It felt good to be back in a dungeon, though part of the reason that Hannah had said yes to it was a smidge of guilt. She had been spending time with Marsh, probably too much. He was a distraction from what she was trying to do with her life. If she’d known, going in, that she was going to be seeing him almost every day for many hours at a time, or if she had realized that they would fall asleep cuddled up together, she might have rebuffed him. But he was fun, and it was as he’d said: she should live in the moment rather than trying to chart some path of optimal freedom.

And even when she was in the dungeon, she caught herself thinking about him. She could be obsessive, that was in her nature. It was one of the things that made her a good cleric. Thinking about a boy while in life or death situations was a bit much though. The suddenness with which they’d decided to do this dungeon had made it more difficult for her to switch gears, that was what she told herself.

The curved corridor led to a small room with a crude fire in it, which thankfully vented upward into a chimney, as otherwise it might have smoked them out. Alfric had said that one of the things they’d eventually have was a way to keep them from having skin contact with anything, as well as complete air filtration, but that was quite a bit down the line. Over the fire, supported by a few branches, was a bubbling pot of brown, and Mizuki wrinkled her nose but said that the pot was magical.

<We’ll tip the pot and come back to it later,> said Alfric. <It’ll be too hot to put inside the chest, and I don’t want to deploy the chiller for it.>

<We have a chiller?> asked Isra.

<There’s a paired heater and chiller in the bag,> said Alfric. <Either can be a life saver in the right situation.>

Sometimes Hannah thought that Alfric enjoyed spending time and money having an organized response to every single situation more than he actually enjoyed the dungeons. The acid — though it hadn’t been acid — seemed to have rattled him, and his face was only slowly returning to normal.

The cauldron of soup was kicked over and the rest of the room was searched, and then they moved on.

It was a normal dungeon, more or less. They’d been in enough of them that there were surprises, but really, it was more variations on a theme. The ‘trap’ had been a surprise, as had Mizuki’s tumble, but Hannah could already see that they were nearly seasoned. The surprises would be fewer and further between, and their gear would be better each time, and with Alfric having undone days left, there was really not all that much danger.

They killed a two-legged creature with a single arm and no face or sensory organs that they could see. It held an axe in its hand and swung it at Alfric with wild abandon, but Alfric put it down, and they moved on.

They fought bushy-tailed animals that leapt onto and off of the walls, making leaping attacks with foot-long claws, and Hannah waded in with her plate armor, which made her impervious to their hits. She swung the hammer wildly, crushing ribs and skulls, until at last she was panting in the center of the room, having done the majority of the killing work.

They came across a pack of creatures with intense magic, ones that could go insubstantial, like a ghost. There were six of them, and they had a habit of becoming material with a weapon midway through them, fused there and stuck in place. They had no special weapons though, only brute strength, and eventually the hits that landed were able to put them down, and the weapons that had been embedded in them were retrieved and cleaned.

A room with a foot of brackish water had slow-moving humanoids covered in hard minerals. Despite their slowness, they were incredibly strong, and their mineral armor made them very hard to kill. Alfric’s bident was useless, and he was grabbed by the arm, squeezed so hard that his wrist broke in two places. Hannah came in with the hammer to save him, and once he was clear, it was a matter of moving away, down the corridors, enough so she could heal him. With a corridor between them, they were able to take the creatures on one at a time, though Hannah’s arms were aching by the end of it. She had transferred the liquid metal of her armor to the head of her warhammer, and swinging it a dozen times had left her winded and slightly numb.

<Incredibly painful,> said Alfric, rubbing his arm where he’d been grabbed.

<You don’t normally scream,> said Mizuki.

<Screaming can get you killed in a dungeon,> said Alfric, as though that explained everything, as though he’d conquered the human need to yell out in pain through sheer necessity and training. It was, she supposed, remotely possible, but how little he vocalized serious injuries had always been a bit shocking to Hannah. Some people were like that though. In the seminary, she’d dealt with a farmer whose arm had been flopping to one side, broken in three places, and he’d been holding it like this was a minor inconvenience.

They made their way back through the jumble of rooms, with the chest trundling after them. Mizuki and Alfric handled most of the appraisals, which amounted to piling things into the chest and occasionally having Mizuki mark them as entads. Across six rooms they’d found four entads, and to Mizuki’s exaggerated disgust, one of them was yet another bow. The other two, aside from the soup pot, were a pen and a dirk, neither of which seemed on the face of it particularly good, but it was hard to tell without testing or a query from a cleric of Qymmos.

<Still trying to figure something out, sorry,> said Mizuki. It was the twentieth time she’d apologized for not really helping much. Every now and then she would get out a weak spark or explosion of some kind, but it wasn’t doing all that much, and their normal method of engagement was to have Mizuki unleash before combat had actually started. If she was using her magic after they’d engaged, she needed to do it while being mindful of those who were in the melee, which was difficult. Hannah had very nearly gotten hit by stray magic more than once, though hadn’t suffered any injury.

They pushed on, through yet another doorway, and stopped there together to look at what had been unveiled.

It was a huge room, a theater, and they were at the back of it, looking down a long aisle between the seats. There was a balcony overhead and dozens of rows of seating, all done in cushioned red velvet and embossed gold leaf. You didn’t need to be Alfric to think that this sort of place was worth a lot of money. The seats would be torn up and put into the garden unless they had too many nails, in which case they would be carefully loaded into the chest up to its limits, which Hannah didn’t really know anything about. There were thousands of seats, which meant that they might be there for a day or more.

The stage wasn’t empty. Many rooms had monsters, and this one was no exception; they were all crowded up on the stage, two dozen of them, each with their own instrument of unique design. Only one faced away, taking the place of the conductor, and he was the largest of them, standing twenty feet tall. It was, altogether, a symphony of monsters, and as the party watched, the concert started in earnest.

When the music started, it was a horrible racket, but when silence followed that, Hannah realized that they’d only been making sure their instruments were in tune. The proper music followed, and it was … not all that bad, for all its strangeness. Hannah looked at Verity, whose eyes were wide.

<This is the Ellusifé,> said Verity. Her voice was soft, only audible because it was over the party channel.

<It’s what?> asked Alfric, turning to look at her.

<The Ellusifé,> said Verity. She was staring at the performers.

Alfric looked around at the theater they’d found themselves in. <You’re right,> he said.

<It’s where the concert will be in two weeks,> said Verity. There was sorrow in her voice, and her eyes were still on the performance taking place. The music wasn’t bad exactly, but there was something about it that grated, especially as it went on. Hannah couldn’t say exactly what.

<Do you know this song?> asked Isra.

<No,> said Verity. <I don’t think it’s a real song. Minor key, saccharine, sounds difficult to play — limited, repetitive, it’s — I don’t know.>

<This is the Ellusifé,> said Alfric, who’d finished looking around. <That doesn’t make any sense. Dungeons aren’t supposed to have direct copies of things, and certainly not on that scale.>

<Like the trap we found?> asked Isra.

<That probably wasn’t this one to one,> said Alfric. <I’ve been to this theater, the copy is — well, exact.>

<Are we fighting that whole orchestra?> asked Mizuki. Her eyes were forward, on the performers.

<It seems difficult to do,> said Isra. <There are so many of them. We’re outnumbered by a wide margin.>

<I might be able to do something,> said Mizuki. <I … might have a plan.>

<This place is valuable,> said Alfric. <Whatever else is true about it, however much it looks like a place that it can’t possibly be — the dungeons don’t pull things from a person’s mind, they’re not like a dream.>

<I influenced the dungeon,> said Verity.

<That’s not how it works,> said Alfric.

Verity gestured to the theater, as though that proved her point. <It’s the Ellusifé, the exact theater. The place that’s been on my mind. I’ve performed there twice and will again. What other explanation could there be?>

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. He fell silent. <It’s odd.>

<We need to deal with the here and now,> said Hannah. <Whatever’s weird here, a proper talk about it can come later, unless we think there’s some unique danger?>

<No,> said Alfric. <Probably not, though without Mizuki, I don’t know how we’re going to handle the conductor.> The conductor was so tall compared to the others, waving a baton that could be used as a cudgel.

<I said I had a plan,> said Mizuki. <A shaping to the discordance. I think I can take out, um, at least the big one.>

<Then we should make a plan and get ready,> said Hannah. <They haven’t taken notice of us yet, maybe because it’s dark, maybe because they’re focused. We can get the drop on them.>

<I wish we could record this,> said Alfric. His mind was still on the oddity of the theater, which was a bad place for it to be. <We should take measurements, make drawings.>

<We’re gonna strip this place, aren’t we?> asked Hannah.

<Right,> said Alfric, looking around. <We’ll be spending some time here, enough to remove quite a bit of it. We can compare later.>

<Is there a reason to do that? Compare?> asked Mizuki.

<If the seats are exact matches, if it really is a clone of the Ellusifé, then this is fundamentally weird,> said Alfric. <Almost certainly related to Verity being a chosen of Xuphin, but if it’s repeatable, controllable, it will alter the future of dungeoneering forever. And even if it’s just her, by the will of Xuphin, then it’s something we need to know more about.>

<I feel sick,> said Verity. She had closed her eyes.

<Sit down, take a breath,> said Alfric.

<It’s the music,> said Verity, shaking her head but taking a seat anyway. <There’s false progress in the song, too much repetition, a return to simple melodies. It’s a misbegotten symphony.>

<We’re going to silence them soon enough,> said Mizuki. <If we’re done with the philosophy?>

They worked out as much of a plan as they could, though the music started to grate on everyone after not too much time had passed. Whether or not Mizuki’s attack would bear fruit was an open question, but if she were able to handle the conductor, then Isra could move in and puncture the players with arrows, and Alfric and Hannah could do the work of tearing through whomever remained. Verity would be shifting focusing, first on Mizuki, then Isra, and finally Alfric. For the last phase of the song, she was going to attempt something that she’d never done in a dungeon before: a progressive melody, one which would compound his strength the longer she played. Eventually she would lose it and the whole thing would fall apart, but for a time, Alfric would be able to fight with enough sheer muscle to make up for their lack of numbers.

Mizuki’s spell did not disappoint. It brought the music to a screeching halt, and the conductor turned toward them as though he was going to roar in anger before promptly falling apart. Whatever she had done, it had caused his internal organs to all slip right out of his torso onto the floor of the stage. For a moment, it seemed as though he might keep going anyway, but he fell shortly after, and the concert members rose from their seats as if to avenge him. His body tipped over and he fell into the front row, gushing blood and unmoving.

Isra zipped back and forth, and the creatures thankfully fell to an arrow each, at least if it was well-placed. As she thinned the crowd, Alfric and Hannah moved in, weapons at the ready. The creatures were humanoid, using their instruments as weapons, a shiny brass horn raised like a hammer, or a string violin that would surely explode into pieces of wood the moment it hit their armor.

All of the monsters were humanoid, though there were variations among them, extra arms, extra legs, patches of hair on the sides of their faces, horns in awkward places and bits of what looked like rot. They were dressed, though, in different outfits of black. Too human for Hannah’s tastes, but they attacked without any apparent cognition and uttered nothing that sounded like a word.

Hannah beat and bashed her way through them, bringing down her hammer on their heads or aimed squarely for their stomachs. The hammer felt better with a big wind up, its massive head crunching bones when it hit, but she was already worn down from the earlier battles, and found herself winded after three giant swings. Hannah backed off, going defensive as she tried to catch her breath. The musicians were beating against her with their instruments, and there were too many of them, threatening to mob her. While her armor was protecting her, she was going to be bruised and broken.

The song had transitioned into its progressive phase, and Alfric came to Hannah’s rescue. He’d dropped his shield and was using the bident with a two-handed grip, plunging it into the humanoids and using his whole body weight to fling them away, as easily as if he were using a pitchfork to move hay. He flung one of them to the side with the bident, moving it with such power that the floor cracked beneath his feet, and it twisted through the air, slamming into several others. One of the musicians came at him from behind, and he elbowed it in the face, splitting the skull in two. In no time at all he had cleared her, and he went at the others, slicing the bident through the air with enough speed to shatter bones.

Hannah did nothing more than watch while trying to recover her stamina. Her arms felt like jelly, and she set the head of the hammer on the ground so she wouldn’t need to hold it up. She was going to have to call it after this room, if there were any rooms left. The might of Garos was incredible for healing, but her god was limited in his ability to help with endurance.

Alfric moved with such speed and power that it seemed like he was fighting against himself to keep from over-rotating or sending himself into the air. Verity’s progressive song was making it so that instead of normal footwork, he was leaping from enemy to enemy, those that remained. When he physically connected with one of them, the counterforce pushed him back, with the power of a punch not fully contained by his connection with the floor. Alfric was a fantastic fighter, Hannah had seen that, but he was in a new circumstance, and having trouble adapting to it. It was getting him into bad situations, mobbed by the musicians, which he got out of primarily with brute strength. At one point he grabbed one of them by its wrist to throw it off balance and ended up ripping the arm off entirely.

The song faltered, then ended, right as Alfric was dispatching the last of them. He’d dropped his shield and lost his bident, and now he was barehanded and in the thick of it. They grabbed him, having already smashed their instruments, and he allowed them to, then launched himself up in the air with the helmet. It was slow, with two of them dangling on him, but he reached the top of the expansive theater within twenty seconds, and from there, he peeled them off, letting them fall down to thud, lifeless, against the ground.

<We did it!> shouted Mizuki, just as Hannah slammed her hammer down on the last of the stragglers.

<Now we did it,> said Hannah. She looked over at Isra, who was rubbing her arm and wincing, and Verity, who had a somewhat stunned expression. <Are you alright, music girl?>

<Uh,> said Verity. <It was never like that in practice.>

<In a good way or a bad way?> asked Hannah.

<Need healing,> said Alfric as he landed next to Hannah. Blood was dripping out from his armor, the same arm he’d injured earlier.

<I felt so full,> said Verity. <Like I could keep it going forever, like I could hit infinity. There’s normally some feedback from the songs, some sense of how much I’m doing, and I could feel the strength wafting off you Alfric, a — a vapor. And it feels like I could keep playing for hours, but I know that I’m more or less tapped.>

<There’s more of the dungeon left to do,> said Alfric. He glanced at Hannah, who had repaired his arm. From what she could tell, none of the monsters had injured him, which meant that he’d probably mangled his arm by using so much strength. It was also possible that he’d wrecked it when the strength had suddenly left him. <Hannah, you’re exhausted, we can take some time, but it’s partly your call.>

<I overdid it,> said Isra. <A dozen shots in so short a time is too taxing.> She was rolling her right shoulder, stretching to alleviate the overexertion.

<Nice trick, dropping them,> said Mizuki.

<Thanks,> said Alfric. He twisted and turned his newly repaired arm. <I do think we’re done with combat, if the dungeon agrees. No more rooms.>

Isra had a rotator cuff injury, which was no particular surprise. She pushed herself hard when she was using the time-dilating bow, and the last shots invariably had worse form than the first ones. She’d been working on her endurance, but there were limits to how much endurance a person could have, especially when drawing back with full power so much in such a short amount of time, and also doing that while walking. The problem, at least so far as Hannah could diagnose as Isra’s cleric, was that Isra was engaging in an all-out sprint, but for her arms rather than her legs.

<Thank you,> said Isra once Hannah was finished with the healing.

<Anyone else?> asked Hannah.

<Verity and I stayed back with the chest,> said Mizuki. <I could feel the progessive melody, but the best I’d be able to do was some weakening, and that wouldn’t have been much. Sorry again for being useless this dungeon.>

<You killed the giant,> said Alfric.

<Well, yeah,> said Mizuki. <But in terms of kill count, I’m way at the bottom.>

<Have you been tracking kill count?> asked Verity.

<Seems unfair to the healer and the bard,> said Hannah, though with her armor, hammer, and the work she’d put into getting strong, she was effectively their second front line fighter.

<It’s a bad idea overall,> said Alfric. <Kills are a bad metric, and if you focus on them, you’re likely to do stupid things for stupid reasons.>

<Alright, fine,> said Mizuki. <I was just trying to spice it up.>

<We’re in the Ellusifé,> said Alfric. <Isn’t that enough for you?>

<I’ve never been there,> said Mizuki. <Maybe if I had, I would be shocked that it was an exact replica, but I have to take your word for it.> She shrugged. <Seems rich.>

<It is,> said Verity. She was looking around. <We should take some of this home.>

<We’re taking all of it,> said Alfric.

<Do we have the tools?> asked Hannah.

Alfric smiled. <Of course we have the tools.>

<Do we have the room?> asked Hannah.

<The chest is a perfect pack animal,> said Alfric, nodding to the entad. It gave the impression of milling about, mostly in how it followed the edge of the group. <The storage capacity is unreal. And there’s internal protection as well, so the stuff at the top of the internal vertical column won’t crush the stuff at the bottom.>

<I don’t believe you ever told us how much it could hold,> said Hannah.

<Eight hundred short tons,> said Alfric.

<Is that a lot?> asked Mizuki.

<A lizzo is about two tons,> said Alfric. <So we could fit four hundred lizzos in it.> He looked around the theater. <The chairs are obviously the biggest thing, but we’ll want to take other things as well, as much of the embellishment as possible, the chandeliers, the panels, the lighting … we’ll have to clear backstage, if there is a backstage, but there’s probably more to grab there.> His eyes went up. The theater was well-lit, and he narrowed his eyes at those lights. <Verity, does the Ellusifé have ectad lighting?>

<Yes,> said Verity. <Very high power, aimed directly at the stage with carefully ground lenses.>

<It’s unusual to see ectads in a dungeon,> said Alfric. <Not unprecedented, but if we take the lights as well — this is a very good payout.>

<We’re lucky we didn’t get my room at the conservatory,> said Verity.

<It’ll be hundreds of thousands of rings,> said Alfric. <If we sell these seats for even just ten a piece, that’s twenty thousand, and I imagine we can get much more than that. They’re velvet with gold leaf.>

Mizuki was staring at the theater. <How long is all this going to take? Because this was supposed to be a short dungeon, and I have that stew going. It will burn if we’re in here for a day.>

<Er,> said Alfric. He looked at the seats, then up at the balcony, where there were more seats. By a quick count, there had to be at least two thousand. Verity would probably know the exact number. <Well. Crap.>

<We’re going to be here at least a day,> said Hannah. <Maybe more. Maybe considerably more.> She frowned. <This is a lot of seats. If we grab them all, let’s say five minutes each, which seems quite fast to me — they’re fastened in, ay?>

<They are,> said Alfric, who had bent down to look. <Connected sets of three, with … nails, looks like. We have crowbars.>

<It’s already been two hours,> said Mizuki. <I would really rather my house not burn down, and it probably wouldn’t burn down, it would just fill with smoke from the stew, but I don’t want that either.>

<Not two hours,> said Alfric. <Two hours including travel time, maybe, but still probably not.>

<Mizuki could go home,> said Hannah. <She could make sure that everything there is fine.>

<No,> said Alfric, biting his lip. <If something has gone wrong —> He turned to Mizuki. <Party channel doesn’t work across the dungeon boundary.>

<Really?> asked Mizuki. <I guess we’ve always been in the dungeons together. That’s super inconvenient.>

<Almost nothing crosses the boundary,> said Alfric. <Undone days being one big exception. So if we send you home, you won’t be able to return to the dungeon, and you won’t be able to send word back.>

<Wait,> said Mizuki. <I wasn’t saying that I would go back, I don’t want to ditch out on the work.>

<You don’t?> asked Verity.

<No,> said Mizuki, turning on her. <I don’t. If we’re going to be sweating our butts off pulling up seats, I want to put in the work so that when we’re sitting there counting out all our earnings, I don’t feel like I did nothing against the monsters and put in no labor. I’ve gotta do something.>

<I didn’t mean any offense,> said Verity. <I was just saying that avoiding the hard labor of pulling up seats should have an appeal for anyone.>

<Someone should go home,> said Alfric. <It’s just a matter of whom.>

<The herb dragons won’t heed my commands indefinitely,> said Isra. <They’ll need to be kenneled and fed.>

<Or you should be the one to go,> said Alfric.

<No,> said Isra. <I’d rather put in the work here too.>

<Alright, who wants to go?> asked Alfric.

Hannah looked around the group and saw that no hands were going up.

Mizuki turned to Verity, and before Hannah could intervene, said the less delicate version of what Hannah had been thinking. <It’s okay if you want to leave,> said Mizuki. <No one will think less of you.>

<I’m extremely capable of putting in work,> said Verity.

<You need to practice for the upcoming concerts,> said Alfric. <You need to be able to answer mail from your mother if it comes.>

<We’re six miles from the border with Pucklechurch,> said Verity. <For me, it would be a longer walk than for Mizuki. She can use the helmet, but it frightens me too much for me to zip over.> This was true, though Hannah thought that Verity was overselling it a bit. They had all taken their turns with the helmet, which was party bound, and Verity had gotten three feet off the ground before landing with wobbly legs and declaring it a form of transportation suited only for maniacs.

<Alright, how are we settling this?> asked Alfric. It was, in Hannah’s opinion, the wrong thing to say. A better strategy would be for their party leader to decide how it would be settled, then settle it, or better, just make a firm decision that he would stand by. They would follow what he decided, even if there were some grumbles. Trying to figure out a fair and equitable arrangement just meant that there would be more argument and potential for bad feelings.

<No one wants to be the one to go, but someone should go,> said Verity. <Is it between me and Mizuki?>

<Yes,> said Alfric. <I’m the chrononaut, I need to stay in case something goes wrong, and — meaning no offense — Hannah, Isra, and myself are better suited to physical labor.>

<I do plenty fine with physical labor,> said Verity. Her eyes had a spark of defiance, and whatever was going through her mind, Hannah thought it likely that her current disposition could be traced back to her feelings about her mother.

<A contest, to see who gets to stay,> said Hannah. <Game of chance?> That was, in her opinion, for the best, just so there would be no hard feelings.

<Spoon flip,> said Mizuki, taking out the Anyspoon. <Right side up, I go, back side up, you go.>

<Sure,> said Verity, as though this weren’t at least a little bit a point of pride. It was an unexpected clashing of egos, and entirely avoidable, in Hannah’s eyes, though she was sure she’d have a better understanding of what had happened and why when she’d had a chance to think it over.

Mizuki flipped the spoon around, so fast that it was a blur in the air, and it clattered to the ground on the stage floor, facing up. Mizuki stared at it for a moment.

<Best two out of three?> asked Mizuki.

<You said you’d go,> said Hannah. <Someone has to, we probably would for the dragons even if you weren’t worried about the stew.>

<But I’m going to be so lonely,> said Mizuki. <Two, three days you’re going to be in here?>

<We’ll be in here for as little time as possible,> said Alfric. <You’re not going to miss anything, and no one will think less of you.>

<And I get to take the helmet?> asked Mizuki.

<Er,> said Alfric. He glanced at Hannah. <I need it in order to take the lights out.>

<But part of the argument was that Verity didn’t want to use the helmet,> said Mizuki. <So —>

<You’ll have to walk,> said Hannah. <We’ll give you an escort to the dungeon entrance, then you should get going.>

<I don’t like this,> said Mizuki. <Just for the record. It’ll be written down in the log book, that Mizuki didn’t like this.>

<It doesn’t record party chat,> said Alfric.

<Well, all the same,> said Mizuki. <Try not to do too much bonding without me.>

It took some time to bring Mizuki back to the dungeon entrance, and once she had left, there was some sense of enormity hanging in the air. Mostly it was the size of the job in front of them, and the knowledge that they would be in the dungeon for multiple days doing back breaking labor. At least a little bit of it was knowing that they would have only each other for company, and only what comforts they’d brought along.

Hannah was hoping that Alfric’s over-preparedness extended to long stays in a dungeon.