“Fangflies?” I said, still trying to process what Gerik was saying, but then the buzzing intensified and the concept of fangflies was explained when a group of maybe ten fat insects soared around the corner of the tunnel.

  We were in a section of finished stone, complete with decorative tables along the sides of the hall, many of which had long ago collapsed from age or been broken in battle. The fangflies were the size of soccer balls and looked like the result of a housefly mating with a walrus. Their wings flapped madly as they spotted us, and then they all, oddly, began flying against the walls, scraping along them with their tusk-like fangs.

  “They do that to sharpen them,” Gerik said, helpfully.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “They want them sharp enough to kill us,” Gerik said, being helpful again.

  “Oh,” I said, and then “Oh shit,” as the flies collectively decided their fangs were sharp and the time was ripe, and they sped down the hall toward us. I could tell they were making even Gerik nervous, which meant they were making me terrified. How could we fight something like this? I have a hard enough time batting an ordinary housefly; it was worse when the flies could legitimately fight back. And with so many of the fangflies, it would be impossible to fend them all off.

  I saw Gerik’s form fade as he gathered shadows around him and began moving closer to the fangflies. I didn’t know what to do. They were almost on us. My dagger seemed insufficient for any attack, and my t-shirt would provide little protection. I looked in desperation for anything I could use as a weapon, but there were only the decorative tables and ancient vases. I did spot a tapestry on the wall next to me, though. It was frayed and threadbare, but if I wrapped it around me, then maybe it could provide some level of protection?

  I grabbed the edge of it and yanked it as hard as I could, desperate to gain some measure of defense before the flies arrived. The tapestry was attached to the wall by a series of hooks, all of which ripped free from the rotten cloth, excepting the far one, which heroically held tight despite my increasingly frantic tugs.

  Finally, it tore free. But even as the tapestry ripped away from the hook, the fangflies arrived, barreling into the tapestry just as it fluttered away from the wall. The insects slammed into the ancient cloth in a repeated series of thumps, like a catcher snagging a fastball. Then, as the tapestry crumpled around the fangflies, one edge of the cloth trailed against a hanging oil lamp, which spilled its contents all over the dusty tapestry and set it aflame.

  Suddenly there was a crumpled and burning tapestry on the hallway floor, shaped into what amounted to a bag containing all the fangflies. In seconds it was a roaring conflagration. I could hear, through the crackling of the flames, curious popping noises mixed with furious sizzlings. The high drone of the insects’ wings immediately vanished. Flames reached halfway to the ceiling. Floating words appeared, glowing neon blue amidst the dark reds and bright orange of the fire.

  +38 Experience Points

  +42 Experience Points

  +27 Experience Points

  There were more of the neon announcements, often immediately following one of the louder popping noises. A pair of fangflies, encased in flames and now wingless, crawled out from the burning tapestry. Devoid of flight, they were ungainly and stumbling, dragging their outsized fangs. I quickly stomped on them and was rewarded with two more proclamations of experience points, along with a squishy coating of goo on my boots and the excitement of momentarily setting my pants on fire.

  The flaming tapestry was soon spent. The fangflies were dead. That tingling sensation pulsed through me with every new appearance of the floating letters, letting me know that I’d gained additional experience points. Gerik toppled onto his ass, laughing, with his voice coming from a blur of darkness that even the flames couldn’t touch.

  “Hah! Well done, Josh of Apartment 3B! You fucking torched them! I’ll be telling this tale in taverns all across Goncourt!”

  My heart hammered in my chest. I felt dizzy. Clammy. I was sweating from the sensations pulsing through me, and the sudden heat in the hallway. I put a hand against the wall for support, then decided to sit on one of the decorative tables, which immediately cracked in half and sent me thumping to the hallway floor in a burst of billowing dust and renewed laughter from Gerik. At first it pissed me off, but in moments I was laughing along with him, laughing at the absurdity of what I was doing when I should’ve been at home, in my apartment, in my bed, in another world, safe and warm in my blankets. And I was also laughing at a release of my tension, too. I might’ve possibly laughed until I was legitimately insane instead of merely bordering on it, but we were interrupted by a bell.

  “Ding!” it sounded.

  “Ah,” Gerik said. “Treasure.” The shadows around him faded as he used the tip of his sword to search through the charred fragments of the tapestry and the equally charred remains of the fangflies. He quickly found a pair of small leather pouches, untouched by the flames.

  “A few coins,” he said in disdainful fashion, peering into the first pouch. “Maybe ten gold, all told.” He tossed the bag to me and opened the second one.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Now, this is interesting. A ring.” He took it out of the pouch. It was made of silver and not of particularly fine quality, with a small black stone embedded in the metal.

  “Wonder what this does?” he said.

  “What it does?” I asked. “Why would it do anything?”

  “Doesn’t need to, I suppose. Could just be normal treasure. But even in this dungeon, it would be odd for a purse to contain a worthless ring.” He handed the ring to me. And then, almost even as I touched it, stats appeared in floating blue letters.

  Trip Ring

  Wearer can cause people / animals to trip

  3x per day

  “A trip ring?” I said. “How’s that work?”

  “I’d assume that, when you’re wearing it, you simply concentrate and make the person or animal trip. Fairly self-explanatory.”

  “Doesn’t seem that powerful,” I said, slipping the ring on. At first it wouldn’t fit, but it seemed to adjust to my size. I guess it was magic, after all.

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  “Nothing ever seems powerful until it does,” Gerik said. “I remember one time, me and a dwarven fighter named Kallisto were in the Underfollows, those ghostly caverns near the Blackmark Mountains. We were terribly lost, the rest of our party having been eviscerated by Burning Spirits with their cold black fingers. We were navigating the edge of a deep pool of abyss waters, a lake made of endless sorrow and pain.”

  “Damn, Gerik. I just never enjoy your stories.” He clapped my shoulder, nodding in agreement.

  “Kallisto slipped,” he said. “His boots were worn from our days on the run. And here’s the thing. He’d been just about to throw away a length of rope, claiming it was too short to be of any use. Not more than four feet of frayed hemp. But as luck would have it, as he slipped, and as I was frantically trying to grab him, my fingers closed over the other end of the rope, and that rope saved him from going under the water.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “That it is, Josh. That it is. What I’m trying to tell you is, we never know when the littlest objects may save our lives, so you should treasure that ring.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I told him. “Whatever happened to Kallisto? Did he make it out of the, uh, Underfollows?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Perhaps two seconds after that rope saved him from going under the abyss waters, a deathwhale surfaced. The sudden waves splashing on the shore chilled us both, freezing Kallisto and I for several moments, with the damp of the abyss waters sinking into our souls and leaving stains that I carry to this day. In the tumultuous moments of that great beast’s surfacing, we failed to heave Kallisto to safety, and the deathwhale bit him in two. My friend died with his eyes staring into mine, the light fading away. His pain lasted several moments longer than his life, twisting his face into anguish. Then, his fingers released the rope, and he was gone.”

  “Jesus fuck.”

  “It was a fine thing he didn’t drown, though,” Gerik said, looking nowhere in particular, lost in thought. “Drowning’s a bad way to go.”

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  I fought two more giant beetles, like the ones Molly had killed in my apartment. This time I did less screaming and I heroically avoided stabbing myself. We were in an open cavern, and Gerik heaved one of the beetles up off the ground, using his shoulder to block the powerful pincher attack while slamming the insect down over a stalagmite, skewering it while the insect emitted a shrill, almost human shriek, even as Gerik continued pressing down with his whole of his weight, driving the beetle down, down, with a horrible crackling noise.

  Meanwhile, I managed to kill the beetle that was chasing me by leaping onto its back and plunging my dagger into it again and again like I used to see Tarzan do with fierce lions in the comics, except that Tarzan wasn’t yelling “Oh shit!” on endless repeat, even after the lion was dead.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  I fought another skeleton. This time I picked up one of the decorative tables from the side of the hall and held it out in front of me like a battering ram in an attempt to crush the skeleton against a wall, but I tripped while ducking the sweep of his sword, and the table and I barreled through the skeleton’s moss-covered leg bones, snapping them into fragments. After I scrambled to my feet, I simply tossed heavy rocks at the disabled skeleton as the legless horror struggled to pull itself along the floor.

  It was a gallant fight.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  “It’s unknown how dungeons form,” Gerik told me. We’d found an open cavern the size of a small house, lit by glowing stones embedded in the ceiling, banishing half the shadows. Trickles of water echoed throughout the cavern like chamber music. None of the water ever seemed to pool up on the floor, but I couldn’t tell where it was going.

  “Dungeons are always filled with monsters and treasure,” Gerik said. “If you and I were to scour every single level of Cordvale Dungeon and carried out every last coin after killing every single monster, we could come back tomorrow to find other treasures and creatures in their place. More, there’d be no evidence of our passing, and the treasures and the monsters would both seem as if they’d always been here, waiting undisturbed for ages.”

  The two of us were drinking water Gerik had collected from a stream and sharing a rich dark cheese he was using a dagger to slice from a circle of cheese no larger than a hockey puck. But that hockey puck never seemed to grow smaller. There was always more cheese. The taste had nuances of almonds with hints of dark chocolate, both of these flavors overpowered by an almost stinging cheddar. All in all, it was delicious.

  “Every day?” I asked. “The caverns refill every day?”

  “It’s complicated. We could be down here for weeks and it wouldn’t refill. Not until we left. But a separate adventuring party would need to fight their way to reach us, battling through monsters we’d already killed and traps we’d already sprung, but the moment they reached us then they’d be in our dungeon, with the monsters we’d killed as dead to them as they were to us. And don’t give me that look. It’s useless to try to understand these things. The world is as it is. Magic will do what magic will do. A man can only accept what he sees as true. Questioning magic is as useless as stabbing a ghost.”

  “Unless you have a magic dagger.”

  “Hah! Good and wise, Josh of Apartment 3B.” He stood and stowed away his cheese, then clapped me on my back and helped me to my feet. “You’re learning.”

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Ten minutes later I was learning that a Beekeeper Spirit is a ghost that commands supernatural bees and that, as education goes, Cordvale Dungeon was an elective class I should’ve skipped.

  By then I was monstrously tired and clad not only in my jeans and t-shirt, but with the addition of a cloak that looked heavy but felt weightless, and a buckle of leather armor around my right forearm, armor we’d taken from a kobold’s knapsack after Gerik had done me the favor of running the little bastard through with his sword. Even the act of holding my dagger was exhausting. My arm was tired from all the stabbing.

  I was frantically trying to stay behind Gerik even while he himself was twisting and turning, because I had absolutely no way to harm either the Beekeeper Spirit or his bees, but Gerik had used his Intimidate ability and they were wary of him, keeping their distance, although that distance was steadily shrinking.

  “Hold out your dagger!” he ordered me. I held it out, even while we continued our strange dance, trying to keep the bees from circling behind me. Gerik had produced a vial of some glowing red liquid and he splashed it all over my dagger and part of my hand, then lit everything on fire, with the red liquid bursting into flames all along my dagger and arm, and also a few places where it’d dripped onto my clothes.

  “God damn shit!” I yelled, trying to snuff out the flames, nearly managing to cut my own throat.

  “It’s spirit flame!” Gerik laughed. “Can’t harm you! Just stab the ghosts!” Even before he was finished speaking I’d noticed how the flames weren’t burning me, and that in fact that I could hardly feel them at all, though I was struck with a sudden sense of extreme loneliness.

  Despite that newfound loneliness I didn’t want the Beekeeper Spirit’s company, so I lunged forward and ran my dagger through its chest. The spirit appeared as a stocky elderly woman in homespun clothes, blurry at the edges and mostly transparent, but as my flaming dagger rammed through her chest she momentarily lit up from within like a paper lamp, and I could see demonic features flickering across her shocked expression. Then I felt a fierce wind all along my arm, and the ghost screamed shockingly loud in my face, resulting in me pulling abruptly back, which in turn caused my dagger to rip upward, slicing the spirit in half.

  The smoky flesh made a valiant effort to merge back together, but then came a burst of cold and the spirit vanished with a girlish sob. The ghostly bees fluttered toward the floor but disappeared before impact, glowing blue in their last moments as they reflected the light from the proclamation that appeared in midair.

  +195 Experience Points

  “Not bad,” Gerik said. “Though I was hoping there’d be treasure.” He was looking around, disappointed. “These spirits often drop jewels. Do you know why?”

  “I literally feel like I don’t know anything right now.”

  “It’s because of the structure of gemstones. They’re similar, gems and ghosts. They’re almost kinfolk. The presence of an emerald or a diamond can help strengthen a ghost. They feed off them. That’s why so many of the larger gemstones are haunted.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, not feeling fascinated, because the only thing I felt was tired. But then the hair along my arms went prickly. My skin buzzed. My heart raced. I worried that I’d been poisoned. Maybe one of the spirit bees had stung me, and I had supernatural poison racing through my veins, attacking me at my very core, my entire existence?

  Light flickered around me. Tiny explosions.

  “Oh!” Gerik said. “You made a level!”

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-