The Daily Grind - Chapter 131 (Patreon)

Back in the thick of things!

_____

“The strong do what they will.  The weak suffer what they must.”

- Thucydides -

___

Once upon a time, James had dreaded high school.

If this came as a shock to anyone he knew, he’d been exceptionally surprised.  Some of his current friends had even been with him through the experience, and they almost universally agreed it hadn’t been great.

‘Almost’, because JP was an eternal outliner in any poll of their group, and he’d actually had quite a lot of fun in high school.  Though James was of the opinion that if JP hadn’t spent his youth tricking kids into doing his homework and convincing teachers to let him bail on class, then his high school career would have been a lot different in nostalgia quality.

The point was, walking through the doors of a high school wasn’t an action James associated with good vibes.  But it was, he would readily admit, kind of satisfying to do it as an adult, and also as someone with a level of prowess to shape the world around him.

There was a security guard standing by the doors, watching the flow of students who were currently mid-lunch. It was the same old guy who they’d identified themselves - falsely - as the FBI to back when they were first investigating here.  He was watching James and his companions as they came in with a wary eye, probably not recognizing them right away through the masks.

“Rufus.”  James greeted him, the old man’s name easy enough for him to remember.  “How’s the place been?”

The lines around the man’s eyes lit up in recognition when James greeted him.  “Oh!  Agents!”  He rumbled out with a casual familiarity that was completely unearned.  “It’s been quiet.  Mostly just making sure the kids keep their masks on.  Is there…” He cleared his throat, looking around and needlessly lowering his voice against the dull roar of hundreds of students talking, eating, and yelling.  “Is there something going on again?”

“Shouldn’t be anything serious.”  James said.  “We’re just here to check up on things.”  He half-lied.

They were, absolutely, here to check up on things.  It’s just, that ‘thing’ they were here to check on was whether or not the hostile living place under the building was still eating high school students.  Which was, you know, a mite bit more serious than basically anything that the FBI normally got up to.

The weirdest part of this whole thing, as far as James figured, was that he wasn’t entirely lying about being an FBI agent anymore.  *Mostly* lying, but not entirely.  And the second weirdest thing was that he thought that was weirder than the dungeon itself.  The last year and change of his life had been pretty malicious about recalibrating his gauge of what was and wasn’t strange.

Extradimensional arena that offered a marketing class as a reward for survival? Normal.  Working for the government?  Strange.

“He’s booked.”  Sarah muttered in James’ ear as they politely nodded to Rufus and headed down toward the school’s lower level.

“What?”  James took a second to process that.  Booked.  Like the books the dungeon they were headed to offered as rewards.  Usually rewards for murder.  That was, in a lot of ways, very concerning.  “How do you know?”

“A couple perception orbs helping.  How he was standing, and also just the change in how he greeted you.”  Sarah spoke in a low tone; there were still students around lining the halls down here in small clusters as they ate lunch and took a reprieve from their own daily toils.  “He’s too confident.  He’s thinking that he’s pulling a fast one on you, which means either our ‘cover’ is blown, or he’s got some kind of power.  Book makes the most sense.”

James closed his eyes and considered the man they’d just passed.  “Ah, shit, you’re right.  I’ve seen that look he had before.”  He muttered.  “That’s the expression Frank always had.”

“How’s the old guy doing these days, anyway?”  Daniel asked, venom in his voice.  “Still a bitter asshole?”

“I think that’s the most angry I’ve ever heard you!”  Sarah noted.  “Also he’s still in prison.  Our casual subversion of the justice system is working out!”

“You make that sound like a really bad thing…” James trailed off, then cleared his throat.  “Okay, yeah.”  He resignedly admitted.

The three of them rounded the last corner, and started descending a ramp that wasn’t normally there.  And as they did so, their ears picked up on the sudden hush that ran through the hall.  The whispers of students that were watching, trying their best to not let on.  James could *feel* the prickling on his arms as he passed between the real school and the otherworld below it.

At first pass, Sarah and Daniel were not his first choice for a scout team.  Even with the ethereal Pathfinder tagging along, tethered to Daniel’s mind, that still left a solid seventy five percent of their party in the category of ‘humans who had been shot within the last couple months’.  And yes, Daniel hadn’t been shot anywhere critical, and Sarah had the ability to recover absurdly quickly thanks to this own dungeon’s magic.  But that still didn’t leave James feeling comfortable with it.

Still, they were who was available.  And despite his promise to his boyfriend to let him fight rats in the basement, Anesh had rapidly gotten distracted with helping Research renovate their basement space into something usable again.

So three humans who still had itching scars walked down the stone slope, carrying duffel bags full of tools that might not work, feeling simultaneously unprepared and oddly confident.

“Hey Lua.”  James greeted the middle aged woman who was sitting at the threshold.

She had a heavy black cardigan on, her hair pulled back in its usual bun, sitting on a confiscated chair from the school’s library, reading a book on the history of warfare.  Her chair was at the bottom of the ramp, pushed back against the wall right next to a blue metal door with a rusted push bar on it.

“James.”  The school counselor replied with a nod, closing her book around a bookmark with a snap as she looked up.  “Welcome back.”

“I’ve been back for a while… oh, you meant to here specifically.”  James flushed a bit and looked away.  “Sorry.  What’re you doing down here?”

“Making sure no one goes in.”  Lua said, matter of factly.  “It is still the same place, isn’t it?”  She asked.

“That’s what we’re here to find out!”  Sarah cut in with her usual cheerful flair.  “Do you wanna come with us?”

Lua smiled a soft smile, and gave a single heavy exhalation.  “No, no.  I’m no soldier.”  She told them in a voice that was equal parts kind and sad.  “No matter what the students think of me.  I’m just here to watch the door.”

What the students thought of her, as far as James could gather, was that she was some kind of guardian spirit that could snap necks by pointing at people.  And while that was only about thirty percent accurate, no one really had the inclination, or ability, to get an entire high school worth of kids to change their minds.  The fact that she’d stuck around after the building had been turned into a warzone, to keep up her job as guidance counselor, just kind of added to her local mythology.

James was *almost* jealous of her growing status as folk hero.  But more than that, he was happily amused that she was recognized for the monumental effort she’d put in saving lives during the fight here.

And also that the Order had someone keeping an eye on things here.

“So, has anyone peeked inside?”  He asked, eying the overtly suspicious door.

“No, no.  No one wants to risk that it’s a teleporter.”  Lua explained.  “Imagine touching the door, and then you’re inside.  It seems like the kind of trick the  sewer would pull.”

“Fair.”  James said.  He readjusted his grip on the handle of the duffle bag in his hand.  “Alright.  You two ready?”

“As we can be.”  Daniel grumbled.  “Are you sure we shouldn’t be doing this with a small army? At least we could get one of the snakes in here.”

“Probably a good idea.  But it’s fine.”  James replied.  “We’ve got a telepad.  If we need to, we’ll just bail when it gets unsafe.”  He rolled his head from side to side, eliciting a popping crack from his neck.  “Let’s see what’s in there.”

Sarah laid a hand on his shoulder, and farther back Daniel did the same to her.  James reached forward, and touched the door, tensing up in preparation for a possible teleport into an angry sewer dimension.

Nothing.

He let out a soft sigh, and pushed at the bar, having to use quite a bit of force to get the rusted metal to move into place.  And then, with a grinding screech, it swung open on ancient hinges, and the three of them stepped forward into the dungeon’s territory.

_____

The Order of Endless Rooms was, as far as they knew, the foremost experts in dungeon physiology.  Barring a few outliers, like the Old Gun, they could safely say they knew far more than Status Quo did.  They certainly knew more than more mundane government agencies like the FBI, who for some reason had an organization problem acknowledging that the supernatural existed.

Between operational experience, a series of inquiring totems that Momo was constantly developing, and the existence of a dungeon that was friendly to their organization, they had multiple sources of data that were more or less capable of letting them come up with working theories.

They’d come a long way from James trying to figure out if staplers could be friends.  And yet, they still didn’t really *know* a whole lot of stuff.

They knew that a dungeon was a living place.  There was an intelligence that built, maintained, and populated these strange spaces.  It absolutely was not a human intelligence; dungeons didn’t appear to get tired or bored, ever, as confirmed by Momo’s totems.

What they *didn’t* know was a lot of the other stuff about the central intelligences themselves.  Did they have a brain of some kind, a central physical object that housed their mind? Or were they distributed through the entire structure that they built?  What did they want? What methods did they have to communicate, and did they have their own society?

They knew that there was at least one other dungeon out there that they hadn’t seen, because it had *called them* through the phones of Officium Mundi.  It had spoken in riddles, but it had called the office its brother.  Did dungeons have families?

One thing they knew, through their connection to Clutter Ascent, the dungeon in the attic of a house that the Order now had listed in its growing spreadsheet of assets, was that dungeons needed to challenge people.

Not hurt them, not kill them.  Though apparently that was still part of it.  But no matter how friendly or kind a dungeon grew to be, it had to offer a challenge.  And these challenges almost always came with rewards, in some way.  That part also seemed to be compulsory, either an instinctive part of how dungeons thought, or a ‘biological’ impulse, like how humans couldn’t really choose to turn off their lungs.

Momo called this process the ‘harvest of conceptual weight’.  Anesh called this process ‘poorly defined and in need of catagorization’.

They also knew that the life that dungeons created wasn’t just an extension of the dungeon itself.

Most of their working data came from the Office, where they had multiple forms of life to look at, but there were other examples too.  Dungeons could create life that was intelligent, and they could find ways to impose control on that intelligence, but it didn’t seem like they could perfect it.

Things in the office made with yellow orbs seemed to act like wildlife.  Untamed, often dangerous, but not evil.  Just usually hungry. Camracondas, and a few other forms, were made with green orbs; they were referred to as Puppets by the smarter forms of yellow life, and it seemed like the dungeon had a strong finger on the scales of how they behaved.  Especially when it came to fighting intruders.  But removed from the control of the dungeon, they were people, with as much free will as anyone else.

Infomorphs were another form of life that they’d run across in the Office.  Life made of an idea that thought itself, that grew and shared itself with others.  They were impressive, and scary in some ways.  And they appeared to just be the surface of non-material life, since the Order had also encountered something called Authorities when they’d fought Status Quo.  If Infomorphs were living ideas, then Authorities seemed to be living commands.  Not that they had a living one left to examine.

They knew a few other things, too.

They knew that dungeons could send their creations out into the real world.  They knew some of them did this to erase memories, or kill perceived threats.  They weren’t passive places, they were active operatives.

They knew that dungeons *had* to be challenged, in some way.  It was how they fed, essentially.  And while the ones they knew of didn’t need it very often, they still did need it.

And so, they could extrapolate, that if a dungeon was left untouched for too long, it would eventually be faced with a choice.  It could quietly starve, leaving a husk of itself only barely tethered to the physical world.  Or, it could take one last risk, and send out its agents to bring it what it needed.

_____

Which was why, even though they were all still recovering, James had made the call that it was time to revisit the Akashic Sewer.

Because no one wanted to risk another outburst.  Even though the last one had been outside influence, it had still killed a lot of people.  And a repeat of that was unacceptable.

So, since they didn’t know how to kill a dungeon outright, if that was even an option, the delve team pushed through the door to fight monsters, collect magic, and get out alive.  Turning the pressure valve just enough that it wouldn’t be a problem for a while.

The room the door opened into was a circular chamber, lit by sickly glowing yellow bulbs on the ceiling, and mostly made of stained concrete.  The instant all three of them were in, the door slammed shut behind them, the line of its edge merging seamlessly with the wall and leaving just another part of the grey stone wall where there had once been a portal to the outside world.

There was graffiti on the walls, much of it obscured by the very overt infomorphs that lived here and tried to eat names.  There was a rusted drain in the middle of the room, with a foul and rotten smell pouring out of it.  And aside from that, not much else.  No creatures waiting in ambush, no sludge traps, *nothing crawling on the ceiling*, which James made damn sure of.  Just an empty room.  Three holes in the wall led to pitch black tunnels, the sticky light of the room not moving beyond the threshold.  A cluster of bright red shelled roachlike things scattered as they walked in.

The lack of a nauseating transition from Earth to this place was appreciated.

“Gear check.”  James called as the three of them spread out a bit and dropped their bags on the floor.  He could already feel that his own had been lightened, so the barrier was still in place.

Here was something else they sort-of-knew about dungeons; they all had some kind of defensive shell.  The attic had a fear field, the office had some kind of time compression, and the school’s sewer?  Well, it had a restriction, of sorts.

From what they could tell, it was pretty dang close to a list of things that weren’t allowed in school itself.  This was one of those things that didn’t fully make sense, because if you tried to come in holding a knife, the thing just hit the floor outside the entrance and you ended up unarmed.  But once you were *in* the sewer, there were *ample* opportunities to relieve the local wildlife of a blade, and you could walk around stabbing things with that one as much as you wanted.

But whatever the hypocrisy of the Akashic Sewer, the rules mostly lined up like this: no weapons, no electronics, no toys, no outside food.  Notably, laptops were exempt, as long as they didn’t have any games on them, with the exception of Minesweeper.  Other exemptions included water bottles, regardless of if they were full of water or not, and skulljack braids.  Presumably those last ones counted as medical devices in some way, but no one wanted to make a judgement call on that and risk being wrong when someone with a pacemaker tried to wander in and spontaneously died.

“Gun’s gone.”  Daniel reported, sorting through his bag.  “Sword’s gone.  Armor’s still here, though.  So’s the coffee.  And this.”  He held up a pen they’d liberated from Officium Mundi that, while technically still a pen, used a kind of highly concentrated acid instead of ink.

“Same stuff missing here.”  Sarah chimed in, smothering a choking cough.  “Ugh, I hate this smell.  It’s like it’s eating through the mask filter.”  All of them had chosen to wear thicker filter masks today, but as Sarah had said, it wasn’t doing much against the smell aside from making a fashion statement.  “Weirdly, the ball bearings are gone, but the stakes are still here.”  Her bag had contained a jar of the small metal orbs, perfectly suited to be ammunition for her organic ability to shape magnetic fields.  It had also contained a trio of sharpened wooden spikes, which were modified to be magnetically charged themselves.

“Maybe they were too close to ammo?”  James suggested, pulling the different pieces of armor padding out of his bag and starting to strap them to his arms and legs.  “Oh, telepad’s still here.  Good.”  He noted as he found it at the bottom of the bag.  “My rope is gone, though!”  James sulked, even as he pulled out a trio of wooden rods, and started screwing them together to form a staff.  There was a broom head in the bag, too, just to drive home the point to the dungeon that it was a tool and not a weapon, but he left that in there.

“Could be.  Hey, help me with this.”  Sarah turned toward him, presenting the straps on the back of her body armor for James to pull into place and hook together as she pointedly ignored his comment about the rope.  “Daniel, you need help?”

“We’ve got it.”  The younger man said simply, a dusty golden glow dispersing off his back as Pathfinder helped him don his own suit.

“Alright.  Ready?”  James asked again.

“Ready.”  “Set.”  The other two replied.  Sarah and James clipped pen lights to their shoulders, the thin beams of white light giving a small amount of illumination to their surroundings.  Meanwhile, around Daniel, Pathfinder spread her wings a couple inches, throwing off an orange glow that lit the area around him.

They picked a tunnel at random, and started walking.

Their boots made echoing thuds as the three of them stepped into the tunnel.  The walls still had rough concrete to them, but large chunks of both the wall and floors were replaced by clusters of pipes.  Most of them were metal, copper or rusted iron, though there were a few more modern looking plastic tubes as well.  The lights they had on them seemed to be almost strangled by the dark, only getting them a few feet of vision before they died out.  But it was enough to safely walk, and they made far better time than James’ crew had the first time they’d been here.

Every now and then, the group paused to listen to the rattling of something crawling through the pipes overhead, or the rush of some kind of liquid around them.  More than a few times, a bug the size of a human fist would scuttle out from a crack and dart toward their ankles.  None of them made it that far; not a single one of the people here had any interest in letting a magically spawned cockroach climb up their legs, and a heavy stomp was more than enough to deal with the things.

Every time they killed one, a small sputter of red sparks would light up the corpse for a half second before being drawn into whoever had killed it.  James had checked when he came in, and after a familiar brief flash of pain, had gotten a number to appear around the back of his hand; the sparks counted kills, and now they knew that they didn’t reset, no matter how long you were out of the dungeon.  So if nothing else, they’d have enough to leave through a gate if they needed to.  The last time James had fought this place, he’d killed enough creatures to have quite a stockpile.

After a half hour of walking in a mostly straight line, they came across an intersection in the tunnel.  A simple T, with the wall in front of them having a rusted door set into it.  It was also the first place they’d seen with its own light in the whole time they’d been walking; a puddle of some kind of aggressively glowing blue liquid forming a pool underneath a leaking pipe that it kept dripping from.

“Alright, left or right?  And also don’t touch that.”  James realized the words were absolutely pointless as soon as he’d said them.  None of the people were were amateurs or idiots; these were experienced delvers, one of whom had technically been doing it longer than he had.

“I say door.”  Sarah said.  “That’s where the green points come from, right?”

As far as James knew, yes.  There was one way to earn green sparks, and that was by answering the cryptic and hostile questions that the dungeon had carved into the walls in some of the side rooms.  And while the red sparks were used to open doors, the green ones were used to open the closest thing to treasure chests that an dungeon he’d seen so far had.

“You good with that?”  James asked Daniel, cocking his head to look back at the one bringing up their rearguard.

“Yeah.  Nothing’s been following us, and Path says that this place isn’t changing the walls.  So I don’t mind if we take a minute.  Besides, I kinda want to see what sort of lesson I’d get from this place, and that means we’ve gotta be a little greedy, right?”  Daniel answered with a shrug.  “It’s not like it’s hard for us to just run if we need to.  This place isn’t actually hard to navigate once you know the tricks.”

The trick, mostly, was to have a source of light, and not let it panic you.  Eventually, you’d find yourself at an exit arena.  And then all you had to do was kill your way out.  Not that such a thing was easy, but a strike team of experienced delvers had a hell of a lot more chance than a group of scared students.

“Alright.  Daniel, push it open from that side.  Sarah, take the left.  If anything moves, stab it.  Ready?”  James felt like half the words he’d said so far down here were just to ask if everyone else was ready to act.  He almost laughed as they got into position, but then remembered that this place was, more than any other dungeon they’d seen, *trying to kill people*.  If anywhere called for playing it safe, it was this dark and moldy pit.

James stood in the middle of the intersection, one foot on the jagged step that led to the door, while Daniel braced himself against the wall, and fed enough red sparks into the handle to convince it to crack open.  He had his makeshift staff held out in front of him, prepared to smack anything that charged out of the doorway once it was open.

He was in absolutely no way prepared for a trio of elongated human arms to burst out of the opened door.  They were easily several meters long each, with gooey flesh that practically dripped off of them, shimmering translucently in the different lights that the delvers had brought.  Multiple elbow joints on each one of them, that seemed to not be limited to a single direction, as the things jerked and thrashed across the floor, leaving behind a trail of their own melting skin.

In an ideal world, James would have reacted with the reflexes of an action movie protagonist.  But even having intentionally prepared for a fight, the only thing he managed before one of the hands wrapped around his own wrist and started applying force was to scream out a panicked yelp.

The second hand clamped onto his shoulder, and James jerked backward, peeling away a wet patch of skin from the thing as he tore himself away from it.  He brought the heavy wooden staff he had down on the one that was trying to readjust its grip, and heard the sickening pop of bones cracking.  But his angle was all wrong for this sort of suddenly proximity, and he found himself pinwheeling an arm as he fell backward onto his ass, the plastic shell of his body armor fortunately eating up the impact onto the ragged concrete.

Through the rushing noise in his ears, James heard Daniel and Sarah yelling something indistinct.  His heart started hammering in panicked fear as hands with a grip far stronger than should have been possible started clawing their way up his armor, closing in on his neck and unprotected face.  Then, one of them jerked sideways as Daniel brought the heel of his boot down on a joint so hard that it popped apart, splattering a yellow pus that smelled like year old eggs onto the floor and up James’ leg.  The disconnected hand instantly went slack, and James brought his other hands up to grab the last one that was trying to get to his eyes.

It had too many fingers, he realized the information as his hands latched onto it.  If that was the *only* thing going on, it would have been horrifying on its own.  But as it stood, he had bigger things to worry about.  So he grabbed at one of the thumbs and a couple of the fingers that were seeking his eyes, both his hands finding as solid a grip as he could through the gloves and the slippery flesh of the attacker, and James yanked his arms as hard as he could in opposite directions.

The arm tore in half like wet cardboard; a slurping sound accompanying the fountain of yellow pus down the front of his armor.  Then the thing started *crying*, the noise almost exactly like that of a human baby as it screamed and wailed, whipping back and forth as it slithered away from James body.

Then there was a magnetic snapping noise in the air, the crunch of wood on bone, and everything went silent.

James own wild yelling trailed off into the quiet as he realized the arms weren’t moving anymore.  Rolling to his stomach and pushing himself off the jagged floor with his gloved hands, he brought himself back to his feet and looked around.  Daniel was dry heaving onto the side of the hallway, the smell having gotten so far up his nose it felt like he was drowning in it.  The arm things lay limp across the concrete and pipes.  And Sarah was standing in front of the door, arms raised, panting in exertion.

James stepped up beside her, keeping an eye out around them and trying not to gag himself.  In the beam of his flashlight, he could see through the doorway that the wooden spikes she’d fired had found purchase in some kind of hanging bulb of flesh and slime.  The arms had been growing out of it, and there were more attached to the thing that simply weren’t long enough to reach past the door.  Now, it lay dripping that same pus, as well as a soft fountain of red sparks that flooded into Sarah’s still-raised hand.

“Okay.”  James eventually said, having to try the word a few times before he could speak without coughing in disgust.  “Alright.  So.  That’s just the fucking worst thing down here so far.”  He settled on.  “Congratulations.  There is no prize.”

“My prize is that I’m going to stay out here while you two check the room.”  Sarah informed him matter of factly.  “Because *fuck everything about that*.”  She pointed an accusatory finger through the doorway.

Neither of the guys argued with her.

The room itself was like the waiting room for a principal's office.  Only without any windows, and the chairs were all turned to piles of sharp kindling, and also the carpet had rotten away to a black sludge.  It just had that feeling, though.  The walls had words scraped into them, and in the light from the single flickering bulb overhead, James and Daniel read through them.

There were a couple of math questions; word problems about how many people died in a burning building.  One thing that seemed to be asking how many children perished in the book The Lord of the Flies.  And a much larger diagram that seemed to show a person having their organs ritually torn out.

Daniel answered the math problems easily enough.  James took a minute to run through the plot of the book he’d liked the least in high school before giving an answer to that as well.  Then the two of them stood looking at the last diagram together.

“Is it… does it want us to identify the different organs?”  James asked.

“Maybe it’s art.  Are we supposed to know that it’s cubism?”  Daniel wondered.  They waited, hopeful, but no green sparks came to life at his words.  “Alright, organs it is.”  He conceded.

“Well, that’s the heart, obviously.  Lungs.  Li… no, kidney.”  James pointed and labeled the pieces of the pictured person.  “What else?”

“Eyes are organs.”  Daniel offered.

James shrugged and tried it.  “Okay.  Heart, lungs, kidney, eye?”  And that was enough for the biology portion of the quiz; a dozen radioactive green sparks burning to life and flowing into James’ hand as he named the pieces of a dismembered image.  “Great.”  He said.  “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

No one had any arguments to that.

But even though they all now desperately wanted to take a two hour long scalding hot shower, and use up more soap in one go than the state of Ohio used in a year, they still took their time to move safely through the corridor.

They had the telepad; they could leave at any time.  But if they took their time, played it safe, and found an exit room, they could trade the answers they’d had to the simple - if grim - questions.  And the books they were rewarded would represent a large spike in consistent strength and survivability for the Order.

So they kept at it.  Picking off bugs, and at one point one of the weird hairless rat things that lunged down from the ceiling.  Avoiding the dripping fluids and drifting spores.  None of them talked much, because even though it would have been a distraction from the smell, no one wanted to spend the extra breath in this place.

They tackled a couple more rooms, neither of them with the arm bulbs.  They ran down the tunnels at a reckless speed when one of those balls of skulls and screams made itself known behind them.  They waited patiently as Daniel carved his way through a patch of wall that didn’t fit the rest of the place, hoping to find some kind of magic item buried there.

They helped Daniel make sure he’d gotten all of the swarming bugs off himself after it turned out that patch was a nest and not a hidden treasure.

And eventually, they came to a point where their tunnel stopped being quite so dark.  An orange light that looked almost welcoming, at the mouth of the tunnel where it opened into some kind of wider room.

“Ready check.”  James said, for what felt like the hundredth time.  As he did so, he unzipped his bag and pulled out the bottle of enchanted coffee that each of them had brought along.

“Grossed out, but ready.”  Sarah said, downing her own brew.

“Objectively more grossed out.”  Daniel added.  “But I’m good.  This is where they challenge us, right?”

“Maybe.”  James said.  “If we’re lucky, it’s empty, and we have the red to buy our way out.  If not, we’re going to have to fight.  If we’re half and half, then one of them is going to threaten us, but not stop us.”

“Them” in this case were the ratroaches.  Bipedal, with a third arm placed somewhere depending on what dice they’d rolled at character creation.  They were covered in a patchwork of mangy fur and rough beetle shell chitin, and so far, every one of them the Order had come across had been fanatically devoted to the act of killing for the dungeon they saw as some kind of god.

And as they stepped forward into the arena, James hissed out an angry breath as he saw dozens of the things lining the walls.

This last chamber had a floor of asphalt gravel.  It was the size and dimensions of a basketball court, but it didn’t stop at the edges.  Instead, a rusted chain link fence rose up around the outside, and beyond it, dozens of silently observant ratroaches watched the trio walk forward.  Well, ‘silent’ in that they didn’t speak or hiss or whatever other noises their species often produced.  They did rattle the various jagged blades and rough clubs they had against the fence, though.

At the end of the chamber, a warped iron grate covered a small hallway that led to a single door.  The door was blue, with the paint only a little chipped.  Just a normal looking metal security door, that happened to look exactly like the one they’d entered by.  It even had a fluorescent light overhead that bathed it in white light that looked positively divine compared to everything else in this hellish pit.  A couple of fairly mundane looking lockers sat nearby, half melted into the concrete, but otherwise intact.  James knew those would only open with the requisite number of green sparks to feed them, just as the metal grate wouldn’t be moved without enough reds.

A single ratroach stood in the center of the court.  Cream colored fur with speckles of brown mushrooms growing out if it.  Its extra arm was extended out of the elbow on its right side, giving it something akin to the look of a pincer.  Each of its hands on that side held a knife in a low position, idly flipping the blades over in its three-fingered hands.

As James, Sarah, and Daniel spread out on the court ahead of it, coffee burning in their veins alongside the adrenaline of a coming fight, it raised a fist over its head, and the rattling and thumping from around them ceased.

“Yooooou.”  The ratroach drooled out the words in a voice that was worryingly recognizable as feminine.  “Brrhing usss a prraaghry tooo thhe makerrrrr!”  Its - no, *her* - voice rose as she spoke, turning side to side to address not just the delvers, but the crowd as well.  A chittering series of cheers answered her as she screamed her words into the still air of the arena.

“I promise you we do not.”  James said, voice firm and projected loudly through his face mask.  He shook his head at the ratroach as he stepped forward in the middle of the trio’s wedge.  “Get out of the way.”  He ordered the creature.

“Nooooooo, nooo.”  The pale ratroach hissed a laugh at him, the noise bubbling through its muzzle.  “One lasssst praaaghyr you haaahve for ussss!”

“Per… prayer…”  Sarah tilted her head as she puzzled out the word.  “James.  James!  It’s saying ‘prayer’!”

“Not interested.  I’m ranking your religion shortly below Jehova’s Witnesses in terms of how much I don’t want you coming to my house.”  James bit out the words.  “Now get out of our way.  We have no interest in sacrificing each other to open the door, but if we need more blood we can always come back for yours.”

The ratroach chuckled, spraying acidic spittle onto the floor as it doubled over, clutching its chest in a strange inhuman parody of a laugh.  “Noooooo!”  It called, and the delvers finched and closed ranks as the ratroaches around them echoed the laughter.  “Iiiiii am yourrrr exhaulltation!”  It bellowed the words, mangled as they were through its twisted throat.  And then, without any further warning, lowered its arms to a boxer’s stance, and *flung* itself across the floor of the arena toward James.

It was fast.  *Fast*!  Faster than he’d expected from every one of these things the Order had put down in the past.  But being tempered in constant combat and dungeon exploration had given James a healthy paranoia, and a habit of making sure that the coffee that enhanced his reflexes to inhuman levels was always taken *before* the fights started.

One of the ratroach’s bone knives flashed down from overhead, the creature already having closed the gap.  James caught it on the bracer of his armor, eyes going wide as the blade sunk an inch into it and rasped against his skin underneath.  But it failed to draw blood, and when the thing brought its opposite fist up to try to uppercut him, James matched the blow with his own closed fist.

Ratroaches were, for all that they were willing to die in bloody spiteful droves, not built as well as a human body was.  And when James’ fist clashed against his enemy’s wrist, one of them was using a compact missile of flesh and bone, and the other one was cursed with a poorly assembled limb that shattered under the attack.

The ratroach swept its other knife in a crescent arc toward James’ throat, but he leaned back just enough to let it sweep past him without touching.  Then he lurched forward again, dropping a stomping kick onto the monster’s ankle while he brought his forearm up again to absorb another knife strike.

The ratroach hissed at him, droplets of its acidic saliva splattering onto his face and making James glad he’d kept the mask on.  Pulling on the knowledge of multiple martial arts orbs, he slipped forward into its guard, and shouldered it back under the jaw.  A rapid series of punches before the ratroach could react caved in parts of its stomach and ribcage, and then James jetted backward, multiple different magical sources making him faster than a human could ever be.

“Yessss!”  The ratroach wailed, even as it vomited up its own blood onto the floor.  The voice sounding less like a creature in pain and more like the thing was drowning in pleasure.  Then it lunged forward again, arms coming together to try to wrap James in a vile embrace.

Daniel slugged it in the side of the head, dazing it and knocking it off course.  Then, having circled around it from behind, Sarah landed a hook kick on it that caved its flesh in around her boot and sent the ratroach sprawling to the ground, the knives it was holding pinwheeling through the air as it lost its grip.

James caught one of its knives in mid flight, pivoted into a pitcher’s stance, and flung it at full speed into the creature’s chest.  The blade half-cut into a patch of skin where it met chitin, and opened up a gash in the ratroach before bouncing across the floor beyond it.

The monster lay there, dripping its own blood and drool, staring up at the grimly lit ceiling of the room.  Its chest heaved with the ragged breaths it took, but it made no move to try to rise.  James stood a yard or two away, in a rough circle around it with Sarah and Daniel trading looks over the body.  Around them, the ratroaches encircling the arena seemed to be holding their breaths; not a sound from the crowd of dozens of the disgusting creatures.

“We’re leaving.”  James announced.  “Sarah, Daniel.  Get the door.”  He let them run ahead, and then turned to keep an eye on their downed foe.  “Ah, fuck.”  He muttered as the ratroach started to push itself up, blood running red lines through its pale fur.

“Goooood.”  It coughed out.  “Aahhhhh…. Yesss.  Goood praghyr.”  The light in its eyes danced in joy, even as it had to suck in haggered breaths just to get the mangled words out.  “Next tiiiime… againnnn…”  It gasped the words, settling itself onto its hands and knees, prostrating itself on the jagged rocks of the floor.

James looked at it, the adrenaline of the fight not having fully faded from his blood.  Even though the coffee and his enchantments made it so he wasn’t really in that much danger, the feeling of having something try to drive sharpened bone into your eye wasn’t a pleasant one.  And in that moment, he had a thought.

He should just kill this thing.

What possible good would come from leaving it alive?  The last time he left an enemy alive, it came back and shot his friends.  It would take six seconds to stomp this thing’s throat into paste, and that would solve that problem forever.  No risk that it would end up eating some random kid that fell into this place.  No risk that it would sneak out and try to murder James or his family while they slept.

He took a halting step forward.

That was the point, wasn’t it?  He’d won.  Again.  Every time someone tried to kill him, he’d survived, and won.  His reward should be a feeling of safety.  And he wasn’t going to get that if he kept trying to play nice.  What was the point of surviving if no one ever tried to do *better*?

James yanked the knife out of his armor where it had been buried, and took another step forward.  The ratroach raised its eyes to look at him, and he got the sickening sense that it both knew what he was thinking, and was thrilled by it.

He sighed, tossing the knife off to the side of the makeshift court.

“You know.”  He said softly, crouching down in front of the thing.  “I’m not really in a position to kink-shame anyone…”

“James!”  Sarah called over, a rattling of metal accompanying her words.  “Let’s go!”

“Don’t eat anyone until I get back.”  James ordered the ratroach as he stood.  It looked up at him with glee in its faceted eyes, and nodded its triangular head in obedience, before slumping back to lie prone in its own blood.

The green sparks they had were enough to crack several lockers.  They made it out of there with a water-damaged romance novel, a cliff notes version of some Shakespere play, a biology textbook, two spiral notebooks, and something that James was pretty sure was a German copy of a Harry Potter book.

Each of them picked one of them, as they made their way through the blue metal door and past where Lua was still sitting keeping watch.  It dropped them out right where they’d started.

James offered a book to Lua as well, and she accepted it.  Each of them knew the value of having a little extra edge.  Which left the romance novel and a spiral notebook to be tested out with the magic copy process, to see if they could start to spread the stat upgrades from this place into the whole of the Order as part of their loadout package.

One by one, they cracked open the books they’d chosen.

It was either minutes or hours later that James looked up from whatever he was reading, the physical object of the book fading into dust that itself faded down into something smaller and smaller until it was gone from reality.  And then, in the back of his head, the thought he’d been waiting for.

[Lesson Begun : Biology 0/200

Lesson Continues : Basketball 64/1200]

He looked around at the other three members of the Order, and asked the obvious question.  “What’chall got?”

“US History.”  Daniel said, a little disappointed.  “I… don’t like history.  Dammit.”

“I’ll link you a Youtube channel.”  James promised.  “Sarah?”

“Art!  I finally got art!”  She exclaimed with delight.

“Finally?  How many of these have you used?”  Lua asked her.  “I’ve been watching the door the whole time…”  She glanced between the entrance to the dungeon and the young woman doing a small shuffling dance in the hallway.  “Also I got geometry.  Does it not tell you what you get for completing it?”

“Not until your first upgrade.”  James said sadly, unbuckling the damaged and dripping pieces of his armor.  “Daniel, empty your bag into mine, let’s use yours to store all the gross stuff.”

“Aaw!  No!”  Daniel started to protest, until he was assured that they would be burning the bag afterward anyway and he wouldn’t have to carry it with them.

After that, stripped of as much of the mess as they could manage, the three of them said their quick goodbye to Lua with a promise to meet up again at the Lair later to discuss what had changed.  According to her, they’d been in there for only twenty minutes or so, not the few hours they’d experienced.  But it would still be prudent to vacate school grounds before anyone got too suspicious of them.  FBI or not, there was no sense pushing the limits of their cover.

In the car on the way back to the Lair, where James was given to understand someone had installed a hot shower in the basement, the three of them finally started to relax.

“Well, that was super fucked up!”  Daniel exclaimed.  “I think I hate that place.”

“Agreed.”  Sarah nodded.  “Hey, James, you’re still on about building that arcology, right?”

“Constantly.  We’re working on figuring out a few main things before we lay the foundations, though.  Why?”

“Well, I’m just thinking.  If you can get Momo to magic you up some kind of portal, we could just connect it to that place, and use it as a sewage dump, and no one will worry or care.”

James opened his mouth to explain that doing that might be unethical, or just mean to the life that lived in the Akashic Sewer, or might annoy the dungeon itself, or any *number* of other problems.  But then he remembered the smell that still clung to his clothes and hair, thought about the sensation of slimy fingers and ragged fur trying to rip him apart, and checked his count of how many kids the place had killed in the last year alone.

“Yeah, okay.”  He settled on.  “I feel like at this point, literally shitting on that place is probably a fair response.”