There were a good thirty yards between me and the serpent, so I tore my eyes away and started sprinting for the next turn in the maze. Maybe having to make a sharp turn would slow the hulking creature down, or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. Either way I skidded around the corner and kept running.

  The sound of scale scraping against stone was quieter now, but I knew it was just a matter of time before the snake caught up to me. My lungs were burning in my chest, and this hallway was a long straightaway for at least another fifty yards, without any twists or turns for me to try to lose myself down. What little lead I had would quickly vanish.

  What if I stood my ground? I was underleveled, but maybe I had a chance of surviving a one-on-one encounter against a single, Zone One enemy. On the other hand, just going off appearances, it seemed unlikely that this was an appropriate-Level Monster for the area.

  Tatzel had already admitted to bending the rules by stationing the Brainknocker here as a ‘passive’ guardian… maybe she was bending the rules yet again. If so, she was using a different strategy this time. The serpent was being far from passive in its attempts to kill me.

  “Tatzel!” I shouted between breaths,“What Level… is that… thing?”

  Tatzel laughed. “You know, Roland, I’m not quite sure.”

  I chanced a look over my shoulder. The snake had squeezed its head around the turn, which meant the rest of it wasn’t far behind. “You’re… cheating. Too high… Level. Against the rules… right?”

  “Nonsense! Carmichael here isn’t under my employ. He’s not even a Monster, he’s just a garden-variety snake! It’s not my fault if the local wildlife gets into the place and… hold on, what was that?” The screech of tearing metal emanated from the PA. “Aeshma? Is that… no, wait, I thought you were looking for your–”

  Tatzel’s voice cut out. Apparently, Aeshma had reached the Boss room.

  I guess that was a good thing… but it came as bad news to me personally. I’d been holding out hope, however foolishly, that Aeshma was gonna swoop in and save me from this giant serpent. Of course, the window of opportunity for that to happen was closing fast. I glanced behind me again.

  The snake Carmichael was a stone’s throw away.

  I stopped running and pivoted to face it. My hand shook as I leveled my handgun and fired. There was a flash of light and an ear splitting cascade of noise. The recoil tried to kick my hands back; I was ready for it, though, and managed to keep my aim steady.

  The bullet ricocheted off of Carmichael’s nose and didn’t seem to do him any direct harm. However, he instinctively flinched away from the unexpected sound of the gunshot, and in the process, slammed his head hard against the tunnel wall.

  “Yeowch! What the friggin’ heck, man? That was loud as tarnation,” the snake Carmichael cried indignantly. He shook his head from side to side in a daze, and with every move, his scales shimmered with a colorful iridescence. He was a beautiful animal, which I would’ve appreciated more if he wasn’t trying to kill me.

  I didn’t have long; Carmichael already seemed to be recovering some of his faculties. I considered shooting him again, but I figured it would be a waste of ammunition. With how tough the creature’s hide was, I’d be lucky if he even felt my previous shot. So I raised the Flare Disk instead, letting its fiery sensation course through my veins. "I don't really want to do this, Mr. Carmichael, but you gotta understand my position here!" A gout of fire erupted from the medallion and blasted Carmichael right in the face. The heat was intense enough to make me flinch back, even from my position safely behind its area of effect.

  “YEAAAAAAARGH! Oh, I’m gonna kill you, boy!” the snake Carmichael howled. He thrashed about wildly as he tried to extinguish his red-hot scales on the cold tiles lining the hallway. Bits of scale were warping and snapping from the rapid change in temperature.”You’re gonna be fulla fang holes the time I’m done with you!”

  That was my cue to start running again.

  “Woah! Hey Roland! I can see you on this thing!” Aeshma’s voice crackled over the PA. The eyes of the nearest seer statue flickered. “How’s it going down there?”

  I didn’t have time for pleasantries. “Tell me how to get away from this snake!”

  “Uh… I dunno man, it looks like you’re in a maze? Have you tried just going left the whole ti- OOF!” she said as someone, presumably Tatzel, bowled her out of range of the PA.

  I couldn’t think about Aeshma’s situation right now, not while I was still embroiled in one of my own. The Flare Disk was spent for the hour, which meant that my combat repertoire was reduced to Jie and my last remaining bullet. The bullet was practically useless here – and Jie, for his part, was only Level Two. I suspected he wouldn’t hold up so well against Carmichael’s fangs.

  The next turn in the maze was coming up, just paces away, but the slithering behind me had grown oppressively loud. The snake had finally caught up with me. He let out a furious hiss, his jaws opening wide as he reared back for a strike. My legs had grown too heavy to try to dodge his attack. I was so tired it almost felt like the ground itself was moving beneath my feet.

  No, wait… the ground was moving beneath my feet, twisting and buckling like something was squirming beneath the surface

  The eyes of every seer statue lining the hallway flared with sickly golden light. Both Carmichael and I gasped in surprise as thorny roots jutted out of the floor and walls and grew inward, slowly but surely reducing the tunnel’s diameter.

  “Lady Tatzel, what’s the meaning of this?” Carmichael hissed.

  Just ahead was the next intersection, another left turn – but a wall of roots had grown up in front of it, barring the way through. I almost despaired, but as I approached, the roots slithered back down into the ground to let me pass. Once I was through they sprang back up behind me. Through the gaps I could see Carmichael struggling to slither down the hallway, beset on all sides by crushing roots.

  Whoever had triggered all this was definitely on my side. That ruled out Tatzel… so maybe it was Aeshma? But that didn’t seem right, either. If she’d wrested control of the Dungeon away from Tatzel, she’d probably be bragging about it over the PA. Whoever it was, I owed them big time. Right in front of me was a metal gate, padlocked shut, blocking the entrance to what looked like an old-timey freight elevator.

  The end of the maze. My wall-hugging strategy had worked.

  I slammed my shoulder into the gate, hoping to break either the padlock or the metal ring it was attached to. All I got for my troubles was a sore shoulder.

  “Jie, turn into a chisel,” I commanded. “We’re gonna have to try to break the lock.”

  Before the Mimic could respond, a root snaked up from the ground and tore the gate fully off its hinges. Jie let out a questioning squeak. “Nevermind. Just stay a shield,” I said, and stepped through the opened way.

  “Don’t you dare!” screamed the snake Carmichael. He tensed into a tight coil and sprang forward through the grasping roots, sailing through the air, mouth wide and fangs bared.

  Only a split second passed before a root shot from the ground and impaled the serpent through the soft underside of its jaw. Steaming blood spattered the hallway as other roots punched through the rest of Carmichael’s body.

  The elevator doors shut in front of me, unbidden, and the elevator began to rise.

  –

  The journey up took much longer than the journey down had. It gave me plenty of time to mull over what just happened, but no matter how I turned it over in my mind, it didn’t make sense. I hardly knew anyone in this world besides Aeshma, and she definitely wasn’t powerful enough to have summoned a bunch of roots like that. Especially because it seemed like magic of some sort. The only person with magical aptitude I could think of was that Arcanist, Doctor Charlotte… Charlotte something, who I’d met at the Rusty Mug. I had no reason to think that she was keeping an eye on me, though.

  Maybe it was Crankshaft’s Boon, coming to fruition? But that didn’t make sense either – why would a god of technology and industry come to my aid with a bunch of tree roots?

  So what did that leave? I tried to convince myself that Aeshma and Tatzel busted up a security console during their scuffle, and that it coincidentally set off a bunch of root traps in a way that just happened to save my bacon. That seemed extremely unlikely. Besides, the eyes in the seer statues suggested that there was someone else involved. When Tatzel was watching me, and when Aeshma watched me through Tatzel’s viewer, the eyes were purple. But just before the roots had erupted…

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Gold. The same golden light as outside the Dungeon.

  It was a real puzzler. I got the sinking feeling that Aeshma wouldn’t be much help figuring it out, either, assuming she survived her fight against Tatzel.

  I sighed and tried to get some rest as the elevator made its way up the chasm.

  –

  BING-BONG

  The metal doors slid open. The elevator let me out just beside a large, circular chamber.

  It was high-ceilinged but somehow still felt cramped, stuffed as it was with decorative lights, potted shrubs and fruit bearing trees, and hanging mosses. In the middle of the room were the splintered remains of a velvet-cushioned throne. Bits of pillow and downy stuffing were scattered across the floor, trailing from a metal chandelier that had somehow been torn from the ceiling.

  I had a good guess as to the culprit. On the far side of the room stood Aeshma, lilac as ever and looking perfectly healthy. The slender black Dragon whose tail was in Aeshma’s hands looked remarkably less so.

  The creature – who I assumed to be Tatzel – looked quite similar to the stained-glass depiction I’d seen earlier. She was long and serpentine, with small, bat-like wings attached between her shoulder-blades. She had two sets of scaled arms, slender and toneless, all ending in reptilian hands. As though to compensate for the extra arms, Tatzel had no legs to speak of, and so altogether she looked like a long, stupid noodle. She howled as Aeshma spun around in a circle and thumped her head against the remnants of the throne.

  “Yo, Roland! You made it out! Did you just keep going left like I told you?” Aeshma asked cheerfully over the Dragon’s yowling.

  Tatzel noticed me entering the room for the first time, and a malicious gleam came over her eyes. She thrashed around and tried to face me. A quick jab from Aeshma sent Tatzel’s head slamming into the ground, leaving behind the faintest puff of poison fog.

  “Yeah, basically,” I yelled back. “There was a snake down there, too. Also some other stuff happened that I wanna ask Tatzel about.”

  “A’ight, sounds good.” Aeshma had one hand clamped around Tatzel’s snout to keep her from poisoning us, and the other hand wrapped around Tatzel’s shoulder. She positioned herself to execute a chokehold. “You said there was a snake down there? Was it like a Basilisk or something?”

  “No, it was a regular snake, I think.”

  Aeshma frowned. “That’s weird. Why’d you have a snake down there, Tatz?”

  “Chgeetin’,” Tatzel said as best she could through her clamped muzzle.

  “Yeah, I bet. Why don’t you go ahead and turn Human so Roland can question you?”

  In her current form, the Dragon was over fifteen feet long. As she transformed, her body seemed to collapse and compress into itself, squelching down into the shape of a tall, thin woman wearing a knee-length black dress, hemmed with gold. Her wings resolved into poofy shoulder puffs, and her four arms merged into two, which ended in narrow, delicate hands bedecked in gold rings.

  As I approached the two of them, Tatzel spat out a gob of blood, along with a sharp, serrated tooth. She glared at me through her one unswollen eye. Up close, it was clear she wasn’t Human. Her eyes were gold disks, each split down the middle by a lizardlike black pupil; her skin wasn’t flat and smooth, but rather a layer of soft, flexible, olive-toned scales. “I didn’t expect you would escape the bone pit,” she said.

  “To be honest with you, I didn’t think I would survive either. That’s what I wanted to ask you about, actually. A bunch of roots popped out of the walls and started attacking your snake–”

  “Carmichael,” Tatzel interjected.

  “Yeah. Some, like… tree roots, or something, came to life and killed him. Do you know why that happened? And the statues, the seer statues, all of their eyes went gold. Was that, like… related at all?”

  Tatzel’s eyes narrowed. “I’m the only one using the seer statues. Perhaps while I was… otherwise occupied, some malfunction tripped the seer statues, in addition to one of the Dungeon’s defense systems. ‘Tree roots’, aren’t part of those systems, however. I assume you didn’t properly observe what was going on.”

  She turned her gaze back up to Aeshma. “Now, if the two of you are quite done with your questions, hurry up and kill me already.”

  “That I can do!” Aeshma said with a grin. “Watch out, Roland, this is gonna spray everywhere!”

  Tatzel grimaced toothily as Aeshma tightened her headlock.

  Should we really be killing Tatzel? Seeing the way her eyes were bugging out of her head didn’t sit right with me. She had already surrendered.

  I remembered how things went with the Gremlins, though. I had been wrong try to spare them. Things had turned out worse for everyone because I stepped in – for me and Aeshma, for the shopkeeper, for the Gremlins themselves...

  The Dragon’s body went slack as Aeshma tightened her vice-grip around her neck.

  The extra Levels we’d get for killing the Boss would definitely be useful too. And maybe we could feed her body to Jie, and get him a special Perk… assuming it worked that way.

  “Hey, Aeshma,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah? What’s up?” Aeshma grunted back. “Man, her noggin is on tight! I thought I’d be able to just, you know, pop this bad boy off!”

  “What if we, like… didn’t kill her?”

  Aeshma loosened her grip on the unconscious Dragon. “You remember what happened with the Gremlins?”

  “Yes, I remember the Gremlins,” I said.

  “How they tried to blow us up?”

  “Aeshma, I-”

  “Their last stand? Remember how hatefully they last-standed?”

  “We got the Flare Disk out of it, which has been pretty useful,” I countered.

  Aeshma sighed, but still didn’t remove her hold around Tatzel’s throat. “Dungeon Bosses are supposed to defend their Dungeon unto death, Roland. If we spared her, the Queen would have her executed anyway. And it’d be a whole lot messier than how I’m doing it now.”

  I massaged my forehead. Deep inside, a horrible idea was taking form. “What if…”

  “What if what?” Aeshma asked impatiently.

  “What if… we took her with us?”

  Aeshma stared at me open-mouthed. "You want us to take her? Like, as a party member? To adventure with?” Her voice dripped with incredulity.

  “She’d have no incentive to betray us, because she’d already be on the outs with the Queen and everyone for abandoning her post. You said it yourself. So… yeah, why not?”

  “Because it’d mean more heat on the two of us!” Aeshma said. “When her corpse isn’t found here, they’ll send agents out to look for her. Besides… you spoke to her, right? She’s terrible! Do you really want her around all the time, messing up the vibe? Our vibe?” She gestured back and forth between us, indicating our tight vibe.

  “Aeshma… I hear your concerns, and I agree with you that the current vibe is impeccable. It’s good. It’s a good vibe,” I said, taking my own turn to indicate our connected vibe. I made an effort to gesture at Jie, too, so that he knew that he was included. “But look at yourself. You have to know this isn’t right.”

  Aeshma looked down at Tatzel’s unconscious body and frowned. I was breaking through to her, apparently. “And if they send more goons after us, so what?” I said. “That’s just more free Levels. You’re gonna be punching way above their pay grade, right?”

  “Ugh! Fine, we can take her. But if this backfires, it’s on you,” Aeshma said, punctuating every syllable with a shake of Tatzel’s limp, but still-breathing form. “Deal?”

  “Deal,” I sighed. I really hoped this wasn’t going to blow up in my face.

  Aeshma slung Tatzel’s limp body over her shoulder and said, “She’s gonna need a healing potion or something before we get into any troub-”

  BA-DING!

  A shower of colorful sparks erupted around me.

  BA-DING!

  And kept erupting. I closed my eyes, half to recover from the lightshow and half to inspect the UI and see how much XP I’d received for completing the Dungeon. It looked like…four Levels. That was more than I’d expected, really. I wondered if I got something extra for being near Carmichael when he died.

  BA-DING!

  Jie let out a little squeak and his Level-up screen drifted into my peripheral vision. He’d gained two Levels himself, with four stat increases and a Perk selection for me to agonize over once we got out of this place.

  I opened my eyes. “I guess I should, um, Level up. So you can have them.”

  Aeshma shrugged bashfully, jostling Tatzel’s body in the process. “Ha, you aren’t still nervous about all that, are you?” she asked. But there was a blush blossoming on her cheeks as well as mine, this time.

  “Look who’s talking.” I retreated back into my menus, cramming four levels into something random just to get it over with. “Ever, uh, kissed a Clinical Geologist before?”

  “I guess I haven’t. Anyway, hold on a second. I am not smooching with Tatzel’s rear end right in my face.”

  Tatzel’s body hit the floor with a thud.

  “That’s better. Okay, get over here,” Aeshma said, looming over me with a grin.

  “Aeshma?” I asked quietly.

  “Uh, yeah?” Her mouth was nearly against mine.

  “Could I… I don’t know if it works, if we do it this way. Or if I’m being too forward or anything like that. But maybe… I could, uh, be the one to kiss you this time?”

  I felt the heat radiate off her face as she stammered, “Y-yeah, sure. That should work fine.”

  I stretched up to meet her and kissed Aeshma on the lips.

  NOTABLE CREATURES

  ---------------------------------

  Carmichael LV 10

  Ancestry: Animal

  Class: Snake

  Notable Perks:

  Potent Venom: Your venom is faster-acting, more deadly, and is produced in greater volumes.

  Increased Size (Major): Each tier of this Perk doubles your size.

  Beautiful Scales: Your scales gleam and shimmer magnificently. Increases your social prowess in situations where your beauty is relevant.