Dom had wanted to smack Cadd when they’d found no Spunks in the trap corridors. He hadn’t been sure before, but that was enough to prove to Dom that the dungeon was listening in on them somehow. His brief tutorials for all of Cadd’s men on how to Disarm a basic trap had only been a feint anyway. He’d just had to teach them enough to make them appear to be Thieves, not enough to really be able to do much about the complicated traps in this dungeon. He’d been hoping to catch a Spunk and make them reveal whatever hidden mechanisms they had to get into and out of those corridors. That should have been a short cut straight down to the control panel.

  Instead, Dom found himself in a room full of doors. As the one with the highest lock-picking ability, Dom was tasked with unlocking all the doors. He’d taken a small group of the highest Rogues in to help him out, but there were not only dozens of doors, but almost every plank of wooden flooring was also trapped.

  The room was more than a hundred yards long and half that wide, about the size of an American football field. There was a stage at one end, and benches set up for what could have been an audience. The walls and floors were paneled in wood and the overhead was full of wooden beams and a darkness that set his teeth on edge. Dom was sure that the darkness held something dangerous, but nothing moved there.

  Dom had worked his way across the floor of the aisle in the center of the audience, keeping a wary eye on the darkened rafters above him. He’d tasked his crew with clearing the floor traps before approaching any of the doors, but it was taking far longer than any of them had predicted, simply because the traps were all different and high levels.

  “How much longer will this take?” Cadd asked from a relatively safe space behind Dom’s group.

  “I’m aware of the dungeon timer,” Dom grit out, loosening a wire trigger and wondering just how much damage he’d do to his cause to leave just one small trap for Cadd to trigger the hard way.

  “The dungeon will reset behind us in less than ten minutes,” Cadd reminded Dom unnecessarily. Dom was impressed the man could count that high.

  “So what?” Goth bristled with impatience, but not at the trap she’d just unraveled three feet to Dom’s left. “It’ll just reset the mobs behind us, not in front of us. I wouldn’t have thought that you’d need a coward path to the exit with your levels.”

  “Mind your tongue, girl,” Cadd spat at her, and Dom reminded himself that Cadd was on his list of people to gaslight, humiliate, and destroy once he got his levels back. “Considering that it has taken a full hour just to check the floor of this room, I thought it key to point out that it would be easier to just clear a single path and open these doors until we find the exit.”

  “You have a penchant for repetition,” Dom muttered.

  “What’s that, Thief?” Cadd challenged, and Dom’s patience snapped.

  “Fine, then,” Dom stood on the stage that he’d finally cleared. “Which door would you like to start with?”

  Cadd replied by striding to the first door to the right of the entrance. Dom could understand the man’s impatience, but it grated on Dom’s nerves. So far, the dungeon had been overtrapped with keen puzzles and more backups than Dom had anticipated. Dom’s caution had been proved out, but not in any way that Cadd could see. Still, he could use a fight to shut the bastard up.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to check it for traps for you?” Dom offered, but he was counting on Cadd not taking him up on it.

  “Not necessary,” Cadd waved Dom off. “I have a good Healer to counter any backlash and you take too long. I actually hope that there’s a flock of Gossowaries back here so I can get some experience instead of sitting on my ass for hours while you lay down flower petals for the rest of the dainty army you amassed for this idiot project.”

  Dom shook his head and turned to squint at the one-way door on the stage that glowed with his Trap Sense. Dom was pretty sure that the door was the exit to the level. Nothing had come in the door, so he was hoping that when Cadd triggered the trap on the door near the entrance, this door would release a mob that would make it so that Dom could prop the door open.

  “What the?!” Goth exclaimed, having stopped to watch the idiot fling open the door.

  Dom turned from the one-way door to watch. A small dwarflike creature came barreling out of Cadd’s door and right between the large man’s feet. Cadd’s group scrambled to catch the thing that looked more like a ratman than anything else. Two of Cadd’s Fighter buddies took swings at it, but it was super-nimble, darting away with maniacal giggles that were so infectious, both Goth and Dom found themselves smiling.

  The little creature didn’t stop to fight, but rather went to the next door on the line, releasing a pack of Gossowaries that distracted Cadd’s group and served to gather a few spectators from the other groups. They didn’t dare to edge too far into the room with the Gossowaries being joined by another small mob of terrifying mechanical spiders, a rare version of the golems they’d fought in Temple Run.

  The giggles of the ratman was joined by two new ones as the all raced to doors all around the room. The clusterfuck was just what the doctor had ordered as far as Dom was concerned. Rather than join in on the melee that was leveled over his measly 18 levels, he leaned casually against the one-way door and waved his trap-dissemblers off their lines and out of the middle of the fray. There was no need for Dom’s people to get harmed when Cadd was so needing a set-down.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Goth picked her way to the center aisle, as did her buddy Kindred. The other two on the other side of the aisle had been pretty far behind Dom, but they were careful as they made their way to the center aisle of cleared traps. It wasn’t Dom’s people who triggered the traps in more than a third of the room that hadn’t been Disarmed.

  One of the giggling ratmen did it. Upon opening one door in the middle of the wall to Dom’s left, what appeared to be hundreds of chickens fluttered out into the main room. Each chicken held a pillow strapped to its back, like a saddle, except that nothing rode the chickens. The chickens didn’t seem to want to fight anyone but each other, ripping into pillows. Feathers filled the air like some porn-movie version of a co-ed pillow fight crossed with a barnyard fiasco of Chicken Run.

  Goth was laughing outright now, with Kindred staring around wide-eyed, his back plastered to the wall behind them. Their other two trap-disarmers had barely made it to the stage when one of the floating feathers led Dom’s gaze upward into the foreboding rafters and all mirth slipped from his face.

  “Get Down!” Dom lunged at Goth, knocking both her and Kindred to the floor. The others weren’t so lucky.

  The biggest hood Dom had ever seen nearly parted his hair as it came so close to them to crash into the wood of the back of the stage. It stuck there for a pregnant moment before it quivered itself out of the wall, as if alive, to swing with even more force back into the room. The chickens and ratmen were too short to get hit, but that didn’t keep the chain from spreading out those feathers as well as a pillar full of splinters as it crashed through one of the thick wooden pillars.

  “Thanks, Dom,” Kindred panted, casting a quick area-effect Heal on the three of them.

  “I feel like I’ve been to war with a porcupine,” Goth complained, plucking at one of dozens, maybe a hundred of the splinters they had over half their bodies.

  “I don’t feel so good,” Kindred admitted, turning a bit greenish before turning to throw up onto a trap that then detonated.

  “It’s the feathers!” Dom quickly flicked a potion toward the Healer/Rogue and passed another to Goth. Their buddies had been swooped up by the passing demolition-sized hook and slammed into the wall next to where Dom had leaned. “They’re poisoned. If they prick you, you’ll get sick.”

  “Ugh,” Goth ducked just in time, throwing up near and somewhat on Kindred, who scooted away in disgust.

  That move saved them both as another even bigger wrecking ball came crashing into the wall between them and Dom.

  “The good news is that those chickens did their job,” Colt crowed from the control room, wishing he could send the images down to where Kat and Bernard waited. All he could do was explain, but he was having a hard time of it through his guffaws.

  “The bad news is that the demolition ball broke right through the level-clear doorway,” Lacey snapped out, annoyed enough to be able to talk through the chuckles that nearly choked her too. “If they don’t get wiped out by the poisonous feathers floating everywhere, they’ll be able to hammer their way into the next few trapped maze levels.”

  “Are you sure we can’t come up there to watch?” Kat howled. “What I wouldn’t give to see my dad face-first in a pile of vomit trying to inch out of the room of killer chickens!”

  “I’ve just got to rework the angles of the hooks and balls so that they avoid breaking down that door,” Lacey scribbled notes.

  “Lace!” Colt chided her through hiccuped barks of laughter. “Take a minute to enjoy the moment!”

  “He’s right, Lacey!” Kat’s voice practically pleaded. “You can see this! I need you to tell me all of it, not lament about how it could be better!”

  “But the next time, he’ll be ready for the traps and know how to get out,” Lacey argued.

  “Then send some Spunks and Rejects to change it up,” Colt insisted, tears in his eyes. “You’ll have plenty of time between them having to clear the Manchester room for the rest to pass and another four levels of trapped mazes they’ll need to pass. Especially now that they’re down an Earth Mage.”

  “They are?” Lacey scrolled through and sure enough, their highest Earth Mage had been in Cadd’s group.

  “Cause of death, frantic chicken?” Kat called out.

  “Technically, he was crushed by a flying anvil,” Colt teased.

  “It’s not an anvil,” Lacey tried to frown, but she was finally finding the funny in it.

  “Lace!” Colt shook his head, but they were both grinning.

  “The death toll is satisfying high,” she admitted.

  “How high?” Kat asked eagerly. “Come on! I want details! Did you kill my dad with a chicken? Did you? Tell me you did. He’d never live it down.”

  The Earth Mages had pried open the walls between the traps and that secret corridor only to find them empty and again Dom was faced with a locked room mystery. He had amazing secret door perception skills, but he could find nothing in the corridor yet again. Even having a dozen other people look hadn’t helped. Dom was as close as he would admit to sulking. He was down to two Earth Mages and they were both still on the other side of a cave-in that had taken out a quarter of his army.

  The fact that it hadn’t taken out Cadd, who’d had just enough health to survive in a small bubble that his Earth Mage had made for both of them, was a sore spot for Dom. That Earth Mage had then succumbed to the poison of pillow carrying chickens because the idiot had saved his imbecile leader instead of the more helpful Healer behind them both. It was enough to sour Dom’s enjoyment because Cadd had then blamed the whole thing on Dom and his inability to efficiently dispense with the traps that remained. Only a third of the swinging wrecking balls and iron hooks had been loosed by the frantic chickens stepping on traps, and yet that had been more than enough to take out enough of the support pillars to take bring half the mountain down into the room.

  At least the blowhard had been pulled into the other side of the mess rather than Dom’s side. Dom had managed to pull both Kindred and Goth into the alcove that had opened up behind them. Dom consoled himself with the knowledge that now he knew where the exit was and exactly which two traps should crash through it enough to bypass this fiasco the next time.

  And he still had his backup plan of using the hammers on the sliding doors and the earth movers to bypass the tricky mazes. Even if he lost all the Earth Mages, he could handle a few more of those trapped maze levels even if it did take a bit more time than he’d wanted. The mazes had been changing, but the complex wall sliding mechanisms had been more vulnerable to brute force than the solid walls. Sure, they still had to Disarm a dozen traps or so per maze, but that was nothing compared to the hallways of doom that had been set to trip them up.

  It didn’t help that they’d found another trapped maze just down the stairs to the next level. Dom had been rather counting on that be a finale for the dungeon, but he had enough to get through more of these things. He just had to wait for the Earth Mages that were left to make a tunnel big enough for the rest of the army to come through. He might have started on the next trapped maze level, but he was letting Kindred get his mana back and giving Goth a rest. They’d only gone far enough to realize that there was just another trapped maze beyond.