Dahlia:

  You have gained 371 Unbound Essence and 37 gold coins. Total Unbound Essence: 402. Total Gold: 74.

  You have gained 9 Uncommon Health Potions, 15 Uncommon Mana Potions, and 7 Uncommon Endurance Potions.

  You have found: 16 F-Grade Monster Cores (Minion).

  You have found: Runes of the Necromancer (Rare Garment Upgrade): Applied to a shirt, robe, or other upper body garment, the Runes of the Necromancer will turn the item into a Rare chest item with 12 points of Damage Resistance against all forms of damage and the following Traits: +20% to the Energy Pools, Attacks and Defenses of all Undead entities under your control; +50 Mana that can be used to activate or maintain Undeath effects.

  After collecting loot bags from the rats the party had killed, they had found a chest at the end of the room with an item for everyone and a nice 100 Essence reward. Everybody except Dahlia had enough to level up.

  She was annoyed, even though she understood why her levels were so expensive. Legendary Classes were expensive because they had true power.

  The first thing she did when they took a break was take one of her favorite T-shirts from the backpack that was now taking one of the fifty slots in her inventory. Time to put the runes she had earned to good use.

  When she was sixteen, she had taken a plain black T-shirt and made it her own. First, she had carefully cut a slashed pattern between its neck and upper chest. Another set of cuts turned the shoulders of the shirt into something artistic. Finally, she used silver thread to embroider a pentagram on the front. She only wore it on special occasions.

  Taking a page from Roland’s stories about upgrading his coat and shotgun, she drew a ritual circle. She placed the shirt, the rune, and her last Rare Item Upgrade token inside. When she activated them, she felt an undercurrent of power flow from her into the circle, and her Mana dropped by fifty points.

  Significance Detected! The Runed Shirt of the Necromancer (Rare Item, non-armor chest piece) has gained 50 base Significance (personal) and two Significance Traits. These traits will only apply to the item’s soul-bonded owner.

  Durability: 250/250

  Significance: 50 (regenerates 1 point/hour).

  Traits:

  * Armor: 12 points of Damage Resistance against all forms of damage.

  * Focused Damage: Add +5 damage to all Undeath effects per Significance point spent (maximum of 10 points). Lasts one minute.

  * Mana Pool: 50 Mana per level; can only be used for Undeath effects. Regenerates at the rate of (10 x Level) Mana per hour.

  * Repair: 5 Durability is regained per Significance point spent).

  * Runes of the Necromancer: +20% to the Energy Pools, Attacks and Defenses of all Undead entities under your control.

  * Store Life Force: The shirt will store any damage you or your Fiends inflict on a living being, to a maximum capacity of 100 points of Health per level. You can use this stored life force to heal you or your Fiends.

  Dahlia smiled. The fight had been gross and a little scary, but the rewards were worth the trouble. And they had done it without Roland babysitting the party.

  Thoughts of Roland made her smile vanish. He’d better come back. He... She didn’t know what she felt. He’d always been interesting, but a bit too much of a normie. Now it was different.

  The darkness around him was real. Losers like Victor had been playing a part. Roland lived it. And then there was Raven. That thing the bird did with his mental voice had convinced her: that was the Raven.

  Those are going to conquer the world, she thought. Or burn it down. I don’t care which, I want to be there when they do it. I want to be a part of it.

  She pictured herself and Roland commanding an army of Fiends and Death Spirits. Behind them, a city lay in ruins, dark columns of smoke rising toward the sky.

  I know he isn’t like that. He doesn’t just destroy. He wants to build something, save people. Which is good. There are plenty who deserve death. Might as well spare the innocent.

  “Bloodykee,” her Familiar whispered sweetly in her ear.

  She gave him some head scritches and thought of burning cities. Cities full of people who deserved it, of course.

  “All right,” Bob said. “Let’s search this barracks, see if a hidden room or compartment is here. Wendy, did you level up?”

  “Yes,” the blonde elf said. “And I got Reveal as my second level Skill.”

  “Good. That’s going to help a lot.”

  Bob was a second level One-Man-Army now. Dahlia considered him one of the few people who didn’t suck.

  As a Dungeon Master, he’d always been cruel but fair. When someone figured out a way to mess with his plans, he always gave them a chance to do their own thing. His games kept Dahlia entertained. Which was good, because when she got bored she’d begin killing random NPCs just to see what would happen.

  Roland had made the right decision, putting Bob in charge.

  Dahlia stayed out of the way while Wendy and Barton did their thing and checked the room for any secrets.

  Barton was doing pretty well for a social reject. His Class was all kinds of broken, in a good way. Even better, he seemed to have switched his fixation from her to the elf girl. He’d convinced her to pick Reveal instead of another heal. She listened to him. That had to be a first for Dorko.

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  Better you than me, blondie, Dahlia thought as Barton kept casting loving glances at Wendy while she used her Skill.

  Dahlia was used to almost every guy she met trying his pathetic moves on her. Bob had gotten it out of his system pretty quickly. Barton was a pest but harmless. Josh was an asshole, but she knew that he wanted to do her. They all did.

  Speaking of Josh, the guy was giving her dirty looks whenever he forgot he was supposed to be watching the door they hadn’t opened yet. Dahlia could tell he was trying to figure out a way to come out on top. Dumb as a rock and ambitious; one of the worst combinations when it came to sucking.

  Unfortunately, killing him would antagonize the party’s healer. This was going to take some finesse.

  Maybe slicing his face open with one of her cards to give Roland a blood sample hadn’t been the best idea, but she had wanted to do that so much. And it was funny. Especially since she had used her blood spider card to draw blood.

  Sangara?a was still around; the Fiend would stay until destroyed or dismissed, and Dahlia didn’t mind the five Mana investment to keep her around. Sangie wasn’t as cute as Bloodykee, but she was a great Fiend. At the moment, the blood-crystal spider was standing upside down on the ceiling and watching over the same closed door as Josh.

  “Nothing here,” Barton said. “This room is a dead end.”

  Dorko had also leveled up, and his extra Intelligence and Class level had gotten him six additional Hex slots, which he was holding in reserve. He was improving, she had to admit.

  Bob nodded. “All right, we’ll get the next door. Same drill as before, except we have the spider. Dahlia, please have her stay on the ceiling over me. If we hit another barracks, she can help me keep the rats on their side of the door.”

  “You got it, Lieutenant Liberty,” she said in her most saccharine tone.

  “Heh, that’s a new one,” Bob said with a smile. “Always wanted to be an officer.”

  “Do I get a nickname too?” Barton asked.

  She grinned at him. “You already got one.”

  “Dorko doesn’t fit the military theme.”

  “You are right. You can be Private Dorko.”

  “Should have seen that coming,” Bob told him.

  They formed up by the door, same as before except for Sangara?a being in the party. Bloodykee was on her shoulder. Her Familiar weighed a good forty pounds but with her Strength seventeen he wasn’t that big of a burden.

  “I can draw one more card today,” she told Bob.

  “Go ahead; might as well know what we’ve got to work with.”

  A new card appeared in her floating hand. An Apotheosis. She was hoping for Gravetoise or another tanky Fiend, but it wasn’t a bad card. Perfect for her Sangie, as a matter of fact.

  “Blood of the Xenomorph,” she said triumphantly. “A Rare card I got from a pack. That’s going to turn Sangie into a monster.”

  “She’s already a monster,” Barton said.

  “Her webs will gain an acid component that can eat through rock and metal. It increases her damage to sixty points per second to anybody touching her webbing. Correction: seventy-eight points with my bonuses. More if I add damage with my new shirt.”

  “You gotta keep that shirt on,” Barton told her for the first time in his life.

  “Not sure we want that stuff near us while fighting for the door,” Bob pointed out.

  “I can send her deeper and have her shower the mobs with face-melting delight for ten seconds. After that, the acid goes inert.”

  “Okay, that can come in handy. Don’t deploy it until I give the word, though. If we need to pull back, acid web might be our ticket to breaking contact without Barton burning a Fireball we might need later.”

  “You want me to get a Fireball ready, just in case?”

  “Yeah, this time I don’t want to wait a minute. That’s a long time when you got rats trying to eat your face.”

  Plans made, they had Josh open the door and step aside as Bob did his door-kicking routine.

  It was another Barracks room. But this time at least a third of the rats were lieutenants. Champions and Guardians.

  “Let them have it!” Bob shouted as he stood at the entrance and began to shoot his phallic substitute oversized handgun at the Ratlings.

  Dahlia activated the Apotheosis card and Sangara?a changed shape, becoming a thing of leathery skin, still red in color but with more organic lines. The spider hissed, releasing steam that smelled like burned rubber and made Dahlia’s nostrils itch.

  “Fireball!” Barton shouted as Josh fired his big gun. The roar of the blunderbuss was swallowed by the whoosh of Barton’s big ball of fire.

  Dahlia waited until the fiery explosion had died down and sent Sangie in while Bloodykee unleashed his black lightning bolts into the monster-filled room.

  Barton had detonated his hex deeper into the barracks to keep Bob outside the blast radius. When the flames cleared, every small Ratling Marauder in range was down, but the Lieutenants were just hurt. Hurt and pissed off.

  Sangara?a webbed five of them; the acidic webbing burned through flesh and bone, but the Champions and Guardians had some resistance to it. They were only taking forty-odd points of damage per second and were strong enough to start ripping the webbing off.

  Bob had exchanged his pistol for his war hammer, but the weapon didn’t have the range to deal with a pair of Guardians who were beating on him with axes made out of traffic signs. His shield kept him in one piece, but he wasn’t going to contribute much damage until he switched weapons.

  “Kee, kee, kee,” Bloodykee said.

  Dahlia nodded. “You are right.”

  She used her Twinner Boon card on Sangie: suddenly there were two spiders raining acidic hell on the rats, and the Apotheosis timer reset, so both Fiends would be empowered for a full ten seconds before Sangie reverted to a single, non-acidic spider.

  About a third of the lieutenants chased her spider-fiends, but the wall-crawlers stayed on the move, skittering away and shooting webs as they went.

  Dead Champions and Guardians began to pile up in front of Bob, who had switched back to his pistol and was shooting them at point-blank range while using his shield defensively. If they didn’t drop the rats quickly enough, he might need to burn his long cooldown Skill to stay alive. Wendy was healing him steadily, but each time a big rat landed a hit, Bob’s hit points dropped by a lot.

  Barton was using his wand, a better model than the one she’d gotten from Roland. Knowing her Death Bolts were too weak to hurt the lieutenants, Dahlia grabbed her wand and began to burn eleven Mana a shot for thirty points of damage.

  More rats dropped, but the big monsters took a lot of killing to bring down. Roland had made it look easy.

  Now their brutal attacks were steadily forcing Bob back. If they got past him... She couldn’t take more than a hit or two from those monsters, even with doubled-up magic shields and magic t-shirt. And Bloodykee only had seventy-eight hit points with all her bonuses.

  She still had two more Fiend cards to play, but waited for a good moment to use them. One-Man-Army Bob was still holding steady.

  There was another boom as Josh fired over Bob’s head and knocked back a lieutenant without killing it. Dahlia finished it off with her wand, at the cost of twenty-two Mana. She drank a Common Mana Potion to restore some of it.

  “Lightning Bolt!” Barton shouted.

  The Tier Three Hex produced a jagged line of electrical devastation as thick as her arm. It flew into a Champion and then forked to hit two more big rats; each bolt forked a second and final time, delivering enough damage to drop the first three targets and injure another four.

  Dahlia targeted the temporary cleared area by the door.

  “Rattabatta, come help me!”

  A humanoid rat – with a different anatomy than the Ratlings – sporting a pair of bat wings on its back appeared a few feet off the ground and flew toward the nearest Lieutenant, tearing into it with six-inch-long poisoned talons.

  Bob emptied his gun at the other wounded rats. More rats went down.

  Rattabatta killed two Champions before a Guardian cut him in two with a crude axe made with a sharpened forty-pound weightlifting plate.

  Dahlia felt a cold, sharp pain in her heart, and it wasn’t metaphorical at all. Her Health bar didn’t drop, but she wasn’t able to do much for several seconds as she recovered. Having a Fiend killed hurt.

  Her Fiend’s loss seemed to drive Bloodykee into a cold frenzy. He stopped chattering and his black lightning bolts carefully targeted the monsters with the lowest Health; every shot was a critical.

  By the time the last Ratling died, Sangara?a was still alive, barely so. Dahlia only had one Fiend, an Apotheosis and one Boon left in her hand.

  Barton had consumed all his hex slots and only had two hexes left to cast.

  Other than that, everyone seemed to be okay, although Bob had to drink an Uncommon Health potion when Wendy ran out of Mana.

  The drawbacks of having weird Classes with abilities that needed twenty-four hours to reset were beginning to become apparent.

  On the one hand, Barton had saved the day with his nukes and Dahlia had helped Bob tank the whole room. On the other, they might not be able to do it again for the rest of the day.

  If we get a good reward from his room, I’ll level up and pick up another Skill. That might be enough to keep going. Same with Barton.

  We are clearing this level without Roland, she swore to herself.