[Alert]

  Imminent breach of the (error) containment.

  Resolution required.

  The message flashed in front of him, causing him to nearly trip. “We’ve got a problem, Snik,” Elijah whispered to him, relaying the message he’d received to him. He sent a command recalling the bat that he’d sent in the other direction. If they were heading towards the containment breach, he wanted to have both his scouts on standby.

  “I am curious about what the mountain goblins contained down here that the last adventurers to come this way could not destroy,” Snik answered. His tone was reverent, and he did not break stride. Instead, the shaman seemed to speed up. Elijah hurried to follow the goblin.

  “If this thing breaks out,” Elijah told him through heavy breaths. “Unless I specifically request otherwise, I need you to let me handle it.”

  He was excited about the possibility of a solo boss fight, though he didn’t know what he would face. The experience alone should be enough to push him to level twenty.

  As they continued walking, Elijah could tell they were getting closer by the lights on the floor growing closer together. They came out of the hallway and entered a large cylindrical chamber. The room fit the same aesthetic as the rest of the dungeon. Worn metal gears slowly turned within the wall, serving some unknown purpose—if they served any purpose other than to look cool in this game world—and pipes ran haphazardly along the wall. On the far side of where they came in was a massive door.

  The door had several glowing runes etched into it, emanating the same silver light as the first vault room, but between the lines of the runes there were more carvings. Elijah couldn’t help himself. He moved close to the door and looked closely at the carvings. There were several repeating patterns. Magic insignias, tools such as picks and hammers, and a carving of the creator of all of this. The mountain goblins.

  Except they weren’t goblins at all. It was hard to see through the aging of the engravings, but he could pick out the general form. They appeared human, with short, stocky builds, round ears, and long flowing beards. The mountain goblins were actually dwarves.

  A voice cracked out through hidden speakers before Elijah could reveal this information to Snik. “A new challenger approaches to test my resolve?”

  Whatever was behind this door, its voice obscured by the hum and tinny reverberance of the speakers, was sentient and aware. That told Elijah immediately that this wouldn’t be a standard boss fight. It would be something more calculated.

  “That depends,” he answered, though he wasn’t sure if the speakers worked both ways. “Why were you imprisoned down here?”

  Snik tried to intervene, but Elijah cut him off with an upraised hand. He didn’t want to give away to this trapped entity that there was anyone besides him here, assuming the entity couldn’t see them already.

  A deep rumbling laugh echoed through the speakers, impossibly deep even through the distortions. “My creators sought to invent a machine, one capable of unlocking the vast magics of this land. One who could harness the immense power hidden deep beneath their feet that they had sought for so long. In their hubris, they built me.”

  “So what?” Elijah asked as its voice stalled. “They created something they couldn’t control, and a final climactic battle wiped them out as they tried to contain you?”

  His expectation was that this would be the case; it cleanly explained the boss’ containment within this vault, the disappearance of the dwarves, and the story of the goblins. It was clean, if not cliché game design. He couldn’t fault the devs—or the AI if this was a story built by it—for reusing the same old tropes. They were tropes for a reason, because players enjoyed them.

  The creature laughed again. “You think this containment is to keep me inside? No, this is to keep the rest of the world out until the time has come. To prevent any interference from those who would seek to stop me. My creators knew that in defying the natural order of things they would not be around to witness the completion of my task.”

  Elijah felt his stomach sink and his mouth went dry at the creature’s words. He had a strong sense that he was in way over his head here. This was a storyline that had been several real-world years in the making.

  The alert menu popped up in his vision again, silencing any doubt about what was going on here.

  [Alert]

  Imminent breach of the defense field containment.

  Resolution required.

  The breach of containment wasn’t something trying to get out; it wasn’t meant as a warning to him. It was a warning to whatever was behind the door that he was here.

  “What was your task?” he finally built up the nerve to ask.

  Silence filled the air, but it didn’t bring comfort. Instead, the silence was like a heavy weight on his shoulders, waiting for the optimal moment to slam him down to the ground.

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  “To dig down to the leyline beneath this land and unlock the true potential of my creation.”

  He knew little about leylines in this game, but his memory from other video games and media had always depicted them as rivers of pure mana running through the world far below the surface. Terrible things always happened when someone messed with them, and this creature was actively working on getting down to one.

  Nothing good could come from that, but a lot of bad could. He rushed forward, placing both hands on the door and activating his ‘Reality Warp’ skill.

  He tugged at the code of the magical seals around the door, snapping them one by one, but each time he broke one seal, another would form somewhere else on the door. It wasn’t enough; he didn’t have the control necessary to prevent them from reforming after he’d turned his attention away from one and onto another.

  “Help me!” he screamed over his shoulder at the shaman, who was standing there completely dumbstruck. At his words, the goblin snapped to and walked over to the door, placing a single hand on the metal.

  “My ancestors spoke of this moment. The moment that the world would change. I never truly understood the old stories until now,” his voice was quiet, barely perceptible over the thrumming of Elijah’s heart beating in his ears.

  “The oral traditions never explicitly stated why we made our homes in the abandoned fortresses of the mountain goblins. Only that someone gave us a task.”

  Elijah turned to look at the shaman. Now wasn’t the time to wax poetic about tasks and traditions. He needed the shaman’s help to make it through this door and stop whatever was on the other side.

  “The moment the mountain goblins would return and reward the greys for our obedience,” Snik snarled at Elijah as his body pulsed with mana.

  Elijah wasn’t fast enough to realize Snik’s intent. As the goblin finished speaking, he realized the shaman was a threat rather than just a liability. Lightning magic erupted from the goblin’s hand, discharging through the door and sending Elijah flying backwards.

  Truce broken. Time to kill.

  Before Elijah had even hit the ground, he was summoning his familiars. The Bitter Brothers sprang forth into existence in a blast of blue mana. Even Bitter Dryad, now wasn’t the time to worry about the trauma, he had to stop Snik, then stop this boss. He hit the ground and rolled up onto his feet, drawing his sword. “Kill the grey!” he commanded his familiars.

  The lightning spell had done the work that his ‘Reality Warp’ hadn’t managed. Several runes were now dark, but there were still so many left to break. His familiars lunged at the shaman, attempting to wrestle him away from the door, but his magic was more powerful than any of the previous ones. Once his eyes focused, he could see why.

  [Boss Info]

  Ley-infused Goblin Shaman (Level 30)

  HP: 200 / 200

  Two-hundred health. That meant that its constitution was already into Master-tier, which meant bad things for Elijah considering this was a spellcaster.

  But he didn’t have to defeat the shaman; he just had to get past it and then through the door and defeat the enemy on the other side. The shaman was just a stalling tactic.

  The Bitters lunged forward at the shaman, but his magic was being boosted by the power of the leyline. Electricity arched out from his body, sending them flying back. He smelled the stench of burning flesh and wood as they screamed; they hadn’t had the time to react. Elijah lunged next, but changed things up by activating his swarm ability. The lightning arced through the bat swarm, frying many instantly, but the mass of bodies had done the job of dulling the bolt of energy before it got to Elijah. It still hurt, but it didn’t cause him to lock up like the last time.

  He swung down with his blade, attempting to hack at the shaman, who sidestepped his assault and whacked him with a wooden staff. The distraction had given his familiars just enough time to get back on their feet and get in close. Bitter Dryad grabbed the shaman and threw him across the room.

  “You can not win,” Snik chuckled as he got to his feet. “You do not have the magic necessary to breach the containment of the door and will not prevent them from returning; you will not prevent the rise of the goblins and our total dominion over this world.”

  Elijah finally had another trick up his sleeve. When the shaman had hit him with the lightning through his swarm, he’d been able to activate his power and read the debug menu. He now had access to lightning magic of his own. His scouts went flying forward, crackling with barely constrained electricity.

  “No!” Snik screamed, lunging at Elijah, but Bitter Bat teleported into his path, causing him to trip.

  He summoned another set of scouts immediately after the first two exploded against the door and destroyed several runes. He sent them on their way, flying at the door to finish destroying the containment. It was working, and Elijah could tell it was only a matter of time now.

  “No! Goblins will rule. Our kingdom shall stretch from ocean to ocean. Our dominion over this world will be unmatched, a situation unseen since the Library ended the Dragontooth King’s reign!”

  Elijah stopped dead. He’d been about to gloat until the shaman had spoken those words. He was so far away from the dungeons of the Undying Library and the Dragontooth King’s Abandoned Fort. And yet here was a boss monster name-dropping them. Could this be a coincidence?

  Any adventurer could have stumbled upon this dungeon. Anyone could stand where he was now and uncover this story. So why was the game using context that was directly linked to him and his unique class?

  He felt nothing shifting within the code of Snik, nothing being specifically rewritten to include the knowledge that he had just dumped on Elijah.

  Thinking about that was a waste of time. He just had to hope that Snik survived whatever came next so he could beat the information out of the goblin.

  The seals had almost been destroyed; it would just take a few more bats to finish the job. Two more scouts surged forth and crashed into the door. Sparks of dazzling energy cascaded off the door as they broke the last seal.

  Snik screamed as the Bitters held him back; they wouldn’t allow him to interfere as Elijah stopped the boss that waited beneath. He rushed forward through the now shattered doorway and came to a great pit. He could sense the boss and the leyline down below.

  On the far side of the room, impossible to get to, he could sense the Dungeon Core within the wall. He could sense it, but there was no way for him to get to it. The walls were completely sheer, and there was no lip or foothold for him to grab onto.

  It hardly mattered; the core wasn’t his focus here. It was what waited down below.

  Impossibly far below.

  He felt the bottom of the pit with his ‘Dragontooth Teleport’ ability. The spell could lock onto it, which was much better than throwing himself down into the pit blindly. He took a deep breath and let the bats carry him away.