The good news was that they weren't trapped in the dungeon…yet.

A timer had surfaced on their SIs, and there were still a few more days left for the dungeon to resolve.

The bad news was that the timer was glitching, in and out of view, and the time was running down much faster than it should have been.

Not to mention that there were trolls they couldn't see surrounding them.

And there was no exit.

Fear had Lexie stalling, her brain short-circuiting. She was too scared to even think, as her own doom dawned on her.

This was a stupid, stupid idea.

It wasn't until Torin grabbed her hand and said, "Run!" that reality slapped her back to life.

She ran.

Her feet moved before her brain did, racing back through the darkness with Torin's grip tight on her shaking hands. The ground trembled as the heavy creatures pursued them. Their roars echoed around them, and Lexie's heart lodged in her throat.

She ran fast, faster than she ever ran before. She had enough presence of mind to activate <Lightfoot>, which gave her more speed.

It still wasn't enough. The trolls were bigger, and were gaining on them,

Torin activated a fireball in his hand and threw it behind them. A roar became a high-pitched screech, and he threw another, then another.

Lexie took that opportunity to look back.

All she saw were gleaming beady eyes, reflecting the flames that were burning in the air.

Torin turned sharply, into a corner, dragging her along.

A few of the trolls bounded right past on the straight path, while some followed them.

"We need to hide," Torin muttered to her, and he didn't even sound out of breath. Lexie realized that this wasn't at all his top speed. He was running slowly because of her.

The near-daily half-marathons he'd had her run for training had increased her speed and stamina, but it wasn't up to his, even with Lightfoot.

"How can you see where you're going?" Lexie gasped.

"I can't," he said, and she realized that he had one hand out on the wall, feeling their path forward.

Smart. She should have thought of that.

Lightfoot elapsed, and Lexie reactivated it almost immediately, feeling the drain on her mana.

One sharp turn later, and they ran down another dark tunnel.

"How many of them followed us?" Torin asked Lexie.

"About four," Lexie told him.

"Okay. I have Fireflight. I'm going to carry you and book it, but it won't be for very long. They'll probably catch up to us eventually, but if I get you to somewhere safe, can you communicate with the dungeon and figure out our way out of here?"

"Um, yes, I think so."

"Good, then that's what we'll do."

Torin was remarkably calm for someone who was in a dark dungeon surrounded by trolls. Then again, he was a Firebringer. Plus, he probably had more experience than she did fighting monsters in dungeons. She could see why he'd passed almost all his simulations with flying colors.

Torin activated a wall of fire between them and the trolls. Flames blazed behind Lexie so bright that she could see what lay ahead of her: a lengthy tunnel with no end in sight.

Suddenly, she was airborne. Torin had picked her up, and he was jetting through the tunnel, faster than she could gasp. It was almost as fast as the Road Rocket, and Lexie threw her arms around his neck, holding on as he twisted and turned. Her hair slapped against her face, the roars and heavy footsteps of the creatures echoing from further and further away.

Lexie almost started to feel relieved. Torin could outfly them.

But not for long.

When they reached far enough away, he put her down, and Lexie instantly got to work. She laid her hand against the cave walls and was hit with a kaleidoscope of flashing images, one after another. The same images as last time.

Three men holding hands, chanting a spell.

Strangers entering the dungeon.

Delvers fighting monsters.

Dungeoneers conducting research.

The dungeon sees it all.

Theo, she thought to herself as she tried to mentally slow the progress of the flashing images. I need to find Theo.

Lexie somehow sensed that what she was seeing wasn't just from this dungeon she was in. It was from every dungeon connected to it, the dungeons it controlled. There were so many images, so many things that she didn't understand.

Finally, she got a flash of Theo entering the dungeon.

It flipped by too fast for her to pin it down, as more images flooded her mind.

"No," she muttered.

"Lexie," she heard Torin's tight voice, but it sounded like it was far away. "You might want to hurry."

She nodded, but she tried one last thing to find Theo. She spoke to the dungeon once more, speaking firmly, with as much authority as she could muster.

Him. She pushed Theo's image she'd just gotten to the forefront of her mind. Show me this again.

The dungeon didn't cooperate, but Lexie thought maybe that was because it couldn't. It didn't seem in control of the images it was showing her as they ran through her mind. It seemed completely random, but Lexie continued to call images of Theo to her head, ignoring everything else, until the image merged with the reality she was seeing, and then she saw it...

It was a video.

She saw Theo entering the dungeon. Flashes of the men who attacked him.

Lexie's heart raced at the vision, and she eyed his opponents. One of them was the guy in her dream. One had a tattoo. The other, a mohawk.

A spray of water from the ceiling doused Theo's flames, and he had to fight back using only combat.

He was good, but there were too many of them.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

One of them was a forcefield user.

Everything happened fast, as they all pounced on him.

The video was interrupted by an array of different images that forced their way into her mind. Lexie let it flip by and kept focusing on Theo, shoving his image to the forefront once again.

She would get flashes of them here and there, interspersed with images of other dungeons, but the flashes of Theo became more frequent, and through them, Lexie began to piece together a story.

It was a different dungeon. Or maybe it was the same dungeon, just a secret compartment. Mist and grass covered everything. There was a castle in the distance. It looked like one of the secret levels.

The same guys in her dream were carrying Theo and having a conversation as they walked in, tendrils of which reached Lexie's ears.

"My wife again...so annoying..."

"...what do you think he's gonna say when we tell him about this..."

"We can't say anything. This is all top secret. You even think about spilling, and you'll die."

. "...there's gonna be a festival here in a few days....Biambal..."

"Yeah, don't worry, the dungeon will be gone by then."

With their back turned, they didn't see Theo's eyes open ever so slightly during transit. They didn't see him slip a familiar card into one of their back pockets as they dumped him unceremoniously on the grass.

They didn't see him subtly activate Sir Hoppington on their way out.

Lexie suddenly felt frustrated.

For Torin, she'd tuned Sir Hoppington to show her whatever he saw upon activation, but for Theo, it would only show him what the frog saw.

Shit.

If only she'd kept that feature in, then she could have found him.

Before despair took over, Lexie realized that she'd found something. She'd heard of the Biambal festival before, although she didn't know what exactly it was. But it was only held once a year, she was pretty sure that wherever it was being held was where the dungeon was.

Elation filled her. She knew where Theo was.

Unfortunately, even through her visions, she could hear the roar that suggested that the trolls had found them.

Lexie ripped her hand away and opened her eyes to see four of them burst out of the end of the tunnel.

Torin hit them with fireballs that engulfed their entire body, making the seven-foot beasts screech in agony, falling to their knees.

The smell of burning flesh permeated the atmosphere, and Lexie almost gagged.

But the fire only slowed them down. They still advanced.

Lexie took a deep breath, centering herself. She had fought several Shadow Orcs in her dreams.

This was the time for all those lessons to pay off.

She opened her Defense Deck and chose the void cards. She turned the effect up all the way and targeted the trolls.

Darkness burst out of the top of her finger and attached to two of the trolls. They screamed as they fought back, but the darkness swallowed both of them whole.

Lexie collapsed.

"Lexie!" Torin screamed, but he wasn't staring at her. He was using all his energy to keep the fire burning on the other two trolls, who were attempting to fight through the flames.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," she said weakly. She was exhausted, a headache pounding at the side of her skull, her heart beating faster. That last void card had drained all her human mana, and everything she used from now on would be Eldritch.

"Did you find the exit?"

Oh shit. She'd forgotten about that.

She touched the wall again, and this time ignored the images that were flashing at her. Instead of that, she went deeper, tracing the mana paths of the dungeon. She noticed that the mana was growing stronger, the dungeon getting more powerful.

The timer in the corner of her vision only had a few hours left, but it ticked down like seconds.

Lexie knew what was happening. The dungeon's sentience was fighting its stability, craving chaos.

And it was winning.

By Lexie's estimation, the dungeon was seconds away from resolving itself.

"Hurry," Torin said. "More are coming."

Not just that. The timer is about to run out. Lexie followed the mana path, stretched her senses farther and farther until she sensed the place where the dungeon drew mana from the atmosphere.

That was the entrance of the dungeon.

"I got it," she said.

Torin picked her up again, without further ado.

"You direct," he said as he jetted off. He soared above the heads of the burning trolls, one of them reaching out to grab him. Torin expertly swerved out of their hold and shot down the tunnel, back from where they came.

"There," Lexie pointed, and they curved right, just as the three unburnt trolls came barreling from the other end of the tunnel, chasing after them.

Lexie tried not to think about them, or the five other trolls that were somewhere in this dungeon.

"Left," Lexie called, closing her eyes so that she could sense more. She reached out to touch the walls of the dungeon, just in case the entrance shifted again.

"Right."

Torin turned sharply without any qualms.

"Left again."

They continued down the path until the entrance was right there, just ahead of them.

A torrent of water slammed them from the ceiling, just like the other dungeon had done in the fight with Theo.

They dropped.

Lexie lost her grip on Torin, rolling in what felt like mud.

She got to her knees, even as the mud sucked at her like quicksand.

She tried to get to her feet, but she slipped and fell again.

"Torin!" she said because, for whatever reason, he was sinking in worse than she was. He was nearly up to his neck.

Guttural screams shook the walls of the cave.

There were trolls charging in soon, and Lexie had no time to panic. She had to think fast.

The quicksand reminded her of her first encounter with the V'Sala.

That gave her an idea. But she needed to get Torin out first.

She turned round to Torin, watching him with his eyes closed. He was heating his body, steam rising off him, trying to get his fire working again. They didn't have time.

"Torin," Lexie yelled for him, and he glanced at her.

"You'll find Theo in a dungeon located where the Biambal festival is supposed to be," she said. "Tell your mom and Vacek."

"What?"

"Don't forget. You need to get him before the festival because the dungeon will be resolved by then. One of the kidnappers has a mohawk, and the other a tattoo. Also...be on the lookout for an invisible frog."

"Lexie, what are you sayin–"

Lexie had been activating <True Windbreaker> as she spoke, linking it to the telekinetic card. She'd also wanted to reverse the antimagnetic element of <Can't Touch This> and use that to attach herself to Torin, but she didn't have time to configure that into the combo, and she didn't want to risk it not working.

She collected the wind from the atmosphere and from her own body and shoved it all at Torin.

It worked in pushing him out of the mud.

He was swept away toward where Lexie thought the entrance was.

He disappeared, and she was relieved.

Before she could do the same to herself, the timer ran out. The entrance vanished, the dungeon resolving.

Lexie was officially trapped.

****

Aiden was standing outside the weapons store in the Palisades, Old Moulding.

In his research on the weapon's store, there was one thing that had stuck with him, which he now realized he should have paid more attention to: the fact that this had been one of the places hit by an underground unstable dungeon back when Hovelton was having its own UUD problems.

Though they'd gotten rid of the UD, there was no way of knowing if it was back. After all, UD's tended to recur in the same area.

Aiden thought there might be a UD around here, deep underground, or somewhere where they couldn't see and where his daughter hadn't been able to sense intrinsically.

He had a theory–that the Alchemist could appear anywhere around an active UD.

Maybe not physically, but he could project his consciousness through the dungeons, which might have been how he'd been able to talk to Aiden in Hovelton.

It was also how he'd appeared here and controlled his golem anyway.

The Alchemist might also be using the dungeons to power his experiments. Based on the description Tate gave Aiden, that was probably how the Alchemist was powering the golem. The real Alchemist's powers were supposed to be suppressed, so the golem's source of magic was the dungeon core itself.

It was an insane feat, something only the Alchemist would be capable of.

The real Alchemist was sitting on the Island oblivious, while the golem had evolved enough power and independent consciousness to continue his work. There was still some connection there–seeing as how the golem knew about Aiden's presence in the Alchemist's mind–but the Alchemist in the tower did not know about the golem's activities, which was why the truth potion didn't work.

The golem was, for all intents and purposes, the new Alchemist and possibly even more powerful.

Aiden sighed. He might be walking into a trap.

Tate didn't know where he was tonight. Neither did anyone else except Naem, because he didn't want to put them in danger.

But if anything happened to him, well, Naem knew what to do.

He'd left Lexie a note telling her how much he loved her. He'd also left enough food for Tate to last him at least weeks. Upon his death or disappearance, Naem would reveal what had happened to Vacek, as well as everything he'd discovered about the Alchemist.

He didn't expect to die today, but one never knew. And he wanted to be prepared for anything.

Aiden took a deep breath as he watched. Then, he walked in.

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