The drive to Rosehill was quiet.

  It was only a half a mile or so from the north side of Norse Street; Tori and I stopped the Explorer well outside the wrought iron, fog-wall-backed fence that circled it. “I’ve got a little work to do, Tori,” I said. “You keep watch. Any Zomberserkers or anything like that show up, you let me know, alright?”

  “Alright.” She settled in on the Explorer’s hood and stared out at the cemetery.

  I’d never explored Rosehill. Back home, cemeteries were places for family to visit their loved ones, not somewhere to go to connect with nature or anything like that. You wanted that, you just left town and got out past the fields. Plenty of nature in western Nebraska, as far as you could see—and farther.

  But in Chicago, folks didn’t have that choice, so some people visited the cemetery like it was a park. I didn’t get it. But then again, I didn’t have to.

  I emptied out my inventory, pulling a selection of green items I hadn’t ripped the Charge from yet and a half-dozen tools—plus the inert frames of the battle rovers. Then I got to work.

  The first issue was the Explorer. I’d considered that even though Charge made it fuel-efficient, I’d have to do some refueling occasionally. If I wanted to do anything with the Charge I’d dedicated to it, I’d need to empty it. So that was the first step: draining the battery.

  It went pretty easily. I’d done this before—breaking my own creations—and as soon as I cracked the battery casing, all thirty-six Charge I’d put into the Explorer started evaporating. I’d have to figure out how to recapture some of that, since it was a good three-plus magical items to recharge it, but it did free me up to get the battle rovers up and running again.

  That took a lot longer.

  Without the proper tools, and with only thirty-six Charge to play with, I ended up with a trio of single-shot rail-gun rovers—and it was almost dark by the time I’d finished. Tori kept bumping her heels against the Explorer’s bumper, and the rhythmic thumps were almost enough to drive me insane. At last, I stood up and slammed the SUV’s back hatch closed. I’d also thought about the Bio-Electric Scanner, but decided against it—it wouldn’t help us in an undead dungeon.

  “You done?” Tori asked.

  “Yep. I’ve got the squad back together.” With the bots, I felt a little more confident that I could handle whatever Rosehill Cemetery threw at me. But still…something about jumping into an undead-themed dungeon—and the hardest one we’d fought through so far—at night felt wrong. “Do you want to wait for morning?”

  Tori rolled her eyes and slid off the hood. She stared at the fence and the open gate with the fog wall behind it. Then she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’ll probably be nighttime inside anyway. Let’s go.”

  I nodded, pulled the Trip-Hammer out of my inventory, and headed for the door.

  Tier Four Dungeon: Rosehill Mausoleum (Floor One)

  Objective: Defeat The Gravekeeper (0/1)

  Objective: Enter the Catacomb (0/3)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 8%

  Open Environment: Dungeon monsters can leave this dungeon for limited time periods.

  Activation Code: The dungeon’s boss will only become active once certain conditions are met.

  Open Floor: Once triggered, the dungeon’s bosses will roam freely.

  Guarded Entrance: You cannot leave this dungeon until this floor is completed.

  Gauntlet: Dungeon monsters respawn quickly. They do not drop experience orbs until the dungeon is cleared.

  Environmental Hazard: This dungeon’s denizens are not its only threat.

  “Six rules? Really?” Tori asked as we stepped through the fog into…more fog.

  A lot more fog.

  The dungeon was covered in roses to the point where we couldn’t see over the massive, thorn-covered hedges. Running through and reinforcing them were the strangely colored brambles that had taken over Chicago in patchwork sections. I thought about giving the hedge in front of us a tap with the Trip-Hammer, just to see how tough it was. Then I shook my head and put the weapon on my shoulder instead.

  More concerning was the fog. It was so thick it was almost wet, and it covered the floor to a little over knee-high. When I took a step through it, it parted for only a second before rushing in like a river to fill the space I’d been standing. “That’s not good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…look, I’ve seen foggy days like this on the farm. Not many, but a few. I bet the environmental hazard is on the ground. Probably open graves.” I shivered involuntarily.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Tori nodded. Then she stopped. Her eyes crossed as she reread her system interface. “Nine percent completed. It was eight a minute ago. Hal, someone else is in here with us!”

  She was right. When I double-checked, the dungeon’s percentage tracker had, indeed, ticked up to nine percent. I groaned. “Okay. Either we’re looking at another situation like the Twilight Menagerie, where there’s a team in here that’s not ready for this and they’re trying their best but in over their heads, or it’s someone who knows exactly what they’re about. Either way, we need to be cautious, because they might not be friendly.”

  “But they might be, right?” Tori asked. “They might be willing to team up to get this place under control.”

  “They might…or they might be gangsters, or something like the Fireborn Crusade. That’s why we need to be careful. Now, let’s start working through this maze.”

  As we picked our way through Rosehill’s first floor, a couple of things became abundantly clear.

  First, the roses’ thorns were ridiculously sharp.

  They sank into the leather armor that covered most of Tori’s body and left scratches across the steel plates on mine. And worse, they didn’t break off. They just kept cutting. It was almost impossible to avoid them, too. The first time a zombie jumped at us, it didn’t even try to bite; it just slammed Tori into a wooden lattice covered in roses and let the spikes do the work.

  I killed it, but Tori didn’t need to be taking that kind of damage.

  “Let’s slow down a little,” I muttered. The fog had only grown thicker to the point where I couldn’t see what was next. Without my vision—and with the Bio-Electric Scanner basically worthless against the dead—I found myself relying more and more on my ears and nose.

  And that led to the second problem: the constant moaning and stink of rotting meat. The whole dungeon smelled like the time we’d had to slaughter sick pigs to stop it from spreading through our entire stock. We couldn’t do anything with the meat—no one would buy it, and we couldn’t feed it to anything—and it’d been July. The stink was unbelievable until the bugs and crows eventually took care of it. It was like that, but instead of one corner of a fallow field far from the rest of the farm, it was everywhere.

  And it was following us. I knew that from the moaning.

  “Hal, I’ve definitely seen this movie. Probably a dozen times. We’re looking for the Gravekeeper, and we won’t find him by wandering. We need to trigger the set-piece,” Tori said.

  “Yeah, if it’s a movie, sure.” I paused. If it followed the same, video game-like rules we’d seen so far during Integration, Tori was probably correct.

  That’s when the first real wave of zombies hit us.

  One second, it was quiet—as quiet as the constant moaning and groaning could get, anyway. The next, the zombies’ sounds had increased to a fever pitch, and worse, their feet scraping across the gravel path almost drowned out their voices.

  “How many do you think there are?” Tori asked.

  I didn’t have time to answer. The first one stepped out of the fog only a dozen feet from us.

  Zomberserker: Level 57 Monster

  I tensed. If the others were as powerful…we were in trouble.

  The two scythe-like blades matched the Zomberserkers we’d fought in Norse Street. As it rushed me and slammed them toward me, I let the Trip-Hammer rev and crashed it through the rusty weapons, then whirled the hammer around my head and slammed the Zomberserker itself into a nearby hedge. It squirmed there for a minute—at least until the hammer vaporized its top half.

  “Hal!” Tori yelled. I spun around and took in the wave of zombies.

  They weren’t all Zomberserkers. That was the good news; most of them sat in the Level 28 to Level 35 range—cannon fodder. Easy kills. Tori could probably mop up dozens of them at a time.

  But there were so many, and there were Zomberserkers—and worse—mixed in with them.

  I fired my rail gun into the swarm, knocking two zombies out of the fight, then deployed my rail gun rovers. They weren’t going to kill enough to matter, but I didn’t care. We needed reinforcements. Any reinforcements.

  All three picked targets and fired their single shots instantly, and three more zombies went down.

  “Tori, thoughts?” I asked.

  She had a pair of Gravity Wells down, forcing the swarm through a tiny gap that, so far, had kept their numbers from being overwhelming.

  “This is just like that one game. There should be a bridge nearby, or a house. Something we can use as a choke point!”

  “Your spells are a choke point!” I shouted back. A zombie’s fangs clamped down on my wrist, and I slammed the Trip-Hammer’s handle into its skull. It caved in, covering my arm with rotten brains. The zombie let go, and I backpedaled away from the rest of the horde.

  “Yeah, but we’re not trying to kill zombies!”

  “We’re not?”

  “No. We’re trying to get the Gravekeeper to spawn! We need to figure out the Activation Code, and I bet it’s not massacring zombies!” One of Tori’s Gravity Wells collapsed, and she Pushed the pile of undead away, into the rose hedge.

  “Okay, I’ll figure it out!”

  “Well, hurry!” Tori yelled. “We need to break off!”

  She was right. The swarm could afford to lose hundreds of zombies if it meant killing us—and with the Gauntlet rule, there’d always be more. Forever. Unless we cleared the floor.

  Violence wasn’t the solution. At least, not the best one. The huge numbers of enemies could handle everything we could throw at them.

  The next couple of minutes were pure violence, though. Zombies died everywhere, heads crushed and bodies shattered by Tori’s spells, my hammer, and the rovers’ periodic shots as they re-Charged and returned to the battle.

  And the whole time, we kept losing ground. The horde pushed us through the dungeon, past tombs made of bones and an occasional bonfire. Tori stared at the first fire, then shook her head. “Too obvious!”

  I had no idea what she meant, but we kept fighting.

  The whole time I crushed zombies, though, I was thinking. Hard.

  The Gravekeeper.

  Activation Code.

  The Catacomb.

  We were missing something.

  I glanced at Tori. Or at least, where she was supposed to be. But she was gone. I could hear her yelling. Then, the very ground rumbled, and I lost my balance. As I hit the ground, I caught a glimpse of her hand sticking up from a hole in the ground.

  Then it closed with a thud, topsoil settling rapidly.

  Tori was gone.

  Or…was she? I pushed myself to my feet and backpedaled away from the horde of zombies. Without her spells, all I could really do was retreat—and think. The Catacombs. That sounded like an underground area. Some big cities had catacombs filled with skulls. Europe somewhere.

  I pulled up the System message with the dungeon’s information.

  Tier Four Dungeon: Rosehill Mausoleum (Floor One)

  Objective: Defeat The Gravekeeper (0/1)

  Objective: Enter the Catacomb (2/3)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 12%

  Enter the Catacomb. Tori had done it. Somehow, she’d done it.

  And she’d done it by—

  Before I could figure it out, I ran out of ground beneath my feet. As I plunged through the fog and down into an open grave, the light above me cut off, and the System message changed.

  Objective: Enter the Catacomb (3/3)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 13%