I will admit, the emerald wasps were a bit much. The idea had come to me after the girl began showing us all kinds of unique and interesting predators that could be found on planet Earth.

  This particular species could essentially inject roaches with a paralytic venom, followed by its own eggs. Eggs that would, in time, hatch. And eat the poor roach from the inside.

  The gnomes were not able to inject other gnomes through this process of course, but they could inject Parasitic Worms. The kind that Body-Snatchers and Saboteurs shot at enemies.

  Naturally, the act of stabbing someone wasn’t as effective as shooting them, but effectiveness wasn’t was I was going for here.

  No… someone had taken the boy’s family and my creations besides.

  It would not stand. A message had to be sent.

  And I had a pretty good idea as to go about it.

  The Emerald Gnomes threw themselves at the group. Injectors sharp as razors while their tongues licked at the corners of their lips.

  It was a disgusting sight, but gnomes were disgusting creatures. So that was to be expected.

  The trench coat fool raised his hands and shot out a crackle of lightning.

  The gnomes barely noticed. They shot out like buzzing bullets. Lethally fast.

  One heartbeat, two heartbeats… The seconds passed on and on as the gnomes closed the distance in the time between blinks.

  I saw them reaching him, two at once. Knives entering through his right lungs and liver both as his body…

  His body…

  Vanished.

  In a rush of light and displaced air.

  I saw it all through all the gnomes and all the stones that made up the living walls.

  He was gone, as were the girls. Even the one who’d been killed.

  I smiled. My body writhing with barely contained glee and jubilation within the confines of my great big Pool.

  ‘Just as planned.’ I almost giggled to myself. ‘Hehe! I can’t believe that went so well!’

  It had been the most basic and cursory of assumptions. Casper would not have any funds to work with, now that he’d betrayed Carlyle. Sure, he might be able to steal an important thing here and there and he might be able to find all kinds of employment with his Magic, but the act of breaking away from Carlyle meant you’d need more than that. A nest egg to rip your whole life off the ground and start again.

  He needed funding, and the logical choice was Ryuji Hanamura.

  So of course, Casper would have some way to keep track of him. Why, I’m surprised he didn’t have anyone tagging along to keep an eye on him.

  Whatever method was used to follow the fools around would be their undoing however. I had purposely set many many different and varied traps so far and I had deployed beasts so vile as gnomes. These flashy obstacles took up all of the delver’s attention, as well they should.

  One can hardly keep calm after being taunted so viciously.

  Yet it was this rage that had doomed them all. For while they were focused on the horrors they saw, they weren’t focused on the horrors they weren’t seeing.

  Horrors like the modified Sky Shroom spores that floated around the stagnant air in microscopic doses. A good many of those spores had gone into their lungs by now and all still carried instructions for what do with their hosts.

  On the first day, weakness.

  One the second day, fever and anxiety.

  On the third day, delusions and hallucinations, as the fungal stalks started hijacking the nervous system. Forcing the host to wander off and seek the highest point they could find.

  And on the fourth day… well.

  The resulting bio-organism would be much like the Masterminds. Temporary signal boosters aligned with my own Magic.

  I did not know what the maximum range would be, but I had high expectations for what three levels worth of improvements could do.

  If Casper didn’t wise up that is.

  The smartest and simplest way to counteract my little surprise would be to kill all the infected, and to then burn the bodies for good measure. Or to simply be a high enough level that the spores just can’t take hold in the first place. Any level 2 or higher would likely be safe as their immune systems would kill the infection while it was still in its early stages.

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  He could easily kill them all and dump their bodies in a ditch somewhere in the other side of the world.

  But I was betting he wouldn’t.

  ‘Casper is soft of heart and soft of mind. Letting his emotions blind him to the practical truths the old man spouted. The old man had been cruel and vicious. But he had not been wrong. Not yet anyway. Casper had a way of failing to see that his way was the best and most logical way, due to the sacrifices it entailed. Failing to see how those sacrifices would let many more survive in the future. He will not kill them.’

  Not only that, I was betting that he would be so foolish as to expose other normal human collaborators to the infected as well.

  There had to have been at least one. Likely an entire group working from the shadows to coordinate the leak of information as well as him fleeing and becoming lost despite Carlyle’s connections. And him getting lost was the only way his plan made any sense at all.

  If enough of his pawns got infected… why, a man like Casper might actually be stupid enough to risk the Dungeon in person, trusting that his levels would let him overpower me.

  ‘Let him keep thinking that.’ I thought to myself with much satisfaction. ‘Let him grow angry and desperate. Let him grow rash and stupid. Let him come.’

  If he did, he would be in for one of the greatest surprises of his life.

  But enough about that.

  There were still soldiers running about the end of the first floor and the Cannibal was still not truly dead.

  The former were running for their lives. Letting grenades fly at the Emerald Gnomes as they laughed cheerfully towards them or otherwise emptying spare weapons of ammunition as they kept retreating room by room.

  A couple of soldiers stumbled into a room filled with quicksand that sucked them in towards the center of the chamber. The grains moving in unison to drag them underneath the surface and choke the life out of them.

  Sadly, or perhaps mercifully, the gnomes found them first and stabbed their weapons into their screaming faces and through their skulls.

  Another trio tried to batter down a door, only for the wooden boards to explode violently in their direction. The Napalmlings hiding it coordinating to all blow up at the same time to maximize the damage.

  The wooden splinters flew like burning shrapnel and eviscerated two of the three where they stood. Their intestines falling out and splattering out unto the floor as they screamed and screamed and screamed.

  The third did not try to help. Instead, he ran forwards through the new opening. Weeping bitter tears as he desperately hoped to find a passage leading to the surface.

  Instead, he found a room where three Emerald Gnomes were perched on the darkened high ceiling. Hidden and ready to strike.

  His legs stumbled upon a section of sticky oil and his right boot refused to come out of it. And that was all the gnomes needed.

  They fell like thunderbolts. Their injectors stabbing in three points and dropping the man into an unresponsive, paralyzed mess.

  He wept as he felt the next few stabs and his face stared out into the shadows beyond the current room. His limbs heavy as steel beams when their help was needed the most.

  The soldier died. Alone and terrified. Praying for it to end.

  I turned my attention to the other two. To Gunther and John. Still dragging themselves across many spiralling chambers in hopes of finding a way out.

  They were out of grenades at the moment. And out of ammo as well. Getting by thanks to the blades they had taken from Herr Muller. The ones I’d made out of level three bones.

  The instruments were, obviously, far superior to anything else they could have brought on such short notice and even now, they kept their keen edge. Slicing and dicing through the weaker units placed in their path.

  ‘I have to give them this much; they have definitely exceeded my expectations.’

  They had killed so many Sunflower Brutes in the past hour that I was more or less sure they’d each gained nearly a full stat point between their different attributes.

  That much growth might have allowed others to live. To burst through a few more walls in order to beat the odds and flee.

  But as they took one wrong corner after another, I knew that was not to be.

  And I wasn’t about to let them simply walk away after becoming complicit in the kidnappings. I let loose two more bricks from the ceiling. Angling them so that they struck true so long as they kept moving in their current direction at their current speed.

  Gunther’s brick found his skull with another brutal Crack!

  John’s brick took him in the shoulder. Shattering the shoulder blade and forcing a scream out of the man.

  He fell, weeping from the pain and Gunther stumbled right over him. His eyes swivelling in their smokestacks as drool fell down the side of his face.

  I had to admit, I was somewhat impressed.

  Taking that much head trauma and likely cervical spine fractures and surviving was half a miracle.

  My senses flared. The light returned. The two were gone. As were the spores in their lungs.

  The light flashed two more times and another two groups went missing.

  I smiled internally and moved my attention once more to where the Cannibal was raging.

  She had grown gills now. Along with three more stingers on her back and another pair of thin clawed arms and tentacles ending in sharpened barbs.

  She opened her mouth as if to roar, but her lupine jaws instead find another were-piranha. Ripping an arm off the creature even as its other limb raked her chest and the thing’s own fangs found her throat.

  Jane Holland was not deterred. Striking out with undaunted fury and managing incomprehensible speeds despite being underwater.

  She rips. She tears. She rushes forward and she kills. She shifts out of the way and dodges a lethal blow while taking on half a dozen lighter wounds. The blackened water was too dark to see anything, but I could taste blood through the walls and through my units and I knew the waters were reddish brown with the coppery taste of blood.

  The monsters tried to surround her and she would dance through the water to claw open the first one and use the body as a shield to absorb further blows. Her own arms stretch out to crush a skull against the wall beside it but the piranha slips from her grasp. A jellyfish takes her from behind and its venom breaks through a few of her still open wounds.

  She whirls. She turns. She strikes out and misses.

  Another jellyfish, another set of tentacles, comes up from below and the venom burns her further. She screams, but her screams die out under the black water.

  The light tried to shine again, but Jane Holland took the rush of power as an attack.

  She bites and claws and sends her would-be saviour packing.

  Then more piranhas take more bites and Magic flows out from her body to try and stem all the bleeding and close all the wounds. To burn away the venom and the other kinds of sickness the water contained.

  It keeps working, until the Magic begins to sputter. Begins to fail.

  She opens her mouth to wail in agony, but her throat gets torn out.

  The blood in the water grows thicker and then…

  And then…

  The body goes still. As each unit claims its prize with wild abandon.

  There are no more survivors now. No more living people within my Dungeon.

  I nodded my head and felt my connection to the boy and the girl remain steady.

  I open the surface tunnels again and move to grow new floors and new passages.

  Casper would be coming soon, after all. And I needed to weaken him as much as possible when he and his posse actually deigned to come down here.