Book 2: Chapter 2: Party-time

  The gong echoed through the cavern like a drunken blacksmith trying to re-tool some cast iron cookware. From somewhere beyond the bare stone walls, music blared. It was a mismatched orchestra of bone flutes, what look like wooden drums, and something that sounded suspiciously to Alex like a kobbold dragging a fork along a ribcage. The little lizards rushed around in a flurry, moving tables, dragging out cutlery and cookware, even unrolling dusty carpets with strange stains on them. All of them were yelling excitedly in their scratchy, high-pitched barking tongue.

  Alex and the team stood still at the center of the madness. They were all still covered in mushroom bits, sweat. Some still had splatters of kobold blood on them. Garret had at some point lost a boot, one foot bare. The other foot was covered in a boot with flames still drawn on the side of it. Kate looked as if she was mentally redrafting her resignation letter from reality itself. Henry, on the other hand, was already silently helping re-stack a broken table like nothing strange had just happened.

  "Did... did we just win a war and get invited to dinner by the enemy?" Devon asked. He slid his glasses back up into place, eyes moving about rapidly.

  "I think so," Allie muttered, wiping a smear of some kind of potion residue off her sleeve. "I also think that drum is a bucket. With a turtle in it."

  A cluster of kobolds scuttled past carrying what appeared to be an entire cooked centipede on a spit. The creature’s legs still twitched, its body wriggled wildly. Maybe it wasn’t cooked after all. Garret recoiled as it was brought past him. “Oh, no. Oh hell no.”

  Alex stood at the center of it all. He looked around himself and couldn’t stop from smiling like a man who had just escaped a soul-crushing work shift at the office, and by some miracle found himself in a surprise party thrown by friends and loved ones. Which, if you think about it, he technically had.

  The Chieftain stood nearby with his burly arms crossed, eyes sharp. He was silent, but he was taking it all in like a quiet sentinel. Alex moved closer to him, trying not to trip over the tail of a tiny kobold dragging a vat of something viscous and glowing, as he passed. The Chieftain still gave of a suffocating and suppressive aura from his body, even just by existing. Alex assumed that was just a part of being an Adept Tier existence.

  “You weren’t kidding about the kobold hospitality,” Alex said.

  The Chieftain inclined his head. “You survived the Dark Den. Earned your blood. This is our way.”

  “Right... with song, and food. And possibly mild poisoning?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled, then nodded toward the others. “You sure it’s okay? All the humans?”

  The Chieftain made a dismissive gesture. “They fight strong. Loud, like little slimes in a bucket, but they belong. For tonight.”

  Tom-Tom popped up behind Alex with an armful of carved wooden mugs.

  “Drink grog!” he bellowed. “You drink the grog, or I will tell my grand-scalemother you are a coward!”

  “...You don’t even have a grandmother,” Alex said, taking one of the mugs from the little kobold.

  “I do now!” Tom-Tom shouted, running toward Lance. “You! You look like grand-scalemother!” Lance looked up just in time to be drenched in foamy, bright green grog from one of the cups. Tom-Tom shrieked with laughter and launched into an awkward dance that looked like a chicken attempting martial arts.

  Across the room, Kate refused her drink. A kobold elder squinted at her, then solemnly poured it over her boots instead. Kate was too stunned to respond.

  “Allie,” Holly whispered as she sniffed her mug suspiciously. “Do you think this is alcohol?”

  “It’s either alcohol or acid.”

  “I can work with either.” Holly held up her mug. They both toasted and took a drink. The response was immediate as they coughed, and their face scrunched into obvious looks of regret. The feast spiraled from there.

  The Kobolds formed a circle and began chanting a song that sounded suspiciously like a retelling of Alex’s dungeon fight, complete with bad impersonations of the boss monster, mimed explosions, and a moment where three kobolds in a trench coat pretended to be Alex. They fell over twice. The crowd loved it. Alex had no clue how the hell they knew anything about his time in the Dungeon, but it was a surprisingly entertaining performance.

  Celeste would’ve hated it.

  By the time Alex was on his second mug of green hulk-juice the kobolds were in full party mode. Long flat stones were dragged into rows and set across the cave to be used as warmed serving tables. Dozens of dishes steamed and hissed on each serving stone. There was roasted root worms, glowing tubers, and jelly-stuffed fungus sacks. At the center of each table was of course the kobold delicacy, the braised centipede guts. It was wriggling and jiggling, drizzled with fermented beetle sauce and arranged to look like a spiral.

  Kate looked at her plate like it had somehow personally insulted her ancestors.

  “What,” she said, as she pinched the bridge of her nose, “in the name of every divine and profane law... is this?”

  “It’s a delicacy,” Tom-Tom chirped from across the table. “Very tender. The spiral keeps the life energy inside.”

  “I don’t want the life energy inside. I want it very far outside. Preferably not even on this plain of existence.”

  Tom-Tom nodded solemnly. “Then you eat from the center first. That frees it.”

  Kate grimaced and then simply stood up and walked away. No one tried to stop her.

  Meanwhile, Garret had become something of a celebrity. He sat at the end of a table, surrounded by cheering lizardfolk. He clasped two empty mugs in each hand. A third mug sat precariously, upside-down on his head like a tailgater’s crown. His cheeks were flushed red, and his grin absolutely feral.

  The bartender, an old kobold male that Alex saw was missing most of his tail, slammed down the next challenge in front of the human. It was a squat mug filled with a thick, tarry liquid that steamed ominously over the rim. Garret never lost his grin as he downed it in one go.

  “AGAIN!” he roared as he slammed the mug down so hard that it cracked.

  The kobolds around him erupted into raucous squeaks and cheers, all of them flailing their arms like tiny inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-men. One of the kobolds, tucked somewhere in the crowd, threw him a bone necklace. Another handed him a stick carved with runes and a rat skull. A third slung its loincloth at him.

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  Then suddenly without warning, multiple Kobolds began dancing around the man in weird, jerking motions. The other kobolds began pushing on Garret, trying to get him to stand.

  “What... is this?” Garret asked, blinking through his intoxication.

  “You are now Champion of Grog!” A kobold shrieked, hopping in place. “You must defend your title in the Dance of Dislocation!”

  Garret turned to Allie, his speech heavily slurred, “I think I just joined a gang.”

  “No, baby,” she patted his shoulder. “You started one.”

  Tom-Tom, meanwhile, had disappeared only to reappear five minutes later standing atop a wooden crate. He was now wearing a ceremonial war-bra made of polished beetle carapaces and waving a pinecone on a stick in his hands. A small crowd of kobolds surrounded him, clapping in rhythm.

  “TOM-TOM, DECLARE THE DANCE OF THE TEN TOES!” he yelled out over the squawking of the cavern. Gasps echoed through the chamber. Each little lizard freezing to look over at Tom-Tom. One of the kobolds fainted with a loud Thump!

  Alex turned slowly toward Cole who was busy chewing on a frog leg. “What the hell is the Dance of the Ten Toes?”

  “It’s probably better not to know,” Cole whispered. “Just don’t make eye contact.”

  Tom-Tom began stomping in an erratic, high-speed circle. He paused every third spin to smack himself in the face with the pinecone-on-a-stick. The rest of the kobolds joined him, mimicking every movement. As the seconds went by the rhythm became tribal in quality, even hypnotic. And Alex had to admit, slightly terrifying. But then, suddenly, it stopped.

  Tom-Tom froze mid-movement in a dramatic fashion, poised in a perplexing display, his pinecone held aloft. As he held lock-still, Alex saw a single bead of sweat dripped from his brow and onto the stone below. Silence fell across the chamber as the others froze as well. The Chieftain stepped forward, looming over the tiny lizard, his expression grave.

  “I see you,” he said. “Scaled-Sibling.”

  Tom-Tom dropped the pinecone. “I accept the burden.”

  The kobolds screamed in joy and surrounded him. Someone threw him a sash. Someone else handed him a baby cave salamander. Tom-Tom accepted the salamander and cradled it proudly.

  “I am become scale,” he whispered.

  Devon, who had spent the last hour drawing a diagram of kobold party hierarchies in a notebook, leaned toward Alex. “I think that made him nobility.”

  Alex just shrugged. “Let him have it. He’s earned it.”

  As the evening dragged on, ritual dancing turned into wrestling contests. Devon lost immediately, twice. Kobold riddle time turned into insult poetry contests which Allie won with a brutal takedown of a kobold’s “shiny but emotionally repressed” scales. And someone accidentally turned a fire-breather act into a loss of an entire neon green grog barrel..

  Alex found himself laughing more than he expected. The tension he'd carried out of the Dark Den was now bleeding away, sloughed off by the chaos and camaraderie of the night. No system messages pinged in his vision, no bestial threats loomed. All he had to worry about was just food, and firelight… and lizardfolk trying to crowd-surf Devon against his will.

  As the fire dimmed, Alex found himself raising a mug one last time when the Chieftain approached. “We talk?”

  “Uh sure,” Alex and the Chieftain moved to the far side of of the cavern. One of the Adept Tier Warriors stuck close behind, but even it’s claws clutched a wooden mug half-filled with green liquid.

  “You fought well,” the Chieftain said. His voice was somewhat quieter now. “But you also... returned with triumph. A rare thing”

  Alex tilted his head. “You sound surprised.”

  “Dark Den changes warriors. Breaks them. Warps the spirit. Your eyes still clear. Your steps still strong.”

  It was a concerning statement. Alex wasn’t sure if that was a reference to what the dagger had tried to do to him, or just the dungeon itself. He still wasn’t sure if the kobolds had given him that weapon to purposefully try possessing him, or if they just gave one to every person who attempted the Dark Den, as some sort of ceremonial tradition. Were they accidentally dooming every one of their kind that dared brave those shadowy depths?

  Alex said nothing at first. Then he exhaled slowly. “It tried to. It really did, I almost died, almost lost hope.” A beat of silence passed between them. Across the cavern, someone who sounded a lot like Peter shouted something about ‘grog pong’ and a cheer went up.

  “You kill Doudra,” the words came out as a statement instead of a question. “I heard it from others.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Alex admitted. “But she didn’t really give me a choice. I didn’t even know she would die, or that I would live. Sorry.”

  The Chieftain nodded once. “We mourn our shaman. But not with anger. She is free now. Spirit returned to the root. That is enough.”

  Alex turned to study the muscle-bound lizardman. “You know... for a kobold war chief, you’re pretty wise.”

  The kobold gave, what Alex assumed, was the barest of grins. “For a hairless flesh-human you are not useless.”

  They shared a nod. And maybe, just maybe, a smile.

  “Hairless flesh-human huh? I like this Kobold.” Obby chimed in his mind.

  Across from them, Tom-Tom shouted, “I NAME THIS HUMAN GROG KING!” and tried to put a crown made of forks on Peter’s head. Garret, Eric, Lance and Cole, as well as a few other kobolds all cheered around him.

  Alex sighed. “I should probably go save someone.”

  “Let ritual continue,” the Chieftain said. “You need peace before what comes next.”

  Alex paused. “What is next?”

  The Chieftain didn’t answer. He just starred off into the distance for awhile. Alex was getting the feeling the kobold was thinking over a choice, a choice of whether to say something out loud or not. It made Alex a bit uneasy, like he didn’t actually want an answer.

  “They are freed, but they will suffer more soon,” The Chieftain finally said.

  “They’ve been through hell. They deserve a break.”

  “They will get one. But not long.” He leaned forward, eyes glowing faintly in the low light. “The Den accept you. It marked you. But it is not done. Your kin can enter. Their own trial waits.”

  Alex’s brow furrowed. “The dungeon can be re-entered?”

  The Chieftain shook his head, then nodded, before he eventually hesitated a moment and wobbled his clawed hand back and forth. “It rests. Tests anew. Never not hungry. Only those who passed once may not return. The Den demands fresh spirit. Untested resolve.”

  “After a full day, a completed Dungeon will open again. Anyone who already completed a Dungeon may not enter it again, but everyone can enter and complete it, earning Dungeon points.” Obby translated for the Chieftain in Alex’s head.

  So they can go through, earn points and buy things in the Dungeon Shop? But… they have to complete the whole Dungeon, face the Grave-Tyrant, the puzzles, the Warden? Alex conversed in his head with the rock through their soulbond.

  “Yes, they will have to survive all of it.” Obby confirmed.

  Alex sat with that a moment, chewing on it the way Garret had chewed on what might’ve been fermented spider jerky earlier in the night. He glanced toward his friends again. Behind the college-party visage, he could see they were tired, barely equipped for another Den Mother fight, let alone a full dungeon crawl. They weren’t ready. At least not yet.

  “We’ll need time to train,” Alex finally said. “Gear, supplies... probably better weapons than what we’ve been duct-taping together with twine and hope.” He looked to the Chieftain. “There’s a place not far from here. Vrung’s Quarry, a human town. We can stock up there and prepare.”

  The Chieftain made a low, approving sound. “Yes. We know human town. Greedy, but honest. They honor strength. Go there. Take your pack.”

  “We’ll leave soon,” Alex said. “But not tomorrow.”

  The Chieftain tilted his head in obvious confusion.

  “They’re running on fumes,” Alex said. “And grog. I think Garret just challenged a mushroom to a duel. They can’t keep going like this, and neither can I. We need a day to rest. Just one.”

  The Chieftain looked at his warriors, some of whom were using a shield as a group hammock piled with rags and empty food sacks. He seemed to process something then gave a slow nod. “Agreed. Rest tomorrow. Train the next. Then go.”

  “Thank you.”

  Alex stood and stretched. He let out a groan as his joints popped like wood kindling. He turned and walked toward the others and clapped his hands together, drawing a few groggy eyes and several more groans from the group.

  “Alright, listen up,” he called. “The dungeon’s still open for all of you. You’ll get your shot. But not tonight. And not tomorrow either.”

  Garret raised a hand slowly. “Are we dead?”

  “No, Garret. Just drunk.” Alex pinched his nose and shook his head.

  Garret nodded. “Whew. Proceed.”

  Alex waited a beat and then continued, “We’ve got one day to breathe. Then we gear up, train, and head west to Vrung’s Quarry for supplies. After that... it’s your turn to face the dungeon.”

  The group didn’t cheer. They were too tired for that. But a few smiles flickered through the fatigue on their faces as Alex looked over them all.

  “We get a day off?” Allie asked, eyebrows lifted.

  “An actual one,” Alex confirmed. “No death. No eldritch undead horror. Maybe even a nap.”

  Tom-Tom jumped onto a table and raised his mug with both hands. “TO STRANGE ALLIES!”

  Garret raised his half-empty cup. “To naps!”

  Devon poked his head up from under his cloak. “To whatever this stuff is that’s making my teeth numb!”

  Kate sighed, then lifted her cup with some dramatic reluctance. “...To grog-induced mistakes.”

  Alex grinned and raised his mug last. “To all of it. And to whatever insanity comes next.”

  The kobolds howled in agreement. And for the first time in days, Alex didn’t feel like an outsider in a horrible hostile world. Instead he felt like part of a team again. Even if half the team was asleep in a pile of grog soaked bones and blankets.

  Alex looked down at his empty cup and smiled.