Alfric moved slowly to the room’s brass door. They were well and truly lost in the dungeon, which wasn’t a good thing to be, especially not so quickly in. This was worse than the shifting of the earlier dungeon, where they’d been poisoned, and the periodic thrum took on an ominous quality now that they were trapped. Still, there were doors, ways out, paths that might lead them further away or closer to the exit. What would have been worse was nothing to try, if there had been no clear route by which an attempt at escape might be had.

He wondered whether this, too, was Verity.

It might represent her feeling lost in her life, or her disconnection from her parents, or it might have just been random. The thrum that washed through the dungeon was definitely her, or if it wasn’t, then an enormous coincidence. The hundred lutes were her, or — no, definitely her.

They’d come into the dungeon early in the morning, which meant that they had time. That was the one thing on their side.

he said. He was painfully aware that it wasn’t normal, and that they hadn’t done a dungeon in a long time. The party hadn’t rushed back into the dungeons after the failures, which meant the party had a long lag between when they’d fought.

asked Mizuki.

Alfric had been moving toward the large brass door rather than the smaller sliding wooden one. He stopped and considered.

said Hannah.

said Alfric.

Hannah nodded.

Alfric could feel that he’d changed. He’d lost confidence. The answer of which door to pick should have been obvious, or not obvious, but at least the arguments should have sprung clear and fully formed from his mind. He should have made a decision. He took in a breath and tried to focus himself. He thought about what his mother had said, which was that training was something you carried with you, a tool that never left your side, and if you had it, then you could use it even when your mind was failing you in other ways. He let out the breath.

he said. It wasn’t the time to creep along, it was time to use contingencies.

She nodded, slowly.

The bucket of mice wasn’t an actual bucket, that was just what Mizuki had called it. Instead, it was a wooden box held in the garden stone which had a number of cubbies in it for the mice to sit in. Isra could control them with relative ease, given their small size, and better, she could see through their eyes.

It took time to get the mice out. They transferred the box into the trunk, where it fit somewhat snuggly, by design. It was on top of the lutes, and Alfric once again had cause to thank the trunk’s ability to stop things from crushing each other.

said Alfric.

Isra frowned.

said Alfric.

Isra nodded. She opened the box and took a mouse out, then set him on the ground with a bit of food. A second and third mouse were held in her hand. They were small brown field mice, skittish little things, captured from a meadow earlier that morning, before breakfast. Isra hadn’t liked this contingency, and hadn’t been able to articulate why, but she had agreed to it.

she asked.

said Alfric.

said Isra. She had wanted the mice to live. She was comfortable with killing, even with killing animals that she had touched with her druidic powers, but there was something in the nature of this that gave her pause. It gave Alfric pause too.

he asked.

she replied.

They waited as the mice did their work, particularly the right mouse, which was scouting ahead. It was dark, and the mice had no light to move by, but Alfric was hoping they could make their way anyway. Animals had better night vision, but dungeons could be brutally dark.

Alfric waited. He tried to keep his eyes from Isra, who was, at the moment, the only one actually doing anything.

She swore, a sharp Kiromon curse she must have picked up from Mizuki, and shook her head. she said.

asked Mizuki.

said Isra. Her dark skin was looking more pale than usual.

asked Alfric.

said Isra.

said Alfric.

The thrum happened again, cutting him off. He hadn’t forgotten about it, exactly, but he hadn’t been tensed for it. He covered his ears, as they all did. It was five seconds, and then he went back to talking.

he finished.

asked Isra.

Alfric chewed his lip as he thought about that.

said Isra. She still seemed uncomfortable.

said Alfric.

asked Isra.

said Alfric. He didn’t like to say it, but it needed to be admitted up front. The death of a single mouse had affected her more than he had thought it would, for as proficient of a hunter and trapper she was.

said Isra. She nodded.

There were ten of the mice in total, which was more than they had thought they would need. Really, they hadn’t thought they would need any of them. The hope had been that they would release the mice back into the meadow they’d been taken from that morning, having given them treats for their service. One was already gone.

asked Mizuki. She was looking at the brass door.

said Alfric. He looked at Isra. She was subdued, and he wished that he could help, but they were also stuck in the dungeon until they could find the entrance again, and he needed her to be sharp and ready. He didn’t have the words though. He watched Verity squeeze Isra’s arm, and Isra nodded. He hoped that was enough.

When he pushed through the brass door though, Isra stopped him.

she said. She pointed down to where the wall met the floor.

Alfric nodded.

asked Mizuki.

asked Verity.

asked Hannah.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki with a wave of her hand.

said Alfric. He took a breath and tried, again, to steady himself.

said Hannah.

said Alfric.

said Hannah.

said Alfric. This was a horribly rough approximation, an attempt to make sense of the dungeon.

asked Hannah.

said Alfric.

asked Verity. She had a mild expression, which was good. He didn’t want her to feel as though this was all her fault.

said Alfric. He was keenly aware that they were saying they would start and then stopping again. He blamed himself, but they were in an uncertain situation.

The brass door led down a hallway with thick brick walls and a stone floor. It, too, was dark, illuminated by the lantern disc that was hanging around his neck. Alfric kept his eyes ahead, to the room at the hallway’s end. He was able to see two pale green reflections of his light far before the beast came running towards them.

It was small, as the beasts went, the size of a goat, with an oversized head and eyes that were each the size of a ripe orange. The head lolled as it charged at them on thick hooves, and it gave a high, piercing screech. It had no horns or antlers, and not even really a flat, thick skull like Alfric would have expected. Instead, it opened its mouth wide, showing teeth that weren’t particularly sharp, as though it was planning to do a charging bite.

Alfric had his armor ready to spring into action and his bident held in front of him. He was worried about what the catch was, but there was no catch. The creature cleanly impaled itself on his bident, its screech brought to a sudden end by the bident going into one of its lungs. Alfric held it there for a moment. It couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. He detonated the bident and the creature died in an instant.

Alfric withdrew the bident and looked back down the hallway. Where there was one, there could be two. He moved forward, stepping over the creature’s body, until he was in the room. There were no other creatures in there, nor any doors. There was a dresser, with a jar of honey sitting on top of it, and a vase with fresh flowers. A counter ran across one side of the room, like something that you’d find in a general store, but the shelves beneath it just had little glass sculptures of indistinct things, if they weren’t just meant to be abstract bits and bobs of glass.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki, looking around.

Alfric looked back the way they came while Mizuki was piling clothes into the chest. The door was still open.

he said. He was watching the other room, or at least what he could see of it. He slid the armor down so it wasn’t covering his head, then clamped his hands over his ears and replaced the armor. It wasn’t necessary, the thrum wasn’t that loud, but it was more comfortable. Alfric was very aware that they might be caught out by the sound at some point and need to tough it out in the middle of combat, and he was trying to prepare himself for that eventuality. He was also aware that they might be hearing the sound another hundred times. The interval was regular, and each one represented time slipping away.

said Mizuki.

said Aflric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

asked Hannah. She’d come to stand next to him.

said Alfric.

When everything was back, they headed the way they’d come, stepping around the big-eyed hoofed creature and their chest, which had followed them. The big brass door to the other room was still open, and the same table and chairs were still there. Beyond them was a door back to the room that had contained the lutes and was now stripped bare. It hadn’t moved.

asked Alfric, pointing at the wooden door, the way they hadn’t gone.

Isra had a deep frown.

said Alfric.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric. He looked into the lute room. He wasn’t sure that was the best way to think about it, and it seemed like the kind of analogy that might come back to bite him if he was using a framing that only imperfectly worked.

Mostly he was worried about escaping with the loot.

They moved through the wooden door, and no, there was no mouse waiting for them, it was elsewhere in the dungeon, still alive, according to Isra.

There was no hallway. Instead it was a winding cave passage, narrow in places but wide in others. It went for some time, winding back and forth. There was something about caves that Alfric particularly liked, in part because they brought back fond childhood memories of spelunking with his father. Together they had gone into a few large cave systems, which was supposed to have been good practice for dungeons. It had been good time together, sometimes with his youngest sister, who had also been a dungeon fiend, and was apparently tearing up the Junior League.

They were in the stretch of cave for two more thrums, making their way slowly, wary of ambush. At one point the passage narrowed, and Alfric worried that it would be too narrow, but he was able to get through by having the armor move away from him, and no one else had any problems. The cave seemed natural, save for the floor, where the steeper bits had steps cut into them with a chisel. It hadn’t been an actual chisel, given that the dungeon hadn’t existed an hour ago, but there were chisel marks.

The long tunnel ended in a door, and it hadn’t been long since the last thrum, so Alfric called out to the team and pushed through.

The attack happened so fast that Afric didn’t have time to react. A beam of fire was striking his armor and he had a horrible flashback to his unfortunate death two dungeons ago. He almost moved, but the rest of the party was behind him, and he had better armor than any of them. He instead pushed ahead, calling out, shifting plates around to cover the front of him, overlapping them. He ran, into the beam, and it cut out as he approached. His eyes had been seared by it, but he was realizing that he had suffered no injury. His bident stabbed forward as he blinked away the spots, into the brown flesh of the thing that had fired on him, and he felt the prongs of it connect. He unleashed the explosion, and felt the bident slip out. It was a small creature of some kind, with many legs, scrambling around the room to get away from him or prepare another shot, if it could do that, but it was limping, bleeding, and Alfric turned, still trying to blink his vision back to normalcy.

He was hit by another beam from the side, and his armor seemed to stop it. In fact, that first beam hadn’t seemed to hurt him at all, hadn’t melted straight through his armor like he’d thought that it might. He squinted, trying to see as little of the beam as he could, and he raced to the creature that it was coming from. It was the eye, he thought, a large watery cyclops eye in the middle of a furry face, another creature with hooves, these ones cloven. It leapt away from him when he came close and the beam moved elsewhere in the room.

called Mizuki, and Alfric closed his eyes, seeing the afterimage of the beams. He was thankful for the earplugs, which saved him from the worst of the blast. The explosion had pushed him with a wall of air, but gently, and he was still on his feet.

A third beam of fire lanced through the air and struck Alfric, and he shifted his plates again, trying not to look at it. Now that he was focused more on the battle than the fear of death, he could feel a blush of heat, like the side of a mug of tea that needed to cool down. The light was the big thing, but he’d yet to see any of the usual weapons on these creatures. He also didn’t know how many of them there were, but if armor could protect against them, then the situation was far less dire than it had first seemed.

called Hannah, who must have had a better view of the situation than Alfric did. He took a breath, blinking again, and waited for his vision to come back to him.

said Mizuki, and Alfric looked at her, fearing the worst. She was burned on the face, but seemed more annoyed than actually injured.

said Alfric, looking around. Everyone was standing, which was a good sign.

said Isra.

said Verity after a moment.

said Mizuki.

said Hannah as Mizuki moved toward her hand, letting it hold her face.

said Alfric. His sight was slowly returning. He could see that there had been seven of the creatures in total, which meant that each of them had probably only fired a single one of their fire beams. The one he’d speared through with the bident was the most injured of all of them, and two had pretty obviously been taken out by Mizuki, but the bulk of them had died with a single hole through them, which seemed to be the work of Isra.

The room was fairly small, especially for having contained so many of the monster. Each was only the size of a baby deer, but they had pranced around. The room itself was a wreck, and had burnt lines across it, though thankfully no fire had started.

Looking closer at the monsters, they had undersized mouths, and the more Alfric looked the corpses over, the less they seemed like they had ever been a threat. In fact, even with seven of them, it seemed like a pretty normal fight for a party of their elevation. If they had gone in with less powerful equipment, they’d have taken some licks, but you expected to take some licks, and that was why you brought a cleric. There’d been only one injury from the room, two if he counted his vision, but that was returning to normal, or at least normal enough that he could see.

said Mizuki.

said Hannah.

said Alfric.

The thrum hit them, unexpectedly. Alfric had lost track of time, but he thought it was still about right. The fight hadn’t lasted long, and then he’d looked around. He wished that he had a pocket watch. It would have been a sound investment.

When the thrum was done, they searched the room. It was incredibly clear that they weren’t doing a full clear, that it might actually be impossible to do that given whatever was going on with the dungeon. That in mind, it made more sense to search rooms right when they were done rather than waiting until the end to haul things out. With the chest, it was possible that should have been their strategy anyhow, but some things were large logistical or labor challenges, and Alfric preferred to save his brain power and strength. With the circumstances as they were, they would simply be avoiding those situations when they came up. This room had no entads but a few henlings, and furniture that was too awkwardly made to be worth taking as anything but firewood.

The door to the next room was singed, and Alfric braced himself before entering, but as soon as he was through, he saw something familiar — not the exit, as he’d hoped, but a small mouse.

said Isra when Alfric pointed it out. She knelt down and held out her hand, and the mouse scurried over. She put it into the chest, with the others, and seemed to feel better about the whole situation.

said Alfric. He moved down the hallway, past where the mouse had been. It was clear they would have to talk about the ‘bucket of mice’ strategy, but that would have to come later.

There was light coming from ahead, and Alfric moved toward it, with his own lantern light leading the way. It was a fire, he could see from the flickering as he rounded a bend, a fire that was letting smoke up into a moonless, starless sky. Fires could be deadly if they had no way to vent, and it was considered one of the more serious of the standard dungeon problems. That was because of the smoke, rather than the fire itself. As soon as he saw, he closed his lantern and told the others to move quietly.

There were creatures around the fire, three of them, humanoids holding sticks out over the flame. It was as though they were cooking something, but there was nothing on the ends of the sticks, and Alfric thought it likely that it was just the odd sort of behavior that you saw in dungeon creatures. He didn’t like going up against humanoids, but it had to be done. They were dressed in long cloaks with feathers, bulky things that they were shrouded in, and they had long jaws that sat beneath equally long noses. They chattered, noises that Alfric hoped were nonsense.

said Alfric.

She stepped forward in her skull armor and looked at the three humanoids. It was impossible to tell their age or gender, given how much was obscured by their feathered cloaks. One seemed smaller than the others, maybe the female of the group, or a child. Mizuki stared at them for a bit, so long that Alfric started to grow uncomfortable. The party had moved into position unnoticed, but there was no telling whether they were going to stay that way. Stealth wasn’t one of the party’s strong suits, it was only possible here because the light of the fire would be so bright up close that people on the outskirts couldn’t be seen.

said Alfric. That was just his sense of the timing, which might have been exacerbated by Mizuki’s stillness.

she said.

said Alfric.

It was the second bout of qualms this dungeon, with the first being from Isra. He understood it, truly he did, but it was the sort of thing that was best to agree on ahead of time. They had talked about the bucket of mice strategy, and they had talked about humanoids in the dungeons. The time to balk was then, not when right in the middle of life or death situations.

The thrum came, and just before it, the three humanoids set their sticks down and covered their ears, as though expecting it, like it was part of their routine, nevermind that they didn’t have a routine, they had only been created an hour ago. And if they hadn’t been, how would they sleep with such a noise? Still, that action, putting their hands to their ears in anticipation, spoke to something in them. It humanized them.

Whatever Mizuki was feeling, Alfric was sure that she was feeling it more deeply with her hands to her ears, just as these creatures were doing.

As soon as the thrum was done, she fireballed them. It came without warning and Alfric barely closed his eyes in time, but when he opened them, there was utter devastation. The cloaks seemed to have been blown apart, leaving half-naked creatures dead around the fire, which had been scattered. Embers had been blown around the small chamber. Feathers were on fire.

said Mizuki.

asked Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

He moved forward, wary that something would jump out at him, though with dungeon madness, most of the monsters would have charged them after an explosion like that. He opened his lantern back up, letting its white light join the orange of the dwindling fire, and looked at the corpses.

Mizuki had been right. He could see it from the feathered corpses, but also from the backs of the humanoids, where there were red marks from the birds' claws all up and down their backs in nice, ordered rows. They weren’t wounds, exactly, but the birds had hooked into the flesh. Alfric felt a chill down his spine.

he said.

said Mizuki. She seemed pleased with herself.

asked Isra.

said Mizuki.

It occurred to Alfric that his reading of Mizuki’s hesitation had been wrong, and that the humanizing way they’d covered their ears hadn’t been what she was thinking at all. It hadn’t been her that had a case of qualms, it had been him.

The bodies had nothing on them but the loincloths. There were two doors leading out of the room, one of red and the other blue, though the colors of both were subdued. Before anything else, Alfric grabbed a small hand shovel from its storage spot in the lid of the truck and dug up some earth to smother the fire.

said Mizuki, looking at the starless sky. The only reason Alfric thought it was sky was that when he turned his lantern up toward it he could see rocky walls and no end in sight.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric. They could test it, and maybe should have. That wasn’t normally a thing you had to do. They had twelve hours to finish before Alfric would snuff the day out, and he was worried about using more of their time, especially because confirming wouldn’t change much.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric, rattling off conditions as he thought of them. He was the leader of the party, by agreement, but he worried that Mizuki in particular was a bad one to push. She had some recklessness to her, which was one of the things that made him worried about her having the helm.

said Mizuki.

They waited, and chattered, but the chatter died off as the thrum approached and they braced for it. It really wasn’t that loud, just loud enough to be a major irritation, to drown out anything else, to interrupt thoughts, and Alfric found himself surprised by just how much it grated on him. The sound was a novel thing for a dungeon to have, or at least relatively so, but it made him want to get out of the dungeon all that much faster.

said Mizuki. She lifted up until she was visible only by the lantern she was carrying with her. Alfric kept his eyes on her.

“Are you doin’ okay?” Hannah asked. She’d come up beside him. He looked at her, and saw that Isra and Verity were held back in their own private conversation.

“Better to use the party channel,” Alfric said. “But — yes, I’m fine. I’m handling it. I want to get out of this dungeon as soon as we can. I want everyone to be safe and fine. It’s claustrophobic here.”

“That’s how dungeons are,” said Hannah. “I’m not sure I see what you mean.”

“This sense of —” Alfric began.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. “In a normal dungeon, you can get back out. You leave a path for yourself, you’re aware of that path, you know how to travel it, it’s — part of how things are done.”

Mizuki landed next to him, gently for once, not risking a broken bone just to look cool.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric.

she said.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

said Hannah.

Alfric nodded.