Badax woke up the next morning with a dry throat and rumbling stomach. Neither of those had anything to do with the poison but the minotaur cursed it all the same as he rolled out of his tiny bed and stood up. It didn’t matter at all that he just needed breakfast; Badax was a simple creature and liked having something to bitch about in the mornings.

Grabbing his cracked earthenware bowls, Badax headed down to the mess hall, salivating at the scent of peppered meat wafting through the air as he got closer and closer.

The mess hall was filled with other minions and mini-bosses, but Badax didn’t bother greeting any of them as he took his place at the back of the line and waited for it to move. He didn’t know them and didn’t care to, though his malaise-afflicted brain now wondered if maybe he should. Weren’t they his comrades, after all? Didn’t they all share a common purpose of protecting the Mistress and serving her interests?

Growling to himself, Badax dismissed the unwelcome thoughts with a vengeance, and held out his bowls for the day’s special rations.

A perfect harmony of gloopy mess and grainy texture, the special rations were a sludge that the Mistress required all mini-bosses to eat them with every meal. Today’s variant was gray, though the minotaur didn’t think there was much difference between the colors. The flavors were always damn near the same.

He was much happier to see the seven juicy slabs of meat that were put in his bowl at the next station. They looked and smelled like they’d been coated in a thick layer of salt and pepper, and the minotaur’s mouth watered as he didn’t bother grabbing anything else and made his way over to a soon-to-be-vacated table.

A pair of repair gnolls were sitting there, muttering to each other in their sloping way. Each word of their peculiar dialect made Badax imagine someone falling down a deep hole, but of all the unique minion languages in the lair it was one of the easiest to pick up and understand.

With a grunt and a snarl, the minotaur curled his tongue and told them to get lost as best he could in the same language. His pronunciation and accent surely left much to be desired, but the gnolls got the point and skedaddled.

Badax sat down and ripped into the meat, not wanting to tarnish its smoky flavor by dipping it in his special rations. He’d choke them down after he finished the good stuff, as he always did.

As he chewed and swallowed, his thoughts drifted to the day before him. Since it was Seconday, he wasn’t scheduled to go to the mini-boss station and ensure that the lair was protected from adventurer incursions. Instead, he had to report to the quarries for a few hours and assist the quartz golems in their endless task of breaking the oblong crystals used in some of the Mistress’ experiments. It was simple work, but tedious.

Still, once he was done, the rest of his day would be his own, and Badax intended to try and replicate the strange sounds of the guitar for himself. He hated to admit it, but he was eager to hear the ethereal sounds once more, and excited as could be at the prospect of being the one to make them. His enthusiasm aided his appetite, and Badax wolfed down the rest of his meal in near record time and went to wash away the remaining bits of gray sludge.

With his bowls cleaned and returned to their spot next to his bed, Badax stomped down to the quarries.

Rubal, the golem quartermaster, handed Badax a pickaxe and sent him to quarry nine on the southwest corner, where the minotaur spent the next few hours mindlessly swinging his tool and carrying heavy crystals. His side ached and twinged a little bit, but the minotaur had a good tolerance for pain and didn’t let it slow him down.

Still, he veritably itched to finish his duties, and smiled when Rubal came over to collect his pick.

[Quarry assistance complete! You have gained 30 experience!]

Badax stamped his hooves as the popup vanished. He didn’t really give a damn about his experience – he’d always been big and strong enough to kill whatever he needed to without having to worry about his XLevel, which had been stuck at 33 for as long as he could remember – but it seemed wrong that he’d gotten more by swinging a pick for a few hours than he had for killing the adventurers the day before. He wasn’t one to question the Mistress, but he had to admit that it seemed like her priorities were a little fucked up. Surely lives were worth more than some rocks, right?

If not…well, better not to think about that. It made the back of his skull itch.

Urt covered in filth, and reeking like garbage, met up with the minotaur as Badax returned to his room. The goblin was grinning, and he carried a tiny sack that Badax suspected was filled with more contraband.

“It’s good to see you,” Urt said. “Last night I was a little worried that I’d forgotten to add the Buffalo Cherrysap, but I guess I didn’t.”

“How can you tell?”

“If I had, you wouldn’t be standing here breathing right now. Your lungs would have collapsed while you slept.”

“Ah,” said Badax. “Good to know. I guess that’s settled then.”

The friends stepped to the side of the hall as a regiment of batlings marched down the hall, and Badax nodded to them as each of them saluted him in turn. The leathery creatures weren’t well-suited to moving along the ground, and two stumbled and fell before they disappeared down a different hallway.

Once they were back in the minotaur’s room, Urt busied himself with refilling his bag from yesterday and yattering about things Badax didn’t understand while the minotaur picked up the guitar. How he’d been looking forward to this! With a hungry gaze, Badax examined it from every angle, admiring the way the green paint on the wood reflected the light and the strings seemed to glow. In a way, it reminded him of the puppet construct that he’d once worked alongside, with a big belly, tiny head, and impossibly long neck.

“You have any idea how this thing works?” Badax asked.

Urt stared at the guitar for a moment, then reached over and gently ran his fingers along the strings, plucking each in turn. They all made a bright, ringing sound, but they weren’t the same as the ones the Bard had made. Badax said so, and the goblin fondled his fingers as he thought and continued testing.

Eventually, he stopped and nodded to himself.

“I see, I see. It’s all vibration, with the sound coming out of the hole. Hmm. I bet that those bars of metal in the neck have something to do with it,” he said. “If you pinch the strings down against the wood between them, I think that’ll be enough.”

To test his hypothesis, Urt pressed the thinnest string between two of the small pieces of silver along the neck down and plucked it. Sure enough, the noise was quite a bit different than it’d been before.

“Yeah, that’s it. Why don’t you give it a try, Badax?”

The minotaur grunted and lifted the guitar up off the ground. His heart started racing and his breaths came quick. Somehow, the guitar felt even lighter than it had the day before, but he wrapped his left hand around the neck and pressed the strings down. Then, he raised his trembling right hand and strummed all six strings the way Urt had, expecting to hear a sound like the ones made by the Bard.

Instead, there was just a snap of steel as the strings sheared beneath the force of his stroke, and Badax barely had enough time to close his eyes before six thin whips raked across his face. The pain barely registered, but when Badax looked down and saw the strings wiggling around like worms in the dirt, a red flare of burning rage filled through his senses. He lifted the guitar high into the air with his hands around its neck and roared. As the walls of his room shook, he slammed the instrument into the ground, shattering it into pieces.

Urt wiped a scrap of wood from his brow and picked his nose before looking up.

“You know, I think we could have fixed the strings,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any hope left for it now.”

Urt was right, and Badax knew it. The minotaur breathed heavily, the furnace of his fury cooling almost as quickly as it’d ignited. A strange, unpleasant sensation he was entirely unused to took root in his stomach as he looked down at the bits of wood and metal that now covered his floor. Regret.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly, feeling foolish at his anger.

[Personality Deviation Detected! Activating Corrective Measures!]

Something popped in Badax’ skull, and he heard Urt say something he couldn’t understand as the room swam before his eyes. Falling to his knees, Badax looked up at his friend and tried to talk, tried to ask what was happening, but his mouth was fuzzy and he couldn’t get the words to come out right. Or at all.

Darkness took him.

When he opened his eyes once more, his room was pitch black, and the walls were screaming.