I woke to a gentle shaking of my shoulder.

  “Sorry, bro,” Nathan said.

  “What time is it?”

  “4 a.m., but I thought you’d want to know Louis got to the boss room.”

  “Huh? Already?” I slowly worked my way upright.

  My ribs were still sensitive to movement. A day or two into this, however, I accepted that pain was inevitable. I breathed through it like a pregnant woman using Lamaze in the delivery room. When I wasn’t being overly dramatic, I could admit that I was improving steadily each day.

  “There’s a chance it isn’t the boss room,” Nathan added as he sat with the television remote. “But Louis was talking like he was pretty certain. Should I have let you sleep?”

  “Nope. Do you want some tea?”

  “Could kill for a cup. Are you sure you want to move that much?”

  One day in the office was more exhausting than I expected. My general wellness levels seemed to regress under the strain, but I didn’t like being helpless. Pain was preferable.

  “I’m fine,” I replied.

  When I sat back down, Nathan had the stream up. Louis’s party did equipment checks in advance of opening the black iron doors between them and the next room. The doors themselves presented an odd puzzle, however.

  They had ringed handles, but those handles were the size of above-ground swimming pools and hung well out of reach of the crawlers. At some point before we tuned in, the party had managed to get a rope around one handle. Their plan was to pull it open, and the way Louis’s party behaved suggested confidence in that plan was mixed.

  “What’s going on?” Beth asked, barefoot and wrapped in a comforter.

  “Sorry for waking you up,” I said, returning from the kitchen with two cups of tea. “Louis is about to fight an S-ranked boss. Possibly.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Handing Nathan his cup, I offered the other to Beth.

  She smiled and accepted it. “Thank you.”

  A few minutes later I returned to see that the rope on the handle worked, though the effort the party expended was substantial. Even the frontliners who had the strength stats of demigods bent over to catch their breath. That didn’t seem like the best state for beginning a boss fight, but they formed up and went through the door anyway.

  “Did they ID the dungeon?” Beth asked.

  Nathan shook his head. “So far, it’s all been new, the monsters and the setting.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’re going in blind,” Nathan answered.

  “No, I mean, is the uniqueness itself significant?”

  “How would you answer that, Dor?”

  I thought. “The novelty and the challenge of the unknown are the only real significance, I think. I’m not aware of any other unique dungeons having broader consequences.”

  Nathan held up a finger. “Shh.”

  “You asked me to answer!”

  “They’re going in!”

  The three of us quieted.

  Beyond the door was a floor made from quartz tiles, the same material that formed the stairs and bridges between the floating islands seen previously in the dungeon. The party’s drone was low on battery, but they deployed it anyway. An overhead view was good for viewers because the points of view of individual crawlers could be hard to track in the frantic chaos of a boss battle.

  Oddly, though, the drone’s night vision couldn’t penetrate the darkness that surrounded the room. Torches and Nightsight enchantments couldn’t either.

  The screen went black, and the crawlers called back and forth to each other. They had only just begun going one by one for health checks when the room suddenly burst to life. The quartz floor was gone, as was the door, and the crawlers were surrounded on every side by stars, above as well as below.

  The drone looking down on the crawlers showed that they still stood on something solid even if it was invisible, but the change had spooked a few members of the party. When we saw the crawler POV, it was easy to see why. There was no real frame of reference for anything in the room. Just looking down at your feet gave you the intense sensation of falling. They weren’t, to be clear. The drone confirmed that. But if I could feel that on the other side of the screen, I had to imagine it was exponentially worse in person.

  “Movement!” One of the crawlers yelled. “One, no, four jumpscares.”

  “I’m tracking three more!” another said.

  Then the room went dark again, but the lights hadn’t gone out. There were so many jumpscares closing in on LootLootLouis’s party that they blocked out all the stars.

  The drone died. One of the monsters likely destroyed it, but it wasn’t clear if it was deliberate on their part or just part of the chaos.

  The shadow monsters attacked from every angle, even below. One of the crawlers looked down, and the floor seemed to writhe with flying enemies. Whatever force made the invisible floor could be penetrated by the jumpscares, but not the other way around. Crawlers couldn’t hurt them until they attempted to reach through.

  “I can’t tell what the hell is happening,” Nathan said, squinting.

  Neither could I. The battle was visible for the brief moments when a spell or ability was active, revealing a mob of winged shadow men attacking from everywhere.

  LootLootLouis’s party had no shortage of big, flashy spells and abilities to make fights exciting. This boss fight, however, made them impossible to see. The only aspect of the attacks that wasn’t hidden was their sound. Crackles. Explosions. Roars that rivaled jet engines. Water crashing.

  Little by little, more stars shone through. The crawlers were making progress, but at least one member of the party hadn’t made a call in a while. Chat noticed thirty seconds before anyone in LootLootLouis’s party did.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  When was the last time we heard from BiggerGinger?

  ^ It’s been a while.

  Too long

  dude is dead lol

  User has been removed by a moderator.

  Okay, he’s never quiet this long. I’m scared, guys.

  Big Ging! We believe in you!

  When the jumpscares were eliminated, the party spotted BiggerGinger’s remains. The shadow monsters tore him to pieces, leaving only ribbons of flesh and shards of bone behind.

  Before any member of the party could fully parse what they were seeing, all the stars in the room converged on a single point, creating the illusion that the whole party fell sideways.

  The starlight melded into the shape of a winged beast. Like the jumpscares, it lacked true definition, so it took the boss spreading its wings for its form to be clear.

  A dragon made of starlight.

  And it dove at the party.

  Like the jumpscares, it could move freely through the invisible floor, so when it dove to attack, it never slowed. It screeched by the crawlers as they dove out of the way. Then the dragon glided beneath them for a moment, preparing a course to climb and attack again. All the while, the room was nothing but void save for the brilliant white outline of the dragon.

  The screen froze, and a popup appeared:

  This stream has entered subscriber-only mode. Subscribe to view.

  “Assholes!” Nathan shouted.

  “They cut us off?” Beth asked.

  “Yeah. Louis talked so much shit about never being a streamer that pulled this pay-per-view garbage, and here we are.”

  “Might not have been his decision,” I offered. “He’s not running the backend. Could have been his manager or his guild.”

  Grumbling, Nathan stood up. “I’m going back to bed.”

  Beth looked back and forth between us. “Really?”

  I patted her on the back. “It’ll be up on YouTube in a few hours at most.”

  “This sucks.”

  “Yeah. It’s a part of the crawl stream hustle, unfortunately. At least we got to see the majority of the crawl. Sometimes it’s behind a paywall from the start.”

  Beth and her blanket retreated to my room and closed the door.

  I was jealous they could go back to sleep so easily. I definitely couldn’t.

  The star dragon, as commentators had taken to calling it, took over twenty minutes for the party to kill. On a few occasions, individual crawlers had close calls, like narrowly avoiding a diving attack or needing to be healed after a burst of dragonfire.

  Watching it in clips and GIF highlights wasn’t the same as seeing it live. It was still a spectacularly large fight, though.

  The dungeon itself generated a lot of discussion. The stream didn’t show the harvesters coming in behind LootLootLouis to collect the golem remains or to mine the quartz bridges and stairs. On earth, quartz was unremarkable, but dungeon quartz contained mana, making it a highly sought-after crafting material. Most of the coverage focused on the golems, speculating whether or not they could be remade, and if not, how valuable their meteorite bodies were.

  For the record, constructs had appeared in dungeons before, and several labs actively pursued replicating the technology. Those efforts began shortly after the gates opened, and no known progress had been made. Billionaires continued to dump funding into it, though.

  A great proportion of dungeon materials were purchased by researchers and inventors. Mana crystals could be incorporated into any compound without changing its base properties. Mix ground mana crystals into the refining process of steel? The metal that resulted functioned like steel but was now exponentially more durable.

  That was cost-prohibitive in most cases, but states were increasingly requiring new construction to incorporate mana materials into their builds. With so many modern challenges associated with the simple decay of physical objects, like bridges crumbling beneath decades of vibrations and heavy loads, the upfront investment made sense.

  The electronics industry used mana materials for data storage because Earth-only hard drives were doomed to decay, as were things like cassettes and CDs. The military used mana materials for weapons and armor, and most modern nations abandoned coal and nuclear power in favor of power plants fed by mana crystals.

  As far as Louis’ recent crawl went, the commentary that interested me challenged the notion that the star ocean dungeon had never appeared before. This was the first time the gate had been observed. We had no way of knowing if this gate appeared in the past and surged before it was ever discovered. In other words, jumpscares and star dragons could be on Earth somewhere.

  Analysts and conspiracy theorists were already pulling old unexplained deaths and attributing them to jumpscares, proof that these monsters were a present, active threat. The more moderate voices suggested that we would be very, very aware of jumpscares and star dragons if they were indeed on Earth already.

  I heard about all this as I continued scanning in records. I hadn’t seen another human being since getting started last Friday morning, so I filled the silence with dungeon podcasts.

  The documents themselves were still just as boring. I had moved on from guild membership lists to an archive of complaints made against CDM enforcers and investigators. The oldest record I saw there was from 1975. A druid crawler accused an enforcer of “smelling like reefer” and demanded they be disciplined. That one got me to laugh out loud.

  The vast majority of complaints I read boiled down to enforcers or investigators being rude and unreasonable. From my limited experience, that part of crawling hadn’t changed at all.

  My day wrapped up partway through complaints from 1987. Peeking ahead, it looked like the CDM started logging these digitally in 1992, so I might finish those tomorrow and get to look at something different. Probably still boring, but I’d take different.

  Scanning documents wasn’t exciting, but you know what was? The prospect of breathing out of my nose again.

  “This will feel strange,” the doctor said as he inspected my healing progress. “Some pressure is normal. It’s important we move it slowly and with control, so resist the urge to yank your head back. It sneaks up on people.”

  “Got it.”

  The packing sliding out of my sinuses and nasal passages felt like a rope unraveling from the back of my skull as it was pulled out of my nose. Much of the packing was black from blood, and many bits had a green tinge as well.

  Then the sweetest, most invigorating breath of air passed through my nostrils.

  The doctor smiled at me. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  “Like I’ve never breathed for real before.”

  He chuckled. “Sounds right, and that’s good news. Let me take a look.”

  He looked up my nose with a handheld device and nodded his approval.

  “Healing pretty well.” Stripping his gloves off and stomping on the pedal of a garbage can, he drifted into what felt like a speech he had given before. “You’re still healing, so don’t think because the packing is out that you’re done. I know you miss it, but no basketball for another six weeks.”

  “Huh?”

  “You athletes always overdo it. Trust me. One stray elbow and you’re starting this all over again.”

  “...I don’t play basketball.”

  “Sure you do,” the doctor said, looking down at my chart. “We talked about this last time.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Hmm… The wrong notes must have ended up in here.” He sighed. “Good help is hard to find, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “So remind me, how did you break your nose?”

  “I got my ass kicked.”

  “Yes, now I remember. Bar fight? I can recommend some resources if you’re interested. No shame in getting a helping hand to get your drinking under control.”

  I thought to argue but abandoned the idea. Eventually, the nurse came in, walked me through proper aftercare, and discharged me.

  On my way out the door, I reflected on my crawls. I couldn’t remember ever getting hit in the nose. I might have during a Roach Run, but what were the chances I drew one of those if I took a few culls here and there? Not that I could. I was benched until the doctors cleared me.

  Outside, I took a slow, deep inhale.

  Ah, fuck. My ribs.

  Yeah, crawling could wait.