I found myself frozen in place. Not truly frozen but instead held by a force greater than me. My wrists and my ankles were held back. I could struggle, but it felt like a kid trying to outmuscle a grown man. It just wasn’t going to work; no matter how hard I struggled, I just couldn’t muscle my way out of the grip.

The goblin looked like he was straining. His staff was pointed at me, but his other hand was the thing that was worrying me. He had his left hand lifted like it was gripping something heavy and then he mimed throwing it. I watched as a skull came flying right at my face. I was glad that my head could still bend, and I tucked my chin to take the skull to the top of my head.

It shattered all over me, and I felt bits of bone filling in around my chainmail. I picked up the concussion debuff, and my vision swam. If this had been any other fight, Blink would have ripped out his throat by now, but I was stuck, and she was a little girl.

I felt my earring heat up, and the immovable force that held me in place decreased to a heavyweight. I started to move forward; I raised my arms up to protect my head and began the slow process of walking ahead. It felt like I was trying to walk with a full squat bar; each step threatened to send me to the ground, and my legs started to burn.

This whole time he was launching skulls at me. Now that I raised my arms, he aimed at my sides and the exposed skin on my legs. The skulls were hitting hard enough to make me stagger, and I felt a rib crack, which went along with the painful breath debuff. I was only about 5 feet away from him now, and I felt my speed slowly increase. Then much to my dread, he backed up. I had been treating him just like he was a fixed point. I was cursing as I moved forward; there was nothing I could do. I was committed.

He was down to just a few skulls and was using them to knock me around. He wasn’t hitting me as hard as he had been, but they still rattled me. I was getting a little faster, or at least it felt that way. So, now that he was moving, he was leading me around the room. I wasn’t taking damage on every skull, but he had gotten to the point where he could hit me with the top of it and take a point off my health.

I had chased or followed him around most of the room, and as we approached the tunnel, I saw Blink. She was just standing there watching this whole process with a big smile on her face. Then I saw her reach down and pick up the Spear of Delightful Death and step into the room. She moved ever so lightly, and the spear just passed behind the goblin.

The goblin turned toward her taking his eyes off me, which dropped all the resistance. I fell forward, and as I went, I saw Blink tap the goblin about five times with the spear. Then, as I stood a readied my sword for a strike, the goblin staggered and fell. He was still breathing but not by much.

Blink said in her super sweet girly voice. “You’re great bait, Daddy!” Then the preciously cute little girl slid the tip of the spear through the goblin’s neck with a grin that would make the Joker run and hide.

I was breathing hard while my body started the process of healing. The fight was a weird one. He couldn’t hurt me too much, but by myself, I wasn’t going to be able to win. I needed a good distance attack that was magical. Fireball, or ice spike, I would even take just a simple mana dart, just something that would let me attack without a weapon at a distance.

As I was catching my breath, Blink came over and gave me a side hug while holding the strangely deadly spear. “Daddy, we make a great team!” Then she hopped over to the treasure chest and sat down near it.

I went over to the dead goblin and picked up the staff.

Ghost Ogre staff

A goblin wants what a goblin gets. This one wanted the ghost of an ogre and believed once he used the foul dropping left by the passing of an ogre he was able to steal its soul and bind it to this staff. That is not what happened at all.

Gravity manipulation 5 range 15 feet. Two targets.

I thought about leaving the staff after reading how he made it and seeing the brown stains on the otherwise white bones that were used in making it. However, I could think of too many times that this staff could have helped. So it went into the bag. The goblin had nothing else worth taking, and after looking, he just had a smelly pile of brown stuff that I refused to get close to.

I felt the chest in the room calling me. I took my time to open it, still checking and not finding the trap that I was sure was there. As the lid lifted, nothing happened at all. It was like there was no trap. I backed up another ten feet, worried that I was missing something. After a few moments, my desire to find what was in the chest overcame me, and I rushed forward.

I dipped my hands into the chest and pulled them back up and out. In my hands was a white feather. When I tried to pull up, the system acted like it was nothing. I looked down at the bottom and saw that the gate token was there, along with a small sack. The bag had a few dozen silver coins.

“Blink, do you know what the feather is for?” I asked as I turned toward the little girl.

“Yup! It is to turn in to get your dungeon reward. Mine last time was Gold and was how I got this form.” She reached into the empty chest and pulled out a white feather.

“So how do we use them?” I asked.

“When we leave Dave shows up again and we can trade them in for rewards based on how we did. I have no idea what we can get for the white ones!” She said and grinned with a sideways smile.

“Well lets take a look around and see if we can find the dungeon pedestal.”

The old shamans said that I would be able to feel the directional pull of the dungeon heart as it pulled mana from the area around. They also said that it would likely be hard to get to but that it had to stay open so that mana could move. So Blink and I started to look around. I tried to see the flow of mana but I just couldn’t seem to find what they had talked about.

So with that problem in mind we took to looking the old fashion way. I started to run my hand across all walls trying to see if I could find a secret passage. Blink was also looking around which was odd to watch. As a lizard her nose and tongue were super sensitive. As a little girl they were not but, she was still trying to taste the air to see where to go.

Blink and I took a few minutes looking around until we found the fake wall and walked through. There were no traps, just an illusion that kept us from being able to see the passage that we had to crawl through. Once through, the glowing yellow ball of the dungeon and its pedestal were right there.

I walked up to the pedestal and pressed my hand against the ball. A new menu popped open, offering me to take ownership of the dungeon. When I did, I received even more prompts. After wading through them, I found the one I was told to look for. I selected to move the dungeon.

Warning Dungeon move in progress

Please exit dungeon to avoid death

5 minutes to collapse.

The dungeon pedestal shrunk slightly from its four-foot-tall self to a more manageable two feet and went from a foot round down to 6 inches. It was still hard to get it through the tunnel we had to crawl through. Once we got through that, we were down to just three minutes, and I popped the token in the gate.

The gate took another two minutes to open, and then we rushed through. I didn’t know how long it would take to get all the way out of the dungeon, but Blink seemed to think we needed to run. So we did.

Yet right as we passed through the gate, we were standing before Dave. He smiled at us, then the room shook, and his smile left. “Well, that will make us move quickly. You have only 5 minutes in here before the dungeon out there collapses. So you won’t be able to think over your choices much. You each earned a white feather for the first team completion of the dungeon under 5 floors. As such you have a few things that you can pick from for your rewards. First Arn, you have..”

Blink interrupted him, “Can I upgrade my reward from last time?”

Dave stuttered a little while he recovered from being interrupted. “Yes, is that what you want?”

Blink grinned, “Yup! Are there choices or is there only one thing?”

“Choices always choices,” Dave said as he shook his head.

“Okay! What are they?”

“First would be to decrease the wait time from 24 hrs to 20, Second would be a second form that was a partial transformation and third option would be to force level yourself to level 10.”

I was thinking through the options; one would let her be half-lizard and half-girl, one faster change, and the other an increase in level up to 10 for the alternative form. I thought that I would pick the leveling so that the form was more helpful. Right, when I was about to speak, Blink said what she wanted.

“I will take the partial transformation!”

Dave snapped his fingers, and a bottle appeared before him. He passed it over to her and said, “Take that after you get out of here, it will make you pass out for about two hours.”

He turned to me and smiled, “Okay like I was saying we have a few options for what you can get. She up graded a previous reward which is always an option. You however, get to pick from our white feather level. Now what is fun for you is that we have only two options because of your classes and levels.”

I sighed. I knew that because of how messed up everything was, whatever reward I was going to get wasn’t going to be worth much.

*