NOVEL NEXT 124 - A bad boss
Darkness filled the Corner Office, the bottommost part of the Second Tier, dark as tar, dark as pitch. Mercifully, it didn't seep past the door.
And as a second blessing, the whole of the outer chamber, which Archmund had stretched oddly, remained that way. The darkness here was far too dense to spawn Monsters.
They had a moment to breathe.
"Weird, isn't it?" Archmund said. "That was supposed to be the bottom, but it turns out the real power was up."
That almost sounded clever, except no one here had the cultural background to appreciate puns based on the phrase "power up."
"Do you want to talk about it?" Mary said.
"Talk about what?"
"That. Anything. You seem annoyed."
"Isn't he always annoyed?" Beatrice said. "Or smug."
"Well, he's not smug now," Rory said gravely. "Almost wish he was. Because…"
Because the alternative to smugness was annoyance, which he preferred to show over terror.
"When he's smug, we're winning," Rory said.
"It just doesn't make sense," Archmund said. "It's the lowest point of the Dungeon, so why would the big, scary monster come from above? And honestly, why are we facing a big, scary monster?"
He turned to Mary. "You thought it might have been me, right?"
"That was a joke," and to the nobles, "He allows me to make jokes."
"Is that also a joke?" Beatrice said. "Mary, we pulled you back from the brink of death and also spent three months training with you. Sure you might be a filthy peasant but you're allowed to be funny without explaining yourself."
"Was that a joke?" Archmund said. "Don't answer that. I was thinking. The last big, scary monster in this Dungeon was the natural and logical guardian to rule a dark reflection of Granavale Manor — the ghosts of all my ancestors. The legacy I didn't realize I had, I guess. But let's say I'm right to be self-centered for once and this really is about me — haven't I already learned my lesson about the power of friendship and not abusing my station to exploit my friends and the natural world?"
"That is pretty self-centered," Beatrice snorted.
"This is called Granavale Dungeon."
"Uh, yeah, because that's where it opened?"
"You thought you were in charge," Gelias said quietly, "but maybe you were serving the purposes of something else."
"Surely I would have noticed. Surely—"
And he stopped himself. Because he'd rationalized it away, as surely as he'd rationalized away a whole lot of other things. The Dungeon was "safe", it was "secure", it could be scientifically and mathematically modeled on a curve — none of this was self-evident. The Dungeon was a hole in the ground believed to be carved by the spirits of the dead as they escaped the underworld.
"There was loss in the compression," Archmund said. "Whenever I tried to fuse Gems together through feeding, a lot of techniques would lead to a substantial amount of power loss. The only way to avoid it was contributing my own power. I thought that power was dissipating, but…"
He looked through the door.
The darkness was pulling back from the door. The room had already been a mess, but now everything that hadn't been nailed down had been strewn everywhere. Moment by moment, the darkness pulled itself to a tighter column in the center of the room — the condensation of miasma.
"Gelias, tell me if my intuition's right," Archmund said. "More darkness in one place is higher density, meaning a tougher Monster?"
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"That can be the case," Gelias said. "It's hard to tell from the outside unless you have the senses for it — with humans, you can see the light of their Gems, and with elves you can judge from their age, but with monsters… You have to see it happening."
Archmund grit his teeth.
The miasma started to condensed into the form of a man. Inky black body, and pale face.
"We should, uh, make a plan," Archmund said. "I don't suppose any of you know a unified language for fast combat communication?"
"Callsigns and standard commands," Rory said. "We're a small group, so names work for now. But for techniques?"
"We can't memorize everyone's technique names," Beatrice said.
"We don't have to," Rory said. "The thing about magical knights is that they all have unique techniques, unlike servant-soldiers. So you need generic words like 'guard', 'dodge', 'strong attack', 'attack', 'quick attack', 'heal', 'cover me', and you trust that they know what to actually use."
"As good as it's going to get," Beatrice fretted.
"My Skills don't really…" Mary ventured.
"The wind is flexible," Gelias said. "It can turn away a blade or blow away a foe."
"Open to interpretation," Rory said, looking Mary directly in the eye. "We spent so much effort on waking you up, it's fine if you focus on staying alive."
"That would make me a target," Mary said. "Tell me when to hit it, and I will."
"You all fine if I lead?" Archmund said. In other circumstances he might have deferred, but this was his mess and he had no right to run from it.
They all nodded grimly, even Beatrice.
The black looked like a perfect business suit. White gloves, white undershirt, black tie. Not quite bald, but a ring of black that looked like a circlet.
All the miasma in the room was gone, vacuumed up into the spirit's substance. There wasn't a hint of taint on the walls, not a tarnishing of the false gold ornaments and corporate participation trophies. Every bit of it, what Archmund had seen and beyond, all that vast power that had lied between the glass ceiling, everything that he'd wasted was lying in wait for him.
"There's our boss," said Archmund.
He looked at his friends. (A small voice in his head told him he barely deserved to call them that.)
"Maybe we could just head out now and come back when we're stronger?"
"You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that," Beatrice said. "Trying to keep up with you is exhausting."
"I'm surprised you're admitting it."
"Better a coward than dead."
And then the Monster turned around to face them.
The ring of black upon its crown broke in the front, more like a laurel crown than a proper circlet.
Its eyes were but sunken pits, its mouth nothing more than a line, its nose imperceptible upon the perfect white of its face.
It raised a hand and twisted.
Suddenly they were inside of the room again. They entered neither door nor portal. One minute they were looking through the door, and the next they were standing before their foe.
Archmund frantically looked around. Rory and Beatrice seemed remarkably calm, presumably because this wasn't the first time they'd been thrown recklessly around the Dungeon with no warning. Mary looked pale, and Gelias fell to one knee.
"Weapons out," Archmund heard himself saying. Rory pulled out his staff, Mary pulled out her fan, Gelias clutched his bow, and Beatrice drew her wand, though her lanyard-chain and knife circled tightly around her.
Archmund drew his Gemstone Rapier — it was his best defensive option, though his Gems floated above his shoulders.
There was no door.
"I am the Merchant of the Damned," said the Monster in a neutral monotone. "You have all been wonderful employees."
He raised a hand and pointed a pure white finger at them.
Swift as a whip, Rory's staff flew towards him, a spinning helicopter blade of barrier. The Merchant unfurled its palm and smacked the staff away, and it flew out the back window into the endless blue.
Rory held out his palm, and his staff flew back into his hand. The Merchant paid him no mind.
"I would like to present the five of you with a retention offer," the Merchant said. "You have shown ingenuity and initiative. With your help, we can help this Dungeon climb to ever greater heights."
"Why is it talking so weird?" Rory muttered.
The language wasn't English, and yet the cadence, the jargon, the synergy of unrelated buzzwords and circling back and around and actioning — this was corporate slop speak. How such words had made it to the depths of a Dungeon Archmund had no idea, but perhaps Omnio had a surprisingly large managerial class, or there was some apocalypse that had killed of a previous iteration of a managerial society.
Archmund pulled the Diamond Hand from his pack. There might not be a door, but they could still escape. He could create a portal to an upper part of the Dungeon. It didn't matter how much power it took as long as it didn't kill him. If they were out of the Second Tier, instinct and experience told him that this creature would take its sweet time pursuing them upwards. If he drained all the power of his Gems, if he drew on the chemical potential of his muscles, the electricity of his nervous system, the calories of his fat, he could get them as close to the surface as he could — and his friends could drag his unconscious body into the light of the sun where he could spend another week recovering.
He tapped on the instincts of Portal, his magic flowing along those well-worn channels, getting a grounding in where was now and building a door to elsewhere—
But nothing happened. The world was slippery. His magic could get no grip upon this part of the world — because it was wholly ruled by something else.
"That's very rude of you," said the Merchant of the Damned, monotonously, as if it didn't actually care. "Attempting to leave a mandatory meeting requires… disciplinary action."