The cages were so small that those inside couldn’t properly stand or lie down. The prisoners hadn’t seen them yet, the shadows of the tunnel hiding them from view. The room stank of grime and fear. Hump could hardly bear to look at them. They were husks of their former selves; their thin shapes huddled into the back of the cages. Dead, hollow eyes stared out. Hump forced himself to look away and scan the room methodically, building a wall of logic to block out his horror and grief. The cages were square shaped, made of poorly crafted wood that wouldn’t stand a chance of holding an experienced adventurer. For ordinary villagers though, it was enough. Iron locks bolted the doors. There was no escaping this prison, not without help.

Three children were kept at the centre of the room, in full view of everyone else, seemingly a constant reminder of why they shouldn’t try to break free. Beside them were three empty child-sized cages. Hump wished with all his being that they were simply three cages too many, but from the cruelty he could already see, he doubted it.

White hot fury blazed within him.

He was young, but he’d been in the world of dungeons and monsters for almost a decade. There was a level of desensitisation that one built up to sights such as this, but it had been a while since Hump had seen something that made him feel so much hate. He wanted the kobolds dead. He wanted them punished. It took everything he had to not charge into the chamber and hunt them down like rats in a sewer. He could still hear them, the clicks and chatters of their voices warping as they echoed through the tunnel.

“Bastards,” Bud snarled, storming the chamber.

Hump threw himself into the knight, shoving him against the wall with all his strength. It was barely enough to move the big man. “Wait!”

“Get out of my way,” Bud hissed, half shoving him to the ground, but Hump threw his body weight against the knight.

“We have to check for traps, Bud,” Hump said. Bud glared down at him, breathing heavily, with an anger in his eyes that made Hump nervous. He felt the same anger, but a wizard knew not to let emotions take control. “We can’t help anyone if we’re dead.”

“I won’t leave them,” Bud growled, shoving against him again.

Hump gritted his teeth and pressed him back. “We won’t,” he growled back. “If you want to help these people, let us make a plan.” Bud paused. Hump held his breath, ready to go for another round, but Bud’s shoulders relaxed. Hump released him and took a step back. “Are you good?”

“Yeah.” Bud nodded. “Sorry. I… There are children.” He practically choked the words. He rubbed a hand against his face and blinked hard. “We have to help them.”

Hump clapped his arm. “I’m with you all the way. We’re going to get them out and make the bastards who did this pay.” Hump turned back to the other two to find them watching him closely. “What do we do?” he asked Vamir.

“You two won’t be any use now,” Vamir said. “Wait here and stay quiet.”

“We can help,” Bud said.

Vamir shook his head. “This must be done quickly and quietly. If there are traps, I can only be sure of Celaine and I spotting and disarming them. A single wrong move, and every kobold in this damned place could be after us. Hump, are you able to bring down this tunnel?” He pressed his palm against the tunnel wall.

Hump glanced up at the jagged stones. It was hard and solid, there wasn’t a hope of blasting it apart with his ordinary battle magic. But there were other ways to work things “I can do it. It’ll be big, loud and explosive, but I can bring it down. I’ll need at least a couple of minutes to prepare.”

Vamir nodded. “Work on it. But do it quietly. When the time comes, you won’t have a minute. You’ll be covering our retreat.”

Hump gulped but nodded. He was in over his head. Way, way over his head. The old man would have been able to pull something like this off, no problem, but Hump had never needed to use such large-scale magic under pressure. We should have stayed with the other parties, he thought. But dammit, then nobody would have found these people. Just don’t screw it up.

“Good,” Vamir said. “Bud, guard him. Don’t let anyone wander off.”

Bud frowned.

Vamir gripped his shoulder tightly, chainmail crinkling. “I know you want to help, but trust me, this is the best you can do for now. Leave us to our strengths and understand your own weaknesses. That’s what it means to work as a party. When the fighting starts, we’re going to need you on the front line. Understood?”

Bud nodded. “Understood. You can count on me.”

“I will.” Vamir looked between them. “With any luck, we might not get stabbed or eaten.” Then he turned his focus to the chamber. “Celaine, take the left side. I’ll start with the kids.”

“Got it,” she said.

“Good luck,” Hump whispered after them.

Hump could hardly focus on his work as he watched Celaine and Vamir creep forward. Slowly, the prisoners began to pay attention to them. Hump saw dim eyes; grey eyes suddenly flicker and shine with hope. It split his heart in two.

Celaine held a finger to her lips.

It was slow progress for Vamir and Celaine. They found the first trap almost immediately—a stone tile on the ground that wasn’t quite uniform. A pressure plate. He’d already seen Celaine disarm one of them in the tunnel earlier; it had been connected to a delicate shard of essence. She had explained that stepping on the stone would crush the shard and the shard would explode. Enough to take your foot off and alert every kobold in the area.

Hump forced his eyes away. There wasn’t time for him to watch, he had his own job to do. Even his master would have had difficulty bringing down a tunnel of hard stone, but knowing the old man, he’d have figured out a way to crumble it to gravel and then form it into a wall or something of the sort. Hump had never been much good at fine work. That took real skill and practice—something he was many years away from perfecting. Instead, he preferred to rely on brute force. Chuck enough power into a spell and it didn’t matter how much leaked out in the process, so long as it got the job done.

“What’s the plan?” Bud asked. “Can you really bring this down?”

“Sure.” Hump shrugged. “A wizard always has his ways.” With all the slickness he could muster, he whipped free the stick of chalk he’d purchased in town from his trouser pocket and held it up as if it were a dangerous weapon. Then he knelt and got to work.

Wizards thrived in magical focal points. They were places where essence was most concentrated. Here in the dungeon, the ambient essence was so thick that Hump could feel it on his skin like tiny ants. He might not have a god to draw magic from like a Chosen, but he knew his own strength, and he could draw on the essence from the world around him. Just as the dungeon gave the kobolds strength and rejuvenation, he would take it for himself.

There was a reason Chosen didn’t use magic in this way. It was slow, inconvenient, and essence came in many different forms. Vamir had said it right, essence was innately chaotic. If that was true for the outside world, dungeon essence was on steroids. To use it, Hump would have to transform it into something less likely to burn him alive.

He drew a circle of six runes around him. The general idea that he affixed in his mind was one of control. If the dungeon essence was a storm, he was a sail. A little wind would carry him wherever he needed to go, he just had to ensure it didn’t tear apart his ship. There was no need to complicate it further. With this amount of essence, he needed to do little more than point it where it needed to go.

Runes were complicated. To the uninitiated, they might seem to be nothing more than simple words and letters. They weren’t. They were far beyond anything that could be conveyed in simple writing. Devised from the writings of the gods, they conveyed concepts and meanings in a way that could literally change the world. Technically, it was possible for a powerful enough wizard to do something like this with their mind alone, but it was far more difficult. All the wizards Hump had met needed things to help them focus, words, gestures, artefacts, and most powerful of all, runes.

There was no room for mistakes. Each stroke, each mark, had to be imbued with the will of the writer, guided into existence by their carefully crafted intent. The runes for Hidden Fire had been child’s play, designed only to store his essence and intent to maintain the spell. Now even for a rune as simple as ‘Gather’, he had to maintain complete and perfect focus. Like his storage runes, it would hold essence, but unlike them it would draw in that essence from the dungeon. There would be no second chance, not on a rune that had absorbed this amount of essence. If he messed it up, it would be the end of him, and likely the end of any chance these fourteen prisoners had to escape.

When he was done, the runes took effect immediately, lighting up with the bronze sheen of earth essence. Hump felt the power immediately. He was at the centre of the formation, the conduit through which it all worked. The runes helped to contain it, but residual essence assailed him in a wave of heat that pressed up through his body like a fever. He leant heavily on his staff and focused on its crystal, channelling as much of the power as he could into the artefact. The engraved runes along the staff began to glow, smoking with bronze vapour.

As more essence flooded him, the dark tunnels suddenly seemed full of light; every jagged rock was as clear to him as if they were outside. The blood, the emaciated prisoners, the children. He could see it all. And he could sense the deep, unending power of the dungeon.

It was the power to shatter stone, to crack the earth, to shake the very world. And for this small moment, it was his. And it was ready to burst.

When he opened his eyes, he saw three children standing behind Bud at his side, watching him with a mixture of awe and fear. He’d not noticed them arrive. He knew how he must look. Essence leaked from his body like steam, his eyes would be shining with the bronze radiance that he channelled.

Hump gave them what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Make sure nobody touches the markings,” Hump said, bronze mist on his breath. “It’s sensitive stuff.”

They all nodded nervously. They were thin—so thin he wondered how long they had been captive. The sight opened a pit in Hump’s stomach and he almost allowed his magic to spill inside and consume him. He closed his eyes and breathed. He couldn’t let emotion take over. When that happened, he would no longer be the one in command, it would be the essence driving him. And little good would come of that.

In the darkness beyond his sight, through the connection he now had with the dungeon, he felt something stir. A tremor through the ground, so faint, he wondered if he’d imagined it.

He focused harder, reaching out with his senses, searching beyond the chamber’s exit and into the tunnels beyond. Nothing. Whatever it was had stopped.

Relax, he told himself. Just tunnel echoes. He frowned. Or lack thereof.

The silence crashed upon him like thunder. The sound of kobolds was gone. There was no quiet clicking chatter, no cough of choked snarl. Just silence. Hump turned to Bud in panic. “They’re coming.”

“What?”

“I can feel it. The noise is gone. They’re onto us, we need to move.”

There wasn’t a moment of doubt. Bud drew his sword, the blade coming alive with frostfire, casting Bud and the tunnel in an icy blue light. The children shrank back.

Bud hurried into the room, trying to be as quiet as he could, retracing the steps laid out by Vamir and Celaine. “Vamir, we’re cutting open the cages.”

The man glanced at him, taking only a moment to understand. “Do it.” He drew his own sword. “Celaine, shoot whatever the hell comes from that tunnel.”

She already had her bow in hand. “Like you need to tell me,” she snapped back. For all her bravado, Hump couldn’t help but notice she floundered with her arrows—she was nervous. That wasn’t good because he was nervous too.

Don’t get distracted, he told himself. There was way too much essence flowing through him for him to start getting cold feet.

Vamir hacked at the first cage, using his sword as an axe. Bud charged up to the next one, a man held inside. With a great, two-handed swing of his longsword, he sliced through all five bars with ease. A crack echoed out.

Two more prisoners free. They could do this. They could…

The ground began to tremor. Fast and constant, like beating drums. Footsteps.

The first out of the tunnel was a salamander. It bounced off the walls like an overexcited puppy as it charged into the chamber, only this puppy was bigger than a crocodile. Dark red-brown scales armoured its body, the scales slick and smooth as a snake’s. Its underside was a lighter tanned white. It charged at them, snarling with razor teeth, tail whipping behind it.

Celaine let loose an arrow that streaked through the air, trailed by silver, piercing the creature just beneath the eye. The salamander recoiled and fell, screaming and writhing on the ground. But then another appeared out of the darkness behind it, barrelling over its injured brethren. Kobolds rushed into the chamber with spears, snarling like dogs. In seconds, the room was a chorus of snarls and howls.

And then the horde was upon them.