Behind me, Alpha finished slaughtering all the goblins. The final Shaman, the leader of the tribe, self-destructed in a wave of darkness. Some kind of ultimate attack move that actually dimmed Alpha's rune defense for a moment. Maybe it was running out of steam.

I ran across the cavern to the exit tunnel. It looked almost identical to the entrance cave, a rough round opening about 10 feet in diameter. Instead of stairs leading down, the tunnel rose in a gradual curve. Huh. An inverted dungeon setup.

I paused about a foot inside to set a bear trap on the ground and a paired set of two emoji sticker traps on the walls to either side. I hadn't used my amazing emoji sticker traps much on this stage, so Alpha wouldn't know about them. They'd helped a ton down on stage 1, so hopefully they could prove just as useful again.

I slapped the identical stickers onto the sides of the cave entrance, about chest height, facing each other. The emojis looked like those hilarious minions in Despicable Me, sticking their tongues out. They faded to shadows within seconds of being applied. The description of the trap was not nearly so cute.

"Emoji Pincer Traps. Erupt with spears imbued with bonus piercing damage to puncture the target from both sides and hold them in place while delivering a dozen additional spear strikes."

Satisfied, I stepped out of the exit tunnel. Alpha had waded through the entire goblin horde with his rune shield still intact. He'd taken some hits, but he moved so fast, few of the goblins had landed really good strikes. My first idea was to hit him with several powerful attacks simultaneously to see if I could overwhelm his defenses. Maybe the goblins weakened the rune barrier enough one final barrage might finish him off.

When I glanced back at the goblin town, Alpha was rampaging through it, howling and shouting for me to show myself. I waited until he leaped atop the hall and let out a louder howl.

When he turned in my direction in a 360 degree scan, I triggered the Sunburst spells from my two diamond bracers. I hadn't used that ability yet, but hoped they worked as promised. In twin flashes of blinding brilliance, the bracers blazed like living suns for a second. For me, the light was muted to barely a glimmer. They really were keyed to affect only enemies.

Alpha swiveled toward the light and launched off the roof, sprinting toward the exit cave like a bullet of living fangs. I crept to the left side of the exit, then remained perfectly still, invisible and impossible to smell.

"You cannot flee!" Alpha roared. For a guy who could be so clever sometimes, he didn't think too deeply in the grip of an active bloodlust. Good.

He wasn't totally stupid, though, and slowed as he approached the cave mouth. Peering around cautiously, he sniffed. Standing perfectly still 5 feet away, I held my breath lest the sound of my breathing gave me away. He growled and padded forward, nose low to the ground as he quested for my scent.

No. His face might get caught in the bear trap, but the emoji sticker traps might miss with him crouched so low. I wasn't about to let him escape my fun little surprise.

So I took a single long step behind him, deactivating Mirror Cloak, and booted him in the backside. The kick didn't hurt him, of course. The protective rune barrier flared up and bounced my foot backward, but only a little. My Treads of the Luscaan Explorer boots absorbed most of the magical hit. Maybe I should have kicked harder, but all I'd needed was the distraction.

With a triumphant roar, Alpha rose to his full height and spun to face me. In the process, he move a vital half step deeper into the cave. For a second, he loomed over me, the mightiest werewolf of all. His fierce musky scent filled my nostrils, and his coarse, prickly fur was matted with blood.

"Hi, how are you?" I called as the terrifying bear trap materialized out of the thin band of shadow concealing it and crunched into Alpha's legs with terrific force. At the same time, thick spears plunged out of the walls and slammed into Alpha's sides.

His rune barrier flared with incandescent white light again. The bear trap shattered as its same force was rebounded back against it, while the spears exploded into shards. More spears shot out from both sides in a devastating sequence, one after the other, each offset by a couple inches, all stabbing at Alpha's sides in an eyeblink.

Against anyone else, or even against Alpha any other time, that barrage would have shredded them. Unfortunately, they all exploded. The rune barrier did noticeably dim. Still, that hadn't gone as well as I had hoped, so I slammed a potion of Create Darkness to the ground, then threw myself flat as an enormous sphere of absolute stygian blackness erupted out to consume 10 yards of space.

Air whooshed overhead as Alpha leaped through the darkness, growling with anger as he sought to catch me in his claws. He missed me by a fraction of an inch, and as soon as he passed, I rolled to my feet and jogged into the exit cave, reactivating Mirror Cloak. After a few seconds, while Alpha roared and cursed me for cowardice just outside the sphere of darkness, I sped up.

The sloping ramp's smooth floor helped keep my noise to a minimum. The traps had failed, but they seemed to help weaken the rune barrier. A couple more of those should do it. Then the fight could really begin.

After two upward spirals, the winding tunnel emptied into another large cavern situated above the goblin cave, but offset, extending deeper inside the enormous mountain. Eerie green light shone down from lichen covering the ceiling, which was barely 50 feet overhead. The open space close to the entrance extended like a huge, square parade ground about 100 yards across. On the far side, half a dozen tunnels broke the distant wall, extending away into darkness.

An army of humanoid creatures were already gathering near the entrance where I crouched. They looked a lot like the goblins, only taller, much more muscular, and a lot fiercer. I focused on one.

"Orc Warrior. Common. Level 35. These savage fighters train tirelessly to perfect unit tactics to overwhelm far more powerful monsters together."

The Warriors generally wore better armor and carried better weapons than the goblins. I spotted swords, axes, maces, spears, and less traditional weapons among their ranks. They were forming up into 3 companies of 20 orcs each, with the closest ranks carrying heavy, steel-banded wooden shields. A captain stood at the back of each company, while a much bigger orc in the rear apparently led them all.

"Orc General. Uncommon. Level 50. This elite fighter and master tactician is the veteran of hundreds of clashes with forces of the other dungeon levels and invading monsters."

None of them seemed to have magic, unless it manifested as part of their fighting skills. They looked a bit like the famous Uruk-hai of the Lord of the Rings movies, but with longer tusks and whiplike tails capped with serrated blades.

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The Grindstone dungeon was proving really unique. Thankfully, I didn't need to fight that well-organized army. I'd brought a living wrecking ball to do the heavy lifting for me.

I paused just inside the cave, crouching slightly to ensure Mirror Cloak kept me covered. With Phantomstep Breeches magnifying my Stealth, I wasn't too worried. Within 60 seconds, the orc companies finished forming up and the echoing howls of Alpha grew closer. He'd finally figured out I'd escaped the goblin tunnel and was coming fast.

Just before the furious Alpha rounded the last bend in the tunnel, I tossed out one of my Decoy Hares I'd gotten from those crazy teleporting exploding bunnies. It plopped to the floor about 10 feet inside the cave, and a lifelike replica of me appeared. Thankfully, it didn't duplicate Mirror Cloak. With a flash that drew every eye, it formed a perfect clone of me.

Instantly, the orc army charged, shields up, spears poised to thrust. Just as they closed on my decoy, Alpha erupted out of the tunnel like a harbinger of death, howling with bloodlust. He crashed into my Decoy just as the orcs tried steamrolling it.

If only I could cast a second Potential Hammer, but the 10 minute cooldown timer hadn't expired yet. A timer had appeared with the counter of charges, and I still had 3 and a half minutes to use them.

The Decoy Hare detonated with a fantastic explosion. Of course, Alpha's rune shield blazed with defensive light so the orc army got a double shot of explosive force right in the face. Several shields shattered and the front ranks of the center company tumbled back into the ranks behind.

The companies to either side got hit with less of the blast, so rushed forward, targeting Alpha as eagerly as they'd attacked my decoy. They were bigger, stronger, and far more disciplined.

Didn't help.

As another slaughter commenced, Alpha took many more hits. Despite getting flung back again and again, the orcs pressed forward, howling and gnashing their jagged teeth in their hunger to rend Alpha's flesh. It didn't work, as one attack after another was turned and rebounded. Meanwhile, Alpha tore through them, venting all his frustrated rage at missing me again on the hapless orcs.

The general tried to call a retreat, but Alpha was tearing through the center of his forces and discipline collapsed to pure havoc. Howls and shrieks echoed painfully in the cavern, and the stench of blood and worse things made me want to retch.

Through it all, I remained crouched by the cave mouth, studying the rune array, which flashed constantly around Alpha under the barrage. Its power was noticeably dimmer, but still far from extinguished. Alpha had called me a cheater, but he'd brought that shield array to the fight. I also activated Spellseer's Gaze and watched the flow of mana and energy through the rune matrix.

That helped me get an idea. The matrix was very powerful, but it was all built around the simple core principle of Reflection. Everything else just expanded on that core idea. I wished I could copy it down and study it.

Such a simple concept made for a powerful core energy focus. The second level runesmith tome talked in depth about the principle of power through simplicity. Complex concepts were far more likely to shatter unless every possible connotation was included. Better to pare the idea to its most basic core truth and build the runes out from there.

The greatest weakness for simple concepts was that opposing concepts were also simple to figure out once the core of the rune matrix was understood. To break the concept of Reflection, obvious choices included Dispersion to spread more energy through the matrix instead of reflecting it all, thus overloading it sooner. Or Inversion, which could flip the reflection back against Alpha, magnifying the damage instead of deflecting it.

The runesmith creating the matrix could include modifiers to block the application of obvious counters, and I sensed that Noctarus had included counters to both Dispersion and Inversion. However, another less obvious idea seemed more promising.

I was a programmer back on Earth, and runes were a kind of magical code language that really made sense to me. One concept in programming that was both super powerful and famously squirrelly was the idea of recursion.

Basically, recursion was when a program tasked with solving a complex problem called itself again, breaking the problem into smaller bits each time. A recursive program might call itself hundreds of times before finishing. Then as each instance of it finished, it returned back up the chain, sending the answer to that bit of the problem back to itself and releasing every copy until it completed the final answer so the program could move forward.

The problem with recursion was that if the return condition wasn't set right, the program would end up in an infinite loop, just calling itself over and over and never finishing. The program would hang and eventually crash.

Noctarus had mastered complex rune concepts I couldn't even imagine yet. Pitting my fledgling rune mastery against his would be hopeless. But what if I added a modifier to turn his unbreakable rune matrix into a recursive endless loop?

As more and more hits kept pouring in, the energy wouldn't have anywhere to go. Worst case, the idea failed, but it might just short out the rune matrix like a crashed program.

In seconds, I scanned my memory of the long list of runes I'd studied with Noctarus or been force-fed from the runesmith tomes and found the runes I wanted. I could use the concept of Anchoring, or grounding the reflected energy into a single point, with a modifier to reflect the energy back into the defensive rune web as if it was a new impact. That would then call the anchoring rune again, recursively looping the energy again and again.

The problem was, there was no way I could run up to Alpha and start scratching runes onto his back while he was leaping around, fighting through all those orcs. I needed a delivery method for my experiment.

After a couple seconds perusing my inventory, I extracted one of the long silk ribbons I'd gotten in Abbie's dominatrix dungeon. The smooth blue ribbon was about 6 inches wide and 20 feet long. Perfect, except I didn't have a pen.

I did have ketchup.

"That'll work," I whispered, crouching near the wall and turning my back to the fighting to obscure what I was doing behind Mirror Cloak. I hated to waste good ketchup, but desperate times called for great sacrifices.

Using one of my throwing knives from that set of 4 I'd picked up in the plateau dungeon but never used, I dipped the tip into a bucket of ketchup and used it like an old-fashioned quill pen. I quickly, but carefully marked the basic rune of the Anchor, followed by the basic rune of Self, with modifiers to link the two so they'd create that recursive magical loop. I even added another modifier to discharge excess mana into the air as heat energy. I didn't want my basic script getting overloaded instantly and wiping out my ketchup mastery before the loop called itself a lot of times.

My first rune script with more than 2 runes. If only I had more time to appreciate the moment. It was crude, but the idea was simple. I'd wrecked test programs with a single line or two of badly written recursion enough times to feel absolutely confident this would work.

When I focused mana into my little rune script, the runes glowed with a soft, golden light. Rising, I tossed the ketchup back into my inventory and turned to the battle, which was quickly winding down.

Only 10 of the orcs remained, including the 3 captains and the general. They fought with amazing ferocity, working together in perfect harmony to strike from every side and counter Alpha's return strikes when one of their number suffered rebound damage.

It looked like they understood they could not defeat him until they exhausted his protective rune, and they were doing an admirable job of attempting to do so. It wouldn't be enough, though, not without a little intervention.

I crept toward the fight, stepping over scores of dead and mutilated orcs. The area stank, and dark orc blood lay in sheets over everything.

Fighting back a chunky cough, I closed on the still-fighting combatants and whispered, "Okay, here we go."

As I crept closer, I tied the end of the ribbon to the hilt of the dagger, making sure the runes remained visible, just behind the knot. I nearly had to step on the back of an orc to get close enough, but paused there, waiting for the opportune moment.

The orcs had Alpha hemmed in on every side. He could have leaped out of the trap if he really wanted to, but he seemed to be reveling in the slaughter. He spun from one attack to the next, lashing out at the disciplined orcs whenever they attacked. He laughed as he tore open the arm of one orc, then spun and backhanded one of the orc captains trying to rush him from behind.

Perfect. The move slammed the captain into the orc right in front of me, sending them both tumbling to the ground. That gave me an opening as Alpha spun to deflect a spear thrusting in from the opposite side.

Praying the plan worked, I threw my knife.

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