“Champions! Thirty-plus!” Roland shouted before he started firing. His position gave him a few extra seconds of shooting, and he intended to make the most of it.

  Crack. Headshot: a big rat went down. Crack. The second .308 Winchester bullet lifted the top of the Champion’s skull – or maybe just its scalp – like a little pope hat, but the creature only stumbled and kept on going. Roland growled and shot it center mass twice more, which did the trick.

  He switched to a third target and spent ten Endurance on Deadshot. Crack. Another headshot, this one right into one eye that blew out the back of its head in an explosion of bone and brain. Roland spent the cooldown time double-tapping two more targets. One stayed down; the other leaned forward and kept coming, as if it was trying to push its way through the gunfire. Cursing, Roland shot it twice more to put it down.

  By then Bob and Josh had joined in, but Roland realized with a sick feeling that only the Champions he was hitting were going down reliably. In between servicing targets, he spotted some of the apelike beasts slapping at their wounds like he’d seen a Ratling do before, except they barely slowed down. The light bullets were having less effect than they had on the roaches on the previous wave. It took four, five shots or more from 5.56 rifles to bring the big critters down. Their hide wasn’t as good as ballistic plates, but it was definitely bullet-resistant.

  One weird thing of having mental and physical stats twice as high as the human maximum was how much extra time he had to think even as he did something complex like lining up shots and putting giant humanoid rats on the express elevator to hell. Roland was able to assess the situation while killing his seventh target. By then the first Champions had reached the bottom of the road and were entering the landfill’s perimeter.

  Roland exchanged the rifle for his naginata and ghosted down to meet them.

  The good news was that now that the Skill was working out of his Class Core, the pain was gone. Less good was the strangeness that Reaper’s Dance did to his senses.

  Instead of catching glimpses of spiritual energy during the fraction of a second the dash lasted, he was now immersed in the spiritual realm for as long as the Skill was toggled on. Colors shifted, became more muted, thinner. The Champions looked even more monstrous through his ghostly eyes; their cores glowed in sickly, toxic-waste greens and yellows, pulsing like second hearts inside their wide chests.

  And when he began to kill them, he saw their fake souls flee screaming from their bleeding bodies.

  How did he know their souls were fake? He just felt it in his gut and couldn’t begin to explain it.

  Roland moved through them, his disembodied form injuring but not killing them outright. The lieutenants had too many hit points to be stopped the way he had destroyed the bug horde. A few died anyway as the gunfire from the top of the mound and necrotic effects from previous hits finally did the trick, but Roland needed something more destructive.

  Something like materializing in front of the leading Champion and chopping off its head.

  The sudden beheading gave the monsters pause, but Roland only had time to slash another rat in the throat before they pounced on him. Half a dozen three-hundred-pound masses of muscle, claws, and rage, sought to tear him apart or keep him busy while the rest of the horde went past him and wiped out his team.

  He ghosted again, ignoring an almost-painful chill when he left the realm of the living. Reaper’s Dance didn’t have a cooldown, so he could toggle it on and off for as long as he had any Mana left to give. Something occurred to him, and he activated Coup de Grace while imbuing the weapon with the Reaper’s Touch Feat, which turned the physical damage component of the attack into pure Death.

  The effect while in a semi-corporeal state was everything he’d hoped for.

  His naginata, already imbued with twenty-five points of Death damage, slashed through the nearest Champion without inflicting any physical injuries – the ghostly blade passed through the Ratling as if it was made of smoke – but the rat’s Health went from a hundred to zero the moment the weapon touched it. Fifty points of Vital Energy replenished his reserves, and Roland knew exactly what to do.

  He stayed in his ghostly form and cut a swath through Ratlings’ ranks, spending Mana like crazy and relying on the life force he stole from his kills to keep his tank full. Every hit was a kill; his movements were fast and efficient. He became a machine that did its job without mercy.

  Got to kill them all.

  Shotguns were booming now, and the zap of Barton’s Taser mixed with the mini-lightning bolts of Dahlia’s new wand. Some of the bastards had made it past him!

  Roland dashed toward the mound, called the Executioner’s Gun, and put a slug through the head of a Champion heading up the mound. Two other monsters had made it to the top. While Roland shot one of them, Bob raced past Barton, spear in his hands, and intercepted the other one.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The monster caught the spearhead with a taloned hand, ignoring the way the sharp edges cut into its palm and fingers. It dragged Bob closer. Right into range of its claws.

  Roland shot the Ratling Champion at the base of its spine just as it swiped at Bob, who had dropped the spear and lifted his arms in an instinctive defensive posture. The crack when his left forearm broke was audible even through Josh and Wendy’s gunfire. Bob was launched off his feet; his limp body slid to a stop near the edge of one of the pits.

  “Wendy, healing potion! Now!” Roland shouted.

  As he turned around to face the oncoming monsters, he spotted Dahlia lying on the ground. Her Health bar was full, but her Mana had bottomed out.

  Wendy dropped her carbine and grabbed one of the red bottles Roland had left for them. She headed towards Bob as Roland dropped the shotgun and faced the next Champion, spirit blades extended. He tanked a metal club to the head for the chance to move in and stab the monster four times in under a second. The impact on his helmet was barely noticeable in the cold rage that filled him.

  Behind him, Josh’s shotgun boomed twice in quick succession before falling silent. Roland turned and saw a wounded Champion closing in on Josh as he mindlessly pumped the now-empty weapon and uselessly pulled the trigger. Before Roland could react, Barton stepped up, holding the wand Wendy had dropped, and unleashed a continuous stream of energy, his Mana bar disappearing rapidly. The Champion fell; Barton collapsed a moment later.

  There were a handful of monsters left. Roland stood between them and his party, returning to his ghostly form. When the Champions tried to maneuver around him, he turned Judgment Gaze on the farthest one. Bleeding from several wounds already, the Ratling collapsed after one second.

  Five left, four after Josh and Wendy shot one seeking to outflank Roland. The last survivors spread out, three trying to come at Roland from different directions while a fourth went after the two shooters still on their feet.

  It wasn’t a bad plan, if they weren’t dealing with someone with teleport and charge abilities. Roland took down one, ghosting behind it just long enough to hamstring it. Dropping the Dance, he used I’m the Juggernaut to knock another down and drive his naginata clear through its throat.

  Roland left the polearm stuck in the quivering body. He ghosted through one of the two survivors on his way to the next.

  Finishing them off was more butchery than anything you would call a fight. The two Champions still on their feet were helpless against him, and Josh and Wendy took aim at the crippled ones and shot them dead in cold blood.

  “How’s Bob?” Roland asked after the final gunshots echoed away.

  “Alive, but his Health is only up to six and his arm is still broken,” Wendy reported.

  “I’ll work on him,” Roland said, handing her a Mana potion before he took another red bottle out of his inventory. “Feed half of it to each of them,” he told her, indicating their wannabe mages before he headed down the mound.

  Three minutes to go until the fifth wave.

  God help them all.

  * * *

  One Common and an Uncommon Health Potion took care of Bob. Fixing the broken arm required over-healing the injury, so he had to use the contents of both bottles.

  “How are you doing?” he asked his cousin as they made their way back to the top.

  “That hurt like a mother. And I ain’t getting a Purple Heart out of it, either. Sucks to be a civilian.”

  Roland chuckled. “None of us are getting any medals, cuz. But surviving what’s coming is the bigger prize.”

  “Yeah.” Bob paused for a second before continuing. “It’s very different when it’s for real, you know? The way things speed up and slow down, sometimes at the same time. It’s crazy.”

  “I know. You mad I dragged you into this?”

  “Hells no. This isn’t just realer than anything I’ve ever dealt with. It’s important. I’m not a nobody working at a pawnshop I’m never going to own, not if Pops has a say in it. Not anymore. My old man’s gonna have to respect me when he finds out.”

  “You were never a nobody, Bob. But I hear you.”

  “Thanks. What’s the plan, boss-man?”

  “I’m leaving all the guns with you, except for my personalized shottie,” Roland said, placing the weapons on the ground. “Then I’m going to spawn-camp the next wave. Catch them as they come out by the dungeon entrance. You guys engage any leakers. Hoping there won’t be many.”

  “I normally don’t approve of kill-stealing,” Bob said. “But I’m prepared to make an exception. Kill ‘em all if you can.”

  “I’ll definitely try,” Roland told his cousin as he gave the rest of the group a once-over.

  Wendy looked calmer than she had been since the dungeon run began. Josh was still acting a little manic but was concentrating on reloading all his weapons. Barton and Dahlia were arguing over ownership of the wand.

  “You’ve got that enchanted Taser, Dah,” Barton was telling her.

  “It’s crap compared to the wand. And don’t call me Dah, dork.”

  A Dah and her Dork. Good title for a web toon.

  “Hey,” Roland said, interrupting them. “Dahlia has more Mana, thirty-two versus twenty-nine. She gets the wand until she goes below ten Mana, then she’ll hand it to you, Barton.”

  Dahlia looked like she wanted to argue some more but restrained herself. “Okay.”

  “And both of you, keep track of your Mana, you hear me? Doing a few extra points of damage at the expense of becoming a casualty is a bad trade. You can’t defend yourself while unconscious; you’ll get killed or get someone else killed while trying to help your sleeping ass. Got it?”

  Dahlia blushed and looked down. “Yeah.”

  “Got it. Sorry,” the equally abashed Barton said.

  “You’re doing good, both of you, but you gotta do better. Two more waves and then you’ll have a Class and a bunch of superpowers. Eye on the ball. In this case, the ball is, keep your Energy Pools above zero.”

  “Eye on the ball. Spells are my balls,” Barton said. “Magic Missile, Fireball, Bigby’s Hands, Wall of Force...”

  Roland walked away while Barton continued to recite his favorite D&D spells, resisting the urge to comment on ‘spells are my balls.’ He began to jog down Trash Hill. He had less than a minute to make it to the monster’s spawn point, so he ran, immediately breaking every Olympic record in any category that involved putting one foot in front of another.

  He made it to the end of the road with fifteen seconds to spare and got ready.

  The Dungeon didn’t disappoint.