The dungeon entrance looked like a bad decision someone had built a door around.

  Stone archway, maybe three meters tall, set into a hillside that had no business having a hillside in it — the Fractured Lands were flat, ash and dead trees as far as the eye needed to go, and then here was a hill with a dungeon in it like someone had dropped it from somewhere else and not bothered to explain. The stone of the arch was old. Not old like a building that had survived a long time. Old like it had been old before the Fractured Lands existed and was waiting for them to catch up.

  The air coming out of the entrance was cold. Temperature

  cold this time, not the behind-the-sternum kind, just straightforward underground cold with a layer of damp stone and something metallic underneath.

  Andy stood at the threshold and looked at his system screen.

  DUNGEON: THE HOLLOW KEEP

  Floor 1 of 3

  Recommended Level: 3 — 8

  Party Size Recommended: 2 — 4

  WARNING: Solo entry below recommended level is

  inadvisable.

  "Inadvisable," Andy said. "Not impossible. Inadvisable."

  "There is a difference," Dren agreed, standing beside him

  with his newly acquired spear — he'd found it an hour back, wedged under a dead tree, better than the broken one but not by a margin anyone would brag about.

  "A meaningful difference," Andy said. He looked at Dren.

  "You ready?"

  "I am Level 3," Dren said. "I have a spear that I don't entirely trust and leather armor that has already failed once this week." He considered. "I am as ready as that situation allows."

  "Good enough."

  They went in.

  The first thirty meters were a corridor. Rough stone walls, low ceiling — Andy had maybe six inches of clearance, which was fine for him and tight enough that Dren had to angle his spear diagonally to keep it from dragging the ceiling. Torches on the walls, which was the first genuinely confusing element — old torches, burning steadily, implying something maintained them.

  The system hadn't mentioned anything about torch maintenance in its dungeon briefing.

  Andy filed that under things that would probably be relevant later.

  The corridor opened into a room.

  Large — about the size of a school gymnasium, rough stone floor, ceiling that went up further than the torchlight fully reached. Three other corridors leading out, evenly spaced on the far wall. In the center of the room, a stone platform about knee height and four meters across, with something on it Andy couldn't identify from the doorway.

  No enemies visible.

  He looked at Dren.

  Dren looked at the room with the specific stillness of someone who knew something was wrong but hadn't identified it yet.

  "What?" Andy said quietly.

  "It is too clean," Dren said. Just as quietly. "Dungeons at this level have enemies in the approach corridor.

  Crawl Fiends. Bone rats. Something." He looked at the three exits. "There is nothing here."

  "Cleared already?"

  "Or moved."

  Andy looked at the ceiling that went up further than the torchlight reached.

  "Moved where," he said, and looked up more deliberately.

  The system pinged.

  ENEMIES DETECTED

  Stone Lurkers x4 — Level 5

  Location: Ceiling.

  Status: AMBUSH FORMATION

  He had exactly enough time to process the word AMBUSH

  before the first one dropped.

  It hit the floor between him and Dren with a sound like a bag of gravel landing on concrete and came up moving immediately — roughly humanoid, roughly the right number of limbs, but made of something that wasn't quite flesh. Grey and dense, skin like packed wet clay, moving with the heavy efficiency of something that didn't have joints that hurt.

  Level 5.

  Andy threw the knife on reflex.

  It hit the Stone Lurker in what was probably its face and bounced off.

  Bounced.

  The knife hit the floor ten feet away and the Stone Lurker kept coming and Andy had just enough time to think that was new before it hit him.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Not a grab. Not a bite. A straight shoulder charge from a thing that weighed at least twice what he did and was moving fast, and the impact took him fully off his feet and put him into the wall hard enough that the stone behind him cracked.

  HP: 63 / 120.

  He'd lost thirty-one HP in one hit.

  He'd been fighting for six hours total in this world and had never lost more than twenty HP in an entire encounter. He'd just lost thirty-one from one contact from one of four enemies that were all currently landing from the ceiling.

  Dren engaged the second one with his spear and Andy watched from the floor — he was on the floor, he'd been put on the floor by a single charge, which was a new experience — as the spear skidded off the

  Stone Lurker's shoulder without penetrating. Dren pivoted, used the spear shaft to deflect a grab, moved well. Not well enough. The third one came down behind him.

  Andy got up.

  He got up because staying on the floor was worse, not because he felt like getting up — his back was going to have opinions about the wall impact for several days. He retrieved the knife from the floor, looked at the Stone Lurker that had charged him, and thought very fast.

  Knife bounced off the face. Spear skidded off the shoulder. The things were dense — not armored, dense, like the material they were made of was just structurally harder than steel at the surface.

  He looked at where the Lurker's limbs connected to its body. Joints. The surface density wouldn't go all the way through a joint — joints needed to move, and things that needed to move couldn't be solid all the way through.

  He needed to close distance and get into something that could be cut.

  The Lurker charged again.

  Andy didn't move backward. He moved into it, inside the angle of the charge, let the main mass of it

  go past him, and drove the knife into the joint where the arm met the shoulder with every bit of force he had.

  The knife went in.

  Not deep. Two inches, maybe three, but in. The Lurker made a sound — first sound any of them had made, low and grinding, like two stones under pressure — and the arm on that side went

  dysfunctional. Not severed. Compromised.

  One arm.

  It turned toward him and Andy was already moving to its weak side, the compromised side, because you moved to the weakness and you stayed there and you worked it until the problem was solved.

  Basic. The kind of thing they taught in week one.

  What they did not teach in week one was how to work a weakness when a second enemy hit you from behind.

  The fourth Lurker. He'd lost track of it.

  It didn't charge him. It grabbed him — both arms, from behind, in a grip that was like being grabbed by a car. His arms were pinned. His feet left the floor. The first Lurker turned toward him with its one functional arm and the grinding no-sound of

  something that wasn't hurrying because it didn't need to.

  HP: 63 / 120.

  GHOST STEP — Cooldown: 3 minutes remaining.

  Andy assessed his options.

  They were: none.

  He had no leverage. No weapon he could use. No terrain in range because he was being held two

  feet off the floor. The Lurker in front of him was raising its functional arm and he couldn't prevent what happened next with anything currently available to him.

  This was the gap.

  Not tactics. Not improvisation. Just the raw numerical distance between Level 2 and Level 5, expressed as a thing holding him off the floor that he couldn't break free of while another one prepared to end the argument.

  He headbutted the Lurker in front of him.

  It was not a good plan. He knew it wasn't a good plan when he did it. His forehead hit the dense grey surface of its face and his vision went white for a moment and the Lurker did not react at all except to pause in what might have been confusion

  about why he'd done that.

  It bought him one second.

  From Andy's right, Dren's spear came through the air in an overhand throw — not at the Lurker

  in front of Andy, at the one holding him. The spear shaft wasn't going to penetrate the surface but that wasn't what Dren was trying to do. The spear hit the holding Lurker's arm joint at the elbow and lodged there, not cutting but jamming, and the grip on Andy's right side loosened by maybe twenty percent.

  Twenty percent was enough.

  Andy dropped his weight, twisted into the loosened side, used the rotation to pull his right arm free, and drove his elbow back into where he estimated the Lurker's face was based on the height of the grip. Made contact with something. Grip released.

  He hit the floor, rolled, came up with the knife, and created distance.

  He looked at the room.

  Two Stone Lurkers between him and Dren. One with a compromised arm. One with a spear lodged in its elbow joint. Both still functional and moving.

  A third one that Dren had been engaging was on the far side of the room, between them and the exits.

  The fourth was behind Andy, between him and the entrance corridor.

  Four enemies. Two fighters. Three HP bars doing things Andy didn't like the look of. His own HP at sixty-three out of one-twenty.

  He looked at Dren across the room.

  Dren had a long cut on his forehead from somewhere in the last thirty seconds and was holding a secondary blade Andy hadn't known he had — short,

  more dagger than knife, old but maintained. He looked at Andy with yellow eyes that were very focused and very calm in the specific way of someone who had been in bad situations before and had decided that calm was the only useful response.

  Andy looked at the three exits in the far wall.

  He looked at the Stone Lurkers.

  He looked at the central platform with the unidentified object on it that he hadn't had time to examine yet.

  The system had nothing helpful to add. No ENVIRONMENTAL OPPORTUNITY or TACTICAL SUGGESTION.

  Just four enemy indicators, his HP bar, and the God Hunt timer at five days, twenty-one hours, which was there to remind him that everything happening right now was also happening on a clock.

  He took a breath.

  "Dren," he said.

  "Yes."

  "The platform. Center of the room. What's on it?"

  Dren glanced at it without taking his eyes fully off the Lurker in front of him. "A lever. Stone.

  Old."

  "What does it do?"

  "I told you. I don't know what's in the dungeon."

  "Right," Andy said. "Right, okay." He looked at

  the lever. "So it either helps us or makes this significantly worse."

  "Yes."

  "Fifty-fifty."

  "Roughly."

  Andy looked at the Lurker between him and the platform. Looked at his HP. Looked at his knife.

  Looked at the joint on the inside of the Lurker's knee, which was probably structured the same way the shoulder joint was.

  "I hate fifty-fifty," he said.

  "I know," Dren said.

  "I'm going for the lever."

  Dren said something that the system translated as a very concise acknowledgment that this was a terrible idea and he was going to cover it anyway.

  He moved on the Lurker to his left, loud and aggressive, creating noise and drawing attention, and Andy moved on the one between him and the platform low and fast, targeting the knee joint.

  The knife went in. The Lurker buckled on that side.

  Andy used its falling motion, vaulted it, hit the platform edge, got his hand on the lever.

  He looked at it.

  Old stone. Smooth from use. Pointing up.

  He looked around the room one more time, at the ceiling, at the three exits, at Dren actively

  not dying with great determination on the far side.

  "Okay," Andy said. "Here's the thing about fifty-fifty."

  He pulled the lever down.

  The torches went out.

  Total darkness. Immediate and complete, the same quality as the Darkness during the timer countdown except without the cold and without the directed presence.

  The Stone Lurkers stopped moving.

  All of them. Simultaneously. He could tell from the sound — the grinding shifting sound of their movement just stopped, like someone had hit pause on them specifically.

  Silence.

  Andy did not move.

  "Dren," he said quietly.

  "I am here," Dren said, from somewhere to his right. "I am not dead."

  "The Lurkers stopped."

  "Yes."

  "They're stone. In the dark, they're just stone."

  A pause.

  "...Yes," Dren said, with the specific quality of someone making a connection they should have made earlier. "Stone Lurkers animate in light. It is why they are called—" He stopped. "I should have mentioned that."

  "That would have been useful information before we went in, yes."

  "I told you I don't know what's in the dungeon."

  "You knew what Stone Lurkers were."

  "I didn't know Stone Lurkers were in here."

  Andy sat on the platform in the darkness next to the lever and thought about the thirty-one HP he'd lost to one charge from one enemy and the four enemies that were currently statues because he'd guessed right on a fifty-fifty and pulled a lever.

  He pulled up his system screen. The glow was low but present — enough to see by, barely, the immediate area around him.

  HP: 63 / 120.

  XP: 620 / 1500.

  GHOST STEP — Available.

  FLOOR 1 NOTE: Stone Lurkers deactivated.

  Lever controls floor lighting.

  Reactivation: Restore torchlight.

  "So if I turn the lights back on," Andy said.

  "They wake up," Dren said.

  "And if I leave them off."

  "We navigate Floor 1 in the dark."

  Andy thought about that. About three more corridors and whatever was in them and a ceiling he couldn't see and enemies that stopped being enemies when you took away the light.

  "Dren," he said. "Do you have anything that makes light?"

  A pause.

  "I have one fire striker," Dren said. "Very small flame."

  "So we can control exactly how much light there is."

  Another pause, longer this time.

  "...You want to use the fire striker to activate individual Lurkers one at a time,"

  Dren said. "In a space where we control the light source."

  "I want to use the fire striker to fight one Lurker at a time in a space where we

  can turn the light off when we need to," Andy said. "Which is different."

  "Is it different?"

  "It has better odds."

  The system updated.

  NON-STANDARD INTERACTION LOGGED.

  Environmental

  mechanic reversed.

  Dungeon lighting used as tactical resource.

  XP Bonus pending — Floor clear.

  "It's logging it again," Andy said.

  "Is that good?"

  Andy looked at the four statues around him in the low light of the system screen. At the three corridors leading further in. At his HP bar sitting at just over half.

  At the God Hunt timer, which did not care about any of this, and was down to five days,

  twenty hours, and fifty-one minutes.

  "Ask me after Floor 2," he said.