Golden light poured from Roark’s skin and an ascending chime rang through the Keep’s throne room. A round of raucous cheering and the slamming of maces on shields filled the throne room as if on cue, courtesy of the Troll High Court.
[LEVEL UP!]
[You have 10 undistributed Stat Points!]
With a thought, Roark dismissed the notifications. He didn’t want the Jotnar Exarch out of his sight for any longer than necessary.
“And here,” Azibek said as if it had only just occurred to him. “A boon, from the depths of my generosity.” Eyes sparkling, the Dungeon Lord plucked the crescent-bladed whip up from the pile of surrendered treasure and held it out to Roark as if he weren’t offering Roark what was already rightfully his. “Maybe you’ll surprise us all and live long enough to enjoy it.”
Roark pursed his thin lips and held the whip before him in both hands like the shackles of allegiance the gift was meant to be.
“I have every intention of it,” he said.
TWENTY-FOUR:
Partnerships
Azibek dismissed Roark, then nodded at the Reaver. She reopened the hidden panel and escorted them out of the Keep and back up through the tunnels. A brooding silence hung over the party as they navigated the floors. The Reaver fiddled with the leather wrappings around her hands, Kaz slowly came out of his paralyzed panic at having stood before the Dungeon Lord, and Roark calculated what it would take to depose the slimy bastard. Macaroni slithered along between Roark and the Reaver uncamouflaged, his bulbous head flicking around at every sound.
They were nearly halfway through the second level before the Reaver broke the silence.
“I suppose you think you got away with something back there,” she said, “planting ideas in high places.”
Roark snorted. “Those worthless sycophants? They haven’t got a full brain to share between them. I’d trade the lot for one stouthearted Kaz any day—” The Thursr beamed with pride at the vote of confidence. Roark turned his attention back to the shadowy depths of the Reaver’s hood. “—or one quick and deadly Reaver with a mind of her own.”
Her steps faltered and she swiveled to face him. “Who are you? What are you?”
At her sudden movement, Macaroni, still positioned between Roark and the Reaver, growled a low gurgling threat and pulled back his gray lips to bare rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth.
“Stop it,” Roark ordered the salamander.
“I mean it,” the Reaver demanded, ignoring the growling beast at her feet. “You call out the Dungeon Lord’s practices to his face and then claim you were trying to sway the low-level runner who poisoned you to switch sides? You’re either a terrible strategist or a very bad liar.”
“How long have you had to fight and scratch your way up through the levels while your own kind cut you down from within?” Roark asked.
“You fight the heroes from the front, and you watch out for the friendly fire at your back,” she said as if challenging him to prove her wrong. “That’s the nature of life. Everyone knows it.”
“No, it’s the nature of what Azibek’s built,” Roark said. “He fosters the atmosphere of internal competition and paranoia so no one will band together and overthrow him. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
The Reaver snorted and spun on her heel, stalking down the hall, her steps as silent as the grave. Roark and Kaz hurried to follow, Macaroni keeping pace with them, tail twitching warily. They came out of the corridor into the second floor’s huge torture chamber. Rather than leading them to the stairs, however, the Reaver took a sharp left and halted beside the cart stacked high with body parts.
“Do you see this?” She pointed at the pile of decaying limbs awaiting disposal in the furnace. “This is what becomes of Trolls who talk like you do. And worse. You’d be surprised how much screaming is still left in a body once its arms and legs come off. How long it takes to roast alive over a lava pit or bleed to death on a rocking cradle. Longer if Azibek has a Shaman heal you up so the torturers can start again. Look around you,” she said, her voice harsh. “Is this what you want?”
As if her words had opened his eyes, Roark suddenly realized that the majority of the skeletons and rotting corpses in the cages lining the room or strapped to the tables were missing their limbs. But beneath the Reaver’s grim tone, there was a desperation burning, defying him to give her a reason to believe some other fate were possible.
Before Roark could respond, however, Kaz took a quick step forward, one clawed finger raised as if he were about to make a counterpoint.
A trio of flat-bladed knives appeared in the Reaver’s fingers, their edges oily with poison.
Macaroni lunged, and only Kaz’s quick reflexes and thick, tree-trunk arms stopped the salamander from taking a bite out of the Reaver’s leg. The beast squirmed and fought to break free of the Thursr’s grasp.
“Macaroni, stop!” Roark snapped. “She’s not going to hurt anyone.”
When the gurgling, growling, and barking didn’t stop, Roark glared at the Reaver meaningfully. After a moment, the knives disappeared back into her leather wrappings. Macaroni quieted, and Kaz set the beast down.
“Kaz used to think the same way,” the softhearted Thursr said to the Reaver, still watching the salamander out of the corner of his eye. “That there could be no change, and that life was only fighting and death and respawn. But Roark helped Kaz level up and Evolve! Kaz is a Thursr because of Roark. Roark showed Kaz that working together, we don’t have to stay mindless dungeon mobs trampled under the heroes’ feet.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The heroes’ or the Overseers’. We can do anything, become the masters of our own destiny … even learn to cook food.”
The Reaver’s hood swiveled from the earnest Thursr to Roark.
“I would’ve phrased it a bit differently,” Roark said with a shrug, “but essentially, he’s right. None of the lies you’ve been told about what you can and can’t do are true. I’m proof of that.” On impulse, he pulled the World Stone out of his leather armor. “If you’re tired of living under the thumb of that self-important tyrant while you watch your back for friendly fire, there’s a place for you in my honor guard.”
From the shadows of the hood, Roark felt keen eyes studying his face and the amber pendant dangling from his fist.
“How do you know I won’t go running back to betray you as soon as I say yes?” she asked.
“I don’t.” But he could tell a rebel when he met one. “But the fact that I’m trusting you not to is evidence enough that Trolls don’t have to sabotage and fight one another, isn’t it?”
“Or it’s evidence that you’re soft in the head,” she replied, her tone shifting back to its accustomed cynical bite. “But then, I must be too, if I’m considering this.” She crossed her arms. Sighed. “Fine. You only die ten thousand times; one of them might as well be for something.”
Roark reached out to take her by the shoulder, but she grabbed his wrist and held it fast, her grip like iron.
“Easy,” he said, opening his hands to show he meant no threat. “I have to touch you to trigger my Soul-Forge ability.”
“And I have to make sure you don’t have some poisoned payback in those hands,” she said, twisting his palms toward the firelight and inspecting them thoroughly. “Occupational hazard. You understand.”
Roark nodded. Once the Reaver had satisfied herself that he wasn’t trying to poison her, Roark placed his hand on her shoulder and triggered Soul-Forge.
[Current World Stone Authority: Greater Vassal 2 / 3]
[Use Soul-Forge? Yes / No]
Roark selected Yes. The pendant burned ice cold even through his leather armor, and the cloudy stone at its center shone with amber brilliance. The same bright amber light seeped from beneath his hand. When he released the Reaver’s shoulder, the handprint remained. He stared at it for a moment, fascinated by the way it contrasted with her midnight blue skin.
The nameplate floating over her hood changed from [Re
aver] to [Zyra], and before Roark’s eyes a notice appeared.
[Zyra has become your Greater Vassal!]
The mystic grimoire opened itself to the Followers page, and he glanced over Zyra’s statistics.
As he closed out of the grimoire, the glowing mark on Zyra’s shoulder faded to invisibility.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it,” Roark said as if it were a small matter, though in truth, his stomach was churning with excitement. He’d taken the first-floor Overseer position, he was leveling quickly, and he was assembling a solid team to take over the citadel. He’d see this coup through yet and get home to finish off that bastard Marek.
“Then in my first act as part of your honor guard, I’d like to say that you’re a fool if you think Azibek doesn’t know what you’re doing,” Zyra said.
The four of them resumed the trek across the torture chamber toward the stairs.
“He definitely suspects,” Roark said, thinking back to the uncanny intelligence in the Exarch’s stare and his emphasis on keeping ambition in check. “But without an open challenge, he can’t kill me forever. Can he?”
“No, but he can kill you before you reach the level cap for Jotnar, dropping you back to level one,” she said. “And the smartest way for him to do that would be to plant an assassin as close to you as possible. Say, in your honor guard.”
Roark smirked. “Or he could just give his runner the nod to snuff me out on the way back to my floor.”
“You were paying attention then,” she said—equal parts statement and question.
“We could’ve found our way back without a guide,” Roark said, shrugging. “Any reason you chose not to? To murder me?”
“Any reason you waited to confront me about it until now?”
“I wanted to give you the chance not to.”
The hood shook, side to side. “That kind of thinking will get you killed.”
“Not now that I have an assassin in my honor guard to point it out to me,” Roark said.
Zyra laughed, the musical sound utterly out of place in the gory, stinking torture chamber.
“You definitely have the cunning of a Jotnar,” she said. “I hope you do make it to level eight.”
With that, she slipped through the arched doorway to the shadowy stairs. Roark watched her go.
A long black claw tapped Roark on the shoulder. Kaz was looking down at him.
“Kaz would not have let her kill Roark,” the Thursr insisted. “Kaz would have snapped her in half.”
“I know, mate.” He clapped Kaz on his huge arm. “Though I suspect you would’ve had to fight Macaroni for the pleasure.” Roark turned and jogged up the stairs.
Zyra had stopped at the top, just inside the first-floor throne room. When Roark reached the top step, her hood turned to regard him, then she stepped aside silently.
Every one of the throne-room Thursrs had been slaughtered and completely dismembered. Their body parts littered the floor, mixed in with tapestries and spiked heads torn from the walls. The glowing stained-glass windows were shattered and colorful shards littered the floor below.
Scrawled across the wall in thick Troll blood was a message:
PwnrBoner_OG was here! NO ONE griefs me, DICKFACE! Prepare for a world of hurt! I’m coming back for you and I’m gonna camp this level like I camped your mom! Roark the Griefer will pay!
“Friend of yours?” Zyra asked.
Roark’s fists shook at his sides, sharp Changeling claws biting into his leathery palms. He stalked to the twisted obsidian throne and sat. In response to his thoughts, the Overseer’s grimoire opened to Troop Management.
The simple floor map at the bottom of the page showed only corpses. The roster confirmed it—out of all the creatures on the first floor, only he, Kaz, Zyra, and Macaroni were still alive.
PwnrBwner_007 and his band had come through and decimated them.
Roark glared at the letters splashed across the wall, but he was really seeing Korvo—its sewers running with blood, its colorful homes and buildings burning while the Tyrant King looked on. He couldn't help but wonder if Marek had razed the city to the ground after Roark escaped him, just as PwnrBwner_007 had done here. Were the heads of the whole T’verzet rotting on pikes outside a burnt-out ruin by now?
Roark turned to the Floor Design page. He had an hour before the Trolls and other creatures respawned, and he didn’t intend to waste it. PwnrBwner_007 was going to regret ever having set foot on his floor.
TWENTY-FIVE:
Death Trap
The first thing Roark did was tweak the layout of the floor. With only 100 points to distribute, inefficiency needed to go. Every space, every hallway, every blind corner needed a purpose.
He added a smaller antechamber and moved the great room where the Changelings and Reaver Bats usually grouped off a bit so they would have some warning when raiders came. Then he repurposed a few smaller corridors that branched off from the main passageway only to reconnect a few yards later; he simply erased their reconnection points, creating dead ends where he set up spring-loaded spears to stab out of the walls from both directions.
Next, he went through the level, disposing of several useless rooms—including the Stone Salamander nest and the cell where he and Kaz had first fought PwnrBwner_007’s party—and reinvesting those points into traps. Chests that exploded in deadly firebombs or nasty clouds of plague vapor. Enormous falling chandeliers. Hails of poisoned darts. Spiked grates that snapped shut against walls like standing Blackthorn Beds. True, the dungeon level would be smaller, but every inch of the space would be far deadlier. Quality over quantity.
While he worked, Roark heard footsteps around the throne room, things scraping on stone, and Kaz and Zyra speaking in hushed tones. At some point, Macaroni jammed himself between Roark and the back of the throne and curled up, snoring softly. Roark paid none of them any mind. All of his focus was absorbed in creating the perfect death trap of a dungeon.
There was a small part of Roark that wanted to spend all the floor’s building points on deadly traps—envisioning PwnrBwner_007 furiously cursing his name as the hero died in every single one—but Roark knew he needed to think longer term. The traps were expensive and, excepting the spiked grates which automatically reset themselves after springing, could only be used once per battle.
Weapons and armor, on the other hand, would benefit his troops and help them kill as many heroes as they pleased, not to mention help them level up. So, Roark invested a whopping ten points in a smithy, placing it near enough to the throne room that it would be handy. An arcane workshop would have been an ideal complement, but he wasn’t willing to spend another ten points on the whole room when he could toss an enchanter’s table into the smithy for a mere two points. He also added on a tanning rack for another two points, allowing him to work on leather armor. That left him with a handful of points to pour into the decrepit library, adding new shelves, a cartographer’s desk, and an enormous hanging map of Hearthworld.
It seemed like a solid, defensible layout. Plenty of ambush points, but also interconnected enough that his troops could escape from the heroes if they needed to. Roark was about to accept the changes when Kaz’s voice somehow broke through his focus.
“... and then we ate food! Not ale, food! Zyra can’t imagine the wonders of food. It warms the belly, filling the nose and mouth with flavors and smells so delicious! Roark promised to find Kaz a cookfire, and when he does, Kaz will make a stew. Kaz has read all about stew. It is meats cooked in a pot with vegetables and water. A true innovation.”
Cursing under his breath, Roark examined the floor map. Traps, smithy, library, but no kitchen. According to the list of options, cookfires weren’t available outside of kitchens. He could leave it out for now and swear to Kaz that he would add one later when there was more time and less pressure, but when would that ever be the case? The pressure never came off in a war, not truly. Besides, they would need to eat—armies needed food as s
urely as weapons and armor—and escaping to the marketplace whenever they required a meal hardly seemed practical.
Roark scratched the back of his neck and grudgingly inspected the layout of traps again, playing with points values in his head. If he got rid of one spring-loaded spear trap here and that plague cloud chest … He’d have to sacrifice the falling chandelier there, but that could easily be made up for by stationing a few Stone Salamanders on the ceiling instead …
A bit of finagling later, he had enough points for a proper kitchen. He added it in the far corner of the level near the great hall so Kaz could introduce the Changelings who gathered there to the miracle of food—maybe even help keep the little lushes sober enough to defend the place by balancing out their ale consumption. A prompt appeared:
[You have changed the floor layout of the Cruel Citadel Level 1! Changes will take place immediately, but no further changes can be made for (24) hours. Are you sure you wish to proceed?]
[Alter the Cruel Citadel Level 1? Yes/No]
Satisfied, Roark accepted the changes to the floor, then turned to Troop Management and began rewriting the scripted actions for each of the different categories of creature.
He adjusted the Changelings’ so that rather than running at attackers separately, relying on their teeth and claws against well-armed and armored heroes, they would attack together in groups of three or more. Likewise, he set the Reaver Bats to harry the heroes from above, and the Stone Salamanders to use their camouflage to get close enough for surprise attacks. If Zyra’s wariness was any indication, it would take some training to get all of them trusting each other enough to work together, but Roark was certain the time spent would be well worth the payoff when the first wave of heroes marched through.
He accepted those changes as well, then closed the Overseer’s grimoire and stood up from the twisted obsidian throne. Across the room, Kaz was scrubbing at PwnrBwner_007’s message with a fistful of torn tapestry, smearing the Troll blood around but failing to obscure the words. To his right, Zyra was throwing Troll heads on broken spikes and dismembered bits of Thursr down the stairs to the second floor. The ransacked chamber was very nearly back to normal, minus the row of staring heads. They must have been cleaning the entire time he was working.
Rogue Dungeon Page 17