The kobold was crying.

  Brutus found this annoying.

  Not because he had any particular feelings about kobold tears — he'd seen plenty, mostly when they lost at cards — but because Onetooth had been crying for the last twenty minutes while simultaneously trying to crawl backwards through a crack in the cave wall that was clearly too small for him, and the whole thing was just undignified. Brutus had tracked him for three days through the Underdark. Through fungal caverns that smelled like a corpse that had eaten another corpse. Through a river that he was fairly certain had tried to bite him. Through a goblin checkpoint that he'd resolved by walking very fast and looking very confident until the goblins confused certainty for authority, which in Brutus's experience they usually did.

  Three days. And now this.

  "Give me the crown," Brutus said.

  "I'll die," Onetooth wailed.

  "Yeah."

  Onetooth stopped crawling. He looked up at Brutus with his huge wet eyes and his ridiculous little ceremonial robes that had accumulated three days worth of Underdark on them and said, with genuine wounded dignity: "You're not even going to lie to me?"

  "No."

  "You could try."

  "Onetooth."

  "Tell me you'll let me go. Tell me you'll give me a head start. Tell me something."

  Brutus looked at him. He looked at the Crown of Shadows, which Onetooth had been clutching to his chest this whole time like a child with a stolen toy. It was ugly. Black metal, old and dull, carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly. Brutus had assumed artifacts were supposed to be impressive. This one looked like something dug out of the wrong kind of grave by someone who knew better and did it anyway.

  "The dungeon's falling apart," Brutus said. "Maldred's poisoned two people. Goblins control the east wing. Four adventurers walked in this morning through the front door because nobody was watching it. Puck let them in. On purpose. For fun."

  "Puck is a nightmare," Onetooth agreed miserably.

  "The Dark Lady arrives in three days."

  "I know."

  "And you ran."

  Onetooth's ears flattened against his skull. For a moment he looked less like a dungeon keeper and more like what he actually was — a small clever animal that had climbed very high and was only now understanding what falling from this height would feel like.

  "I panicked," he said quietly.

  "Yeah," Brutus said. "I know."

  He reached down and took the Crown.

  Onetooth didn't fight him. He just sat there in the dirt looking small, and Brutus thought, not for the first time, that there was something almost pitiable about a creature who'd clawed up from nothing and built something real and then destroyed it in forty-eight hours because they were scared. Almost.

  He wrung Onetooth's neck with one hand. Fast. The kobold didn't suffer.

  Brutus wasn't cruel. He was just practical.

  He stood there for a moment in the dark of the Underdark, holding a dead kobold in one hand and an ugly crown in the other, and he thought about what came next. Bring the crown back. Stabilize the dungeon. Figure out what to do about the Dark Lady. He'd never run a dungeon before but he'd kept monsters alive in one for fifteen years, which felt like relevant experience.

  He turned the Crown over in his hands.

  The carvings shifted when he wasn't looking directly at them. He noticed that. He thought: that's probably fine.

  He put it on.

  The pain was extraordinary.

  Not the dramatic kind — not lightning and screaming and your eyes going white. Just a sudden, total, intimate wrongness, like something very old had just noticed him. Like he'd reached into a dark hole and something in there had grabbed back. His vision went black at the edges and then snapped back sharp, sharper than before, and for one horrible second he could feel the dungeon.

  All of it.

  Every corridor. Every room. Every trap that was still armed and every one that wasn't. The goblins screaming at each other in the east wing. The necromancer Maldred somewhere in the main hall, probably standing over a body with an expression of professional satisfaction. The four adventurers poking around the treasury with the comfortable body language of people who expected no resistance. The wyverns in the lower pens, restless and hungry because nobody had fed them in two days.

  He could feel something else too. Underneath everything. Deep and old and very very awake. It felt like standing at the edge of something with no bottom.

  Then it spoke.

  "Oh," said a voice. Right inside his skull. Bright and warm and slightly too loud, like someone leaning in close and speaking directly into the part of his brain that controlled whether he stayed calm. "Oh this is GOOD. Hi. Hello. You're the monster one, right? The big dumb one who's nice to the wyverns?"

  "What," said Brutus.

  "I've watched a lot of dungeon keepers and I have to be honest with you, most of them lasted longer than I think you will. You're not — and I mean this affectionately — you're not a planner, are you? You're more of a 'walk at the problem until it stops' kind of creature."

  "What are you."

  "The dungeon core. We're bonded now. Crown does that. Anyway — I got you something."

  Something flickered in his vision. Brutus blinked. There was a screen hanging in the air in front of him. Transparent, faintly glowing, full of numbers and text and a small map of the dungeon with little icons clustered across it. He looked at the icons.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Most of them were skulls.

  DUNGEON KEEPER: BRUTUS DUNGEON INTEGRITY: 23% DAYS UNTIL INSPECTION: 3 CURRENT THREATS: (14) RECOMMENDED ACTION: UNCLEAR

  "What is this."

  "That's your management overlay. Every keeper gets — actually no, most keepers don't get this, you specifically get this because I did a very quick assessment of your cognitive situation and I decided that without significant external assistance you were going to be dead before you got back to the dungeon. This is me helping. You're welcome."

  Brutus stared at the screen. He looked at the skull icons. He counted them. He stopped counting.

  "What does RECOMMENDED ACTION: UNCLEAR mean."

  "It means the situation is so comprehensively bad that the overlay can't identify a single correct first move. Which is genuinely rare. You should feel special."

  "Can I take the crown off."

  "Yes."

  Brutus took the crown off and put it in his pack.

  "The bond stays, obviously. That's a soul thing. The crown is just a hat at this point."

  Brutus looked at the screen still floating in his vision. He looked at DUNGEON INTEGRITY: 23%. He looked at DAYS UNTIL INSPECTION: 3. He had no idea what the crown did beyond apparently giving him a headache and a floating piece of paper that called him stupid. He'd figure that out later. He had a dungeon to save first.

  He picked up Onetooth's body, because he wasn't leaving it in the Underdark, and started walking.

  "I do want to flag a few things—"

  "Not now."

  "There's a rogue—"

  "Not. Now."

  A pause. Then, very cheerfully: "Okay! Your funeral. Probably literally."

  He smelled the dungeon before he saw it. Smoke and alchemical burn and the specific stench of goblin mob mentality — sweat and bad decisions and torchfire. He came through the back entrance into a corridor that had acquired, since he'd left, a large scorch mark across the ceiling and a barricade of stolen furniture blocking the east passage.

  A goblin he vaguely recognized was standing on top of the barricade. It pointed at him.

  "NEW GUY."

  "I've been here fifteen years," Brutus said.

  "NEW DUNGEON GUY."

  "Prince of Monster Handling."

  "THAT'S NOT A REAL—"

  Brutus walked through the barricade. Not over it. Not around it. Through it. The furniture exploded in both directions. The goblin went sideways off the top and hit the wall with a sound like a dropped sandbag. Two more who'd been crouching behind it ran immediately, which Brutus respected — at least they were fast.

  "You're doing great," said the voice.

  Brutus stepped over the wreckage.

  The main hall was worse than he'd expected, which was saying something because he'd expected it to be bad. Scorch marks on three walls. A chandelier on the floor. Something wet and unidentifiable smeared across the base of the administrative podium that Brutus chose not to examine. And at the far end of the hall, standing over a body with the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting to be noticed:

  Maldred.

  She was tall for a drow, which meant she stood at exactly the height required to look down at almost everyone. White hair pulled back with architectural precision. Robes immaculate — the specific immaculateness of someone who had learned to stand at exactly the right angle while messy things happened near them. She had the kind of face that had decided a long time ago that visible emotion was for lesser beings, and had not revisited the question since.

  She had been in the dungeon for six months. In that time she had reorganized the administrative records, implemented a new trap maintenance schedule, poisoned two people Brutus knew about and probably more he didn't, and made it loudly clear through every available channel that working under a kobold was a humiliation she was enduring purely for professional development purposes.

  She looked at Brutus. Then at Onetooth over his shoulder. Her expression moved through surprise, calculation, and something approaching contempt before arriving at a cool professional neutrality that was somehow worse than all three.

  "Brutus," she said. The way she said his name had a very specific texture. The texture of someone addressing furniture that had unexpectedly started talking.

  "Maldred."

  "You found him." Her eyes went to the dead kobold. "And apparently resolved the situation."

  "Yeah."

  "The crown?"

  "Gone."

  Her gaze moved to his empty head. Then to his pack. It stayed there a fraction of a second too long. Then back to his face, and the neutrality locked back into place like a portcullis dropping.

  "So," she said. "You're in charge."

  "Yeah."

  "Hm." She said it the way someone says hm when what they mean is how unfortunate for the dungeon. "I suppose someone has to be. I'll brief you on the current—"

  "Where are the adventurers."

  A pause. The pause of a woman who had been mid-sentence and did not appreciate the interruption. "Treasury. Third level. Four of them — a fighter, a battle mage, a cleric, and—" Another pause, this one with weight behind it. "A rogue who separated from the group approximately forty minutes ago and has not been relocated."

  "Still behind you," said the voice. "She's very patient, I'll give her that."

  Brutus stepped left.

  The dagger hit the wall where his kidney had been. He turned. The rogue was already moving — good instincts, fast feet, two more daggers out, the expression of someone recalibrating very quickly from easy kill to problem. She feinted right, went left, aimed for the gap below his arm.

  He caught her wrist.

  She was fast. He was a dragonborn who had spent fifteen years physically wrestling creatures that outweighed her by several hundred pounds. There was a brief and honest conversation between those two facts. He turned her wrist until the dagger clattered on the floor, got his other hand around the back of her collar, walked her three steps forward, and threw her at Maldred.

  Maldred sidestepped with the practiced elegance of someone who had anticipated this and found it beneath comment. The rogue hit the floor and rolled and came up already looking for exits.

  "Leave," Brutus said.

  She looked at him. Looked at the door. Looked at the ceiling in the calculating way rogues do when they're deciding whether a situation has become structurally unprofitable.

  She left.

  "You let her go," Maldred said. Her tone suggested this had been entered into a mental ledger under incompetencies, day one.

  "She'll go get her friends." Brutus picked up the dropped dagger. Serviceable. He pocketed it. "Then I know where everyone is."

  Maldred looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't fully read. Then: "The goblins have barricaded the east wing and are claiming territorial sovereignty, which is not a legal framework that applies to employed dungeon staff. The east trap corridor is completely offline. We have a hydra in sublevel four that hasn't been fed since you left and has eaten through two of its restraints. And the Dark Lady's advance notice arrived this morning, which means her timeline has moved up."

  Brutus looked at her.

  "How far up."

  "She arrives in two days. Not three."

  "Ooh," said the voice, with genuine delight. "That's bad. That's really bad. I updated your screen."

  He glanced up. DAYS UNTIL INSPECTION: 3 had become DAYS UNTIL INSPECTION: 2. The DUNGEON INTEGRITY number had not improved. RECOMMENDED ACTION still said UNCLEAR.

  He set Onetooth down against the wall. He straightened up. He looked at the dungeon around him — the scorch marks, the debris, the body Maldred was pretending wasn't there, the distant sound of goblins working themselves up to something stupid.

  He was the dungeon keeper. He didn't know what that meant yet beyond the screen in his head and the weight of a dead kobold's bad decisions landing entirely on him. He didn't know what the crown had done to him. He didn't know how he was going to handle the Dark Lady or the adventurers or the hydra or Maldred's particular brand of helpful condescension. He didn't know much of anything beyond the dungeon's layout and the fact that his monsters were hungry and frightened and waiting for someone they recognized.

  That was somewhere to start.

  "Feed the hydra first," he said. "Then the wyverns. Then we deal with the goblins."

  Maldred looked at him the way a professor looks at a student who has confidently given a wrong answer. "There are fourteen active threats across the dungeon, an inspection in two days, and your first priority is feeding things."

  "Hungry things kill people," Brutus said. "I'd rather have them kill the right ones."

  He picked up Onetooth and went to find his monsters.

  Behind him, Maldred stood very still for a moment. Then she produced a small leather journal from her robes and wrote something in it with precise, unhurried strokes.

  "She's writing about you," said the voice.

  "I know."

  "Want to know what she wrote?"

  "No."

  "It's not flattering."

  "I know that too," Brutus said, and kept walking.