Jeremy studied his stat sheet.

  YOU HAVE LEVELED UP!

  FIRST QUEST ACCEPTED!

  Name: Jeremy Wilkins

  Race: Human

  Sex: Boy

  Age: 10

  Character Class: Child-Rogue

  Level: 3

  Health: 8

  Attributes:

  Strength: 5

  Endurance: 5

  Vitality: 6

  Dexterity: 7

  Agility: 8

  Perception: 9

  Intelligence: 6

  Wisdom: 5

  Will Power: 4

  Charisma: 4

  Extra point: 1

  Mana: 5

  Active Skills:

  Identify: 1

  Sneak: 4

  Detect Traps: 2

  Passive Skills:

  Poison Resistance: 1

  Spells:

  None

  Dungeon Account:

  28.01 dc

  UrgMiZinNeh-Deceased/Jeremy Wilkins adventurer party.

  He groaned, I'm sorry, Urg.

  It would seem clowns were worth more than the stuffed monster creatures from the red path. He'd gone up a level. Agility, Dexterity, and Perception had each gained a point. He put his remaining attribute point into Perception, bringing it up to 10. His stats were going up, but he didn't feel any different. If his agility had gone up 3 points, he should be able to do things he couldn't before, not to mention his perception had more than doubled.

  He activated Sneak and ate another dungeon ration, deep in thought. For some reason, handstands had always been difficult for him; if his agility had gone up, that might have changed. He did one now. His arms shook as he did a handstand, blood rushing to his head. He wasn't falling, but it wasn't easy either. He tried taking one hand off the floor and fell over. So much for Agility.

  He reactivated Sneak, ate another dungeon ration, ignoring the sawdust taste, and drank some more water. Dungeon rations were supposed to increase his strength, and he needed all the strength he could get. How many had he eaten? Ten? More? He ate another, focusing on keeping Sneak active as he did so.

  Whatever passed for morning in monster-clown-land came when he heard movements, snarls, giggles, and sounds of fighting from the many clowns returning to consciousness, doing the things monster clowns did when they got up in the morning.

  “Well, I don't know about you, but I slept like a rock,” Clown Lord entered the loft making a show of yawning.

  By this time, Jeremy's Sneak had gone up to 5 and his mana to 6. Jeremy nodded, shoving another dungeon ration into his mouth. His situation wasn't ideal, but it was better than it had been the previous night.

  “My subjects will show you to the secret passage to the spider queen's lair. The rest is up to you.”

  Jeremy followed several snarling giggling clowns down many dungeon hallways. Without the clowns' guidance, he would be completely lost.

  The secret passage turned out to be a hole in one of the darkened hallways, concealed by a circular stone the clowns pulled from the wall.

  Without ceremony, the clowns picked Jeremy up and shoved him inside, replacing the stone behind him.

  The darkness closed in on him, and he fought not to freak out in claustrophobic terror. Without the floating torches residing in the rest of the dungeon, there was no light, and it was just as dark with his eyes closed as with them open. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, pretending he wasn't trapped in a very narrow tunnel.

  Once he'd calmed down. He felt around him. The passageway was not quite large enough for him to crawl down. Nothing for him to do but push forward. He had to half push, half squirm his way forward, making far too much noise.

  It was so quiet in the passageway the slightest brush against the surrounding stone seemed deafening. His knife continually got caught against the stone as he pushed forward, so he ended up pulling his knife from its sheath and holding his knife in front of him. It occurred to him this would be a very bad place to be attacked. He activated Sneak and fought to move in silence. Easier said than done, and his knees started to hurt from bearing his weight in an enclosed space.

  The passageway seemed endless, and his knees went from hurting to agony at every movement. He stopped from time to time to rest, praying he'd get somewhere, anywhere, that wasn't this endless tunnel of darkness.

  The tunnel came to a dead-end. It was a trap! This had all been a Clown-Lord trick! He suppressed a scream, expecting someone to grab him from behind. But nothing happened. He felt around. The dead end was made of a different material from the rest of the passageway. He found what seemed like a door handle. He tried pushing and pulling on it. With a quiet grating squeak, deafening in the silence, he pulled the door open and light entered the tunnel.

  So relieved he could cry, he held still for a long time, making sure he hadn't been noticed. When nothing happened, he activated Sneak and crept forward, doing everything he could to remain silent. If he was caught now, he was under no illusion as to what would happen.

  After another minute of crawling, the tunnel opened, and he looked down into a circular room cut from stone and lit by a few floating torches. His tunnel exited near the room's ceiling, giving him an excellent view of a room that was twice as big as the cavern in which he had entered the dungeon. The room appeared deserted. Nothing looked like a spider queen or silk thread.

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  Beside Jeremy was a pile of rope. Examining the knotted rope, he found it was a rope ladder with the top part fastened to the tunnel wall.

  He watched, hardly daring to breathe. Even if he was in the wrong place, he should see something, if not, he'd have to go down and search, and he was reluctant to do so without knowing where to look.

  As he was about to throw down the rope ladder, he saw a flicker in the torchlight, a distortion in the air. He looked more closely. Something shaped like a car-sized spider hung in the air. Since a flying spider was unlikely, it meant the spider was hanging on an equally hard-to-see web. He shuddered, thinking of what would have happened if he'd tried to go down there. No wonder Clown Lord told him to raise his perception. The spider queen and her web were practically invisible.

  From the way the spider hung in the air, he could figure out approximately where the web was located. One side of the web was close to his wall, and he'd have to be careful to avoid it. Fortunately, his tunnel was deep in the shadows so there was little chance he'd be seen. This was good because he'd run out of mana.

  Without warning, the spider moved in his direction. She was as hard to hear as she was to see, making no noise, moving like a ripple on the water.

  Right when Jeremy thought he was about to be attacked, the spider queen continued past him and headed toward the opposite side of the room, poking a couple of cocoons. She bit into one cocoon and then the other.

  She was sucking the juice out of the poor creatures she'd wrapped up in her webbing. Yuck. He shuddered.

  Finishing her meal, the spider queen went to a slight indentation on the cavern floor and sat. Was she doing something? And was there something in front of her? Like spider silk? It was hard to tell. Spiders were scary enough when they weren't invisible. After sitting there forever, the car-sized spider queen stood up and left the room.

  He waited a few minutes in case she came back. Nothing.

  He dropped Sneak and activated Detect Traps. There were a bunch of glowing lines crisscrossing the room. Too many to memorize. He'd have to go underneath three glowing lines and step over four more to get to where she'd been. Without Detect Trap, he wouldn't have known they were there.

  Question. Could he activate Sneak and Detect Trap at the same time? First, he activated Sneak, then he focused on Detect Trap. He found he could activate both, but instantly ran out of mana.

  He waited to recover. Five minutes later, he tried again. With difficulty, he found he could maintain both for about ten seconds, but doing so used mana like crazy. If he tried using both, he'd lose power long before he reached his destination, let alone return. No choice for it. He had to drop Sneak.

  Feeling like the queen might return anytime and praying she wouldn't, he dropped the rope ladder. The ladder stopped halfway to the floor, caught in her web. He yanked on the ladder, pulling so hard to get it unstuck that it flew in the air, causing the whole web to vibrate. He pulled the ladder back up and waited for the spider queen to return and investigate. Nothing.

  He lowered the ladder again, careful to hold the rope ladder away from her invisible web. This time it reached the floor. He went down it as fast as he could, expecting the spider queen to see him and attack. Activating Detect Trap, he ran across the room as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Arriving where the spider queen had been earlier, he felt around. Seeing a ripple in the air, he reached for it. It felt like a spool of thread two feet tall and a foot across. This had to be what Clown Lord was after. He felt a strand of thread running from the spool to the floor where the spider queen had been sitting. He pulled the end of the thread from the floor. Instead of trying to wrap it around the spool, he wrapped the strand around his wrist, thinking a strong, invisible thread could come in handy. The quest was to bring the silk thread to Clown Lord, which he was technically doing. The monster was unlikely to notice or care if Jeremy kept a single thread for himself. He hoped.

  After wrapping the strand around his wrist and cutting it off with his knife, he grabbed the spool of silk thread and found he couldn't pick it up. Something (a stalagmite?) held the spool to the floor. Growing more and more frightened, he pulled back a leg and kicked the spool as hard as he could. Once. Twice. On the third kick, the spool broke off the floor with a loud crack. He grabbed it and ran back to the ladder, dodging the traps, not bothering to be quiet. He reached the ladder and climbed furiously, holding the spool with one arm and climbing with the other, his knife clenched between his teeth.

  There was a loud, angry screech and clicking noise from the other side of the room. The spider queen had returned.

  He climbed desperately, banging his knuckles repeatedly on the rock wall in his hurry to get away.

  Pshhook! A thick mass of sticky webbing slammed against the wall inches away from him. The spider queen was clambering on her web. Ripples in the air showed she'd summoned reinforcements, and they were coming in fast. He made it to the top and flung himself into the tunnel, making sure to enter feet first.

  Pshhok! Webbing splatted the tunnel entrance. A couple of strands attached themselves to his hair, hurting as his hair came out by the roots when he moved backward, crawling for his life.

  Strands of webbing slid off the spool of spider silk. That was what he'd been hoping for. If anything was resistant to the spider queen's sticky webbing, it would be her own silk. Right? Reaching for the door, he slammed it shut, wishing it had some kind of lock, but finding none, he kept moving. If there was a world record for the fastest person to crawl backward in a narrow tunnel, he was pretty sure he broke it. He scraped his hands and elbows on the passage walls, but was so frightened he barely noticed.

  There was a screeching and chittering as spiders approached. The tunnel was too narrow for the spider queen, but not for her smaller subjects.

  Sticky webbing collided with his spool of spider silk as the first spiders reached him. The tunnel was too narrow for them to get past his spool of spider silk, but hairy legs scratched his face and mandibles slammed together, missing his fingers by millimeters. He stabbed downward over the spool of spider silk, remembering what Clown Lord said about their poison and praying he didn't get bitten. The first stab slid off its exoskeleton, but the second went through its eye. With angry screeches and clicks, the living spiders fought to get past their dead companion and Jeremy really wished dead monsters weren't so quickly reabsorbed by the dungeon.

  He kept crawling backward, hot, exhausted, and panting for breath, wondering how much farther he had to go. The spiders caught up to him twice more. Each time, he drove them back with his knife, using the spool of silk for a shield. His feet collided with the rock blocking the tunnel entrance. He screamed and kicked as hard as he could. The stone covering the entrance fell to the dungeon floor, and he slid out, wasting no time putting as much distance as possible between him and the invisible poisonous spiders.

  Freedom.

  Snarling giggling clowns engaged the spiders pouring out into the tunnel.

  Clown Lord was waiting nearby. “Little adventurer. Do you have my silk?”