The sheer volume of spells slamming into the boss room was almost overwhelming. It felt like the sun coming up in my eyes out in the field, while I ran the tractor—except I couldn’t look away. Even closing my eyes wasn’t enough; the afterimages were as bright as the spells.

  So I didn’t look away. I grabbed Tori’s wrist and pulled. Something popped, and she screamed, but I kept yanking until she pulled away from the dazed Zomberserkers packing the room.

  “And the fourth faction finally makes a move!” the play-by-play announcer shouted. “The locals in the Rat’s Nest make a play at the last moment and keep Tori and Hal’s hopes alive—but for how long? And will they make one final mistake and doom everyone?”

  “That’s an excellent question. We’ll just have to find out if the recycling system's undead can pull off an upset—but it’s not looking good!” the color commentator said.

  I ignored them. The second I was safe inside the rainbow-colored walls, I reached out for the Runelord. He needed to be alive. If he wasn’t alive, this whole thing was over.

  He twitched under my hand, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Something smelled off. It could have been the zombies, but the stink wasn’t quite right for them.

  “Who the hell are you?” a woman asked, and I looked around for the first time.

  Theresa Mays: Level Fifty-Five

  Class: Runeforger

  There were five others, each around the same level as Theresa, but she was obviously the leader—at least for this group. I sighed, rolled my eyes, and stuck a hand out. “Hal Riley, formerly from Nebraska, but more recently from Museumtown.”

  She didn’t shake my hand. I stared for a moment, then kept talking. “Listen, we were here to kill the Runelord. He drops an item Tori needs so we can break through this bottleneck. The Tier Four dungeons are too much for us to handle, and—“

  “No.”

  “No?” I stared at her intense brown eyes, framed by the tight gray-black curls. “We didn’t even know there was a settlement here. If we had, we’d have picked a different—“

  “No. You can’t kill the Runelord. The last time we did, the Rat’s Nest got exposed to the whole world, and we can’t risk that right now, so he stays alive in case killing him makes things worse,” Theresa said. “But you can come with us. We’ll keep you safe until this attack calms down. Then, when it does, you can help us with a problem. You do that, we’ll let you take a shot at the Runelord—without the zombie hordes this time. We’ll let you do it next week.”

  Tori started protesting. She still hadn’t gotten up from the floor, though. I wasn’t thrilled about waiting a week, either, but we were in no shape to fight these people, and even if I didn’t trust them—after all, anyone who wouldn’t shake someone’s hand was either high-strung, had something to hide, or would throw you under the bus for a couple dollars—we didn’t have many options. At some point, the hidden door we’d activated would shut again.

  Tori and I couldn’t be on the outside of it when it did.

  “Okay. What do we do about the zombies?” I asked.

  “Nothing about them. Not yet. But soon.”

  The rainbow-colored staircase went up, so it was a shocker when we exited into what was obviously the basement of a museum. There was stuff everywhere; it had obviously been shelved recently, until the people—Theresa’s people—cannibalized it for whatever they could find. We emerged into the detritus of everything that wasn’t useful for survival, and the Runeforger waved her people through a door.

  The moment they were gone—with the dungeon’s boss in tow—she squared up to me. “You cleared the Seared Wilds tower, right?”

  “That’s right,” Tori said. She was pretty beat up, but holding herself together. What she needed were levels—either that, or a Healer like her stepmom. We didn’t have either, so she was muscling through on sheer grit.

  Theresa’s brow raised. “We lost a full raiding party in there. You saved all our asses.”

  “So, are you going to help us out?” I asked. Maybe she’d changed her mind.

  “No. Not unless you help us first. That’s how it’s gotta work. You handle our problem, we help you with your…bottleneck problem.”

  “Alright.” Something she said earlier stuck out to me. “Have you been attacked like this before?”

  “Yes. The undead from Rosehill show up every so often, but they can’t get into the Rat’s Nest through brute force. They can only do it if they take control of Norse Street, and we’ve been able to stop them so far.”

  “But…” Tori stared the woman down. “If we hadn’t been there…”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “The Runelord’s a lot tougher than he looks. He’s got three phases, although the weapons he fights with are progressively less powerful and more defense-minded. That sword’s just for show, too. I’ve never seen him do anything with it except turn it into rocks he flings at people. But you weren’t even close to losing him. We had a good eight minutes to intervene.”

  I re-evaluated the boss. He wasn’t a quick boss like Ursa Prime—if anything, he was closer to either the Chthonic Abysslord or The Queen Tyrant, an end-of-Tier Two boss capable of taking out groups who weren’t ready without a problem. “So, how long have the announcers been—“

  “Screaming and shouting? Since Rosehill started invading. Before that, Norse Street was our private dungeon—the first floor, at least. We only took high-powered teams to kill the Runelord, though,” Theresa said. She waved a hand, and a handful of runes on the floor went dark. A moment later, the stairs disappeared, leaving the zombie horde below cut off completely.

  She kept talking as she led us through the door. “Welcome to the Rat’s Nest.”

  I blinked. Then the smell hit me in earnest, and I gagged.

  The Rat’s Nest was—or at least, had been—a section of Chicago’s sewage system. It had, mercifully, been cleaned—probably in the terraforming—but even so, the smell hadn’t quite gone away. Three massive pipes entered the room from high above, and clean water tumbled down from them.

  “Waterfall’s new, as of Phase Two,” Theresa said. “Seems clean. No one’s gotten sick from it, at least.”

  Theresa led me into the gigantic, vertical pipe at the center of the intersection. “A lot of folks live in here. It’s better than anything outside. The only ways in are the boss run or the museum door, and we’ve got that one under control, too. The Rosehill leaders stopped attacking that; it’d be easier for them to overwhelm Norse Street than attack us directly.”

  I couldn’t help but notice the large number of people around Level Fifty—or even larger. No one was as strong as Tori or me, but there were probably a dozen Tier Ones in the circular space, and every one of them was watching us. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Theresa, are we good here?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  I shrugged. The Trip-Hammer hung in one hand. I hadn’t pulled it into my inventory, but I wasn’t looking for a fight, either. “I’m not planning on attacking you, if that’s what you mean. Just…you seem like you’re not in the habit of trusting strangers. Do you have any reason not to trust me?”

  She laughed. It wasn’t a friendly one. “No. But you’re going to have to earn it.”

  Theresa didn’t let us stay in the Rat’s Nest for long, but I got a good look at the setup. Every pipe was lined with crude ‘houses,’ really not much more than tents on platforms, and every single ‘house’ was full. Most folks weren’t fighters. In fact, it looked like their ratio was even worse than Museumtown’s. I doubted Theresa had enough over Fifty to make a good defense if someone like the Fireborn Crusade showed up, even if she did have a bunch of Tier Ones. Very few of them had gotten past Level Fifty-One.

  I got the feeling she felt the same way, and that was why she wanted Tori and me to help her out.

  She walked us straight to a Healer—not one as good as Jessica, but he took one look at Tori’s wounds and got right to work. The whole time, the same Level Fifty-Plus folks shadowed us, not threateningly, but not like I’d expected to be greeted by my neighbors.

  Then, as soon as she was back to full health, Theresa moved us right to the museum. “We’ve got thousands of people in here. Most of them can’t fight. You’re going to help keep them safe. Then, we’ll know we can trust you.”

  The Rat’s Nest folks had built a massive wall around the museum, and the Norse Street dungeon covered half of it. Only a single, tiny door opened on the entire defensive perimeter, and torches burned along its flank even in the daylight. Theresa kept talking. “You clear out Rosehill, and we’re good. Come back with proof—something the last boss drops will do.”

  Then the door shut, and just like that, Tori and I were outside again.

  “They’re not the friendliest, are they?” Tori asked.

  “No. But they’re also in a really bad spot. All that stuff she was saying about that place being defensible’s true, but it also means it’d be easy to trap them in the Rat’s Nest—and with the undead in Norse Street, they’ve only got one way out. They clearly can’t handle Rosehill without help. In fact, I’m not sure how they got set up like they did without a more powerful ally. Theresa’s nowhere near strong enough to do it alone.”

  “Who do you think they’ve got?” Tori asked.

  No names came to mind. Then again, I didn’t know many other folks in Chicago—and I hadn’t before the apocalypse, either. “I have no idea, Tori. I have no idea.”

  I started walking—but not toward Rosehill Cemetery. I wanted the Explorer; if we were going to clear a Tier Four dungeon…actually, I had no idea how we were going to clear a Tier Four dungeon with what we had. It’d probably take some serious firepower, and serious firepower was something I was missing.

  We’d need to change that, either with people or with gear. Luckily, I had some of the tools I needed to do so. Not everything, but most.

  Calvin had never imagined he’d be playing politician.

  As far as he was concerned, the suits and ties didn’t do a damn bit of good for him or his people. Sure, there was always someone yelling about ending homelessness, or someone promising to solve the ‘homeless problem,’ but in the end, nothing really changed. Summer changed to fall, fall changed to freezing his ass off in the winter, or if he was lucky, finding a shelter, and so on.

  Now he was the one wearing a tie. Not an actual tie; he wasn’t that dumb, not during an apocalypse. But when people in Museumtown had problems, they came to Jessica. If she couldn’t solve them, they came to him next.

  And he had to tell them the bad news about their…overly romantic…neighbors.

  “Look, Jeff, I get what you’re saying, but there’s not a damn thing we can do about your neighbors. They’re loud at night? Move your tent. You don’t wanna hear them? Go somewhere else.”

  “But, Mr. Rollins—“

  “No, absolutely not. Calvin or nothing. There’s no ‘but’ here, either. Right now, we’ve got five digits worth of folks on the museum campus and Northerly Island, and we’re trying to manage that. Fine. Whatever. But we’re also trying to manage an apocalypse, a faction of fire mages who want us dead or enslaved, and figuring out who else is alive in Chicago. We ain’t equipped to do all that and tell your neighbors to quiet down when they’re screwing.”

  As Jeff—the Level Twenty-One Rogue—left, Calvin blew air out of his mouth in frustration. The battle plan for Phase Two had only been in effect for a couple of days, and it was already turning out to be far messier than Phase One.

  He kinda missed when his biggest problem was figuring out which train to ride and where the closest shelter was.

  Kinda.