Dom stopped climbing when he hit the top of the mechanism where the chain for the wrecking ball was attached to what could only be solid rock. The rumbling of falling earth had ceased. Dom’s climb up the chain had caused the chain to swing more erratically than it might have without his disturbance. The erratic swing of the chain had created a void space that was shaped like an elliptical cone. The chain had made it so that the earth around it had been loose. Where a nearby chain had intersected the route of his chain, Dom could see what was almost another hallway-like void of earth.

  “That didn’t quite work like I’d intended,” he said to himself with a slight smile.

  His group was dead. He didn’t worry about it since he’d gotten them far more experience than they could have lost with their deaths, something they’d all been prepared for. He could see all their names grayed out on his display. They would be celebrating in some pub a good ten minutes after they respawned. He wasn’t worried about them.

  He had less than a quarter of his full health, no mana, and was dirtier than he’d been since dungeon diving with his wife so long ago. The reminder made his smile grow. He was hanging from the chain with one leg and one elbow hooked around a huge link. While he could hang there almost indefinitely, he wasn’t regaining mana or health this way. What he needed was a ledge of some sort.

  He briefly considered climbing back down, but into what? The soil that had been loose enough to fall down into the room below had been followed by various rocks and even some of the chain supports. The result for this cavern of void space was less floor than ragged death trap. Dom didn’t have the health to navigate it safely. He figured he’d have better luck with the areas that hadn’t fallen at all. At least those would be more likely to be stable.

  Dom made his way gingerly across a few of the more stable stones, watching his climb skill tick up in a satisfying way that made him forget that he was lost in a bunch of tunnels that were not a part of the dungeon experience. He was in the mechanisms, and technically still within the dungeon, but he wasn’t in a set of rooms that had a definite way in, out, or around. At least it didn’t look like anything intentional had been done in this place. At least with a purposefully developed room, there would have been an answer of how to escape it. That was a bit of a worry, but with only three hours left on the dungeon timer, he only had that time before he’d be forcibly ejected anyway. No matter how much his mind tried to tell him that he was buried alive with very little chance of escape, he could rely on the rules of the system. That much he knew.

  His mind flitted to what his wife might do. She wouldn’t have been in this situation, but she would know how to get herself out of it. She’d warned him that going after Kat’s boyfriends was a bad idea, but he’d been playing the game. He’d only meant to harass the NPCs at first, but when they’d been such shallow characters, he’d found it more satisfying to slit their throats. Karma had told him to back off and let Kat work it out for herself, but he’d found a way to be more than the helpless man he’d been in the real world, and he’d thought that Kat knew he was messing around.

  Two chains later, Dom found a likely ledge of stone and shifted direction. Karma had finally convinced him to go make up with Kat. She’d said that he should go meet up with this new guy Kat was crushing on, and he’d come with the best of intentions. Dom winced at more than the scrape of a rather sharp stone on his path to the ledge. He had misjudged how upset Kat had been. He wasn’t as smart as his wife in how he dealt with his daughter.

  The little ledge was barely large enough to sit and dangle his legs over the edge and it certainly wasn’t big enough or sturdy enough for Dom to go searching through his packs to find the shovel. He cursed himself for not thinking ahead a little better. Since he didn’t have a shovel, he used his daggers, frowning at the work he’d have to do in repairing them when he was done, and then swearing a bit when he realized he didn’t have a very high Blacksmithing skill in this world. An hour after the collapse of the room and all his plans for redemption, Dom leaned back on the little ledge and meditated.

  He could only think of how Karma would be yelling at him for being an idiot if she was here. It wasn’t like he never did things that she didn’t understand. It was likely one of the reasons that their marriage hadn’t fallen apart even when she’d disappeared for a year into another world. He could always surprise his wife, just like she did the same for him. The idea made him smile bigger than he had since coming into the dungeon.

  “What’s he smiling about?” Colt pursed his lips.

  “I could send the worms,” Lacey was musing, ignoring Colt’s fuming. Dom had been resting in the space he’d cleared off of that ledge. The time had given Lacey a chance to make plans of her own. While she couldn’t build anything, she could use their dungeon creatures.

  “Wouldn’t they just let him out of the grave?” Kat paced a small trail in the floor of the huge cavern very near their control room. Adam had guided Bernard and Kat into the final stand cavern that was obviously not going to be used for that anymore.

  “If I can get even a couple of the Burrugs into that space, then I can just let them kill him and get this over with,” Lacey huffed. She had five of the mole/carpet creatures that she could spare from the army. They should be plenty high enough to take out Dom. At this point, all Lacey wanted to do was end the whole episode before a second wave of people could come in on the heels of the first incursion. Bernard had assured them that the outside was being kept clear by his men, but they’d been overwhelmed once, and they could be defeated again. Lacey had a full company of Spunks out resetting the second set of mazes manually, just in case. Everything else had reset. Even if another group came in on the heels of this fiasco, they would need to get past the final level, then all their mazes, one room full of dirt, and one last Manchester room. And the army.

  “Can I go with them?” Kat fumed, her arms crossed. They’d have let Kat and Bernard into the control room, but the control room was locked to intruders until all other mobs had been wiped out. It seemed a bit too crazy to try to herd everything out into the backyard just so that Kat and Bernard could come watch the displays. They could see enough from the doorway.

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  “Really?” Bernard chastised Kat with a fond smile.

  “Don’t patronize me, Bernard,” Kat paced away. The confinement seemed to be getting to Kat. She obviously wasn’t used to just sitting around, but Lacey was pretty sure it was more than that. It was probably even more than Kat’s annoyance with her dad. Lacey just didn’t feel close enough with Kat to poke the bear and Kat was definitely acting bear-like. Lacey had two-headed owlbears with less bear in them than Kat at the moment.

  “Are you guys getting hungry?” Lacey suggested, hoping maybe to calm their nerves with a bit of hospitality.

  “Oh, yeah,” Kat snapped her fingers, a smile coming to her face. “I’ve got some stuff from town. My inventory keeps it fresh, so there’s that. It’s not ding-dongs, but it’ll do in a pinch.” Colt had tried to pass some snacks out to Kat, but the ding-dongs had hit the invisible barrier and smushed back at them. They’d had to shoo Beka away from treating them like her normal treats.

  Kat dug around in her backpack and pulled out a pub meal, complete with table and stools for her and Bernard. Lacey wondered at the weird rules of the dungeon. They’d been able to bypass the control room limitations for the most part, just by sending mobs out to the backyard and then back in through the bypass between the backyard and the dungeon, but it wouldn’t let a few ding-dongs pass the doorway. Then again, if the ding-dongs were hand-grenades, then maybe they’d have constituted an unfair advantage?

  “Wait,” Lacey darted to the cabinet and ordered up some more ding-dongs for Kat. “I can hand the treats to Ginger, and she can take them to you.”

  “I’ll content myself with a bowl a stew,” Bernard smiled, sitting at the table.

  “Now I feel stupid,” Colt smacked his forehead.

  “These are for Kat,” Lacey pressed the snack into Ginger’s hand and pointed.

  “Fine,” Ginger sniffed at the snacks.

  “And I’ll give you some when you get back,” Lacey promised, earning a nod and smile from Ginger. Colt ordered up more pastry snacks and dumped them on the table, only to have a bored Adam sneak one when he thought they weren’t looking.

  “What’s he doing now?” Colt frowned at the projection, catching Lacey’s attention.

  “Pedestal, zoom in,” Lacey commanded the display.

  “I concede,” was written on the envelope for one of the puzzle pieces they’d given Dom. Next to the score on the envelope, he’d scratched out their tally of seven to one and replaced it with one million to one with the million on their side.

  “It’s a trick,” Kat insisted around a bit of chocolate treat, not that it seemed to be calming her. “Thanks, Ginger.”

  “I don’t think so,” Colt said, just before Lacey turned on the audio.

  “You concede?” Lacey asked the dirt-encrusted man sitting on a ledge.

  “Certainly,” he replied, a huge grin on his face. “The timer has three hours left on it and I just wanted to let you know that I acknowledge that your dungeon has defeated me.”

  “You’ll forgive me maybe for not believing you,” Colt told him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dom shook his head, his smile slipping slightly. He looked up to speak at the ceiling. “I just wanted a chance to let you know that I had a blast and thanks for the fun!”

  “Fun?” Lacey barked out before she could think better of it.

  “What’s he saying?” Kat demanded loud enough to be heard without the intercom.

  “Is that… Kat?” Dom asked, his head cocked to the side. “Of course, she came in when the first group left or died, right?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Colt said, at a loss. Neither he nor Lacey knew what to make of this slide of events. “Bernard is here too, and he’s not happy with you or your crew!”

  “I’ll make it up to him,” Dom chuckled, leaning back against the dirt behind him, like it was a couch in his living room.

  “Kat’s really pissed off at you, and I’m pretty sure I’m feeling the same way,” Colt found words for his annoyance.

  “That would be par for the course,” Dom’s mouth twisted. “When isn’t Kat mad at me?”

  “When you’re not being a dick!” Kat shouted.

  “And when would that be?” Dom quirked an eyebrow.

  “Never,” she spat out.

  “Exactly,” he quipped, but it was in too low a voice for it to carry to Kat or Bernard.

  “You invaded our dungeon,” Colt interrupted the familial spat. “You broke all the rules and came after us like you wanted to take over the dungeon! I’d say that’s a dick move.”

  “Wait, take over?” Dom’s brows lowered. “I didn’t come in here to take over. Why would you think that?”

  “Don’t bullshit, Dad,” Kat broke back in. “Why kill all the mobs if you aren’t trying to wipe the dungeon? Why sneak into all the cubby holes and kill the workers too? You were trying to take over and you know it, and we know it! That would be the almost literal definition of being a dick!”

  “So, wait,” Dom shook his head with his eyes closed. “What else is a dungeon for?”

  “We’ve established rules for this dungeon,” Bernard fussed, having set his napkin down.

  “And you were banned from the dungeon,” Kat called out to him. “If it were up to me, I’d be digging into where you are and sending you back to spawn. And if I find out where you’re spawning, I’m going to camp it until you give up on this server.”

  “This is your server then?” Dom demanded with a growl. “Is that alright with you, Bernard? Is this how it works? Kat is your queen?”

  “Kat is a diplomatic liaison,” Bernard began in an officious tone, but Dom was having none of it.

  “What’s wrong with me having some space away from you and your need to control everything?” Kat argued, not paying attention to Bernard, who frowned. “One server, just one server where you don’t own the underworld! That isn’t too much to ask for, is it?”

  “You want me banned from the dungeon, and you’re just pissed that I found a way around it,” Dom stood on his ledge.

  “Even Mom thinks you ought to give me space, or she wouldn’t have busted you down,” Kat yelled. Lacey was getting the feeling that she and Colt were irrelevant. Is this what Hercules had felt like when the gods warred around him?

  “Stay out of what’s between me and your mom,” Dom’s voice began to rise to meet Kat’s. “You don’t know why, and you don’t know that I agreed with it. You only know you got your way. I knew you’d think this way. I’m always the villain in your life, but we’re more alike than you want to believe.”

  “Maybe if you’d talked to me like a rational person, instead of bringing an army against my friends,” Kat pressed him. Lacey leaned back in her chair, reassessing her god choice for comparison. Was it more like Hades and Persephone? It just seemed easier to let them blow off steam than to interfere. For now…

  “An army?” Dom scoffed. “I brought a challenge!”

  “And you lost, even with your army!” Kat spat at him. Lacey reconsidered sending Kat through a Burrug-made tunnel to have it out in person with the guy.

  “Lost?” Dom raised eyebrows again. “I’ve had the time of my life! This dungeon is fantastic!”

  “Is that why you’re trying to take it from us?” Colt leaned into the conversation.

  “Yeah,” Kat jumped on the tail end of Colt’s demand. “Once again, dick move!”

  “Now wait just a Fizzy-butt minute,” Dom held his hands up at the venom in Kat’s voice. “I did come to wipe the dungeon, but not to take over. Why would I want to do that?”