Chapter 5: Dead Newbie
Kael watched the tank and assassin as they talked at night. It left a bad taste in his mouth, the type that refused to leave even after the cause was spat out.
"Quite despicable, eager to make personal progress, their types are in every story. Tch, I found it difficult to decide who I was going to kill.
If they take it, I’ll get rid of them for sure, hopefully they change their hearts and don’t, but then again, I still need to take care of two people, and they are the best prospects."
——
"Let’s do it then," the assassin said. She propped herself off the wall, "I’ll leave town soon, find my own path and maybe join the assassin guild."
"Haha, seems you already had something planned out, that’s great then. We take it tonight and we leave this dungeon."
After they finalized their little scheme, the assassin moved. She faded into the shadow with practiced perfection. The tank looked around as well and then he walked off.
A few minutes later, the assassin formed from the shadows again. She stood right beside William, the artifacts lay beside him. She moved quietly, too quiet for a human, too still, too good. She picked the two artifacts, and as she had come, she vanished into the shadows again.
She walked out at the entrance that they had come in through, and there the tank waited for her. He saw the artifacts in her hands and a smile formed on his face.
They walked out easy. No hesitation, no looking back, the kind of exit that belonged to people who had already made their peace with the decision before they acted on it.
Kael watched them go.
The alcove was quiet. The remaining newbies were still asleep, breathing slow and even, completely unaware that the two people who had been sitting in the dark corner a few minutes ago were now walking out of the dungeon with everything the team had agreed to share.
Despicable, Kael thought. The word sat in him with a weight that surprised him. Every story has these types. Every single one.
He had been going back and forth on who to use for the directive. The tank and assassin had been the most likely candidates from the moment he identified the four as competent. They were the most dangerous, the most capable of causing problems, and now they had handed him the justification on a plate. He almost felt grateful. Almost.
He was still watching the entrance when one of the newbies moved.
Not stirred. Moved. Deliberate, quiet, the boy’s eyes opening with the kind of alertness that meant he hadn’t been fully asleep at all. He lay still for a moment, listening, and then he sat up slowly and looked at the space where the tank and assassin had been sitting.
Then he looked at the space beside William where the artifacts were no longer.
His jaw tightened. He picked up his sword from the ground beside him, stood without making a sound, and started toward the alcove entrance.
’No, Kael thought immediately. No, no, no. You absolute fool. Do not do that.’
The boy kept walking.
’At least wake William. Wake someone. You saw what those four did to the monsters on Floor One, you saw it with your own eyes, and you think you’re going to follow an assassin into the dark with that sword?’
The boy slipped out of the alcove.
Kael couldn’t speak to him. Couldn’t reach him. Could only watch through his floor perception as the boy tracked the faint sounds of the tank and assassin moving toward the exit, following at a distance he clearly believed was safe, his breathing controlled, his steps careful. He was trying. Kael would give him that. He was genuinely trying.
The assassin vanished.
One moment she was moving through the corridor ahead of the tank and the next she was simply not there, the shadow swallowing her so completely that even Kael’s perception had to work to find her. The boy stopped. He looked at the space where she had been and then looked around the corridor slowly, his grip on his sword tightening.
She came up behind him without a sound.
The blade touched his neck before he knew she had moved, cold metal against skin, and she was completely still behind him, not a breath out of place.
The tank turned around and looked at the boy with the particular expression of someone who had just found something mildly amusing in an otherwise routine evening. "Cheeky little bastard," he said. "Thought you could creep up on us like that?"
The boy’s hands were shaking. Kael could see it from where he was, the tremor running through the grip on the sword, the way his chest was rising and falling too fast now, the fear finally breaking through the surface of whatever courage had carried him this far. His eyes were wet. He knew. He understood exactly what was about to happen and the understanding was written across every part of him.
He tried anyway.
He shoved back hard against the assassin, twisting, trying to create the single inch of distance he needed to run. It was a good instinct. It was the right instinct.
It wasn’t enough.
The blade moved once.
His body hit the floor and the sound of it echoed down the corridor and then the dungeon went very quiet.
The tank looked at him for a few seconds. The assassin looked at him for a few seconds. Then they walked away.
Kael sat with what he had just watched.
The bad taste from earlier hadn’t left. It had gotten worse, settling into something colder and more decided, the last trace of any probability of mercy burning off completely. He had been running calculations. Weighing options. Considering whether the directive could be fulfilled some other way.
That was done now.
He reached down through his floors, past One, past Two, past Three and Four, all the way down to Five where the corridors were wider and the things living in them were built differently from anything the upper floors had produced. He found what he was looking for almost immediately.
The goblin champion was seven feet of dense muscle and old scar tissue, a creature that had survived Floor Five long enough to become the thing other monsters moved away from. It carried a jagged cleaver the length of a grown man’s arm and it had not been given a reason to move in several days.
Kael gave it a reason.
He forced a passage open, stone grinding and cracking as the wall between the stairwell and the current corridor buckled and split, a new and ugly opening tearing itself into existence. The champion came through it without slowing, its footsteps hitting the stone floor like dropped weight, the cleaver dragging a line in the wall as it turned and oriented itself.
It found the two figures ahead of it in the corridor.
Its eyes settled on them.
