It was the third day of exploration, long enough that we were starting to panic about ever clearing this place out, when we found something.

  Most Caverns of Calcul hallways were eight feet wide and ten feet tall, with doors about a foot off the edges and two off the top. There were occasional chambers, usually behind doors, usually not very large, usually with monsters present.

  This hallway opened directly into an open chamber, and this chamber was twenty feet tall, with huge double-doors at the end. The doors bore an image like a circuit board, a series of lines tracing a complex pattern and meeting at weird emblems. A dull, constant grinding sound came through the doors.

  After a moment of silence, I looked at Lacie. "So, there's a boss in there, right?"

  "There's kinda got to be," she agreed.

  "I'll go in. You stay here."

  "Fuck no. I'll give you a bunch of buffs beforehand, but we go in in together."

  "You've seen how slow I am at killing things. I can't just protect you the way someone, well, like Luxe could have."

  "There is no way I'm staying outside." When I didn't immediately reply, she said, more softly, "You're not entirely wrong, though. We're not the strongest party, and we're still underleveled for this place. Maybe we come back later?

  I thought about that. I currently had almost five hundred traps in my inventory from the hallways leading here. Over 95% of those were broken traps, as I didn't have whatever skill let you keep them intact or place them safely, but they were probably all the traps in the hallways that led here. We could just come back whenever we wanted.

  "Alright," I said. "We'll come back later, once we have a plan."

  Turning away, we headed back into the labyrinth, going deeper. We'd gone down many stairs already, and had long since given up on heading back to the safe room regularly. It just took too long to make the trek. Lacie theorized that was supposed to be part of the risk of this dungeon, that there was just one town at the top so you had to find a way to keep exploring with nowhere to rest.

  Our solution was finding small, sealable rooms. She figured out a trick where she attached a rope to a trap in her inventory, then set it down too far for her to trigger. This let her lay out an alarm trap in the door, and pull it into her inventory without ever triggering it when we left, even though neither of us had whatever skill let us safely place traps. We sealed the door, she laid the trap and went to sleep, and I kept clearing, never going especially far.

  I wanted to just stand guard, but she insisted. "The danger isn't a monster in the dark, it's running out of time. Even after we clear this whole Calcul mess, we're not done."

  So, for another two days we kept clearing. I was impressed by how calm Lacie stayed, even as I could tell she was feeling the time pressure. We were five days into the fifteen we had before these aliens murdered us, and all we'd done was kill a bunch of bugs and find one potential boss chamber.

  As we went down a long ramp and into a new hallway, I felt the air moving. "Lacie, is there a breeze?"

  "You'd best open that helm."

  I did so, and gasped. About sixty paces on, the hallway simply ended, broken off with a view through columns of smoke towards a setting sun. "What sort of dungeon is this?"

  Lacie's face fell. "I know what happened, why we're seeing so few mobs and can't get in touch with anyone else."

  I sighed. This was going to be bad.

  Pulling out a blank sheet of paper and the map she'd made so far, she said, "See this section, where all the hallways end?"

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "Yeah, you were saying that was important."

  "It is, but it also made everything into a catastrophe. So, let's imagine nothing has happened, and this whole map is a circle." She drew as she talked, making a side-view of what she imagined the bubble was like. "We have this broad, flat plateau, which is the land quadrant. Somewhere above that there's the air quadrant, but no need to worry about that, yet. Around the land, down the cliff, is the water quadrant. And we're here, underneath the land quadrant."

  "Makes sense, aside from why I can see daylight."

  "So, look atop here, where the town was. This here—" Lacie sketched a quick box "—is the safe room, right next to where the blast occurred. And this right below it, this is that huge column we keep running into that you tried damaging and couldn't scratch with your best throw."

  "Alright, that all matches the layout."

  "The town is at the top of the subterranean layer, and just above it is a thick panel of stone." By now, we were almost at the edge, and she pointed up. Sure enough, at the top there was a slab of stone about a hundred feet thick. "All this means that the blast Vitorio made was caught between the top of an indestructible chamber, a mass of stone so heavy it effectively trapped the blast, and the back end of a literally indestructible safe room. That's why we could only exit through the one side of town. That's why we keep getting into collapses as we move the other way."

  I asked the obvious question. "But why is the sky visible?"

  "His blast was so fucking powerful that, directed as it was, it tore through multiple entire floors of the subterranean zone, all the way to the edge of the plateau. It destroyed so many walls and did so much damage to the structure that the entire plateau collapsed. Once that heavy stone layer started sliding, it kept going. See out there, that's supposed to be water out to the edge of the bubble, but instead there's a rockslide. Vitorio blew up half the zone."

  "There's no way he could do that."

  "You weren't in that group long. You didn't hear him bragging. He got really pissy about it because the other explosives guys mostly just told him, 'Cool, but goblin dynamite doesn't measure up to hobgoblin anyways.'"

  "So, he had a lot of goblin dynamite?"

  "On the first floor, he found a map that said where all the goblin workshops were and he raided every single one he could get to. According to him, he had 'like a million sticks of dynamite', which I assumed was nonsense. Did you ever hear of the Halifax Explosion?"

  I frowned. That did sound familiar. "Maybe you told me about it when you were obsessed with nuclear bombs last year? I don't think I remember anything but the name."

  "Halifax had about 2,500 tonnes of explosives and the blast was about a sixth the force of the Hiroshima blast. Twenty or thirty thousand sticks of goblin dynamite would have been comparable to that. Basically, he set off a subterranean nuke and blew up the whole quadrant."

  I thought about him emptying his inventory. "As I was running, I could sense him pulling whole carts out of his inventory, full of something I couldn't make sense of. I saw at least twenty-six carts by the time we passed those... the dead crawlers. But if it was that powerful, my leg would have been entirely gone from being only halfway through the door."

  Her eyes darted away. "Uh, it was kinda pulped and had torn off. You weren't really cogent for that bit. I can, well, I don't have the same quick heals as most healers, but I can cast regeneration. I made the detached bit reattach and regrow. It's a mostly-new leg. Maybe I should train that skill. If I get it to level 5, I'll be able to regrow a limb, not just reattach it."

  I stared down, wondering how I'd not known that.

  I looked out again. "So... half the dungeon we're supposed to clear was exploded. Odds are good that we literally can't get inside this central cylinder, which obviously has our destination inside—"

  "That boss door we bypassed goes into that cylinder, but presumably we're supposed to do other things, first."

  "Oh. Well that's something." I looked across the destruction. "All the same, every quadrant's in utter chaos because Vitorio decided to blow up the world."

  We both stared out at the setting sun.

  "You know," Lacie said, "he was the least worst of those three. I mean, I didn't like him, but he seemed to actually enjoy all that explosives stuff he was doing. He'd get all excited talking about it."

  I sighed. "At the end there... Like I said before: I think he just was so enraged by this place that he wanted to leave a mark."

  "Well, he succeeded. I'm actually kinda impressed. That's a bigger blast than that fuck Carl has ever managed. Like, what a way to go, right?"

  I nodded. She wasn't wrong.

  We sat down, legs over the edge, watching the sunset. Lacie leaned over, her head on my shoulder. Every bit of worry unclenched, and I settled into her. We were going to die in about ten days. Still, ten days was a while.

  As we sat there, as darkness came, I started to feel nervous, like something was vibrating through my bones. Wait, scratch that. Something was vibrating through my bones.

  I grabbed Lacie, jumped upright, and closed my hitai-ate. There was something moving, one floor below us. A lot of somethings.

  "What's happening?" she asked.

  Opening my hitai-ate, I lit a torch and hurled it into the open air. As it fell into the ruins below, the motion of countless black, writhing bodies appeared, then snuffed it out. The ruins below had collapsed, but the megapedes had survived. In amongst them one moved that was larger than the others.