Scholarly Entry #T45-309-Vf8:

  Gremlin Tears

  Superficially tragic sobs emitted by small, snaggle-toothed creatures with the dramatic flair of a stage actor and the ethics of a banana republic tax officer. Said to resemble crocodile tears, if the crocodile was also trying to sell you insurance. Exposure may lead to dehydration of both wallet and will to live. Known side effects include misplaced pity, poor financial decisions, and waking up with a contract stapled to your forehead and a hex in your spleen.

  These tears are seldom genuine, occasionally flammable, and always followed by the sudden disappearance of your cutlery, furniture, and sense of emotional stability. Any attempt to comfort a weeping gremlin will likely end in theft, humiliation, and possibly mild arson. 1

  1(It should be noted that Gremlins, despite their childlike stature and unfortunate hygiene, possess the moral compass of a blackjack dealer in a blindfold, and the same odds of leaving you with anything but an empty pocket and a story no one will believe.)

  ***

  Lionel felt like a fool.

  Not the usual kind, mind you—not the sort that wears bells and juggles for coin, but the rarer, more pitiable breed: the kind that believes, even briefly, that threatening a girl shrieking like a banshee with a stubbed toe, wailing the sort of tragic lament usually reserved for minor deities with abandonment issues with a one-way trip into the Sundering Void made him the bad guy.

  And now? She was humming.

  Not humming ominously, or with even a hint of guilt, but joyfully—as in, off-key nursery rhymes and annoyingly rememberable tunes, the kind that get stuck in your head and begin to ferment.

  Her feet kicked over edge of his best chair, all sunshine and indigestion, as she inhaled enough interdimensional pizza to induce a cardiac arrest in a tribe of battle-hardened orcs.

  Somehow, and he was still trying to work out the logistics of this without invoking forbidden mathematics, she had managed—while actively vandalising his kitchen—to place an order for said pizza. Double-decker. Extra meat. Extra cheese. No vegetables whatsoever.

  It had arrived shortly after Lionel, in a moment of weakness (also known as "compassion"), agreed to let her stay—so long as she promised to behave and cooperate.

  So far, “behaving” consisted primarily of cramming food into her mouth at a velocity that suggested either incredible dexterity or a mild breach in spacetime.

  “So,” Lionel began, slow and careful, “let’s start from the beginning, shall we? Who, and what, are you?”

  She looked up from her meal, eyes narrowed. “Did you just ask what I am?” she said, affronted, half a meatball clinging to her chin and no evident shame. “Excuse you. I’m a lady. And a great saviour. And a hero. So, you better put some respect on my name.”

  Lionel watched, with a sort of slow-motion horror, as she rolled the remaining half of the pizza into a tube.

  “Saviour of what, exactly?” he asked, as she began slathering the edible scroll with enough sauce to invalidate any remaining claim this meal had to dignity.

  “The saviour of uneaten food and underappreciated snacks, of course!” She cackled, her eyes glittered like a dragon seeing its hoard—except in this case, the hoard was carbohydrates.

  The monstrosity she was holding aloft was roughly the size of her thigh. And that was only the second half of what she'd already consumed.

  Lionel had seen hydras with lesser appetites.

  So, before the inevitable digestive apocalypse could begin, he asked, “Are there more of you?”

  There were a great many things he needed answers to, but this one loomed above all. Because if there were more of her, more small, chaotic forces of nature with bottomless stomachs and dubious morals, he needed to know.

  Worst of all: it seemed likely.

  Taking down a Dungeon solo was no casual affair.

  Could she possibly be…?

  His question caused her to pause, solemn now, sleeves of her borrowed T-shirt inexplicably rolled up (because that was somehow necessary?) and pizza tube raised to the heavens. Her face was set. Her gaze intense.

  And then, with the grave approval of a teacher whose student had just realised the ball was not, in fact, under any of the cups, she nodded.

  “As expected of the one who bested me,” she declared. “Even if it was through a cowardly, dishonourable, underhanded ambush—you’re not just a pretty face!”

  Then, with the dignified reverence of a cleric placing a relic upon the altar, she laid the pizza tube back on the table.

  And promptly shoved her hand down the neck of her shirt.

  Before Lionel could even process what she was doing, out came—not a weapon, nor a communication crystal, nor even something vaguely magical—but a plush toy. One that, until moments ago, had been masquerading as curvature on an otherwise unremarkable body.

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  “Behold!” she declared, holding the thing aloft as if she expected thunder to roll and a choir of angels to hit a high C. “William Wallace Wilton Wiseman, Third of His Name, First of His Countenance. Guardian of the Gates of Avenholt. Master of subterfuge, diplomacy, and—”

  Two beady eyes stared into Lionel’s. It had the sort of fixed, stitched expression that seemed to scream help me. Its chin was too large for comfort, too small for authority, and somehow deeply unsettling.

  “...future patriarch of House…”

  He exhaled through his nose in the slow, pained way that suggested the migraine had begun knocking at the door and was now pressing its face against the window.

  At every turn, this girl defied expectation. And not in a good way. That is, she tied expectation to a chair, set it on fire, and then roasted marshmallows over the flames.

  “…Lord of the Fields of…”

  Why the smug look? Why present the ragged plushie like it was Excalibur in fleece form? Was this some elaborate mind game, a veiled threat, a subtle declaration of allegiance? Or was it just a loud, silent “As if I’d ever tell you who I’m actually working for”?

  Was she secretly a mastermind?

  The violent, wheezing urk-harrkkk-hrrggk sounds coming from her direction rather efficiently murdered that theory.

  Having just finished the royal introduction of her partner in crime, she had, in a feat of either optimism or profound misjudgment, attempted to shove the entire rolled-up pizza down her throat.

  Lionel closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as she began to choke on what appeared to be a sausage-and-regret based obstruction. Sauce was spraying everywhere.

  “Oh, merciful System,” he muttered, “let this nightmare end soon.”

  Then, still rubbing his eyes in the universal gesture of a man negotiating with madness, he continued louder, “You should be taking this more seriously, you realise that, right? Even in the Underfold, smashing Dungeons and breaking into apartments can lead to class-action lawsuits.”

  The choking intensified.

  And then, the girl looked up at him, wide-eyed and teary, with the dawning horror of someone realising they might be getting sued and dying at the same time.

  “L-lawsuit?” she croaked.

  “What did you expect?” Lionel asked, raising an eyebrow. “Since the Co-Existence Accord was signed, overseen by the System, both Dungeon Masters and Delver Guilds are mostly trying to keep the lights on and the lawsuits off. You can’t go around smashing registered Dungeons willy-nilly. There’s paperwork. Arbitration councils. Forms.”

  He paused, then added gravely, “Even in the Underfold, we try to be civilised.”

  He didn’t add ‘as far as the System forces us to be’, because some things didn’t need saying.

  Being forced by the System was like being politely nudged by a brick wall—technically unavoidable, but only if it had remembered you existed.

  And frankly, as of this instant, it didn’t seem to have.

  For all its enthusiasm for daily pop-ups, error codes, tax reminders, and cryptic achievement badges like "Congratulations! You've unlocked: Mild Existential Dread (Level II)," the System had gone... quiet.

  Deathly quiet.

  There were still his lingering, unread notifications, yes—most from Cassandra—but they were all old. Faded into the background. Nothing new had come through. Not even a spam offer for “Ascendancy Boosters: Now With 40% Less Side Effects!”

  And that, more than anything else, was cause for alarm.

  “B-but what about–”

  The girl stammered on. Lionel barely noticed.

  He sent out a series of mental prods, like a man testing light switches during a power cut. Banking services? Nothing. Messaging hub? Dead. Information feeds, dungeon stats, and the gloriously overpriced marketplace full of limited-edition loot crates? All gone.

  The only things still functioning were the various household devices tied to his apartment’s internal network. Which, while somewhat comforting, didn’t say much.

  Without a System connection, he was effectively cut off from everything that lay beyond these walls.

  That hadn’t happened for as long as he’d lived.

  It shouldn’t be possible for that to happen.

  It—

  “H-here!”

  The finality in her voice snapped him back. He blinked.

  There she sat—upright like an actual civilized being—looking uncharacteristically sheepish, a rather suspicious and overflowing pillowcase resting on her lap. It was the kind of pillowcase that looked like it had witnessed things. Dark things.

  From some unknowable place she produced a single copper coin and held it out with all the solemnity of a peace treaty.

  “I hope that with this,” she said, “we can overlook previous grievances and move on from this as better people.”

  The coin glinted in the light. It had that peculiar stickiness of something that had, at some point, been in someone’s mouth.

  It also wasn’t enough to cover a single of the pots that she’d ruined.

  Lionel didn’t spare it a second glance.

  “H-hey, we can talk this over!” she added hastily as he stood up. “No need to get lawyers or anything involved! That would ruin my carefree lifestyle! I can’t afford that!”

  Lionel didn’t reply.

  Because right now, he wasn’t worried about lawsuits. He wasn’t even worried about her.

  He was worried about the silence.

  “Don’t be unreasonable!”

  Lionel reached the door, such as it was, the last barrier to whatever was going on out there. He nudged it open.

  The pizza delivery golem was still, and worryingly, present. It had entered that uniquely tragic state known as buffering, where it spun in place, gently bumping into cracked walls or hovering, lost and bewildered.

  Everything beyond was dull and grey, the sort of grey that wasn’t just a colour, but a lifestyle. The cracked remains of the Core Room, if you could still call it that, melted away into a pale, creeping mist that smelled faintly of damp stone, static, and unpaid obligations.

  The skies were a swirling mess of things you better not stare at for too long, and the silence was pressing.

  And at the centre of it all—where the Core had once proudly pulsed with energy and the usual faint air of impending doom—was a crack. A black, water-filled crevice with a surface so still and reflective it looked less like water and more like the universe had tried to plug a hole in the world with a mirror and darkness.

  Lionel stared at it.

  When the System went quiet, it only ever meant one of two things:

  One, that something had gone horribly wrong.

  Or two, that something very important was waiting to be discovered—and the System had decided, in its infinite and vaguely malevolent wisdom, to let someone else do the discovering.

  “But I’m no Delver,” he stiffly whispered, mostly to himself and partly to the void, “and you damn well know that.”

  He tried to summon an elevator. An emergency beacon. A glorified panic button. Anything.

  Nothing. The System was about as responsive as a civil servant on lunch break with headphones in.

  He glared into the glistening crevice.

  “What are you up to this time,” he growled, “you shitty thing?”

  The System didn’t reply. Nor did the crack.

  But it did seem to ripple. Just a little.

  Like it had heard.

  Like it was waiting.

  And that, Lionel knew from experience, was never a good sign.

  The Dungeon was waiting for them to delve deeper.