Roland played medic for the party, checking on the wounded.

  Barton had a deep cut on one arm he hadn’t noticed until Roland pointed it out, at which point he fell on his ass and began screaming in pain.

  Bob had gotten stuck with a glass spearhead right above the ballistic plate protecting his torso. He muttered about infections as Roland split a potion between him and Barton.

  Josh and Wendy were unhurt, but both had post-adrenaline shakes. He hoped the leadership ability from the magic helmet would help them get a grip.

  He knelt next to Dahlia and gently lifted her head up, dripping half of another potion until her Health recovered, followed by a Common Mana Potion to restore her energy. She opened her eyes just as he was finishing and looked at him.

  “My hero,” she said, sounding only half-sarcastic.

  Roland had to admit that holding her felt pretty good.

  “You’re turning into a regular witch,” he said, letting her go and standing up. “In a good way.”

  “Why, thank you,” she said, getting up. “People usually replace the ‘w’ with a ‘b.’”

  Roland grinned at her and checked the timer. Two minutes. He turned back to the party.

  “How’s the ammo situation?”

  “I’m out,” Josh said.

  “Got maybe half a mag left,” Bob said, checking the side of the mag, where a slit let him see how many rounds were inside. Roland replaced the empty mags with full ones, noting that they were making a dent on their ammo supply.

  He also handed each of them two fifty-round boxes and a couple of reloaders to help them refill the empties while they could. Bob and Josh had burned through three AR magazines apiece, give or take ten rounds. That was almost half a standard combat load for an infantryman. And this was the first encounter of the Dungeon – an encounter that wasn’t finished yet.

  He also had to replace one mag for the SFAR, and give extra shotgun shells to Bob, who had emptied the Kel-Tec on the Champion that had made it up the hill.

  Realizing that keeping all the ammo in his inventory turned him into a single-point failure source, Roland piled up the rest of it on Trash Hill. With logistics taken care of, he did a final Party check.

  Everyone was wrung out and stressed. Only El Cid’s Leadership was keeping them together, along with Roland’s dwindling supply of Health and Endurance potions. Pretty soon he would have to start handing out the higher rank potions. Luckily, he didn’t need them, thanks to his Vital Energy pool, which he had kept topped up by going through Ratlings like a threshing machine.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “This time I’ll wait here until we see what we’re dealing with,” Roland said, picking up the SFAR.

  Going too far ahead had almost gotten his party killed. Maybe it would be better to meet the rats somewhere closer in case he needed to double back in hurry.

  The timer rolled down to zero.

  Wave Three has begun!

  Instead of the chittering sounds the rats made, a weird buzzing filled the night.

  “Something new,” Roland muttered, peering through the sights and waiting for a target to show up.

  “I hate surprises,” Bob grumbled.

  “You always spring surprises at us in your games,” Barton told him.

  “Of course. I love surprising people, not the other way around.”

  “Eyes on target!” Josh yelled. “Bugs!”

  By the time Josh identified what he had seen, Roland had spotted them. He had been looking a little high and missed the crawling vermin headed their way. From the way Dahlia gasped and Barton squeaked, they saw them too.

  The glistening carapaces were two feet off the ground, propelled on six spindly legs. Two more limbs extended off the insectoids’ shoulders, one on each side of their heads, which looked identical to the first bug-man Roland had seen. At the end of each arm, three clawed fingers held knives, glass shards and other crude weapons.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Cockroach Slasher (Beastkin)

  Minion, F-Grade

  Health 48 Endurance 44 Mana 24

  It was hard to get an accurate head count, the way they were bunched up and low to the ground, but there seemed to be more of them than the rats, and they were tougher to boot. No lieutenants, at least not on that wave, but Roland expected they would eventually fight roach wizards like the one he had killed in his first fight. Maybe not on this wave, but soon.

  He was shooting as he considered the situation, along with Josh and Bob. The previous two waves had given all of them a lot of practical experience. Roaches began to drop, but Roland saw that some .223 bullets were glancing off the insects’ shells, producing bright sparks with each deflection.

  The bugs were protected by some kind of energy shield.

  The magical force fields weren’t very tough – most direct hits produced splashes of ichor or torn-off limbs – but they kept casualties down.

  The .308 rounds were too heavy for whatever Skill the bugs were using, so Roland scored six kills in ten seconds.

  After twenty seconds, maybe a dozen roaches were dead or too badly injured to keep moving. That left way too many still scurrying forward toward the landfill entrance.

  “Time to close the gap,” Roland said, leaving the SFAR next to Bob. He headed down as Wendy began to take potshots at the bug horde with her pistol-caliber carbine.

  Reaper’s Dash would kill lots of roaches but also send him through the enemy and let some attackers get past him. He needed to hold the position. If he had his aura ability...

  Screw ‘ifs.’ Make the Skill do what you want.

  He held Reaper’s Dash in his mind and pictured the ghostly transformation, except that instead of catapulting him forward, he visualized moving in a circle, creating an area where anything that entered would be drenched in Death Mana.

  Turn the dash into an area-denial weapon, he told himself – and told the System.

  The first few bugs were about to pour through the gate. Time to make his wish become reality.

  Roland activated the Skill but pulled against the forward movement. He used his Willpower and aura as anchors, ignoring the fact that his aura manipulation ability was locked.

  The pull on his aura sent bursts of Mana through the damaged Dantian. As expected, spikes of intense pain ran through him as every nerve in his lower body, including several very sensitive ones, screamed a warning: stop or suffer.

  He suffered and didn’t stop.

  The dash made a tight turn, wiping out several bugs, and returned almost at his starting point, give or take a dozen feet. Its job complete, the Skill began to deactivate – and Roland held it in place. Now he pushed instead of pulling, forcing his will on the Skill, keeping it active instead of letting it go on cooldown.

  Mana poured into Reaper’s Dash, replenished by Vital Energy as Roland poured the three hundred-plus points of life force he’d stolen from the last wave into the effort. The restrained Skill was burning twenty Mana per second. Only the continued influx of Vital Energy from the bugs he killed kept him from zeroing out.

  Roland couldn’t stay still – the dash was still a movement Skill after all – but he held it in check, riding it like a bucking bronco while moving in a tight spiral by the entrance. The circular route devoured the bugs as they rushed forward. Their shielding ability was nowhere near strong enough to keep them safe from what was now a semi-stationary zone that inflicted over fifty points of damage to the dumb bastards that kept running into it.

  It worked, but it hurt like very few things had before.

  Roland was beginning to become a connoisseur of pain, and feeling like something was swirling pieces of broken glass inside his guts rated a pretty high position in a crowded list. Not as bad as when he had pushed toward the Pristine Pattern, but a notch above the brutal psychic volleyball game from the second Chapel tournament.

  He had made it through those, and he made it through this.

  The Ratlings would have scattered and tried to make their way to the mound from different directions. The roaches just kept coming with insectile stubbornness or stupidity. Bodies began to pile up, and Roland displaced his circling trajectory toward clear areas, massacring more bugs as they maneuvered through their buddies’ corpses.

  Focusing on ‘riding’ the Skill and pushing through the continual pain took most of his concentration, but after a while he realized the shooting was getting far less frequent.

  More noticeable was the sudden reduction of Vital Energy infusions; he was running out of bugs to kill, and now he was spending way more Mana than he could replenish.

  Roland finally released Reaper’s Dash, feeling the Skill recoil back into his Class Core like an elastic band. A band that snapped back into shape after being stretched for far too long.

  The pain didn’t go away; instead, it flared up from his Class Core, making him scared that he might have broken the Dantian housing it as well. Roland doubled over as if he’d taken a bullet to the guts and fell on top of a dead bug. His Health and Endurance took a hit and went down to about half.

  A trio of roaches that had survived the massacre rushed him, holding a mixture of improvised cutting and stabbing implements. A shot from Bob’s SFAR took one down. The other two moved in, Roland’s own body and the corpses of his kills blocking his team’s line of sight.

  Roland was in pain, weak and tired, but if the bugs thought he was easy prey, they soon learned better.

  He sat up and the Executioner’s Gun appeared in his right hand. He held it like a pistol as he blasted the first one, then switched target as the shotgun reloaded itself and shot the other bug’s head off when it was a couple of inches away from the muzzle. That earned Roland a nice splash of chunky bug juice that made him dry heave a little.

  No more enemies showed up. Roland laid back down on the corpse bed he had made. Two more shots rang out, the deeper booms from the SFAR, followed by silence.

  All dead, all done, he hoped.

  So far, none of the wave attackers had tried to hide to make them hunt them down instead of resting. If that was the System’s version of mercy, it left a lot to be desired but was better than nothing.

  He checked the timer. Seven minutes to go. They had wiped out the wave in record time.

  Grunting and holding his pained gut, Roland got to his feet and looked at Trash Hill. There were only a dozen or so dead bugs there, the few that managed to get past his death spiral, easy prey for his party. His party, which was looking at him with what might be awe or abject terror. Maybe a mixture of both.

  He waved at them; there were several notifications waiting for his attention, but he decided they could wait. The Dungeon had warned them things were about to get worse. Roland expected the worst.

  He was not disappointed.