by Rue Vespers
Instead, Hellsbore tried to break his own lock. But there were minute differences in their cages. Two joined metal panels protected the padlock on Hellsbore’s cage door, making it impossible for him to crook his wrist around through the bars to get to it. Jenner’s cage, on the other hand, had no metal panel. He could shove his hand through the bars and cradle the padlock in his palm.
Hellsbore looked at the exit to the dungeon, down to the goblin stewing the now yellowish-green broth, and over to the key and wheel to his cage. The demon was clearly looking for another way out, any way to get the hell out of here that did not involve a second party. A team player, this demon most assuredly was not.
“Look here, you little black-eyed, ice-hearted asshole,” Rosy snapped, rapping its spoon on the bars to get Hellsbore’s attention. “Do you want to live to see Level 5? Or are you so allergic to making an ally for two fucking minutes that you’d rather scramble into someone else and start all over again? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’d make a really cute succubus.”
If looks could kill, the teacup would have been blasted apart into ten thousand shards. But presenting it as a way for the demon to selfishly save himself, rather than work together to help out both of them, proved to be an effective strategy. A throwing star formed in Hellsbore’s fingers. It dripped furiously.
“Hold still,” he ordered.
Jenner froze within the cage. It revolved in the air and eventually settled, the demon moving very slowly within his own confines to keep it from rocking as well. The goblin’s eyes were trained upon the stew, which was turning more greenish than yellowish with each passing second.
Hellsbore threw the star.
His aim was true. The star destroyed the padlock, which rained down in pieces to the cauldron. One metal chunk bounced off the goblin’s head, which at last brought its attention to what was going on overhead.
And that was Jenner, who dropped down directly on top of the creature.
They knocked into the cauldron, which fell off the flames and dumped its green contents in a steaming, stinking wave full of suspicious chunks. Slipping in it, they tumbled apart.
Jenner launched himself away from the fire with a frantic, ungainly leap. It was a move borne from reflex, a carry-over of a life in which fire was a very bad thing for flesh. The goblin, however, landed in the flames.
As the beast shrieked, Jenner snatched the key off the stalagmite. Hellsbore’s wheel was right there, too, Jenner yanking on it hard. The cage rattled down a foot.
“The goblin, you idiot!” Rosy yelled.
Jenner whipped around. He had made the erroneous assumption in the heat of the moment that the goblin would be greatly incapacitated if not killed by falling into the fire. But it was picking itself out of the flames, scorched yet still very alive and very dangerous.
“Goblin status!” Jenner said. “Health only!”
The Common Goblin’s health is currently 17/20.
That was barely any damage! It tipped its head back and roared as Jenner scanned around in panic for a weapon. The dead goblin was crumpled atop its own club all the way on the other side of the cavern. The club that Jenner had brought along was still buried in its skull. As for the living goblin, it was taking its personal club in hand.
Jenner was back exactly where he had started: armed with a dagger that wasn’t going to work against armor. This goblin had a topknot, but it barely came halfway down the neck, far too short to wrap all the way around and pull.
The creature stalked for him.
Jenner did the only thing left. He gave the wheel another wrench, and ran for it.
“Don’t you leave me here!” Hellsbore screamed, assuming that Jenner was heading for the ladder. Jenner hadn’t been going for it; he was just trying to stay ahead of the goblin.
When he reached the dead one, he attempted to wrest the club from its head. And failed. He took off again at a sprint, his boots splashing through the broth. The live goblin charged after him but was slowed when it slipped in the liquid all over the ground.
As it reeled, Jenner took a split second to lower the cage several wrenches further and offer the key up to Hellsbore. The demon snatched it away, shouting, “Fight that thing!”
“With what?” Jenner and Rosy cried, and then the goblin found its footing and they were off again.
They made another loop of the room, which would have been comical if it wasn’t real, or real enough. This was a scene out of some dumb slapstick movie. Jenner ran. The goblin gave chase. Around and around and around the cavern, neither gaining nor losing.
“Fuck! Fuck!” The panel was still getting in Hellsbore’s way. He struggled to grow ice from his fingers to envelop the bow of the key. The next time Jenner ran under the cage, cold droplets rained down into his hair.
“Don’t drop it!” he shouted upwards.
“Fuck you! I’ve got this!” the demon yelled, successfully getting the key into the lock. Throwing open the door, the demon dropped down to the ground.
“Take it down with an ice spear!” Rosy hollered at Hellsbore.
The demon had a better idea. While Jenner entertained the goblin with their endless chase game, Hellsbore climbed up the ladder.
That shithead! Jenner had risked himself to get Hellsbore out of the cage, and this was how the guy repaid him. Well, lesson learned. It was the last time Jenner ever put himself in danger to help out a damn demon!
The goblin was at last cottoning on to the fact that he wasn’t going to catch Jenner by looping the room after him. Running for the cauldron, the monster gave it a furious push. It rolled after Jenner and smacked the back of his shins just as he jumped into the air.
He grasped the bars along the bottom of Hellsbore’s dangling cage. It carried him around in a wild circle. Raising his knees, he kicked the goblin hard in the chest as it advanced. The kick toppled it over backwards, Jenner releasing the bars to dash over to the ladder.
He was halfway up when a fist wrapped around his ankle and almost jerked him off. Shit! It had him! Holding on for dear digital life, he stamped upon the goblin’s face viciously until it let go.
A terrible cry sounded through the dungeon.
It wasn’t the goblin, roaring in fury that Jenner was getting away. It was Hellsbore, whose voice echoed off the walls. Jenner scurried up to the top and darted into the passage out of the cavern.
There was a pit up here. He stopped short at the edge of it as the last echo faded away.
“Classic,” Rosy commented. “The floating platform trope. Just classic.”
Three platforms were floating in the air, supported by nothing over a bottomless pit. It looked like Hellsbore had fallen in. There was no evidence as to how exactly this had happened: the platforms were pretty close to one another, and lined up straight to the opposite ledge. A rapidly melting icicle dripped from the side of the second platform, all that was left of the demon’s presence.
One of those deadly metal wheels? Wizard laser grids? Jenner looked around for proof of either thing and came up short.
He put his foot on the first platform.
It immediately began to sink.
He yanked away and the platform rose back to its original position. The demon must have tripped while jumping to the second platform and fallen off to his scrambling.
There was a grunt behind him. The goblin had climbed up the ladder, programmed not to let Jenner escape quite so easily.
“Do it fast,” Rosy urged. “Don’t think about it; just do it.”
The goblin ran.
So did Jenner.
By the time the first platform began to sink, his foot was already leaving it for the second. The second platform wobbled terribly when he landed, but he maintained his footing and leaped for the third platform. That one shot upwards yet he had already anticipated some trickery and was jumping for the ledge.
He crashed down onto it and made one more leap for the black light as the goblin threw the club across the gap.
<
br /> It nailed Jenner squarely in the back and threw him out of the dungeon just as hard as he’d been thrown in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Congrats! You have survived your first dungeon visit!
Congrats! You have earned a merit trophy for Dungeon Field Trip!
Inner-World News: Ready for more? Join a guild and let them know you’re a dungeon fiend! Teams are always looking for new members because-
“-because you’re drunk!” someone was yelling.
Jenner was lying on his side in the sand. He blinked dumbly, too stunned to move. Nobody was going to step on him; the practice field was void of students, and so were the school grounds beyond. The only evidence of life was the outraged voice from somewhere at his back.
“Do you know what the joke is in all of this? How much alcohol a person has to drink to become drunk in this game! You can get a nice buzz on without too much trouble, but it takes effort, genuine effort, to get wasted. Yet you manage to do it! You must be drinking morning, noon, and night for that to be possible! But I won’t have you do it here anymore.”
Jenner knew that voice. It belonged to Tennus August.
An angry voice answered. It was Boomer, who doubled down. “Of course I’m drunk!” he barked. “Any arms-master worth his salt would have to be drunk to teach at this shitty little school! You said when you hired me that you wanted this place to turn out champions on par with Sword and Spear, but all you give me to work with are the rankest of the dregs.”
The tennus responded with a roar not unlike that of the goblins. “You promised me that you could spin straw into gold with any player, but all I see is a drunkard giving half-assed sword lessons, scratching his balls on the bench while these students teach themselves, and tossing newcomers into the dungeon!”
A woman bent down to Jenner with a smile.
It was only a memory, a very vivid memory. The woman wasn’t actually there on the practice field. She was in her middle years, her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Laugh lines were traced lightly around her blue-gray eyes.
Something was very familiar about her.
Hey, honey, what do you want for dinner? It’s refried beans and cheese, or cheese and refried beans. You choose.
Mooooom! Those are the same things!
Mom. Oh God, this woman was his mom. His mom had slipped through the ancient nets scanning and mapping Jenner’s dying brain. How had he forgotten his mom for even a second?
But he had.
And even seeing her face, which should have triggered thousands upon thousands of memories, triggered very little. He could feel how much of her was missing behind that memory of her asking him what he wanted for dinner. God, it pissed him off that that vegan cat lady memory came through before his own mother!
I’ll pick you up at three, okay, sweetie? Make sure you have your homework packet.
No, I wish we could buy one of those pods, too. They’re just so much money, baby. I would love to try out those games I hear about. They look like fun!
Mom, you’re so short! How rude, Jenner! The polite term is vertically challenged.
Still, a few little pieces of her were coming through, and he held fast to them. More of her had to slip through in time, just so long as his body kept living to feed the information into the nets.
The image of his mother vanished. Moaning, Jenner picked himself up. Rosy was half-buried in the sand beneath him.
“You in one piece?” Jenner asked.
Rosy groaned as Jenner shook sand out of the cup. “I want a rag bath from Dan the Troll,” the cup whined. “He gets in all of my crevices.”
Afternoon had turned to evening, and a bank of dark storm clouds was rolling in from the west. The furious voices were piercing through an open window in one of the nearby buildings. Putting the cup on his shoulder, Jenner headed for it.
“I don’t appreciate having my teaching methods questioned!” Boomer hollered as Jenner tapped on the door.
“Come in!” Tennus August called angrily.
Jenner peeked inside. In a sparsely decorated office, the two men were squaring off around a paper-strewn desk, their fists planted firmly on the wood. They stared at him in surprise, briefly distracted from their quarrel.
“You made it through!” the tennus cried in relief. “Good show. Good show! I bet it was thanks to those grakel scales. What about the ice demon?”
Jenner shook his head. “Scrambled.”
“Dammit!” The tennus refocused on the arms-master. “Dammit, Boomer, ice demons are easy as hell to teach, nearly as easy as elves, and they rack up easy wins once they leave! All that player needed was one damn day of training and he probably would have walked out of that dungeon without a mark on him. They’re a surefire boost to the reputation-”
“A couple of crappy ice demon gladiators won’t boost this school’s reputation!” Boomer said incredulously. “The best schools know damn well which ones are coasting by on elves and ice demons! You’re a shit tennus of a shit school and I could do so much better!”
“Are you challenging me for the role of headmaster?” Tennus August said coldly.
Boomer’s smile was insolent. “Maybe I am.”
The tennus looked furious.
“You,” Tennus August said, pointing to Jenner, “sit down in that chair, and we’ll get you assigned to a dorm room in a moment. And you,” he said icily, pointing to Boomer, “outside. We’ll settle this by sword. No blessings. No assistance. No proxies. A scrambling would do you wonders. You’ve gotten too cocky and a smackdown to Level 1-”
“Isn’t going to happen,” Boomer retorted. “I’m Level 101, and you’re only Level 84. You aren’t going to scramble shit tonight. Unless it’s yourself.”
They went outside.
Jenner sank wearily into the chair. He really didn’t want to be at this school anymore. The yelling just continued from the other side of the window.
The teacup hopped onto the desk, sprinkling sand over the scattered paperwork. It bounced up and down to see outside.
“Rosy, you’re making a mess,” Jenner complained, standing up to brush the sand off the papers.
“Do you think they’re actually going to fight to the death over this chum school?” Rosy asked. “Why bother?”
“I don’t know.” Jenner glanced at the papers after shaking off the sand. They were diplomas from the Augustus School of the Gladiatorial Arts, already signed by the tennus. The only thing left to fill out was the name of the recipient.
Jenner stared at that blank line as cheers broke out from the practice field.
Then swords clashed, the clash of deadly steel, not wooden practice swords. Jenner glanced out the window. The gladiator students were out there now, all of them forming a ring upon the sand and blocking his view of the fight. “Go, Tennus! Go, Tennus!” they yelled before a collective gasp lifted from the student body. “Get up, Tennus!” “Good job, Tennus, give it to him!”
“What if I . . .” Jenner whispered, looking back to the diplomas.
He might not have the time to get through a three-day training course. It was a risk to walk into a gladiator ring with virtually no combat skills, and yet . . . how much was he going to learn at this school?
He needed those nets. To transfer his mind, to give him more memories of his mother, to bring him fully and forever into this world.
“Go, Tennus, go!”
“Come on, Tennus! Take him down!”
“We’ll see which one of us is getting scrambled!” Boomer yelled. Nobody was cheering for him.
“What are you doing?” Rosy asked in astonishment as Jenner lifted a quill from an inkpot. “Kid! What do you think you’re doing?”
Quickly, Jenner signed his name to the diploma. The second the last letter was formed, the diploma vanished upon the desk.
Congrats! You have graduated from gladiator school! Your diploma is now in your inventory. Take it to the office across the street from the gladiator rings and schedul
e your first fight!
Rosy’s little rosebud mouth was hanging open. “You’ve got balls as big as Hogdoor, Gramma. Bigger!”
“You’re not going to try to talk me out of it?” Jenner asked.
The cup shook itself, grains of sand flying off. “You’ve been the luckiest damn son-of-a-bitch so far. Why stop now?”
The yelling outside doubled in volume.
“Tennus! Shake it off, Tennus August, and give it to him!”
“Get up and hit him hard! Come on, Tennus!”
From the sounds of it, the fight was not going well for Tennus August. Slipping out of the office with Rosy, Jenner slunk along the outer rim of the ring. The students were so busy cheering and groaning and clapping for the opponents that nobody noticed him.
He slunk through the shadows to the doors, and let himself out.
Then he was running away from the school, up the hill and around the corner. He ran through Galadras until he could run no more. Slowing to a jog, and in time a walk, he passed by the rings and stopped there. Everything was closed down for the night.
No matter. He would be here tomorrow morning to sign up for a match.
Keeping his eye out for pickpockets, he walked back to the Rundown and let himself into Treasure Chest. The succubus wasn’t anywhere to be seen tonight, but he was more interested in food than sex for now.
“Hey, the sick kid!” It was One-Eyed Sue, who waved in good cheer from a table where she was sitting with two attractive male prostitutes.
“Hey, the chick who didn’t want to play Fish Fish forever for some mysterious reason,” Jenner joked. She cracked up with her boytoys, their heads bending together as they disparaged Fish Fish.
The chalkboard behind the bar was slathered in tally marks; it had been a very busy day for Dan the Troll and his mud puddle. The troll was over at the stairs and speaking sternly to two men about to go to the second floor with the same prostitute. “She is a lady, do you understand? A very fine lady . . .”