System Report:

  Minutes before an unidentified explosion rattled Ashenmoor

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  Gami watched him pace across the sodden room, wearing a groove into the floorboards like a man trying to outrun his own frustration. Yenna no longer required tending—or rather, there was nothing left Gami could do for her except fuss.

  So, she finally asked, “Are you not going after her?”

  He paused, drew in a breath, and then punched straight through one of the cloth draped tables. For all the act of composure he’d been trying to put up, it broke quicker than the rotten piece of furniture.

  “And why,” he said, hissing through his teeth, “should I do that? You Delvers are nothing but tools. Only a complete, star-certified idiot believes otherwise. Everyone knows it. You’re pieces on a board so big you can’t even see the edges.”

  He resumed pacing with renewed fury.

  “Yet when I treat you as such, trying to make the best decision for everyone involved, you either get offended, don’t listen, or try to question me despite not knowing a damned first thing about nothing. You paint me as the bad guy when you’re the ones who signed up to be fucking Delvers.

  “But fine, let me be the bad guy. I don’t care. It’s the only way to make it in this shitty world anyway. Because do you know what happens when you start caring about a stupid game-piece? You get stabbed in the back. Betrayed. Years of work, ideals, dreams—trampled, muddied, and pissed on because you were the idiot who let yourself be used. So don’t you dare—don’t you dare—tell me to trust—SHUT UP, you stupid voices! I KNOW they can’t be trusted!”

  He kicked a wall. The wall, having seen too little appreciation over too many years, sighed and gave way. He sagged down, fingers digging into his face.

  “This,” he muttered, the embers of emotion still there, “is exactly why I should never have signed on with Delvers. Should’ve stuck with Dungeons. Dungeons are simple. Dungeons don’t talk back. Dungeons don’t… feel. Everything would’ve been so much bloody simpler.”

  “If you really didn’t care,” Gami hesitantly began—calmly, considering the circumstances—“if you really only worried about your own convenience, you could’ve taken back that flask she gave me.” Her eyes flickered toward the crumbled wall. She wouldn’t have been able to do a first thing if he did. “Would’ve been easy. Barely an inconvenience. But you didn’t.”

  He didn’t respond, so she pressed on.

  “You didn’t have to let us out of the church first either. Or haul her out before the whole place came down. Or carry her all the way here afterward. And you definitely didn’t have to pretend to be choosing a direction at every damp alley we passed by, allowing us to keep limping pace with you. Ask me, and I’d say that you keep doing a lot of things you supposedly don’t care about.”

  With a quiet snort, the young man lifted his head. “Are you suggesting I’m the sort of idiot who’d actually care about disposable Delvers?”

  “Yeah,” Gami said. “I think that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

  His black eyes fixed on her—two deep, black pits that kept giving the impression they were contemplating the value of your soul. Yet now, stripped of their usual menace—even if he’d possessed fangs, horns, and a tail with poor impulse control—he seemed more human than most people she’d met since she became a Delver.

  “As for the System,” she continued, nodding vaguely toward that persistent message meant only for her eyes, “if you’re still curious, it’s telling me not to trust you. Very loudly. And those voices you keep hearing?” She tapped her temple. “They’ve been chewing on me too. Whispering that I’m weak, that I can’t save anyone, that every decision I make will end in disaster.”

  She took a breath. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe telling you all this will lead you to kill us both.”

  She looked down at Yenna, her expression tightening just a fraction. “But you know what? That’s not the feeling I get from you. And I’ve learned to trust my gut more than anything else—mostly because trusting anything else haven’t gone terribly well. Something I’m sure you can relate to.”

  She lifted her chin. “And, if you are curious, the feeling I got from the girl you were with? Honestly… I think she just wanted you to listen. For you to trust her—like friends do—even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”

  For a full second, he just stared at her, eyes blanking out entirely, as though someone had quietly removed all his internal dialogue for maintenance.

  “The System told you not to trust me?” he repeated, stunned. “But the System isn’t supposed to—” He broke off mid-sentence, suddenly back on his feet. “Oh, for… damn it. That’s what that moron was trying to say.”

  “Say what?” Gami asked, catching him mid stride.

  He paused at the threshold, hand on the doorframe. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a strange, hollow depth, as though he’d dredged the words up from a place he’d only just recalled existed.

  “The mist whispers all sorts of things… But their call’s like the sea: soft at first, then all at once. No joy follows, once they’ve got you. Just the sinking…”

  He shook his head grimly.

  “There’s a reason I can’t access the System. It doesn’t exist here. Not really. Only a twisted, bastardized version of it—just enough to let this place feed on anyone foolish enough to listen to the Dungeon’s call.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  His eyes darkened, not with anger this time, but with something much older and much heavier.

  “She was right,” he said, voice barely audible over the rain. “I never should’ve listened to that damned thing in the first place.”

  ***

  The street teemed like a frenzied school of piranhas at feeding time—if piranhas had legs, cruel weapons, and a deep personal grudge against anything with warm blood. Rabid eyes and slick teeth gleamed with every flash of lightning that split the skies. Claws snapped for floppy bunny-ears, jaws snatched for any chunk of exposed flesh, and bodies—scaled, slimy, or questionably-shelled—pressed in from every direction.

  The air tasted of brine, rot, and the unmistakable tang of something that had once been fish but had since given up on such mundane classifications. And even then, the sounds were worse: a wet, slapping cacophony of gurgles, chitters, and the occasional pop of something organic doing something it definitely shouldn’t have.

  It was the sort of place where brave Delvers went to die.

  It was the sort of place where wise Delvers refused to go at all.

  Annabel Smith was neither.

  As a crabomination lashed through the rain, attempting to pinch her in half, she pivoted aside, narrowly avoiding a set of crude daggers that came slicing through the rain from behind. Continuing her momentum—never sparing the blade-wielding octopus to her side a glance—she slid along slick carapace to meet the crabomination with the rigid spine of a leather-bound journal. She aimed for the face.

  The creature instinctively chomped down on the unexpected serving of literature, and she let it keep it—then drove it further down its throat with a well-swung satchel, ensuring that generations of its offspring would taste the knowledge she’d bestowed upon it.

  Then came the inflated pufferballs—pulsing with poisonous spikes and bad intentions—barreling through the swamp of bodies from opposite directions.

  Annabel met them halfway, only for a quick succession of cartwheels to redirect her path at the last possible heartbeat.

  In her wake, right where the swelling creatures collided, a ticking contraption clinked onto the cobblestones like a guilty conscience.

  The thundering explosion shredded fish-flesh and carapace within a block’s radius, raining down a fine confetti of monster bits and toxic shrapnel.

  Annabell, meanwhile, was busy ricocheting off a wall, narrowly skimming past a pair of airborne horrors that looked suspiciously like the end-result of a moray eel’s and a barracuda’s passionate love-affair.

  To avoid another set of gaping maws, she kicked off the mossy shell-back of something far too slow to catch her (and presumably aware of this fact, judging by its vaguely embarrassed gurgle), and dug into her pockets.

  Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal: Activated

  Equipped: Random Loots & Goodies → Abilities Gained:

  Active: Loot Goblin’s Greed – “Loot Goblin sees; Loot Goblin takes.”

  Instantly disarms a target of one held item—preferably shiny, inconvenient, or both—and relocates said item to the goblin’s possession with absolutely no regard for prior ownership, ethics, or the moral codes.

  Passive: I Wants It – The loot goblin does not shares.

  All stolen, borrowed, misappropriated, or mysteriously-found acquisitions gain a small bonus to their first successful attack.

  She hadn’t even touched the ground as a jagged harpoon sliced past her cheek, ripping a new ventilation hole in her hood. Annabel twisted away, sliding across the puddle-ridden street just in time for a hooked blade to scythe through the air, crossing paths with a set of talons right where her head had been a heartbeat ago.

  They caught only a single floppy bunny-ear, executing it as she dropped low. Her boot skidded, sending up a spray of filthy water as she kicked the blade-wielding merman off balance.

  As the merman toppled, she rose. One hand slapped a fistful of rat tails and a disturbingly unblinking eye into its face, while the other neatly yoinked the blade from its grip (a traditional Gremlin trade).

  Loot Goblin’s Greed Exchanged: Hooked Blade acquired

  Ability Gained – Aerodynamic-ish Menace

  Forged by someone who clearly believed sharpness was more important than symmetry. When thrown, its peculiar, lopsided design grants it a tendency to—

  Hooked Blade → Lost

  The blade screamed away from her fingers as she threw it, carving a neat, whirling arc through the stormy air. It sliced clean through another two Deep Ones as she continued running forward, showering her path with a fine spray of warm gore.

  An enraged roar to her left was the only warning she got before an anchor the size of a moral dilemma plowed through the press of bodies, coming straight for her in a shower of guts and blood that put her own display to shame.

  By the time it reached her, Annabell had already shrugged off her satchel.

  Now, she caught the nautical equipment mid-swing by a leather strap.

  A heartbeat later, she was violently yanked forward, airborne, soaring over the snapping sea of frenzied horrors.

  ***

  It was all over. The Core he’d once worshipped—that magnificent, terrible, utterly unmanageable thing beyond mortal comprehension—was no more. It hadn’t been for centuries, he realized that now. The hope he’d clung to, the desperate plea that it could be remade like it once was, had all been lost by Her hands.

  That woman—that cursed woman—had ruined it all. She had broken it, smashed it, and left her grubby fingerprints all over the fragments. No matter how the faithful had tried to reassemble the pieces—even taking help of that heathen Artificer—none of it had fit the way they ought to. The result had been a sad mockery of the original, like a god built by papier-maché.

  For years, they’d suffered under the… thing their desperation had built. Yet just when all hope seemed lost—She had returned. Weakened, wandering, wanting. There had been a promise. A bargain.

  One they had not been foolish enough to keep.

  But her influence did not heal the Core like they hoped, it merely accelerated the mad corruption that’d taken hold of it. They had created an abomination. An abomination that even he had been forced to agree should be buried.

  Now, with the storm tearing at his shackles where he hung like a damp windchime, Amadeus North raised his weary eyes to the Core floating above his life’s ruins. More complete than ever before. More depraved, as though it had taken their blasphemy and festered.

  How had they ever believed mortal hands could control it?

  He should never have—

  He almost sagged, then caught himself.

  An aberrant, vindictive smile tugged at his lips.

  He had dragged it up from the Depths prematurely, yes, but that also meant She wouldn’t be able to return. She would be consumed, along with the rest of Ashenmoor, nourishing whatever new god would crawl out of the wreckage.

  There was no stopping it now. There was no—

  He blinked, raising his head as a streak of pink flashed across his vision.

  And then a boot—an ordinary, muddy, very disrespectful boot—slammed into the High Priest’s face, using his holiness as a springboard on the way to even greater mayhem.

  ***

  Ripping through the rain, cold droplets stinging her cheeks, Annabell felt the click of the last two gizmos sliding together in ways their inventor had never intended.

  And just as her arc reached its apex—before gravity, that eternal spoilsport, could remember its job and yank her back down again—she hurled the violently ticking contraption straight at the Core.

  A Core that, for the first time since its creation, gave something its undivided attention.

  [Warning! Anomaly Detected.]

  [Warning! Anomaly Det3c7#…]

  [Warning! Anomaly 9e7!–]

  The air did not merely explode—it thrummed, rippled, and broke.