Apart from a few ... accidents, all centralised around myself, raids on Eden had been progressing rather smoothly for the past few days. Which has led to a problem I didn’t realise I was going to have. My domain is too small.

I didn’t fully understand the scope of the task I had laid out before me when I self-righteously launched into this crusade, and more importantly, I didn’t comprehend just what this game is too many of the people who play it.

As it turns out, Earth is relatively entitled amongst the countless numbers of other planets or realms or alternate realities or whatever the fuck that has been sucked into this game. Among many of these places, the weak and young use the game to escape, primarily having it become their ‘real’ world while their world is plunged into chaos and madness as players with unimaginable powers wreak havoc.

Just when some super-powered freak becomes more potent than the rest and takes over, allowing things to start calming down, another monster with more abnormal powers shows up. After 20 years in the game, they then kill the ruling party, because for the ruling party to dominate the world and bring it some measure of peace they murdered a whole bunch of people that the second new guy was partial to. Like their parents, or children, or dog, or whatever it is that person holds dear.

In fact, as a brief tangent, I heard rumours of a planet that was obliterated entirely because the group taking over the world on that particular day accidentally blew some little kids pet frog to pieces in a massive battle. 32 years later, the kid returns with a vengeance so violent that the entire planet implodes under his power.

Thus continues the cycle of madness that is no doubt in the festering stages of outbreak on Earth. If not for the fact that my planet has already been through a catastrophic apocalypse while inhabited by my race, perhaps things would be worse. It’s only thanks to our understanding of precisely what it entails to completely obliterate everything to such a stage that everyone is somehow keeping their madness in check.

Regardless, these idle tangents of thought aren’t helping my situation at all. Thanks to the success of our raiding teams, my domain is now facing a sudden crisis. Thousands of refugees have entirely flooded every available inch of land. Well, almost ... No one is crazy or stupid enough to try and inhabit the Poison Smog. The few individuals that have attempted have taken away my need to worry about them after they turned into a puddle of sludge, indistinguishable from the rest of the slowly decomposing ... wet mass that covers the marshes of the dead forest.

The few individuals that have attempted to excavate into the ground and take some real estate from the spawn have all ... well ... let’s not speak of such things. Unspeakable things are unspeakable after all.

Despite my efforts to encourage people to move to 6 Star instead of cluttering my domain, so many have refused that it’s making a significant strain on what little space and resources I have left here. It’s not even that I don’t have the resources available to support them, it’s merely that I can’t use said resources because there’s only so much you can cram into the land available.

I’ve stolen plenty of exciting things from Eden in the past few days, but regardless of this, I can’t use them without somewhere to put them.

As if my problems weren’t enough, even more people are pouring in from 6 Star in an attempt to join my war or attain citizenship on a domain crazy enough to crusade against a Quest Planet.

This all leads us up to this moment 4 days after I first reopened portals to Eden, which was far sooner than I’d expected.

“ ... and so ... I’ll be closing the portals for the short term and delaying our crusade ... err ... until my domain is bigger and I can support all the people that want to live here...”

Following the end of his explanation to the sea of people surrounding him, Murphy turned around and started to use deprive on the portals to Eden. At the same time, many people began to yell or comment out from behind him, and Seelie stood nearby with a slightly irked expression on her face.

A completely furred creature with backwards feet lumbered above others around him at nearly 8 feet tall and growled the loudest.

“You didn’t explain anything! You just and said ‘and so... ‘ then declared you’re closing the portals. What about the crusade?! What about the people still trapped on Eden?!”

Another strange race, looking something like a seal with an elephant’s trunk, let out a few loud trumpets with its elongated snout. Everyone who’d never met such a creature gave it strange looks as subtitles magically popped up around it as if this was somehow always how these animals communicated ... with subtitles...

“My family are still trapped over there! Please! You can’t do this! What about my children, they’ll become orphans on a world they’re hunted!”

Everyone then watched on as Murphy read this and collapsed to his knees spewing blood out of every orifice at the realisation of how many poor children were trapped on the other side of these portals that he couldn’t immediately save. Despite that, he remained firm and closed another entrance, even as he cried tears of blood while doing it.

Seelie, with a twitching eyebrow, stepped up a rickety old box that Murphy had been using for his dignified speech and redirected the Death Glare she’d been giving Murphy for his total lack of charisma at the crowds surrounding them and clamouring in an uproar. The moment her cold eyes swept across the group, everyone shut up, and a strange silence hung over the entire domain.

Some people even clutched at their hearts and dropped dead right there and then, solely from this casual glance around by Seelie.

With silence reigning supreme, she finally started to explain.

“I’m sure some of you have come to realise by now that things are starting to get very crowded around here. It was our fault as the Domain Lord’s for not having made proper preparations prior to this.” She then gave Murphy another wordless glare as if reprimanding him for his rashness back then and then returned her glare to the crowds, killing a few more people by accidentally making eye contact with them for too long.

“I was of the opinion that we simply kick all of your sorry asses off our domain right now. Hardly any of you have contributed to our domain at all and are just squatters. Many of you don’t even leave the domain to collect food and just beg and steal from the few that do and our actual citizens. Murphy is insistent that we should be taking responsibility for you until you’re on your feet and can take care of yourselves. It’s the least we can do seeing as we decided to be so nosy as to poke our business into your lives.

As such, in order to adequately deal with you all, Murphy has been forced to delay his crusade, and we will instead be going through a short development period for the domain. Putting everything we stole from Eden to use, doing some raids to increase our land mass, and building. Again, anyone squatting here is welcome to leave, in fact, I encourage you to fuc...”

“Ahem!” Murphy interrupted that tangent with a brief strangled cough and Seelie moved on as if she wasn’t about to insist everyone piss off right now.

“As I was saying, we need to refocus our attention for a period of time and maintain the Domain. The crusade is postponed until further notice, but we will eventually be returning to continue this war. Even if it’s unlikely we can end it anytime soon.”

At the completion of her announcement, the crowds around them exploded into discussion, many doubtful or confused or entirely apathetic. One thing was for sure, no one was stupid enough to openly question this frightening Co-Domain Lord of Murphy’s. Mostly because anyone that bore the full front of her stare would instantly collapse, some even taking so much damage they simply died on the spot.

After closing the last portal, Murphy got an eccentric notification from the system.

‘Ping! Murphy’s Law has caused a Happy Accident. + 40 Luck!’

That had been the happiest accident he’d ever caused, but worryingly, he couldn’t figure out what exactly he’d accidentally done. Deciding not to worry about it, he and Seelie retreated back to their castle as everyone else just sort of mulled about and took up space like a herd of cattle, no offence intended for the actual cattle like people within said herd ... who were well ... never mind.

Everyone then felt the disconcerting sensation of the Domain changing direction and shooting off towards the stars in the bright daylit sky.

In the war room of the castle, Murphy had started constructing a star map using his Mana Cartography. By this point in time, Murphy’s Mana Cartography had reached level 8 and had a few impressive abilities. Murphy was still amused by this skill because he felt it was something that should have needed the Imbue skill. Perhaps the only reason it didn’t need it was because he was actually constructing something out of his mana instead of merely altering something else.

Nonetheless, it still worked even with his mana that was filled with a mixed bag of strange properties. Most notably it was now at the point where it was entirely interactive for everyone, not just himself. The spawn were all busy running around the room poking dots of light and watching it expand into a view of a domain.

The best part about this was the map continually updated itself every time Murphy went out and looked around at the sky. Being able to create an image of another domain was a little harder though, requiring him to go and borrow the telescope in Seelie’s observation tower and actually view said domain.

More importantly, his Puzzle Solving skill and Mathematics skill both came into use as they allowed him to more or less track the movement patterns of domains which let him mark them in his star map, otherwise they would all just remain as stars, and he wouldn’t know which was which.

While staring through a telescope out the window and his map updated behind him, Seelie was taking advantage of her scholar skill to correlate all the information she could gather from the system. As she poured it into the star map, Murphy’s skill seemed to just gobble it all up and then automatically allocate it without any assistance.

Where Murphy had originally had to input information personally, the cartography skill was feeding off all his other skills and constantly updated itself without the need for him to do so personally. In particular, it took advantage of a few skills he’d recently gained while trying to train his senses, something called Mass Computation and Divided Mind.

Mass Computation came as a result of him trying to focus all his attention onto a single sense and then try and interpret that information. With all the abuse he’d given his eyes and ears lately they had reached abnormal levels of sensitivity and focus. The divided mind then came from this same action except trying to do it with two different senses at once. Amusingly, these were both skills Seelie had since they were still back on Newb Planet going through the tutorial.

These weren’t his only gains from such training though. Namely, he gained Focused Mind and Heightened Senses both allowing him to do things he’d never thought possible. Focused Mind in specific gave him an unparalleled level of focus on a task.

After a short time more of updating, a huge map of every star within sight from their domain was uploaded into the map.

In the war room, sitting atop the pedestal, Murphy’s star map swirled around the duo in every direction with their little island of a domain sitting right in the centre of it. Murphy was looking around him with eye’s sparkling like a child having just discovered a new toy while Seelie was watching Murphy with sparkling eyes because this was the first time she’d been able to spend alone with him since the crusade began.

Murphy’s eyes then became focused, and he started to flick his hands around oddly like some kind of instructor. Slowly, various stars began to glow an ominous red colour and with another flick of the hand all the other stars disappeared completely. Murphy then focused on the closest red star to themselves and made an action as if gripping it with his fingers and pulled apart, like he was stretching something out.

It then blew out entirely until the view of a large domain filled their view. The entire domain just looked like an island that was blacked out to appear like a silhouette.

“Hmm. Still too far away for me to actually see it from here huh?”

Murphy scratched at his chin, which had started to grow some rough but disparate stubble and gazed into the sky for a little longer. Finally, he just shrugged.

“Guess we’ll just go attack them anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?” He very irresponsibly muttered to himself. After some stretching and a few decimals gained in agility, Murphy strode off into the dungeons of the castle, all while ignoring the glare Seelie was trying to burn through his skull for not taking the chance to do more girl/boy things ... of which they’d almost done none.

After climbing down an unnecessarily long spiral staircase, Murphy stepped into an immaculately clean and tidy open space. Although he called it the dungeon it was looked far from what would be expected in such an evil looking castle. The walls were made of white marble and scattered with torches to ensure it was well lit.

It wasn’t cramped but appeared to be just a single white marble room almost 100 metres wide and long. The roof was nearly 30 metres high and had various strange stones that poured soft light out to fill every corner of the room. While the room itself didn’t appear dungeon-like, the contents were far more fitting of the misconception the word dungeon inspires.

Scattered around the perfectly flat marble floor were dozens of strange and murderous-looking contraptions that would give high-level torturer’s wet dreams. Lining the walls were various doors marked with signboards equating to things like ‘sword chamber’ or ‘fire pit’ and if all this wasn’t enough, a select few incredibly wild and crazed looking spawn were flitting about the place covered in all manner of handheld torture devices.

As Murphy walked into the ‘dungeon’, he split off part of his consciousness to go to the Domain Zone and change the direction of the domain along with handling some other boring administrative tasks. Meanwhile, his body continued to stride past various pieces of blood-stained ‘furniture’ until he found himself in the centre of the room, where he was met by the crazed looking spawn that had previously been trying to whip or shoot arrows at each other.

“Rar rah rar yah!?”

Asked one of the spawn curiously, while pointing at some equipment on his person that looked like they’d been ransacked from a butcher’s shop.

Murphy seemed to think for a moment then shook his head.

“No, not today Stabby Mc’Stabingkins. Is the new training room ready?”

Stabby Mc’Stabingkins looked slightly down heartened that his master wasn’t planning to let him do various unspeakable things to him today, but nonetheless nodded and pointed at the far end of the dungeon were a large obsidian door covered in cartoonish warnings and promises of death were illustrated.

Murphy just chuckled, petted Stabby on the head and quickly stalked off towards the door. This door was something Murphy had invested quite a bit of experience points and materials in to, and was a project he’d called all the best craftsmen on his domain to assist in. He only hoped it would be worth it, because not even he knew what was going to be beyond it.

He felt all the hair on his body standing up on end as he approached the door and goosebumps slowly rising along his skin on every exposed part of his body. It got to the point that it was almost overwhelming as he reached out and pushed on the colossal obsidian doors that were the entrance to some place of unspeakable horrors.

The moment the door cracked open even slightly, a burst of blue light spilt forth and enveloped him. The obsidian door then quickly slammed shut with a shuddering boom and cut the light off, revealing an empty space where Murphy had been standing beforehand.

“Greetings, disgusting enslaver.”

So the first thing to greet me after that blinding light was complete blackness and a deep and sonorous voice, calling me names rather petulantly. After a moment a glowing red crystal formed from nothing in front of me. I could feel the menace and killing intent spilling off this strange creature the moment it appeared.

It definitely wanted to kill me ... which was more or less its job.

“Stop thinking about pointless things, you stupid brute. Everything is prepared for the first ten floors. I’m still building further, and your domain inhabitants have given me a great deal of help. Unsurprisingly, they seem to want you dead almost as much as me.”

This shining ray of happy sunlight is Gorby. He belongs to an extraordinary species of creature called a Dungeon Core. Most dungeons in Domain Wars are system generated and have no such thing, instead just being a spawn point for less than sentient beasts or inhabited by unscrupulous individuals for some strange reason I’ve yet to fully understand. Perhaps just a natural quirk of all necromancers and dark mages?

Anyway, I happened to find Gorby just chilling out in a dungeon I was trying to steal from Eden. Turns out, there are some things even I can’t take. Well ... with the deprive skill anyways, it was plenty easy enough to steal Gorby with my hands ... err ... I mean, re-appropriate? Well ... my point is that I now have this strange being, which from my understanding is capable of building and controlling a dungeon entirely by itself.

With this knowledge at hand, I put Gorby to work building a dungeon on my domain. Unfortunately, all he ever did was sulk and cry about how much less ambient mana and citizens were in my domain, thus building nothing but a single floor with himself on it in the hopes someone would ... re-appropriate him to another domain.

After some long and hard thought on the subject, I struck a deal with Gorby. I would take him to the largest inhabited domain I could get access to on the condition that he built a dungeon capable of killing me. At the thought of a new home he was greatly encouraged, and it definitely wasn’t the thought of killing me, his captor.

Unfortunately, he was adamant that he needed the right resources and enough mana to grow that strong so I humbly offered him access to my domain inventory, of which the greedy bastard bled dry of any raw or organic materials. He even gobbled up half the generic dungeon stones from the system.

After this he created a few levels I found woefully inadequate. Standard flame traps and a couple weak poison arrows didn’t slow me down at all. I then encouraged all of the craftsmen, scholars and even remotely skilled individuals with permanent citizenship in my domain to visit and tutor Gorby in how best to build a dungeon of acceptable strength.

Seelie spent quite some time analysing how he operates and giving him pointers, which has bred a fear in him I can’t even remotely fathom. Just mentioning her near him causes his crystal body to start forming hairline cracks. If he’s actually in her presence ... it looks like he’s about to explode apart.

Anyway, the whole thing is that...

“Thwack!”

And now there’s a poison arrow sticking out of my eyeball.

“Stop doing that standing around and thinking nonsense. I’m not going to sit here and watch you think about pointless things for an hour again.”

With that grumpy reprimand, another bright light flashed, and I was now standing in a classic first level of a dungeon.

Dungeons are creatures that could be classified as semi-Godlike in their abilities. If one of them lived long enough and gained enough knowledge, they could even rival god-like beings. Perhaps even something like Domain Wars was built inside of a dungeon.

The ability to create almost anything from Mana and to absorb knowledge like a sponge was only a few of the powers of a core. The most striking power of a Dungeon Core was building endless levels inside of endless pockets of reality. Like building billions of worlds within billions of worlds, never-ending and growing with the passage of time.

Gorby was only a young Dungeon Core when Murphy found him, and wasn’t very good at much at all. Killing things was a simple thing for him and he basically just summoned apparent traps and stupid creatures to do his bidding for him. By killing things he could collect their essence. Or more appropriately, their knowledge. Thus murder is a necessity for him to grow stronger.

However, an extraordinary thing happened after he was brought to Murphy’s domain. All types of people came and gave him knowledge for free. It was very odd and not something Gorby had ever experienced. Thanks to them, Gorby had built ten levels of hell that no normal dungeon could hope to accomplish so young in their lives.

Not only that, but now he didn’t have to worry about nice things that could lure people into his pocket dimension so he could gobble them up. His goal now was singular, Kill Murphy Law.

“It’s finally time. Hehhehheh!”

Gorby sinuously chuckled to himself as he watched Murphy appear in the first level of his new dungeon. He projected a tiny pieces of his consciousness out as a floating orb next to Murphy and projected all his spite and confidence. Murphy glanced at the standard cave design around him and then at the floating ball of light.

“What the fuck...”

Gorby glowed a gloating brightness as he saw the confusion on Murphy’s face. Normal dungeons had two things. An exit and a level that must be navigated. For the first level, Murphy could see neither of these things. Instead, all he could see was a single huge cavern nearly a hundred meters in radius and filled with floating rainbow lights that glowed dimly.

The cavern had no entrances or exits. No tunnels, no monsters, no traps. It was just a big empty cavern.

“Err ... Gorby ... this is ... I mean ... what am I supposed to do?”

“Hahahahahaha!! Foolish mortal! Tremble in fear! There is no escape! You can just wait here forever until you eventually die of either boredom or starvation, whichever comes first.”

Murphy scratched the stubble on his chin and looked around again.

‘This doesn’t seem right. I thought Seelie said that every dungeon was bound by certain natural limitations. There must always be a path from the entrance to the Dungeon Core and vice versa. Even if it’s not obvious, it must exist.’

Murphy then looked back at Gorby with an odd expression.

“Err ... you do know ... I’m like ... Immortal. Right?”

“What?”

“Yeah ... I mean ... like unless my body is cut up or burned in the sun or something ... I can’t die. I won’t starve to death.”

“Looks like you’ll just have to go mad from boredom then.”

Murphy was speechless. He couldn’t help but feel Gorby was breaking the rules somehow.

‘This must be some kind of trick...”

With that in mind, Murphy wandered around the huge cavern inspecting the floor and walls. Everything was blank. No rocks, no stalagmites, even the ground was just roughly cut stone and had not even dirt to draw pictures on or eat if you managed to get trapped he so long you got that hungry.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour of pointless inspection and endless gloating from Gorby, Murphy did the only thing he could think to do. He turned with his back to one wall of the cavern, crouched down into a runners launch position, then shot forward towards the other wall.

Using his maximum speed and pumping his legs like a madman, his 94 strength and 76 agility propelled him to the edge of the sound barrier. Then with a mighty leap, he jumped towards the furthest wall, twisting his body through the air, and shot forward with his feet crouched up under his body.

Just before colliding with the wall, he kicked his feet out as hard as he could and smashed into the wall. Much to his shock and surprise, he went straight through with hardly any resistance. Moments later he found himself flying through the air at a startling speed towards a very very distant ground.

Looking about himself, he could see a giant column reaching up into the sky and sporting a big dome on the very top. Looking around himself, he noticed a massive chasm filled with darkness and almost a speck in the distance was a floating door with a tiny 1-meter floor underneath it.

Everything else was complete and endless nothingness. All that was here was the door, and nearly 200 kilometres away, the column with a dome on top. Oh, and the rapidly approaching ground that looked like it was filled entirely with razor-sharp spikes made from metal. It almost looked like a forest of metal spikes covered in more metal spikes. It was eerily similar to the tower of thorns ... except made from metal instead of bones.

“Well ... that doesn’t look good...”

‘I can guess what he was doing with all those ‘Unbreakable Steel’ geodes I stole from Eden.’

This was Murphy’s thoughts as he finally reached the ground. Like a speck of dust, he disappeared into the sea of jagged spikes to the accompanied mad laughter of Gorby.

While Murphy was busy testing his limits in Gorby’s dungeon of torture, 10 mysterious travellers passed through the portal from Six Star onto Murphy’s domain. Typically, the moment they stepped through they would have drawn attention from others. First off they all wore bizarre clothes and weapons.

They were adorned in combat vests and tight body suits that glowed with strange green light, dispersing an odd green mist from their bodies making them appear somewhat ethereal. Instead of standard helmets, they all wore faceless dome-like headgear that was tinted wholly black and reflected all light.

The next most attention drawing thing was the strange weapons and devices they were carrying on their person. Chief amongst these was a highly advanced rifle that seemed to also be glowing with various enchantments. Just glancing at these things would give anyone that had developed a decent danger sense the willies, if not directly making them vent their bowels.

The most attention grabbing aspect would be the fact that they didn’t happen to be grabbing any of said attention whatsoever. The only thing was the odd fluctuation of the portal as they passed into this domain, there was no evidence to the senses of other people and creatures that they even existed. Apart from an eerie feeling for those few who’s danger sense was genuinely phenomenal, of which there was very few on Murphy’s domain.

“Spread out and map everything. Keep your eyes and ears sharp for anything regarding the target. Bravo, you’re on the general populace and the towns. Echo, follow up on the reports of an underground labyrinth under the domain. Be careful, unless you want to end up another example of Captain Gustav’s previous infiltrators.”

The moment he finished speaking, two groups of three spread off into two separate directions. As for the remaining four individuals, the leader apparent glanced towards the spooky looking misty forest in the distance. With what seemed like a somewhat resigned sigh, he took off towards them with his 3 companions in toe. None the wiser as to their sudden appearance on the island domain.

As the leader and his group approached the forest, their highly attuned danger senses started screaming. Having brought many skills as scouts and spies from their time as enforcers on earth, these highly trained and incredibly determined infiltrators rapidly attuned themselves to the system in the game and made endless breakthroughs to strengthen themselves beyond anything they could have dreamed of.

Although not the most prominent of the teams amongst the many forces being rallied by Captain Gustav, this team had shown the most promise for infiltration and escape. They were all high agility stat players and had numerous titles and skills that lent themselves to that goal. Just as they had been expected and trained to do.

In the same manner as many organisations over the course of history since time immemorial, the employees were expected to conform to set standards. As such many ‘testers’ had been sent first to determine optimum stats and develop standard classes for what the Captain called, Forces Unified in Service of Earth, or easily swallowed, FUSE.

As such, this particular group were entirely derived of fellows that had selected to use a class predetermined by testers as, Infiltrators. Illusion Magic, Assassin Skills, Scout Skills, Bush Craft, Squad Tactics, Acting, Weapons and Martial arts training and a plethora of other varied skills all tied into one class. Many had specialised into side paths based on their own training or personality. For example one particularly disturbed individual in this group had unlocked something along the lines of Torture Mastery.

As the groups spread out across the domain for their separate tasks, a set of eyes wearily watched them pass. Unbeknownst to them, many an individual had skills that countered theirs, and even with the assistance of their armour, which used ruins and enchantments from the game to reduce peoples notice on them. This set of eyes had no trouble distinguishing them, although not for an obvious reason such as true sight or some other such nonsense.

Skin-Like-Granite, the leader of the Rockskins and the Church of the Big Black, followed those curious yet malicious auras floating around like invisible spirits then turned back to an ancient looking Spawn Shaman, who was busily casting some kind of hexing magic. A moment later, the wrinkled old prune of a spawn had his eyes glow red and also began to follow something with his eyes.

“Rasha rar raka.”

Skin-Like-Granite also returned to observing for a moment and nodded.

“Very well my friend. Please leave a few for me to have a friendly discussion with once you are done. Unfortunately, we will have to forget about the ones traipsing into the Poison Marsh. They march to their own demise.”

Pendulum Nuts grunted and wandered off towards an odd patch of dirt in the Sinister Wastes and was quickly swallowed up by it. Moments later, the group that had been tasked with finding a way into the underground labyrinth came across a very conspicuous tunnel leading into the ground.

The leader, Echo, gave a wary glance towards it before shaking her head as if her suspicions of this being too easy was merely her paranoia. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one finding this suspicious, as her second in command said something to her over their coms channel. She just made some hand gestures and onwards they slunk, or sleuthed, or whatever such action it is that spy’s do in their duty.

Even with the advanced equipment developed by the ‘Technomancers’ back at the Fuse domain, the tunnels were eerily dark. They could only conclude this place had some form of magic that clouded the vision of even their equipment.

Even more disturbing was the structure of the labyrinth they’d stepped into. After only 50 odd meters and 3 intersections they already felt lost. Little were they aware, the moment they stepped into the tunnels various curses and hexes were affecting them and making them quickly lose a sense of direction and confusing their senses.

Even worse was the more disturbing feeling and panic of claustrophobia they now all felt. The more they walked, the more the walls and roof seemed to be closing in on them. Soon, even after trying to backtrack numerous times, they found themselves hunched over and their shoulders scrapping the edges of the dirt walls as they walked.

Based on the readouts from their magical equipment they knew they were somewhere under the Sinister Wastes, mostly due to the vast amount of Sinister Mana that permeated the walls in here. It was so much that it had started blinding their instruments. Finally, after an incredibly stressful and uneventful 30 minutes and still finding nothing, Echo chose to try and call into Alpha, the team leader, and report.

This was even more perturbing for the team as they suddenly discovered themselves unable to send or receive transmissions from the leader. Echo suddenly started to panic even more as a disturbing thought struck her.

“Back up a bit Marco and start counting off as you step.”

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,...”

After 6 meters they couldn’t even communicate with each other. She signalled Marco back and released a shaky breath.

“It seems we’re trapped. Initiate self-destruct on my mark.”

The team of three only nodded at this protocol and prepared to overload their suits. Before Echo could even start the count though, a strange scratching was heard from one of the walls. The three spun on the spot and aimed their rifles at the wall the sound was coming from, holding their breaths.

Moments later, the walls started to cave in slightly ahead of them and a clawed hand of red skin burst out from the wall.

“Eye’s sharp, avoid contact. This is one of the creatures of the Target, we may be able to follow it.” Echo quickly relayed to her subordinates.

It wasn’t long before a strange little beast burst out from the rest of the wall from a hole. It looked around for a moment, scratched its head as if confused, then shrugged and started walking down the path opposite of the interlopers.

They all shared an odd look, shrugged as well, and quickly followed along with the lead member’s rifle aimed at the creatures back.

It was a mysteriously short amount of time later that they suddenly saw a light in the pitch darkness up ahead. It soon revealed itself to be a doorway out onto a stone platform. As they entered, they were all shocked to discover themselves standing at the top of a huge half pyramid-like structure of black polished stone that seemed to be built down along the wall, the wall they just exited from.

Surrounding them on the platform were countless skulls of all sorts of creatures and beasts. Dried and even some still somewhat viscous blood was spread liberally everywhere. Literally, everything they could see seemed to be painted in some form of blood, some of it even glowing.

“Great Saint...” Gasped one of the Infiltrators as his gaze left their immediate surroundings. They were inside a massive cavern with endless smaller caves and tunnels littered across it all over the place. The floor of the cave was filled with countless of Spawn which all seemed to be chanting strangely and bowing in their direction. Surrounding them were endless bones covering up every inch of dirt on the floor and strange structures all about the place, even protruding from the walls and roof, all also made from bones and scales and even giant feathers.

The trio quickly discovered something seemed to be very wrong with this whole situation as the little spawn they’d followed walked to the edge of the platform and gave a mighty and savage yell. Even more spawn, as if that was even possible, started streaming out from the caves and tunnels filling the entire cavern.

Echo turned to get her team to start running only to see the tunnel they emerged from had already somehow filled in completely. Standing directly behind them was an ancient looking old spawn, staring directly into her eyes as he leaned onto a crude staff made from some of the odd decrepit trees from the surfaces of the Sinister Waste.

Standing beside him was another Spawn wearing a completely black robe tailored to fit him. In his hands was a book filled with a strange language and odd pictures, all drawn with blood.

This spawn looked at her as well, except with a very evil looking smile, revealing all of his savage little razor sharp teeth.

“Welcome, spies. We appreciate your delivering yourselves directly to us, it’s somewhat troubling dragging others here. Be happy in the knowledge that...”

Before Serious Spawn could finish the death writes of the Infiltrator’s, they’d already awoken from their shock and levelled their guns in preparation to fire. Just as their fingers began to squeeze the triggers of their rifles, strange magic burst out from the platform they were on, and they all found themselves being locked down by curses, hexes and even slithering tentacles made of shadow and shaped liked cocks.

Echo immediately disliked the direction this was going as those tentacles started touching weird places that they definitely shouldn’t be, trying to get under her armour and do unspeakable things.

Serious scowled slightly then grunted.

“Fine ... stinking creatures.” He then pulled out a wicked looking obsidian dagger from his robes and stalked forward.

“Know peace in the abyss of the Master’s Madness.”

With that, he stabbed them once each, their powerful armour and various other enchanted artefacts all simply being sliced into as if pushing the knife into butter. The moment the blade touched their blood, an unspeakable pain overtook their minds. Not just pain as they had experienced in their lifetimes, but true pain in every sense. Loss, Discomfort, Sadness, Envy, Hatred and an endless flood of other negative emotions flooded their souls and was amplified to beyond the limits of a rational mind to withstand.

Time stretched out for them into infinity, but in reality, almost as quickly as it had happened, it ended. They each collapsed to their knees and a gaseous miasma of darkness poured from their bodies. Everything they’d experienced since they arrived on Murphy’s domain and even somewhat before then was pulled from their bodies by the chanting of the Spawn and all floated up into the air above. Most especially was everything they just experienced in that brief moment of complete madness.

As the last vestiges of consciousness left Echo, she watched a dark ghost of her own self being ripped from her body as it clawed with a face of complete insanity to try and get back into her soul. Slowly, she fell backwards. As her blurry vision passed, she noticed for the first time the wall they’d stepped from had a huge statue of a young looking man carved into the wall. Falling back further, she saw her dark ghost get sucked into a huge floating ball in the middle of the cavern.

It had an uncountable number of other shadowy, ghostly souls all trying to escape from it. Clawing and fighting and snarling like animals. More disturbing were the souls that floated through it all laughing or just staring with strange eyes out into the world around their amassed ball of derangement.

At last, the slight connection between her and the dark ghost snapped like a piece of bubble gum being stretched beyond its limit.

The very next moment, her body materialised on a bed in a secret training camp on earth, and she stared up at the white ceiling feeling completely lost.

She slowly sat up and saw two others in a huge room of thousands of bed being mobbed by various service personnel. Almost as quickly as she awoke another group marched towards her from out of the room, and a very stern looking man with ginger hair and mutton chops left her comrade and walked over to her.

“Report.”

Echo just looked at him strangely for a moment as she tried to get her bearings.

“We arrived at Sin City and found our way to the reported portal of the Targets Domain. We then ... um ... I mean ... we ... Sir?”

The man with mutton chops, here forth referred to as Captain Chops, just sighed.

“Another bust. At least none of you came back like that other one, all clawy and bitey.”

Murphy was quickly coming to love and hate the forest of metal spikes. Every direction he looked was filled with spikes. Even just standing on the ground as he was had left his boots completely shredded, as the ‘grass’ of this metal forest was in fact just billions of tiny metal shards all stabbing up and down from the ground like a tattooists needle gun, and attempting to grind him into dust.

When he first landed, or more appropriately was swatted from the sky by a huge metal spiked tree limb shaped like a club, the grass had almost actually killed him. It was sharp enough to just pierce his skin, and with that happening repeatedly and with rapid speed, it had eventually overwhelmed his skin’s absurd defence and begun shredding his body.

It was only the fact that Gorby got a little too excited too quickly and tried to have the spike trees continue to clobber and slice him to death that he survived.

One of the club’s spikes pierced into his body, and he got stuck on it, lifting him off the ground. Despite Gorby having the tree try and shake him back onto the grass, Murphy clung on shamelessly and let his body start healing up. Of course, Gorby was displeased with this and directly slammed the spike tree limb club back into the ground in the hope it could just keep him pinned.

Murphy didn’t have the strength to push it off, so he pulled out a highly explosive mixture from his storage and set it off under his back. This proceeded to blow him back into the sky along with half the tree. It had also wholly obliterated his back, and he was left with a huge gaping hole that had nearly separated his spine.

Luckily, this brief flight was long enough to stuff a health potion into his gob, and his already monstrous regeneration was assisted enough to completely repair him, before he was once again was struck from the sky like a fly being splattered by a fly swatter ... only without much splatter.

This repeated in various fashions for more than an hour but eventually, Murphy’s body had caught up to the environment, and he was once again essentially indestructible. He even went so far as to angle himself towards a huge open area filled with the grass that reached up to knee height by using a couple exploding potions in mid-air.

Gorby was especially disgruntled when Murphy used the area to roll around everywhere like a dog and let every inch of his body adapt to the point that the grass started to push him into the air. The forces behind the grass was enough to launch him into the sky every time he landed.

After the internal haemorrhaging from the strikes had been annulled as well, Murphy began to try and make his way towards the floating door about 300 meters in the air at the other end of the spike forest. This was what led to his current hate for the forest. Every time he tried to move forward, the metal trees struck him into the sky and sent him flying back towards the giant earthen pillar with the dome that he had started from.

Unfortunately, Murphy had discovered that he was too weak to contend with the power of the metal trees.

“How the fuck am I supposed to get to that door?” Murphy pondered to himself aloud. Gorby’s laughed echoed everywhere at Murphy’s apparent distress.

Hearing the mocking laughter, Murphy scowled at the empty white void that was the sky. At last, he had an idea. He turned back and started to go towards the earthen column. Once he reached it, he started climbing back to the top. This alone nearly took him half an hour and even levelled Climbing up to level 3.

Once at the top, he took a few different potions from his pack and started dissolving the dome wall until it was enough to walk through.

“I hope this works...”

He walked in and headed to the furthest wall. Then started sprinting as fast as possible towards the exit he’d created. The moment his bare foot touched the edge of the column, he poured his strength into and launched himself through the sky towards the door. At first, it looked like he was going to make it. It was quite the distance to traverse, but he had enough strength to launch his body that far.

Unfortunately, Gorby was very dissatisfied with this, and his spike forest began to rip smaller spikes out of the ground with grating and screaming of steel so as to launch them at Murphy as giant metal projectiles. Murphy was utterly blindsided as one of the giant spikes stabbed into the side of his face, spraying blood through the air and launched him hundreds of meters off course and into the distant forest.

“Oomph!” Murphy grunted as he smashed into another spiked metal tree and was stabbed through the side, bending the spike back. The force required to pierce his skin at this point was ridiculous and even a substantial metal spike the size and length of a man’s leg didn’t have the structural integrity to completely withstand it.

The tree limb quickly smashed him into the ground while he was stuck on the spike and began trying to grind him to death once more, followed with all the other metal spike trees thrashing about and smashing into him to try and help out. Murphy just lay there motionlessly for a short time as his body repaired all the damage, reconnected his loosely hanging lower jaw and began to force the deformed spike out of his body, even as the spike trees tried to help hammer it back in.

A little while more of this and Murphy was starting to get very annoyed.

“So it’s like that, huh?”

He then took out almost half the explosive reagents in his inventory and let them fall all around him. A momentous amount of light that had no reason to be so blindingly bright sprung forth, followed by an incredible force, heat and cacophonous sound.

A considerable shockwave erupted and completely obliterated the spike forest for nearly 30 meters in diameter around Murphy. Gorby was watching very intently as the blinding light seemed to linger for a frustrating amount of time. He knew better now, that you can’t count on Murphy being dead until you saw the lifeless ... pieces of whatever was left. In fact, the only thing he’d been able to count in regards to Murphy is the number of potions he’d used and the now rapidly climbing number of times he’d tried to kill him and failed.

Soon, the light faded away revealing a molten crater in the metal ground, at the bottom of which was a very mangled and half destroyed corpse. Every visible inch was charred black, the entire lower body was completely gone up to the waist, and both arms were in various states of missing. The head looked as if it was half caved in, the lower jaw completely gone and the neck missing quite a good portion from the side.

Gorby was most definitely not satisfied enough to call this a victory yet. For starters, there was still something left. As such, he quickly started ripping up spike trees and launching them into the pit in the hopes to bury this insufferable and apparently immortal bastard.

Just as the first spike tree landed, Gorby heard a raspy breath and the chest of the being known as Murphy once more shuddered to life, drawing air to breathe. Gorby was now convinced that was most likely entirely pointless seeing as Murphy most probably didn’t even need to do something so mundane as breathing if he’s capable of surviving something like that!

The charred wreck was then quickly drowned in still thrashing spike trees until the entire pit was full. Gorby then decided that still wasn’t enough and just had every tree in the endless spike forest start uprooting itself and marching towards him to begin building a monumental metal tomb. He’d come to the realisation that Murphy may quite literally be un-killable at the first level of his dungeon, unless he can take advantage of his seemingly childlike strength to trap him.

Hopefully, he would then die after a few hundred or thousand years. Gorby was patient, after all, dungeon cores were actually immortal, and he would only know for sure in regards to Murphy’s immortality when he could survive in a sealed mountain of metal for a couple thousand years.

As Murphy was being buried under a literal forest of metal trees, Bravo’s Squad of three were scoping out the Sinister town. They’d already done a round through the thousands of tents scattered everywhere and filled with every sort of sentient creature imaginable. A brief flit through the town up the hill showed it to be a somewhat sleepy and quiet place of only a few beast-kin and humans all enjoying a comfortable and calm little township.

Using various forms of strange movement techniques, they flittered about the town listening in on conversations here and there and trying to pick up some information from the residents. Their skill set afforded them a useful ability to bypass the basic protection of the Domain that was provided to the town to keep all the refugee squatters out, but it was still now bustling with more life than ever.

The only place with more action was directly around the portal area between the two towns, where a makeshift marketplace, adventurer guild and very pricey inn were located. Although this area afforded the squatters the right to pass through or visit, many chose to avoid it as lingering tended to follow with mysteriously disappearing and then respawning 2 days later with no memories from before they entered the area.

It was very odd and had birthed no small number of rumours. That said, it still was rather low on the interesting things to dwell upon when within Murphy’s realm. Bravo and his team had heard stories that vary wildly from daily sacrifices to dark gods, spirits and even the vast emptiness of space itself. That wasn’t even among the stranger rumours though. Things frequently went missing for no apparent reason, people were often plagued by inordinate amounts of bad luck and every now and then the pet dog of the Target would leave the monstrous barn house it slept in to eat a few random people then go back to sleep.

Speaking of the creature referred to as Morbid, although far more affectionately then Bravo would have thought considering its penchant to randomly eat people, he’d witnessed it having a battle. Or at least that’s what he thought initially. He and some strange old man were almost literally tearing each other to pieces in an area that had quickly been vacated by the many squatters in the area.

The only thing that clued him into realising it wasn’t some battle to the death was when the old man started laughing, used a level of strength Bravo was certain no one in Fuse currently possessed yet, and launched the creature nearly 100 meters away. Only for them to clash again and devolve into petting and brushing the creature’s fur as it panted loudly in a sitting position.

When the hundreds of Spawn had come out of nowhere and rushed over to help with the brushing but mostly the patting, Bravo had quickly escaped the area before he suffered more mental damage. He was sure his superiors would not be pleased to learn of such a monster living here, and probably not too happy about his estimation of the dog’s strength either.

Monstrous old man and demon dog aside, Bravo was now more interested in something unusual he’d just seen in Sinister Town. A man wearing the robes of a priest and with skin made of stone had been quietly whispering to someone nearby about the “Super Duper Secret Thing That No One Can Ever Find Out About...”.

It almost sounded like some kind of setup for a trap, except that Bravo was extremely confident with his skills and technology, so simply brushed it off as the way these strange humanoid creatures with rough gravely skin talked.

Following said priest to a strange cellar, he observed various secret knocks and passwords and every other assortment of verification before the man was let in. Using the advantage to check it out, Bravo slipped in behind the man and then suddenly...

He woke up in the Training Camp on earth with no memories after stepping through the portal to Murphy’s Domain. Although he had no memories, he suddenly felt a very profound sense of guilt, loss and hopelessness.

Almost 10 minutes later, one of his compatriots awoke, muttering and scratching at his skin relentlessly, as if he felt trapped in his own body. Another ten minutes and his final teammate came back. Unlike the first two, she just lay there, pale as fresh snow, staring into nothingness and completely unresponsive.

Captain Chops could only sigh forlornly and grimace as the second to return started screaming about returning to the big black and demanding he be allowed to go back into the game.

Murphy was now laying down slightly stuck in the metal floor of the forest where the molten metal had cooled around his body. On top of him lay a significantly prodigious weight that was slowly trying to crush the life out of him. His bones had all been crushed to powder initially, but after almost an hour of them slowly reforming and being crushed again and again, his body was finally in one piece again.

That’s not to say he was in any way comfortable. For one thing, he’d run out of breathable air and his body was very much opposed to the situation, forcing his lungs to try and draw something in completely by instinct. He then spent another hour simply hyperventilating and slightly panicked, which for Murphy actually felt amazing.

The panic flowed away into a steady calm before he even fully realised his body was trying to respond by initiating standard flight or fight reactions for suffocation. What for most people would have been some of the worst torture they’d ever experienced, Murphy found himself falling into a strange state of clear-headed meditation.

When his body finally finished adapting to the situation and his brain had remade the necessary connections to prevent him from feeling the need to breathe, he awoke from his transcendental introspection completely calm.

“Well, that’s knew ... Didn’t think my skills class would afford me something like this. Total adaption to any situation ... almost like, some kind of rapid personal evolution or perhaps even ... mumble ... mumble mumble mumble...”

He then spent a little while talking to himself and completely off in his own little world as he often does. Finally, he got bored of just lying about under his metal tomb and tried to move.

“Hnngg!!”

“HNNGGGHH!!!”

And discovered that he could in fact not move a single muscle. No matter how hard he tried to move, nothing changed.

‘How in the fuck am I even ... fucking Gorby ... I’m going to be stuck in here forever ... I can’t even lift one of these trees myself, let alone an entire forest... ‘

At that thought, Murphy had a plan. He tapped on the tree laying over the top of him and willed it into his personal inventory. With a strange ‘Pop!’ sound, said spike tree disappeared, and Murphy felt his body being compressed to the floor by the peculiar gravity of his personal storage.

Slowly and ponderously, Murphy forced himself into a sitting position and got up. He now had a small space he could move around in, and so he began to train something he desperately lacked. Strength. Although his body had developed to the point it was nigh indestructible, this did not suddenly grant him super strength. Granted, some strength had been gained simply by the fact his body had been putting on a considerable if not invisible amount of mass, but in the grand scheme of things it was not much.

His endurance was completely illogical in comparison to his other stats and could only be described as magical in nature. Not only that, it was also completely and utterly insane. Before entering the dungeon, Murphy already had an endurance of 168 points. The next highest endurance on his domain was owned by Uncle Calligso at only 70 odd points. The next highest after him was almost half that.

This made it apparent to Murphy and everyone else that endurance is usually an incredibly difficult stat to level at all.

However, by the same token, because he’d been so focused on his endurance, Murphy had neglected his strength and agility. His strength of 94 points was actually one of the weakest on his entire domain. Even some of the refugees that had stats and skill stolen from them had higher strength values.

His agility was very middle of the pack, if the pack was struck by a meteor, burnt to ashes and spread on the wind. Even Seelie had 4 times his agility, and she was a fucking mage!

Thus, Murphy decided that now was a good time to try and rectify that.

In the metal cavern, deep below a mountain of iron trees, Murphy started doing his martial arts forms. Ponderously slow at first, but soon a little faster, and then a little bit faster again until eventually, he was moving slightly faster than a hermit crab along the beach.

Then, overestimating himself, he reached out and added another tree to his inventory. Leading him to immediately face plant into the ground, barely able to twitch a finger.

As if this wasn’t enough...

‘Ping! Murphy’s Law has caused an unhappy accident. -15 Luck.’

The entire mountain of spiked trees rumbled for a moment and suddenly collapsed further in on itself, preventing Murphy from moving a muscle.