Chapter 80 - Dungeons and…

  I eyeballed the structure as I approached, trying to get a feel for what I was looking at. Was it a new feature of Alex’s Domain? That was a reasonable guess, but I’d just eaten breakfast with him that morning. If he was going to do something weird, I had a feeling he’d have told me then.

  If it wasn’t Alex’s doing, then it was likely a threat. My first fear was the Karabos were back already, up to some new stunt. But the nearer I got, the more I saw of the construction, and it didn’t look anything like the other Karabos buildings I’d seen. Their structures had a more natural feel to them, incorporating pieces of shell, seaweed, and so on.

  This building was bigger than anything I’d seen the Karabos put together, and it was made entirely of stone. Massive grey slabs made up the walls. The roof was an arched shape, made up of carefully carved blocks of the same grey rock, each one longer than I was tall, joined together in a way that looked seamless.

  A crowd had already gathered out in front of the place before I got there, so I flew down toward them. Alex was among the people standing there. He waved to get my attention, so I zipped in for a landing a few feet away.

  “Why are you wet?” was the first thing he asked.

  “Cleaning up a little bug problem,” I replied. I waved a hand. “I’ll tell you all about it later, if you want, but it’s not important right now. What the hell is that?”

  Alex shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. It appeared there about half an hour ago. I got a ping on my Domain sense as soon as it did, grabbed a few of our highest ranks, and came out to investigate. So far, we haven’t discovered much.”

  Now that I was on the ground I had a better look at the front of the strange building. Most of the building’s front was taken up by a massive pair of doors, maybe twenty feet high. They looked like they were made of the same grey stone as the rest of the structure, banded by long strips of black iron every few feet. There were no door knobs, no obvious way to open the doors.

  But about fifteen feet in front of the doors was what looked like a massive gong. It was a circle of black iron about ten feet in diameter, hanging from an iron frame by a pair of black iron chains. That didn’t look ominous at all…

  “What do we know?” I asked.

  “The alert I got was vague. Most of this Domain stuff is more about feelings than anything else. It’s not like there’s a voice in my head speaking to me, or something.”

  “A shame. That might be useful,” I replied.

  “Yeah, maybe. I can think of a lot of reasons why that wouldn’t be great, too,” Alex said. “Bad enough all this stuff is happening. If there’s some entity out there making it happen, driving all these changes forward, then we’re in a lot more trouble than we thought.”

  “Fair. How did it feel, then?”

  “Like a mixture of a threat and an opportunity,” Alex replied. “And there’s something about that round thing out front, the gong. It has something to do with activating the structure.”

  “Do we just need to ring it, then?” I asked.

  Alex shrugged. “Maybe? I tried. I had Larson and Ruiz try, too. We all struck the gong with a heavy sledgehammer, but there was no reaction. I have a hunch on that, though. It might be that the gong is set to only activate if rung by someone strong enough to handle whatever comes out when the doors open. Larson and Ruiz are tier five. I’m tier six. Maybe we’re just not strong enough. But you, being tier eight—no, wait, you made tier nine?”

  “Just now, yeah,” I replied. I shot him a grin. “Finished off that pill bug lair. They were growing stronger too, and on the edge of getting out of control. I made tier nine for Strength, Stamina, and Natural Armor.”

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  “Holy crap, that’s a big boost. Nicely done,” Alex said. “Okay, so we know you’re a lot stronger than anyone else here. You want to give it a shot? Ring the bell, and see what happens?”

  I looked over at the strange structure. What was it going to do, if we could activate it? Would it spew a horde of monsters, letting them surge forth and slaughter the people trying to rebuild? Or maybe it was something much less sinister, like a new base of operations for the Domain owner?

  Unfortunately, the building gave me few real clues about its nature. There was no way to tell what it was going to do except to try, and find out. Still, I hesitated.

  “You sure you want me to?” I asked. “I mean, I’m perfectly willing to give it a shot, if you’re positive. But if a horde of tier ten monsters come pouring through those doors after I ring the gong, I’m not going to be able to do anything to stop them.”

  “No, if that happens we’re all going to run. That’s a good point, though,” Alex said. He raised his voice so it would carry. “Everyone who isn’t Cameron, I want you to get at least a hundred feet back from the gong and the building. He’s going to take a crack at ringing the thing. We have no idea what’s going to happen when he does, and I want everyone safe.”

  I arched an eyebrow in his direction. “And if the thing is full of angry monsters that are too tough for us to handle?”

  “Then we run, Cameron,” Alex replied. “We withdraw, and keep pulling back if necessary. But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “Your Intellect talking, there, or the Domain sense?”

  “Maybe a little of both,” Alex replied.

  With a shrug, I stepped forward, grabbing the sledgehammer they’d used from where someone left it leaning against a chunk of debris. This site was where the first major battle between the Karabos invaders and the human defenders had been fought, so there was a lot of battlefield mess everywhere. Fallen chunks of stone littered the streets, and the grassy areas were torn up badly from the melees they’d seen.

  Was that what called this place into being? There had been a lot of deaths here, human and nonhuman alike. Maybe that somehow caused this?

  I was just making wild-ass guesses at that point. It was time to do something real, to see what happened when I stepped up to ring the thing.

  I glanced back at Alex, who was backing away rapidly with the rest of his people, and called out to him. “What happened when you rang it, anyway?”

  “Nothing!” Alex shouted back. “It didn’t even ring. It was like the gong absorbed the sound entirely.”

  Okay, that was doubly weird, because the gong was huge, thin, and hanging freely from those chains. It ought to ring like a bell if you so much as tossed a rock at it. I knew Alex wasn’t as strong as he was smart, but he had a tier four Strength. I wasn’t sure about his men, but both were tier five, and I was pretty sure at least one of them had a tier five Strength. They ought to be able to ring the bell without any trouble.

  If they couldn’t, it meant magic was in play. What sort, why, and what it was intended to do, I had no idea, and that made me nervous.

  I stood in front of the gong, hammer in hand, examining its surface. The black iron was rough, like it was wrought, not cast. The chains looked much the same. The whole thing gave the appearance of something very old, although of course I knew it hadn’t been there this morning.

  I turned and glanced back at Alex. He gave me a reassuring nod.

  “Whatever comes out, we’ll face it together,” he called out.

  I nodded and turned back to the gong. Then, I raised the hammer, cranking it back. Now that I’d literally punched my way through a cavern wall, I knew just how much force I had, and I wasn’t going to hold anything back. I wanted to hit this thing with every iota of power I could bring to bear.

  With an inarticulate shout, I swung. I pivoted my hips as I moved the hammer, using my whole body to give the swing all the force I could muster. The hammer whistled as it slipped through the air, racing toward the black iron circle in front of me.

  It smacked dead center, right in the middle of the gong.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. Part of me was probably figuring I’d hear nothing, that the strange device would absorb all the sound like it had for Alex and his men.

  But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, the impact rang with a sound like the biggest church bell ever crafted falling from the top of a cathedral. It was a hollow, dead sound, loud enough that even as far away as they stood, people covered their ears.

  My ears rang after the impact, and I knew I’d done some damage to them from the volume. Regeneration was already taking care of that. My hearing would be fine in a minute or two. But with my hearing hurt, I didn’t hear what happened next. I felt it through the soles of my boots, instead.

  The two massive stone doors on the front of the building shook, dust flying away from them, and then slowly ground their way open, swinging inward to reveal the space beyond. They opened slowly, ponderously grinding against the ground as they swung in. Their mass was so enormous that the grinding felt like the Earth was shaking beneath my feet.

  I braced myself, ready for whatever might come rushing out at us, but to my shock, nothing did. I took a step forward, then another, slowly moving toward the entrance as the doors swung slowly wider. Whatever was inside, we were about to get a look, whether we were ready or not.

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