Tori woke up eventually, and I managed to get a few hours of sleep before she shook my shoulder. An ominous orange glow filled the Howling Moray’s rock tunnel maze—a glow that hadn’t been there before—and I closed my eyes as the searing light redoubled the headache I’d picked up last night.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She only pointed up.

  Bobby was already gone, and I let Tori throw me through the air with Push. She joined me in the tunnel a moment later, and we hurried back to the air pocket we’d entered the maze through.

  “We got company. Lots of it,” Bobby said.

  I stared at the orange glow emanating from the water below. In the hours I’d worked and slept, the gray-blue had been completely eclipsed by an almost radioactive, toxic-looking aura. It reminded me of—no, it was exactly like one of the herbicides we kept on hand for the farm, in case a particularly nasty kind of weed got into the corn.

  “Let me guess. Orange coral?” I asked.

  Bobby nodded. “Got it in one. Nice job. I think they started growing as soon as we killed that boss, but we were in the cave, so we didn’t notice. Since we know they’re part of the Chthonic Abysslord, I’m guessing we’re either about to transition to Floor Two like the Soldier Field dungeon did, or we need to get down there before Floor One gets completely overrun.”

  Tori nodded, glancing at the water before turning to me. “We should go down there, but…”

  “But what?”

  “The full clear,” she answered. “What if we miss a chance to finish it?”

  I checked the dungeon’s status.

  Tier Two Dungeon: The Watery Grave (Floor One)

  Objective: Defeat The Blood in the Water (1/1)

  Objective: Defeat The Howling Moray (1/1)

  The Watery Grave (Floor Two)

  Objective: Defeat The Chthonic Abysslord (0/1)

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 62%

  Fragile Walls: This dungeon is close to breaking. Its inhabitants will be freed if a threshold of Delver deaths inside is reached.

  Break Counter: 5/5

  Time until Dungeon Break: Two Hours, Thirty Minutes

  Sealed Environment: You cannot leave this dungeon until it is completed.

  Environmental Hazard: This dungeon’s denizens are not its only threat.

  I froze when I saw the dungeon break counter, and the new timer. We were close to two-thirds done with the Watery Grave’s completion bonus, but I couldn’t guarantee that the remaining thirty-eight percent would be down below. Worse, we were on a time limit—and not a three-day or two-week one.

  Someone else had died in here—there must’ve been a fifth party member on Leana’s team—and now we only have a couple of hours to clear it out. “Tori, what if we don’t worry about the bonus for now, and if we can complete it after the final boss dies, we give it a go?”

  She looked like she was about to cry, or yell, but Bobby cleared his throat. “There’s another option, Miss Vanderbilt. You stay behind and hunt down the half-dozen Level Twenty-Something Crushtaceans we missed, or swim around looking for a couple of Bar Cutters, and Hal and I go deal with the final boss. You’ll get half experience, but we’d all get the full clear for sure that way.”

  The crying look went away, but Tori practically radiated fury. Her eyes narrowed and blazed as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Jessica finally gave me permission to do this, and I’m not missing out on the final boss. I need to prove I can handle it.”

  “I believe you can, Tori, but sometimes, the solution to a problem is to focus on what matters most. This dungeon is going to break. When it does, it’s going to spill out into Museumtown. That’s where your step-mom is, and no one up there can handle a Level Fifty boss. It’s us, right now, or no one,” I said. Then I pulled out the Chthonic Pills and handed one to Bobby. “You with us?”

  In the end, Tori was with us.

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  The lost rewards weren’t worth the risk to her, and I was grateful for it.

  The three of us plunged into the blood-orange depths. None of us had to breathe; Tori’s whole body had grown tough, and she’d held her breath for five minutes with no problems before we started descending. As for Bobby and me?

  Well, Chthonic meant something about the underworld.

  I looked at Bobby’s half-skeletal form as he swam ahead into the abyss below. He and I were both almost nothing but bone, armor, and magical gear; his perfectly-fitted suit hung loosely from his shoulders and flapped in the currents as we descended.

  The water should have gotten darker. But the further we plunged, the more tree-like orange corals grew around us. I signaled Tori not to touch any. The last thing we needed was for a Stalk to join whatever boss we were heading toward.

  My feet hit steel unexpectedly, and I staggered. Tori and Bobby landed near me as I recovered, readying my Trip-Hammer and the railgun. We stood on an eight-sided platform with a raised glass half-sphere in the middle; from the shaking and the pressure, the platform was slowly moving up. There were no rails, no structures on the sides, just a wide, flat platform.

  And inside the glass orb, a skull turned to stare at us, eyes blazing a red-orange that matched the Charge flowing through my gauntlet—and the water all around us.

  Chthonic Abysslord: Level Fifty-Three Elite Dungeon Boss

  Current Difficulty: Challenging

  No king rules forever, but the Chthonic Abysslord is determined to try. The supreme ruler of the Watery Grave, this monstrosity yearns for more: more food, more power, and more territory. With its dungeon about to break, it sees an opportunity for all three.

  Invulnerable - This boss has no weak points and cannot be damaged.

  Myriad - This boss’s Elite state consists of innumerable members of a swarm, and will continue swarming until conditions change.

  Dominion Aura - This boss’s lair grants it the Elite status.

  Elite - This monster moves faster and hits harder than a similarly powerful monster.

  Oppressive - This monster’s lair oppresses intruders, reducing their damage dealt.

  I ignored the messages and swung the Trip-Hammer into the glass sphere. The impact sent a jolt up my arms into my elbows and shoulders, but the orb remained intact. The Abysslord’s eyes locked on me, and if anything, they only burned more.

  As I recovered, a screaming, burbling roar filled the water, and the trap sprung.

  Stalk of the Chthonic Abysslord: Level Fifty Boss

  Current Difficulty: Extreme

  A mere appendage of the monstrous boss inhabiting the Watery Grave’s deepest recesses, the Stalk of the Chthonic Abysslord controls all. It sees all. It consumes all.

  One Stalk would have been a fair fight.

  Two probably would have been doable. Maybe even three.

  Not eight.

  From every corner of the octagon, a glowing red-orange tentacle erupted upward. They loomed over us, beaks burbling and feeder tendrils waving. Then they slammed into the platform in a rippling wave of flesh.

  I threw myself to the side, then rolled to avoid a second Stalk. Tori blasted herself upward with a Push. Bobby simply sidestepped and started punching. And the Stalks’ beaks clacked as their eyes rolled back and forth, searching for prey.

  Tori was practically flying, using Push to keep herself above the platform and out of reach, but she couldn’t fit more spells into her rotation. “Hal, plan?!” she shouted.

  I didn’t have a plan. No time to think. I ducked again as a tentacle wurbled and swung over my head. “Fight back!” I yelled. My words came out in bubbles. “That one first!”

  One tentacle reached for Tori, and it couldn’t react as the Trip-Hammer slammed into its base. Flesh tore, and a fountain of yellow-orange gore erupted into the water through the bleeding gash in its side. It roared and lowered, wobbling as it crashed onto the steel platform—and onto me.

  I tried to dodge.

  I didn’t try hard enough.

  The weight felt like a truck had rolled off its lift. I tried to push back against it, but my skeletal frame wasn’t enough; it pressed me down, crushing me below it as beaks burbled and snapped. I fired the railgun, and it tore a fist-sized hole into the flesh and muscle.

  Then the weight over me tripled. It tripled again and again until I felt like my bones were about to shatter. The stench was unbearable as the tentacle’s insides were forced out of the wounds I’d ripped into its side. I tried to crawl away, gagging and retching, but the pressure was incredible; it flattened even the Chthonic Pill’s protections.

  Then it lifted.

  The tentacle stayed down as I pushed myself to my feet. It looked deflated, though I could barely see the monstrosity through all the chunks of giant octopus in the water. It twitched once, then went still.

  Stalk of the Chthonic Abysslord Defeated: 7/8 Remaining

  “Left!” I tried to say, but I barely had air in my lungs, and my ribs all felt cracked. A part of my brain crazily thought that I should never, ever mess with Tori again. The rest of it tried to push my body through the agony.

  Tori took a second to figure out the strategy, and I’d already landed a pair of blows that opened wounds, but nothing significant. Meanwhile, Bobby had his hands full with a trio of Stalks, all targeting him, and the platform kept rocking and jerking back and forth as the massive tentacles crashed into it. I waited for Tori to Pull the stalk straight so I could land a decent hit.

  Instead, it wrapped its tip around her leg and pulled her.

  Tori screamed as the Stalk of the Chthonic Abysslord’s beak ripped through her Iron Body and into her thigh. The agony was worse than anything she’d ever felt—with the possible exception of being told Mom and Dad were splitting up. Worse than being jumped by howler monkeys. Worse than the Floor Mimic.

  Worse than the pacer test in PE.

  She screamed again. She could feel blood spurting out of her leg, could feel her muscles ripping and parting as the beak chewed through her thigh and gnawed on her femur. It wasn’t just biting her leg; it was teething on it, gnawing at it like a dog on a rawhide bone.

  She tried to cast Push.

  It worked. But that only made it worse. The Push shoved her away from the monstrous tentacle, but the beak’s tip tore even more flesh and parted what veins the chomping, gnawing thing hadn’t already ripped.

  She hung in the water a few feet above the platform, screaming and shaking, hardly able to move.

  Then a flash of orange light filled the water. She felt so cold all of a sudden as darkness filled her eyes.

  This sucked, and she missed her mom.

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