The Gravekeeper: Level Sixty-Five Elite Dungeon Boss

  Current Difficulty: Matched

  Welcome to the catacombs, friends. Enjoy your stay.

  Roaming Boss - This boss can appear in other monsters’ lairs, or anywhere throughout the dungeon.

  Dominion Aura - This boss’s lair grants it the Elite status.

  Myriad - This boss’s Elite state consists of innumerable members of a swarm, and will continue swarming until conditions change.

  Multi-Phasic - This boss must be defeated multiple times. It will change properties as the fight progresses.

  I opened my eyes. But I almost couldn’t tell that I had. All around me was nothing but darkness—darkness, and a faint orange glow from the Voltsmith’s Grasp. I held it over my head, lighting up the area around me just a tiny bit. It wasn’t enough to see anything, but it was enough that when I staggered toward what I thought might be a wall, I saw the skull a second before I felt it with my hand.

  “Catacombs…catacombs…” Which city had been the one with catacombs? I couldn’t remember. That had never been important to me. Now it felt like something I needed to know.

  “Hal!” Tori’s voice echoed from far away.

  I whirled toward it, trying to find my way through the pitch-black catacomb. She had to be somewhere around her. “Tori! Where are you?”

  That was dumb. She couldn’t have a better idea where she was than I did. What I needed was light—real light, not the orange glow of my gauntlet. And I needed it before the Gravekeeper found me…or Tori.

  I closed my eyes and tried to listen for a response.

  Nothing.

  No. Something. Footsteps. Shuffling footsteps. From all directions. There had to be dozens of them. More. It was just like outside, but worse. I readied the Trip-Hammer; the Gravekeeper had Myriad, so we’d be fighting a bunch of them. The glow from the Voltsmith’s Grasp almost lit up the room. I braced as the footsteps closed in.

  Something hit me from behind, and I whirled. The Trip-Hammer revved.

  “Oof!” Tori said as she bounced off me and onto the ground.

  The footsteps had stopped. I tried not to laugh, but couldn’t stop myself. As I relaxed, the Trip-Hammer hit the stone floor with a thud. “Good to see you, kid.”

  “I saw you from a long ways away,” Tori hissed. Now that she’d found me, her voice dropped to almost nothing. She paused, bumped into me, and shook a little. “Can you put that out?”

  “Not really. I can take it off, but…it’s a lot of power.”

  “Then get ready. If I can find you, the Gravekeeper can, too.”

  By the time anything found us, Tori and I had found a room with ‘only’ three entrances. It wasn’t ideal, but in this maze, it was as close to a bottleneck as we were going to get. Then I got ready.

  The plan was simple; we had other light sources, they just weren’t what I’d thought about first. I’d wanted torches or candles. Maybe a flashlight.

  Instead, I had three rovers.

  I deployed one to each of the room’s entrances, cannon facing inward so the single rail gun wouldn’t target anything right away, then stopped each of them from moving. None of the three would return to me after firing, which would give Tori and me a clear view of each entrance. As for us, we were pressed against one of the skeleton-covered walls, waiting for the undead—or the boss—to show up.

  And from the sounds echoing through the catacombs, something was on the way.

  “Okay, Tori, remember, lock down left and right as best you can,” I murmured into the darkness. I couldn’t see her; we didn’t have enough light for that. “I’ll fight anything that comes through the front.”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Tori snapped. She was still shaking. She hadn’t stopped. I had a pretty good idea why, but it wasn’t like I could do anything about it except make sure we had plenty of light for any future dungeons and try to get her through this one. It occurred to me that we hadn’t really fought in the dark before.

  The sounds of metal scraping on bone echoed closer. I hadn’t been much of a hunter, but I’d butchered enough pigs to recognize it. A knife on a long bone—a femur or upper arm, whatever they were called.

  “Get ready,” I said.

  Tori readied a spell as the sound of bone scraping on metal—or metal scraping on bone—got closer. Then a hum-whump sound echoed off the wall. One of the rail gun rovers had fired.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “They’re already in the room!” I yelled. “How?”

  I didn’t have time to hear her answer. The Trip-Hammer revved, and it smashed down into a skeleton. Bone flew across the room in a wide arc as the rib cage exploded, then the spine. It went down. Another took its place, looming out of the darkness.

  Tori dropped her first Gravity Well on one entrance, then the second on the other, locking them both down. I stepped across to block another undead from reaching her; it lashed out with a long, machete-like knife and scoured a thin, bright line across the Trip-Hammer’s grip. Then the two hammers whirred and clicked, and its upper body disintegrated.

  A second rover fired its shot, and bone dust sprayed across the room.

  Tori slid behind me. Her two Gravity Wells were still working; as I sidestepped again to dodge a skeleton’s gripping hand, dozens of flailing undead caught the corner of my eye.

  Then Tori Pushed them back down the hallway and into the murky, midnight darkness. But even as she did, more surged into the room.

  “It’s Myriad!” I said. “We’ve gotta figure out a solution!”

  Tori ducked around me and Pulled another group of skeletons, then dropped a Gravity Well on them before they could recover. Then she pointed. “Straight ahead! Less enemies that way!”

  “Got it. You first!”

  As she broke and ran for the less crowded-looking tunnel, I revved the Trip-Hammer again and swung it in a wide arc, backstepping the whole time. The rovers that had fired returned to me, slotting into their spots on my pack and starting to recharge.

  Retreating felt wrong. But we couldn’t keep fighting against an endless swarm of skeletons. Even if they did die quickly, we only had to take a few cuts for every hundred, and they’d overwhelm us. The Gravekeeper was Level Sixty-Five; we weren’t going to out-muscle it.

  This was a problem with no straightforward solution.

  “Tori,” I said as I fought a walking retreat against the oncoming skeletons, “You ever play anything like this?”

  “Yeah. There are all sorts of dungeons with gauntlet bosses,” she said. A Gravity Well dropped behind us, and another in front. “Lemme think.”

  “I’m thinking, uh, we need to find whatever’s causing them. Otherwise, we’ll fight them forever.”

  “The necromancer behind the skeletons. Yeah, that’ll work.”

  “Where?”

  Tori paused. Then she Pushed all the skeletons that’d piled up in front of her. “That’s the bad news. If it’s set up like I’d expect it to be, the Gravekeeper’s the necromancer and the skeletons—and it’ll be as deep in here as it can get.”

  We delved deeper into the catacombs. And the further we got, the fewer undead caught up to us from behind. It seemed like they were starting to lose our trail. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that it was still darker than the cornfields on a moonless, cloudy night, and I could barely see a hammer’s length in front of me. That left me with only a second to club a monster to death before it lashed out at me; by the time we found a flight of bone-covered stairs downward, I was covered in bleeding wounds.

  And the completion percentage for Rosehill kept creeping up; it was at twenty-six percent now. Whoever was in here with us was making more progress than we were.

  “Who do you—“ Tori paused, dropped a Gravity Well, and then Crushed the trio of skeletons into powder “—who do you think’s in here with us? I doubt it’s anyone we know, huh?”

  “It’s probably Bobby Richards,” I joked.

  Tori went quiet, considering—and casting. “I could see him doing better here than we are here. He knows how to move, and he’s not getting bogged down in skeletons in an underground crypt.”

  I pulled up the dungeon’s status—and my objectives—again.

  Tier Four Dungeon: Rosehill Mausoleum (Floor One)

  Objective: Enter the Catacomb (3/3)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 27%

  At least the monsters went down quick. For a Tier Four dungeon, the skeletons weren’t very tough. But we weren’t gaining any experience in the catacombs. If we couldn’t figure out how to gain a little, we’d get worn down. And whoever was in here with us was. I could only hope it wasn’t leftover gangsters or Fireborn Crusaders. Whether they were willing to violate their truce or not, I didn’t know—and I didn’t want to find out.

  I closed the menu. Then I opened it again. “Tori, block both sides for a minute.”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. I think we missed something. Something important.” I stared at the messages again. Then it hit me. “The Gravekeeper’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, it’s gone?”

  I set the Trip-Hammer down heads-first. “I mean, it’s not a dungeon objective right now. What is going on here?” I closed my eyes and listened.

  And the dungeon pulsed with energy. With…Charge?

  Yeah. With Charge. It sounded just like when I ran Charge out of a battery and through a lens array—the same slowing and speeding up. Had I heard this elsewhere? I couldn’t be sure.

  And if I hadn’t, why not? What was so special about Rosehill? And what was going on with my Awareness? Why was I noticing this now?

  “Tori, something’s going on here,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’re stopping in the middle of a dungeon,” she said. She had the same look on her face she always did when she was reading System messages. Then she nodded. “Alright. The Gravekeeper’s gone. Whoever’s in here didn’t kill it, or it’d be marked dead. Either it disappeared, the dungeon decided to get rid of it, or…something else. Right?”

  Before I answered, the Gravity Well behind us overloaded, and a moment later, Tori let the other one go. Skeletons rushed us. The Trip-Hammer revved. Bone shards filled the air, and we kept moving down the stairs, deeper into the darkness. A cut burned across my cheek, and I blinked blood out of my eye.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the hallway widened into a long, cubby-lined room. Every cubby housed a single skeleton, and each of these ones wore plate armor and carried a greatsword or axe. A single torch burned turquoise over each cubby. As I stepped into the room, the first set flickered out as if blown by a gust of wind, and the first four monsters started to move. Nameplates appeared over their heads.

  Crypt Guardian: Level 59 Monster

  They were strong. And there were at least a dozen of them—probably more.

  “All the way across!” I said, pointing. In the faint, blue-green glow, a narrow doorway loomed, promising darkness—and a bottleneck to trap the monsters behind while we fought them.

  Tori nodded. “Don’t have to tell me twice, Hal.” She broke into a sprint, not bothering with her magic. I didn’t take a swing at either of the four monsters, either; my goal was to get across the room and back into the tight hallways, where the Trip-Hammer couldn’t get a full swing, but at least I wouldn’t be surrounded on all sides.

  Only on two.

  To my surprise, a portcullis made of long bones slammed down behind us as we ducked through the tiny passageway. A second later, the first Guardian’s sword crashed into the gate, which shuddered behind us. “Got a minute. Maybe two. Keep moving?” Tori asked.

  I shook my head. “This is bad. Let’s not make it worse. We don’t have any reason to push further, anyway.”

  “Yeah. We’ve only got one objective,” Tori said quietly.

  A voice drawled from the passageway, and a white suit appeared in the darkness. “Survive.”