“Best Route,” said Madeline. “Okay. Step where I step, and follow fahst. If you ain't got good agility, pah up with someone who dahs.”

Threadbare glanced to the Mousewife, who tugged on her tail. “Bless me buttons, I'm not really that nimble.”

“Then you're with me,” he said, and the tiny bear hoisted the large doll by her feet, and ran after Madeline. With her skirts in his face he couldn't really glance back to check on the others, but the scrambling noises and the sound of shifting rocks told him that they were taking Madeline's instructions to heart.

“Oh my goodness!” The Mouseife said, hunkering low and hanging on to her knees, tail lashing for ballast as Threadbare jogged over piles and heaps of fallen tiles, parts of support arches, and raw rock from the cavern ceiling above. “I can't see a thing, sir!”

Once there had been light in this tunnel, he could tell by the occasional twisted mass of bronze or iron that had been a brazier or torch sconce. But now it was a vast, dark hall.

And after a tense couple of minutes, they rounded the first turn.

“Seven more to go,” Midian said. “They get smaller as we go, but they're still pretty long.”

“I'm taking a flying potion!” Thomasi called, from far behind. “Hold on, Chase!”

“Just mind my head!” the halven said. “I add about two feet to your height this way!”

“Good ideah!” Madeline called back. “Everyone who can, drink up! Ah... Threadbeah, yah keeping up. Give us some moah light!”

“Glowgleam,” Threadbare obliged, putting it on Madeline's tail.

It helped, it really did. Almost everyone in the tunnel could either handle the darkness or provide their own light source, but the rubble was strewn about in uneven heaps, and having a good beacon up front helped. They made the next turn in a bout half the time.

“Does it get any easier?” Thomasi asked, from his position up by Madeline. “We're running out of time.”

“Yah right,” Madeline said, pausing on the side of a heap to look back at her charges. “Fahget saving enajy. Just get those flying skills up!”

“We're stopping for a moment,” Threadbare said, putting the Mousewife down and hopping up on her back, grabbing ahold of her bonnet ties. “Please grab my legs and hang on tight. Activate Flight Kite.”

And from under his coat, the tiny framework of the kite snapped out, as cloth filled in between the wire frames.

It did help, as he found his leaps going further, helping him glide with ease. But compared to the others, who whizzed past him with various potions or spells, he soon found himself falling behind.

“I've got you, sir!” Renny called. “Manipulate Air!”

Threadbare barely managed to dodge several heaps of rubble as he unexpectedly got a backwind.

AGL+1

Your Fly skill is now level 48!

They managed the third turn at better speed. And the fourth, and the fifth.

But as they were halfway to the sixth, Threadbare heard the sound he'd been dreading.

KRUNCH.

KRRAAAAAK.

KRUNCH.

Echoing from behind them, he knew what it was, the only thing it could be; the vast bulk of the white wyvern crawling its way over the rubble, coming after them, shoving its bulk through and parting the heaps like a ship through a stone ocean.

“This is a frost wyrm, not an earth dragon. It can't move quickly, except through frozen terrain,” Thomasi's voice echoed back from up ahead. “Have courage. Keep moving.”

And almost as if in mockery of his assessment, a roaring gale of freezing wind came rushing from behind them. Threadbare barely had time to correct his course, and the others took cover for a few seconds, until it was over.

The dragon had breathed frost.

“You know it can MAKE frozen terrain, right?” LivingDeadGrrl yelled. “Fly like you stoled something!”

KRUNCHKRUNCHKRUNCH...

...SHHHHHHHHFFFFF...

The sixth turn came, but yet another hallway stretched ahead, and the rubble was even tighter, here.

And behind them, the dragon came faster, letting the roaring of smashing stone and the sizzle of scales on ice herald its coming.

We won't make it, Threadbare realized. He glanced around as he flew, looking for good sized chunks of rubble to animate. Maybe he could have a few of them roll towards the dragon, and slow it down a bit?

“Hey boss,” came a voice right in his ear.

“Oh? Spackle? I didn't know you were with us.”

“I hitched a ride in Karen's bustle. So anyways I'm gonna go beat up the dragon, kay?”

“By yourself?”

“Yeah yeah! Bitch won't see me coming! Imma be BLAM and POW!”

He opened his mouth to protest, and thought about it, as he weaved past pillars of fused stone shards. And he realized what Spackle was offering. No, there was no way he could win. But he certainly, out of all them, had the best chance of not losing. And not losing for a good long while, would buy the rest of them time to get into an area where they could fight back.

“Don't forget you have a waystone. We all do. Use it when— I mean, if things go bad.”

“I will! Yeah! You keep on going, I'll catch up! Time to die, dragon dick! Woohoo!”

And with that, the little golem leaped off and away, vanishing out of Threadbare's peripheral vision.

Midway to the seventh turn, the crashing behind them slowed.

Stopped.

And was replaced by a different sort of crashing.

Another breath of frosty air roared past, carrying winter in its wake. But they kept fleeing, and did not look back.

But though it slowed him a bit, Threadbare pulled up his party screen and kept an eye on Spackle's hit points.

With mounting dread he watched them fall. The little golem had very few to begin with, perhaps Nurph's way of balancing his overpowered defense. And all too soon, they were in the high double digits.

Then the medium double digits.

“Hey! Should we...” Zuula started. “No. No, too late.”

Another roar of frosty wind, and Threadbare felt himself shudder in helplessness and rage, as Spackle's hit points flickered...

...and then the tension oozed out of him, as he saw them stabilize at three.

Silence in the hallway. A few heavy thwacks, as if oversized claws and wings and a tail were smacking around, to make sure no tiny irritants were still around and hiding.

And then crashing, starting slow but regaining speed, as the dragon began moving again. But by this time they were rounding the seventh turn.

“Not much farther!” Midian called back.

Spackle's hit points stayed at three. Either he'd evaded the dragon or waystoned home. Either way he'd done his job well, and Threadbare refused to waste that opportunity.

And then they were upon it. Past the eighth turn a massive set of double doors lay, flattening the rubble, showing entry to a wide, impossibly huge and round chamber beyond. And a rippling reflection of light, dancing along the floor.

“There wasn't water here last time...” Midian said, uncertainly, as flew in, with the wind that propelled some of them leaving rippling trails in the inch high water that flooded the room.

“Sir?” The Mousewife said, reaching down to tap Threadbare's hat. “I'm getting rained on.”

Threadbare shifted her around until he was holding her up by her hands, and looked up.

“Midian?”

“What?”

“The ceiling is coated with ice.”

“There wasn't a ceiling last time. That was the start of the dungeon... oh no.”

“He sealed it, didn't he?” Madeline said. “Put an enoamus ahs plag up theah.”

“Hang on,” Chase said. “Give me a minute.”

“We don't have a minute!” Thomasi called, from the doorway. “The dragon's maybe a turn away, at best!”

“Get inside,” Midian said. And the second the Ringmaster complied, she chanted “Wall of Force,” and pointed her finger at the doorway. There was a shimmer, a snap, and a fading rectangle of blue light that took up the entire doorway. “He'll have a way around that, but that should buy us some time. Chase, you have your minute.”

The sound of cards was lost in the rising crash of stone shifting outside. Perhaps sensing that they'd entered its lair, the dragon was making haste. Threadbare whispered “Bodyguard the Mousewife,” and added a few more defensive buffs after that.

Time stretched, and the dragon sounded almost at the doorstep before Chase yelled “Up! We have to go up, it's through the ice!”

Midian's reply was frantic. “LivingDeadGrrl! Tell me you're still a Water Elementalist!”

“It's your lucky fucking day!” The wendigo queen called back. “Manipulate Water!”

And at almost the same time, Thomasi bellowed “It's here!”

The dragon roared, and the area right in front of the door, where the wall of force was hidden, turned opaque white.

But around the edges of it, ice crackled into existence and crept along the carved stone of the doorframe. It creaked and groaned.

Except no, a lot of that creaking and groaning was coming from overhead.

“Shit, it's made to collapse! Hold on, this is kinda tricky,” LivingDeadGrrl shouted.

Threadbare looked up to see her trying to pull out a chunk the size of a small house, waving her hands and grasping and pulling, as it rocked and slid... and cracks started forming through the ice, shooting along to either side of it. “It's too much!” LivingdDeadGrrl called out. “This is my support class, I never leveled it to max!”

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Midian swore, and took out a potion. “I'm going to brace you! Pull it straight out once I do, and once it's down everybody fly up the hole. FAST!”

Three more walls of force, and she'd put the planes around in a half-circle, stretching from floor to ceiling. The second they were in place, LivingDeadGrrl shouted, and pulled her hands straight down, as if dropping a prisoner from a gallows.

The crash was earsplitting, and Threadbare felt himself flip almost upside down, as he went between the landing site and the Mousewife, and a shard of ice grazed his rump. He rather hoped his pants were all right, but didn't have time to check. Instead he felt Renny's wind seize him again, and up he went through the hole.

It was a longer trip than he'd expected. Almost thirty feet, with crack-filled ice starting to ripple next to him, and the silent forms of his friends flying by in the vertical shaft.

And then there came a sound that filled him with dread.

Stone giving way, followed by scales scraping between a wall of force and jagged rock. The dragon had no need for doors, when it had frozen walls to burst through.

“Is everyone through?” Midian called out, as they rose into the darkness beyond...

...and jagged green numbers flashed before Threadbare's eyes.

46 61 6C 2D 4E 20 48 5F 5F 56 4E

“It's glitched!” Thomasi said. “I think it said... Fallen Heaven?”

“We t'roo!” Zuula said.

“I'm dropping the walls, get clear and maybe it'll get caught in the collapse!”

“Yeah, you know what? Zuula don't do maybes! Nature's Fury!”

The entirety of the ice below them groaned, as the stone walls around the chamber shook and burst...

...but by then they were up, flying into the darkness of the dungeon as reality faded behind them.

For a moment, Threadbare dared to hope. Dared to hope that they had outpaced the thing, for once a group of people entered a dungeon, they could not be joined by those outside the dungeon. They would be in the dungeon reality, until they emerged, safe from all depredations and hazards outside.

But it was not to be.

Even as the ice broke and plummeted down, the great white wyvern, its copper mask dented and gleaming with blazing light, rose through the chunks of ice as double-digit red numbers were knocked out of it. It didn't care about the damage it took, for it was a thing of ice and snow, and resistant to anything related to those elements, and in the second before Threadbare lost sight of the world behind him, it caught up to them, maw opening, and vapor streaming as it prepared to breathe...

And halted, hovering in midair, as Thomasi darted down and threw his gloved hands up. “You shall not pass!”

“When did you learn the Muscle Wizaard's trick!” Chase screamed down.

“I haven't! But I'm a Tamer, and I have Dragon Truce! This'll buy some time, keep going!”

The dragon, flapping its wings furiously, tried to move around him, but Thomasi shifted to keep himself interposed.

Threadbare looked up, as something pattered on his hat. More melting ice?

No. This was a rain, hard and heavy and cold. There were dim shapes above, for this dungeon was vertical, and they had to keep flying up. That was what Midian had told them, on the way here. No matter what, they had to keep going up.

“You sure on this, dude? You tokened up?” LivingDeadGrrl shouted down to Thomasi.

“Enough for one more respawn! Chase, find me in Gnome if this goes bad!”

“I will!” Chase said, her voice breaking.

“Watch the sides!” Midian shrieked.

And Threadbare looked around just in time to turn and glide away, as four vast pillars of stone, two from either side rushed forward from the sides of the chamber, filling the space above him.

But they didn't fill the whole chamber, leaving perhaps a third of it open. To his horror he saw two more pillars, enough to fill the remaining open space, roaring toward each other... and stopping, leaving a small gap in one side.

Immediately, a shrieking gale howled down from the open space, and the kite was nearly blown away.

Nearly.

AGL+1

Your Fly skill is now level 49!

“WorldWarpR told me about this!” LivingDeadGrrl howled over the wind. “It's trigrams and stuff! This one probably means wind.”

“NO FUCKING SHIT!” Bellowed Zuula.

But louder than the wind, even louder than Zuula, was Thomasi's scream. Thomasi wasn't in Threadbare's party, but he didn't need to see the status screen to know what had happened.

They'd lost their buffer. The wyrm would be upon them, soon.

“There's something above us!” Renny warned.

Threadbare shifted, putting himself between the Mousewife and whatever was coming, and stared upward. The wind rippled the fur of his face, pushing against his stuffing, and made his eyes go at crazy angles for a second, but the oncoming creature was large enough that he could see it without trouble.

At first he thought it was a dragon. But no, it had the body of a horse, with a lot of extra frills and fins. Its main crackled with lightning, streamers of it flaring out to either side as it came down for the lot of them.

But there was something about the way it moved. Something he didn't quite figure out, until it had almost reached him.

Its legs had clear joints in them. The hide was inflexible, and appeared to be metal plates. Its eyes were crystal.

This was a golem, or an animi, or some other form of construct.

And he had skills for this, didn't he?

“Command Golem,” he told it. “Fight the dragon below us.”

CLOUD GUARDIAN KI-RIN's Magic Resistance cancels your command!

Immediately the thing oriented toward him and charged, but he was saved by the very nature of his flight. The bulk of the thing, and the way the wind seemed to shift with it, pushed him to the side and it only clipped him, sending him spinning.

The Mousewife screamed in alarm, and Threadbare gathered himself to try again.

“Command Golem. Fight the dragon below us.”

CLOUD GUARDIAN KI-RIN's Magic Resistance cancels your command!

A loud whinny was the only answer, as the thing turned and he spun like a leaf in a hurricane, dragged along in its wake. By the time he righted himself, he saw that the thing had stopped in midair, its maw stretching open impossibly wide as it yawned, segmented joints in its cheeks stretching it wider as it revealed some kind of cannon crackling with electricity—

“Wall of Force!” Midian yelled. “Also, Haste!”

The world slowed down.

The creature breathed lightning that crawled through the air toward him...

...and toward a small, rapidly-growing blue square of energy that barely snapped into existence in time to catch the blast.

But that wasn't what horrified Threadbare.

For as he spun in slow motion, he saw what lay below, and saw a blast of frost and icicles spewing out of the wyvern's mouth, as it breathed upward. In a matter of moments, it would impact his friends. Would they survive it? Some, probably. Others? Not much of a chance.

Threadbare glared at the Ki-Rin.

“Command Golem. Fight the dragon below us, please.”

CLOUD GUARDIAN KI-RIN's Magic Resistance cancels your command!

“No,” he whispered, as the words crawled past, and he saw the blast just catch Madeline, as her wings iced over and she fell straight into the frost wyrm's waiting jaws—

“Chase, curse it!” Midian snapped. “Rewind Time!”

Madeline flew up from the wyvern's jaws.

Her wings de-iced.

Threadbare and the Mousewife were whirled back around to face the ki-rin, as the wall of force shrunk, and the lightning spattering against it retracted.

He felt his lips move, as he spoke words backward.

And then, as the lightning struck forth in slow-motion again, the world righted itself, and he heard Chase chanting as fast as she could.

“Bad Fortune, Bad Fortune, Bad Fortune, Bad Fortune!”

Had he been human, he would have taken a deep breath.

Instead, he was a golem, so with supernatural patience he forced himself to wait.

And then he spoke.

“Command Golem. Fight the dragon below us, please.”

WILL+1

Your Command Golem skill is now level 36!

The Ki-Rin's jaws snapped shut.

It looked down.

And in the second before the cloud of icy doom reached Madeline, it dropped, and the wind shifted downward with it, pushing the ice away as the great horselike golem smashed into the wyvern.

They were roughly about equal size, but Threadbare didn't have time to watch the fight or enough information to guess who would come out on top. Instead he felt the winds lift him as Renny or another of his party stirred them to help him out, and he flew upward, and out of the pillars, back into the open air.

The open air didn't last long.

“More pillars!” Midian screamed. “Watch out below!”

They rose from the bottom of things this time, almost clipping the Ki-Rin and the wyvern as they came. A vast one that rose in the center and took up a third of the room, sloping as it stabbed past the scattering friends. Then two pairs more, that stabbed from the top and the bottom simultaneously, leaving an opening and forming a sort of floor. Chains rattled somewhere, and bits of the central pillar flipped and sorted themselves out, until Threadbare and the others were looking at a mountain.

At a foot of it, the wyvern roared ice into the Ki-rin's face, and tore its lightning mane free from its body with one set of claws, even as it crackled with energy and red numbers flowed out of it like spilled wine. It would win the fight, Threadbare saw.

But then he had more pressing issues, as he suddenly dropped as if the wind had been shut off. He had a second to read the words flashing before his eyes.

You may not fly while MOUNTAIN is ascendant!

Fortunately he was fairly light, as was the Mousewife. He scrambled up the second he hit the terracotta pillars, and tossed a few Mends to those in his party who needed it.

“Everyone all right?” LivingDeadGrrl said, watching the fighting dragon-things a few hundred yards distant. “I think we need to go up the mountain!”

“You're right, but look!” Midian said, pointing up the slope.

There was what looked like a ladder, up at the very top. It went through a single octagonal hole in the ceiling.

But between it and them, on every switchback of what looked like a trail up the mountain, were human-sized holes in the slope. And from those holes crawled what Threadbare at first took to be wolves, wolves made of stone.

“Golem dogs!” Zuula shouted. “Dreadbear, you got some'ting?”

“I can command them, but there are a lot, and I'll have to go one at a time,” he called back.

“Let's get moving, and fight our way through!” LivingDeadGrrl said. “Run!”

Threadbare picked up the Mousewife and ran for his life, hearing the crunch and scream of steel giving way behind him, and knowing that the dragon would be on their heels shortly.

And as he went, he chanted. “Command Golem, go fight the white dragon,” over and over again.

Fortunately, they had less magic resistance than the Ki-Rin had.

Unfortunately, he couldn't get them all. They spat out of the holes in the mountain one after another, and the group had to slow down to fight them. But between Madeline and LivingDeadGrrl and Zuula who'd decided to be something she called a Tee Rex, they made steady progress. Aunarox and Chase and Midian and Renny supported, throwing spells where necessary.

It was steady progress.

But not steady enough. Crunching on the slope behind them, as the dragon tore dogs apart with single swipes of its long claws. And a gurgling noise that Threadbare recognized as a deep, deep inhale.

“I'm running low on mana!” Midian called. “Last one for a while! Wall of Force!”

The dragon roared icy death onto the mountain side, and the wall...

...but also onto the slope ahead of them, turning the trail into a slippery path. One misstep, and they'd be down and into its jaws.

On the plus side, it had sealed over most of the dog dens in that area.

Still, Threadbare had had enough.

“LivingDeadGrrl? Can you forge a path?”

“Easy!”

“Good. Please hold Karen for me.” he tossed the Mousewife to her, and a surprised Wendigo caught the plush rodent one handed before shrugging and charging up the path.

Threadbare turned, and glared at the dragon as it loped up the slope, sidestepping the wall, its eyes gleaming out from behind its mask.

He didn't know how.

He didn't know what he was going to do.

But for the sake of his friends, he was going to drive this creature away or kill it.

He thought furiously as he stood there, head swiveling from side to side... and felt a tug against his neck.

Curiously, he put his paw up and felt something just under the surface of his fur.

And as the dragon thundered up toward him, he realized what it was. An item that he'd tucked away in his stuffing for safekeeping.

The Scale-smasher.

A gift from Anne Bunny.

A weapon against dragons.

He tore himself open with a slice of his claw, drew it out, even as the dragon loomed over him, maw opening wide.

It was as he remembered it. A golden hammer with a dial on its side.

A dial because its size was adjustable.

And as the dragon's head came down, as he heard his friends scream and start to shout skills, he held the hammer up and spun the dial to the right, and kept on spinning it.

The dragon's jaws snapped shut...

...and straight into the head of the hammer, stopped inches from connecting with him, thanks to the now wagon-sized hammer head blocking its mouth.

The dragon whipped its head up and Threadbare hung on for dear life, twisting that dial even further, finding himself being pushed out of its mouth as the hammer grew and thrust him back.

The dragon tried to shake its head to clear the hammer out of its mouth, but by now the head was too big, and wedged in between its jaws in a way that prevented it from coming out. The dragon's own physiology, its predator's teeth and mouth designed to catch and hold on worked against it.

It slammed the hammer to the ground, but Threadbare shifted so he was on the opposite side of the still expanding hammer, and kept on twisting the dial.

Only when its claws came up and groped at the handle, did Threadbare realize that he had to go.

Fortunately, that didn't stop him.

“Animus,” he told the dial. “Command Animi, keep turning to the right.”

And then he leaped down and ran, as his party, who had been running back to help, stopped and started running back up the slope again.

After a moment, there came a loud cracking noise, and the sound of a dragon falling back down the slope, tumbling head over heels.

Followed by a loud SQUISH, that was perhaps the sound of a hammer the size of a house falling on top of a very unlucky dragon.

But by that time Threadbare was clambering up a ladder, following the rest of his group, ready for the next challenge.

“We're through!” he heard Midian say, and hope filled his heart...

...hope that was dashed, when she gasped, and whispered, “What the hell?”

He was about to ask her what was wrong, when the ladder rolled upwards, and beneath him the octagonal hatch snapped shut with a resounding THOOM.

Threadbare looked down at it, then up to a world gone mad.