1

Because of the door’s low height, Harper needed to jump off of her boulder to pass through. As her feet smacked onto the floor, she suppressed an urge to cry out. Grimacing, she tiptoed through the doorway. Damon, who’d already walked into the room, stood with his arms on his chest, a smile gracing the corner of his lips.

Once again, there were no creatures to be found. Only this time, the trigger was in plain sight. A bronze lever hung from the center of the room. Two bronze snake heads, facing each other, formed the lever’s handle.

‘Ugh, snakes again,” Harper said, wincing as she tried to remain on her feet.

“Yeah, it appears so. Let’s wait for the rest of the team to enter,” Damon said, then glanced at the veteran mage. “You should get back on that boulder. It might help to have you attacking from a higher angle.”

She nodded and did so while more teammates filtered through the doorway. Unlike the previous rooms, the floor was covered with a series of short, ridged, three-foot-wide metal slats that ran lengthwise across the room.

“Are those conveyors?” Angie asked.

Damon nodded. “They could be.”

Carved into the far wall, closed doorways aligned with every conveyor. The team walked to the switch at the center of the room. Damon looked around at the members, who were fully equipped and had their buffs running. “This might be tricky. Is everyone ready?”

Harper, who sat perched on her boulder, passed a glance at her teammates. Then she turned to the orc general. “We’re ready.”

Damon pulled the lever.

2

The conveyors remained still while the doors slid up, disappearing under the stone wall. An armored humanoid figure stood in the shadows of each opening.

“Hey, more kobolds,” Zack said, almost cheering. He had enjoyed the kobold battles from the first tower.

But there was something different about these mobs. Antennas fluttered just beyond the margin of the light. The creature at the center of the openings took one step forward.

The orcs started walking forward, looking to engage the reptilians. Suddenly the armored reptiles screeched in unison. Abruptly, the conveyors started moving, but their accelerated speed caught the teammates completely off guard. There were shouts of alarm as Zack tried to keep his balance on two sliding tracks. He switched to one, almost falling over in the process.

As his combatant sped away on the rushing conveyor, descending deeper into the earth, he caught a glimpse of two daggers. He shouted the information to the team, worried that the mages and healers would be ill-equipped for such close melee action.

As his head slipped under the rim of the opening, Zack was shrouded in complete darkness. He couldn’t even see where the kobold-creature was ahead of him. He cast his much weaker light spell, Firefly. The creature was ten meters up the track. Behind it, the tunnel seemed to go on endlessly.

The metal conveyor under Zack’s feet continued to rocket him forward. He could hear the crunch of metal gears grinding against earth, stone, and grit.

Ahead of him, the monster was running against the flow, slowly closing the distance on him. It jumped off the track and clung to the side walls of the cavern. The speed of the track propelled Zack to the waiting creature.

In that instant, he realized he had misjudged what he thought were antennas. Two snakes protruded from where the eyes would have been on that reptilian face.

His Creature Description details appeared.

SNAKE-EYES (Level 26)

HP: 467

MP: 54

STRENGTH: 44

CONSTITUTION: 46

DEXTERITY: 49

INTELLIGENCE: 5

WISDOM: 9

XP: 182

DESCRIPTION: Gambling-addicted serpentine lizards.

Zack raised his sword to defend himself. In the dim light, their blades crashed, creating an incredibly loud noise in the tight corridor. The snake-eye moved to stab him with its other dagger. Zack smacked it away with his steel glove.

The monster spoke to him—something unintelligible—and slashed its dagger against his helmet. It grazed Zack’s cheek, but he barely noticed. He drove his fist up and connected with the monster’s jaw. Lime-green blood splattered against the Marine’s cheek and a tooth rattled down his metal armor, sounding like a shaken spray paint can.

While they fought for position on the speeding track, the armored lizard vaulted forward, and two fangs plunged into the flesh just above his collarbone. Zack received a prompt.

You have been poisoned (level 3)! You will lose three hit points every 5 seconds. You better hope you have the antidote!

“Yeah, yeah, antidote,” Zack grumbled as he grappled with the beast. Pain pulsed through his body every five seconds, and his HP started declining.

He drove his sword at the rapidly moving creature, but the weapon just clanged against its armor. The snake-eye did the same, striking its blade against Zack’s metal. They continued to fight, jostling for position, as the metal conveyor below them raced deeper into the bowels of the earth. Zack wondered where it was going to end.

He tilted his sword vertically and thrust it up through the monster’s neck. It emitted a gurgling noise and spat the word, “Blatt!”

More blood splashed onto Zack’s face, temporarily impairing his vision. But the creature stopped attacking. As he heaved its limp body off of his, the conveyor below seemed to hitch then suddenly, the conveyor he was standing on was gone. Zack fell fifteen feet onto a separate conveyor that yanked him sideways, jarring his shoulder and sending him down another unknown cavern.

3

Some of the teammates had the wherewithal to run against the current of the conveyors, and Rachael was one of them. I feel like I’m running on a treadmill, she thought, then misjudged her step and landed on an adjacent track. She flailed in a spread-eagle position for a moment, extending her arms for balance. Then she toppled onto the other track and was quickly pulled toward a cavern opening. Her right leg was still hanging over the original track, and Rachel saw that it was on a collision course with a thin, stone pillar that separated the two tracks. That’s thing is going to slice my leg clean off! She rolled on the conveyor and pulled her leg out of danger just as she slid into the darkness of the tunnel.

Unlike the others’ caverns, this one didn’t appear to have a waiting combatant. She scrambled back toward the opening, trying to get back out, but the speed of the conveyor was just too much to keep up with. She heard the sounds of battle behind her. She turned and looked, no longer fighting against the propulsion of the track. She couldn’t see anything beyond the illumination of her light spell. I’m on someone else’s track, she thought and tried to distinguish the cries she was hearing.

As Rachel’s Fire Glow spell followed her rushing body, she saw Angie battling with one of the snake-eyes. It was on top of her, having gained the advantage. The veteran hunter was stabbing it with one of her throwing knives, but the armored reptilian had the longer blade.

Rachel sprinted forward and drove her short sword through the monster’s neck as it buried its dagger into Angie’s side. The veteran hunter screamed agonizingly, and, in the dim light, blood glistened on the metal slats under her body.

“Oh, no,” Rachel blurted as the dying reptile turned its attention to her.

It had dropped its weapon and groped for the healer, snagging onto her leather brigandine armor. The conveyor suddenly rose at an acute angle. Rachel swung her sword, but it rang off the creature’s armor.

The dying snake-eye crawled onto her body, its short claws gripping her leather and piercing through her skin. The monster faced her. The two snakes that protruded from under its brow struck Rachel’s face again and again. She panicked, her legs and arms flailing frantically as she received a notification indicating she had been poisoned.

She unequipped her sword and called for her push daggers. She sliced furiously and blindly. As one of the snakes fell off her shoulder, the moving track below them ended. Rachel, Angie, and the now dead snake-eye were driven off a ledge and flung into a large, open space.

4

Zack’s Firefly raced along the new conveyor with him, and it was the only thing that alerted him to the danger ahead. In the dim amber lighting, he saw the tips of blades protruding from the cavern’s ceiling. They were pointing downward, and he was just microseconds away from it. Zack coiled into a tight ball, trying to cover as much of his body with his armor as he could. At the last moment, he raised the shield above his helmeted head and slipped under the trap.

The metal blades slammed down onto him with incredible force. Metal tore through metal as the iron blades punctured his shield. Zack felt his flesh rip in two places, but couldn’t immediately determine where he had been injured.

As he sped past the trap, his shield wedged into the cutting blades, wrenching his shoulder violently. Zack cried out painfully but yanked at the shield, not wanting to lose it. He heard a sharp chime and the shield pulled free. As he raced along the conveyor, he stared at the perforations in his shield. His shoulder ached like hell. As the speeding wind blew over his body, he could feel his spilled blood turn cold against his skin. But he was able to detect where his wounds were now. One on the side of his left calf, the other on his right forearm.

He realized that after pulling his shield free, he was facing the opposite direction the conveyor was taking him. If there are more traps, I won’t see them, he thought. He tried to turn himself around, but the speed of the track made it virtually impossible. The conveyor under his body ended over a wide gap in the tunnel. Zack fell fifteen feet onto yet another track, going in the opposite direction.

“What the?” he muttered as he smacked his head against the new cavern’s ceiling.

Having lost complete control, Zack began rolling like a golf ball, bouncing against the rock walls. The noise around him was deafening. He felt like he was at a busy train station, lying on the tracks. He ricocheted from one wall to another and bashed his shoulder against a stone outcropping. He screamed, but it was muted against the grinding machinery.

As he rolled, he vaguely saw a dim light ahead. Is that the end of the—

Zack was jettisoned off the rim of the conveyor and into a large cave where he crashed down onto the hard floor of a massive stone excavation.

5

As he shook the cobwebs loose, Zack saw where the light had been coming from. His teammates rushed to him, each followed by their individual light spells. Rachel, who had healed her facial injuries, cast Mana Heal on the Marine. He jumped to his feet, clutching his sword, but his left leg buckled and he staggered against the rocky wall.

“It’s okay,” Damon said, gripping his shoulder. His neck had a long gash across it which was still bleeding. “The creatures are all dead… I think.”

Zack looked around. Dead snake-eyes were strewn across the flat rock base of the clearing. He noticed a few members were missing. “Who’s still in there?” he asked as he gazed up at the large stone wall he had been shot out of. He saw thirty caverns dotted throughout the massive structure, some as high as eighty feet above the ground.

Damon frowned. “Armando, Zahra, and Thao. And of course, Harper, who”—he sighed—“thanks to her boulder, never got caught up in this mess.” Zack stepped away from the wall as the orc general continued, “We’ve been in touch with her via telepathy. She’s going to try and get us out when the other members shoot through.”

Sierra walked up to the two orcs. “Did you fall into any of those traps?” she asked Zack.

He nodded and held up his shield. “Yeah, those blades went right through this,” he grunted. He looked up at the holes in the wall. At the bottom of each opening, a conveyor looped back into the cavern. “How the hell are we going to get out of here?”

Before anyone could answer, another body shot out from one of the wall’s highest caverns.

6

Hammer ran to catch whoever it was, but instantly, he knew this wasn’t going to end well. Sliced pieces of meat and armor dropped onto his waiting arms, coating him with green and red blood. He turned and stared hopelessly at his teammates. Part of a severed elbow fell off of his forearms, which remained frozen in their position.

Sierra walked up to the stunned orc and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Lower your arms, Hammer,” she whispered.

As the team circled him, he peered down at the carnage. Chunks of twisted metal and bloody tissue littered the wet stone floor at his feet. He could see that some of the body parts had belonged to one of the snake-eyes, but the red blood indicated that one of the members had been chopped up as well.

“Who… who is it?” the Alabama orc asked quietly.

No one answered. Whatever meat shredder the two combatants had gone through was more than just a row of blades. Each piece of metal and meat was no more than the size of a fist.

Damon bent down and examined the remains, but it was impossible to tell who it was. At that moment, Harper telepathed him asking for a progress report. The orc general told her that they had lost a member.