Logan Murray pulled his truck into the driveway of his ranch house in Arvada, Colorado. The suspension creaked as the tires crunched onto the gravel beside his garage. The garage itself was full of tools, lawn mowers, replacement parts, and a big woodchipper named Wanda—not to mention a variety of equipment he only pulled out when he had specialty jobs to run. But that was fine. His big F-350 didn’t need a comfortable place to live. His business did. Logan’s Landscaping, though physically demanding work, kept food on the table and him out of trouble.

He killed the engine, but just sat there for a long beat. He rubbed his tired eyes with calloused hands and sighed.

It had been a long day, and he was glad to be done with it. The work had been the same as always, but he’d had to fire Tyler McWiggins. HR was easily the worst part of running his own business. But Tyler had it coming. The kid had three major issues in his life: he drank too much, worked too little, and complained like a defendant in divorce court.

Out of the three issues, the complaining was the worst. Tyler had called in to complain how sick he was. Logan knew better. His employee had the Monday flu after a weekend of Coors Light and kvetching, red wine and whining, Bud Light and bellyaching.

So Logan had to work the day alone, which he hated. His other guys were hammering together a deck in Cherry Creek. Logan had spent most of the day bidding jobs and most of the evening digging post holes for Grady Henderson in Thornton.

The setting sun streaked red and gold across the sky. After spending hours in the heat, Logan was sweaty, dirty, and his belly rang empty like the bell in an abandoned church. Dirt covered his hands and clothes, and mud encrusted his boots. When digging post holes, you soaked them down first, before you used the digger. One of the first rules of landscaping? Let water do the heavy lifting for you. Still, even with the water, digging post holes was backbreaking work.

His uncle had disagreed with Logan’s choice of careers. Uncle Bud called picks and shovels idiot sticks. Logan shrugged that off. He found the long hours, the heat, and the labor fun. Besides, any kind of manual labor was a thousand times easier than the grunt work and never-ending hours he’d pulled overseas in the Army. Logan had been a 25B, once upon a time—an Information Tech Specialist. Sounded fancy, though in reality it amounted to being a radio operator attached to an Infantry unit.

Now that had been work. Running line. Going on patrol. Lugging around the oversized PRC-77 radio—affectionately referred to as the Prick-77, by the poor souls who had to carry it. Landscaping had nothing on that. The work was fulfilling in its way. And the hours went by fast when he was with his workers, listening to the radio, talking trash, and building things. Nothing was as satisfying as taking nothing and leaving behind a masterpiece of wood, sod, and flowers.

Working with plants was fascinating.

Logan spent hours researching flowers, climbing vines, mushrooms, and different kinds of fertilizers. After five years of running his own business, he knew, down to the week, the life cycle of your typical lawn.

He popped open the door of his truck, stepped out, and winced as he put weight on his prosthetic leg. Unlike Tyler, he wasn’t a complainer. However, if he did have a mind to whine, it would be about his leg. Not losing it. He was lucky to be alive. But by god, it hurt after a long day. Phantom tingles raced up and down the skin that wasn’t there. The tingles were better than the raw pain that often lingered in his stump. They’d taken the leg just below the knee. Why? That was a long story, too long for a summer night when there was a beer and voicemails to attend to.

Moving with a slight limp, he headed through his back gate and into the weeds and grass of his backyard. It was a jungle—the only thing it was missing was Tarzan and a few stray lions strolling through the savannah near the back fence. Logan spent his days perfecting the yards of his customers, but his own was liable to get a notice from the HOA any day. What was that old proverb? The shoemaker’s children have no shoes. It was like that but with more weeds.

He strode across the cracked patio cement and through the back door.

The scratch of nails on tile announced the presence of his three slobber hounds. The trio were only too happy to see him. He felt the same. Patting their heads and ruffling their fur, he let them race out into the wilds of his backyard.

The fridge gave him beer and some leftover fried chicken. He stuck a leg in his teeth and stood at the sink watching his dogs race through the tracks they’d created in the jungle. Those puppies were the best: Noodle Doodle, Princess Peach, and Booker DeWitt.

He caught a whiff of himself. “That’s the smell of money for a working man,” he muttered under his breath.

He’d get a shower. Eventually. But first he had voicemails to suffer through. His foreman, Ramon Garcia, said the deck was going well and that the team got more work done without him. It was an old joke between the two.

Then there were the clients, asking for updates or wanting him for more work. Always more, which was a good problem to have at the end of the day. Denver and its suburbs were booming. He’d have to replace Tyler—despite the kid’s failings, he hated having to let him go. He sighed again, resigned. Such was life. Truthfully, finding help was always an issue when you ran your own business, but it needed to be done. Hard work was always made easier by many hands. Too bad he couldn’t cast a spell and turn his dogs into people.

Speaking of spells, he had something special planned for tonight.

He would chew down some chicken, wash it down with a cold one, then grab a fresh beer for an evening of murder and magic. He was so damned close to beating the game, and what a game it was.

He grunted and sat down in a wood chair at the same dinner table he’d grown up eating at. His parents were gone now, both passed on, but they’d left him the house and a fair amount of their personal effects in the will.

Slowly, he unlaced his boots then threw them on the welcome rug by the back door. His pups were done with their jungle expedition and whining for dinner. He’d feed them outside so they could enjoy the night. He limped out, one foot in a holey sock, the other bare plastic. From the garage, he grabbed the food and filled their bowls on the back porch. They joined him, tails waggling, mouths drooling, nails clicking on the cement. The fragrance of dog and dry grass reminded him that he’d need to give them baths soon.

“Good dogs,” he said. Having the puppies kept him from feeling too alone. He’d have to try that dating thing again at some point. He still had his lapsed OkCupid account and a Lizzy-sized hole in his life.

That was a worry for another night, or maybe another year entirely.

For now? He had a date with destiny.

Beer in hand, he ambled back into the house and through the kitchen. His living room was bachelor sparse. Over the years, he’d cleaned out his mother’s stuff, then his father’s stuff, and now all that remained was his stuff—two big La-Z-Boys, flanked by end tables, faced a seventy-five-inch TV sitting on a shelf above his game consoles. The walls had some pictures of Logan, his dad, and Uncle Bud, but mainly they were for the speakers, which gave him perfect, crystal-clear surround sound and enough bass to stop the heart in your chest.

His newest game console awaited him, and it was strange to say the least.

It was a purple cube he’d picked up at a pawnshop for twenty-five bucks. Old-school. The single controller had a long wire—that told you exactly how old the unit was. He liked to think of it as a lost classic, probably some knockoff of the old-school systems like Atari and Intellivision. Maybe the purple cube had been one of Nintendo’s first competitors. He hadn’t been able to find anything out about the thing on Google, which was shocking in its own right, but he didn’t really care.

Logan liked the classic gaming experience. His Army buddies were all probably shooting it up in Blood Warfare 4: Blood Debt.

Logan needed to keep in better touch with his buddies. Growing up as an only child, struggling through high school, he hadn’t found true friends until he’d enlisted. Then? It was what the military called the esprit de corps, a fancy French term for morale. But it was more than that. It was that feeling of camaraderie that Logan missed. Going through hell with your buddies made you love every single one of them… well, maybe some more than others. He would never miss Wheeler getting black-out drunk and barfing all over his bunk. There was plenty he did miss, though.

With a sigh, Logan promised himself he’d send more texts and make more calls. Just as soon as he beat this game.

He’d been hooked on the thing for the past month.

Only one controller. Only one game: The Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons. Zany. Wild. It had character. It was an outdated 2D Dungeon Keeper–style game. The graphics weren’t great, but the game play was fun and that was all that mattered in the end. And he was so close to finishing it. Stuck on the last level.

A stylized S, the black logo of the company, decorated the front of the purple cube. The power button was nestled in the top swoop of the S. A mauve light winked on in the bottom swoop.

As the old game console rattled to life, he plopped down on his favorite La-Z-Boy. He unstrapped his fake leg and propped it beside his chair. It felt good to be free of the prosthesis—like taking off ski boots after a long day on the slopes.

He sipped his beer and set it on the end table. No coasters. If the dating thing turned into the girlfriend thing, she might insist on coasters. He wasn’t sure he could handle that kind of action.

The screen flashed, music tinkled out with 8-bit beauty, and his current progress showed him at 97% complete. He’d kept his dungeon safe from dozens of waves of greedy dungeoneers looking to steal his dungeon core from out of the inner sanctum. Tonight would be the night he’d kill the last, most powerful group. It was made up of five raiders, each a different class, all bent on his destruction.

Logan had prepared his dungeon carefully.

It was a deadly place, full of traps, monsters, and mazes. Logan had chosen the Spider King Guardian, so he had access to webs and arachnids of every size and shape.

Logan licked his lips and hunched forward, allowing the lead fighter to effortlessly hack through cobwebs he’d placed in an inner stairwell. Sure, let the tank through. Logan didn’t much care about that guy. However, the cleric in the party? His healing spells would only make Logan’s life harder.

At the perfect time, Logan pushed the X button. The floor opened up like a yawning maw and the pixel-y cleric fell onto venom-coated spikes.

“Hell yeah!” Logan crowed.

The cleric gushed blocky blood before flashing and dematerializing. The cube gave out the kill sound, “Wah-wah,” before promptly notifying him that only four dungeoneers remained.

The party’s magic-user, an Inferno Hellreaver, cast a fireball that fried a room full of giant spiders. That was the bad news. The good news? They’d missed the secret room that Logan had put behind them. One of his largest minions, Debbie the Drider—his name for her—scurried out of the hidden room on a host of arachnoid legs, raising her bow and unleashing a hail of poisoned arrows. The magic-user’s days of fireballs were over. Two arrows pierced him, shattering him like the glass cannon he was. Debbie also critically wounded, thanks to the efforts of an elven ranger, before the party’s rogue managed to stab her in the back.

Poor Debbie.

The rogue undid Logan’s pressure-plate trap in the next room, and the tank took out his giant spider, Shelly Shelob. Logan frowned. Three raiders were still alive. He’d wanted to keep the party out of the inner sanctum. They’d taken a fair bit of damage, but was it enough?

The tank and the ranger slashed through the webs covering the entryway to the innermost chamber. Logan’s boss, a spidery wizard with web spells, poison missiles, and hard chitinous armor, waited for the raiders, protecting the dark gem floating over the sanctum’s pedestal. That dark gem was the heart of the dungeon, and if he lost that, the game was over. This was risky and the fight could go either way, but he was too close now not to at least try.

Logan focused his efforts on the rogue, riddling him with arcane missiles. The wah-wah of the kill was sweet, but the battle was far from over.

Logan quickly spawned a pair of level-two Spiderkin. They never stood a chance against the invaders, but he used them to split the remainder of the party just long enough to snare the elven ranger in his Web Lock spell. He used the last of his magic—called Apothos instead of the more typical mana—to summon an additional round of Spiderkin, which rappelled in from the ceiling on strands of silver silk.

The tank had his big two-handed sword raised, ready to slash Logan’s dungeon lord to pieces.

The cube squawked and hissed as the spiders descended and killed the ranger. Wah-wah. The tank hit Logan’s arachnoid wizard, halving his hit points.

Logan clicked to his menu, found the melee option, and chose his only weapon, a Black Widow dagger.

Logan toggled the directional pad, narrowly avoiding an overhand slash, then smashed X, driving his blade home even as the tank pivoted and ran him through with his sword.

Breathless, the Army vet turned landscaper winced, waiting for either the wah-wah or the more sinister tones of his own destruction. He had to grin. He was a combat veteran, and yet, he felt like a twelve-year-old boy. This was fun. This was so much better than being in a real firefight—so much less was on the line.

Then?

Wah-wah!

His stomach clenched into a knot.

Logan’s character had single-digit hit points but the tank was dead. Dead. Gone. TPK. And his fragile dungeon core had survived every single dungeoneer the game had thrown at it. Supposedly, something called the Tree of Souls was now safe from the raiders. Logan wasn’t sure what that meant—great game play, but the world building lacked the substance of some of the more modern dungeon crawlers out there on the market. The game was over, though. He grabbed his beer and raised the tip of the bottle in a salute.

“Debbie. Shelly. We did it.”

His eyes narrowed. The screen was flashing, almost like the dang thing was glitching. That would suck—to beat the game and be denied the endgame cutscene. At least he hoped there was an endgame cutscene.

Suddenly, the cube went crazy with blips and bloops, and then a new song started, the victory song. Logan let out a sigh of relief as he waited for the end credits to roll. But something else happened. A purple glow slowly filled in the room. The cube looked like a radioactive bomb about to explode.

The screen itself went black.

Words formed in the darkness, growing larger and brighter. Congratulations, Neophyte. Welcome to the Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons!

Huh? That was a strange message. Why did it say welcome when he’d just beaten the game?

The cube wasn’t just glowing purple anymore, it was twitching, shaking, and rattling on the shelf next to his Xbox and Playstation.

Uh- oh. Seriously, what in the heck was going on?

Blisters bubbled across the plastic of the cube and plumes of fine gray smoke curled up.

No, no, no. It was overheating. Catching fire maybe. Logan wasn’t about to lose his TV and his other gaming consoles. He threw himself off the sofa and hit the carpet, lunging forward to try and knock the boiling plastic away. He was too late.

Tentacles exploded out of the purple cube. His TV careened backward as the cube grew and split the shelf and smacked away the other consoles.

The cube itself, now the size of sofa, was covered with a slick purple skin. The horror, whatever it was, opened like a mouth as wide as his woodchipper. Too many jagged teeth filled that glowing maw.

Logan skittered back, hit the chair, and used it to stand. He was moving so slow—he’d taken his leg off! The pups were still outside. Thank goodness for that. But things were looking bleak.

No, he couldn’t afford to think like that.

The battle was only over when you gave up, and he wasn’t going to do that. Not ever.

Resolve hardened, he hopped toward the bedroom to get to the Mossberg 500 shotgun by his nightstand. That would put a damper on the purple monster in his living room—tentacles, teeth, that garish purple glow.

He would grab the Colt 1911, his father’s pistol, as well as the scattergun, but that meant getting there. He got three hops in before a tentacle whipped around his single leg and pulled it out from under him. He hit the ground with a thud, teeth biting down into his tongue in a bright flash of pain.

Logan spit out a mouthful of blood, dug his fingers into the carpet, and began to pull himself forward. The air had a hot, fetid smell, like a dead raccoon stuck in a truck engine on a hot summer’s day. He couldn’t see the creature now—his eyes were fixed on the door at the end of the hall—but he could feel it looming over him.

With a jerk, Logan was yanked across his carpet. He felt teeth sink into his good calf, a jagged lance of pain shooting through his body. The mouth opened and chomped back down, ripping into both his thighs. When he felt the teeth rise for a third bite, he turned and kicked at it. He wouldn’t be taken by this monster cube without a fight.

The thing had grown a single eye—in the same place where the power button had been. It roared in defiance, flinging greasy saliva into Logan’s face.

Logan grimaced then roared back. He lashed out again with his remaining leg, but the kick felt weak and uncoordinated. He was losing blood, and his vision was narrowing. Tentacles slithered out, wrapping around his arms, his neck, and what was left of his legs. Logan struggled and thrashed, still fighting toward his bedroom, determined to get to the gun. He was losing consciousness.

The last thing he saw was the thing’s fangs and then it was all darkness.