“Help! I’m being kidnapped!”

  The carriage rattled as Raehel woke up, her red hair frizzy from a night of sleep. The first streaks of dawn, muted by gathering clouds, lightly danced upon their faces as they rode towards Granavale Dungeon. Archmund rolled his eyes, unamused by his sense of deja vu.

  “Do you always do this?” Archmund asked.

  “I don’t know why I agreed to this again,” Raehel grumbled.

  “You complained that we didn’t spend enough time in town for you to ‘investigate the little people’, and then you complained that we only got back to the manor after dark.”

  “It’s dangerous to travel by dark!”

  Usually it was, but every first-rate carriage had embedded Gems that drew upon the driver’s magic and acted like floodlights. It was rather ingenious, really, though obviously a bit constraining magicwise — though it was worth noting that “normal” people actively tried to use as little of their energy as possible when using a Gem instead of pushing past its limits.

  Archmund ignored her complaint because it was completely unfounded.

  “And that’s why we’re coming out bright and early. So we can see Granavale Dungeon. Like you wanted to.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” Raehel said, perking right up. “Granavale Dungeon. I’d love to see what it’s like before it really really calcifies!”

  “Calcifies.”

  Like a bone, or a brain, or a fossil.

  “Oh, yeah. Lots of accidents have happened in the Arcane Dungeon, so the place feels like all the regrets of dead mages in training. I’ve heard the Omnio Dungeon feels like a mausoleum for the Emperors, though no one outside of the Imperial Family can confirm. It calcifies. Stops changing. Becomes all the same.”

  “I’m not sure I want you poking around in my subconscious.”

  The words just slipped out.

  “Now that’s an interesting thought. You think the Dungeons are the subconscious of the people who first enter them?”

  It was a tricky question. The Dungeon’s first tier ended with a reflection of Granavale Manor, which could be blamed on his ancestors and their grudges. But he’d also seen a glimpse of an unexplored level of the Dungeon, and it looked like a cubicle farm, the type of place that haunted his nightmares. But he couldn’t say that. He didn’t want to reveal too much.

  “I thought they were shaped by the grudges of the dead.”

  “No one denies that. But you make it sound like it’s also the grudges of the living.”

  Archmund shrugged. Technically, he was pretty sure he’d already died once.

  When they got to the Dungeon, the sun had just fully risen.

  The Dungeon’s geography was actually quite unusual. Archmund hadn’t actually seen it in the light of day, only in pale torchlight.

  The Dungeon’s entrance was at the bottom of a massive caldera. But no volcanic eruption had blown this hole in the ground, and there was no hill surrounding it — it had been created, rather, by the deathly power of the Dungeon Storm.

  Mercy’s troops had built a ramp from the rim down to the bottom wide enough for two carriages to pass comfortably, that took a full rotation. Down at the bottom there was a decently-well-stocked supply camp.

  At Archmund’s instruction, they’d also started building rudimentary arbalests and ballistas and catapults and pots of large rocks and other such traps on the rim of the Dungeon. These were, of course, last resorts should Monsters ever escape. They would likely do more damage to the guardians of the Dungeon than any escapees.

  The Dungeon was under a 24-hour armed guard, by the ragtag sons and daughters of Granavale County. They wore leather armor. Many wielded pitchforks. Hardly an elite fighting force, but suitable for keeping an eye on the Dungeon. Some were on the rim, but the bulk of the camp was down below in the crater.

  All of this was fairly standard for how Dungeons were guarded, at least those that didn’t natively support an adventurer camp.

  That was the one big deviation. Instead of letting adventurers come and make their mark on Granavale County, he was handling it himself.

  A pair of guards saluted, raising their pitchforks, as their carriage started descending the ramp.

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  Mary frowned. “Are those going to do anything?” she said, eying the pitchforks.

  Raehel snorted. “Doubt it. It’ll keep them alive long enough to get a warning out, which should be enough to keep at least half of this county alive.”

  Archmund frowned. “The ones at the surface level shouldn’t be that difficult to deal with. Besides, we do get a few adventurers a month who manage to keep the upper levels clear.”

  “I guess?” Raehel said. “This place just opened, didn’t it? I’d say you have another year or so until you’d need actual guards.”

  That, he wasn’t looking forward to. They observed the camp as they made their way down.

  When they got to the bottom, he commandeered the commander’s tent — the largest tent there. Even still, it was spartan — a simple cot, racks of honed weapons, some diagrams of the dungeon. Purely practical.

  The three of them sat down to talk strategy.

  “The Omnio agent who helped me clear this place was a bit tight-lipped on what to expect as the situation evolved,” Archmund said.

  That was one of the major flaws of this world: the extreme sparsity of highly crucial life-saving information. In his old life, he had access to the Internet, a global network of information and people yelling lies at each other, but in theory he could’ve looked up the answers to any question he could imagine. Here, he had only garbled theories and musings and rumors. As far as he could tell, information about Dungeons was given out on a need-to-know basis to nobles, through word-of-mouth and ghost stories between adventurers, and under mountains of jargon for magical researchers.

  “You can expect an s-shaped mortal force curve,” Raehel said, her voice becoming increasingly textbook. “First few months sets the steady-stable state of Monster escape rate. If you clear out the place good enough, there’s a antithesis reaction between ecosystem niche creation and psychomortal trauma shock.”

  Archmund sighed. “Is there anything that matters other than… what, an s-shaped ‘mortal force’ curve? So they’ll get deadlier suddenly, and people won’t be prepared?”

  “I heard that happens,” Raehel said. “But that’s what adventurers are for. All adventurers get graded roughly by their peers and their magic capacity, and they give danger ratings to Dungeons and reassess when needed, so—”

  Wonderful. Another proprietary, unclear, potentially bullshit rating system. He wondered if he could just hack his personal Gemstone Tablet to display what everyone else’s rating was, or whether that would be too overpowered.

  “Didn’t the Omnio agent revoke the charter for the adventurer’s guilds to operate in Granavale County?” Mary said.

  Archmund closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “She said it would be temporary.”

  Rather, the adventurer’s guild said they’d challenge the matter in the legal system. And it had been long enough that presumably the suspension had either lapsed or the appeal had succeeded.

  “Oh, that’s no good though,” Raehel said. “You don’t want to piss them off.”

  “They were trying to bleed us dry,” Archmund said.

  “They risk their lives, of course they ask for more than they really need.”

  Now that he thought about it, he’d really ended up backed into a corner.

  If he hadn’t refused the adventurer’s guilds, Granavale County would’ve been bled dry over the course of decades.

  If he’d let them operate freely, they would’ve fundamentally shifted how people saw risk-reward: why spend years making an honest living when you could become superhuman by risking your life for eight hours for one day?

  But since he’d rebuffed them over his reasonable concerns, they were understandably wary of working in the County.

  And without an adventurer ecosystem, they were woefully unprepared to keep the Dungeon at bay, and fighting through a Dungeon to gain the necessary practice and gear was risky and life-threatening.

  But the Dungeon couldn’t go unguarded, so it was in House Granavale’s best interest to pay people to watch it.

  But in doing so they also distorted the labor market for a job that was fundamentally temporary.

  And their lives were at risk, when the Dungeon inevitably became more and more dangerous without adequate adventurer support.

  But if he were to train them and equip them on his own initiative, he would be making use of the Princess Angelina Grace Prima Marca Omnio’s dispensation to build a private fighting force.

  A dispensation that could be revoked at any time should the tides of politics be turned against him, thus making his House guilty of high treason.

  “I need to talk to some people,” Archmund said. “If you want to go into the Dungeon — Mary, why don’t you go with her together?”

  “Me, young master? Don’t you want my help with numbers?”

  It was complicated. On one hand, Mary was smart enough to take notes and get insights he didn’t necessarily had. On the other hand, he didn’t like the image having a maidservant tagging along projected when it came to talking to the rough-and-tumble salt-of-the-earth guards.

  And anyways, it was a Dungeon, and Mary was trained. Somewhat.

  “Come here, Mary,” he said. He grabbed her by the shoulders, which was a little awkward since she had a good six inches of height on him, and positioned her about a foot away from him.

  “Think of the worst pain you’ve ever felt.”

  “When I was young with a fever and stuck in bed, throwing my guts out. I thought there was a real chance I’d die.”

  “That’s a ten. Think of no pain at all, and that’s a zero.”

  Mary frowned, and she opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

  Archmund punched her in the arm as hard as he could.

  (So much for never laying a hand on her.)

  “Ow!”

  “From one to ten, how much does that hurt?”

  Mary shook out her arm. She was glowering at Archmund. “Zero, young master.”

  He was sure he’d actually tried.

  “Are you sure? Because I just want to make sure you can handle it in there—”

  “Wow, ruthless,” Raehel said. “If you wanted to know if she could handle it in there, you could’ve just asked me. There are ways to tell that sort of info, actually.”

  “Really?” That was certainly an interest data point. “Is she ready?”

  “She’ll live. But next to Raehel the Magnificent, no one is ready!”

  He hoped this would be a valuable learning experience for Mary. She’d get the experience she needed fighting some Monsters for real in the Dungeon, she’d be able to report back on Raehel’s capabilities, and he’d get a real sense of the discontentment of the working class.

  Because one thing was clear as day: Granavale County needed military power. A private army could become a capital crime at any moment.

  But a peacekeeping force or road guards or a “purely ceremonial” honor guard? All of those were more than permitted.

  And if they were used to project power or enforce order in other ways…

  Well, he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But he would be prepared if it did.