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  Chapter 1

  “Shh.” I held my finger up to my lips as I glanced around the corner of the dank dungeon wall.

  The stones were covered in a strange layer of greenish grime I hadn’t seen in a dungeon yet before, and the last thing I wanted to do was touch it.

  Yasha, the sexy fox-woman I had met in one of the first dungeons I’d made my way through, leaned over my shoulder to try and peer around me. Her golden-eyed gaze was intense, and her hands were tight around the hilt of her katana.

  I was more than a little afraid she was going to slice me with that damned thing, but I knew if I so much as insinuated that aloud, she would be more than a little insulted.

  “What is it?” Yasha whispered right back.

  “Trying to figure that out now.” I tightened my grip on my own blade.

  Phantom Doomslayer seemed to thrum in my hand as if the blade itself had been run through with an electric current. The weapon was the ghostly twin of my former sword, Doomslayer, and this blade was strangely pearlescent.

  It had only been a week since I had lost Doomslayer in a dungeon and received its twin blade, and I was still getting used to the differences in the way Phantom Doomslayer reacted to things. Unlike Doomslayer, which had only held power over fire, Phantom Doomslayer also affected magic.

  I could feel the difference every time I picked up the blade, but especially every time I came near something magical. And right now, the blade felt like it was pinging like some slightly fucked-up metal detector.

  Yasha and I had only been in the dungeon for ten minutes and thirteen seconds, according to the red timer that floated just in the corner of my vision, and so far, we hadn’t come across many issues.

  There had been the strange slime pit right at the entrance, and then a rat roughly the size of a fucking Toyota Camry, but between the two of us, it had been easy work.

  This, however, was a little less clear-cut.

  A large wall stood at the end of the hall, and even though it seemed perfectly normal through the magical influence of my Pauldrons of Wisdom, I couldn’t help but shake the notion that there was something undeniably strange about the wall.

  If only because we were at a complete dead end if the wall was just a wall, and that left me with about a thousand other questions I had a very concise timeline to try and answer.

  “Think, Wes,” I murmured to myself before I remembered I wasn’t actually alone.

  Yasha’s ears twitched in amusement.

  The fox-woman had done a handful of dungeons with me since we’d found Iris, who had been trapped inside one of the dungeons since 1977. We hadn’t spoken about it directly, but I knew from her posture and the way Yasha seemed to be on even higher alert than she usually was that she was waiting for something strange to happen again.

  I couldn’t blame her. Yasha had been training for the dungeons all her life, and she hadn’t even known someone could get trapped inside a dungeon the way Iris had, much less for almost fifty years. It was more than a little bit terrifying to imagine that sort of fate.

  But now wasn’t the time to dwell on all of that.

  We had to figure out what the fuck was going on with that damned wall.

  “Come on,” I urged Yasha. “Stick close to me.”

  “That is very noble, Wes,” she teased. “But I think it is you who should stick close to me.”

  I paused, and while I wanted to defend my manhood, she sort of had a point. I had only been doing this whole dungeon slayer thing for less than a month, and she had quite literally been training her entire life.

  “We’ll stick to each other,” I amended.

  That seemed to work for her, and together, the two of us snuck out from the safety of our spot behind the wall and slowly started to creep up toward the wall that loomed in front of us.

  I scanned my eyes over it slowly and looked for anything that might have been amiss among the mossy, oozing slime.

  It was disgusting, but it didn’t look threatening in any way, which I took as a slightly positive sign at least. I might not have been an expert at dungeons yet, but I was getting better at it.

  It had only been two weeks or so since I first acquired the crystal that allowed me to enter into the strange pocket dimensions where the dungeons resided, and my life had changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

  Thanks to the dungeons and the loot I was able to take out of them and back into the normal world, I had been able to quit my job at the bookstore entirely. I had spare money to spend for the first time in forever, and I had a very sexy girlfriend I was more than willing to spend it on.

  Life wasn’t perfect, but it was good.

  It would be slightly better, however, if I wasn’t about to stick my hand in mysterious slime.

  Up close, the ooze on the wall appeared to be at least a few inches thick, and I had a feeling it might be obscuring any sort of indicator that the Pauldrons of Wisdom might have tried to give me.

  The slime itself, at the very least, didn’t glow red to indicate that it was something bad.

  “I really don’t want to do this,” I groaned. “I can already tell it’s going to feel horrible.”

  “You have touched slime before?” Yasha asked. Her voice was faintly accented in a way that reminded me of something vaguely Eastern European, despite the fact she was from an entirely different world.

  “No,” I said, then paused to think the answer over again. “I mean, probably not. But I can just tell by looking at it that it’s going to suck.”

  I slid Phantom Doomslayer back into its sheath at my hip for safekeeping and took a step closer to the wall. I hopped up and down a few times just to psych myself up, and hoped it looked cool as opposed to slightly lame. Then I sucked in a deep breath and plunged my hand forward into the ooze.

  I hissed through my teeth as my fingers made first contact with the strange substance. Unlike the mossy grime that covered the majority of the dungeons walls, this was definitely more in the slimy-oozy category as opposed to something more naturally gross.

  It was cold to the touch and reminded me more than a little bit of Jell-O. The slime shifted under my touch and seemed to try and suck my hand into its depths.

  I had been wrong about knowing what it would feel like, because once I was past the initial Jell-O comparison, it was something else entirely.

  The slime seemed to move around my hand like it had some sort of sentience, and I could feel thick, gooping strands of it wrapping around my wrist as I pressed my hand in deeper. It felt like I should have touched the wall by then, but I was still touching nothing but slime. It was entirely up to my wrist, and I could splay my entire palm flat, but despite that, there was still more to go.

  I couldn’t get a clear look at the wall past the slime, but from what I could see, it definitely looked like I should be touching the wall by now.

  I frowned and started the slow, tedious process of pulling my hand loose from the slime. I felt it tighten unpleasantly around my fingers, and as I pulled my hand backward, it created a sort of suction that made it nearly impossible to break free.

  “Shit,” I grunted as I gave a hard yank in the hopes that the sudden force would cause the slime to release, but it was holding tight.

  “What is it?” Yasha asked. The sexy fox-woman had come up at my side and was peering over my shoulder into the slime. Her plush lips were pulled back in what I assumed was a mix of disgust and curiosity and provided a view of her sharp canines.

  “I can’t get my hand loose,” I said.

  That wasn’t quite true. My hand was coming loose, but it wasn’t coming loose at the rate that I very much wanted it to be coming loose. It felt like each second I continued to pull backward, the hold the slime had on me seemed to tighten.

  Definitely not pleasant.

  Yasha frowned and leaned in closer so her nose was nearly touching the wall.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I warned and stopped my tugging for a moment. “I don’t want your nose to get stuck.”

  “Hm,” Yasha mused. “That does sound unpleasant.”

  She took a very deliberate step backward and then pulled her katana from its sheath. The blade was wickedly sharp and glinted dangerously in the flickering torchlight that lined the walls of the dungeon.

  “Yasha, please don’t try and cut my arm off to get it loose,” I said in what I hoped was a very patient yet firm tone. Mostly, I was just trying to keep the momentary wave of panic from my voice.

  Yasha blinked. “Why would I cut off your arm?”

  I sighed in relief, but she wasn’t done talking.

  “It would make the most sense to simply cut off your hand,” she said, like that was the problem with my statement. “But I would not do that, either.”

  “Well, thank god for that,” I muttered. “Why is your sword out, then?”

  “I am going to attack the slime.” Her lips curled into a wicked grin, and before I could tell her it probably wasn’t a good idea to go swinging her weapon at this shit, she raised her katana in the air and swung it in a clean arc.

  I moved as far to the side as I could to steer clear of the blade’s path, closed my eyes, and waited for the horrible sound of metal scraping stone, but it never came.

  After a moment, I slowly opened my eyes.

  The katana protruded from the slime like it was in some sort of massive knife block. Yasha’s blow had lodged it into the slime at about the halfway mark of the blade. The handle wobbled a little as the blade seemed to settle further into the slime.

  “It’s like some sort of optical illusion,” I realized as I looked from the blade to the slimed wall.

  “What is an optical illusion?” Yasha asked. She reached forward and gave a hard yank on the handle of her katana, but it stayed put.

  How the fuck did I explain an optical illusion to someone who, until two weeks ago, hadn’t even seen a shower?

  “It’s a sort of picture,” I tried. “And when you look at it, it doesn’t look like what it actually is. Or it looks different until you look at it a certain way.”

  Yasha blinked. “I do not understand.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I would have either with that explanation,” I sighed. “Um, so imagine you’ve got a picture of two lamps--”

  “What is a picture?” she interrupted.

  I paused again. This was getting more and more convoluted, but I was sort of strapped in for the ride.

  “It’s like a painting?” I tried. “You know what those are, right? Wait, no, it’s like a scene from a movie, but it’s frozen.”

  The different approach seemed to work, because Yasha nodded in comprehension. “Yes, I understand. But I still do not understand the point of an optical illusion.”

  “It’s essentially just something for fun, but none of this really matters,” I said. “What this means is that even though it looks like the wall is close, it actually isn’t all that close at all.”

  “Which is why my sword did not hit it,” Yasha finished.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Which gives me an idea.”

  “What sort of idea?” Yasha asked and furrowed her brow. “What is your plan, Wes?”

  “I think we have to go through the wall,” I said. “All the way through. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  And besides, we were wasting time just standing there and trying to figure it out. The worst thing that could happen was we could be wrong.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. The worst thing that could happen was getting killed by some sort of terrible monster or dungeon trap, but I was trying to ignore that part for my sanity.

  “See if you can push your sword in further,” I said. “That way, we’ll know if I’m actually right before I go all the way in.”

  “That is a good plan,” Yasha said and began to push on the end of her katana. Her lips were pressed together in concentration as she drove the blade in further and further into the ooze until she could only press at the very end of the hilt with the tips of her fingers.

  I held my breath as the katana disappeared entirely into the ooze. A second later, I picked up the faint sound of metal clanging onto stone.

  The katana had made it all the way through the ooze without any issue.

  “Well, that settles it then,” I said. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Yasha leaned forward to brush her lips against mine in a quick kiss, and with that, I started to push further into the ooze.

  The sensation was perhaps one of the most unpleasant things I had ever experienced, and I had experienced some pretty unpleasant things in the last two weeks. But this was definitely in a league of its own.

  I was strangely reminded of the Kids’ Choice Awards I used to watch on Nickelodeon while growing up, and the slime they would dump on the winners. I imagined it probably felt something like this.

  The slime suctioned itself onto my body as I pressed in deeper and deeper until my entire arm, most of my torso, and one of my legs were strangely submerged. It was as cold as stepping into the ocean, but without the bonus of having just been on a beach.

  I sucked in a deep breath and held it. Then I pushed my head in and took the literal plunge into the slime.

  It felt as if I was floating as I tried to propel myself forward into the ooze as much as I could, but it was like moving through molasses. And when my other leg finally disappeared into the slime, too, I had nothing to push off of any longer.

  Despite that, however, I could still feel that I was moving. It seemed like the slime itself was pushing and pulling me along, which probably explained the tugging sensation I had felt earlier.

  Just when my lungs started to burn with the need to take a breath, I was violently discharged from the slime with more velocity than I had been expecting.

  A combination of the slime and my own pent-up momentum sent me stumbling forward. I fell into a ragdoll-like sprawl on the cold, gray cobblestone floor of the dungeon and sputtered out a gasping breath.

  My skin was still sticky and faintly green with slime residue, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t died in fucking Nickelodeon slime. I counted that as a win in my book.

  I scrambled up to my feet and gave my new surroundings a cursory glance to make sure I hadn’t stumbled directly into danger.

  The Pauldrons of Wisdom helped illuminate my sight, and thankfully, nothing was flagged as a problem with that ominous red glow I now knew to recognize.

  A loud, sickening, squelching sound came from behind me, and I quickly turned back toward the large wall of slime. It was bubbling like a pot of soup about to boil over.

  The slime shifted around and popped noxious-looking bubbles, but the longer I looked, the more I was able to make out the wavering shape of Yasha’s form as she was propelled through the slime.

  It spat her out with just about as much grace as it had done for me, but unlike me, Yasha didn’t have to fall flat on her face.

  I quickly stepped in front of her and held my arms out to break her fall.

  The fox-woman slammed into my chest with the grace of a wrecking ball, and I took a few stumbling steps back to make sure we both stayed on our feet.

  “I did not like that!” she shouted a little too close to my ear for my liking, but I still laughed anyway.

  I held her shoulders and gently pushed her back so she rested squarely on the heels of her boots. Her reddish-gold hair was slicked through with ooze, and a few particularly chunky green flecks clung to the matching fur of her ears.

  Her sharp features were contorted in disgust, and she held her arms out to her sides and gave them a harsh flap in an attempt to free herself of the slime that coated her in a thin sheen.

  I was sure I was in a similar sorry state, and I was very glad I didn’t have to see my own reflection to confirm that.

  Yasha bent down, hoisted her katana back up, and slipped it into its sheath with another disgusted huff. She wiped her hands on the front of her battle outfit and scrunched her nose in disdain.

  Her clothing, while definitely a little revealing, were probably far more armored than my own heavy jeans and leather jacket beneath my Fire Smith’s Leather Armor.

  She wore a pale green dress that barely covered the tops of her thighs and left her ample cleavage on display, but there were plates of matching armor on her arms as well as her legs. I had offered, a little ruefully, to find her some better clothing to wear into the dungeons, but she assured me this was traditional fighting gear in Arcadio.

  I didn’t know much about her world aside from the broad strokes, and they weren’t particularly pretty strokes at that. Arcadio was a world composed almost entirely of deserts, and it didn’t seem to be made up of particularly kind people given they would have left Yasha to die without a care in the dungeons. But the idea that there were other hot women with fox tails dressed in similar scant attire was certainly almost enough to make me overlook all those other big-ass red flags.

  Yasha looked down at her dress and boots and huffed out in annoyance.

  “I feel sticky,” she said to me flatly. “I do not like this.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I teased, though I did agree with her. I didn’t like feeling greasy. I thought I had left that part of my life behind when I stopped being sixteen, but apparently not.

  She scrunched her nose at me in response before turning to take in our new surroundings.

 

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