The second collapsing room was a bit daunting to Dom. When he opened the door and saw the layout of yet another of the collapsing rooms, Dom considered trying to turn back. The dungeon had reset, but with the higher levels and the Earth Mages, they might make it back through the previous collapsed room and the hardest level’s respawned creatures to make it out in time. He didn’t have a lot of the coupons left, but there might have been just enough for that. Dom activated another coupon to extend their time, not that it would help much.

  “What are you waiting for?” Cadd sneered at Dom.

  “Merely gathering my thoughts,” Dom’s eyelids lowered to half-mast. “You might try it once in a while.”

  “What did you say?” Cadd growled in warning.

  “That you’re an idiot,” Dom replied, his hands slipping into his pockets, as if he was speaking about the weather on a Sunday afternoon at the church picnic.

  “Watch your tongue,” Cadd stepped up close, but looming over someone taller than him was ineffective, at least to Dom, who wasn’t intimidated by the man’s higher levels.

  “You need me far more than I need you,” Dom did not budge.

  “I could kill you with a single blow and loot anything from your corpse that I might need to completely wipe this dungeon, whelp,” Cadd shaved a few hit points off of Dom by poking him in the chest with a gauntleted finger.

  “Be my guest,” Dom leaned into the finger, his voice a low snarl.

  “Make yourself useful, then,” Cadd shoved Dom at the room ahead, as if Dom had said less.

  Dom managed to avoid the first trap only because of a very high agility, then deliberately stepped on the trigger. He ducked. Cadd didn’t and was flung from the room and back out through the door. Dom scanned the rafters of the room from his crouched position, then rose back to stand.

  “You should know your place, Knight,” Dom drawled at the clanking man that was sprawled back against his fellows. “One wouldn’t want you to inadvertently step somewhere you shouldn’t.”

  Dom and his crew worked the traps much faster this time around. Cadd had decided to take a nap during Dom’s absence, and if there hadn’t been so many witnesses, it would have been a nap the Knight would not have woken from. It had, however, kept the idiot from interrupting the process. This time, they managed to completely disarm the floor traps of the room before opening any doors.

  “Scoot back,” Dom ordered his band of player Thieves. “Just in case.”

  Dom waited to trigger the trap until his people were well back from the wall where he expected the wrecking ball to grant them access into the tunnel beyond. All the other floor traps had remained the same, so he was fairly confident that nothing had been changed. Dom watched the ceiling as he sprung the trap and darted out of the way of where the wrecking ball should have gone. It was a good thing his reflexes were fast, and a better thing that he was a paranoid son-of-a-bitch.

  “So close,” Colt complained, but it was with a hoot of pleasure as they watched the results unfold.

  “Did he just hop onto the returning wrecking ball?” Lacey goggled at the projection.

  “It won’t do him much good,” Colt shook his head. “It was genius to redirect that toward the chicken room.”

  Feathers flew again as the busted door let loose more chickens than last time and one giggling little Ratman dwarven thing to go fling open the doors of his brothers.

  “That wasn’t my idea, actually,” Lacey shook her head too, but for her it was in wonder. “The Spunks came up with that on their own.”

  There weren’t a lot of people in the room this time, but they were quickly downing potions and heading back to the door of the room. Unfortunately for them, the floor traps had reset when Dom had loosed the wrecking ball, another addition from the Spunk team. The clucking of the chickens had successfully covered up the ominous clicking of all the traps resetting one at a time in sequence across the floor tiles. Hooks swung, chicken Poillows exploded, and chaos ensued, but none of the swinging demolition crashed into the wall that would give access to the route down deeper into the dungeon.

  “My dad is riding the wrecking ball?” Kat stared at the ceiling from her spot near the front of the army that was still waiting patiently for the oncoming incursion. Only the front line was ready. The rest were kicking back on shifts of naps so that they would still be sharp for the battle, even if it was taking far longer than any of them had thought it would take.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Like a cowboy on a mechanic bull at the bar,” Colt’s eyes held just the hint of awe.

  “At a bar?” Kat challenged with a small smile.

  “Ah, yeah, I would imagine,” Colt temporized, regaining his disdain for their nemesis with a little clearing of his throat. “Not that I’ve seen that in anything but movies.”

  “Right,” Lacey’s eyebrows rose. She knew better, but sure, Colt’s mom might read the book, right? Then again, Lacey doubted that seriously since they had vowed to never tell her so that Colt could take advantage of the beer without “root” edits. “And that’s a root beer you’re sipping on.”

  “I like root beer,” Colt gave Lacey a telling glare.

  “Oh, good grief,” Kat rolled her eyes. “Just keep telling us what’s going on!”

  “He’s climbing the chain for the ball,” Lacey reported.

  “Will that work?” Kat looked baffled.

  “Nah,” Colt was frowning.

  “Actually,” Lacey tilted her head and used her desk monitor to scroll up. “Maybe.”

  “Unbelievable!” Kat threw up her hands.

  “The chickens made a beeline for the door,” Colt tried to redirect the focus, using a second projection to show the hallway outside the Manchester room.

  The whole incursion had been kicking back, either napping or snacking, or just socializing. The chickens barreled through the hall, feathers flying. While they were mowed down rather quickly, the result of the feathers made a mess of the corridor. When the other mobs from the room were released and herded toward the only exit to the room by the whooping Ratmen, people scurried to their feet, slipping on the mess and just generally creating havoc that rivaled the previous Manchester room’s chaos.

  The incursion gave it their best shot, but it was like trying to dodge a stampede in a narrow chasm slathered with … uh, slippery stuff slathered on the floor. Cadd had managed to commandeer another Healer, but she was lower-leveled and not as competent as his previous one. A Gossowary took her out, even as Cadd lopped off its head, just as she got off a final Heal that allowed the guy to survive another moment or two. It wasn’t the first Gossowary to tromp into the hallway and it was nowhere near the last.

  The hallway outside the Manchester room was wide for a hallway but narrow for a fighting area. It was about 20 feet across and a hundred feet long. The doorway was the choke point and should have served as a place for the incursion to gather and slaughter the mobs as they came out. It had been meant to be a chokepoint for the mobs to back a party into, but with the mass of mobs charging out of the collapsing room, it turned against the monsters.

  Cadd was on the front line at the doorway, and while he’d gotten off to a rough start, being startled from sleep by the commotion, he had the levels to put up a good fight. He took down a fair share of them, but when his Healer fell, he was left to try to hold back the flood, with at least half the mobs near his own level.

  “He’s backing up,” Lacey crowed in delight. “Even with the bottleneck, they can’t fight off that many of them.”

  “Once he gives up that doorway, he’s toast,” Kat said.

  “They formed a line beside him, but it won’t be enough,” Colt’s eyes were glued to the screen, but Lacey was splitting her attention between the fight outside the Manchester room and the single man climbing up out of the falling rubble. How he was even still alive, she didn’t know.

  Cadd stepped back wrong, faltering and giving the Ghoffin an opening that it did not miss. Ghostly griffon claws raked down a battered breastplate, cracking and then splitting the metal in half. While Cadd still had the metal greaves to protect his legs, his helmet had long since been knocked away by a stray Gossowary kick that had come from a mob that had just killed the Fighter next to Cadd. The loss of the breastplate left the man dangerously exposed, and Lacey and Colt’s mobs knew how to take advantage of that.

  The Ghoffin turned translucent and roared into Cadd’s face, sending hair flying backward on a wave of the stench of death. Cadd’s swing whooshed through the ghostly image and was headed back when the Ghoffin rematerialized just its beak to plunge it into the Knight’s chest.

  “That’s ghastly,” Bernard responded to the commentary that Colt was keeping up.

  “Agreed,” Lacey winced as the Ghoffin, true to its nature, pushed Cadd to the ground and began to rip the heart straight out of the man’s chest. The ingestion of the organ refueled the Ghoffin. The trembling replacement for Cadd on the line took one look at the red eyes of the levelling Ghoffin and ran, not that there was anywhere to go. The remains of the incursion fell one by one. Whether they fell to a mob out of the Manchester room, or to a trap in the maze behind them, they were sent back to the respawn queue.

  “I thought they disarmed the traps in the last maze,” Bernard protested as Colt described a death by mimic-log trap.

  “The Spunks reset some of them,” Lacey explained. “That guy was just unlucky enough to step on one of those.”

  “I thought you pulled the Spunks out,” Colt frowned.

  “I did,” Lacey grinned. “Some stayed behind once the incursion started leaving the trap corridors alone. I guess Cadd found so many trap corridors empty that he gave up on checking. They stayed behind without Georges to make sure they weren’t a danger to the dungeon.”

  “Want fight,” Ginger grinned with those long, pointed teeth that reminded Lacey that the Goblin was more than a favored pet.

  “What was that?” Bernard asked.

  “Ginger was just reminding us that the dungeon creatures want to fight,” Colt expanded Ginger’s short sentence to make it more clear.

  “I didn’t realize that,” Lacey smiled to Ginger.

  “I don’t think I did either,” Colt admitted. “I was so busy trying to protect them that I forgot what they were made for.”

  Ginger gave him an offended snuffle that made him chuckle.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Do you want to go down there and root out that idiot Dom?”

  “No way!” Kat protested, getting up from her spot near the end of the last untouched Manchester room. “He’s mine to kill!”

  “Technically, he’s in our dungeon,” Colt chided Kat, his eyes stern.

  “You couldn’t get to him anyway,” Lacey tried a more diplomatic approach. “He’s been climbing the chain, dodging the falling dirt and stones, but there’s nothing there.”

  “What do you mean?” Bernard interrupted before Kat could explode at Colt.

  “He’s climbing up into an area that doesn’t go anywhere,” Lacey shrugged. “We designed the Manchester rooms away from any other rooms so that the collapses wouldn’t destabilize any rooms above them. He’s basically dug himself into his own grave.”