CHAPTER ONE: THE ONLY GUY WHO SHOWED UP

  The dungeon smelled like wet garbage and something sickly sweet. I’d made a personal policy not to think too much about that last one.

  I’d been keeping to that policy for seven years. It held up fine.

  I pushed my cart through the mouth of Dungeon #409 at 5:47 AM with a flashlight taped to the handle and a work order that called for three people and a full day. The other two people had called in sick at 4:15 AM, forty-seven minutes apart, in texts that both said “not feeling well, sorry bru” with the exact same punctuation. They weren’t sick. They’d looked at the job sheet the night before and seen the assignment: Slug-class dungeon, sublevel 8, post-sweep. They’d made their decision.

  I couldn’t blame them. I also couldn’t call in sick because I was the senior tech and the solo-completion form was technically a thing that existed and Dungeon Cleaning Co.’s operations manager technically expected at least one of us to file it before noon.

  I filed the absences, doubled my chemical load, and started down.

  The emergency lighting on the walls was Heroes’ work. They’d wired it in last year for the deeper sublevels because nothing slows down a sweep like tripping over your own dead in the dark. Dungeon Cleaning Co. (we’ll call them DCC to save time) had no infrastructure budget. We used whatever got left behind. The lights down here buzzed at a pitch you stopped noticing after ten minutes and started feeling again two hours later as a headache. I’d developed a tolerance. Mostly.

  The cart wheel squeaked in B-flat. I’d been meaning to fix it for six months. At some point, I’d stopped meaning to.

  Sublevel 3 looked like someone had thrown a party and invited only things without spines.

  Slug-class monsters died in stages: the outer membrane went first, then the interior, then whatever passed for a skeleton in a species that didn’t technically have one. In practical terms this meant that by the time a Hero team was done with a sublevel, everything was flat and everything was wet. The smell was industrial. The cleanup was methodical. I worked top to bottom, left to right, the way you’d clean any floor if the floor had recently been a battlefield.

  I knew this dungeon. I’d cleaned it four times. I knew the drain locations, the low spots where fluid pooled, and the pillar in sublevel 6 with a natural ledge at knee height that always caught the runoff. I also knew where Heroes liked to stand when they fought, always the same places, good sight lines, solid footing, great camera angles for selfies, which meant the messes concentrated in predictable areas.

  I knew the egg configurations on sublevel 8 because Slug-class dungeons were territorial and consistent. The mother nested in the back. Eggs fanned out from the nest in three arcs based on the temperature gradient of the cave. There was always one cluster near the north wall and one near the drainage crack in the southeast corner.

  The work order was placed by a Hero-team lead named Hagan, Level 47 Pyromancer, consistent tipper of nothing. We get the orders before the raid, and get an update form when it’s wrapped.

  I met Hagan’s crew at the dungeon mouth on my way in. They were on their way out, gear still wet, Hagan in the front walking like the path belonged to him and everyone on it was trespassing. I moved the cart to the side. He tossed the update form at me without slowing down.

  “Zero.” He said it the way some people say furniture. Zero was the term for those of us unblessed with powers. Not even level 1. “All clear to sublevel 8. Left you something special in twelve.”

  His team was laughing before he finished the sentence. Three of them, all Leveled, gear probably worth more than my apartment and everything in it.

  The one on the end, a woman in shadow-class armor I'd seen before but never heard a name for, didn't laugh. She glanced back at me once. Looked away.

  I noted that they were missing someone, but couldn’t put my finger on who. Their crew was usually five people. Thought about asking about it, but Hagan had already passed me.

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  He didn’t hear it. Or he heard it and didn’t care. Either way he was gone, and I was alone in the mouth of the dungeon with my cart and my supply list and the knowledge that whatever he’d left in corridor 12 was probably something I’d spend an extra hour on.

  I checked the form. It said: all threats neutralized, full clear to sublevel 8, one biological precipitation event in corridor 12.

  Biological precipitation event Hero-speak for “we somehow got a ton of guts on the ceiling and you should bring a raincoat.” You’d think someone would teach these guys to aim.

  I added corridor 12 to my checklist and circled it in red.

  I went down.

  Corridor 12 was on sublevel 8, which meant I spent three hours getting there. The sublevels above it were bad but manageable. Hagan’s crew had come through and done their job, which meant the major threats were handled and what I was dealing with was residue. I sanitized, I scraped, I bagged, I moved on. The work was specific and I was good at it and if you’re good at something and you have music it’s not a bad way to spend three hours.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I wore a full respirator because, while Heroes and other Leveled Individuals could handle a little monster goo in their mouths, Zeros couldn’t. For us, it was fatal. Heroes couldn’t be bothered to clean up after themselves. They had more dungeons to clear, more adventures to… adventure, or whatever.

  The respirator smelled awful, but like the buzzing, you got used to it anyway.

  I hummed. The cart squeaked. We got along.

  Corridor 12 opened up into a massive cave.

  The Slug-mother was everywhere. That’s not hyperbole. Hagan’s team had done what high-level Pyromancers do with targets the size of a bus: they’d vaporized the coherent parts and pressure-cooked the rest until it adhered to every surface within thirty feet. The rock walls had taken on a green, glazed finish.

  The floor squelched beneath my feet. The smell hit the respirator like a wall and went right through it.

  I need new gear.

  I stood in the doorway and looked at it for a moment.

  Welcome to the suck.

  I put on my yellow raincoat, pulled out my expandable ladder, and started with the ceiling.

  I was forty minutes in and making progress on the south wall when a glob of green guts sloughed off the ceiling and hit the floor behind me. I looked up to check for more, and that's when I saw it.

  An egg. Webbed to the ceiling in the northeast corner. Roughly the size of a basketball, translucent gray-brown, glistening with the membrane fluid that meant it was viable.

  This one was pulsing.

  The work order said: all threats neutralized, full clear to sublevel 8.

  Shit.

  I reached for my radio. Static. Eight sublevels down in a rockwall dungeon, there was never signal this far down. I'd written a memo about this. DCC had filed it somewhere memos go to become part of a policy review that would conclude in approximately forever.

  I looked at the egg. I looked at the corridor behind me.

  Hitting it was not an option. A viable Slug-class spawn could take three hits from a Level 10. I was not a Level 10. I was a person with a mop.

  Slowly, I backed away.

  A monster getting left behind in a “cleared dungeon” wasn't entirely unheard of. Rare, but not unheard of. Our company's insurance would bill the Heroes’ insurance if there were losses. Losses meaning my life. But most teams ran with at least one member with a monster sense ability. Which meant someone on this team had one and had missed it, or—

  The missing Hero. It must have been their Scry.

  The egg shuddered.

  Nope.

  I climbed down from the ladder fast enough to feel a rung bend under my boot, and started packing gear like a military drill.

  It shuddered again. Harder.

  Nope, nope, nope.

  Screw the gear.

  I ran with what I had on me, mop in hand, bucket clipped to my hip, belt of dissolvents, and my nonslip shoes. I did my best not to slide as I sprinted toward the next-level ladder. Nonslips can only do so much when the floor is three inches of goo.

  Behind me: a wet crack. Then movement.

  Slug-spawn were mobile within seconds of hatching. Short bursts, low to the ground (or, in this case, ceiling), building fast to a sprint. Acidic spit at short range. Vulnerable to fire or significant blunt trauma.

  I had neither. I could produce neither.

  Here's what I knew about Dungeon #409 as I was running through it: every maintenance ladder, every drain, every crack and crevice, and approximately how many steps it was from sublevel 8's south corridor to the service ladder in junction 3-East.

  The service ladder ran straight from sublevel 8 to sublevel 4, bypassing three levels. It wasn't on most maps and I didn’t like to use it, because I liked to do a double check on each floor on the way out.

  But the ladder was there. And it was closer than the main one.

  I ran.

  The spawn was behind me. I could hear the wet slap of it moving, short bursts building longer. I didn't look back. Looking back was for people who wanted to know exactly how they were going to die.

  Junction 3-East was forty meters ahead. I knew the turn. I'd mopped that turn a hundred times.

  I made the turn and stopped.

  The corridor was gone. Instead it was a wall of rock and rubble.

  No, no, no.

  It must have caved in, and by the looks of it, it was as recent as this raid. Rock and shattered stone piled floor to ceiling, dust still hanging in the air. Fresh.

  The service ladder was on the other side of that.

  Behind me, the slapping sound got closer.

  But the cave-in had shifted the rock. To my left, where there had been solid wall, there was now a gap, narrow, jagged, dark.

  I went through, mop first. It was too tight to fit the bucket, so I left it behind.

  The emergency lighting didn't follow. Ten steps in, the path widened slightly. I was in total dark. I slapped the switch on my helmet lamp and got a cone of yellow light that showed me raw rock.

  The spawn came through the gap behind me.

  I heard it before I saw it, and then felt the burning of acid before I could move out of the way. Its spit attack covered the back of my left leg.

  I knew everything there was to know about these monsters. I’d read my monster guide, like everyone. What the guide could not communicate was what it felt like. What it felt like was a lit cigarette the size of my fist pressed into my leg and held there.

  I screamed. I spun. The spawn was three meters back and closing, low to the ground, already pulling in air for another spit.

  I took the best baseball swing of my life with a janitor's mop.

  The handle punched into the thing's membrane and snapped. Half the mop stayed in my hands. The other half stayed in the spawn. It recoiled, which bought me two seconds.

  I scrambled backward. The helmet light swung wild across the ceiling, the walls, and the pit where the floor should have been.

  My hand went back and found nothing. My weight followed. The respirator tore free on the rock edge. I went over the edge of a fissure I hadn't seen because it hadn't existed on any map, because no map covered wherever the hell I was now, and for a moment I was just in the air, in the dark, with half a mop in my hands.

  I hit rock.

  Both legs told me about it at the same time, and the message was comprehensive. I heard myself make a sound that wasn't a scream. Something lower, involuntary, the kind of noise a body makes when it receives information it doesn't want. The helmet lamp had survived the fall and was now pointing at a ceiling about four meters up, showing me the fissure I'd come through, showing me raw rock, showing me a chamber that had no business existing below sublevel 8.

  A ninth level. Unmapped. Uncleared. Unmopped.

  My legs were broken. Both of them, no question. They looked and felt the way things do when they are no longer the right shape or pointing in the right direction.

  The spawn appeared at the edge of the fissure above me. I saw its silhouette in the helmet light, low, wet, contracting for the drop. It launched.

  Freshly spawned slime monsters aren’t the smartest creatures. But they are one of the hungriest.

  It came down.

  I didn't think. I held up what I had, which was half a broken mop handle, jagged end up.

  The spawn landed on it.

  The handle went through the center membrane and out the other side, and the thing burst over me like a water balloon filled with everything terrible. Hot, thick, reeking.

  I lay there with goo dripping off my face and a dead Slug-spawn skin sack pinned to a stick above me and two broken legs underneath me.

  I lay there for a while.

  I should have called out.