“Well, we got four hundred and sixty-three Gold Coins back from Tex,” I removed my monocle and rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “So not a bad profit. We need to get some more stuff for him.” I glanced lovingly at the crystal ball Tex had given me. It was twinned to one that he carried, and I could use it to speak to him when I needed to. It would be weeks, possibly months before he called to set up a handoff outside of the city, but I got a fluttery feeling in my stomach whenever I looked at it.

  The new coins didn’t have my face on them, which was refreshing. They were stamped with the profile of a bald man. His prominent nose stuck out beyond the edge of a portcullis that appeared as a background image on the coins. They were shiny, heavy, and tasted like gold, so I didn’t care about what picture the system had stamped on them.

  “I thought you’d sworn off dungeon floors?” Kat asked. She had built another stool of coins and was perched on it, going through her status screen for my home.

  “They can’t all be as annoying as the last few. Can they?” I asked her in a worried voice.

  “No!” she laughed. “Usually, they’re more like the first and fourth. More fighty than designed to torture the core owner.”

  “Where is the core? Does it exist physically?” I wondered.

  “It does, and no, you can’t see it,” Kat said quickly.

  “It’s mine, isn’t it?” I asked, annoyed. I was betting it was shiny and would make a fine addition to the hoard. It would be nice to have a pillow.

  “It’s up there,” she pointed to the ceiling. "It’s buried in the stone. All anyone has to do to initiate a duel for control is touch the damn thing! Leave it where it is, please?”

  “It can be taken from me?” That was new. “Alright, fine. It stays where it is. I can find something else to rest my head on.”

  “You wanted it for a pillow?” she rolled her eyes at me. “Permission to take from the hoard to open a new level, oh lord and master?” she said sarcastically.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, accessing my own dungeon screen. “Nine bloody hundred! The system is a goddamn bandit! This is system-sanctioned theft!”

  “Oh, shut up, lizard. You’ll make more than that back as we clear it.”

  I rose to my clawed feet and shook myself out, the vibration passing down my body to the tip of my nose to the end of my tail, like a dog shaking off the rain. Kat fluttered up to her usual spot behind my head, and we threaded our way down through the dungeon floors I already controlled.

  The industrial floor was darkly lit, like something out of a dystopian Victorian novel about the harsh realities of the working class. It had arrived already covered in soot and ash, so despite all the vats and forges being unused, the whole place was filthy.

  “The Janglebonks don’t like this floor. We should look at getting more minions; some more miners would be good,” Kat said.

  “How harsh was the world you came from, Princess? I am not going to be using child labour,” I said. She thwacked me on the ear with her sword.

  The next two floors were unchanged from the way they had spawned. The last one was still blissfully free of suicidal balls of fluff. I had to suppress a cough every time I thought of all those quills stuck in my throat.

  “Righto,” I grumbled as I spent the coins, and a new hatch appeared next to the bottom of the staircase. I slipped downwards into the darkness, then butted my nose against the portcullis and waited while the system did whatever it had to do to create and populate the floor.

  A grinding of metal followed as the gate lifted, and I stepped out onto my next conquest. I looked around, taking in the flickering torches that lined the distant walls and threw flickering shadows throughout the space. There were none of the technical gizmos from the Doltron floor; ominous-looking torture devices lined the walls instead.

  “Oh, this one isn’t too bad. It’s a cultist floor. You just need to kill the chief-crazy,”

  “Where’s the treasure?” This place was giving me the creeps.

  The nearest one is that way.” She pointed with her sword, the end of it showing in my peripheral vision. “Gee-up, horsey.”

  I scowled but headed in the indicated direction. I moved stealthily down a wide corridor.

  “How is that even a thing?” I asked, nodding at a contraption that appeared to be designed to insert delicate parts of someone's anatomy into other parts of themselves. “No way does it work.”

  “That’s Archibald the Masochist’s Self-Molester. It does work, and you don’t want to know how,” she replied. “Eyes on the prize, you kinky lizard!”

  “I not even equipped to use the fucking thing, Kat,” I complained quietly as we headed towards a large door at the end of the corridor. It was less of a door and more of a Portal Of Doom. Faint wails, sobbing, and muffled screams came from beyond it.

  “All praise be unto he who makes the worlds tremble!” called several voices in unison.

  “No! Please, no, no, no!” a single voice cried out. I stuck my head through the door and then yanked it back.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Jesus!”

  “Yeah. Cults are weird in this world. Back home, it’s just usually some peak cultivator who wanted a fan club. As long you don’t talk shit about their boss, you’re golden. On Helstat, they take things a bit more seriously.”

  “Helstat?” I asked.

  “This world, lizard. Look, you need to get in there and stop them doing… whatever they were doing so you can get to the chest, and we can get the hell out of here,” Kat whispered back.

  “You didn’t see? One of them was in the process of slicing the poor bastard on the altar right along the bottom of his–”

  “I closed my eyes, and I don’t want to know! I closed my eyes for a bloody reason, you cretin!” she snapped, rather more loudly than was sensible.

  “Who’s there?” a man's voice called. “Herman, if that’s you, you don’t have to do it outside; you’re welcome to join us. It always freaks out the victims when you– Who the fuck are you?”

  He was human. Ritual scars had been carved over every inch of his visible skin. Far too much of his skin was visible. He was wearing a leather posing pouch, and what appeared to be old-fashioned braces looped over his shoulders to hold it in place. Intricate whorls of scarification covered him from head to foot.

  “By Garnok’s Bones! Upon the names of the Sacred Foundations, Gakal, Farondak, and Silwa– erk!” Red light had begun to gather around his hands as he chanted his nonsense at me. Magic was something Kat had left me deeply concerned about, so I took no chances. His body slid to the ground, and I pulled back my tail, leaving a large, bloody wound in his gut that he clutched as he began to moan piteously. No, he wasn’t moaning in pain; he was moaning for a different reason.

  “Oh, do that again!” he groaned. As this was the first human being I’d ever killed, I was feeling pretty bad about it, but now I felt dirty as well.

  “Dude,” I muttered as I stepped on his skull and put him out of my misery. The other four cultists had stopped whatever they had been doing to their poor victim and rushed at me. I ignored the kill notification that popped up in my vision, but I felt a little better at the thought of coins appearing in my hoard; there were about to be a few more additions in a moment.

  One had snatched up a long-handled device that ended in a circle of cutting blades. The flower of knives that crowned the weapon opened and closed ominously, and the top six inches of it also glistened moistly. He got a blast of acid to the face. No way was he touching me with whatever the hell that thing was.

  A pair had short skinning knives, and they charged at me, screaming to whatever dark god of sadism they worshipped, waving the blades above their heads. One got the claws, and the other lost his throat to my jaws. The last of them had hung back, and he had been chanting something under his breath. As I turned to look at him, he yanked on a chain that ran from his left nipple to his undercarriage, screamed in what was quite possibly pleasure, and then swelled to three times his normal size.

  “Welcome to the club, new friend. Let’s have a little fun!” he boomed as he strode toward me with giant steps. Another blast of acid spewed out, but it bounced off him, some invisible shield causing most of the attack to spray out the sides.

  “Puny dragon! You can’t– Ouch! Shit!” He had stepped forward into the still-bubbling acid. His leather sandal was smoking and falling apart as he hopped backwards, clutching one foot in both his hands.

  He landed on his backside and began rolling around as the sole of his foot started melting.

  “What should I do?” I asked Kat.

  “I think we can ignore him now? He’s not much of a threat with only one and a half, sorry, make that one foot. That’s some strong acid,” she replied.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I stepped delicately past him, unaffected by my own acid, to touch the lid of the chest.

  “What do you think that’s meant to be?” I nodded at the chest. “Kinda looks like a load of mangled sausages have been carved into the lid.”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t think you want to know, either,” she muttered as the lid opened up. I nudged the sobbing giant away with my tail and had to shake him off as he tried to latch onto me.

  Chest discovered!

  Rolling for contents…

  Congratulations Dungeoneer!

  Item: Blade of Cutting x1

  Item: Osifer’s Eclectic Eviscerator x1

  Item: Scroll of Passing Fancy x2

  Currency gained: 734 gold

  “Help me!” moaned a pained voice from the altar. I looked over.

  “Should we?” I asked Kat.

  “Might as well. If we get him back to the entrance, he’ll become a minion,” she said with a shrug.

  I drew a claw against the ropes that were pinning the skinny wreck of a man to the black stone altar. He tried to stand up but collapsed as his feet touched the ground, landing in an untidy heap on the floor.

  “So the system can create people as part of the dungeon?” I tried to help the man up, but in the end, I had to scoop him into one claw and hop along on three as we headed back to the entrance.

  “Yeah. It made you, didn’t it? Human floors are pretty rare; it’s usually monsters. If we can find any other ‘victims,’ it’s worth rescuing them. Saves us the recruitment cost on the Core Market,” Kat said.

  “Oh, thank you, master! Thank you! They were going to go for my nuggets next!” he sobbed and pressed his face against my wrist.

  “Well, I’m glad we got there in time to save your nuggets, mate. What’s your name?” I asked as gently as I could.

  “Reginald, master! Reginald the Metastatic Manipulator! Lord, do you have any healing potions? I’m really in rather a lot of pain.”

  I glanced down, and he was cut in various places, at least one of which was unmentionable, and blood was slowly seeping from his wounds.

  “Not on me, I’m afraid. We saved a few, didn’t we, Kat? Didn’t give them all to Tex?” I asked.

  “We’ve got some upstairs. I’ll get a Janglebonk to bring one down,” she said.

  “Oh, thank you, blessed lady! I will, of course, repay this kindness, for a beauty such as you, name your wish, and I will make it happen!” he stuttered, taking in the pixie on my neck for the first time as she had peered down to get a look at him. “Your marvelous breasts! Such a shapely face, and so fierce and tiny! My dearest, please tell me your name?”

  “Oh bloody hell. You can call me Your Imperial Highness, weirdo. I’m not even the same species as you!” she snapped.

  I laid his body down just the other side of the portcullis and looked down at him.

  “One of the Jangle-things will be down with a potion for you soon. Just rest up for now.” I turned and moved away as he continued to profess his love for Kat and wax lyrical about her physique.

  “What a creep,” she muttered.

  “Next chest, oh chestiest of tiny princesses?” I laughed, earning another thwack on the ear. Worth it.

  “Let’s just go kill the boss. It will auto-loot the chests for you.”

  I couldn’t look at her as she was sitting on my neck, but I narrowed my eyes.

  “You mean I could have skipped all the bullshit, running around looking for chests on the other floors?” I asked in a quiet voice.

  “It was character-building. This place is too freaky. Boss is that way, chop chop donkey!”