Lucian was the first to react, raising a wall of stone all around the party. Even as it was going up, however, the next shot was incoming. It was aimed at Cas, who was already moving. He had spun around, which meant the bullet took him in the breastplate he was wearing under his robes, instead of his back.

  That probably saved his life, Mel noted with disappointment. The tremendous kinetic force of the shot spun him around as it disintegrated against the apparently invulnerable plate. Then the stone wall rose up to cover them in a dome.

  Another shot spacked against the rock. It made a crater about six inches deep, but the rock wall was thicker than that. Mel stared at the small pit, that was somehow catching fire, and realisation dawned.

  “Oh! You used one of the big guns!” she exclaimed.

  “Got it in one,” Kelsey confirmed. “They could probably shatter this if they kept firing, but they won’t shoot without a target. I didn’t see this coming.”

  “What now?” Mel asked. Kelsey grinned.

  “Back to psychological warfare,” she said, and walked through the rock wall. Mel followed, of course.

  Lucian glared at them when they entered. He was the only active one of the three. He was probably the one who had added the light spell to the ceiling, and now he was healing Cas. Maris was still frozen, staring at her blood-covered hands.

  “Nice hustle,” Kelsey said with approval. “Did he catch some fragments? Better make sure you get allll of them, that stuff is poisonous in a couple of different ways.”

  Lucian only cursed in response.

  “What is it?” Cas asked.

  “The dungeon said that the fragments are poison,” Lucian spat. “I need to get them out, but I can’t seem to move them.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Kelsey sneered. “That metal is rarer than even gold, beyond the classification of noble metal.”

  “A tier beyond noble?” Lucian exclaimed incredulously. “You’ll have to do it then, Cassian. It should be easier since it’s in your body.”

  “That makes no sense,” Cas complained through gritted teeth. “But…”

  Kelsey had already moved on to examining the corpse of Aubey, who had fallen face up. Her face, at least, was still recognisable.

  “Now that’s what I call an exit wound,” she said to Mel. “The bullet must have broken up when it hit her robe. It tore through, but it was in pieces before it even entered her body.”

  She looked up.

  “Hey Maris, do you think you could turn her over? I want to show Mel the other side.”

  Maris jerked into life, staring at Kelsey in horror.

  “You—you killed her! You monster!”

  “I did say I was going to,” Kelsey said. “I thought we were being polite?”

  “Snap out of it, Maristella,” Lucien called. “Wash yourself off and get it together. We have too many problems for you to be wool-gathering.”

  Maris stared at Kelsey a moment longer before tearing her gaze away with visible effort. She glanced over at Lucien and Cas, but decided to see to herself before getting involved.

  A small sphere of water, about a foot across, formed in the air near her. Mel watched with interest as the interior of the giant droplet started to swirl about and then become bloody as Maris used it to clean the blood off her. Mel had never seen someone clean themselves with magic before.

  When Maris was done, she let the ball drop to the ground and moved closer to the others.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, pointedly ignoring Kelsey. “Do we turn back?”

  Lucian sighed. Small slivers of a silvery metal were emerging from Cas’s wound and accumulating on his palm. “I’m not sure we have a choice. We knew there would be risks, but this has proved much more dangerous than we thought it would be.”

  Cas grunted. “That weapon is behind us,” he pointed out. “We’ll have to defeat it if we plan on fighting our way out.”

  “She could have more, or worse ones, further down,” Maris said, glancing at Kelsey.

  Kelsey chuckled evilly. “You guys still haven’t got it,” she said. “I’ve already won.”

  She pointed at the corpse. “Aubey died down here,” Kelsey said. “That means she’s eligible for rebirth as a revenant. Someone who will be only too eager to spill all the juicy secrets of the Wizards Guild to me.”

  Maris and Lucian looked uneasily at each other, but Kelsey wasn’t done.

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

  “From me, to Suliel,” she continued. “And now the nobles know. How much of a disaster is that for you guys? I guess we’ll find out, because there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “What is it?” Cas asked at the suddenly stricken faces of the other two.

  “She says she can bring Aurelia back and interrogate her,” Maris replied. “Get everything she knows.”

  Cas groaned. “We have to put that collar on,” he said firmly.

  “If we get ourselves killed trying, we will have accomplished nothing but giving her more minions!” Maris snapped.

  “If we pull back and send for reinforcements, we can at least ensure the guild knows about this metal,” Lucian said, holding up his hand. “And that gun.”

  “Hmm,” Kelsey said, causing two of the group to snap their gaze to her. “I’m not sure that ‘guns can be made bigger’ is that much of a secret. You’d work it out eventually. But I’d prefer to keep depleted uranium under my hat for the time being.”

  “Is that what this is?” Lucian asked, looking down at the glittering, bloody fragments in his palm. “And just why should we care about your opinion?”

  “Obviously, you should care as a guide to my future actions,” Kelsey said, grinning wolfishly. “What makes you think you’re getting out of here alive?”

  Lucian stared at her for a full second. “We should leave,” he told the rest of the group.

  “What’d she say, to get you so afraid?” Cas snorted. “We can still do this. We need to do this.”

  “It’s just… she’s so confident,” Lucian confessed.

  “Dungeons always are,” Cas stated. “On account of how they’re unbeaten until the right party comes along.”

  “Even so, I don’t think he’s wrong,” Maris said. “I’m voting to leave as well.”

  “Don’t be—” Cas started, but he was stopped by the look in his companion’s eyes. There was a meaning there, that Mel could read, and it seemed he could read it too.

  “Fine,” he said instead. “Get it out.”

  Lucian drew out a metal hoop from underneath his robes. “What about Aurelia?”

  “Just leave her with me,” Kelsey suggested. “I don’t need it to make her a revenant, but there’s this thing I do, where I let the new spawn eat their old brains. They get so excited, it’s like watching puppies play.”

  Lucian’s eyes bulged with anger and disgust, but Maris cut him off.

  “Just hold her hand around the circlet and it should still work,” she said. “She still counts as a person, even if she’s dead.”

  “It’s like you’re not even trying to help me out,” Kelsey complained.

  Ignoring her, the wizards gathered around the metal circlet. Cas held on with one hand and pressed Aubey’s dead hand against the metal.

  “Everybody ready?” Lucian asked. “Then…”

  Nothing happened.

  “What’s wrong?” Maris asked.

  “I don’t know!” Lucian exclaimed. “It’s just not… working.”

  “Oh dear,” Kelsey said. She held her little finger up to the corner of her mouth and smiled. “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Kelsey broke your stupid magic item!” Mel crowed. “Now you’re stuck!”

  “The anchor?” Lucian blurted. “You couldn’t have! You can’t attack something that’s outside of the dungeon!”

  “I can’t go outside the dungeon,” Kelsey corrected. “But ranged weapons have this distressing tendency to keep going in straight lines after they’re fired. Your anchor is abstract art, now.”

  Cas looked at the dismay on his companions’ faces. “I take it this means that our escape route has closed.”

  “She destroyed the anchor,” Lucian said despondently. “We’re trapped here.”

  “Hey, don’t be so glum, chum!” Kelsey said brightly. “You get to die! That’ll be fun, won’t it, Mel?”

  “Yeah!” Mel exclaimed. “All the screaming and the bleeding. I’m looking forward to it!”

  Cas leaned back against the stone wall that surrounded him. “Well, now we have to press on.”

  “It would still be easier to fight our way out than get to the bottom,” Maris argued.

  “Do you want to tell the master that we not only failed to conquer the dungeon, but we lost his recall device?”

  The other two looked at each other. “No,” Lucian conceded. “But I don’t want to die, either.”

  “I didn’t sense any guns behind those doors,” Maris said thoughtfully. “She’s keeping them well away from us for some reason, probably to keep the element of surprise.”

  “If she holds to that pattern—and there’s nothing to say she will— then she won’t use guns on the next two floors,” Cas mused. “The Castle and the Spider’s Lair, they’re both close combat only.”

  “Actually,” Kelsey put in. “I swapped the rats for the spiders. I did have to downgrade the rats, but it let me upgrade the poisons I had available. That doesn’t change his point, though, so go on.”

  Maris glared at Kelsey suspiciously, but passed what she said on. “I shudder to think what upgraded poisons mean, but we should still be warded against them,” she added.

  “There are… three? floors that are open enough for her to use guns,” Cas suggested. “The Forest, the Village and maybe the Vampire Lair. We don’t have good reports of that area.”

  “I don’t think those are impossible to get through, if we’re careful,” Maris said. “We can make shields out of rock, and you can even carry them.”

  “Assuming the dungeon doesn’t have more surprises in store,” Lucian pointed out.

  “What are the chances of that?” Kelsey asked sardonically.

  “There’s nothing to say those surprises won’t be thrown at us as we leave,” Maris said. “She did say that she can’t afford to let us leave.”

  “Fine,” Lucian groaned. “I don’t want to report failure any more than you do. We can’t lug Aurelia all the way to the bottom, though. What are we going to do with her core?”

  “Absorbing it would go against protocol,” Cas said disapprovingly.

  “This is an emergency. We need all the mana we can get.” Lucian replied.

  “I think…” Maris paused for thought. “We can probably get more utility if we don’t absorb it.”

  Lucian looked confused. “You mean… swap it for one of ours?”

  “Swap it as necessary to fill gaps in our capacity,” Maris explained. “For example, if we didn’t need Cassian’s Control at a particular point, he could take it up to get Aurelia’s healing.”

  “I see… doing it that way will be clumsy,” Cas said.

  “But absorbing loses two-thirds of the mana,” Maris retorted. “Whoever gets it will be stronger, but will it be a useful improvement?”

  “Possibly not,” Lucian conceded, “And we won’t get into trouble that way. More trouble.”

  He got up and started rifling through Aurelia’s robes. Some of her possessions he set aside; others found their way into pockets inside his robe. He treated her core differently, carefully removing it by its chain and lowering it into a bag without touching it.

  “That’s everything,” he eventually said.

  The others nodded solemnly. At Maris’s nod, Cas opened up a hole in the dome, facing the exit doors. At a gesture from the Control mage, the doors swung open.

  “Well, go on, you’re letting the mana out,” Kelsey said as they hesitated at the threshold. “I don’t put encounters right at the front door because you adventurers will stick around at the door looking for threats.”

  “There are no skeletons within thirty yards, but there is a mass of them just past that,” Maris said. “I don’t sense any guns though.”

  They slowly walked forward, casting nervous glances as the doors closed behind them.

  “Finally,” Kelsey said. “For this floor, I’ve decided to serve you up a little thing called a Zerg Rush.”