“Torches, lads,” he said.
The dungeon thus far had been lit by lamps, which Endliver thought was a considerate touch on behalf of the dungeon core. Now, they took their own torches out of their packs and sparked flints until they lit.
Under the glow of a dozen torches the true features of the tomb emerged. It was an oval chamber made from stone, with no means of escape that he could see. In the center of the room was a giant steel set of weighing scales. One scale was raised higher than the other, and it was empty. The second scale was close to the ground and was filled with dark lumps of some kind.
One of his men kneeled in front of the scales.
“There’s writin’, cap’n. Something is written here!”
“Then read it to us, seaweed brain!”
He cleared his throat. “While chaos reigns, no man might find his true way. Balance is needed to show the path.”
“What that mean?” asked Hogwash Jenkins, a particularly dull-brained man who was only good for lugging barrels around the ship, and who wasn’t even much good at that. Endliver had met him when he was a little orphaned boy begging for fish scraps on the docks, and he wouldn’t get rid of him no matter how useless he was.
“It means, Hogwash my lad, that we need to balance the scales. In other words, see the scale that’s raised up and empty? We need to fill it with something.”
“I know!” shouted Hogwash.
Before anyone could stop him, the brute of a man grabbed the raised scale and shimmied up it with surprising dexterity, until he could climb into its base. His great weight should have brought it down, but the scale didn’t move.
“Looks like we can’t balance it with just anything,” said Endliver. “Try taking some of those black lumps from the other scale.”
Two of his men each grabbed a chunk of rock from the scale near the ground. As they did, two things happened.
First, an ominous hiss filled the chamber.
Secondly, words appeared on the ground. Blood red words.
Balance cannot be achieved by robbing one side and giving it to the other.
Only blood may open the way.
Endliver gulped. His throat tightened, and he even wished that he had a bottle of rum with him, no matter how much he hated the stuff.
His men began coughing. Green smoke emanated from a hole in the wall.
“Poison!” cried one.
Endliver took a bandana from his pack and tied it around his mouth.
“Aye, its poison,” he said, his voice muffled.
He stared at the words again, the meaning of them sending an icy chill through his heart.
Balance cannot be achieved by robbing one side and giving it to the other.
Only blood may open the way.
Endliver Pickering hadn’t spent all of his pirating career just boarding other vessels and stealing what was there. He’d done other stuff, too. In his early years on the seas, he had done some good old, honest pirate work – finding treasure maps and decoding the riddles to find the booty.
As such, Endliver was adept at solving riddles, puzzles, and other cryptic shite like that. These words didn’t confuse him. Not one bit.
Only balancing the scales would open the chamber and save them from the poison, and the only thing that would balance the scales was blood.
The question was: whose blood?
I watched them from my core chamber. I wasn’t nervous, exactly. Nor was I excited. I supposed I was feeling some approximation to those sensations. Either way, it amounted to one thing – I couldn’t wait to see what happened with my new trap chamber.
I had unlocked it on my last level up, and the idea of using it made me tense. Excavating the chamber had taken Redjack and the miners most of the day, which had been cutting it fine. I had spent a great chunk of essence constructing the trap, a new puzzle chamber, and then used the rest of my essence on furnishing Razensen with monsters.
Now all that remained was to see how the sacrifice chamber worked.
So far, it looked good. Poison was pumping from the walls, and it seemed to me that the leader of this band of fools had discovered the meaning behind it; that only filling the scales with blood would open the doors.
Of course, like most trap-puzzles, I was forced to provide another way of solving it. A simple way that didn’t involve self-sacrifice.
The question was…would they figure it out?
Well, it would keep them busy, that was what mattered. In the meantime, I had a more dangerous foe to focus on than 30 pirates. A teenage girl and her little friend.
“Razensen,” I said, using my core voice. “The witch is separated from the others. She doesn’t look much like a witch to me, though. And she is very young. There’s also a freckled-faced boy with her.”
“That’s them, alright, Stone.”
“I trust you can deal with her this time?”
“You doubt me? I will send her to the ice!”
Anna paced slowly around the tomb, gritting her teeth so she could endure the pain in her leg. The temperature in the dungeon wasn’t good for her at all, and the sooner she could kill the core and leave it, the better.
She inspected every inch of the place, running her fingers over the walls and feeling the stone flake away, tapping the ground with her good foot to see if there were any weak points or hidden doors or something.
“Boring, boring, boring,” she said. And then a song came to her head, one her mother taught her. “There once was a goblin, and he found a ring. A goblin ring! A goblin ring!”
“Do you have to sing? You know I hate your singing voice,” said Utta.
Behind her, she felt waves of fear coming from Utta. And although she’d promised him that she never would, she cast a small blanket in his mind. A nice one. Lovely and bright, and so light it was like silk. He wouldn’t feel it but instead would just lose a little of his fear. It was okay to lie if she was doing it to help her friend.
“What did our oh-so-perfect school tell you about dungeons, Utta? I don’t know much, but I know they have rules. They can’t just lock you somewhere until you die.”
“Every dungeon is run by a core, and every core has rules. If there are puzzles, they have to have solutions. The core can trick us, but there has to be room for us to figure things out.”
“Then what are we missing?”
“You’re missing the fact that rules can be bent, without breaking them,” said a voice.
Anna looked around. The voice had come from above them and around them at the same time.
“Core?” said Utta. “Is that you?”
“I prefer to be called the Dark Lord. The Master of Malevolence. The Prince of Pain.”
“The Prince of Pain?” said Anna. “Sounds like the name of a villain in a two-copper theatre show. Like you should be prancing around in tights and cackling.”
“Beneath your feet is a simple pitfall. A trap that I was reliably informed no hero would ever fall for these days, but I knew differently.”
Anna looked at the ground. It was brown and made of dirt and stone. It didn’t look trapped, but she supposed she was in a dungeon, so it would make sense.
“You have to offer the chance of a way out,” said Utta.
“Ah. Freckle Face knows about cores, does he?”
“More than you’d expect. And my father always says freckles are spots of wisdom.”
“Yeah, core!” said Anna. “Don’t you forget it.”
“Your father is a fool. Behind you are two levers,” said the voice.
Anna turned around, but she couldn’t see them. “Where?”
“Behind you.”
She moved a little. “Here?”
“Thirty degrees to your left. See? Where it is dark? No, no, you’ve gone too far. Wait…there.”
“Ah,” She said. “Two levers. Gotcha.”
“One lever will open a secret door. The other will open the pitfall beneath you, plunging you into the very depths of the underworlds, w
here demons will rip out your intestines and stab your arse with forks and other equally dreadful things.”
“You’re a dungeon core,” said Utta, “Not a demon or a warlock. You can no more access the underworlds than I can conjure fairies when I sneeze.”
“Fine. The pitfall will drop you a long way. Enough that your little necks will snap.”
“What do you want?” said Anna.
“So, you are prepared to talk? Good. Tell me, you wretch, do you have a kobold in your possession?”
The babble of voices was enough to make a man lose his temper, and Endliver Pickering always strove to be the kind of man who kept his temper safe so he never misplaced it and could always find it when he needed to. But right now, so many of his lads were talking at once that he couldn’t even think straight. Gods of the waves, he needed a drink! It was at that point that he realized although he didn’t like rum, he bloody well needed it.
“Shut yer flappers!” he shouted. The din gradually quietened, until they were all staring at him. “Let’s think about this loglostically, shall we? Eh? Use a little dollop of what they call inturition. So, we know that to balance these scales, we need to fill the empty one with blood. Now, what did we work out the depth of the scale to be, lads?”
“17 inches, Cap’n.”
“Right. And how many gallons fill 17 inches of space?”
“Gallons? I thought we were talking liters.”
“When I’m baking,” said another man, “Most recipes don’t talk about gallons or liters. They measure stuff in cups.”
“Cups? But cups can be made in different sizes. That ain’t a uniform method of measurement. And when does a cup become a mug?”
“Enough!” said Endliver again. “We’re trying to escape before this place fills with poison, you land mammals, not bake a jam roly-poly. How many gallons, liters, cups, or bloody tankards of blood will we need to fill this scale so we can get out of here, and how many people need to heroically sacrifice themselves to fulfill that?”
The green mist continuously hissed into the room as they spoke. It made them cough and gag, and it had already made Straw-Stomach Milroy vomit, though the man vomited thrice daily anyway.
That said, though it was indeed poison, it was slow working, and Endliver had worked out why. The dungeon core wanted to give them time to make this horrible decision. It’d be no fun to just kill them quickly with poison, would it? The master of this dungeon was a sick, sick freak.
Pete Leaf, the quietest lad of the bunch who barely ever said a word and never, ever joined in when they sang sea shanties, cleared his throat.
“I worked in a slaughterhouse when I was a boy,” he said. Words from Pete Leaf’s mouth were so rare that everyone listened. “I saw lots of blood. That scale? Well, to my reckoning, it’d take a couple of cows to fill it.”
“How many humans?” said Hogwash Jenkins.
“Three, maybe four regular folks,” said Pete Leaf. “Or maybe just one regular-sized man…supplemented with a big old Hogwash Jenkins.”
The implication was like a cutlass cutting through a sailing rope. Glances darted Hogwash’s way. The lovable, poor, witless brute, hadn’t soaked up the implication yet.
“He’d barely even feel it,” said Pete Leaf. “A big, stupid oaf like him? Look. Barely even knows I’m talking about him, even when I look him in the eye. See? All I have to do is speak with a smile on my face, and he thinks I’m joking with him.”
Hogwash grinned at Pete Leaf.
A few men sighed. Others stared at Hogwash.
Endliver felt a deep stirring in his gut. He’d seen things like this before. Times when one crew member took more than his fair share of the air and spoke poison to the others. Though nothing had been directed at Endliver yet, it smelled like the beginnings of a mutiny to him.
And not just that. For the sneering little arse-face to talk about poor Hogwash like that?
No.
Endliver pulled his dagger. Before the rest of them could even blink, he slit Pete Leaf’s throat.
“There’s one for the scale. Come on, you scabs! Hold his neck against it ‘fore we lose all the blood. Hogwash, come stand here, next to me. The rest of you? I suggest you forget everything our little friend just said. Every damned word.”
Redjack and Jopvitz hacked away at the tunnel, swinging their pickaxes in rhythm so that no sooner had one bitten into the stone, the other followed. The result was a clink-clunk-clink-clunk rhythm that kept them going and reminded Redjack of Brecht the bard and his tambourine. Klok, meanwhile, was dozing against a rock, eyes shut, spit bubbles gently forming and popping as he snored.
Redjack had made the supervisory decision to allow him to have a nap. Klok was the lowest-skilled miner, clearly not as good at it as him or Jopvitz. The work wore him out, and Redjack didn’t see the point keeping him working while he had no strength to swing his pickaxe.
“How comes Wylie and Tarius get to rest?” said Jopvitz, his whiskers dripping with sweat.
“Rule of seniority,” said Redjack. “Wylie is the enforcer. Tarius has been here longer.”
“But you’re the boss now.”
“Boss in training, but I won’t succeed if I make enemies of kobolds who should be my friends. You know how much the Dark Lord likes Wylie.”
“Speaking of bosses and friends. How about you be a pal and let me go get a few shrooms from the larder? This work is sapping my energy.”
“Go on then, but only if you bring me some.”
“I always said you’d be a good boss, Redjack.”
While Jopvitz left to get shrooms and Klok slept, Redjack decided to have a rest of his own. Only for a minute.
He’d only just sat down when a kobold walked toward him.
He couldn’t believe it.
“Shadow?”
“Redjack!” she said.
It was her, alright. The rogue kobold. The one who usually had her dogs with her, who was always sneaking around, and who half the dungeon seemed to have missed in her absence and half had been glad she was gone.
“Where you been, Shadow? When did you get back? Have you been to see Lord Dark yet?”
She walked toward him. “Just on my way, actually, but I have a few things to do first.”
“Wait. What’s wrong with your eyes? Why have you got that strange look on your-”
Searing heat spread through his belly. He looked down and saw Shadow’s fist next to his stomach. He couldn’t see the dagger, because she’d buried it all the way in his gut.
I was starting to really enjoy the scene with the pirates and the sacrifice scales when I got a deep, dull feeling in my inner core, and a message appeared.
Redjack [Miner, supervisor in training, kobold] has died!
“What?”
My mind started spinning like the wheels of a wagon careening down a mountain slope. How in all hells had Redjack died? He and a few miners were excavating a tunnel in the northeast of the dungeon, far away from the witch and her pirates. In any case, all of my opponents were accounted for. What had happened? Had I missed something?
As much as it pained me, I switched my core vision away from the sacrifice chamber and to the tunnel, where I saw two kobolds on the ground.
“What? Klok is dead too?”
But he wasn’t, I realized. Klok was lying down against a rock, sleeping. Redjack, meanwhile, was in a puddle of his own blood.
“Razensen,” I said, using my core voice. “I need you to go investigate the new tunnels in the northeast. The enemy may have split into three groups before we trapped them. I suspect they have rogues sneaking around, ones skilled enough to avoid detection.”
“Impossible.”
“Redjack is dead, Razensen. And unless he fell on his own pickaxe…”
“I mean, Stone, it is impossible for me to go there. Those tunnels are too cramped for me. It is a matter of fitting. I am too big!”
“Damn it. Gary? Brecht? Rusty? I need you to head north…”
>
The situation was all spinning away from me. I needed to keep control. To remember that it was the witch who posed the biggest danger to us all.
I switched back to my view of the pitfall room.
“Hellooooo?” said Anna, walking in a circle, trying hard to not betray the pain shooting up her leg. “Hellooooo?”
“He’s gone,” said Utta.
“Impossible. I was just talking to him. Maybe he just fell asleep, or something.”
“What?”
“What?” she said, making a face at him.
“You’re an idiot sometimes, Anna.”
“You’re an idiot all the time, Utta,” she said, and then smiled.
“I don’t have the time to play games anymore,” said the voice, audibly more exasperated than before. “Do you have a kobold in your possession or not?”
“What’s a kobold? Oh, you mean the weird wolf-goblin thingy?”
“Wolf-lizard. Yes. The one who you tortured to learn about my dungeon and its traps.”
“Oh, I didn’t torture her,” said Anna. “She’s perfectly fine. I had a chat with her, and now we get along amazingly.”
“You…had a chat?”
She strolled over to the levers on the wall. “A fifty percent chance of safety or death depending on which lever I pull, yes? One lever opens the door, the other makes me and Utta plunge to our deaths. And the alternative you offer is one where you hold ultimate bargaining power over us?”
“As you see, you have little choice but to tell me what I want to know. Now, where is-”
“We are Chosen Ones, core. There’s a certain destiny implied in being a Chosen One. There are no odds that don’t favor us. Do you really think Utta and I are fated to die in a no-mark dungeon in the middle of a desert?”
Utta shouted as she reached for the lever. “Anna, what are you doing?”
Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) Page 95