times over, at the cost of most of her minions and their resources.
People’s reaction to seeing Dungeon Lords do what they did best wasn’t kind. They remembered the times when a Lord had run away from danger, leaving them or their friends to die. Trash and empty mugs flew at the screens as Lord Wright ducked under a low archway and rushed for a nearby maintenance tunnel. “Stay!” the crowd urged. “Fight! Die!”
However, a pair of ragged werewolf mercenaries watched in silence as Lord Wright reached the tunnel’s entrance just in time to avoid being eviscerated by the scorpion’s mandibles, then closed the iron door behind him. “Nice sprinting form,” one of the mercenaries finally told the other, who nodded his approval.
The Lord of the Haunt had no idea when he had lost the others. He was painfully aware that running head-first into trapped, unknown territory was a death sentence. At one point, glinting darts like angry bees raked his side, but the armor protected him from most of the damage and his talents from the rest. A lucky break. He reached a maintenance tunnel before the scorpion. He closed the hatch, locked it behind him, and stared at the darkness that extended in front of him.
He was hopelessly lost.
The scorpion pounded at the door, and Ed took a moment to consider his options. He was alone. He didn’t know where his team was, or if they were even still alive.
All in all, he had been through worse.
He checked his sword and was pleased to see he hadn’t dropped it. His cursewing was nervous—he could tell by the way it fluttered without wind in all directions—but unhurt. The potions in his backpack hadn’t broken during the fight.
“Very well,” he said, trying to sound confident. “Forward it is.”
He used his Evil Eye for light. Maintenance beetles skittered above him, flakes of rust fell on his shoulders, and mist—not from a Nightshade, he checked—rose up to his ankles. The tunnel was cold and humid, which he wouldn’t have expected of the Factory. He wondered where he was.
Two slippery flights of stairs later, he found another hatch.
“Try to see if it’s trapped,” he told his cursewing cape—more like a scarf, really, at this point in its growth.
The fiend rose up to his face in what had to be an “are you kidding me?” gesture.
“Well, what happens to you if I die?” Ed wondered aloud. “If it’s trapped, I can summon you back with the ritual. If I die, you can’t eat somebody else’s blood, can you?”
The cursewing frowned. Then, slowly, it slithered away from Ed’s back like a snake, its body language making it clear it did so under protest. It draped around the hatch and tried to shift it. Nothing happened. Ed gave it a couple more seconds, then returned the cursewing to its place at his back.
Nothing happened when he opened the door either. He stepped out with careful movements and arrived at a vast dark vault. At some point, the ceiling and the surrounding catwalks had collapsed. It seemed like the maintenance beetles had either failed to find the place or had so far been unable to repair the damage. The sound of falling water, like an artificial waterfall, filled the silence. There were open cages to the side as Ed climbed his way through the debris, some of them appearing like they had been crushed long ago. He saw bone fragments, and a piece of skull from a creature he did not recognize. It had many pointy teeth. To be fair, though, most animals in Ivalis did.
Past the debris he found a set of dented iron stairs that led to a submerged section of the chamber, with two intermittent streams falling from up high through a set of cracked pipe openings. Concentric waves formed under the artificial waterfalls, giving the pool the aspect of a turbulent sea at night, where unknown monsters lurked under the tumultuous surface.
A figure stood at the edge of the pool, the waves licking at her feet. She was dragging an unconscious body by its collarbone, and when Ed came into view she dropped it without ceremony and reached for her sword. Panic widened her eyes under the eldritch green of Ed’s Evil Eye.
“Lord Wright. You’re not the one I hoped to see,” the figure greeted him.
“Lady Redwood,” Ed said. “Fancy meeting you here.” The body was one of her minions. Judging from the unhealthy blue of the face, he had drowned not long ago. “Go ahead, try to save him. I won’t interfere.” He certainly wouldn’t get into stabbing range of her to help, though.
Lady Redwood raised one sharp eyebrow and visibly masked her fear under a mask of contempt. “Save him? Why? He was useless back there. I only want his runes.” She eyed Ed dubiously, then set her sword aside and knelt to rummage through her dead minion’s pockets. “Will you attack me?” she asked Ed.
He considered it. Redwood was Vandran’s ally. She was alone, without Molmeda or the rest of her team. She had five hundred experience points, and a balanced character build. He sat down, resting the length of his sword along his knees. “My quarrel was with Lord Vandran. You are an asshole, but that on its own is no reason to kill someone.” Nevertheless, he kept a careful eye on her. The champions of Vorgothas had shown a penchant for trickery before.
“So Lord Vandran is dead, I take it?” Redwood asked. “You spoke of him in the past tense.”
“We clashed not long ago.”
Ed wondered what kind of relationship the two of them had had. Merely one of convenience? Or had it been something more? Perhaps he should have attacked after all—maybe he still could do it. Then again, Redwood’s body language did not match what he envisioned a grieving lover planning revenge would do.
“I told him we should have left you alone after Vaines’ banquet. There was no need to start the Endeavor with you as an enemy, wasting our strength before the other dangers.” Redwood kept her face down as she spoke. A moment later, she finished looting the body and stood. A tense silence spread before them. “We shouldn’t linger here,” she said. “The creatures that chased us may come back at any time.”
Ed’s cursewing tugged nervously at his shoulder, as if its nose had caught a concerning scent. “You don’t want to head back, either,” he told Redwood. “Neither of us has a character sheet built around taking out automatons.” He nodded to the pool, then to the dead body. “What happened?”
“This part of the Factory was Tillman’s,” Redwood said. “It flooded during a fight in the last Endeavor. The other side is not far and there is a breathing zone near the middle.” Her mask of calmness slid for a second. “A plant… thing caught us in its grasp just before we could reach it, though—just when air was sorely needed,” she said, kicking the dead minion. “We were right at the back. Molmeda and the others probably didn’t realize we were gone until it was too late.”
“So he may come back for you any second now.” Being caught alone with two hostile Dungeon Lords wasn’t his definition of a good time. More so because Vandran had died doing exactly that.
“And risk losing more minions, or even his life?” Redwood smirked. “His Devil Knight isn’t a good swimmer. Molmeda won’t trust his luck a second time. If I know my old teacher as well as I think, he has moved on already, probably trying to catch up with Vaines and her pet Planeshifter.” A pause. Redwood scowled, looked away past Ed’s shoulder uneasily, then seemed to come to a decision on something. “Lord
Wraith, we have reasons to… dislike each other. Beyond that, we are Dungeon Lords, so we know not to trust other members of our Dark family on principle. However, I cannot see how we can remain as active participants of the Endeavor without teaming up.”
Ed had been thinking the same thing. A single person, no matter how strong they were, couldn’t watch their own backs for long. Even Vaines had had to call it quits once she ran out of minions on the previous Endeavors. “I see.” What she said made sense, and fit with the mental image Ed had of Molmeda—and most of the Lordship, for that matter. It could also be an elaborate trap. Molmeda could be waiting for Ed to surface at the other end, ready to fireball him into ashes. He doubted it, though. Molmeda didn’t like Ed, but his entire world did not revolve around trying to kill a Starevosi Dungeon Lord. He decided Molmeda likely wasn’t waiting for him with a pair of fireball runes. Hopefully.
“Beyond the submerged section are the mutagen laboratories, which is about as far inside the Factory as we ever got. It’s a hellish place. The fruit of Tillman’s sick mind yet survives in there. Trust me, Lord Wraith, it is not a place you want to face on your own. My suggestion is, either we work together for a time to ensure we both remain in the Endeavor, or face our losses and go back.”
Prisoner’s Dilemma again, Ed thought uneasily. If they both cooperated, both would get past the flooded section. That meant a later conflict, though, when—if—either made it to the end of the Endeavor. If one betrayed the other, the traitor would get rid of a possible rival later on. If both betrayed the other, however, chances were both would die under the black waves.
Of late, it was as if his life revolved around a life-or-death choice between cooperation or fighting, and there was no way of knowing which was the right one until long after the fact. And in Vandran’s case, Ed still had no idea.
He looked back at the debris, the open cages, and the darkness that lay beyond. The Haunt needed him to win the Endeavor. That made things clearer—as if he carried a beacon with which to light the path ahead.
“What do you say, Lord Wraith?” Lady Redwood asked. Past them was the constant crash of the falling waters, loud enough, perhaps, to mask the footsteps of an approaching predator.
Ed fastened his sword back to its sheath and walked next to Redwood to the edge of the pool. “I could use a swim,” he said.
The water was so cold Ed had to cast protection from the elements as soon as he stepped in. When the water reached his waist, he snapped out a lapis ring from a simple leather bracelet on his wrist. It had been with him a long time now. He had bought it when he had gifted Katalyn Locksmith a similar one as a safeguard for her voyage to Plekth. He put the ring on and started a mental countdown; the water-breathing enchantment would last for ten minutes, after which time the ring would become useless.
He made no attempt to swim—the weight of his armor meant he dropped straight to the bottom like a brick. Protection from the elements felt like a muted buzzing along his body. The magic would last a little longer than the water-breathing, so he didn’t have to worry about dying from hypothermia. Drowning was a nearer concern, and just as deadly.
Redwood dropped next to him. Both Dungeon Lords had knives at the ready. Ed looked over his shoulder at the dark half-collapsed chamber covered in darkness. He then stepped farther into the flooded section, walking down the steps of a wide staircase. Soon, he disappeared under the black waters.
To take his first breath, he had to fight his own instinct to avoid getting water inside his lungs. A deep inhalation filled his lungs with a mouthful of ice-cold liquid. His ring transformed the liquid into oxygen while it traveled to his lungs. He exhaled a string of bubbles that left an awkward taste in his mouth. After that, breathing became easier as he got used to the experience.
A blurred world of cold, muted colors spread around the Dungeon Lord. He immediately realized his water-breathing ring did not also allow him to see underwater. He wasn’t about to complain. One of the two was more than enough.
Together with Redwood, he delved into Tillman’s flooded domain. This part of her laboratory had been for specimen storage, Ed decided, judging from the amount of cages piled atop each other. Most were closed, all that remained of their inhabitants being a pile of bones trembling slightly with the weak current. Ed reminded himself that those creatures had been dead long before the Lordship flooded the place. And he hoped the creatures of the cages that weren’t closed had also died long ago.
A few of the doors on those empty cages had been ripped off their hinges.
Walking underwater in silence except for the sound of their footsteps on metal reminded Ed of astronauts walking on the empty hulks of spaceships in the survival-horror videogames he had played on Earth. Redwood, with her mail armor and her crimson cloak floating eerily behind her, did not resemble those protagonists and their sleek futuristic armor in the least. She belonged to another genre entirely.
Redwood caught his glance and returned it with a grimace. Ed guessed she was wondering the same as he—when would each betray the other?
The best moment to do so would be halfway through the duration of his ring, so even if he survived an attack he would have to choose between hurrying back, or pushing forward into some unknown danger.
When with five minutes remaining on his ring, the Dungeon Lady of Vorgothas patted his armor to catch his attention; he was understandably jumpy. She only pointed ahead, though, at the black-and-mustard-colored field of bladderwrack growth that covered the floor and parts of the walls, algae-like tentacles covered in polyps drifting placidly in tight clusters as if swaying to the tune of unheard music.
Redwood gestured a warning at Ed and then pointed up. He saw a small opening right above them. The Dungeon Lady swam upward, hard, visibly fighting against the weight of her mail armor. In Ed’s case, with his plate armor, swimming was out of the question, but there were handles on the wall rising all the way up. He climbed those, and soon enough his head broke the surface of the water.
“That’s the creature that attacked your group?” he asked Redwood.
She spat a mouthful of water and then nodded. “The very same. It looks harmless now, but it goes crazy as soon as you’re within reach. Molmeda and the rest of us avoided it by climbing horizontally using the pipework that runs along the wall—it’s about ten inches below us.”
Ed searched for the ledge. Going by touch alone, the pipes were thin and didn’t make him confident they would hold his weight.
“Be careful. About a minute in the climb, a piece of piping broke off,” Redwood explained bitterly. “That’s how my minion and I were left behind. Let’s hope you can reach the next pipe in that armor, Lord Wraith.”
“I’ll manage,” Ed said. “Who goes first?” he asked.
Both Dungeon Lords exchanged mistrustful glances. The Lordship only went first in a dungeon raid if everyone else was dead, and that usually meant the surviving Lord was in the middle of an enthusiastic tactical retreat.
Ed fought off the need to roll his eyes. “I’ll do it.” He closed his eyes as he went down, taking a deep breath despite the ring’s magic.
When he opened his eyes again, he realized they had more pressing concerns than the seaweed creature.
In Saint Claire & Tillman’s Museum, there is a wax statue of a giant red-and-black-striped cat with the face of a beautiful blond woman. Her oversized smile is full of shark-like teeth. Any visitor with an interest spiked by such a sight may learn a bit about Saint Claire & Tillman’s lampagos by the brass plate next to it.
A lampagos, originally, was a type of wild fiend that thrived in the deserts between the regencies of Vorgothas and Tal Zamor. Its most famous characteristic was a mouth full of poisoned teeth and an attitude that made them very likely to use such teeth on the first unlucky sot that set foot in their hunting grounds. Few Netherworldly inhabitants had seen a lampagos up close, and even fewer knew that, originally, the lampagos had lacked the human face and the poisoned tail spikes,
being nothing more than an aggressive desert cat predator.
That was until Evangeline Tillman had come across one in one of her trips, where she had rubbed her chin and wondered, “How can we make a giant man-eating cat even worse?”
Mutagen experimentation was a chaotic field of research, dangerous and morally ambiguous, even for Saint Claire & Tillman’s Research Facilities, whose Sub-Committee of Ethical Investigation consisted of a single ogre with a spiked club sitting behind a desk waiting for any complainers.
No one was sure why the lampagos had developed a human face along with the mutations that gave them their poison and their tail. If any semblance of human intelligence dwelt past their noble foreheads, it was hidden underneath a constant, boiling rage that caused them to hunt and kill anything that moved and breathed. However, it was generally agreed that this mutated version of the desert cats were far more effective than the originals, mainly because they were even more aggressive.
The lampagos had been marketed to Dungeon Lords as, “a trainable beast capable of protecting a dungeon, guarding its master, and a modern pet for the discerning Evilness that wishes to dispose of their prisoners in a stylish way.”
The sales campaign had been a massive success.
Only because of the Lordship’s—and thus the company’s—general decline did lampagos production ever stop, which ended its Ivalian presence due to over-hunting by Heroes such as Ryan Silverblade or Edward Wright’s unnamed Wizard. The last known surviving lampagos had its existence ended during a duel between Lady Aramis Vaines and Lord Dominique Molmeda, but that last part was not included in the Museum’s plaque.
Neither was the fact that before Evangeline Tillman’s untimely demise, an improved, deadlier version of the lampagos product had been one of her many secret projects.
What the hell are those? Ed—who obviously hadn’t read the Museum’s plaque—thought, as a pair of black-and-crimson-striped lampagos swam like a pair of slender missiles toward him.