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  The map of this particular Dungeon was long enough I thought I'd make a link to it

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  The Dungeon was big and long, unduly so, if there being little chance of getting lost. The fighting started fairly soon, and rapidly began to increase in intensity.

  It started with golden-furred Tusker Liberators and Redeemers, mature males who were of age to be breeding, out to prove themselves as suitable mates. Much to Lord Mick’s surprise, these soon upgraded to Tusker Slaves and Guards, strong and fast warriors who had originally been mutated by the Virindi, and then become part of the improved Tusker advancement.

  Lord Mick withdrew Bunita’s Kiss, all Firephased and up for tusker-slaying, from the chest of a black-furred, coppery armored Tusker Rampager, one of the stronger and more elite breeds of tusker that had popped up as we moved into the older, Empyrean-made section of the Dungeon. “Lass, weren’t nothing tougher than Redeemers here at one time. Ye didn’t find the likes o’ these apes until ye got t’ the southern island.”

  “You mentioned Isparian Summons down here,” I pointed out. “We’ve not seen a one of them...”

  “Aye, an’ seen we only the bones. Probably died in the fighting against the tuskers themselves, I imagine.” He eyed some of the remains to the size of the room, human skulls and bones quite visible against those of tuskers for their smaller size.

  Rogar toed a relatively massive tusker skull. “This looks to be the size of an Assailer, Lord Mick.”

  He glanced at it, and the crumbled and rusting armor attached to the skeleton. “No, that’s a Devastator,” he corrected Rogar grimly. “Armor is bronzed. Ye don’t see them in the Direlands… nor the Plated and Armored Tuskers which were the equal o’ the Rampagers here. The Ramps were the fast ones, the others were stronger and tougher, respectively. Devastators dominated them all, but never got outside the tusker lands here, kept close by Bobo.”

  “There’s tuskers bigger than Assailers?” Milee asked, wincing. While they were quite vulnerable to arrows, particularly fire arrows, the black-furred and silver-armored Assailers stood at least ten feet at the shoulder and massed well over a ton, capable of crashing into and running right over a braced lugian when they charged!

  “Well, we’ll ignore the Snow Tuskers up in the Frozen Valley, but aye, the Devastators and Annihilators be both as big ‘r bigger than the Assailers.” He watched Rogar kick the crumbling head of the Devastator into the lava below, the bone exploding and vanishing as it hit the lava into a poof of vivic mist. “Bobo brought out the big guns o’ the tuskers for this fight, an’ the defenders piled ‘em up, aye, just like we used to rampage through these places and kill the Summons by the hundreds an’ thousands. Tuskers were a great thing to fight. Only did the blunt damage, died quick t’ fire, an’ if ye were skilled, didnae hurt much t’ fight.

  “Now, when they actually be strong an’ kin push ye around like a sack o’ potatoes, ‘r jump on an’ grapple ye while gnawing yer face off? That kind o’ thing be suicide. Without the Crushfoot keeping us on our feet, we’d be having problems here,” Lord Mick stated, looking back ruefully on his past fights.

  The Roaches nodded. They’d seen some paramounts fighting tuskers in the Dires, and how their utterly confident demeanors changed into shocked confusion when the brutes manhandled them extremely roughly. The older cocksure fighters were having to learn how to fight tuskers all over again!… which was damn funny to watch, I’d also been told.

  The Mick and Hundig were blocking the hallways with their Shields up, resisting the attempts by the tuskers to rip them out of their hands, throw them aside, and get to the rest of the Roaches behind the two. It helped when they could ignite your Shields with a Flaming Infusion and burn the tuskers when they tried to grab the metal. Ouch-ouch, hot-hot!

  Of course, the tuskers were dying really fast to the flaming arrow fire at point-blank range, but the fact was the two men were basically concentrating on not losing their Shields and the Archers were doing most of the killing. The areas behind us were replete with vivfiying tuskers with arrow holes punched through their skulls as a result.

  “Why is there Empyrean architecture here?” I had to ask, walking up to the edge and staring at the lava pool below. Like other Dungeons, the heat of the lava was being channeled away and restrained, not super-heating the Dungeons at all. The air was warm, but not hot, or the furred tuskers would have been extremely uncomfortable. “If this was a mine, it would be base walls of volcanic stone and the like. This has been prepared for habitation. It’s actually cooler than the surface is!”

  Everyone looked around at the layered room about us, eyeing the chambers above looking down on us, speculating as to the layout and why it was set up this way.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “Better question. What sort o’ daft idiot puts a vacation home in the middle o’ a volcano?” the Mick had to ask.

  “There’s no living quarters, unless you consider the lava pool a giant self-cleaning privy. But look, you can see pegs on the walls there, as if something used to hang from them. Tapestries, possibly?” I pointed them out on several of the walls.

  “Wait, you mean something to look at as you walked through the place?” Politia asked in disbelief, leaping to a conclusion. “This… really was a tourist spot?”

  We all just kind of stared dumbly around us at the idea.

  “Could put a lot o’ artwork up on them walls,” the Mick finally managed to get out, trying not to laugh. “Ketnan, he must have figured it out when he got t’ the end o’ this place. The hot springs, maybe?” he guessed.

  “If the Summons were as weak as you said, you’d get some exciting light exercise on the way down, and reach the end in time for a soak and a drink. I can see that, but…” Rogar, always the grim one, looked around in disbelief. “Lady Magos, I know you can mold a lot of stone, but would all this be worth the effort?”

  I just chuckled softly, flicking up a Holo of the winding area we’d cleared so far. “You’re talking about the Empyrean magic system, so I don’t know how much area they could mold at one time, but I’m assuming at least a hundred thousand cubic feet, and it could be several times that. It probably cost them at least fifty thousand pyreal, too.”

  My eyes twinkled as Lord Mick coughed, and even the Roaches got peculiar looks on their faces.

  They each went through five hundred pyreal, a goldweight raw, a day, over ten goldweight between us all. An MMD note or less had been all that was needed to build this whole Dungeon?!

  Rogar just slapped himself on the head. “I keep forgetting how much money they could throw around. Sorry, Magos.”

  “It’s unnatural to think of just how much coin they could spend, and how fast they could make it back. Once they hooked into the ley lines and made the place more or less indestructible, it was just a source of cash they probably earned back inside a year… or a few days if they killed Summons themselves and pocketed the drops back then, aye, Lord Mick?”

  “Feh,” he spat over the side, into the lava below, watching it fall and hiss and pop when it hit the molten stone whose heat we couldn’t feel. “We would’ve made more than fifty thousand pyreal in loot just fighting our way down t’ here, if we took everything. Once the Summons came up, they’d’ve gotten their money back inside a day, an’ had their own private Dungeon t’ play with fer light exercise fer perpettin’ tuity.”

  “That really was an insane time,” Selena commented, testing her fingers. “We’re good to go, Lord Mick. Group three, finish off your Naming Karma, you’re in front.”

  “Aye, let’s go clear out some monkeys.” Lord Mick brought up his Kiss’s burning point, cutting with it lazily. “It occurs to me I saw no tracks o’ tuskers up top. That probably be because there might be no way out o’ the caldera here without a Portal at the bottom and all.”

  “Making this an interesting and safe place to fortify up and use as a base!” Hundig finished for him, hefting his Shield Sul next to his teacher. Which was a very interesting point...

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  We proceeded on, and the Tuskers got tougher. As the Mick predicted, the Armored and Plated Tuskers showed up as Summons, filling up the hallways in front of us, trying to smash the two Isparians in front back, and instead ate fiery arrows to the face as they burned their paws.

  We ground through them slowly and patiently, while I cleared away the bones of the Isparians and tuskers from long ago, silently making tallies as I did so.

  If this was all the real humans on the island, there had to have been hundreds. If Summons had been involved in this fight, then tens of thousands of combatants had likely been involved here. The dead tuskers were only increasing in size as we went deeper, sort of keeping pace with the Summons, and such brutes had to have been drawn from the population of the southern island, traveling miles to get here.

  Still, they’d come at the command of the Tusker King, and they had died here.

  Had Bobo himself come to this place, to fight the humans who had rebelled against his power? I could only assume that his head-cracking Charms had broken when the surge of magic from the Fall swept past, leaving behind a bunch of Isparians clad in towels who had single-mindedly gained power to keep up with their tusker lords, but abruptly were free to treat the tuskers as they themselves had been treated.

  One tusker reacting violently to not being able to push a human around, magic flashing, tuskers dying, and likely it had all gone downhill from there with amazing speed.

  “Lord Mick, everyone, hold a moment again.”

  The death cry of the first Devastator we’d run into echoed off the stone. The ground was thick with tusker bones of all sizes, a virtual carpet of them, interspaced with the occasional Isparian.

  They’d probably run out of mana and been reduced to weapons, the lesser tuskers taking the brunt of the casualties. Without armor, a melee fight was only going to go one way.

  I picked up an upper armbone as long as my whole arm. “Your opinion?” I asked Camwise, handing it to him.

  He took it with some confusion on his face visible in the darkness of the tunnels here, looking it up and down carefully with his Mask down like we all had for the Devilsight. “What am I…” he trailed off, peering closer. “This looks like it has been gnawed?…” he said, as I picked up another forearm and handed it to Selena. He looked down the end of it, thumbing a long crack in it. “The marrow is all sucked out…”

  “This one, too…” Selena confirmed, inspecting her prize.

  Soon everyone had a different bone in their hands, Isparian and tusker alike.

  All of them were split open, all of them were gnawed with not a scrap of dusty hide or flesh remaining, and none of the marrow was left.

  “When did this start showing up?” the Mick asked, holding the human pelvis to Bunita’s Kiss. White streaking motes of Lost Light punched into it and set it en vivus in his hand, and he watched it crumble rapidly to powder and dissipate to mist in his fingers.

  “Since at least when we left the rooms to the lava pool behind, I think. I wasn’t paying much attention to it, until I realized how very, very clean all the bones were, even if they were burned. There should be nigh indigestible hide remaining, sinew, something.”

  “Something ate them,” the Mick nodded agreement. “I can recall thinking that Devastator skull Rogar kicked into the pool, it were unsuitable for a Baneskull. None o’ ‘em were suitable fer Baneskulls…”

  “Because they were all split open and cracked,” Mizaya murmured, everyone nodding along. “Are we assuming the tuskers were victorious, and ate all the dead? Possibly when they couldn’t get out?”

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