Mary had two major opinions about who Archmund Granavale was, at his core.

  First, he thought he was a conniving bastard.

  Second, he was also very bad at it.

  When he smiled and waved her off, it was blatantly obviously that he wanted her to get something from Raehel. Maybe it was information about stuff that the other girl wouldn’t share willingly — but that was precisely why Mary thought he was so bad at it.

  Raehel was an open book. She didn’t hide or obfuscate anything. When she opened her mouth, it was a genuine wonder that the whole of her knowledge didn’t come tumbling out.

  “Well, I’m glad to have you with me,” Raehel said. “You don’t want to be caught alone with a Monster, but I want to see one before heading back.”

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do,” Mary said. “I mostly did dusting.”

  “If you see a Monster, wave your fan and blow it into the wall. Pretty easy.”

  Mary was unconvinced.

  Together, they entered the Dungeon. The opening was now behind two wooden gates, each guarded by a pair of guards. Doors would’ve been a bad idea — they would’ve trapped people fleeing Monsters, but did little to stop the Monsters themselves. All told, there were probably thirty or forty people guarding the outside of the Dungeon at any given time.

  Archmund had given Mary some idea of what to expect, but it was still jarring to see the near-parody of the Dungeon herself, how it mimicked so closely the network of underground maintenance tunnels that underlaid Granavale Manor. Archmund probably had no idea that such tunnels even existed — he had been spoiled, until that day he’d suddenly become eccentric, but even after turning eccentric there were a lot of things he just ignored or didn’t consider worth thinking about. This was one of them.

  Raehel walked a few paces forward before stopping and rubbing her hand against the wall.

  “This really is shabby,” she commented.

  “It’s a Dungeon,” Mary said. “I wouldn’t expect a slaughterhouse or a tannery to be pretty.”

  “The Arcane Dungeon is,” Raehel said. “If anything, it’s like a second branch of the university’s library. Now, let’s see…”

  Raehel walked forward a bit more until they came to the first fork in the corridor. There were symbols in white paint.

  An arrow pointing downwards, on the right side.

  A circle with an x beneath it, on the left side, and one vertical line beneath it.

  A sun, back the way they’d came.

  Frankly, times like this Mary wondered why Archmund even wanted her to bother to learn how to read. Pictographs were more than clear enough, and when one wasn’t clear, asking questions was always possible.

  “The arrow means down,” Mary said, “but what does the circle mean?”

  “That’s a skull and bones,” Raehel said. “There be monsters.”

  Mary didn’t like the sound of that. She was about to suggest that they head downwards, but Raehel turned and walked in the direction of the Monsters.

  “What are you doing?” Mary said, calling after her.

  “So far up, the Monsters are weak. The first round, the ones that actually wanted to escape, got cleaned out, so any Monsters spawning up here are masses of undirected instinct. Anything smarter or capable of actual combat is biding its time.”

  It made sense, but Raehel had sounded like Archmund did when he had a reasonable guess about something but was missing one or two details that proved he actually knew what was going on, so Mary wasn’t very reassured.

  Why were they like this?

  *****

  Archmund was nervous, but he refused to let it show. A moment of weakness could lead to a lifetime of ridicule for a noble.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  He was glad he’d commandeered the commander’s tent for his private discussion with Mary and Raehel. It meant he could fidget and pace and burn off some of his nervous energy and he considered his situation.

  The tent was spartan. It had a single meeting table, upon which was drawn a map of the first Subtier of the Dungeon. He’d seen more finalized copies of it sent to Granavale manor, but this had a few scribbled-out charcoal marks where people had tested for secret passageways, and potential “spawning grounds” for training purposes. He recognized the various nooks and crannies he’d explored, all leading to the shadow of the Manor deep beneath the earth.

  Other than that, the tent had few other furnishings, just crates piled full with dull Gemstone Gear. Nothing particularly potent or useful, but things like pauldrons, boots, gauntlets, and masks. Useful additions to a set of armor to empower their wearers with Gem power.

  There were, all told, around thirty to forty men currently on duty. This world didn’t have the concept of “resting on the weekend” or “8 hour workdays”, but generally speaking not having those things led to losses in productivity, so when he was talking to his father about how best to staff the Dungeon, he’d argued for a slightly more generous than usual “work for 5 days for 12 hours each, then get two full days off”. It wasn’t particularly supportive of labor rights compared to what he knew, but it was a whole lot fairer than making them do 12 hours per day all week.

  He missed the four stooges of Mercy’s men: Zankto, Vurl, Yald, and Wrest. Them staying had never been in consideration — they were Mercy’s men, after all, in the official employ of the Empire — but they’d been disciplined. They’d been measured. They’d been professional

  “Young master Archmund,” said a gruff but gentle voice.

  Weaponsmaster Garth Alavant was a long-contracted retainer of House Granavale. He was one of Lord Reginald Granavale’s bosom friends and had served House Granavale for as long as Archmund could remember. Most recently before this as a groundskeeper.

  In another world, unravaged by the Crylaxan Plague, he would’ve trained Archmund in the way of the sword from the age of five, but Archmund had been too sickly for that to have been possible. Instead, he’d been relegated to guard duty.

  “I hope you’re doing alright out here,” Archmund said.

  Weaponsmaster Garth chuckled. “Lad, I’m more than fine.”

  He was clad in scale armor, light enough for him to stay mobile but strong enough to blunt a strike from a bandit or a Monster. His beard was growing out rough, untrimmed in likely half a month. There was a Gem-encrusted sword peeking out from a scabbard at his waist, but no other Gemgear.

  And he looked alive in a way Archmund didn’t remember him ever looking before.

  “You missed it,” he said. “The dungeoneering, the sense of adventure.”

  “You’ve gotten awfully keen in the past summer, lad,” Garth said. “Awfully perceptive. I’m glad. You’re growing up.”

  More like he’d grown up a lifetime ago and was reminded of all its horrors and wonders.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “Not much at all to report,” Garth said, rubbing the back of his head. “We got maybe five adventurers in the past month. Only two of them got any loot of note. You cleared out the place too well, so the wrathful dead are running scared. We’ve probably got a few more months of that before we need to send in a serious presence or call for aid. We had one breach of the surface by an animated skeleton, but the boys chopped it up.”

  “Did it drop any Gem?”

  Garth handed Archmund a crystal dagger all but identical to the ones he already had.

  Archmund sighed and pocketed it. “You’ve done this before, Garth. How does the development usually go?”

  Garth told him.

  The Dungeon Storm was a burst of raw instinct — the wrathful dead, having finally built up enough pressure within the earth like a volcano or zit, burst forth, running amok and carving out the Dungeon in their fury. This first wave absolutely had to be culled, lest their momentum continue and overwhelm the land they were in. The Frontier Dungeon had gone unnoticed and unculled, and even now the hundreds of miles around it were a bizarre wondrous wasteland.

  But after that first culling, things normalized for a time. Monsters slowly built up their power in the depths, training and eating and emerging from the underworld, fighting each other and amalgamating into more powerful, wrathful forms. There wasn’t enough space for all of the spirits of the dead to take full physical form, so they would merge and become stronger instead. The dumber ones would still naively try to escape into the light of the mortal world, but they were both weak and prone to expending all of their power to create Gemgear for survival.

  That made them a prime target for adventurers, whether they were commoners who weren’t bound to land or those favored by the nobility. It was a simple loop: hunt the dumb and simple monsters for their Gemgear. Attune that Gemgear and become stronger. Go deeper into the Dungeon and hunt stronger Monsters for their Gemgear, which would likewise be stronger. Go even deeper and hunt stronger monsters there. Ad infinitum. Once you had a full set, you could become a Hero, able to go toe to toe with nobles.

  But it required that first stroke of luck, that first victory of Gemgear, to start the loop. Hard work and training to sustain it. Luck to not die in the process.

  He’d disrupted that loop by doing too good a job. Normally, a first pass through a Dungeon cleared out 70%-90% of its monsters, leaving just enough to spawn. It was exponential growth — the more there were, the faster they grew. So now the Monsters of Granavale Dungeon were weak near the surface but growing stronger in the depths. There would come a time when they left the depths and started climbing the higher levels, and unless they managed to train a stronger defensive force before then, things would go from quiet to very bad very, very quickly.

  It was a much clearer and more intuitive explanation than Raehel’s.

  “So…” he asked Garth. “Is this empirical? Is it theoretical?”

  “It’s based on observation, lad,” Garth said. “Most Dungeons that open up these days follow these patterns. The Four Great Dungeons are exceptions, but all the rules go out the window with those.”

  He’d expected to hear about how this was a problem on an economic level. But clearly, this was a problem on a home-defense level as well.

  He’d made this problem, and he had to fix it.