Cora stared at her sister in horror as her Guardian’s words rang in her consciousness.

“Maze of death?” she squawked—and a small portion of her consciousness reveled in the fact that she could even conjure up the emotions of surprise and horror that were coursing through her right now.

“This is not my fault” Sally said defensively, “We must have had an automatic threat-response in case someone was good enough to access our core systems without permission.”

The two were in the Dungeon’s central chamber, along with Sam’s parents and a few of the others allied or supported by the dungeon. And only belatedly did Cora realize that it might not have been a great idea to speak of Sam’s predicament in the open like that—

“Maze of what?” Annie Tolliver squawked. “What the hell did you do to my boy?”

“Easy Dearest,” Jackson Tolliver said quietly, placing a huge hand on his wife’s arm. “Sally,” He turned his cyclopean gaze on Cora’s sister, “can you get him out?”

“What the hell do you think I’m working on, Blinky?” Sally sounded stressed, which also struck Cora as odd that she would have access to those emotions so much sooner than Cora had herself. Perhaps something about her intrinsic make-up made her more able to rebuild the emotional centers that Cora had lacked? “This ain’t exactly basic arithmetic, okay? Back off and give me a second!”

“It will be alright,” Cora said in what she calculated was a soothing manner. “Sally is very resourceful, and we all know that Sam is strong and clever and will not be easily slain.”

She frowned then as she analyzed that last bit of the sentence. Perhaps she should not have included the potential for Sam to get killed in this scenario.

“I’m getting my mace,” Annie Tolliver snarled, shaking her husband’s hand off. “And if you haven’t gotten my son out by the time I get back, I’m going to give you all kinds of interesting new lumps on that shiny shell of yours.”

“Not helping,” Sally muttered.

Cora closed her eyes and concentrated on her friend.

Samuel. Sally is working to get you out on this end. What do you see in there?

***

“Little busy, Cora,” Sam shouted as he ducked around a corner. A heavy iron bolt slammed into the wall just where his head had been, sending red chips flying and pelting the back of his head as he ran.

“Would have been nice if they gave me a little more of a head start,” he growled and put on a burst of speed.

He glanced back over his shoulder just as his pursuer came around the corner. Like the voice had said, it was a minotaur. Eight feet tall, hairy, horns, and golden armour covering its torso while leaving its digitigrade legs bare. It had a gold ring in its nose, and carried a long stocked weapon that looked like the bastard offspring of a gnomish black-powder rifle and a pretentious crossbow.

“Don’t run,” it laughed in a voice that sounded like three pounds of gravel in a blender. “You’ll only die tired!”

“Real original.” Sam spun on his heel and slapped the Identify spell in his quickmenu. Time seemed to slow down as the spell took hold, enhancing his perceptions to the point where they could take in the information scrolling across his display without worrying about getting shish-kebabed by those long iron bolts the thing was shooting at him.

Name: Tauren Man-Catcher

Race: Minotaur

Sub-Race: None

Essence Level: 18

HP: 775

MP: 2

Description:

Oh boy. Okay, so, you know how sometimes you go duck hunting with that one asshole who doesn’t eat what he shoots and is just in it to kill something for the thrill of it, and he does this high-pitched giggle thing when he actually hits something and it makes everyone uncomfortable and think about maybe staging a hunting ‘accident’ as a form of public service?

Yeah. These guys.

Tauren Man-Catchers are specialized minotaur troops deployed in kill-squads of five or ten, usually to take out high-value hardened targets. They are strong, fast, and armed with customized Dwarven Bolt-Throwers that are magazine-fed, lever-action, and can fire a host of special bolts from explosive to poison to rope-harpoons.

Oh by the way, don’t spend too much time looking over your shoulder at the one behind you, because there’s probably a couple more just ahead taking aim at your head.

Because you’re the duck in this scenario.

Keep your head down, Ms. Mallard.

Combat Data:

Heavy Firepower: The customized bolt-throwers these units possess are powerful enough to bypass any and all forms of damage resistance.

Hit And Run tactics: When fighting in groups of five or more, Tauren Man-Catchers gain +15% ranged damage and +15% land speed.

Go For The Eyes, Boo!: Man-Catchers are Vulnerable to blindness effects

Seeing Red: Minotaurs are Vulnerable to the Berserk condition whenever they see the color Red.

“Swell,” Sam muttered as time sped up and he jerked aside to avoid the bolt heading towards his head. “I swear, if I get out of this, I’m getting some items that cause status effects.”

He put on another burst of speed and made a left turn down what turned out to be a long passage almost twenty feet wide… And then screeched to a stop when he saw three more man-catchers waiting just a dozen yards away, their bolt-throwers leveled at him.

He reacted on instinct. In an eyeblink he had his harness controls up on his display, with a half-dozen sliders and settings that would allow him to utilize the powers of the construction harness he wore over his clothes.

He slid the slider labeled ‘mass’ all the way to the -10 setting and drew on the telekinesis powers of the harness’ headband.

Then he jumped

The blast of telekinesis hit the floor underneath him and sent him rocketing up thirty feet into the air just as the man-catchers fired at him. The bolts zipped under him, and he let out a harsh laugh as two of them slammed right into the fourth man-catcher that had been chasing him just as it came around the corner.

Then the fifth minotaur, who had apparently been on top of the fucking wall dropped onto his shoulders and sent them both plummeting earthward.

***

“He’s under attack!” Cora squeaked, turning to Sally. “You’ve got to help him!”

“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do,” Sally snarled back at her, her gemstone flickering on and off as she did… Something. “It ain’t exactly like I know how to re-route my own processes here, sis.”

Cora bit her lip and turned away, eyes narrowed and staring off into the distance as she thought furiously. Sally’s systems had identified Sam as an intruder and shunted him to… Somewhere. A Red Room, he’d called it. A holding cell? But then why was he under attack? Why give an intruder a challenge, rather than just killing him or ejecting him outright?

“God damn it Sally,” Annie Tolliver’s voice made Cora turn back. The woman was towering over her sister, fists clenched. “That is my son in there. Tell me how we can help, and we’ll do it.”

“I don’t fucking know,” Sally practically wailed. “I smash shit and kill people! I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, but I don’t have the expertise for this kind of—“

Rashun. The name rose into her mind like a deep-sea fish breaking the surface and waving an amiable flipper at her. The kobold child was very knowledgeable about mana runes. He’d sat with Samuel many times, examining her core workings, trying to work out how she functioned. Perhaps…

Cora(SparklyPerson): Rashun, please come to the central chamber quickly.

Rashun(Smartypants): Aunty Cora? Sure! What’s wrong?

Cora(SparklyPerson): We have need of your skillset. Hurry please.

***

Sam lashed out with his telekinesis in both directions, slamming it into the walls on each side of himself and sliding to a stop fifteen feet above ground. He twisted in the invisible net as the minotaur on his back started pummeling him. He swore as pain flashed through his side, and his healthbar blinked and began to drop under the onslaught.

And a small weapon for close-in fighting, he promised himself. So many things he needed. So many things he hadn’t thought of.

He snarled and threw an elbow back at the minotaur. It impacted against bronze armor and did nothing but leave a bruise on his arm. He cursed, then cursed again as he felt something give way in his chest.

That was a rib, his mind identified. And even as he understood that, he caught a glimpse of the four minotaurs beneath him all racking the levers on their bolt throwers and taking concentrated aim.

Shit.

The minotaur on top of him laughed, then hit him again.

So he reached back with his right hand, found that golden ring in its nose, grabbed, and yanked.

The creature screamed right into Sam’s ear as its head was tugged forward and down, practically covering the upper half of Sam’s torso just as its fellows let loose their barrage. One of the bolts missed Sam’s head by a hair’s breadth. The other three were directly on-target and would have pounded one after the other right into his breast.

Except now the minotaur’s horned head was in the way.

The creature jerked once, twice, three times as the long bolts cracked home into its skull. Its health bar appeared above its head and dropped like a rock, bottoming out and disappearing at the third hit. The beast went limp on Sam’s back. For a second he considered dropping the damn thing onto its fellows, then glanced upwards.

It had dropped on him from the top of the wall. Which meant there was purchase up there. If the minotaur could get there, then he could, too.

He pushed off with his telekinesis just as another bolt passed through the area he had occupied a moment before. He only got a few feet higher, thanks to the weight of the minotaur on his shoulders, but it was at an upwards angle, pushing him up and over towards the opposite wall. As soon as he was within range he pushed again, bouncing himself back and forth between the walls, gaining more height each time. Bolts zipped by him as he went. One smacked into his calf, and he swore as the pain shot through his body and his health bar dropped almost fifty points.

And then he was on top of the wall, which was wide and flat enough for him to collapse down without falling off. Another bolt spanged off the edge, ricocheting off into the distance. And then things were quiet.

Sam groaned and heaved the dead minotaur off of his back and onto the walltop. And then, in the grandest tradition of adventurers everywhere, he began to loot the corpse.

***

Cora sat next to Rashun, staring intently at the runes and sigils that Sally projected into the air in front of the dais. They were graphic representations of the mana circuitry inside of her, the stuff that was the core of her being, what gave her her powers and made her her. They were complex and overlapping and made as much sense to Cora’s eyes as advanced mathematics would have made to a moth.

But Rashun, short and slender and wide-eyed, was leaning forward almost off the dais, gaze darting from one set of patterns to the next, and if there wasn’t perfect understanding in the child’s expression, Cora knew enough to recognize the absence of abject confusion as well.

“So big bro triggered some kind of failsafe,” he said in his high tenor voice. “Okay, that means we’re looking for alarm sigils first of all. Or patterns that are used in intrusion detection and rerouting…” the boy frowned and tapped a dewclaw on the stone in a staccato rhythm.

“You actually understand this stuff?” Sally asked in surprise.

“Some. Go one layer deeper, please.”

Sally bobbed in a full-body shrug and switched the sigils down to the next layer. When Cora had been in the form of a dungeon core, she had had eight full layers of runes on top of one another. Samuel had commented at the time that no one had ever seen a creation with more than three layers of overlap. Sally, for some reason, had eleven.

Cora tried to ignore the pang of jealousy at learning that her sister was more complex than she was.

“Wait, this one.” Rashun leaned forward even more and stabbed a clawed finger at one section of rune patterns. “I know this one. Hang on.” He turned and practically dove into a pile of books and papers he’d hauled up from his bedroom with him. He skimmed through one, then another, tossing the discards into a haphazard pile that grew and grew until—

“Got it!” he crowed in triumph, surfacing with a periodical clenched in his hand. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere before! The Etchmeisters published it in the Journal of Engravers and Etchings three months ago. Look, see?” He held up a page to Cora that showed a string of arcane symbols that meant absolutely nothing to her.

“Er, yes,” she said, blinking.

“It’s a new combination—“ he stopped and glanced up at the menu pane still hovering in mid-air where Sally was projecting it. “Okay, I guess it’s a really really old combination that they just rediscovered. But see? It’s a combination of Mortenson’s anti-tamper sequence and Belvedere’s Intrusion-reflection algorithm. See?”

“Kid.” Sally’s voice was flat. “Sammy’s about to get his ass chewed on by a bunch of minotaurs. How about you speed it up a notch?”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. Uh, so, can you see if this sequence is active?”

“Yeah, lemme look…” Sally went quiet for a moment. “Yeah, it’s lit up like a Christmas tree.”

“Perfect! Okay, there should be another sequence nearby that is also lit up. It’ll be the active alarm that got triggered. I think that’s gonna be what’s keeping big bro locked away. If you disable it, it should end the lock-down and let him come back.”

“Should?”

“You’re like a million years old, miss Sally, and you’re way more complicated than anything else in the entire world. ‘Should’ is the best I have.”

“Thanks for making me feel pretty, pipsqueak.”

“Do it,” Cora commanded.

“Yeah.”

***

Sam dove down at the Minotaur troop from on-high, warhammer in one hand and the bolt-thrower he’d looted from their dead companion in the other. He let out a bellowing scream of defiance, making them all spin and stare stupidly upwards for a long second.

And that second was all the time he needed.

He lashed out with telekinetic force, slamming one of them straight into the wall with force that was designed to pick up and hold a dozen tons of construction material without breaking a sweat. He heard the crunch of bones from here, and saw blood shoot out of the minotaur’s mouth to blend with the red walls.

He fired the bolt-thrower at a second ‘taur, the heavy bolt catching it right in the groin. It pierced the gold armour and sank half of its length into the minotaur’s vitals, leaving it bent over and screaming.

Then he hit two of his powers in his quick-buttons. The first, Guardian’s Wrath, supercharged his next melee attack, granting him power based on the power of the dungeon and its denizens. He didn’t know the exact formula, but he knew it enhanced the damage tremendously. He’d once killed a T-Rex Necrosaur miniboss with it.

The second power was called ‘Indiscriminate Justice’, and in addition to boosting his attack power even further, was an area-of-effect attack that could knock mobs caught in its blast prone.

He slammed into the ground just in front of the three—well, two-and-a-half—remaining minotaurs and pounded the hammer straight down onto the red surface.

The resulting flash of light bowled over all three creatures. He saw their health bars flash red and vanish in chunks as they were thrown backwards like sticks in a gale. He dropped the hammer then and worked the lever action on the bolt thrower, raised the stock to his shoulder, and fired. Once, twice, three times, sinking a two-foot iron bolt into a vital area on each of the minotaurs. The first one caught it in the eye, the second one in its unarmored throat, the third right on the top of the head.

They all stopped moving.

Sam stood there, panting, thanking Sensei Long-Stride for making him practice with crossbows, wondering what came next.

And then there came a soft, almost gentle chime from somewhere, and the walls started to retract.

Alert canceled. Authorization granted. Have a nice day.

Sam stared as the featureless red expanse opened up before him again, empty save for a single glowing door not five yards away, and the bodies of the minotaurs.

Hey Butter-boy. You done having fun in there? Only time’s a-wastin’. I can see you now. Rashun helped me out. Step through the door, it’ll bring you back to the White Room and we can bring you home again. Chop chop, please.”

“Sure. Just let me get my luggage.” He hefted the bolt thrower and slung it over his back by its strap.

Lordy. After all this, getting eaten by a dragon was going to be a veritable picnic.

And with that truly terrible pun groaning in his mind, he stepped up to and through the glowing door and back into a reality he was at least familiar with.