The Countess watched me approach with distaste written clearly on her face. She’d set herself up with a comfortable chair and a small side table for some tea. There were some other chairs, for guests, arranged to emphasise her importance. They were all facing her, but none of them were directly opposite. They were also smaller and less comfortable. I resolved to ignore them if we ever got to the stage of sitting down.

  “Ugh, another of those hollow images of yours,” the Countess sneered. “Show a little courage, why don’t you?”

  “I’m getting here,” I said mildly. “Don’t think for a second I’ll be approaching this close in my real body, though. We can kill you from way over there.”

  I waved vaguely at the entrance.

  “Not even trying to engage in Social Combat? I thought that was your specialty.”

  I shrugged. “I like to think winning is my specialty, and engaging in conversation with a mind mage doesn’t strike me as a winning move. I work with other people to cover the areas that I’m lacking in. Like killing.”

  I glanced ostentatiously over my shoulder at the entrance. We were still a little while away, but it never hurt to make your opponent feel nervous.

  The Countess laughed, but even without my skills, I could tell it was fake. “As if you could kill me, here in the heart of my domain,” she said.

  “Got plenty of mana, then?” I asked idly. “Gonna summon a bunch of ogres? Or are you saving it for spells?”

  Her face twitched. If I wasn’t operating through an Emissary, I’m sure I would have gleaned a novel’s worth of information from that twitch, but as it was, I was just pretty sure I’d hit the mark.

  “I don’t need spells,” she said scornfully. “There’s nothing you can do to defeat me, I just need for you to realise that.”

  “I hadn’t noticed that becoming a dungeon master made you immune to fireballs,” I said dryly. “Is that a thing?”

  “There really is no getting through to you,” she sighed. “Oh, well, I suppose I’ll come back later and try again once you’ve had a chance to think things through. Sitting through a person’s education is so tedious.”

  She wiggled her fingers at me in a half-wave. “Bye now,” she said and disappeared in a flash of yellow light.

  “What the hell?” The real me yelled. I was so startled that I tripped on the steps leading up to the Temple.

  “What happened?” Felicia asked.

  “She just… disappeared!” I said.

  I’d searched dungeon floors before, but not for people. It had always been treasure or body parts, gruesome as that sounds. The Ogre Temple was a pretty easy search, consisting as it did of four large, empty rooms. No secret doors had ever been found, but we looked for them. I got cleansed to make sure I hadn’t been manipulated into remembering wrong. Nothing worked. Or rather, everything worked as it should, but no Countess was revealed.

  Eventually, we ended up in the fourth and final room. The core room.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t an illusion?” Nadine asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I repeated. “She didn’t disappear like a cancelled spell would, but I could have made it look like that. Some of the tea was drunk, but if she wanted to beat me at my own game, she could have faked that easily enough.”

  “And we don’t think that being the dungeon master allows you to teleport around the dungeon.” Koenig stared at the dungeon core as if he were interrogating it.

  “It never has for me. I never asked Rhis about it, though.”

  I looked at the core myself. In all this time, I’d never done an [Identification] of a core. I guess it was because I’d never had any question of what I was looking at. There was some useful information there, though.

  “So… we should destroy it?” I suggested.

  “Are you mad?” Koenig snapped. “Destroy one of Talnier’s dungeons? They’re the only reason this town even exists!”

  “What’s the alternative?” I asked. “Let Lady Rankin control one of Talnier’s dungeons? Wherever she’s gone, we’ve got to assume she can come back any time she likes. Then she mind-controls all the adventurers, and this whole thing starts up again.”

  “Is that why she didn’t put up a fight?” Nadine asked. “And where do you think she’s gone?”

  “That would be one interpretation of what she said when she left,” I agreed. “As to where… my guess is that one of the perks of owning two dungeons is the ability to teleport between them.”

  “So right now, she’s back in her county,” Koenig growled.

  “Earldom,” I corrected. “I… think? But that’s not important right now.”

  “If she can flick across the kingdom like that, it might explain how she hoped to get away with all this,” Nadine said. She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “If scattered complaints about her are coming from here and she’s safe at home…”

  “It can’t be all of it, but memory alteration covers a lot of sins.” I looked at the pair of Guild officials. “So, any alternatives to smashing it?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Could you… wrest control of it from her?” Nadine asked.

  I looked at her through narrowed eyes. “I thought I was done with this Chosen One nonsense. Couldn’t you wrest control of it from her?”

  “Our oaths prevent us from doing such a thing.”

  “Those oaths are broken,” I pointed out. “Not in the sense that you violated them, but the geas is broken. You can do anything that you like.”

  “We’re not Reynard,” Koenig said firmly. “Just because there is no magical compulsion, we’re not going to forsake our Guild.”

  “You’re just going to stand by and watch me violate the precepts you hold dear.” I raised my eyebrows and looked at them skeptically. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Under the circumstances…” Koenig said awkwardly. “It seems like the lesser of available evils.”

  I looked at my party.

  “Right behind you, fearless leader!” Cloridan said.

  “Oh, I could never,” Felicia averred. “I’m not good at confrontations.”

  Kyle nodded and drew her close. “My job is to look after her,” he said. “I can’t do that in a dungeon.”

  I sighed and turned to the priestesses.

  “Wait, you’re not even going to ask me?” Janie demanded.

  “No one wants for you to have infinite fireballs,” I told her.

  “Hold on, no one said that was part of the package!” Janie exclaimed. “Infinite fireballs, or just a whole lot?”

  “Never you mind,” I said firmly and turned back to the priestesses.

  “Ah, the Guild wouldn’t be happy with a dungeon master of foreign nationality,” Nadine put in.

  “Jointly managed, remember?” I said with a grin.

  “Even so,” Therris said, bowing slightly. “We seek to return to the Tree as soon as this situation is resolved. We don’t want a permanent posting.”

  “Traitors, every one of you,” I muttered. “But even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that I’m the one to do it, it’s still a bad idea. The Countess as much as told me that she had to kill me before she could take over Rhis.”

  “When I hear that,” Koenig rumbled, “It just makes me think that she couldn’t beat you in a fair contest.”

  “That—” I stopped. “I thought it meant that you couldn’t contest a binding like that.”

  “If that’s true, then there’s no problem,” Nadine pointed out. “You touch the core, nothing happens.”

  “Huh.” I thought about it. “The other possibility is that it's a coin-flip with unknown stakes. I could get sucked into the core if I lose.”

  “I think your bond with Rhis might protect you from that happening?” Felicia suggested timidly. “Maybe?”

  I glared at her, but when I thought about it, she might be right. “Maybe,” I agreed. “But still! It’s a big risk!”

  “But the alternative is letting the Countess win or destroying Talnier’s economy,” Nadine said. “She might well have bonded the Forbidden Laboratory as well.”

  “Ugh, so if this goes well, I’ll have to do it all again?” I complained. But, thinking about it, I didn’t see any alternatives. “Fine. But I want you two to have Cleanses at the ready! If anything starts looking funny, I want you to clear out any malign mental influences!”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Therris agreed.

  “Great. Now, nobody panic. If it takes me more than five minutes, I’ll stop. If I can’t stop, then someone should Cleanse me. If that doesn’t work, move my hands to put it back on the pedestal without touching it.

  “What are you talking about?” Nadine asked.

  “You’ll see,” I said. Then I had my Emissary pick up the core and hold it out to me.

  I was pretty sure that everyone would get to see that one. From the startled and worried looks on their faces, I was right. I had another notification to deal with, though.

  Well, that might be some good news hidden in there.

  Not wanting to waste time, I selected [Y] with a thought. Instantly, I was thrown into the maelstrom.

  I’d been so foolish. How could I imagine that any attribute of mine could have affected this contest? The times when I’d touched a core that was still connected to its dungeon—the external mana construct—I’d felt the power of the intellect behind it. It wasn’t ‘vast and cool and unsympathetic’. It was cold and hateful, filled with the desire to bring about the end of everything.

  I’d avoided its power before by unplugging the core. That was how I’d bound Rhis, and it was why I’d unplugged this core. But this wasn’t a fight between the two of us. The core—Maan, if Identification was to be believed—was still connected to the Countess. Maan might have lost their external mana construct, but the Countess still had her snake dungeon. She brought it into the fight.

  All that power, firmly leashed under her control. She must have used the same trick I did because I could feel her power, and it was nothing compared to her dungeon.

  I would have been in trouble if I hadn’t had a dungeon of my own.

  The will and the darkness and the hate of Rhis flung itself into the clash with the snake dungeon. Maan was nothing more than the bone they fought over, and the Countess and I were mere afterthoughts.

  It was troubling, even as it worked to my advantage. I liked to think that I’d moderated Rhis, at least a bit. Now I saw that all I’d done was put a leash on the beast. He followed my orders; that was all. The Rhis that I knew, the one that I’d talked to before planting my dungeon, was only the relatable face of the monster.

  It was a coin-flip after all, her dungeon against mine. To my surprise, Rhis was winning.

  It wasn’t clear to me what gave him the edge. At first glance, you might think that he was the underdog. His dungeon was less than a year old, and I was willing to bet that the Countess was not short of mana to feed her source of power.

  But Rhis wasn’t just the Tower of Learning, only a year old. He’d been Oakway dungeon for a long, long time. Starved of mana, slowly working his way to a fourth floor. He might be older than the snake dungeon. Big, powerful dungeons were desired, fought over, and sometimes destroyed. It made sense that a small, unwanted dungeon might survive longer.

  If that was the reason, then I should be grateful that the gods had sent me to Oakway first. Rhis saw the other dungeon off with a contemptuous burst of disdain. He presented Maan to me like a cat bringing in a mouse.

  The Countess was gone. Fled, probably, in the confusion.

  I opened my eyes—I hadn’t realised I’d closed them.

  Three minutes? It had seemed… I don’t know how it had seemed. My Emissary was still there, so I had it put the core back where it belonged

  A humanoid figure about four feet tall stood next to me. They had a pointed nose with long whiskers and rounded ears. Their face was furry, and they had rounded animal ears sticking up near the top of their head.

  They looked absurdly cute, and I had a feeling that only I could see them.

  “Hello, Master!” they said, and I tentatively assigned them as female based on the voice. “Who would you like to kill today?”