Noxarcer's attention followed its most recent acquisition, observing everything. It observed the Gauntlet runner with a range of strange organs that would’ve left whoever coined the phrase “the walls have ears” a shaking wreck. Unaware of the attention, the new student trudged from the Keeper's den and across the twisting fabric of the dungeon towards where he would be stored when not working and studying.

  Noxarcer approved of the fact he’d slipped on the coat. It was infinitely more appropriate than the affront to scholarly pursuits it helped cover—the dungarees—which it considered an affront. No matter how much Noxarcer wanted to, it did not interfere. Aesthetic crimes were, regrettably, outside of its remit for direct punishment. Especially not after the incident where its distaste for noserings had been combined with its experiments with localised magnetic fields.

  The [Delinquent] was a promising resource. It was already proving to be useful. By passing the test, it was just a matter of time till this was discovered and the foolish dynasties demanded attempts that would embarrass them again.

  The student was a new tool. On his own he represented a pickaxe. He was functional, crude, efficient, and likely to smash something important if swung carelessly.

  Noxarcer was very careful though. It had been setting this trap for a long time. There was a rot setting into the culture that provided its students, and just inventively maiming a few of the loudest fools wasn’t going to resolve things.

  This was due to the slow degradation of culture, where the idiots were in charge, unaware of their lacking intelligence and yet miraculously able to convince those they represented that they were more than a greedy speedbump in their soul’s progress towards the nether. So the ancient mind's goal had shifted.

  It let ‘The Board’ in, and helped the conversation swirl, gently seasoning it with nudges of invasively distributed reading material till a specific idea floated up from the fermenting soup of smooth-brained fools.

  Why not prove that our idiot children are better than the people Noxarcer picks! They’d got really excited by the idea. They got funding, they talked about it in papers. The government had tried to silence it, but Noxarcer had sent them some light reading and convinced them to stay out of this.

  Noxarcer was rather proud of itself. Not for tricking such fools, but of the restraint required to enable this.

  It was rather like watching a man who’d nailed his own feet to the ground challenge his much fitter, motivated, and skilled neighbour to a race.

  Honestly, if they intended to play fair, Noxarcer wouldn’t have even had to get involved. It was a centre of learning, of knowledge, and the performance statistics painted a picture even a toddler could understand about how the competition was going to go. But the cesspool of nepotism and corruption had taught them one thing—it was how to cheat. Noxarcer did not like cheating. It was, after all, an academic institution.

  Noxarcer of course wouldn’t break any rules. It could, however, course correct.

  The student was meant to head to the specialist dorms, a place set aside for those with unconventional bodies and uncooperative magic. Noxarcer had made sure of it, using the excuse of the familiar to ensure he wasn’t lost to the dormitories.

  There was potential in putting him in the main halls. Communal hygiene facilities bred resentment at a rate that only a knife in the back could equal. Shared kitchens spawned feuds that echoed through decades. All of that was entertaining, but not easy to control. The [Delinquent] needed to be deployed strategically to achieve Noxarcer’s goals.

  That, and the dog might actually eaten someone’s familiar.

  The first such deployment would occur before he even reached his accommodations. Noxarcer guided him, the very fabric of the campus shifting under its control. A missing signpost here. A slight shift in the pathways. A distraction for his familiar to slow him down.

  At the same time, it watched the other target moving. One who’d been temporarily ‘cheated’ of what she was due.

  Noxarcer patted itself on the flying buttress for not just dropping a bookcase on that idiot ‘board member’ for interfering earlier in an instructional display of how knowledge might equal power, but that it also had a lot of mass behind it. The idiots were like pigeons—easily spooked, and likely to shit everywhere and cause a ruckus on the way out.

  The forested parts of campus—Noxarcer’s skin, in a sense—were considered calming to the lesser minds. Trees, birdsong, the illusion of nature carefully cultivated to resemble wilderness without ever truly surrendering control. Today though, there was a shift. The trees were taller, closer to the path. Around the target it shifted, small movements in the underbrush, sounds of footsteps that disappeared in haste, the crack of a twig.

  The target was getting nervous.

  In the other thread of its consciousness it watched as the [Delinquent] passed the Department of Mazes. He paused and spoke with one of its lesser minions. The professor, a minotaur who was firmly on the side of the wrinkly brains, gave him some helpful advice and the student set out.

  He was nearly in place.

  The encounter had been positioned precisely—away from sight to minimise variables, but close enough for help to arrive.

  The other target was starting to hurry. She pretended to be just walking, but her steps were hurried. When Noxarcer sent the sound of a twig breaking she froze, staring into the forest. The forest that conveniently blocked her view of the approaching Delinquent, and more importantly, his familiar.

  Excellent.

  Noxarcer began producing a minion, spinning up a creature with a complex guidance, including plans and contingencies on where to run, how to ensure it kept its target’s attention, and how to twitch its tail for maximum engagement. The final ingredient to its careful plan.

  The squirrel was deployed!

  Before the formation of the current republic, Noxarcer had threatened to start eating people if it didn't stop seeing the same faces return generation after generation. The dynastic lines of the great, and not so great, dungeons had laughed about this. Noxarcer had been teaching their children for centuries, and to appease it, they began permitting some children from ‘loyal’ vassals' dungeons to compete for entrance.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  They were not pleased when their spoilt children routinely failed to outperform the scrappier and heavily motivated ‘lessers’. They were alumni of the ancient school, and like many alumni, the fear, anxiety, and gruelling labour of memory had shifted to nostalgia. The school’s threats like an old toothless dog growling at them from behind a picket fence.

  They laughed when they received notice, demanding the return of their overdue library books.

  What followed would go down in the history books as ‘The Great Reshelving’, as multiple dungeon keepers were slain for the first time in decades. As Noxarcer reminded everyone of two things. First, that it was an S-Tier dungeon, and second, that it had taught them the very foundations that they and generations of their ancestors had built their strength upon.

  The librarians were just pleased that people stopped leaving without returning their books.

  The end result of all this was the establishment of a joint scholarship fund, and an agreement that half of Noxarcer’s students would be sourced from exceptional people in the general population, and half could continue to come from the dynasties. They, of course, all had to pass the tests.

  These scholarship students, often coming from far-off parts of the republic, tended to arrive early, as travel through the realms could be time-consuming. And as such, many arrived early.

  Angeline Goodweather was one such student. Still unclassed, she was excited to be joining for her first year and was making her way back to her accommodation, admiring the artfully tended woodland that helped break up the campus.

  Angeline liked forests. They were better than open plains where her ancestral instincts turned any passing shadow into a heart-thundering moment of dread. The trees offered cover and places to hide. However, now she had to compete with the other side of her ancestral heritage, which kept suggesting she go ‘water’ the trees and chase squirrels.

  She told herself this to try and drown out the feeling that the woods were closing in, and the way her senses had started scanning the underbrush. Forests were nice and friendly and not full of monsters. Not here. Not at Noxarcer.

  At least she hoped as much.

  She tuned out the thoughts, muttering to herself. “I’ve got the recommended reading on Dungeonomics and Dungeoneering that I couldn’t get back home. Maybe I should take a look at the ones I already read here? They might have more up-to-date editions? No, I can only borrow six books at once.” Then there’s—

  She shifted her backpack, which was laden with books that she’d borrowed from the library. She wasn’t about to waste her extra two weeks, even if reading wasn’t really how she’d hoped to spend her time.

  She’d expected to have a class by now. The professor she’d met while heading to the classing hall had explained the changes. That her getting a class early wouldn’t be fair on the others. She had done her best not to argue back that the fear of another incident—something that should’ve qualified her for an early classing due to the medical exemption rules—wasn’t fair to her.

  She had just decided to make sure she didn’t do anything too dangerous and spend most of her time reading in her room. The one she’d been given in the special dorms, which totally didn’t add to her feelings of not fitting in.

  She tried to perk herself up and ignore the hairs rising on the back of her neck. The walk to her room was taking a really long time. She was certain she’d memorised the way back, even with how the grounds of the Academy tended to change from one day to the next. Was she lost?

  Angie paused. She’d been focused so much on her worries that she hadn’t noticed she’d ended up somewhere new. The trees felt especially tall here and loomed over her. The path curved so she couldn’t see more than ten paces in any direction. If she didn’t have the path, she may as well feel like she’d been dropped in the deep forest.

  The long ears atop her head perked up, listening for sounds of predators, while trying to ignore the feeling of her fingernails lengthening.

  Something skittered in the underbrush, and her ears honed in on it, rabbit brain considering the best route to flee, the predatory part of her brain starting to salivate. Angie was better than that. She focused on the path and on getting back to her special accommodations. She wasn't going to jump at shadows. She was the master of her mind. She’d fought her way to a scholarship, and she was going to rise up, fix her misaligned heritages, and become more than anyone from the town of Dullston had ever managed.

  Noxarcer had been the unreachable peak that she’d summited. A gruelling trek that demanded everything—extra homework, extra courses, missing out on friendships, and the ‘glory of youth’. That she didn’t mind missing out on. She suspected it was overrated, as the only people who ever seemed to talk about it were the kind of people who kept their school trophies and never found replacements.

  She totally didn’t envy her friends who’d got to go to parties and make mistakes without worrying about the possible loss of a single percentage point on her tests. Not her. Totally dedicated to the mission, she was.

  Angie continued down the winding path that led to her dorms, pushing against the misdirection magic. The dorms didn’t want you to reach them, and even having the key was no guarantee of reaching them. It’d been explained by the teachers that this was to help keep the students who needed them safe from bother.

  That was sensible. Not like she’d heard one of the older students suggest, that it was to cut down on the larger rooms they offered being used for massive parties. That student must’ve been joking. This was Noxarcer after all!

  There was more rustling in the underbrush. Her fists clenched, but this time she didn’t even look! Angie was triumphant. She wasn’t going to mess this up. Here she’d fit in. Here she’d be recognised for her intelligence, not her ‘problems’. She just had to get some control over it.

  You had to have focus to be a student of Noxarcer. You had to be dedicated not only to your studies of dungeons and your chosen path, but had to comprehend the interlinked nature of every role in the dungeon. It was a place where only the most unwavering minds would flourish.

  Squirrel.

  Angie’s eyes snapped to the small creature that raced out of the woods, straight at her. The rabbit brain froze at the unexpected movement, while the rest began to growl.

  Not at the squirrel, but at the rustling in the bushes beyond it. At whatever had flushed it out. Angie looked up, in time to see a monster burst out of the bushes—a hulking two-headed dog with black fur and gnashing teeth. Its heavy, muscular body bulled open a path through the bushes in desperate pursuit of its prey.

  Prey that was currently fleeing between her legs.

  Thanks to her heritage, Angie understood all about the concept of prey drive. That urge to chase what flees. Some part of her knew that if she stayed still she’d be fine. It might not even notice her. That was the rational-thinking Noxarcer student thinking.

  Her legs, however, which very much drew from her father’s rabbit beastkin side, said run. And didn’t involve her brain in the decision.

  Angie sprinted into the forest, dropping her bag to gain as much speed as possible. She heard behind her the pounding of paws, and the heavy breathing made all the worse by it’s two heads as the beast chased her.

  Her mother’s side raged at this. It was just a dog. A filthy bastardisation of her heritage. She should turn and fight. Show it who was bigger. She turned to gauge the beast, understand the threat.

  She saw the dog just sitting in the middle of the path, both its heads cocked to one side, watching her. Distantly, she heard someone yelling.

  Maybe she’d made a mistake?

  Looking behind you was never something a rabbit did. They just ran as hard as possible till they found safety. They also didn’t turn around because not looking where you were going could be more dangerous than whatever was behind you.

  Angie never saw the branch that knocked her out. All she knew was that she was on the ground, and the world was swimming. As she began to lose consciousness, the hard control she kept over her swirling mana exploded like a crushed coffee cup.

  “Oh no, and I just bought this outfit.”