Koenig looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Break the dungeon?”

  “Let’s take this conversation private,” I said. “It concerns Guild secrets.”

  Koenig narrowed his eyes, but he followed me far enough away from the others that [Privacy] would work. Nadine followed.

  I cast the spell and paused for a moment to gather my thoughts.

  “You know the Countess has taken over this dungeon.”

  “Aye,” Koenig said. “As you have, for Oakway’s.”

  “That name is hardly relevant anymore,” I complained. “But because I did, I know what a mage can do with a dungeon they control. Do you?”

  The two of them looked at each other awkwardly. I clapped my hands. “Focus, people! The cat is out of the bag!”

  “We know,” Koenig grumbled. “We’re just not used to talking about it.”

  “So you know, but aren’t ready to admit, that the dungeon can cast her spells with its mana,” I said. “And it has a lot of mana.”

  “Aye,” Koenig admitted reluctantly.

  “So lots and lots of mind-control spells, then,” I said. “What was your countermeasure?”

  “We’ve got the priestesses,” Koenig said defensively. “And the amulets you gave us. Dungeon spells don’t have a great spell total, the amulets can probably handle them.”

  “You haven’t tested it, though, have you?” I asked. “And the Countess is in there somewhere, perfectly capable of casting her own spells… which we can’t counter!”

  Koenig shrugged. “Dungeons are never easy,” he said. “We’ve got a big crew, one of us will get through.”

  I shuddered. “Or,” I countered. “We could break the dungeon, and force it to use all its mana on monsters.”

  “Which we’d have to fight, all at once,” Koenig said.

  “We can fortify this clearing with earth mages,” I pointed out. “Like they do in the capital. And they don’t all come out at once, they come in waves.”

  “Even so…” Koenig objected.

  “And when we’re done,” I kept talking, pressing my point. “We go in and face a Countess without extra mana, without extra monsters, and without any traps she made when she saw us come in.”

  “Hmm,” Koenig rumbled.

  “I have an objection,” Nadine said. “What if she responds by Breaking the Forbidden Laboratory dungeon?”

  “How?” I asked. “She’s stuck in this dungeon, isn’t she?”

  “She might have bound that dungeon, as well.”

  “Even if she did, she’d have to be in it to give orders, and… Can a dungeon master order a dungeon to break?” I asked. I didn’t think so, but I’d never asked.

  Nadine started to answer but then stopped, struck. “I— don’t know,” she said. “It seems strange that an ordinary person can do something the dungeon master cannot, but I’ve never heard of a case.”

  Koenig grunted. “She can always step out and catch herself a beast, like we would,” he said.

  “I can’t see her doing that,” I confessed. “And if we’ve got someone watching the entrance, she can’t. We should have someone watching the entrance.”

  “We do,” Koenig grunted. “Though they might need more specific instructions. Returning to the subject at hand, if Lady Rankin can Break the Laboratory, she can do it whether we’re in the Temple or outside of it.”

  He frowned, thinking the scenario through. “The rest of your points stand. We’ll Break the dungeon.”

  He turned and started yelling orders at the adventurers.

  It wasn’t long before we were ready. The earth mages had built a wall a fair way back from the entrance. We had the forces to man it, and the further back it was, the longer our ranged attacks had to whittle them down.

  There was a lot of nervousness in the air as we waited for the hunter to come back. Some of the adventurers here were beast-kin, more used to the idea of Breaking a dungeon. They were used to laying trails for the maddened beasts, sending them where they wanted them to go. Sometimes that was a human settlement, at other times it was for something as mundane as feeding a herd of useful monsters that ran wild outside.

  For the Latorrans, Breaking a dungeon was pretty much a war crime. So many of their settlements were built near dungeons that letting the beasts out was essentially a mass civilian attack. Surprisingly, it wasn’t actually illegal under the King’s law. Nadine had told me that there were legitimate, if rare, reasons to Break a dungeon. Between those reasons and the unfortunate fact that someone who would risk such an event wouldn’t care about the law, had led to jurisdiction being handed over to the local lords or affected community.

  That was me, so we were all right there. That might have had something to do with Koenig’s lack of resistance to the idea.

  Surrounded by the wall was the entrance to the dungeon. This was a simple three-sided stone building. There were columns along the outside of the walls, either for additional support or for decoration. The invisible line where the fourth wall would be marked where the dungeon started. Inside was just a staircase leading down into the dungeon proper.

  The hunter approached with a struggling spider-jaguar in his grip. He threw it in without ceremony. The monster froze for a second and then dashed down the stairs. The hunter ran back and climbed up the ladder that was lowered for him.

  It took a minute. Then, the first orgeling scrambled out of the dungeon’s maw on all fours, its spindly limbs jerking with unnatural speed. Its beady eyes gleamed with feverish anger, and its nostrils flared as it sniffed the air for prey.

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  Behind it, more poured forth, clawed hands scraping against stone, their ragged breath hissing between jagged teeth. They moved with a manic energy, their sinewy frames twitching, their heads snapping in different directions as if barely containing the urge to lunge. Then they surged forward, a tide of bloodthirsty malice, driven by nothing but the raw instinct to kill.

  The archers saved their arrows and the mages saved their mana. Ogrelings went down easy.

  Most of the fighters here could kill them in a single blow, and slowed down by the wall they weren’t a threat. Heads went flying as fast as they could climb up.

  The next wave was only incrementally more dangerous.

  These guys warranted a few arrows, if only because triggering their Berserk meant they killed a few of their own before they got to the wall. These guys hated their ogreling masters almost as much as they hated humans. Having the remaining ogrelings between them and their targets must have given them a brief moment of happiness.

  A sudden jump in difficulty. These were the guys who had enslaved the orcs, after all. They may have had a lower Threat value, but Skilled was a multiplier on all their attack and defence totals. These guys were a serious threat to a Level three adventurer—even a Level four, in enough numbers. Our force, though, was split between Levels five and six.

  These guys, I’m sorry to say, would be a good match for me. That’s more an indictment of my combat capability than anything else. They were still small and weak enough for our fighters to cut them down with one blow. Skilled didn’t give monsters more hit points.

  I didn’t see the Ogreling Chieftan. He had a leadership effect, so the mages blasted him as soon as he appeared. The next wave came hard on the heels of this one. Ogorcs had longer legs and moved faster than the smaller ogrelings.

  Seven feet tall, with grey skin and uglier faces than either an orc or an ogre, these monsters were purported to be a cross between the two species. They were tough and strong, but that was it. It now took our fighters two or three blows to take them down. The Orgorc Champion was more of a challenge, enough to attract some ranged attacks as he rushed forward, but he fell before he reached the wall.

  More slaves, at least within the context of the story that the dungeon was trying to tell. These were full-sized ogres, just missing the crude weapons that they preferred. These monsters took at least three blows before they fell, and they were tall enough that they could reach up to the top of the wall and pull themselves up.

  That didn’t mean any of them made it. They didn’t seem to grasp that doing that left them open to attacks on their hands and faces. None of them lived long enough to learn the lesson. The next wave was close behind them.

  At least the numbers were reducing, because Ogre Warriors were where it started to get dangerous for us. With skill totals comparable to a Level Five warrior and over 1300 Hit Points, they were a serious threat to a lot of people here.

  A barrage of arrows and spells hit them as soon as they stepped out. That thinned their numbers some, but they charged forward undaunted. They crashed into the wall with a thundering roar, cutting down the few Thralls left in front of them.

  Warriors had enough reach with their weapons to attack the defenders directly, but the angle was bad for them. The height of the walls had been carefully chosen to encourage that behaviour and discourage the alternative of trying to smash the wall down. A few tried it anyway, but the mages managed to keep up with repairs.

  We felt the next wave coming before it arrived. The stone underneath our feet trembled, and both the ogres and the defenders redoubled their efforts. On some level, it was amusing to see the realisation flit across the faces of the brutish ogres, that they were going to be treated the way they had treated the thralls. But it was tempered by the knowledge that we would soon be facing the brunt of it.

  The first Ogrehulk had to climb the staircase on its belly. It was too big to walk out. Someone must have had the bright idea of blocking the exit with its body because arrows and spells started flying at it before it even left the dungeon. It roared with pain and thrashed enough that I thought it would bring the building down on top of it.

  It lay there for a few seconds, giving the archers the opportunity for another shot, and for a second, I thought it might work. Then, the hulk flew forward, injured but still alive, roaring with pain. The monsters behind had pushed it out of their way.

  The first one didn’t make it to the wall. It got up and roared with anger and pain, but it only got a few steps more before it fell. The next Ogrehulk almost made it out of the entrance before it started attracting fire.

  This one made it to the wall. Standing over sixteen feet tall, it could easily reach the defenders. It tried to sweep a section clear, but the crenelations, put there for exactly this purpose, got in the way. They didn’t escape unscathed, but the earth mages could put them back.

  The Level Fives had to step back now and concentrate on the remaining ogre warriors. We tried to manage three Level Sixes on each hulk, but as more of them squeezed through the stairway, that became untenable.

  Koenig was trading blows one-on-one against a hulk, and it was awesome to watch. Standing on a ten-foot wall, he was about the same height as the monster. If the umberhulk had been smart, it would have hung back for a reach advantage, but it came in close, just as eager to use its teeth as it was its weapons.

  I started helping out, casting [Improved Blind] on the heads of the hulks as they came out. Cloridan and Kyle didn’t have to worry about mana and had been on the wall since the beginning. Now that there were injuries, Felicia and the other healers came into play, keeping our fighters fresh and unbloodied.

  Koenig’s opponent finally fell with a shuddering crash. Four of the hulks were still fighting when the final wave started coming up the stairs.

  They emerged from the dungeon with slow, deliberate steps, their hulking forms wrapped in layers of furs and bone charms that rattled with every movement. Their tusked mouths twisted in guttural chants, voices thick with the weight of devotion to some Ogre god. Each carried a weapon that was more a relic than a tool—a massive iron cudgel, a jagged obsidian blade, or a staff crowned with a skull. Their faces were smeared with war paint, crude symbols of their faith scrawled across grey flesh.

  The monsters from the final floor. The Ogre Priests