The Rangers fanned out, rapping the walls and stomping the floors. The way things were, Dane figured that there had to be a secret bedroom, some place that she went to when defeated to respawn and do this all over again to some other poor schlubs. There was a problem, though. Wherever it was, if it was here, they just weren’t skilled enough to find it. A futile feeling of despair permeated their ranks.

“So now what?” Guzman asked. All of them had taken it hard but unlike Dane’s rage Guzman had taken a softer and weepier approach, pawing the walls and tapping the floors in a robotic way as the silent tears just flowed.

“Fuck. I don’t know. She has got to be here somewhere.” Dane pushed and prodded a bit more, then sighed. He’d have to think of another way to find her.

A dismayed silence brooded over the room, each peering at the other. Rivera narrowed metallic eyebrows and struck a hard blow against the ceiling. stone fragments and mortar cascaded down around him. Dane narrowed his eyes and looked at the man’s metal face.

“Rivera, do you take damage when you punch walls and stuff like that?”

Rivera laughed, an emotionless and hollow echo in this room. “Give me the time and I can punch through a mountain without a scratch.”

Everyone was looking at him, and Dane was happy to know that he had it all figured out. “We all want revenge and I know just how to do it: Rivera, start breaking walls.”

The golemite was more than happy to comply, strolling over to the closest one and landing an immediate crack into his center. It might have been Dane’s imagination but it really felt like the whole room itself shuddered under his amazing might. Assuming he was using the entirety of the strength available to him, cards included, he was laying mid double-digit whammies against the masonry of this dungeon, one by one walls cracked and splintered until, finally, a hole appeared. One that peeked directly into a secret room.

“Tracy,” Dane shouted. “We know you’re in there!”

Shuffling ensued, and Tracy peered back from the other side of the hole, her body still in demonic form.

“Just leave me! I don’t want to kill any more of you!” She was crying, crocodile tears if he had ever seen them.

“Bullshit,” Guzman growled. No tears stained her face now, just an angry scowl sharp enough to cut flesh.

“Ay, tis a shame if that is true, lassy. Cause the heft of our blades will be finding your insides nonetheless.”

Dane peered closer at the woman’s face. Her eyes were wide and she appeared to be in quite a bit of distress. Maybe she was telling the truth.

“Who are you, really? Your save point story was a lie, so what else was the same? What’s the truth, Tracy? Who are you?”

Tracy’s tears thickened into a torrent. “I, I, I’m just a nobody. When the change came I was just hiding out here, in the library.”

Dane cocked his head.

“Yeah, it was a library. I was hiding in a study cubicle, reading a romance.” Her eyes grew distant. “It was the story of The Man-Eater, a demonic succubus who didn’t like who she was but had to be. She’d mate and kill, over and over again. In the book there was an item, an artifact, that could change her. But before she was to find it, the world went to hell.”

Dane nodded and sighed loudly. “And suddenly you were here. Goddamn it.”

“I don’t want to be a monster. I don’t want to do what I do. But the feelings are so strong! I constantly want to have sex… and kill.”

The LT snorted. “Lady, what you are doing isn’t just killing. Killing around these parts means a level down, a card out, and no more worse for wear. You are deleting people.”

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

“Outside of this room, when people kill and get killed, they don’t stay dead. But you, what you did here, that wasn’t normal. Is he dead dead?”

It was Tracy’s turn to sigh. “I didn’t know there was any other kind. I consumed him. I could feel his light blaze brightly inside of me and then sizzle and dissolve, a final scream and then silence. He is dead dead.”

“That settles it then,” Rivera said, smashing himself through the wall and seizing her in his grip. “You die now.”

“No, please, I can’t control it!”

Rivera smashed her head into the wall again and again, until she faded and they got their victory notification, xps and loot appearing in the vision. The succubus appeared again in her bed and Rivera was on her once more. The rest of the rangers just watched as she was smashed and broken again and again until, finally, there was nothing left but a rabbit and a card. Both of which promptly vanished.

“What happened? Where did she go?” Guzman asked, striding forward and searching the spot where she’d last been.

“I think we nega-leveled her and she’s now a card. Probably spawning to some treasure horde elsewhere. Or, hell, a shepherd’s cottage somewhere. Does it matter? She’s something else and completely neutralized. Let’s get on with this.”

***

They had just begun to unpack the reality of what happened to Pugh when Priscilla, Rinna, Hale and Drell came flouncing down the stairs. They looked, in all ways, the opposite of how the Rangers were holding up. First of all, Priscilla was smeared with clown makeup, wore big squeaky shoes, and had on a wig so big and garish Dane thought Sir Gigglesworth was resurrected and descending the steps to try and murder them again. Hale was right behind her, chuckling and wiping goo-ified clown off his enormous sword, while Drell was eyeing her with suspicion, as if he was checking to see if she hadn’t been possessed by a psychopathic clown and was going to turn on them at any second.

“Whoo, you were right!” Priscilla called. “Bloody dungeon is an XP wonderland. An’ ye say it goes on forever? ‘Ave a looksie at this, eh?”

She showed off a posie attached to her cloak, which shot a ray of water out. This sailed right by Dane’s ear and power washed some of the wallpaper off the succubus room.

“Six to forty-five water damage, puts out fires, exacerbates lightning damage, and is cute as all get out!”

“I am amazed your civilization exists at all with these… clowns… rampaging throughout earth. They are truly terrifying to behold, and even worse to fight,” Hale said.

“The illusions at work!” Drell exclaimed, shaking his head, going tsk tsk tsk. “Those Democrat illusions.”

“Who wants a squirt?” Priscilla called.

Rinna held up a furry white paw hand. “Hold, Priscilla Shadow Walker.” He peered about at the carnage. “There were six of you… now five.”

It took a surprising amount of time for the otherworlders to believe that Pugh had been killed and wasn’t ever going to return. The concept of the spawn point was only three months old, but from the sound of it, the otherworlders had been killed a number of times and had come back to life. They essentially had come to rely on coming back from the dead, since it allowed them to take big risks for big rewards.

The realization was hard-hitting, especially that some creatures could circumvent their spawn points and leave them without a safety net. More importantly, the loss of Pugh was difficult to handle. Niederhauer was especially down, and while Rivera was his characteristically silent self, the lights running over his body had dimmed noticeably.

“She was some level far higher than I’ve ever tried to Inspect,” Dane said, shaking his head. “It’s why she came off as an NPC.”

“Lad was right the whole time,” Daniels added.

“Wot now then, eh?” Priscilla asked.

“The plan’s always been to hit the training hard, and get enough levels to face off against The Five. This whole thing might end up coming down because of them.”

So they did.

The remainder of this level nearly murdered them over and again. It was stuffed to the gills with murderous, cleaver-wielding puppets and these things that darted out of your shadow. The puppets were immune to every condition available, so even if they were just a head with a single hit point, they could still deliver a powerful bite. For a time, it was all Niederhauer, blasting every doll piece River and Guzman left in their wake with fire breath, until they were nothing more than ash.

The shadow creatures were just as insidious, going after their weaker attackers before Rivera or Hale even knew to use taunt abilities and draw their damage. If it weren’t for the hyper vigilance of the Rangers, Priscilla would’ve been dragged off, Drell would’ve been shredded to death by their long claws. Lucky for them, they had a stellar combination of healing, DPS, and Dane’s eagle throwing True Sight everywhere. Its head was literally on a swivel.

Four hours and an entire level of dungeon later, they collapsed outside the boss’s lair. They were on the brink of level 9, but were in no shape to face the boss.

“Loving the metallic skull on the double doors,” Niederhauer said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“One hunnert percent boss lair. Wot ye say, Dane, have us a rest, go in guns blazin?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

One campfire and several heal spells later, they sat down to rations.

“I can’t wait to see the look on those idiots’ faces when we tie them to their beds and set fire to them,” Guzman said quietly.

Dane nearly choked. The idea went through him, clanged off several different questions, and got stuffed into the gearbox of his mind. There it went through the assembly line and came out polished.

“You’ve seen The Five in the flesh, right, Priscilla?” he asked.

“Four,” Niederhauer said.

She was lounging in Rinna’s lap grooming herself, which sent bolts of jealousy and lust through him. When she nodded, he went on. “How long before you think we can go after them?”

“Few months. Maybe level twenty-five or thirty, if’n we all got a banger of a plan an’ git lucky.”

Rivera’s eyes burned with indignant fire. “Months?”

“Months?” Niederhauer echoed. “Did you say months?”

“What happened to the fifth one?” Rinna asked, steamrolling the dragon man. “They’re supposed to be The Five, but you keep saying four.”

“We had a man on the inside who took her out,” Daniels explained.

“What happened after that? Why didn’t he get the other four?”

Daniels shrugged. “Command lost contact with him after that.”

Priscilla sat up, tail twitching.

“Do you know how he did it?” Rinna asked.

“He teleported her bed to the very edge of the anomaly… HQ reported she was pulled out of the anomaly on a luxurious four poster,” Dane replied.

“Right to the edge of the anomaly,” Daniels finished for him. “Killed her too. So when she respawned she was being dragged outside the anomaly by our people. She’s a Canadian citizen so it’s… been a bit of an incident.”

“Wish he could’ve finished the job,” Guzman added. “We wouldn’t be in here looking at months of this.”

“What’s this guy’s name?” Priscilla asked. Dane felt a flash of jealousy for no actual discernible reason.

“Corbin… Donnelly was it?”

“Dogherty,” Priscilla finished. “Corbin Dogherty.”

“Wait, you know this guy? What happened to him?”

Priscilla told them. By the end of her story, jaws were on the floor. Two minutes later they had the crystal ball on the floor between them, and were staring in confusion at a peacock mantis shrimp.

***

Dane watched all of this in horrified confusion. Of course he’d seen Willow once upon a time, and knew exactly what was going on, but… the rest of the scene was something else entirely.

“We hafta get ‘im back, sure as shit,” Priscilla demanded.

“We have our mission–”

She was in his face with a glowing purple dagger. “I made a mistake wiff Corbin, unnerstan? I owe the wee bastard. We done helped you get on yer feet, now you return the flavor.”

“I…”

He peered around, or was about to, but the glowing purple dagger in his face drew closer. He could almost hear it slurping his life out to give to her, from the eerie spectral moaning barely audible.

“Okay… hang on.”

“LT?” Rivera asked.

Eyes swung over to Daniels while Dane considered. He bent his Knowhow to the task, and called on all the Intelligence he had as a character in here. Maybe if he…

He dumped the contents of his Voluminous Sack on the floor, then the rest of his inventory, and began to sort through it. Armor scraps came spilling out, a stack of ability cards, followed by three echocrystal shards, a bunch of fur pelts, and then… springs, gears, power cores and the scroll for the portal out of this dungeon.

“He’s an owl now,” Guzman said.

Okay… he could do this. He grabbed up his toolkit and began to attach the gears and springs to some of the sturdier plates, while the power core scanned and then ate the scroll of ‘portal out of here.’ He was halfway through building this horrible little bronze monstrosity, and tinkering with the interior coding of the spell subsumed within the power core when a great cheer went up. When he pressed the debug button on the power core, a new pop up came in, which was vaguely like working in Python: each rune of power had a description of what it did, and the language was truncated with plenty of seemingly unnecessary punctuation marks. He ripped out the ‘dungeon entrance’ command and peered around for something to replace it.

“Go, go, go!” the rangers shouted.

“Come on, Corbin!” Drell urged.

“Fly outta there ya feathered sonovabitch!” Priscilla screamed. “Mama wants a new owl familiar!”

Dane fiddled with the tiny dials and buttons on the fist sized eldritch power device until the text read exactly what he wanted it to read.

Priscilla shot to her feet and shrieked, “NOOOOOOO!”

“I dunno, he looks pretty good as a jaguar,” Niederhauer muttered.

Dane had the first power core set up to provide the juice, and the second one with the scroll instructions programmed in. Another thirty seconds later he ignored the confused muttering about what the hell Corbin was doing, and Priscilla pulling her hair out. Okay, the whole device was pretty much ready, including the cup necessary to hold the crystal ball. Before any of them could protest, he grabbed it and settled it into his new gadget.

Oh, and the protestation began immediately. He ignored that too, pointed straight at Niederhauer, and commanded, “Open the portal right now.”