It looked like it could use its legs to eat people. That it could smash you to pieces with its stone head and body. It was a creature designed to kill, to maim, to destroy any hero foolish enough to battle it.
“A boss monster,” said Bill. “The end of every dungeon.” He turned to the barbarian now. “We have no mage, bard, or rogue. Tell me you at least planned to face an elemental boss.”
“Plan? My plan is to kick its arse all the way to hell.”
“What?”
The barbarian approached the loot chest in the center. “Hold off the freak,” he told them.
Bill held his sword in dueling stance, while Lisle saw that he now had enough mana for two more fireballs. Still not enough. Not enough at all.
His brother whispered to him. “Grow a fireball on your palm. Don’t cast it yet. We need to make the monster wary. It doesn’t know how small your balls are. Your fireballs, I mean.”
Lisle nodded, and he let mana seep into his palms.
The barbarian, standing in front of the loot chest, raised his sword. Light flashed down it now, before glowing a deep, dark red, and then yellow. It looked like he’d just taken it out of a forge.
It must have been a barbarian skill.
“Strike of Almighty Fury!” shouted the barbarian, and he smashed his sword against the chest, shattering its padlocks.
Lisle was beginning to see why barbarians were thought of as being so stupid. While mages, rogues, and bards used their skills in silence, barbarians had to shout idiotic phrases to activate theirs.
The barbarian grinned at the brothers now. “More than one way to loot a dungeon,” he said. “I’ll grab the treasure and we’ll find a way out. Screw the boss monster. You’re with me now, kids. When you’re with me, you know you’re with the real brains of the party.”
The barbarian reached into the unlocked chest.
And then he screamed in a way that Lisle had never heard in his life. It was a cry so primal, so unexpected, that his blood froze, and the flame died in his hand.
Bill ran over. “A bear trap! The chest was trapped!”
The barbarian raised his hands, bringing the trap out with it. Both his hands were caught in its teeth. “Get…this…off…me…” he said, in between sobs and gasps.
There was no time.
Because then, Gary the boss monster bounded over to the barbarian and attached three of its slimy legs to him.
Then Lisle saw the teeth, and he realized they were leeches. It had leeches for legs!
The barbarian fell on his back, turning paler and paler as the giant leech legs drained his blood.
The brothers backed away.
They were alone.
A rookie swordsman and mage, alone in a dungeon that had already claimed the lives of a party of fully licensed heroes. This was the end, and nobody would ever know it had happened.
Their mother would think they had left. So would Vedetta; she’d have no idea that a damn dungeon existed underground near town.
Lisle stood shoulder to shoulder with his brother. Neither of them said anything. They were completely muted, completely disarmed by fear now.
And the monster turned their way. His face was pure evil, his leech legs swollen with blood.
Just then, just as Lisle prepared to meet his end in a dungeon that he wished he’d never entered, he heard a voice. A voice he recognized. A voice that filled him not with hope, but an overwhelming fear.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he shouted.
CHAPTER 33
“No. Not now! What are you doing?”
I shouted like a madman at the scene playing out in my core vision. I just couldn’t believe it.
One second, Gary had slaughtered the brute and was left with only the two rookie lads. It was over. I could almost hear Overseer Bolton’s reluctant congratulatory speech in my head.
The next thing I know, a little girl with red hair ran into my loot room and sprinted over to the rookie swordsman and mage. The mage pulled her into a hug. It was completely sickening.
Gary prowled over to them, and the girl pushed away from the mage and looked upwards, at thin air. I knew what she was doing.
“Halt your monster, Beno,” she said. “These are my brothers. You wouldn’t hurt someone close to me, would you?”
Oh, for doom’s sake. I really didn’t need this.
It was an interesting question, though. Would I hurt someone close to Vedetta?
Hmm. I had to think about it. On the one hand, I did like her. And the two brothers weren’t heroes, despite the fact that they, unfortunately, met the technical description. Killing them wouldn’t give me anywhere near as much pleasure as it had with the barbarian and his gang.
But then again, I was a core. My human instincts had left me long ago. Really, they had. When the other cores used to tease me and say I’d kept too much humanity, they were wrong, and they were idiots. Especially Core Jahn.
So yes, on reflection, I would kill someone close to Vedetta. I was a core; it was my job, my purpose, it was the reason my soul was resurrected in the first place.
“Sorry, but you know the rules,” I told her.
“Can I talk to you properly?” she shouted.
Her brothers looked at her strangely. “Detta? Who are you talking to?”
“How did you find us?”
“Later,” the girl answered. “Beno, I need to speak with you. You won’t be harmed.”
Won’t be harmed?
I won’t be harmed?
This was my bloody dungeon, and I had her brothers on a plate! No matter how old Vedetta really was, she was still a little girl. She was nothing but a morsel to Gary.
“Please, Beno,” she said. “Just come and hear me out.”
I used my core powers to amplify my voice through the dungeon. This needed to sound terrifying and serious.
“Why would one such as myself talk to one such as…yourself?”
Damn it! The effect wasn’t what I had intended. The amplification made my stupid voice sound even worse.
“There’s something you need to know, that you won’t find out if you kill my brothers.”
“Oh?”
“About the overseers. Something you don’t know about them.”
Ah. Now, this might change things.
I supposed I could talk to her. After all, the moment to issue an order for Gary to slaughter them had sort of passed. I could find out what the hell she knew, then kill her brothers.
“Fine, child. Tell me.”
“Come here.”
“Heh. Not a chance, have you lost your mind?”
“Come and talk here, core, or not at all.”
I wanted to know what secrets she held about the overseers, but I couldn’t just pedestal hop into the loot room. That’d leave me right in the center, and I’d be too exposed.
No, it was time to do something I had avoided for all this time because I found it demeaning.
“Tomlin? Come here please.”
My core room door opened and both Tomlin and Wylie shuffled in. I couldn’t justify keeping them out of the fighting while sending my other clan monsters into it, yet I didn’t want them to get hurt. They were my favorites, after all.
At any rate, I had posted them outside the core room as guards, which technically meant they had a role in things.
“Dark Lord has almost destroyed his enemies,” said Tomlin. “Tomlin is impressed.”
“Almost, but not quite. Tomlin, I’ll need you to carry me.”
He arched the little strip of hair that counted as a kobold eyebrow. “Carry you, Dark Lord?”
“Yes, I know. It’s demeaning as hell to be carried around by a kobold, but I need to get to the loot room, and I don’t want to be stranded in the center.”
“Dark Lord can move to other pedestals.”
“And if the mage hits me with a fireball and knocks me off it?”
“Ah, Tomlin understands.”
“Good,” I s
aid. “I’ll need you to carry me to the loot room entrance, where I will speak to them. If there is the slightest hint of trouble, you carry me back here. Got it?”
“Tomlin will protect his friend.”
That felt like a dagger of emotion in my cold, dead, completely non-existent heart. “Thank you, Tomlin.”
The kobold carried me to the loot room, where I saw Gary, Vedetta, and the brothers. There was a dead barbarian with his hands stuck in a bear trap, surrounded by his own blood. It was beautiful.
“Vedetta,” I said. “Tell me what I should know.”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just needed you to come here so you could see my brothers properly. Look at them! They’re scared. Barely out of their teens, but with simple minds and cowardly souls. They aren’t made for fighting.”
The swordsman eyed his sister now, but I suppose he knew better than to spoil her blatant attempts to get me to spare them.
Yes, I understood what was going on. I don’t know how or why, but Vedetta’s brothers had joined a party of heroes and had come to loot my dungeon. Now, Vedetta wanted me to spare their lives. Apparently, actions shouldn’t have consequences after all. Who knew?
“Vedetta, you know as well as I do that sparing a hero’s life willingly is the most disgraceful breaking of core rules that is possible.”
The mage brother spoke to his sister. “Detta? You know this…thing? You know about dungeons and cores? What the hell is going on?”
Vedetta patted his arm. “Sweet brothers, it would be a great idea if you didn’t speak a word until I’ve negotiated your release.”
If I had a face, I would have been giving her a very serious frown right now. “Oh no. Nope. They’ll be no negotiation. These guys came into my dungeon willingly and with their own motives, whatever those motives are. You know what that makes them. You know what it means.”
Vedetta nodded. “I thought you might feel that way. I would have, too.”
“You would have too? What?” said the swordsman brother.
I was about to give Gary his kill order when Vedetta pulled something from her bag.
It was a mana lamp. Small, made of metal, with a green flame inside.
“Gary, tear these two to-”
Before I could say anything, Vedetta ran at me, barged into Tomlin, and then ran past us. Her footsteps echoed all the way down the tunnel until they stopped, and I knew where she was.
Holy hell. She was in my core room!
“I’m sure you know,” she shouted. Even as a little girl, her shouting voice sounded better than mine. “That mana lamps can be smashed. And when a mana flame touches essence…”
The essence vines! She was going to burn them. I didn’t want to exaggerate the danger of the situation…but this was bad.
I decided to call her bluff. “So burn them, then. I’ll murder your brothers and I’ll still pass my graduation.”
“Your evaluation doesn’t end just because you kill a party of heroes, Beno. Come on, you know that. It ends when the overseers say it does, and from what you told me, you’ve annoyed them. Let’s say you kill my brothers. But now that your dungeon is open, more heroes will come. With your vines scorched to cinders, you won’t have essence. Which means, my little core, the next heroes to find their way in will kill your clanmates and then smash you into dust.”
She had a way of getting her arguments across, I’ll give her that.
The biggest problem was that everything she had said was true. Winning against this party of heroes wouldn’t automatically end the evaluation. It would just put me in a good position for judgement when the overseers called a stop to things.
But without essence, I was defenseless. Like she said, when other heroes inevitably came, I’d have no resources.
At least if I let her and her brothers leave and spared my essence, there was a chance I could beat the next set of heroes. Or that I could at least talk the overseers round.
That was my choice. Death by a hero’s sword, or death when the overseers smashed me up.
Sometimes, there are real drawbacks to being a core.
“Get out of here,” I told her. “You and your brothers.”
“Just wait,” said Vedetta. “Wait here, Beno, and I’ll fix this. Thank you.”
“Wait here? Where in all hells else would I go?”
CHAPTER 34
This should have been a time for celebration, for basking in the deaths of my enemies, for stripping their corpses for loot while practicing my cackle. I had been so, so close.
Now I was in a dungeon filled with heroes corpses, yet every single body and bloodstain was a symbol of how so near to victory I had gotten, yet had failed miserably.
Tomlin and Wylie and Gary tried to comfort me, but I was in a horrible mood. I couldn’t bring myself to loot the heroes or to do any work. I floated restlessly, spending hours going from one dungeon chamber to the next, turning it all over in my mind, considering all the ways I was absolutely screwed.
And then I heard footsteps.
Someone spoke to me.
“Core Beno?”
My first thought, in a flicker of hope, was that Vedetta was back with some miraculous solution.
“Core Beno, please join me in your core room.”
It was Overseer Bolton. Here to gloat, no doubt. Here to deliver his judgment that I be smashed into thousands of pieces, and those pieces used to create a core for a new soul.
A brief, crazy idea sparked in my head. That I should order Gary to kill the overseer.
No, that was both idiotic and useless. A core’s creatures couldn’t harm an overseer.
The best thing I could do would be to get things straight in my head. Work out my arguments, and somehow convince the overseers that I shouldn’t be immediately pulverized.
I gave my kobolds and my spider-leech-troll monster a sad smile. “It’s been great getting to know you all,” I told them. And then I didn’t have the heart to say anything else.
I tried to make myself resolute. To face whatever happened next like a true core.
As I prepared to hop into the core room, I heard something else.
Footsteps and voices, but coming from the dungeon entrance.
Heroes? Now?
I hopped into the room next to the entrance room so that I could hear them without being seen. It was then that I heard a familiar voice. The voice of a little girl.
“Just down here,” she said. “I told you, didn’t I?”
A deep, harsh voice replied to her. “Very good, girl. You weren’t lying after all. You say there’s treasure down here?”
“There sure is. You just need to walk through that door.”
I cast my core vision to the entrance, where I saw a man step into my dungeon.
A tall man wearing leather armor, with a patch over his right eye, and a piece of wood where his left leg should be.
This was no hero, I knew that much. I could sense the foulness coming from him. The complete lack of morality. I could see, just by looking at him, that he had a dark aura. Not that it was his eye patch or peg leg that made it so. After all, many pirates are said to be lovely guys when you get to know them. It was more that I could sense the corruptness of his soul.
So he certainly wasn’t a hero, no. Not in the moral sense, anyway. Yet, he had walked into my dungeon willingly, seemingly led here by Vedetta in search of treasure.
Vedetta stayed by the dungeon door, not stepping foot over the threshold. The door slammed shut, trapping the man here. Trapping the man who, by voluntarily walking into the Whispering Caverns of Gary Fight Kill, had just deemed himself as a hero. Technically.
Now I understood what Vedetta had meant by fixing things for me.
Sort of.
Was this man a bandit? Could he even be the bandit who had killed Vedetta’s father?
“Core Beno,” said a voice across the dungeon. “I am not accustomed to waiting.”
Aha
! Vedetta had delivered me a second chance. If I killed this man, this dictionary-definition hero, before I even spoke to Bolton, then surely that would count in my favor?
“Oh Gary,” I said. “Get ready. You have work to do.”
CHAPTER 35
One-Eyed Sanders had just enough time to hear the girl say something before the door started to close.
“This is for George Costitch,” she said.
And then the door slammed shut, leaving Sanders alone.
George Costitch? Who the hell was that? Was he supposed to know the name?
He might not have recognized it, but he knew the intention behind her words. See, you didn’t spend decades as a bandit without occasionally having the family members of people you murdered come looking for revenge. They usually said things like, “This is for my father, mother, uncle, donkey, blah blah blah.”
And then Sanders would kill them.
Now, though, he was alone. He hadn’t brought his men with him because they were all out west, waiting for a merchant who they knew would be heading over travelers’ pass with boxes of gems in his cart.
Sanders was always happy to delegate, and he’d trusted them to do the job alone while he relaxed at camp. And then the little girl had come to him, saying she knew a place where there was treasure, but she was too scared to go. That she’d lead him there if he gave her a cut of it.
He’d planned to follow her, get the treasure, and then murder her.
But now a locked door separated them. Sanders tried its handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
Damn it, little girl!
There was nothing for it but to explore.
Sanders took one step, and then almost fell down a bloody hole in the ground!
He leaned over and saw a corpse at the bottom of it. What the hell has happened down here?
Sanders hadn’t known fear for a long time, but he felt it now. Steeling himself, knowing what a story this would be if he survived, he looked around the room, and he saw a door.
He walked through it, following a tunnel into yet another room, with even more corpses. A dead bard was lying next to some kind of frog creature.
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