The room fell eerily silent. Everyone contained within was now on their feet, myself included, and most were flabbergasted, afraid, or a healthy portion of both.

The NPC guards had been the first to shake off the shock of what we’d just witnessed. They rushed forward, forming a line just over halfway up the chamber, doubtlessly afraid to venture further lest they find themselves within the mysterious assassin’s reach. They were promptly joined by a large warrior who immediately pushed himself to the front of the formation. It was Grom, and his demeanor had completely changed from that of the man I met earlier.

“All combatants,” he announced, projecting an authority I wouldn’t have imagined him capable off. “Ready yer weapons. “As contractors fer Clan Kronan, we all have a duty to protect the zeros. An’ as human beings, we have a duty to prevent whatever’s back there from spreadin’ to the main dungeon an’ zeroin’ out our weaker brothers an’ sisters. Mages, hold yer damn wand-fire until we see what’s comin’ out of that tunnel. Zeros, get the hell out of here while yeh have the chance. Now!”

While some of the combatants seemed reluctant to step forward, he certainly didn’t have to give that last order twice. At the foreman’s command, a sea of workers scrambled toward the tunnel we’d arrived through, hoping to escape whatever threat was now on its way. Unsurprisingly, not all of the workers attempting to escape were non-combatants. But to his credit, Tiny remained, despite my knowing for a fact that he no longer possessed a weapon.

Shit. Speaking of which… telling the basic workers to run for it while we cover their retreat was all very noble, but what about the combatants who don’t have a weapon compatible with their skillset? You know, like me?

A few more warriors were clearly having similar thoughts, their attention split between the source of the threat and backwards glances toward the roughly-constructed exit. As the swarm of zeroes passed through them, some fighters inevitably broke rank, hoping that their quiet addition to the exodus would go unnoticed.

“C’mon you pack of sword-jockey’s,” bellowed Kriabal, adding his presence to the makeshift army as he addressed those who remained on the sidelines. “Get yer overly-toned asses over here. In case there’s any confusion, no-one’s expecting you pack of losers to take down a boss. If that was the case, you wouldn’t see me for dust. But this is an organized retreat. We just need to hold the line until the zeros have filed into the tunnel. After that, we retreat through the cave ourselves, an’ use it as a bottleneck to take down anythin’ that might try to slip through behind us.”

Well, that was a relief. I looked to where Samusk had been standing, wondering what sage-like wisdom he was going to offer me now. But the little coward was already making his break for freedom, and at a speed I’d not imagined possible from his dwarven avatar. Hurmp! So much for his always being at my side to compensate for my weaknesses, eh? I could order him back, I supposed (him being my slave and all). But if it truly was a boss on the other side of that corridor, then I had to ask myself: was there really any benefit in my knowing how many times more powerful than me the creature was, while it was kicking me around the lair like a human football?

I sighed and drew my assassins’ dagger. You know, because I’m a fucking idiot who doesn’t know when to back down from a fight. Hell, that much was obvious from the moment I punched one of Siriso’s guards, right? But in truth, there was more to it than that. There was no denying that I needed to grasp every opportunity with both hands, if power-leveling to warden-slaying levels was to be achieved within the time that I’d been allocated. And boss battles provided incredible boosts, I’d learned that first hand. ‘Shade, monster-slaying Emperor of Noobs’ did have a nice ring to it, after all. Perhaps this was how I was going to reach my impossible goal.

A boss-battle a day keeps the murderous goblin priest away, eh? Here’s hoping.

By this stage many of the barbarians, half-orcs and sword-wielders had filled out the ranks of the NPCs: brave souls hoping to do the right thing, rep up, or just make a good impression on their employer. Like the guards they now stood with, their weapons were drawn, and their eyes fixed firmly on the tunnel leading to the front line. Some were consuming potions, their chatter confirming that the temporary boosts to their strength or skills would be their only hope of surviving a fight, regardless of what form it took. I suddenly wished I’d used my chat with Kriabal to ask if he had any such elixirs going spare.

To my surprise, a few of those who remained were from the rabble known as the brotherhood, no doubt ordered to stand their ground by their battle-hungry imbecile of a leader. They were a few rows back, admittedly, but they were there, nonetheless. Most were independents, like me. I’m sure they all had their own reasons for standing firm, and I wouldn’t profess to know the inner thoughts of anyone who chooses to run around in a loin-cloth all day. But be it naivety, bravery, avarice or fear, they were all standing together, a scattered rag-tag army of noobs. A community, readying itself to confront whatever was lurking in that darkness and threatening its home, if only to buy the weaker prisoners time to escape. I felt my heart swell. And two little words later, it sank.

“It’s barred,” yelled a voice from the back of the room.

“What?” yelled Grom, his tone switching to concern.

“The tunnel’s sealed by some kinda forcefield,” came the cry of another. “We can’t get out.”

“Shit. I was afraid of this,” the foreman spat, turning to one of the NPC guards.

“Only one thing can seal off a boss chamber,” agreed the guard, solemnly. The tentacle must have been enough to send the chamber into shut-down.”

A commotion was growing among the troops. Cursing under his breath, Grom rushed to scale a pile of building blocks, elevation from which to address his motley excuse for an army.

“Alright everyone, listen up. You’ve heard it already, we’re all sealed in…”

“So fucking unseal it,” came a guttural half-orc’s reply.

“Yeah, we have to get the hell out of here,” came another, one of the swords-women standing among the rabble.

As noobs, it was evident that they weren’t privy to the workings of a boss lair. Unfortunately for me, I was. Intimately so. Grom didn’t mince his words, explaining that we were trapped here until either the boss was dead, or we were. Until that happened, our only exit was sealed.

Panic erupted at that announcement. Most of the souls trapped in the chamber hadn’t so much as encountered a level 1 mob, let alone a boss. Many were determined to check the exit for themselves, breaking ranks with little thought of how weak their attempts to escape made them look in front of the others. Like sheep, more and more bodies began to break away, futilely descending upon the tunnel we’d arrived through. And one such deserter stood tall above the others: it was the lanky foreman’s assistant, SkullFucker.

Yup, that one’s sword is clearly only for decorative purposes.

Determined to help reverse the trend I ran to Grom’s side, my dagger in one hand and my battered shield in the other. I was joined by a flustered looking Kriabal, a slice of mob meat hanging from his mouth as he jogged into position.

“Something’s coming out,” cried our army’s solitary dwarf, his night-sight piercing the darkness of the corridor’s mouth.

Seconds later we all saw it, a flurry of activity as a surge of bodies came tumbling into the chamber. They were on the back-foot, bloodied and blindly stumbling as they struggled to put distance between themselves and the corridor. Among them, I recognized three faces from the raid party (the tank I’d shamelessly robbed, a generic-looking barbarian and jackpot… General Nyx). They were accompanied by a barbarian I didn’t recognize and an equally bloodied wizard, his once flamboyant robes now steeped in crimson.

They were barely on their feet and running for cover when a volley of tentacles erupted from the darkness behind them. Three shot out directly, rigid as a spear, tearing through the ranks of the retreating warriors. The damage was devastating, with one of the barbarians completely impaled. But to make matters worse, the strike had been two-fold. Two further tentacles had veered left and right, banking around the corner of the corridor’s entrance and instantly skewering the mages who lay in wait for the enemy. One fell, clutching a gaping wound in his side, but he was the lucky one. The others had been too slow to comprehend what was happening before they’d been completely impaled.

Shock and revulsion rippled through our ‘army’ as we stood there slack-jawed, powerless to assist. And once again, the tentacles withdrew as quickly as they’d arrived, all five snapping back as one. They disappeared into the darkness, taking two apprentices and one screaming barbarian with them.

Only one member of the arcane ambush party had survived, and he was bleeding heavily from the hip. The name above his head declared him to be ‘HarryPothead, and I recognized him as the guy who had patched me up earlier. He took a moment to raid his colleague’s pockets, downed what I could only assume to be his friend’s emergency healing potion, and abandoned the spot where his companions had died, limping across the chamber to join the makeshift army that had amassed a good thirty yards from the corridor’s opening. Although within spitting distance of the fallen raid party, he didn’t stop to check on them. He had only one goal: reaching the relative safety of our numbers.

“The apprentices were hidden from its view,” spat Grom. “How the hell did the thing know where to strike?”

“It’s intelligent, that much is obvious,” replied Kriabal, “As for how it knew, you can blame the trigger-happy apprentice for that. He’s the one who blew our magic users’ position. It knew we had at least one fighter with range attacks lying in wait to ambush it, so the clever bastard attacked both sides, just to be sure.”

“The raid party, can you read their HP?” asked the closest guard, confirming that his own perception was probably little better than my own. And that worried me.

Has the warden sent noob guards to babysit noob prisoners, I wondered? They were probably still quite tough, if they were expected to keep about fifty armed prisoners in line. But boss level? No chance. It occurred to me that perhaps NPCs had to grind their skills too, just like the rest of us. And that it would be a bad allocation of resources on the Dungeon Wardens’ part to have his strongest troops looking after a pack of noob’s, while their mighty trusted employers were so close by. Shit! The guards probably are stronger than we are, but not by much.

Grom nodded and squinted at the broken mass of bodies lying halfway between us and the abyss. “General Nyx is alive, but barely. The apprentice is stunned, suffered a critical hit, probably hasn’t got long. The other two are both dead.”

“Kraynor’s dead?” gasped Kriabal.

“’Fraid so.”

“Damn, I’m sorry I missed that. And in all seriousness, we could really have used another healer.” He turned to our own apprentice, who was busy casting heal on himself. “Oi, Gandalf Jr. Have you got the range to cast heal on the general, there?”

The bloodied apprentice shook his head, holding up a finger to signify his pitiful level.

“Fuck! Damn that Grandel for refusin’ to come outta his cell after the shadow stallion fight. Fucking baby. And damn Nyx for cutting costs like this. I can’t believe she stuck us wiv a bunch of level 1 and 2 wiz-tards.”

“What about the boss?” continued the guard, turning back to Grom. “I’ve heard you have good eyes, foreman. Were you able to glean the beast’s stats from its tentacles?”

Grom nodded. “It was only a quick glance, so I only caught the basics. It’s called a Paracyde, whatever that is.”

“Never heard of it,” replied the guard. “And unlike you failed flesh-bags, I have full access to the dungeon’s bestiary files.”

“Yeah, but that’s the trouble with unexplored dungeons…” piped up Kriabal. They’re full of nice new surprises. And it’s up to us humans to catalogue them. Who do you think keeps updating those damn files of yours? It ain’t a Not Particularly Competent, that’s for sure.”

The guard grunted, then asked: “What sort of HP are we dealing with, then?”

“Trust me, yeh don’t wanna know,” replied Grom, solemnly. “I’ll send yeh both a private message. I’m not sure it would be wise worry the ‘troops’ with the finer details just yet.”

That didn’t sound good. I listened, trying not to interrupt the grown-ups with stupid questions like ‘we’re all going to die now, aren’t we?’

“Its mass is getting closer to the chamber,” called out the dwarf. “Somethin’ big is definitely movin’ in there.”

“Dwarf, you’re with me,” ordered the guard. With that he turned on his heel and rejoined his own kind, our early detection system now following closely behind him.

“Typical,” spat Grom. “I knew it was too much to ask that they work with us. Looks like I’m fine as a source of information, but not worthy of discussin’ strategy wiv their mighty AI brains,” he lamented. With that he retook his meagre podium, again addressing the ‘troops.’ “All right, time to ready ourselves fer a shit-storm of epic proportions. Orcs, start smashing up some of those blocks into the biggest rocks yeh can possibly throw. Let’s hope brute force succeeds where magic failed us. I want barbarians to the front of our ranks as tanks, sword-wielders, I need you to form up the next line. Be ready to strike with precision while the barbarians take the brunt of the damage.”

“Shouldn’t we do something to help Nyx and that apprentice?” I asked, placing a hand on Kriabal’s shoulder.

“I don’t like the way this thing just left them in the middle of the room for us, like that,” replied the warlock. “You saw that things reach. It could have finished them off easily. You ask me, the raid party are looking an awful lot like bait.”

I looked back behind me, to the back of the chamber where roughly twenty zeros were huddled in fear beside the tunnel we’d entered through. They’d formed a pitiful barrier using sacks of mob meat. A few were wailing, dreading the loss of what little skill they’d accumulated when the penalty kicked in for respawning. I pitied them, but they did not command my attention for long. The corridor’s occupant let out a disturbing screech, pulling complacent eyes such as my own back to the threat at hand. Turning to the corridor, my gaze was met with unnerving glowing eyes that were far from human. Worse, there were a lot more of them than any of us had expected.

“Crap, the fucker has an advance guard of lower level mobs with it,” snapped Kriabal, furiously pumping mana into his staff as he spoke. “What were the raid party doin’ in there, using their fancy swords to scratch their arses?”

The staff flared with arcane energy, its skull-topper beginning to blur as if reality itself was unfolding around it. I immediately decided that I’d picked the right guy to stand next to.

Creatures finally came shambling from the darkness and into view, and to our shock, they were wearing the raid party. Or perhaps the other way around, I wasn’t quite sure. Either way, it was a bizarre sight. Each barbarian was wearing the maw of a hellhounds neck like a grotesque crown of fangs and eyes. The beast’s bodies were slumped over the warrior’s backs like animal furs that someone had foolishly forgotten to remove from their previous owner. Compared to the hulking beast of a hellhound that I had encountered earlier, these dangling creatures looked emaciated, as if their very essence had somehow been drained from them.

“Possession,” grumbled the warlock. “This shit-show just keeps getting better and better, eh?”

Ah. At least that explained their withered forms, then. In each case, the mob’s very essence was being leached from one (possibly stolen?) body into another. And the horrific act did not come without the physical mutilation of the host. Across the punctured skin of each barbarian spread an infection-like disease, their skin laden with pock-marks and dark twitching veins. Armored bone plates grew from random points in their ravaged-looking anatomy, as if a former hosts programming was being patched into their systems in an ad-hoc quest for power. I gave thanks for the shield that Kriabal had gifted me: it was probably the only thing that prevented the beast I tackled earlier from sinking its teeth into my once-vulnerable arm and making me its next host. Mental note: go shopping for proper bracers.

One thing was for certain: the walking horror shows made the shadow foals I met yesterday look like my little shadow ponies by comparison. And to make matters worse, there were seven of the gruesome bastards, all slowly advancing on our position.

This, I now realised, was why the hellhound had been so keen to reach the main dungeon. It was carrying an infection of sorts, and it was determined to spread to a more powerful host. Apparently where that hound had failed, the rest of the pack had succeeded. I tried to read the one I recognized, but where it should have said BulldogBrit, the text above its head simply read ‘possessed barbarian.’

“So, this is the appetizer before the main course, eh?” announced Tiny, cocky as ever.

He wasn’t the only one who was growing in confidence. All around me, my fellow warriors were itching for a fight. And who could blame them, the odds (for the moment at least) were definitely looking to be in our favor. You know, from a number’s perspective. The odds were five-to-one in our favor, at least.

Positive thoughts, Shade. They may be ugly bastards, but they’re ridiculously outnumbered. We have sword-wielders, barbarians, half orcs and even a couple of magic users. We can do this.

Of course, there was much more to a numbers advantage than the number of troops you possessed in this world. Still, my allies didn’t seem to think so. Humanoid opponents were something they could get their heads around, and a handicap match even more so. Moral was definitely up. Until a ripple of panic brought the chorus of jeers and bravado to an abrupt close.

Slowly this time, tentacles began to feel their way out of the darkness. There was no question about it. Momma was coming.