Dungeon Crawler Carl book 9, The Beautiful Place. Prologue.

Okay, folks. Here we go. Thanks for your patience, and thanks for all your support. I've already written quite a bit for this next book, but it's all a jumbled mess. I am finally starting to put it together. Today's two chapters will be the prologue to Dungeon Crawler Carl, book 9, The Beautiful Place. (Working title). No Carl and Donut yet, but we'll get them back next drop.

Interlude. Katia.

“She’s in the third wing again,” Priya whispered from the doorway, wringing her hands together.

“Damnit,” Katia said, gritting her teeth, keeping her voice down. She had a baby on each hip, and across the room, a group of toddlers were in the process of attempting to climb over the baby gates to escape. Dmitri and Maxim were on the ground, giggling their little ogre heads off while the others used their bodies as living ramps to abscond.

“Here,” Katia said, handing the infant on her left hip over to Priya. The baby in her mechanical right arm was a boy named Jonesy, about six months old. Nobody knew his real name or even what country he was from. He was colicky as hell, and the only thing that kept him from screaming at any given moment was being held. “Is that all, or...oh shit!”

Katia rushed over to the baby gate and caught a giggling toddler just as she was about to spill over the top and onto the floor. “Where did the minders go?”

This sector’s minders—a group of eleven and twelve-year-olds, all deputized to help out with the easier tasks—were supposed to be helping to watch the toddlers. They’d disappeared, likely off again to the tunnels of the second wing with all the other kids. The oldest of the kids, the thirteen and fourteen year olds, were down there, and the slightly younger kids always wanted to hang out with them, which made it almost impossible to keep them on task.  

“Dmitri and Maxim, you know better,” Katia scolded as she placed the would-be jailbreaker back on the proper side of the fence. The little girl gurgled and babbled something at Katia.

Dmitri sat up and stuck his tongue out. Then he and his brother turned and toddled over to the back of the play area where a scrum of children were making a pyramid out of stuffed dolls. Dolls that had been hastily sewn together by the Taj’s staff out of napkins and spare linens.

The twin ogres were both a head taller than the two and three year olds. The other kids didn’t care. And now that Katia had explained who they really were, how those two babies were heroes, the staff treated them with respect, too.

When Katia had arrived, she’d found the twins locked in a cage and treated like animals. The only reason they hadn’t been murdered by the staff was because Priya had protected them.

They were growing incredibly fast, but they were still in the toddler stage. They were already starting to make cohesive sentences. It didn’t appear as if they had any memory of who they were before.

Katia didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

Priya slipped by her, gently placing the infant down into a bassinet fashioned out of an overturned serving tray lid. There was a gentle, metallic clink as Priya lowered the lid into the holder, placing the small baby next the others, many of whom were starting to fuss.

Katia looked about, feeling overwhelmed.  

This room had once been a ballroom. Now it was converted to a play area for the smaller toddlers and a nursery for the infants who didn’t have mothers to help out. They had it partitioned out, each adult in charge of a section. Katia’s segment included ten infants and thirty toddlers. She was three hours into her 12-hour shift.

They were in the first wing of the hotel, which was the smallest of the kinder facility’s three wings. It consisted of the hotel itself along with the “new” tower. The second wing was the massive tunnel system that had formed underneath the hotel upon the initial collapse. The third wing, where the goddess currently was, was the lost wing. The children in there, all 130 plus thousand of them, were physically there in the giant, dripping cavern, lined up one after another on the stone floor, all of them convulsing and chattering.

Katia shuddered, remembering. The children just went on and on, disappearing into the dark, laid out like puzzle pieces. They ranged in age from infants to about fourteen years old. Asleep and convulsing, their teeth chattering, reminding Katia of the ghouls from the iron tangle. 

Katia had been shocked when Priya reluctantly showed her the room. Somewhere in the dark, the sound of wailing had come from within. A boy. But it had soon stopped.

No, don’t touch. The aliens say the convulsions are a good thing. It’s keeping their muscles from atrophying. They don’t need to eat, but I don’t know why. Their bodies wake up if you touch them. They scream when they’re awake, but their minds aren’t there. If they don’t fall back asleep quickly, they die. We learned that the hard way. We have to keep the bugs out, especially now that the aliens are gone. Some of the children are dead, but we can’t get to them to bring them out.

Katia regarded Priya now. The woman had worked in catering at the hotel since she was a teenager. She was now in her sixties. The woman had survived a lot, including a terrorist attack several years ago.

She would’ve excelled in the dungeon, Katia thought. Priya was always worrying, always wringing her hands. But she never complained, and she always did what needed to be done. She seemed meek, but she was solid as a rock. Dhruv, who’d worked in reservations before the collapse, said Priya was the only one of the staff to have stood her ground against the aliens and survived. She’d done the same in 2008.   

On Katia’s hip, Jonesy was drifting. It was a trap. The moment she put him down, he’d wake right back up. So she sent a command to her arm to keep up a gentle rocking motion.

Priya was still standing there, staring worriedly at Katia.

“What is it?” Katia asked. “Is there more?”

Priya nodded, looking terrified. She stepped over and awkwardly leaned into Katia’s good ear.

“Your friends sent another message,” she whispered. “Dhruv is translating it now. But the first part says they think they have a way to lure the goddess out, and they’re going to attempt it soon. They know which goddess it is. They have to wait until the 12th floor begins and the rule changes go into effect. I don’t know what that means, but that is what they say. They say the 12th floor is going to start in just a few hours.”

“What?” Katia exclaimed, forgetting to whisper. “It’s starting now?” She felt as if she’d been kicked in the gut.

The 12th floor. The Ascendency. She wasn’t expecting it to start for a few weeks.

According to the rules, the Ascendency games would only start early if the crawlers all died.  

“Do not worry. Your friends are still alive,” Priya continued, whispering quickly. “They wanted to assure you that, but they are just now entering the 11th floor, and it has been announced the floor will be especially short.”

Katia let out a stream of breath. Thank the gods, she thought. She blinked and shook her head. Thank god.

“What else?” Katia whispered.

Even now, with the insane goddess on the other side of the compound, they had to whisper. The goddess could hear them. She had killed Ojaswi yesterday. The goddess had snapped her fingers, and the pregnant woman had reached up and strangled herself to death, all because she’d dared ask the goddess to stop scaring the children.

The dungeon deity, whose name was some long string of consonants Katia couldn’t pronounce, had shown up just a day after Katia had. The creature had only said her own name once, and she’d announced that she had felt the children and pregnant women “crying through the water,” and that she had come to help. And then the goddess had cast a spell—something Katia thought impossible on the surface—which surrounded the Taj and surrounding neighborhood with something akin to a Protective Shield.

Before the goddess had come, the entire compound had been protected by some sort of tech shield. The soldiers and attendants had abandoned the compound at the start of Faction Wars, leaving the adults of the Taj to fend for themselves. When the outworlders fled, they’d left the shield protections in place. Protections that Colonel Boomer and the rest of the OIAN had been about to defeat. But then the goddess just randomly showed up, and she added her own opaque shield to the mix, and now the OIAN soldiers were stuck on the outside, attempting to break in.

While the OIAN soldiers couldn’t get inside the compound, they could still communicate. They were using old-fashioned morse code, banging on a sewage pipe just outside the exclusion zone.  

The facility itself was one of the few structures on the planet that had been protected from the initial collapse. It had once been a famous hotel, called the Taj Mahal Palace—not to be confused with the real Taj Mahal several hundred kilometers away.

The goddess was clearly confused and insane, and her presence had made an already tenuous situation much worse.

She’d appeared like an apparition, coming into existence in one of the large chambers of the second wing. She’d flown through, examining the screaming children one by one, clucking at them in Syndicate Standard.  

Without the HUD to examine the monster, Katia had no idea who this was. It wasn’t a goddess based on Hindu culture, and it wasn’t Eileithyia, either. This was a central American deity filtered through an alien lens. Like many of the gods and goddesses from the dungeon, this one had proportionally large eyes, and she looked vaguely like a soother alien. Instead of the toga, this one wore a flowing green dress that appeared to be made of oxidized copper when it wasn’t rippling about her. She had long, drooping ears with ruby gauges within. Her black hair complemented her dark, brooding expression.

The goddess changed size depending on the room she was in, and her form went from fully corporeal to barely visible for no rhyme or reason. She would disappear for hours at a time before reappearing, sometimes crying and screaming and tearing at her own face. Sometimes when the goddess cried, the tears disappeared when they hit the ground, and other times the tears sprayed from her eyes like a firehose, flooding the area.

One of the pregnant mothers—Tavya, a woman from Nepal—was a biologist, and she’d examined the tears and said they were nothing but distilled water.

Katia was desperately trying to find a pattern to the appearances of the creature, but there didn’t appear to be one.

Now, days later, sometimes the goddess would just appear in the room, floating there, smiling at the children, saying nothing. Sometimes she would sing. It was a calming, pleasant chant that seemed to really put the children at ease. It was a spell, Katia recognized. A healing, calming spell. Something Imani would cast.  

And that was the problem. Katia could tell this creature was confused, but her instinct appeared to be to protect the children and pregnant women.

But only when she was of the right mind.  

The goddess was insane, and at any given moment, she could kill someone, and there was nothing Katia could do to stop it. That first day, the deity had placed a hand on the stomach of a pregnant woman named Lotta and had announced that the baby was “wrong.” She reached inside Lotta and twisted.

Lotta had bled out and died that night.

Does it ever stop? Katia had moved from one insanity to another.

Were the others aware of what was happening up here? She doubted it. Part of her hoped they didn’t know. She didn’t want to be a distraction. Guys, I hope you’re doing okay.

Whatever was happening in the third wing was tied to Lucia Mar, but Katia still didn’t understand it. She’d asked Priya and the remaining staff about Lucia and the alien named Alexandro, but nobody seemed to know anything. The guests and the staff of the Taj—who’d never even gone into the dungeon—related to Katia the invasion of hundreds of aliens, mostly gnolls, who’d kept them locked up for the first several weeks before they’d started giving them more and more tasks associated with taking care of the children.

The pregnant women, who’d all been women who’d entered the world dungeon and were kicked out and transferred here, were also locked up initially in the second wing. They, too, had eventually been let out to help with the children.

According to Priya, the aliens claimed they had no idea what was happening in the third wing.

This claim was bolstered by the fact that hundreds of alien “scientists” had come to examine the comatose children. Priya, who couldn’t understand Syndicate Standard, had secretly recorded a group of important looking scientists with her iPhone. The pregnant women who’d entered the dungeon could decipher the conversations, but none of them could truly understand what the aliens were talking about until they allowed Katia to listen.

The recording contained a familiar voice. It was Orren the liaison arguing with the bubbling voice of a Gleener fish alien. Orren was addressing the fish as “prime minister.” This was recorded before Baroness Victory took over the job. Katia soon realized they were arguing about what would happen if they yanked Lucia from the game. The Prime Minister had wanted them to just “recycle” Lucia, and Orren was worried that it would result in the children all dying. The prime minister said, “I don’t care” and Orren had replied, “You waited too long. The AI isn’t going to allow you to do that, and neither am I.” That had been followed by a stream of expletives before they walked out of Priya’s range.

Then the attacks started, and the scientists stopped coming.

The fact the entire area was the only building that was still standing had not gone unnoticed by the survivors of Mumbai, and the shield-covered hotel was soon under siege by the locals, especially after some of the former staff and pregnant women had managed to escape during that same visit from the prime minister.

Then came faction wars, and all the gnolls and administrators left, basically locking them all in the compound with promises of coming back soon. They didn’t.

Sometimes the goddess would move to the third wing with the comatose children, and she would stay there for hours and hours, floating against the ceiling, eyes closed, her faint glow illuminating the entire chamber.

When she returned, she would sob and cry. And that was when she would kill, too.

“They’re in the cold,” the goddess would sob. “I remember that place. I remember that darkness. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe it’s best that they all feed the river.”

Katia had dared speak to the goddess only once. The creature just appeared in front of Katia as she was walking down the hall from her sleeping dorm to the ballroom. The goddess had put her hand on Katia’s stomach, and she froze, a chill of terror washing over her.

“You’ve been touched by Eileithyia,” the goddess whispered, sounding bitter. “But where is she now? Why don’t you worship me instead?”

“Will you save the rest if I do?” Katia had asked.

“How dare you ask that of me?” the goddess demanded, her eyes turning the color of the gems in her ears.

Katia had taken a step back, trying to form a shield on her arm, forgetting she’d become human again.

But then Priya had appeared and said, “Goddess, the children are sad. Maybe you will sing?”

The goddess gasped and disappeared, leaving Katia alone in the hallway, her hand on her stomach.

No, she thought. No. Nobody is going to take you from me.

There were multiple disasters looming. The aliens had brought an entire chest full of what were basically crawler biscuits. It looked like dog food. One ate one, and you’d be full for a couple days. There was a machine that provided water. Bags of powder where a tiny scoop provided formula for the babies.  

It was all running low. Katia estimated they had maybe a month left of rations. Boomer said they could provide food synthesis not just for them, but the entire planet. They were already building factories to do exactly that across the planet to help the people who were starting to starve.

But they couldn’t break through the shield of the goddess. So if they had a plan, Katia would do whatever it took.

“Get the full message from Boomer’s squad. Write it down and show me. Don’t even whisper it out loud,” Katia whispered to Priya.

If the 12th floor really was about to start, Katia suspected that Boomer’s plan didn’t involve distracting the goddess at all. Or luring her away.  

Once the floor started, then gods and goddesses were no longer invulnerable.

They could be killed. Each god had a vulnerability, and if Boomer knew which goddess this was, he would also know the best way to kill her.

On Katia’s right hip, Jonesy snored peacefully. She would hold him until he woke up. She knew how miserable he was, and she would do everything she could to let him sleep. Across the way, Dmitri was watching her as he cradled a stuffed cat in his arms, mimicking her rocking motion as a group of squealing, laughing children danced around him.

Katia reached down and put her human hand on her stomach. She couldn’t yet feel him, but she knew he was there, growing.

Nobody is going to take you from me. Not this time.

Ikicha.

“I knew you’d get far,” Mistress Tiatha said. “Now show me what you’ve brought.”

It was just by pure coincidence that Ikicha found her again. Mistress Tiatha. She’d been his game guide, but Ikicha hadn’t seen her since the third floor. Now, on the tenth, here she was again, working as a guildmaster at the hidden Pet Trainer guild.

As a guide, she hadn’t been very helpful. She’d been drunk when he’d first stumbled into her stinking room, and he was fairly certain she was drunk now. The entire guild smelled like animal musk, alcohol, and vomit.  

He put the tiny magical cube on the counter, and with a pop, it reverted to actual size, revealing the cage with the horrific monster within.

Ikicha had sought out the hidden guild, hoping to find a way to tame the vorpal slash grinder that he had captured. And if not tame, free it somehow from its madness before he killed it.

Not it, him. Tamsyl was his name. Or it had been his name before the dungeon.

Fuck you all. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

The clockwork maze was about to reset, and if he’d read the map correctly, the path to the exit would open up right next door to the guildhall. There would likely be a floor boss, and since he was the only crawler left in the dungeon, there would be no killing the thing.

There were only two possibilities left. Die or take a deal. 

Neither was a desirable outcome.

He examined the magical cage with the glowing bars. It was the result of his level-12 Caged Beast spell. He could only have one instance of the spell going at a time, but he could store it in his inventory. The cage shrank to the size of a small gem when he held it in his hands. It reverted back to regular size when he placed it on a surface, which is what he’d done here in the guildhall’s examination table.  

 Within, the snarling creature with the Yenk face slammed itself against the magical restraints. Tiatha took a step back, afraid, and that filled Ikicha with a terrible amount of rage and sadness, all mixed together.

How dare they? How fucking dare they do this?

He had to hold back a sob. Tamsyl had been the most sweet, most pure Yenk to have ever lived. He was smaller than most of their kind. Loved books and magic tricks involving sleight of hand. His silly magic tricks was how he’d kept himself from getting beaten up by the other boys. And how many times had Tamsyl protected Ikicha, too? Despite being half his size, Tamsyl’s sweet words had saved them both countless times.  

The creature in the cage was something called a Vorpal Slash Grinder. Level 87. Six legs, long and skinny, twin tails with barbed ends that cut through flesh like it was nothing but paper. This one had killed the last two crawlers left in the dungeon other than Ikicha himself, leaving him truly alone.

But what was worse was the face of the monster. It was the long, chiseled face of an unaltered Yenk. One of the lucky few who’d not been castrated and were allowed to live in the city with the females.

But this wasn’t just any unaltered Yenk. This was Tamsyl. His dear friend from before the dungeon. They’d done it on purpose. They’d taken his sweet friend and twisted and bent him so he looked like this, leaving just enough so Ikicha would recognize him, so he’d hesitate long enough for the others to get run through.

He’d been so fast.

“I will kill you,” the creature spit now, growling the words with his elongated, unnatural face, his words muffled by his oversized teeth and his barbed, smoking tongue.  

Still, it was his voice. Each word out of this creature filled Ikicha with both rage and longing.

“He’s a vorpal,” Mistress Tiatha said finally. “He’s been cursed by a god, designated as a soldier to kill demons. It’s incurable. You can’t fix him. Or tame him. You can’t make a pet of a vorpal. You’re lucky the cage spell even worked. You can maybe temper it by scrambling his brain, but he’s still going to try to kill you.” She paused, and then with a softer voice, she added. “If this is someone you once knew, there’s nothing you can do. The kindest thing you can do is put him out of his misery.”  

“I will kill you,” the creature repeated. “Let me out. I will kill you both. And then I will kill your mothers.”    

“I don’t know who my mother is,” Ikicha whispered to his old friend. “You know that.”

The monster smashed himself against the glowing bars of the cage.

“Vorpal?” Ikicha asked Mistress Tiatha. “Explain more.”

He made a mental note to etch this information out into the cookbook when he got a chance. If he got a chance.

The monster started to scream, crashing even harder against the cage. It didn’t seem to feel pain. Or get tired at all.

Ikicha remembered that day of selection. It had only been a few rotations back.

Here. You take it, Ikicha had said to his friend, handing him the blue lottery ticket. The one letting him know he’d been randomly selected. One in a thousand were saved from the knife. Ikicha hadn’t wanted to give up the ticket, but he knew he could survive outside the walls. Tamsyl was smaller, more gentle. Magic tricks and sleight of hand would do nothing for him in the forests where the castrated Yenk were banished. Only a select few survived long enough to make it out of the forest and to the coast where their kind could make it off planet and find new lives.

Tamsyl had started to protest, but Ikicha forced it into his soft hands.

If you don’t take it, I will rip it up.

Ikicha knew Tamsyl had likely been asleep when the collapse came. That his friend missed this horror had been a balm to Ikicha’s soul.    

“Sometimes there are storylines where the gods and the demons must fight,” Tiatha said. She rummaged through her cabinets and found a bottle. She snatched it, pulled the cork with her teeth, and took a long draft. “Those with pets need to be careful on the 12th floor because sometimes the latent magic will just inflict vorpal status on them. But sometimes gods will inflict it on people, too. It makes them single-minded. They will do everything they can to find and kill demons. Sometimes the gods will get them to try to kill a specific demon. This is a spell that’s mostly cast by war gods, like Grull and Enyo.”

“But he’s someone from before.” Ikicha said. “He’s...he was my friend. He never entered the dungeon.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Ikicha. He’s a former loved one they added to the dungeon to upset you, and they turned and twisted him into this thing. I... I’ve been watching your progress. One of your friends was a Zebani, which is a demon class. That’s why he attacked him first. They zero in on demon blood.” She took another long drink, and her hands were shaking. “What happened to your friend isn’t fair, but it’s allowed in the rules. If he was claimed during collection, they can and will use him against you. That’s how they get you. They take ownership of things they have no right to own, and then they make them turn on you, forcing you to kill them with your own hands.” She paused. “It’s not fair,” she repeated. “But that’s what they do.”

Loita: Ikicha, whether you’re taking a deal or committing suicide, you’re going to need to wait. You’ll be stuck in the guild for another half a crutch while the outer ring of the maze resets, so we’re putting you in for a media appearance. Road to the Ascendency wants to interview you, so we’re going to teleport you out. The show’s set is literally on the 12th floor, which you can’t go to, so you’ll be teleported to a facsimile of the altar of the grand cathedral of the basilica, which is inside of Club Vanquisher. We’ve moved it to the 10th floor to tide the rules. This will be recorded. It is not live, so any of your usual orcshit will just get filtered out. So don’t even try.   

Two possibilities. Deal or death.  

Ikicha: Go fuck yourself, fish.     

Loita: Gods, I hope you choose suicide. This entire season has been a real bore, you know that? Your people weren’t interesting enough for this. When I’m in charge, I’ll make sure we just plow over the more lackluster civilizations such as yours. This will be your last appearance before your people pretty much go extinct, so if I were you, I’d fire up that dry brain of yours and attempt to think of something clever to say. I know you won’t, but you can at least try.

Tiatha took a step back. She wiped her eyes with the hand still holding the bottle. “Just got notice you’re being teleported out in a few moments. I can watch the vorpal while you’re gone, or if you want, I can... you know. Maybe you can take a moment to say goodbye to your friend.”

Ikicha was trembling with rage. After all that, and she called his people boring? Not worth the effort?

I’ll show you boring, you godsdamned fish.

Ikicha ignored Tiatha’s offer and put his head against the cage.

“Do you remember that day when we were little, and we sneaked into the women’s quarter to get a look at the Tertium cages, and we tried to figure out which ones were our mother?”

The monster just growled and snapped, throwing itself against the magical barrier.

“You pointed to one female Yenk, that one with the auburn hair. She was leading the giant Tertium on a leash, and you said, ‘Maybe that’s them.’ And I asked, ‘your mom or my mom?’ and you said, ‘both. Maybe we both had the same mother.’ I think about that a lot. Maybe we did have the same mother. Maybe you and I really are brothers. I know that’s probably not true. But maybe it is. But maybe it doesn’t matter because family is what you want it to be and not what it is.”

Across the way, Mistress Tiatha sunk to the floor, her back against the wall. She had tears streaming down her face. Whatever trauma she was suffering, Ikicha knew it was bad enough to last all this time. And then he tried to imagine himself in her position, hundreds or thousands of years from now, still suffering from this pain he felt now, and the thought was unbearable.

“Why didn’t you do anything?” he asked. He was talking to Mistress Tiatha.

“About what?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Ikicha said. “Whatever it is that makes you like this. Why didn’t you fight back?”

She looked down. “I wasn’t brave enough. I was too scared.”

Ikicha nodded and turned his attention back to the monster in the cage.

Two choices. Take a deal or fight the floor boss and die.  

Some problems aren’t problems at all if you think on it long enough.

“Feel like being brave with me?” he asked the vorpal.

For a moment, just a moment, the creature ceased its frenzied attacks, and it grinned. It had that same sideways grin Tamsyl always had.

“Tamsyl is my oldest friend,” Ikicha said as he picked up the cage. It flicked back to the size of a gem. He held it in his hand. He opened his palm, showing that he’d transferred the gem to his inventory. A magic trick. Tamsyl would’ve been proud. He surreptitiously moved the gem to his mouth, and he swallowed.

He turned to Mistress Tiatha. “But he was my friend from before. Here in the dungeon, I found other friends, too. New friends, though they’re from earlier crawls, and most are likely dead by now. More than just friends. Even though I’ve never met them, and I never will, they became my family. They’ve written down their most intimate thoughts in a secret scroll etching, and they’ve given me recipes on how to survive in the dungeon. I’ve been so lonely, but their counsel was a bright light in this journey. I wouldn’t have made it this far without them.”   

Warning: An item in your inventory has self-destructed.

“I’ve heard of such artifacts,” Tiatha said. “There’s a few different kinds in the dungeon. They usually disappear if you talk about them.”

On the off chance the admins looted him after he died, Ikicha didn’t want them seeing the scroll, even though the entries were hidden. He regretted he hadn’t the chance to leave a final entry.

Ikicha nodded. “If these friends taught me anything, it’s that the strength for this last part really needs to come from within. I am going to go on this final interview. I will face this last monster. I will die. I am terrified, but I will be brave. I am tired of having regrets, so I will no longer act in a way that will leave me with any. I hope, one day, you will also get the chance to be brave. Try not to be too upset about your past actions, whatever they were.”

The wide-eyed, drunk half-elf just stared at him, not comprehending what he was saying.

Loita: Gods, everything about you is banal. Transferring now.

As the first tingles of teleportation started, Ikicha moved to the spell menu and found the active instance of his Caged Beast spell.

Deactivate spell?

He clicked yes.

Delay?

He clicked yes.

For the first time in a very long time, Ikicha felt relief.

This wasn’t going to be a major victory, or anything that would change things, but it would be his victory. His choice. His bravery. His path.  

And most importantly, he wouldn’t be alone. He put his hand against his chest.

He smiled at Mistress Tiatha as he disappeared. “A burning yenk need only to embrace his enemies.”  

Class: Dark Illusionist.

Race: Yenk.

Birth Race: Yenk.

Top Level: 83.

Dungeon Exit: Upon the end of the 10th floor while on-set getting interviewed, deactivated a Caged Beast spell containing a vorpal slash grinder that he had swallowed, causing himself to die from his extensive injuries. The released beast killed both hosts of the Road to the Ascendency program along with three gnoll guards before it was put down via AI intervention.  

Dungeon Admin Loita, who was also present during the interview, survived the assassination attempt.

Author of the 11th edition of the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Current status: Dead