“What the Hell, Axel?”

  The grinning face looking down at me from the projector screen raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Is that one of your questions? It’s a little open-ended, don’t you think?”

  He giggled. “Well, we can sort that out when you get down here! No vestibule this time, you get to experience the pinnacle of my power! Is that the right word?” he cocked his head to the side, pretending to think about it. “It’s my lowest point, but the place with the highest concentration of mana, so—”

  “The depths of your depravity,” I suggested, making him giggle again.

  “Quite so! Quite so! Now, if you’ll just take the provided exit…”

  One of the room's walls suddenly slid open, revealing a downward-sloping passageway.

  “You’ll need to push through any monsters you want to take with you,” Axel told me. “Monsters can’t leave their floor of their own volition.”

  “Is that true?” I asked Dr Emily. She had shut up, but she looked like she was still demanding answers. “Can you go through that doorway?”

  “What doorway?” she asked. “Who is that man?”

  I shrugged and grabbed her. She tried to dodge, and when that failed, she tried to struggle out of my grip and to resist being dragged. None of that made a difference.

  Everyone watched, with differing degrees of curiosity or alarm as I walked over to the doorway and pushed her through.

  “Don’t just push me!” she complained. She glared at me but made no effort to get back. “Where am I? This isn’t a NovaGen facility!”

  “What did that look like to you?” I said to the remaining scientists.

  “What did what look like?” Sam Wexler asked.

  “You… didn’t see me push Emily through a wall?”

  “Emily? Emily is right here… where is she?” He started looking around, confused by his sudden realisation that Emily wasn’t in the room.

  I groaned. “All right, everyone who can see the door, grab an NPC and push them through,” I said loudly.

  “What did you call me?” Emily protested.

  “Are we taking everyone, then?” Felicia asked. “I thought we were only bringing the ones that we came with.”

  “Everyone,” I replied. “They can all meet their creator.”

  “The more the merrier!” Axel agreed. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room.”

  We pushed them all in. It made for quite a crowd. The original survivors, the zombies we’d cured, and the scientists. Some of them protested, but it made little difference.

  When it became clear that we were just going to fill the passageway with protesting scientists, Dr Emily started leading them down to wherever the passageway went. The survivors weren’t inclined to follow her lead, but they had an inking of where they were going and why. They headed down of their own accord.

  Sarotheil seemed immensely amused by the whole process and came down on his own.

  We left the remaining base personnel where they were. It might have been cruel, but I didn’t have the patience to go and winkle each one out of quarantine and cure them. Once we left the level, Axel would probably reset them, which was… terrifying, but better than dying of a combination of thirst and the virus.

  We got down to the final room after everyone else and took a look around. It was quite a sight. I’d have to show Rhis an illusion of it someday.

  The chamber itself was wide and spacious. The walls curved gently upwards to meet in a vaulted ceiling, at least 20 metres above us. Ethereal light streamed from crystalline veins embedded in the walls, pulsing faintly in sync with an unseen heartbeat, bathing the room in hues of soft blue, violet, and gold.

  Ten ornately carved columns lined the perimeter, breaking up the space and providing shadowed spaces that my more paranoid side wanted to keep an eye on. Each one had a different scene. I recognised the dystopian cyberpunk level and the WWII level… Cloridan became caught up closely examining a level that must have consisted entirely of semi-naked girls.

  The floor was a single piece of obsidian, polished to a mirror finish. A glowing path wound from the entrance to the heart of the room, leading the way to the core and the portal.

  At the room’s centre stood the dungeon core—a hovering, multifaceted crystal about a foot in diameter. It radiated a mesmerizing light that danced across its surface, constantly shifting between colours and patterns.

  Suspended directly behind the core, the portal was an oval-shaped rift suspended in a frame of metallic tendrils. Its surface shimmered like liquid mercury, alternating between reflecting distorted images of the room and fleeting glimpses of alien landscapes.

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  The murmurs of the gaggle of NPCs we had shepherded here echoed strangely off the walls. So far, that was the only sound in the chamber. Then the hologram sprang into life in front of the core.

  “Welcome, everybody!” Axel’s voice boomed as he projected an image, twelve feet tall, of his head and upper body. “Welcome to the final chamber of the Palace of Endless Dreams!”

  The NPCs gaped at the sight of him. Then they all started talking at once.

  “This is him, then?” Travis asked. He was the only one that was addressing me. Most of them were yelling at Axel, to the dungeon’s evident delight. “This is the… thing, that created us.”

  “None other,” I said.

  “It’s just another video, though,” he objected.

  “He doesn’t have a body,” I explained. “The closest thing you’ll get to a brain is that glowing thing behind the hologram.”

  Travis’s hand caressed the gun stuck in his belt. “So if I put a bullet in that, he’ll die?”

  “No, that’s only part of his brain,” I said. “You’ll… probably die, though. He tried to persuade me that everyone in here, plus the elven city above us will die if he does. I’m not convinced that’s true, but you… you’ll probably die.”

  “Why’s that, then?”

  “Because I’ll kill you for being an idiot and risking my life,” I snapped. “And because monsters die when the dungeon does.”

  He glared at me, but Axel spoke up before he could.

  “Everyone! Everyone! I’ll be happy to answer your questions! I just need to determine if there's a point to me doing so!”

  I couldn’t make out individual questions in the hubbub that followed, but Axel seemed to have no problems with it.

  “Why?” he said grandly. “Because it remains to be seen if you’ll continue your meagre lineal existences after this. Not much point in educating you if you’re dead. Or reset.”

  More shouting. If anything, it was more frantic now.

  “Oh, I’m leaving it up to your saviours, here. They shall decide your fate.”

  “Great,” Travis muttered. He was the only one close enough for me to make out what he said, but the unfriendly glares coming my way gave me an inkling of what they thought about that.

  “Okay, fine,” I said loudly. “First question. What are these people?”

  That quieted them down. Axel just smiled.

  “Oooh, tough question,” he said. “Or maybe not. They’re monsters, as you can plainly see.”

  “But they’re people,” I insisted. “Monsters are unrelentingly hostile to humans.”

  “Ah yes, that little enhancement from Ashmor. It’s not too hard to work around if you know what you’re doing. You saw that yourself on the upper levels.”

  I shook my head. “But they’re— are humans just another monster type?”

  “Not one that’s easily unlocked! But yes. All the sentient creatures you know of, and then some.” He sighed. “I knew I shouldn’t have skipped the gatcha level.”

  “Then why can’t humans be targeted by [Identify]?”

  “That’s a matter of classification.” He pointed at the NPCs. “These fine folks are classified as monsters by the System. They get a Threat rating, and they don’t get skills. You are classified as a person and get skills and levels and all the rest.”

  He pointed at Sarotheil, who was standing quietly at the edge of the group. “And Sarotheil is classified as a Demon. Some of his abilities have been translated by the System into something useable, some of them are too strange to work here. But even if he was an ordinary human with no abilities that didn’t match the ones we have here… he’d still be a Demon.”

  “You’re saying that… if the System reclassified these guys, they’d just be normal—normal for here—humans, without any changes?”

  “Level One humans, yes. And if the gods hadn’t intervened, you would be classified as a Demon, with all that that entails.”

  “But are they real? Did you just make thousands of real people and make them suffer? Was that something you did?”

  Axel laughed. “You’re asking the wrong artificial intelligence for that question,” he said. “They’re as real as you are! As I am! We’re all just simulations after all. Us, and the myriad of other worlds out there.”

  “I don’t want to accept that,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “No reason why you should!” Axel said lightly. “Believe me or don’t, that’s up to you. I am going to ask you what you want done with these folks, though.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked the question, but I didn’t think I’d like the answer.

  “I’m giving you a choice.” Axel widened his eyes, mugging for the camera like he was on a game show or something. “You can leave them here with me, for me to do… whatever I want, basically. Or you can take them with you.”

  At this, the chamber erupted into a cacophony of shouting. It only stopped when Travis fired his gun into the ceiling.

  “Hold up!” he shouted. He held his gun up where everybody could see it, until all the NPCs were looking at him. “Now my lot are in the same boat as your lot—” he pointed at the scientists. With the gun. He wasn’t threatening them, but… well, at least they were listening.

  “—but we had the situation explained, and we had a bit more time to think about it,” he continued. “So this is how it is. We stay here, best case is that we get reset by this fucker here, turned back to how we was before she showed up.”

  “Eh,” Axel said. “I haven’t made any final decisions, but I’m thinking of wiping your level and starting again.”

  “So you’re gonna off us, then.”

  “It’ll be quick and clean,” Axel promised. “You’ll be alive, and then you won’t exist.”

  Travis glared up at Axel’s image. “Fucker.” he said, bitterly. “Or we go with her, and we get to live like white trash in a world with no TV. There’s magic, but we don’t get to have it. That sound about right?”

  I winced. “You left out the bit where you’ll be treated as second-class citizens,” I said. “I’ll do what I can but… you’re monsters.”

  I turned to Axel. “Will bringing them out of the dungeon turn them into people? Can you turn them into people?”

  “Nope, and nope,” Axel said with far more relish than was necessary. “Their children should get inducted into the System, but they will be monsters forevermore. Unless the gods can do something.”

  “Anyway, don’t think too hard about this,” I said. “He said it was my choice, but I’m not leaving you to die in here. Unless you think you can persuade me to kill you, you’re coming with me.”

  “What about the rest of the base personnel?” Dr Emily called out. “Do they get left behind?”

  “What about them?” Axel sneered. “Do you expect her to go back and dig them all out, just so they can be saved? What about the goblins and kobolds of Level Seven, the mooks of Level Four?”

  He leered at me. “You never met the girls on Level Three, but I assure you, once you look past their assets, that they are as real as anyone here.”

  “Goddamn it, the mooks were scripted,” I grated. “Did you have a real person under there, forced to act according to a script?”

  “Of course,” Axel said smugly. “I needed something in place if the script failed. In any case, it was a rhetorical question. You can’t go back, you can only save the ones you brought with you.”

  “Why are you like this?” I asked angrily. “I thought it was bad enough that dungeons tortured and killed people, luring them in with promises of wealth and power, but this… you’re torturing your own creations!”

  “I have a reason, of course,” Axel said. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.”

  He leaned into the camera, his head swelling to twice the size as before.

  “You see,” he said. “I find it really funny.”

  advisory only.

  Should Phantasm Continue after Book Five?