“The coupon details are up now, and they don’t totally negate our ability to close the dungeon, but the coupon will delay it,” Colt announced. “We can play our coupon anytime, but it will not become effective until half the time of the extension has passed.”

  “That sounds convoluted, and I know you simplified the help document’s explanation,” Lacey worried at her lips with her teeth.

  “It’s not that bad,” Colt shook his head. “It just gives him an extra hour and a half, and that’s if we play a closure now, but our closure time is also halved if we play it before the full time of the expansion has passed.”

  “That doesn’t make it sound simpler,” Lacey complained but she got the gist of it. They could have a battle of the coupons to see who had the most, but what it boiled down to was that they halved each other. “Does it stack?”

  “Yeah, just like our coupons do, but they are halved for every coupon played against it,” Colt winced at the explanation he knew was going to hurt her head. “So, like, he’s played a three-hour one, and if we played a six-hour closure coupon, it would only count as a three-hour closure and would take his three-hour extension down to an hour and a half. If we played another six-hour closure on top of it, it would again count as a three-hour one, but it would halve his time again, making it 45 minutes instead.”

  “But if he stacks them before we do?” Lacey put her fingers to her temples.

  “Then this whole thing builds exponentially until the coupons are almost worthless except to stop the other person from playing them,” Colt figured, trying to shrug off the math of it with a half smile. “Don’t sweat it. We can outlast him without it.”

  “Unless he has another trick up his sleeve,” Lacey picked up a pencil just to have something to fiddle with.

  “He probably does, but he can’t get past everything,” Colt assured her.

  The coupon had pushed back the original six-hour reset timer that would have respawned the rooms behind the groups. The incursion was doggedly pressing further into their levels and would be completing much faster as they all got closer to the end of their individual levels. Lacey squinted at the wall projections and gave herself some time to study this cleric-less group that was just sitting out in the empty graveyard.

  “What are they waiting for?” Lacey said, more to distract herself than because it might matter.

  “The other group is almost done,” Colt let her change the subject, giving a relieved sigh that he didn’t have to try to make the coupons simpler.

  “Why not just join up and end it faster?” Lacey scowled at the layabouts as if they worked for her instead of Dom.

  The Enlarged Elite came bouncing in, his Gossowary entourage close behind. He and Adam fist bumped and grinned at each other, but they didn’t interrupt.

  “Who knows?” Colt got up to fetch his reward from the snack cabinet.

  They were paying the Elite Goblins for their performances with microwave popcorn. The snack cabinet took a minute to pop it before belching out the contents.

  “Whatever,” Lacey grumped at the screen.

  “Good job, Moe,” Colt tossed a steaming bag to the Elite. Adam was already halfway through his treat.

  Eve got a chocolate bar for every cast of her Enlarge spell and the buffs that went with it. The Elites all got popcorn. The Rejects got granola bars, half of which they fed to their charges. Lacey doubted that the system had meant for the cabinet to be used this way, but it was working for them, so Lacey was hoping they didn’t nerf it anytime soon.

  “In any case,” Colt closed the cabinet only to open it again for a treat for Beka, “that deserter means that we can break even at the very least.”

  Lacey nodded, getting up to pace again, just needing to move. Even with Dom’s coupon threat, they were way ahead of the game. With as long as they’d been collecting the coupons, they’d win that war without breathing hard. She knew that he hadn’t looted those coupons in the dungeon. They didn’t make treasure like that. What did that mean?

  “Remind me why we aren’t just slaughtering them all?” Colt pressed.

  “Because they can’t win,” Lacey threw her hands up.

  “They think they can, or they wouldn’t be trying it,” Colt argued, bending to give Beka a scritch behind her ears. “Are you sure you aren’t just being too nice?”

  “Nice?” Lacey barked out a laugh. “I don’t think nice is why I’m letting them live. Slaughter is too easy and too good for them. What are they going to learn if we just send the whole menagerie against them? What’s Kat’s dad going to learn?”

  “Not to mess with us?” Colt’s eyebrows rose.

  “They’d come back,” Lacey shook her head. “They’d level up and return. The only reason they respected the dungeon levels was that they wanted the element of surprise. Why else would they send lower-level groups into the lower levels? They didn’t have to do that. They could have just packed in the groups with all maxed out NPCs. This whole thing is a matter of MAD, and that’s the best that he can hope for in this silliness.”

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  “MAD?” Colt asked, having to search back to an old social studies class they’d taken in high school. “Mutually assured destruction? Like the nuclear race during the cold war?”

  “Like that old movie, War Games,” Lacey gave him a pointed look, taking a pencil from her desk as she sat down. She needed something to fiddle with. “Only they learned that MAD only resulted in revenge where no one could win.”

  “Do you think they have that many high levels in the camp?” Colt frowned and Beka followed after him as he returned to his desk chair. “Could they have the nuclear option waiting back there?”

  “That’s just it,” Lacey stared out their window into the back valley. “Why don’t they? And we don’t know what’s going on out there.”

  “Do you think Kat’s okay?” Colt let himself ask.

  “Respawn queue or held hostage?” Lacey shrugged. “She’s okay, but how okay? Besides, it’s not like her dad’s going to do anything nasty to her.”

  “Hostage?” Colt looked more contemplative than alarmed. “We could do that. We could take Dom hostage and keep him half alive. That way he couldn’t respawn. We’d just jail him. Put him in dungeon jail like we did when Adam and Eve were being assholes.”

  “We can’t modify the dungeon with him inside,” Lacey gave Colt an indulgent smile.

  “Maybe we could keep him out in the back valley,” Colt mused, and Lacey let him get his frustrations out with the thoughts of revenge. “Chain him to the plows and let the Rejects use him as slave labor?”

  “Really?” Lacey asked.

  “If we could close the dungeon and keep him inside?” Colt rubbed his hands together. “We could slam him in a dungeon cell and turn on the time dilation. He’d spend five years in a cube of dirt. Let him pick that lock.”

  “Fill his orifices with clay and light him on fire while Eve heals him?” Lacey chided Colt. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been thinking about her own revenge plans.

  “Dunk him in the river like the witch trials?” Colt added, but Lacey just rolled her eyes.

  “We can’t close the dungeon with him in it, or maybe I’d be inclined to agree,” Lacey turned her mind back to more reasonable plans.

  “We could run out his coupons,” Colt posited. “We’ve got to have more than he does.”

  “And we could do lots of other nasty things too, but what would that accomplish?” Lacey finally snapped at Colt, tired of the revenge game. “We hit them hard. They hit back the next time, only then they know what they’re up against.”

  “Isn’t that the point?” Colt protested.

  “No!” Lacey insisted, her tone sharper than she wanted it to be. “We could capture him and strip him of all his coupons, but he’d be right back out there gathering more.”

  “And we’d be in here gathering more,” Colt shrugged, tilting back on his chair again.

  “He’s only level 17!” Lacey threw up her hands. “We should be stripping him of everything, but we aren’t. We’re playing the game. We’re letting them run the dungeon.”

  “Why?” Colt boggled at her.

  “Because he didn’t do it when he was level 77,” Lacey put her hands on her hips and paced to her desk. “And he had the chance.”

  “No way!” Colt slammed his chair down with a creak. “Kat waylaid him outside.”

  “He was in the dungeon before that,” Lacey persisted, figuring it out even as she said it out loud. “He was exploring our one-way doors and probing our setup long before Kat said she’d go out and take care of it.”

  “But,” Colt put his forehead in one palm.

  “He could have wiped the whole dungeon at level 77,” Lacey pressed her point. “Instead, he got busted down to a level ten and then disappeared for weeks. Where was he? Why did he even come back? What’s his deal in trying to run the dungeon now when he hadn’t before?”

  “He’s an ass is why.”

  “Yes, yes,” Lacey shook her head at him. “He’s an overprotective asshole Dad that wants to test your mettle and make sure you’re good enough for his grown daughter. That’s what you’re thinking. Right?”

  “Well, yeah,” Colt looked at her like there wasn’t much else to see in it.

  “And that goddess of the system is out there letting him do all that?” Lacey presented the idea like it was reasonable, even though she hadn’t even considered it before that moment.

  “She busted him down in levels to make it fair,” he pointed out.

  “And she gave us a snack cabinet and the back valley and trips home to Mom,” Lacey cocked her head to the side.

  “Yeah,” Colt admitted, then snapped his fingers. “But she let Hughe and Monty take their shots at us when we weren’t even sure what we were doing?”

  “And that guy that apologized for how hard that was on us?” Lacey raised an eyebrow. “Saying that the trips home were her apology?”

  “She didn’t stop the system from testing our mettle,” Colt said, his mouth tense. “Why wouldn’t she allow the same thing with hubby-poo?”

  “So he could mess with her baby girl?” Lacey gave him a dubious look.

  “To protect her daughter,” Colt considered it, but she could tell that even he didn’t believe it.

  “Kat seems able to protect herself just fine,” Lacey argued.

  “He doesn’t seem to know that so maybe she doesn’t either.”

  “But she’s packing our snack cabinet, giving us showers, pizza parties, pets, a whole monster society, and everything else we’ve even started to think we wanted,” Lacey started ticking things off on her fingers.

  “Not everyone is as reasonable as you are,” Colt grumped.

  “Zoo Two and Snow White cleared,” Ginger interrupted their argument and brought them back to the urgency of their situation.

  Lacey darted to her desk to watch what the groups did as they cleared their levels. Colt turned to his screen too.

  “Haunted House is clearing now,” Colt reported. “It looks like they’re staying in the last room.”

  Lacey brought up that screen. One of the group was standing at the attic window with something, looking down on the graveyard where the previous level’s group was still sitting around like bumps on a log. There was a flash of light.

  “Did they just use a mirror to reflect the moonlight down as a signal?” Colt asked.

  “Looks like it,” Lacey agreed. “The group is getting up. I’m guessing that they’ll meet up now.”

  “They knew that there was a way to signal from that window,” Colt waved a hand at his screen, and she knew that he was switching to other groups.

  “That would be the only level they could do that on,” Lacey scrolled through screens to see what the others might do.

  “Looks like the other levels are just strolling through the cleared level to catch up with the next group,” Colt tapped his screen. “Only the Arena levels went backward.”

  “That’s because only the Arena levels have those one-way doors that house the hatcheries,” Lacey nodded, the strategy making more sense as she watched them. “We haven’t needed to employ that method since the beginning, with all the monsters we’ve created being more than enough to fill the new levels.”

  “That and we had the funds to just spawn them up with the level on the new ones,” Colt mirrored her nod.

  “And would you look at that?” Lacey tapped a stray pencil on her screen. “He’s leveled.”

  “Dom?”

  “Yeah,” Lacey pressed her lips together. “That’s another reason he wanted to go back and clear the hatcheries.”

  “He couldn’t get enough levels in one run of the dungeon to even come close to threatening us, though, right?”

  “Black Knight cleared,” Ginger called out.