I looked around at my party and gave a quick nod. “I’ll be right back. Renfry, keep an eye on everyone up here.”

Renfry shook his head. “My lord, I am not sure this is a good course of action. I should be the one that goes and scouts.”

I nodded slowly. “I get what you are saying, and it would even make sense if you could place a dungeon. But you don’t have access to the tunnel doors, so if this leads out of the castle, I don’t even know if you could come back and tell us that you set the dungeon. It’s got to be me.”

Irwin looked at the stairs and started to make his way to them. “I can try, my lord.”

I shook my head. “Nope, that will take too long, and with how you have been moving, you need the break. Just sit down and rest. We know that behind us is safe because we have been that full length, so you can rest for a while.”

Renfry went to say something else but then sighed and nodded. I gave a little smirk. I got it. I was being pig-headed, but that was fine because, in this case, I was right. Right as I started down, Kasidy shoved my standard at me.

She smiled. “We have Renfry and Irwin up here. Take that standard. You might need it.”

I thought for a moment and then took it from her and waved. Then I started to make my way down the stairs. The first twenty or so were visible from the top of the stairwell, then it made a sharp right turn and kept going.

The stairs weren’t fun, and I wasn’t thrilled about how many I was going down. I felt like I was back in the open shaft of stairs to the sewers. They just kept going down twenty stairs, then a turn with a landing, then twenty more.

Each step felt like a standard riser of about six inches. With twenty per flight before a turn, I was looking at ten feet per flight. After four turns, I felt like I was facing back in the same direction as before but just down forty feet or so. The landings were about ten feet long and four feet wide, which meant that they could act as either a resting place or a choke point.

I counted flights as I went down, thinking about Irwin and hoping he didn’t fall coming this way. Of course, the landings would help with that, but still, twenty steps could kill a person on Earth; with the way stats worked here, I wasn’t sure. That was one of the things that didn’t seem to change. If you took damage in critical spots or critical ways, it didn’t matter what your stats were.

As I pondered that and worried about Irwin falling, I realized I had lost count of the flights, which made me laugh. It didn’t matter; I just wanted to know how long it would take. The stairs were all the same, and if I didn’t have my map, I wouldn’t know that I was making headway. I couldn’t see below or above as there was no open middle.

It was likely twenty minutes when the bottom of the stairs didn’t turn but went straight. I couldn’t see very far because of the ceiling height. So I slowed down and drew my dagger of pausing. I wanted to make sure I was as ready as I could be.

I felt my pulse move up as I took a deep breath. The smell of the stairs hadn’t changed the whole way down. It was clean indoor air. No smell of the sewer or the outside, but also no smell of earth. The stairs had been cut from the mountain but didn’t act like a cave.

I moved down the last set of steps, focused ahead of me. If there was going to be a change or a trap, now would be the place for it. But there was nothing. The stair in a hallway went forward until it turned dark.

As I approached the end of the magically lit area, the smell changed. No longer the clean absence of smell that I had grown accustomed to. Now it smelled like a cave, dank and musty. The closer I got to the edge of the lit area, the more I smelled the change.

The smoothness of the wall didn’t change as it got dark. However, there was a clear line where the stone was dry and perfect and where it was damp and cold. The construction didn’t look any different; however, it appeared that perhaps the castle was retreating.

I pulled out a dungeon seed, tried activating it, and got the same message as before. Then I stepped out to where the stone was damp and tried again. This time I got a message suggesting I move another fifty feet away from the Castle core. I gave a slight smile and moved forward into the dark.

I wasn’t happy about being unable to see but was guessing that since everything up to this point was perfectly smooth, the floor would remain so. I didn’t understand what was going on. I hadn’t seen where the collapse was, but I was clearly out of the castle’s zone.

There was also the chance that the collapse happened further up, and now something was eating away at the castle. It had closed off the excessively long stairwell with a magically sealed door. Which, in many ways, was an excellent solution to a hole in its defenses. But that still didn’t explain why the message said one thing, but I still hadn’t found anything that looked like a cave-in.

I also couldn’t figure out why there was no door down here. Sure, it saved me from walking down the stairs if I knew there was a collapse, but it meant that all of this space wasn’t being used but was just left to be. It just was off in so many ways.

I was only guessing that it could heal itself. It might be that the castle cores couldn’t do that. If the walls were part of the castle, it would explain why they weren’t healed yet. My thickets could heal themselves, but my equipment couldn’t without me feeding it. Since people didn’t have access to the visual interface, it could be that they didn’t know how to turn on the castle repair.

The why didn’t matter, though. I just needed to get the dungeon set up so I could get Irwin rested, and we could get Blink back. As I slowly moved into the dark, I was kicking myself. Whenever I found myself in the dark, I was without a way to see, and I always told myself I would make something. Then I made a lamp and left it behind so I wouldn’t have to carry the dumb thing.

The light behind me was mostly gone as I moved over the stone. I was taking care to move slowly enough that I wouldn’t run my face into a wall. Even though it was cool and damp, I felt a drop of sweat fall down my face. It started on my forehead, rolled right over my eye, and got lost in my beard.

I hadn’t heard anything except my walking and breathing. Then I heard a scratch. It wasn’t the sound I was making while walking. No, it was the same one I heard from the rats earlier. The good thing was it was only one. It had been a single scratch. So perhaps my mind had been playing tricks on me.

Then my left foot tripped over something soft but heavy. As I caught my balance, it moved. The single scratch of a rat’s claw on stone turned into a scrambling sound. The rat had all the advantages over me at this point. It could see, and it was ready for me. So when I tripped over it, the dumb thing shifted its location and launched itself at me.

When I tripped over the rat with my foot, it took just a moment for me to understand what was happening. The sound of the rat moving helped, but my brain wasn’t expecting this. So I hesitated just a moment before I started to turn. If I hadn’t, then the rat might have missed with its pounce. As it was, it didn’t take me head-on but hit my left shoulder.

Since I was the one that advanced on the rat, my standard didn’t go off until it attacked. This meant if others were nearby, they were on the other side of my standard. However, I couldn’t see and could only react by skill levels and luck.

That little shift was enough to keep me standing. Then those levels kicked in, and the dagger I had in my right hand flashed forward. The rat was clinging to me, which meant that I knew where it was even though I couldn’t see anything. I hit it with my dagger of pausing. Then while it was paused, I slammed it against the wall pinning it in place.

I needed to see what was happening, so I cast Fire Fist on my elbow and slammed it into the rat. Magical fire damage didn’t make any sense. My ten points of magic damage caused a glowing halo of fire to form around the silent rat. Lighting up the area around it like the rat was on fire.

The rat was trying to bite and claw me, so I took a step back and kicked it down the hallway as it fell to the ground. As it sailed away, I saw the forms of at least another dozen rats. Then it blinked out, which meant that the rat died, and the magic had nothing left to hold onto.

I wasn’t fifty feet away from the castle. But I pulled out the dungeon seed. If there was going to be another fight, I wanted to be able to see. It might not grow as fast as I would like, but it would give me what I needed.

I pulled up the interface for the see and selected to plant the dungeon. I started to smile as I saw the pop-up form in my sight. Then I almost cursed but caught myself from yelling.

Warning!

276 hostile creatures within core room perimeter.

Dungeon at risk of destruction

Reduce hostiles before Planting Dungeon

I was backing away, trying not to wake the rats, when Blink shared her vision with me. Kasidy and Irwin were both being drug through the room by two humans. Kasidy looked like she had been hit in the face with something rather heavy, and Irwin was bleeding out his shoulder.

I watched as Kasidy was tossed into tossed limply into a cage. She didn’t even try to catch herself. Irwin stumbled forward and crashed into the back side of his cage. It looked like that was enough to knock him out, as he didn’t move once he hit the ground.

Blink’s emotions were the same as mine. All I felt was worry for Kasidy and anger towards those who did this.

* * *