The reprieve in the tunnel had been brief, feeling like nothing more than a momentary gasp for air before plunging back into the deep. As Josh pushed himself up from the grit, his joints popping audibly, the heat of the dungeon seemed to press against him with renewed malice.

  "One more junction," Brett reminded them, checking the hallway as he went, recognising some of the landmarks from last time. Not far away they would find the chamber, and then the Foundry.

  "Let’s get it done," Bhel grunted, slamming his twin axes together. The sparks that flew from the impact died instantly in the gloom.

  They rounded the corner, and the tunnel floor changed. The rough-hewn obsidian gave way to paved slabs of dark basalt, each one engraved with crude, angular draconic script. The ceiling vaulted upwards, disappearing into a smoky haze, supported by pillars carved to resemble massive, coiling serpents.

  The chamber was different from last time, but in some strange way it felt the same.

  It was a nightmare of architecture. A long, wide, straight corridor stretching for perhaps a hundred yards, lined on both sides with statues of kobold heroes. These weren't the primitive mud-effigies of the upper floors; these were masterworks of iron and stone, depicting warriors with snarling muzzles and raised weapons. Between each statue, shadows pooled like spilled ink, defying the light of Brett’s flames.

  "I don't like this," Perberos whispered, nocking an arrow to his bowstring. The string hummed tight near his ear. "Too many blind spots."

  Josh looked around before speaking, his voice low. "Tighten the circle. We move down the centre. Don't let even the shadows touch you."

  They advanced. The silence was absolute, a heavy, suffocating blanket that amplified the scrape of their boots on the stone. Josh led, his shield raised, his eyes scanning not the statues, but the air around them.

  He didn't see a monster. But he felt something.

  Ten feet to his right, the air shimmered, like heat rising off tarmac on a summer’s day. A distortion in the light, barely a flicker.

  "Right flank!" Josh roared, twisting his hips.

  He didn't wait to see a target. He swung his shield in a brutal, lateral arc.

  CLANG.

  The metal rim connected with something solid in empty air. There was a grunt of surprise, a splash of black, viscous blood, and suddenly a Kobold Assassin flickered into existence, stumbling back with a shattered ribcage. It wore sleek, tight-fitting leather dyed to match the stone, and in its hand was a dagger dripping with a green, oily poison.

  "Invisibility potions!" Brett yelled, charging a firebolt. "They’ll be everywhere!"

  The floodgates opened; the air around them erupted with movement as the "empty" space filled with killers.

  "Get in tight behind me!" Josh ordered.

  They formed a tight defensive knot. Josh faced the front, his shield a mobile wall. Bhel took the rear, his dual axes spinning in a figure-eight zone of death. Brett, Perberos and Carcan were trapped in the centre, the squishy core of the apple. Perberos stood in the inner ring, his eyes darting frantically, his bow held vertically to snap-shoot at point-blank range over Bhel’s head, whilst Brett did his best to send Firebolts around Josh’s bulk.

  A dagger materialized from the air, aimed straight for Josh’s throat. He didn't have time to block. He dropped his chin, letting the blade skitter off his gorget with a screech of steel, and thrust his longsword blindly into the shimmer. The sword bit deep, sinking into soft flesh. He twisted the blade and ripped it free, bringing a fountain of dark blood with it.

  "They’re targeting the weak spots in armour!" Josh shouted, kicking the dying assassin away. "Watch your armpits! Watch your necks!"

  At the rear, Bhel was a whirlwind. The dwarf didn't rely on a shield; he relied on sheer, overwhelming aggression—there was no need to defend if enemies couldn’t get to him. An assassin tried to hamstring him, materialising from a crouch. Bhel didn't even look down. He reversed the grip on his left axe and drove it downward like a guillotine, severing the kobold’s spine.

  "Come on, you ghosts!" Bhel roared, spitting a wad of phlegm at an invisible attacker. "Show yourselves so I can kill you properly!"

  But the assassins were disciplined. They struck and vanished, stepping back into the shadows of the statues to re-apply their stealth. It was a war of attrition. Josh stopped looking with his eyes, they were lying to him. He started listening, feeling the displacement of air, the vibration of a footfall on the stone.

  He caught a dagger on the rim of his shield, twisted his wrist to lock the blade, and punched the invisible attacker in the throat with the edge of the shield.

  "Perberos! Up high! The wizard statue!" Carcan barked.

  The elf didn't hesitate. He spun, drawing his bow to full extension in a fraction of a second. He fired at a patch of empty air near the head of a statue. The arrow thudded home with a wet, meaty impact. An assassin toppled from its perch, an arrow protruding from its eye socket, its invisibility flickering out as it died.

  "I’m firing blind half the time!" Brett panicked, holding a ball of fire in his hand. "They’re moving too fast! If I throw this, I’ve as much chance of hitting Josh as I do a kobold!"

  Brett’s eyes lit up, a dangerous, manic spark that mirrored the crystal on his staff. He understood the assignment: total saturation without friendly fire. He slammed the butt of his staff into the basalt, gathering the dense mana of a Fireball, but instead of projecting a sphere at a target, he visualised the party as the calm eye of a hurricane.

  Instinct took over. He inverted the spell, pushing the pressure outward from his own core. He focused intently on the vector, forcing the flames to slide harmlessly over the floor for the first yard, skimming under their boots, before detonating.

  A shockwave of liquid fire expanded from the party’s feet, rushing outward along the floorstones like a tidal wave. For a split second, the heat was intense but controlled. But just as the flames crossed the perimeter of their formation, the magic released its tension.

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  It exploded in ferocious, rolling gouts of flame that scoured the corridor wall-to-wall.

  Suddenly, six shimmering figures shrieked in unison. The fire didn't just reveal them; it clung to them. Their stealth flickered and died as their leather armour caught light, revealing the burning outlines of the assassins frantically batting at their clothes.

  "Now!" Josh lunged.

  He abandoned the defensive line for a heartbeat, stepping forward to impale a stumbling assassin. He felt the resistance of leather and bone give way to the superior edge of his new sword.

  But the dungeon was cruel. The assassins were merely the hammer; the anvil was yet to come. A deep, grinding sound echoed through the hall. The bases of the massive statues began to slide open, revealing dark pathways.

  "Reinforcements!" Carcan cried, her voice rising in pitch.

  From the darkness, they didn't get more assassins. They got the fodder. Dozens of Kobold Warriors, rank-and-file soldiers with rusted scimitars and wooden shields poured into the hall, chittering and shrieking. They weren't skilled, but they were numerous. They flooded the corridor, clogging the space with bodies, forcing the party to contract their circle.

  "They're trying to crush us with weight!" Perberos noted, firing three arrows in rapid succession. Thwip-thwip-thwip. Three warriors dropped, but six more scrambled over the corpses.

  "Bhel! Keep the back clear!" Josh shouted. "Brett! Now you have targets! Fire at will!"

  Brett grinned, a manic expression illuminated by the fire in his hands. "With pleasure."

  He unleashed Fireballs as if they were going out of fashion, each spell arcing through the smoky air before detonating within the heaving mass of warriors. The resulting inferno engulfed the charging horde, instantly filling the hall with the choking, acrid stench of burning fur and cooking meat. The front rank of kobolds screamed and tried to break, but the mindless momentum of the ones behind pushed them mercilessly forward into the fire.

  The chaos was absolute. Josh was fighting three warriors at once, his shield battering their strikes aside while Fang of the Dawn flicked out like a viper’s tongue. Every parry sent a shock up his arm; every block was a contest of strength.

  Then, disaster struck.

  In the confusion of the melee, an assassin had used the horde as cover. It slipped through Bhel’s guard, diving under the swing of an axe, and reappeared directly inside the circle, right behind Carcan.

  The healer was busy channelling a spell to blind the warriors in front of Josh. She didn't see the shimmer behind her.

  "Carcan! Behind you!" Perberos screamed, dropping his bow and reaching for his belt knife. He was too far away.

  The assassin raised a serrated dagger, aiming for the healer's kidney.

  Josh saw it. Something inside him flared, highlighting where the attack would land. He was out of position, his sword arm extended parrying a warrior to the front. Turning to run would take too long.

  So he didn't turn. Instead, he drove his heels into the basalt floor, channelling strength into his legs. He launched himself backwards, tucking his sword tight against his chest to avoid skewering his own party. He became a human battering ram, throwing his entire armoured weight into the space behind him.

  He slammed into Carcan, the impact of his backplate against her shoulder knocking her sideways just as the dagger descended. The blade missed her spine by an inch, slicing through the fabric of her robe and grazing her side, but the lethal strike hit empty air.

  Josh landed hard but rolled with the momentum, coming up in a crouch right next to the surprised assassin. Before the creature could recover, Josh unleashed the energy coiled in his sword arm. His blade flashed upward in a rising cut, severing the assassin’s hand before continuing through its jaw.

  "Get up!" Josh roared, grabbing Carcan by the collar with his shield hand and hauling her to her feet. He brought his sword up instantly, deflecting a warrior’s scimitar that was aiming for his exposed neck.

  "I'm bleeding!" Carcan gasped, pressing a hand to her side, her eyes wide more from the shock of the impact than the severity of the wound.

  "You're alive!" Josh countered, breathless. "Heal yourself! Bhel, close the gap! We’re too spread out! Defensive square, now!"

  They didn't advance. They couldn't. The flood of enemies was non-stop, a tide of scales and rusted iron that crashed against their line with suicidal fervour. For ten agonising minutes, they didn't move a single inch forward; they fought, killed, and bled just to hold their ground.

  It was the most intense combat Josh had ever experienced, eclipsing even the desperate siege in the goblin dungeon. This wasn't a battle; it was a meat grinder. Kobold warriors threw themselves onto his shield, clawing at the rim, trying to drag it down so the ones behind could stab at his face. He shield-bashed one until its skull cracked, only for another to leap over the corpse, snapping at his gorget. A constant, high-stakes puzzle where a single missed block meant a poisoned wound or a friend’s death.

  "Back! Get back!" Bhel roared, his voice hoarse. The dwarf had abandoned finesse for brutality, his axes chopping rhythmically like a butcher working through a carcass. He was covered in gore from helmet to boot, a grim statue of violence that refused to crumble.

  Their freshly repaired armour was earning its keep. The reinforced plates were scored and dented, covered in a sticky layer of black blood and soot. Josh’s shield arm felt like lead, the muscles burning with lactic acid, screaming for him to drop the guard. He didn't. He couldn't.

  "They're not stopping!" Brett wheezed, sending a Firebolt into the face of a looming warrior. The mage was trembling, his mana reserves scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  "They have to run out of bodies eventually!" Perberos shouted, firing his last arrow into a throat at point-blank range before switching to his daggers.

  And then, as suddenly as it began, the pressure broke.

  A final, desperate surge of kobolds threw themselves at the shield wall. Josh activated Bulwark Aura, channelling his last reserves of stamina and willpower and met the charging enemies, slamming several backwards. Bhel stepped into the gap, severing three heads in three swings.

  The morale of the horde finally shattered. Seeing their brethren piled knee-high around the adventurers, the remaining kobolds shrieked and broke. They scrambled back into the dark chutes and shadows, fleeing the metal-clad demons that refused to die.

  The silence that followed was heavy and wet.

  "The doors," Perberos pointed with a shaking hand towards the far end of the hall. "The path's clear."

  They stumbled through the gap in the aftermath, moving through a field of dissolving corpses. Around them, the mounds of twitching bodies began to lose their coherence, their physical forms unravelling into drifts of black smoke and glittering motes of light as the dungeon reclaimed its own. The party picked through items, taking some of the loot, mainly the premium items that were worth spending the last little bit of energy they had left to collect, but they left behind a lot. Scraps of armour, copper coins, and serrated teeth all clattered to the stone floor like hail, a grim confetti marking the path of their victory.

  The massive bronze doors of the Foundry loomed ahead, radiating a heat so intense it distorted the air. Bhel made a move to grab the heavy iron ring handle, but Josh put a hand out to stop him.

  "No," Carcan rasped, her voice a dry croak. "Not yet."

  She slid down the wall, her legs finally giving out, and hit the hot stone floor hard. "Rest here. Eat. Drink. We don't open those doors until everyone is back in the green."

  "That was... a lot of kobolds," Brett panted, a hysterical edge to his laugh as he watched the last of an assassin fade into nothingness. "Did we... did we kill the entire population of the second floor?"

  "The dungeon doesn't want us here," Bhel grunted, kicking a pile of scrap metal aside to make room to sit. He pulled a whetstone from his pouch and began his ritual of running it along the chipped edge of an axe. "It threw the barn at us. Which is exactly why we aren't leaving until we take its lunch money."

  Josh looked at his hands. They were blackened with soot and bruised under the gauntlets. He felt the phantom sting of the fire, the ache of the blows he had absorbed. But beneath the pain, there was a strange sense of calm. The tunnels had been a furnace, a crucible of violence, and he felt like he was being forged into something harder. Something more resilient.

  He looked at his sword; it was coated in ichor that was rapidly evaporating, but the edge was still perfect. It hadn't failed him.

  They sat in the orange glow of the Foundry doors, the hum of the lava pits ahead vibrating through the floor, preparing themselves for the final threshold. The silence was heavy, but it was the silence of predators catching their breath, not prey waiting to die.