Dear Diary,

  What, really, is a driver’s license? If not a token of needless formality, then perhaps a glorified receipt proving you once made eye contact with a Department of Transportation employee and lived to tell the tale.

  As far as Annabell Smith was concerned, she had long since deduced that true vehicular mastery lay not in training, practice, or awareness of one’s surroundings, but in a sacred principle passed down by generations of thrill-seekers and people with suspiciously high insurance premiums:

  Keep the throttle firmly pressed down and never, under any circumstances, acknowledge the brakes; the breaks are traitors, there to slow you down; the breaks are for people who have never learned that hitting the wall is a perfectly valid turning technique.

  ***

  The screech of rubber against concrete rang out like a banshee as Annabell yanked the handlebars, treating the scooter and its steering with a firm “more is more” policy.

  The vehicle, naturally, responded with the enthusiastic panic of a startled goat on a skateboard, spinning just wide of the first thick-set zombie charging her way.

  The second undead, lurching her way off the bonnet of a nearby car, failed to account for the trajectory of a spinning Gremlin.

  It missed by a good foot, and instead of a heroic take-down, it was clipped by a swirling rear carriage and was promptly repurposed into a crimson smear across the floor; the scooter; and Annabell, much to her dismay.

  But the scooter was already continuing on its path, bumping straight over any zombie remains that might have been capable of apologizing.

  And it did so with speed.

  The experience left Annabell airborne for a glorious half-second—chin straps flapping in the wind, screams only outmatched by the howling undead and whirring engine.

  No sooner had she dropped back to her seat with a spine-jangling thud than she made up for lost time, hitting the throttle with an ill-advised crank born from her downward momentum.

  The scooter bucked like a stallion, rose defiantly onto its back wheels, and greeted whatever unfortunate undead were standing in its immediate way with the grace of a blender.

  Front tires churned.

  Gore sprayed.

  Something gurgled in surprise.

  Forced to cling on as best she could, Annabell continued her wheelie through a sea of snarling, groping, increasingly confused cadavers who had as little control over the situation as she did.

  Chipped nails and sharp claws passed inches from her face. Jaws snatched for her flailing legs, and lunging corpses did their best to intercept her advance.

  But thanks no small part to Annabell’s complete inability to keep the handlebars still (aiming for maximum balance by constantly jerking them back and forth), she was skidding either direction too rapidly for them to keep up with.

  Even before she returned to a four-wheel connection with the earth, she was weaving through the undead horde in a manner best described as “aggressively serpentine.”

  After, well…

  Zombie viscera clung to the wheels, transforming traction into a fond memory, leaving her to fishtail wildly through the crumbling garage even as she returned to 4WD.

  She cranked the handlebars one way, the scooter whipped out the other, skidding sideways across the concrete like ice.

  A bemoaning “Yeet the living!” cut through the sound of screeching tires and the whine of a small but deeply traumatized electric motor as Annabell continued her erratic drift, keeping just out of swipe range of the zombie horde swarming her way.

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  Bodies tumbled past as she knocked out kneecaps, hulking figures crashed into one another as she narrowly slipped past, and in one overenthusiastic instance, a ghoul ripped into the leg of a fellow undead by mistake.

  Somewhere in the chaos, a shopping cart was flipped, a parking bollard was emotionally scarred, and someone’s disembodied foot lodged itself neatly in a front fender.

  And just as a coordinated effort had them all lunging at her at once, she saw the button—conveniently located there on the handlebars—and pressed it without a second thought.

  Ability Activated: Wheels of Woe

  There was a clank, a rumble, and the general noise of something significant shifting within the scooter. There was the strained groan of a throttle that’d yet to be let up, magic protesting, and as several dozen undead lurched toward her at once—snarling maws, swiping claws, and general zombie unpleasantries—for a brief instant, even time itself seemed to slow down.

  Then, with a sound like a dragon inhaling a carburetor, the scooter launched forward.

  There was no grace. There was no elegance. There was only forward motion, and far too much of it.

  The scooter hit the nearest zombies with all the subtlety of a runaway battering ram, leaving behind a wake of ruined limbs, explosive gore, and one poor ghoul who managed to get airborne before landing in a recycling bin.

  Annabell didn’t scream. Screaming required time, and she was currently using all of hers simply keeping her face attached to her skull as the scooter rocketed in the general direction of a conveniently ramp-shaped pile of fallen ceiling.

  The wheels shrieked out in her stead, spinning madly against a floor now less “solid surface” and more “zombie-flavoured slip-and-slide.” They scrabbled for purchase. They pleaded for traction.

  In the end, instead of a clean, noble charge toward the ramp, the vehicle opted for a more scenic, paint-scraping tour of the garage’s many fine vehicles. Bonnet here, bumper there, and at one point, a particularly fragile support pillar that gave up its architectural career on the spot, exploding into a cloud of dust, rebar, and structural regret.

  The entire garage groaned. Dust fell like cynical confetti. Zombies shambled after her with the confusion of party guests who weren’t entirely sure if the party was over or had just reached the bit with the human fireworks.

  And amid it all, Annabell hit the ramp.

  Through some potent cocktail of sheer luck and whatever passed for instincts in a brain wired for chaos, at the last possible moment, Annabell had managed to wrench the handlebars in the right direction.

  She didn’t so much ascend as skid heroically up it, trailing smoke and viscera as she was launched into the night sky.

  Somewhere behind and below her, the entire parking garage collapsed from sheer narrative pressure.

  “Y-yeet the living!” came a high-pitched, trailing cry of a scooter who’d just remembered it wasn’t designed for flying. Yet fly it did, like a cannonball fired out of a trebuchet designed by madmen.

  And along came the laughter.

  It wasn’t the chuckle of someone in control. Nor was it the laugh of someone enjoying themselves. No—this was the cackle of pure Gremlinhood, the kind of sound that haunted structural engineers in their dreams and caused dungeon cores to mysteriously develop ulcers.

  Destruction Progress: 64%

  ***

  Perhaps the strange look Mira sent him was warranted.

  Lionel was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a man prone to needless expressions of joy. Yet here he was, humming—humming!—as they rocketed upward through the Layers of the Underfold.

  And it wasn’t even a dignified hum. It was the sort of tuneless hum that suggested a man who had been holding his breath for years had finally inhaled, and found that the air didn’t smell nearly as much like failure as it used to.

  Against all odds, things were looking up.

  Years of regret and barely scraping through the daily grind, and suddenly Lionel could say—without irony, panic, or the urge to flee—that he had made the right decision back then.

  He wasn’t some foolish, deluded “aspiring Dungeon Master” anymore. He was a Dungeon Master. He had a dungeon. His dungeon. A real one.

  He allowed himself the smallest of smiles.

  With this, he was free.

  Free from his family.

  Free from Cassandra.

  Free from ever having to deal with Delvers again… Unless, of course, he was designing their demise by riddle, trap, or the classic “haunted ballroom with sentient chandeliers.” Oh, the possibilities…

  His fingers tightened around the outline of the Dungeon Right, as if to whisper: At least you won’t betray me.

  “Today really is a beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said, rolling his shoulders—a gesture that, for once, did not feel like trying to shrug off the crushing weight of existential dread.

  Cassandra’s frantic, rapid-fire messages chimed like a very angry orchestra. Lionel had unmuted them, just to bask in the petty triumph of it.

  Yes. Yes, why had he been so worried? Even he had to get lucky eventually.

  After all, it was utterly ridiculous to live life expecting the universe to kick you in the balls at every given opportunity…

  …right?