The display of numbers that compared the dungeon denizens vs. the invaders was reassuring to Lacey. The number of monsters in the dungeon was going down quickly, but the percentages were still high on the side of the dungeon. Anyone taking bets at the sports book pub that Lacey thought Benny should build outside wouldn’t have given the invaders anything but total longshot odds based on those numbers.

  Lacey’s mind raced with contingency plans, counterattack strategies for the warren of denizen domiciles, war tactics, and even a few retreat plans if it came to that. She’d spent the last hour with Adam and his elite squad going over some of them, but she had to pull back so as not to overwhelm him with possibilities. Eve was little better, but Colt and Ginger were dealing with that side of the army.

  “And if everything totally goes to shit for us?” Lacey prodded Adam and the elites. They should know it by now, but she wanted to make sure they knew the final retreat plan.

  “Adam stand on last line while Spunks and Rejects retreat to back yard,” he puffed out his chest proudly.

  “And?” Lacey gave him her best scary look.

  “And no fight Eve,” Adam’s wide mouth pursed in distaste.

  “Eve is standing with you on your side, right?” Lacey reiterated, shaking a stern finger at him.

  “Eve know same plan?” he challenged back.

  “Yes,” Lacey assured him, and gave up trying to convince them to play nice together. It was like mediating between her divorced parents, and since Lacey didn’t do that in the real world, she wasn’t going to do it here either. “And we have donuts for everybody at the afterparty.”

  “Donuts!” Adam and the elites tended to salivate in a gross way when she brought up their favorite goodies. Between the popcorn, granola bars, donuts, and chocolate bars that they were doling out of the snack cabinet, Lacey was pretty sure their Goblin hierarchy was going to be fat by the end of the war.

  “Yes, but only if you and Eve can work together, so be good,” she wasn’t afraid to wave both the carrot and the stick at this point.

  “Fine,” Adam grunted, grabbing the arm of his second in command and heading toward his spot at the base of the warrens.

  Adam, Eve and the highest-leveled Goblins would be the first line of defense, backed up by 200 Gossowaries from the menagerie and a bevy of other creatures that complimented the Goblin and Gossowary army. The Trugs had all been deployed to their dungeon level, but the ceiling of the largest chamber was where hundreds of bats and Blurgs, the little creatures that shot blobs of acid out of the lacework bodies, had been deployed. Snucks were being lined up along the back wall, ready to slither forth between the long Gossowary legs. Burrugs were burrowing into tunnels beneath the cavern to surprise adversaries from underground, Crocorats happy to follow along and help in the tunnel making for an interesting whack-a-mole setup, if the moles had crocodile heads and teeth.

  Even if all the monsters deployed in the first warren’s main room could be demolished at five-to-one odds against the intruders, they had orders to retreat through the maze of rooms back into the next room where yet another roomful of the menagerie were waiting to back up the first wave. The rooms in between were littered with Piollows, the poisoned pillows that Lacey and Colt hadn’t really known what to do with. The hundred they’d summoned had been far more than they’d needed for some of the pit traps in the main dungeons, but them and the occasional Ghoffin to harry the remaining adventurers through those rooms, Lacey figured it would slow what was left of the adventurers brave enough to chase the monster army from the first wave.

  Even the Krettles, Smugs, and Krowls had uses in the rooms between waves of the monster army. They, like the Piollows, had been fun to place in a few places in the main dungeon, but a hundred of each had left quite the overflow of them. Having lost some inspiration during that race to complete the unique monster creation quest, Lacey had drawn a bunch of household stuff, like rugs that could smother a person that she’d called Smugs. The Krettles were large kettle-like cooking pots made of what looked like cast iron, except that it had crab legs. Krowls were their bowl-like cousins, only they had spiked spider legs that were tucked under the bowl until it was disturbed.

  They had enough Gossowaries for three waves, but the later waves didn’t have as many Snucks and they’d had to replace some of the ceiling Slamps, a vampiric slug that couldn’t fly, but were being stuck to the ceiling to wait for their chance to fall on and suck dry some adventurer. As far as some of their larger mobs, they had a few breeding pairs that they kept out of the main dungeons. The two-headed Owlbears, Peacomelos, E-cheels, and Droffles were scattered in with the second two waves. The menagerie had been breeding extras for weeks. Those weeks had consisted of nights that actually lasted 8 days every night due to the time compression that happened when they slept. That didn’t even count the water habitat that existed beyond the three waves.

  Maybe they really did have enough to beat back even an army, even if they did get past all those trap levels. Lacey, looking over the plans and the fact that the army of thieves actually consisted of many low-leveled adventurers, thought maybe it was overkill. Sure, there was a whole group of max-leveled adventurers with levels in the 40s and one that was level 50, but ever since Ginger had started out-leveling the dungeon, so had the Rejects sought to level their charges up past the dungeon limit. They had Gossowaries at levels past 55. The dungeon itself had been a leveling machine, gaining at least a level every time they opened the doors in the morning and then again when they took in another wave of adventurers in the afternoon.

  The final retreat if everything still went to hell for them was to hide a troop of Spunks, led by Ginger, to hide in the dungeon. Once the trap levels had been bypassed, Ginger and her troop would sneak by and into trap corridors using Georges that allowed them to melt right through the walls themselves. Colt and Lacey each had one of the original Georges to try to hide themselves as well, but they really hoped it wouldn’t get that far. This hide-and-seek portion of the retreat was more to run out the clock than anything else. If the army of thieves couldn’t kill every single mob in the dungeon, then they couldn’t wipe the dungeon and they couldn’t kill what they couldn’t find. The rest of the dungeon denizens, ones that were more maintenance than combatant, would be evacuated into the backyard where they couldn’t be killed. They didn’t count as dungeon denizens once they were evacuated, but the backyard was protected from them being destroyed.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Once Lacey was sure that battle plans were in place and evacuation plans were being practiced around those plans and further setup, she let herself go get a packet of peanut butter crackers from the snack cabinet and a soda from the ever-full ice bucket. It was a little like polishing one’s resume. You always felt like you were amazing once you’d gotten done cataloguing everything you’d ever done and buffed it up so that it all sounded amazing.

  “What would happen if we sneaked a few of the highest-leveled Gossowaries up into the low levels right now?” Lacey asked Colt as he walked in with Ginger on his heels.

  “I thought we had a plan,” Colt reached for his own snack, his eyes darting to the displays just like Lacey’s had.

  “I’m just talking about one Reject and three level 55 Gossowaries being let loose in the arenas to clear out all those lower-leveled adventurers,” she suggested, crumpling up her cracker wrapper and tossing it in the trash.

  “And take out one too-big-for-his-current-britches Assassin/Mage?” Colt got a cruel glitter to his smile. “He’s got to be the one who raised this army and hatched this helicopter parent plot. I thought you wanted to go head-to-head against him.”

  “I mean, I do, but,” Lacey started, then paused to take a long drink of her soda and think the think of it. Why not take out the cannon fodder early? “What if no one from the lower levels reaches the higher-leveled groups. Would they still go deeper? Would they even have enough trap detectors to make it work?”

  “They think so,” Colt considered, peeling back the wrapper on a long stick of dried meat. “Do you think three Gossowaries could take out a whole group of them?”

  They looked at each other and then laughed at that thought. At level 55 and against a group of level 20 and under adventurers, it wouldn’t even be a snack for the Gossowaries.

  “I thought you were worried about the opposition looting one of the good Georges,” Colt pointed at the map in two places. “It would take a good one to get through here and here.”

  “That’s why we send the Reject,” she explained. “Henry’s smart enough to loose a Gossowary and then dart back inside and stay inside if it gets hot out there.” Henry was the head honcho of the Reject society and the smartest of them. He was the only one she’d trust with a George that could melt a doorway through ten feet of stone and then seal it back up again like nothing had happened. The newer, nerfed Georges only went through about two feet of stone, and they’d learned from the old days (all of maybe a month before) that a determined adventurer with the strength of 21 or higher could break through that kind of wall without breaking a shoulder or something.

  “How would we get them all the way up there in time?” Colt bit into his jerky stick and chewed. They both looked at the map displayed on her desk’s screen as Ginger went back to the main pedestal with a twinkie in her hand and a bit of cream on her lips.

  “If they leave now with a good George, they could slip right by the end of the levels they haven’t completed yet, wipe out the lower levels and just work their way back until they reach a group they can’t defeat,” Lacey pointed at the path through their maze.

  “Hardly sportsmanlike,” Colt tapped his chin with the meat stick. “Then again, they’ve already broken the rules by crossing dungeons.”

  They’d built a system of stairs between the dungeons that allowed adventurers to go from one level to another one, but to fight on another level wasn’t allowed. Going to a higher level was silly, considering that another group would have already cleared out most of that level by the time that happened. Even if they met up with a higher-level group, they didn’t share experience between groups and the higher-leveled group would almost always steal the experience from the lower-level group.

  It wasn’t just cheating. It was also just silly unless you were trying to make a run at a dungeon wipe, so they’d made it against the rules. That made it so that they weren’t breaking the contract with Bernard and country by simply eradicating the lower levels. They’d started it by crossing levels. The dungeon had a right to defend itself at this point. There was probably a grey area on whether or not the dungeon had a right to take out the other groups that hadn’t yet broken the rules, but they doubted Kat, Bernard, or his country would blame them for taking action.

  “Some of the higher levels are about an hour from finishing, so we don’t have much time to put it together,” Lacey contemplated it and then tapped the screen again. There was an empty room on each level where they normally parked their elevator. “Or we could just put a few Gossowaries or even the extra Ghoffins or E-cheels into the areas here between the levels to catch those wanting to cross the levels. Then we’d be covered if they whine that we broke the rules first.”

  “That sounds more fair,” Colt nodded. “We don’t have to be the big bad dungeon who kills anyone who breaks the slightest rule, so that’s good.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, but also, if it wasn’t for Bernard and the contract we signed, we’d be fighting incursions like this more often,” Lacey set down her bottle of soda and picked up a pencil. “We don’t need them getting so far along that they see all our defenses right off. I was watching the higher groups and the bigger ones have maps.”

  “Maps?” Colt pinched out to zoom in on a section on the Templar Trials that was ranked at levels 44-47. “Why would they need maps?”

  “I’m thinking that they’re not the players,” Lacey tapped the eraser of the pencil on the forehead of the fighter-looking one of the group. They were trying to bypass the puzzle, so they had the map or paper in front of them. The Fighter was pointing at where the magnets should move on the blind maze and the Mage was moving it. “Players gave them the information, and players then supplied maps so that the upper groups could get by without them.”

  “If we watch them, we could pick out the ones with maps and know for sure,” Colt shrugged and snagged a sip of her soda.

  “Get your meat breath off my soda bottle,” Lacey protested, pulling it out of his hands with a mock scowl. “We could do that, but why bother?”

  “It could help us narrow down which one has Kat’s Dad in it,” Colt sucked at his teeth in annoyance, but he went to get his own soda instead of fighting her on it.

  “He’s in the Arenas or he’s in the Three Monkeys,” Lacey took a drink and set her bottle back down. “What difference does it really make? We could even be wrong on both of those and he’s hiding even better as a Cleric or something. Do you really care?”

  “I just want to make sure he dies early,” Colt reasoned, untwisting the top with a hiss of half-trapped foam.

  “Why?” Lacey asked.

  “Because he’s the mastermind,” Colt insisted, taking a drink. When Lacey just looked at him, he went on. “First, he’s the best trap person they have because I’m pretty sure nobody nerfed his skills, at least not as much as they should have since he’s been way too sneaky since he resurfaced. Second, no matter what level he is at, do you really want him planning the strategy if they actually get to the warrens?”