The door wasn’t a door until Marcus pushed on it.

  It looked like a seam in the air, hidden at the back of a set of book cases. Just a crease of pressure shimmering like heat haze. When his gauntlet met it the world thinned, relented, then let him through.

  The team stepped into a new tunnel that could have been somewhere else completely and shared no resemblance to the ruined manor they had just been in. Around him were the walls of a tunnel with stone ribbing and ancient images showing on the stone walls. They might have once been grand paintings, but were now just flakes of paint and gold leaf. The tunnel was cool and smelled like freezer burn.

  Marcus’s HUD lit up the hallway and provided all the data he needed in the moment. A bar compass. A faint heartbeat line for each of his team, stacked down the left side of his vision and aligned by their distance from him, with health and energy levels.

  HIRO Monk

  KADE Rogue

  AILA Healer

  “Eyes up,” Marcus said, voice kept level.

  “Always,” Elira said with a smile. Her HUD laced dotted lines through the tunnel, pinging angles, ranges, occlusions.

  Hiro rolled his shoulders in the dim light. He wore no plate, no leather, just wraps, a robe and a sleeveless jacket reinforced with carbon fiber threads. His knuckles were raw but his eyes were bright.

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

  Kade was already shadow at the edge of sight, his metamaterial cloak breaking his outline into subtle suggestions. For the team though the HUD outlined him in a soft grey silhouette.

  Aila stepped through the seam last. She held her staff in a low guard and once she was in the tunnel she sent a thought through to the faceted bulb at the top. A glow the colour of an expensive pearl swelled, soft, not too bright – tuned to provide the team with light while still keeping the cameras happy. “I’m through,” she said. Calm voice. Marcus liked that; you could never be sure with the newer adventurers.

  The tunnel led downhill a ways and then seemed to forget where it was headed as it skewed sideways and up before finally going flat again. Marcus watched the groups shadows bounce ahead as his breath plumed and curved towards the ceiling.

  “It’s like the builders changed their mind about where they were going every few meters,” Elira murmured.

  They followed along for 15 minutes without seeing a single break in the stone walls until it finally opened up into a chamber ahead of them.

  “If it weren’t for the old paintings on the wall, I’d say this was more like a sewer than a tunnel leading anywhere useful,” Kade said. “You know, like for water runoff or whatever.”

  Nobody answered him. Ahead, in the dark of the chamber, came a soft hissing sound.

  “Contacts,” Elira said softly. But they all saw the three red dots appear on their HUD minimaps ahead. The ANIP picking up the hostiles even before they could be seen in the gloom.

  “Snakes?” Kade asked, moving closer to the wall.

  “I think I hear… I don’t know. Clicking? Scuttling?” Aila said, stretching her staff forward to try and illuminate as far ahead as possible.

  “Gods, please let it not be spiders,” Elira said in mock horror as she adjusted her HUD settings and activated a thermal overlay. “Huh. I see something. Cold cores…”

  “Shit, snakes then,” Kade said. “I hate snakes.”

  “No, I see legs. Wow. Lots of legs heating up as they move. Some sort of insect maybe.” Elira switched her HUD back to regular vision.

  “More of those Stone Carapace things maybe,” Marcus said and took a few steps towards the chamber, shield held up in front of him. His HUD automatically painted a light, semi-transparent cone in front of it, showing the optimal coverage arc.

  He expanded the Team Vitals view and ensured there were threshold alarms set on everyone’s stamina and health dips.

  “Everyone ready?” he asked. No one answered, but looking around showed him everyone was. “Okay, on me,” he said. “Slow and steady, they’ll come in low but watch the walls and ceilings.”

  They crested a lip into a chamber that appeared to be both cavern and refinery, a half-formed memory of a place that had never quite been. Aila’s staff lit the area and showed rows of stone columns and ore veins sparkling in the walls. Half-constructed gantries started and stopped in midair. Gold coins stood on their sides, fused in the rock. In the far wall, a mouth-shaped gap led deeper in.

  The hiss came back, but louder and impossible to pin point as it echoed around the room.

  “On the ceiling,” Elira said, drawing an arrow back to her shoulder and holding position.

  Marcus looked up and saw them: crablike things the size of large dogs, all spikey plates and legs with long sharp mandibles clacking in front of them. They clung to the stone with too many legs and spittle sprayed out with every hiss. Their bodies glowed with soft light.

  Their shells were all a little different. One was chalk-white and another looked like it had absorbed the ore from the walls, reflecting the light with a dull metallic shine. They bobbed up and down on their legs like they were exercising, and wherever carapace touched stone, frost formed and sublimated out, in little rings. Their cores glowed a cold blue when they moved.

  “Aila, start us off on my mark. And nobody touch those shells if you can help it,” Marcus said and looked over his shoulder at Elira.

  “Tagged them all,” she said. Marcus nodded and turned back to the threat. Soft outlines showed a wave of the creatures coming towards them.

  Kade faded from view but the HUD showed him sliding left along the wall.

  The closest crawler unhooked itself from the ceiling and dropped to the ground in front of Marcus with a spatter of cold dust. Two more followed. Then the rest let go in a soft wave.

  “Now,” Marcus said.

  The world went white and silver. Aila snapped her staff forward and a blossom of sparks bloomed midair, burst, and then fell like a rain of glittering knives. It looked like a festival flashbang. The effect carried a little heat and a lot of sensory violence. Ahead of them, the crawlers’ glowing cores dimmed, their legs fumbled, their mandibles clacked.

  Elira’s bow thrummed. Her arrow followed a dotted line perfectly and buried itself in the joint of a crawler’s third leg, right where it met the body. It shrieked in a surprisingly loud voice and spun in a circle, abdomen scraping cold sparks on the stone below it. Another line, another shot, and she pinned a second crawler through the mouth. Elira breathed like a metronome. Shot, exhale, shot.

  Marcus advanced. The shield took the first impact with a bell-like krang that he felt through his bones. He could feel the metal cool even through his gauntlet. He ignored the advice popping up on his ANIP and trusted in the weight of his weapons. Bash with the shield, rotate, boot stomp. His sword came around in a short arc and punched into the soft joint above a second crawler’s neck. He twisted and ripped it free again, shoving it off the blade with his shield rim.

  Hiro slid into the gap that Marcus had made in the front line. His right hand flexed and a thread of violet light coiled around his knuckles. He centered himself mid-motion, inhaled, stepped around the next crawler’s lunge, and drove his glowing fist into its face.

  Purple light met blue core. The creature's head only got in the way.

  It staggered back, cracks racing across its front plate, a flower of fractures. Hiro’s fire qi burned along the fault lines with a sizzle like ice on a skillet. The creature convulsed and went still, its legs folding like umbrellas.

  “Good hit,” Marcus said.

  Hiro didn’t smile this time. He checked his breathing, shook his hand as the violet guttered and died. “I can hold more,” he said, a little breathless. “Just – need clean lines.”

  “Then we’ll get you clean lines,” Marcus said.

  The crawlers poured across the floor now, but seeing how easy they were falling, Marcus was ready. His HUD painted their approach angles with red chevrons, making it easy to see where they were going to end up. He stepped in with shield and sword to slow them down.

  Arrows whistled through the air and Hiro circled around the outside of the group raining down blows and dancing away. Marcus saw Hiro’s HP drop suddenly but Aila was there with a quick healing spray where a set of mandibles had scored across Hiro’s ribs, tearing right through his jacket.

  Kade appeared behind the wave of creatures and became a wedge of violence, stabbing with those wickedly long daggers of his. Leg segments flew and blue blood sprayed. He vanished again as the rear line spun to face him.

  “Another cluster coming in,” Elira said, voice sharp and precise. “Just three, but one of them is bigger.”

  Bigger was an understatement. It didn’t drop from the ceiling like the others, it plummeted and hit the floor with a boom that echoed around the room.

  “Shit,” Marcus said. The heavy was coming straight for him.

  He set his shield and took the first crash. The ANIP redlined impact strength. Blue numbers scrolled. Marcus bent like a tree in a storm and then straightened again, teeth bared. A giant claw reached around the shield and snapped towards his head. “Hiro,” he said.

  “On you,” Hiro said. He was already there, sliding low along Marcus’s right, purple light coiling again. The heavy reared, plates grinding. Elira’s arrow rang off its crown. Aila flicked her staff and threw a curtain of sparks that made the smaller creatures fall back.

  “Give me a hole,” Hiro said.

  Marcus gave it to him. He stepped right, away from the claw at the edge of his shield, and then stomped left hard and slammed his shield toward the thing’s jaw with both hands. The creatures head snapped up and back and both of its claws flew up into the air in reaction.

  Hiro stepped in immediately and went for the soft tissue at the now exposed neck. His fist landed with a thump. The heavy’s core lit purple from the inside like a lantern. It staggered, spitting cold shards of spittle. Hiro punched in rapid fire. Until the thing stopped moving.

  “Clear,” Kade said from nowhere, a breathless laugh buried in it. He drew his dagger out from the final crab. Elira stood beside him, collecting arrows.

  The chamber went quiet.

  Marcus set his shield down for a second and felt the tremor in his forearm. The metal of his armour was icy cold and covered in frost.

  “Well,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s any loot in here – that wasn’t too bad.”

  As if on cue a blast of cold air billowed out from the tunnel on the far side of the chamber. There was no hiss but a steady cadence of clacking mandibles. From out of the dark, two huge claws grasped at the edge of the doorway and heaved a monstrous crab monster through. It was the same as the ones they had already killed, but huge. Big enough to eat one of the smaller ones in a single bite.

  “You had to say it didn’t you Marcus.” Elira shook her head and drew back a fresh arrow.

  ***

  HEX says dungeons are a side effect of us coming here. Quantum ripples or something. Little stress fractures where realities don’t quite agree with each other. I think they have way too much confidence in their theory.

  And the locals don’t buy it.

  According to some of the people I’ve talked to on our travels, the dungeons have always been here. Older than kingdoms. Older than maps. They talk about them the way sailors talk about storms—not random, but present and mapable dangers.

  They have whole adventurers guilds set up to neutralize dungeons. Although they can’t close them like we can. And we’ve closed a lot… the Iron Fangs alone have closed out almost 30 dungeons in our time here.

  The killing part is easy at first. We were trained to kill the monsters. We go into the dungeons, they snarl, they attack, they die. Clear outcomes.

  It’s the others that stay with you.

  The ones that talk. Bargain. Beg. Is a goblin a monster?

  Those nights are harder. You lie awake replaying conversations instead of fights. Wondering where the line really is, and whether you crossed it—or whether it was drawn that way long before you arrived.

  If dungeons are just quantum ripples, then the killing doesn’t really matter. Maybe that’s why the eggheads feed us that line.

  Personal Journal

  Iron Fangs

  Marcus Steele; Knight