Master Bertram offered Izz and Thuz a piece of advice that now echoed in Hans’ mind: “If you need two days to recover, tuck your ass in a bedroll and take the two days. All that matters is getting it done. No need to rush yourselves.”

  All that matters is getting it done. No need to rush.

  That had to be the strategy for this run.

  For his first three attempts at the hive, Hans fancied himself a warrior, a master swordsman heading into the defining battle of his career. That wasn’t how he thought of himself now, though. He was something different. He could step outside a moment and weave a few dozen threads between the challenge in front of him and every dumb little piece of knowledge he managed to gather in his lifetime. That’s where Hans won his fights.

  He wasn’t the actor; he was the playwright. His real job was done before the curtain ever went up.

  All that matters is getting it done.

  A hive’s strength was its collective power, its overwhelming numbers. Charging down the tunnels to eliminate the matron played into those strengths. Hans’ new master plan, the one that had him bouncing with excitement as he took an inventory of his gear, was to kill the majority of the terathans in the hive. If that took him weeks of hit-and-run tactics, so be it. He had as much time as he wanted, being dead and all.

  He was too impatient as a young man, he decided. That should have been how he ran the hive from the very first attempt. The only thing that mattered was winning. It didn’t matter how long it took him or what he had to do to make that happen. The victory was the same.

  So Hans settled in for his last adventure: a war of attrition with the terathans.

  Which was even more genius than he realized initially. If all or most of the terathans were dead, he could still climb to the surface to see if there was an exit. It would be perfectly safe to do so at that point.

  Yeah. This was a good plan.

  In his mind, his path to success depended on his access to supplies and his ability to rest. Beyond what he had in his pack, Hans had anything in the castle that might be salvageable and whatever he could repurpose from the terathans. So far, that list was a work in progress that had only two ideas: harvest fat to quiet his comings and goings and attempt to use the arm of a drone as a weapon, like he had done in one of his nightmares. That would only be necessary if he lost his sword, but maybe a backup was a smart idea for how long he intended to bed down.

  The castle wasn’t likely to be a trove of opportunities, however. The place was pretty well plundered ages ago, so it wasn’t like he would stumble across a cache of weapons and a storeroom filled with potions. He hoped to find enough materials to make a few deadfall traps but didn’t expect much else.

  New Quest: Search the castle for supplies.

  The only way to really know what he had at his disposal was to go look, but he had already burned two Nightsight potions, and his adventurer’s lamp had enough oil for a few days of intermittent use, tops. Hans had to use a torch at some point. There was no way around it, but running around the castle with a torch was like casting Beacon on himself.

  If a drone caught sight of a single flicker, the hive would investigate.

  So he decided to search the castle in phases. His first pass would be for mapping purposes only. He’d use another precious Nightsight potion and identify the sections of each floor that were exposed to the terathan tunnel that ran vertically through them. The castle was large enough that Hans believed he could mark a point on each floor, a sort of border that if he ventured beyond, a terathan might see his light.

  As long as he stayed behind that line, there would be enough material blocking line of sight that his torch wouldn’t reach anything exposed to the eyeline of the tunnel. If that worked the way he hoped, he could search each floor thoroughly by torchlight with reasonable confidence in his own safety.

  That was the crux of his plan for getting as much as possible out of his resources.

  Getting rest was a more difficult proposition because it meant detaching from a fight without being tracked or followed. Hans could imagine no scenario where the terathans didn’t swarm every floor of the castle the moment he disappeared into them. If he was a threat, they had the numbers to flush him out.

  How could he keep that from happening?

  Hans had no idea. He hoped something from his search would inspire him.

  To prepare for that expedition, he stripped off his armor. He’d bring his sword, but he needed to be as quiet as possible, so plainclothes it was. He would bring his adventurers’ lamp but intended to move quickly enough that he never had to use it. If he could map the light borders with one Nightsight potion, that would conserve the most resources.

  Armed with a sword, a lamp, and a piece of chalk, Hans drank his potion and began his research.

  Defining his borders for torchlight required less stealth than Hans anticipated. With the benefit of Nightsight, he could spot the webbing of the highway from a distance. The dwarves in Gomi talked about the size of their tunnel in wagon-widths. If Hans applied that here, the vertical terathan passage was at least four to five wagons in diameter and roughly cylindrical in shape.

  Spidersilk ran the length of the passage, so when it was viewed from one floor, the gaps between levels looked like one big white curtain. When terathans passed, their shadows showed through the silk, and the webbing bowed and shifted as their weight went up and down.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  If Hans could see the highway, then something using it might see his torch. From there, he did his best to estimate how many turns he needed to stop the light of a torch from reaching dangerously far.

  That meant losing access to about a third of each floor, however. He could still search those sections if he wanted to, but doing so secretly would be much more difficult, and he didn’t want to waste another Nightsight potion if he could help it.

  For now, two-thirds of the castle was sufficient.

  With those safety borders established, Hans lit a torch and took his time searching. He spent two to three hours on each floor by his estimate and found more items than he expected. Whether those were useful or not, he wasn’t sure yet.

  He found the following:

  -A chain from a room that looked like an old kitchen. He guessed it was used to hang something from the ceiling, like a shelf or rack.

  -Three wrought iron grates from the same kitchen, perhaps used to hold food over a bed of charcoal.

  -A handful of rusted nails left behind from wooden furniture that had long rotted away.

  -Multiple wall sconces were intact and made from bronze, if he had to guess. He made a note of where they were, intending to go back for them if he decided they were useful somehow.

  -An old wrought iron poker from what used to be someone’s bedroom.

  -Three clay jugs and as many shards of broken pottery as he could ever want.

  -A few tinder beams that he might be able to move if he tried, but not easily or quietly.

  -The bones of goblins, orcs, and people. They weren’t in piles, so Hans suspected these were other interlopers who didn’t make it out and died alone in whatever corner Hans found them in.

  -A stone mallet in what looked like an old storage room.

  -A shard of mirror that was about as large as an open book. That came out of another bedroom.

  As for the environment itself, Hans concluded that his base of operations needed to be better hidden. A simple door would not be enough to fool a terathan search effort. He needed to be somewhere where terathans couldn’t go and wouldn’t think to look. The gazer expansion of the Tainted Caves came to mind. A solution like the improvised secret passage the goblins used to hide their ritual magic efforts could work.

  Though Hans didn’t find a revolving bookshelf or a hidden staircase, he did find a room blocked by a partial collapse of the ceiling on the lowest floor. Hans only knew a room was there through inferences. Each door along that hallway was evenly spaced, and that pattern said that there was another such access point right here.

  The mound of rubble was taller than he was and wide enough to obscure a door completely. Though that pile had a few sizable stones, Hans believed he could move most of them by hand if he needed to. That process would not be easy, but it was doable.

  With no other viable options, he decided the first step was to see if the room behind the rubble was even usable. So he got to work.

  Hans hated manual labor. The repetition of the same action was painfully dull, and he often envied the people he met who thrived on that predictability. The masons building the walls of the Gomi tunnel, for example, were precise across hundreds and hundreds of bricks. The mortar lines were straight. The brick pattern never varied. The mason’s last brick at the end of a shift was as perfect as the first.

  But they didn’t have to do it in total silence.

  Every heavy stone had to be carefully removed and then gently set in its new resting place so as not to attract the terathans. Hans also couldn’t grunt for a particularly heavy lift, and he couldn’t curse and stomp when he pinched his finger between the floor and a hundred-pound stone.

  Guessing at the time, Hans believed he spent the better part of a day clearing the upper corner of the doorway. The fit was tight, but he wiggled through into the room beyond. What he found was heartening.

  The door to the immediate room was destroyed by the weight of the collapse, but there was a second room off of that one. Based on the broken glass bottles Hans found here, he guessed that it was previously used to store wine and mead. The number of shards on the floor sucked, but this was by far the best spot he had found. The hinges on that second door creaked like shrieking banshees, though, so he still needed that animal fat.

  Otherwise, if he could disguise his entry, he could pass through the first room and then hunker down in the closet. Yeah, this could work.

  Two days later, Hans finished building his secret entry.

  Initially, he wanted a tunnel that went across the floor beneath the rubble and into the blocked room, figuring the farther he got from terathan eye-level, the better, but that was too many damn rocks to move. He settled for a tunnel that was roughly chest height. He used the iron grates from the kitchen to reinforce the tunnel ceiling and replaced all the debris he had so painstakingly relocated to reveal the room in the first place.

  The tunnel opening was parallel to the hallway wall and perpendicular to the doorway. It was wide enough for his shoulders. He practiced getting in quickly a few times to see what it would be like to retreat to this point with terathan pursuers and was pleased with the results. He could run to the tunnel, hook his fingers in the grate, and go in feet first with a quick hop and a kick.

  To hide the portal itself, he lugged a piece of stone table from three floors up down to his hideout. The balance was a bit precarious, but he propped the stone up with his fire poker. Once he was in the tunnel, he could remove the poker to lower the stone into position to obscure the passage. The margin of error was slim, however. Hans imagined himself very easily screwing up an entry and dropping that table fragment directly onto his face.

  But it worked, and the camouflage was reasonably convincing.

  Hans felt quite proud of himself until he started the process of relocating his camp. His shield didn’t fit through the tunnel, and he again wished he could curse loudly to vent his frustrations.

  He tucked it in a nearby room until he could figure out how to solve that problem. He knew, however, that none of his solutions involved rebuilding the tunnel. Not a chance in hells was he doing that much work again, not even in the afterlife.

  Tucked in his hidden closet with a bland ration in his mouth, Hans began preparing for his attack runs on the hive.

  He smiled to himself as he reflected back on his recent efforts.

  I make a pretty good dwarf.

  Mentally reviewing his resources reminded Hans of the mirror fragment he had found earlier. Sacrificing a few seconds of lamp oil, he inspected his new face in the mirror. Yep, he had two eyes, but the scar the Merchant left him was still there. He didn’t look any younger despite how he felt, and when he checked, all of his old scars were in their proper places too.

  Dying is weird.