The change came two days later, and it came in the morning. Lacey wasn’t sure what had tipped her off, but the dungeon felt different. The incursions started off normally with the tribute to the elite Goblins at the entrances, but something tight in Lacey’s shoulders had her itchy. Lacey flipped through the dungeon screens, trying to put a finger on what else had triggered her spidey-sense. Could she be feeling the dungeon or was it just time for another anxiety attack?

  “Kat isn’t in the groups,” Colt said, and Lacey’s discomfort found a cause. Her nerves ramped up into overdrive. Why had he been looking? Had he sensed something too? She wrangled her whirling mind back. Of course, he would always be looking for Kat in the dungeon.

  “Something else is off, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Lacey admitted, watching the group in the lowest dungeon, the one that had the highest-level rating.

  “You felt it too?” Colt was frowning at his screens.

  “I’m surprised you did,” Lacey studied his tight shoulders. “The worst that could happen would be that she’s in the respawn queue.”

  “I know that,” Colt told himself and he let most of the tension go, like a person without abnormal anxiety could do when reason was presented. Lacey didn’t begrudge him the ability to do that, but she wished she could learn it somehow. “But what else is wrong?”

  Lacey flipped to another screen and brought up the stats of the group, then had the pedestal summarize it for her.

  “They’re rushing it,” Lacey put the thought out there, knowing that Colt would either substantiate or refute it.

  “That’s what I’m feeling too,” Colt tapped his fingers. “Do you think we’re feeling the dungeon? Some of the help documents say something about that as a possibility.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, but I thought I was being stupid,” Lacey admitted. “But it’s the why of it, right? We’re looking for the explanation for the feeling, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Group level is high for several of the dungeon levels,” Lacey scrolled through the pedestal’s summary.

  “You have the data?” Colt got up to look at her screen rather than repeat the summary search.

  “Yeah,” Lacey displayed the information onto the wall, something they’d gotten on one of their side-quests. “Every group is close in level to the actual dungeon rating, but if you drill down, they’d fudged the averages by having two low and three high.”

  “Kat’s not there, and they are rushing through the levels to beat it quickly,” Colt nodded. “But why?”

  “Worst case scenario?” Lacey asked, letting her mind go to the bottom of the well of anxiety.

  “Yep,” Colt looked to her with his hands on his hips. His stance was bold and his eyes confident and that helped Lacey use her talent without deep-diving into the anxiety itself.

  “They’re doing a run at wiping the dungeon,” Lacey pulled up the worst that she could think up. “They’d performed the coup overnight and brought their army against us.”

  “The coup is irrelevant to us in here,” Colt strode back to his desk and flicked his own display up onto the wall so they’d have two screens into the dungeon. “What is relevant is that with 21 entrances all populated with full groups, we have 105 adventurers in the army.”

  “Did you see that?” Lacey pointed to his screen on the wall.

  “No, what?”

  “That group just breezed through the puzzle,” Lacey stood and walked to point at the Thief and Mage of the group.

  “Are you sure?” Colt asked, moving the data off of her screen and pulling up another high group. He flicked through a few until he found one group that was coming up on a puzzle. “Yep, there it is. They didn’t even read the directions.”

  “They’re players,” Lacey pressed her lips together and sighed out through her nose.

  “At least there’s a player who’s given every group the answer, because they’re all breezing through the puzzles,” he skipped through screens.

  “And the traps,” Lacey paused her screen on another group hopping over a trap that the thief hadn’t searched for at all.

  “That’s concerning,” he admitted.

  “Not so much,” Lacey let the logic settle her nerves. She still felt the anxiety, but thanks to their previous discussions, it didn’t own her. “They don’t know about the levels between them and us. They don’t know that this is absurd.”

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  “Worst case scenario?” he pressed her, not to be cruel, but to try to keep control of the situation.

  “Okay,” Lacey let her mind consider the idea that they did know. “Worst case could be that they do know about the levels between.”

  “The worst case is that they have a strategy for that too,” Colt shook his head.

  “What would that be?” she worried at it like it was a puzzle in one of their escape rooms.

  “That isn’t the right question for right now,” Colt turned to Lacey.

  Lacey blinked and faced Colt instead of the displays.

  “The right question is, do we close the dungeon?” Colt asked.

  Lacey’s lips thinned, and she was surprised to feel a surge of anger at the thought. “I’m not ready for that, yet.”

  Colt cocked his head to the side and gave her his full attention.

  “It feels like defeat, and besides, so far, we haven’t caught them breaking any rules,” Lacey lifted her chin. “There are a dozen trap levels between us and them, and there are thousands of mobs we can empty into the residential areas after that. Pedestal, show me the adventurer closest to our control room.”

  The pedestal pulled up a map, showing the highest-level group as the ones closest to them. That made sense since they were at the lowest level of the dungeon. The dungeon went down another dozen levels of trapped mazes before it started coming back up in the area of the dungeon that contained the old residences of all the denizens before most of them moved out and into the backyard. There was 100 feet of solid mountain between the column of active dungeon levels that went down and the column of the dungeon that housed their denizens. One had to go all the way down and all the way back up to get to their control room.

  Could someone get through all that to get to them? It was something Lacey hadn’t thought was possible. That was why they’d built it that way.

  “Let’s call up the Spunks for the trap mazes,” Lacey said. “Have them rotate the traps of the upper levels so that nothing is in the same place.”

  “Ginger!” Colt stuck his head out the back door to call into the valley. Even if Ginger wasn’t close enough to hear, someone was and they would pass the word quickly, especially with that tone in Colt’s voice.

  “Why aren’t we just closing the dungeon?” Colt asked Lacey.

  “Because I want to know how they think they’re going to beat us, so I can fix it,” Lacey glared at the screens. “Pedestal, keep the closest adventurer to the control room on this screen until I say otherwise and only use the other screen to answer the rest of our demands.”

  The screen flickered back and forth between some of the adventurers in that party as each took the lead in different spots, but Lacey endured the flickering to keep track of how close anyone was.

  “Pedestal, verbal response only on this, but can an adventurer be closer to us and you not show them?” Colt asked the air around them.

  “No,” the pedestal replied.

  “Even if they’re invisible or sneaking?” Lacey asked.

  “Sneaking or invisible adventurers will not be hidden from the dungeon masters in Tier II,” the pedestal reassured them in a flat tone. “They will display as empty space, but the display itself will follow their position.”

  “See?” Lacey tapped the air between her and the screen. “They can’t hide from the system itself, and I’d bet that they think they can.”

  “Or that we’re not smart enough to look,” Colt put in.

  “Ginger here,” came Ginger’s panting announcement, but Lacey ignored her as Colt relayed information to her. Ginger darted back out with a determined look on her Goblin face that made Colt smile.

  “How many unique dungeon levels are we from Tier III?” Lacey asked Colt.

  The invaders thought they’d gotten complacent, and in a way Lacey and Colt had done just that. They’d been enjoying their life while their foes had been planning. Colt and Kat had been doing their dates out there in the dangerous world, and for all intents and purposes, the dungeon masters had appeared to be resting on their laurels. They hadn’t expanded their dungeon levels even though they had another ten levels ready to queue up at the next big expansion.

  “We have 13 to go,” Colt answered after a quick tally. He’d known the answer, but he’d double-checked it before answering her.

  “That’s a bigger chunk than I wanted for this, but it’s doable if we use the Zoo modules,” Lacey winced at the number. Colt threw the stats up on the wall, but Lacey only glanced at them before moving on. Only two of the maze trap levels had been different enough from each other to count as two separate unique dungeons.

  “We can also rearrange some of the residential levels, but we were trying to do all new themes and distinct challenges with completely new ideas, so we were taking our time,” Colt reminded her.

  “That’s another two days of work at least if we do it that way,” Lacey worried at her lower lip. “They have to know the time limits of dungeon dives. They are already almost an hour into the dungeon. In five more hours, the dungeon respawns behind them and four hours after that, the dungeon will expel them. If they think they can get to the control room by then, then we don’t have time to get to Tier III for invulnerability.”

  “But if they don’t know about the maze trap levels, then just about anyone could get through the adventurer levels in the time limit,” Colt shrugged.

  “That’s true, and maybe I’m being pessimistic, but I think they know,” Lacey shook her head at the displays.

  “Even if they know about the maze trap levels, they can’t know that we sent Spunks to change them all up,” Colt argued, playing devil’s advocate for her.

  “Maybe,” she stared at the screen and then felt a hit of inspiration. “Pedestal, how many Thieves are in each group?”

  “There are 23 pure Rogues in the dungeon at this time,” the system answered her, but Lacey caught the semantics of it.

  “How many adventurers are there in the dungeon with the skills to locate and disarm traps?” she reworded her query.

  “There are 105 adventurers in the dungeon with above-average ability to locate and disarm traps,” the system replied.

  “There it is,” Lacey snapped her fingers. “That’s how they’re going to get through the trap mazes.”