It wasn’t a boss.

  It was crabs. Lots of them.

  With knives.

  Knife Crab: Level 14 Monster

  Individually, not one of them posed a threat. A single rail gun shot could take out two or three, and Tori’s magic would easily handle a half-dozen in a single cast, while her well-placed Gravity Well at the tunnel entrance bought us a few critical moments.

  The problem was that for every Knife Crab I crushed to death, two more pushed through the fading corpse to take its place. It was like fighting an endless tide of crustaceans. Like death by a thousand cuts. Like the battle on Montrose beach, but times ten.

  Like Red Lobster’s most recent all-you-can-eat crab promotional disaster on steroids.

  My hammer crashed down. I hadn’t bothered activating it, and I didn’t need to; the weight of it slammed into a shell, and pink-white muscle erupted from the split, cracked carapace like I’d crushed a tube of toothpaste, not a monster. We retreated backward from the armored onslaught. Tori dropped another spell, a Push that sent the front rank tumbling back toward their comrades in claws, but there had to be a hundred of the monsters—maybe more.

  “Knife Crabs!” Tori shouted. “This is bullshit; they’re not even a threat!”

  A pair of knives scissored shut around my calf, and I yelled in pain as they left a surface cut on either side of the muscle. “With this many, they are!”

  “It’s all about encounter balance! These are gray mobs. They shouldn’t even be in this dungeon!” Another spell rippled out, and nearly a dozen crabs smacked into each other. Their shells exploded with a horrible splorching sound, showering the oncoming wave with gore as Tori’s Crush spell ripped the center out of their formation.

  After that, things got out of control for a while, and I spent as much time backpedaling from the phalanx of knives as I did swinging my hammer into them. Crab after crab died, their blood soaking the damp, sandy floor.

  Then, one of my swings went wide. It hit the cobblestone-and-sand cave wall, and dirt rained down on the oncoming crabs. “Back! Go back!” I yelled. Then I started running.

  The sand stopped cascading into the tunnel long before it completely buried it—in fact, the crabs were still able to get through the gap. But only one at a time.

  After that, it was a matter of maintaining control over the gap and not letting them overwhelm our defense. By the time the last Knife Crab died to Tori’s Pull and my hammer, my arms shook with exhaustion, and the tunnel was as choked with shattered, fading carapaces and twisted, blade-covered limbs as it was with sand.

  It was also choked with experience orbs.

  “Yep, gray mobs,” Tori complained after we’d dug out the tunnel, pushed through it, and collected the orbs. Neither of us had gotten so much as a single level from all that killing. “I told you.”

  “The boss will be better,” I said.

  “You say that, but you don’t know.”

  The next hour or two passed quickly. We slaughtered countless tiny Knife Crabs, as well as a pair of gigantic, technicolor shrimp whose fist-shaped claws dented and bent my pauldron. Those were enough to move Tori to Level Thirty-Three and me up to Level Forty-Two. I put both points into Charge, just as planned. It didn’t buy me anything right now, but it’d pay off soon.

  Tori kept pushing through the tunnels as our completion percentage climbed into the high forties. We were slaughtering this dungeon, and even the Punch Shrimp weren’t more than a speed bump when we found them. It wasn’t anywhere near as big as the Twilight Menagerie, either; it was probably closer to the size of the Void. I couldn’t say that for sure because the twisting, turning passages were impossible to map out. But it definitely wasn’t big.

  “Okay, can’t be more than a few more monsters between us and the boss,” Tori said. She was flushed and breathing hard from our headlong assault through the tunnels, but beaming even though she was covered in sand. One of the Punch Shrimp had collapsed the tunnel network on us.

  “You ready for this?” I asked.

  “Always,” she said.

  “I’m up front. You do your thing, open up weak spots, and I’ll take advantage of them.”

  “As usual, right?”

  “Right.” I headed down the tunnel, taking point this time. There wasn’t anything behind us; every suspicious rock had been shattered by the Trip-Hammer, and every possible hiding place for a Punch Shrimp collapsed and Pulled until Tori was sure we hadn’t forgotten a single monster. She was determined to full clear this dungeon, and without anyone else to worry about, I was all-in right with her.

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  But even though no one else was in here, I couldn’t help but worry about Calvin.

  He was out there, somewhere, by himself. That was fine for me, and thinking objectively, it’d be fine for Tori if her stepmom said it was. But Calvin—in spite of living on his own and on the streets his whole life—wasn’t ready for what this world had become. He was convinced he could get by without fighting in a world where everything wanted to kill us.

  He could be dead already.

  The thought filled my head even though I tried not to let it bother me. The first Knife Crab that saw him would be an even match, and the stuff we’d been fighting in Downtown Chicago was worse. I hoped the old ex-medic was still around, but I couldn’t see any way he’d survive on his own.

  The twins, though…if Eddie’s group hadn’t tracked them down, they were probably fine. Probably. Zane and Carol were tough cookies, and the boost we’d given them in the Twilight Menagerie was pretty significant. If Eddie hadn’t killed Brian, I wouldn’t be worried about them at all.

  Tori used Crush, and a crab imploded in front of me, liquified white meat oozing out of its shell and vanishing as its experience orb appeared. The completion percentage ticked up to forty-seven percent. I pulled myself back into the present, revving my Trip-Hammer to make sure it was running.

  The fog gate hung in the air in front of us, impossible to see through.

  “What are we waiting for?” Tori asked.

  I didn’t have a good answer, so I stepped through the gray wall and into the boss’s room.

  It was, without a doubt, the biggest natural cave I’d ever been in.

  Mom and Dad almost took us to Mammoth Cave National Park once, but the pigs had gotten sick. Beth had spent weeks looking up videos of the caves on the family computer whenever Dad wasn’t using it for budgeting, though, so I had a good idea of what it looked like: smooth limestone, pitch black, a faint drip of water.

  The dripping water was here, but it wasn’t pitch black. Glowing moss and mushrooms lined the roughly circle-shaped cavern, giving it a pale, black-lit look. In either direction, the cavern arced away from where we’d entered, the tunnel disappearing around a massive central pillar of stones the size of the hidden Knife Crabs.

  For a second, I expected the whole pillar to disintegrate into another massive wave of blade-wielding crabs, but as we moved into position, nothing happened.

  I glanced left, then right; neither side gave any hint as to what the boss was or what its attacks might look like. The cobbles and sand crunched a little under my feet, the soft sound echoing in the almost silent cave.

  “Where’s the boss?” Tori asked.

  And just like that, the central pillar shifted. A single eye stalk popped free, eye spinning to stare at her as sand and cobble slid away from the massive crab that slowly pushed its way free of the pillar.

  The Cancer: Level Twenty-Eight Boss

  Current Difficulty: Trivial

  The crab known as The Cancer has slumbered deep within the Dozen-Path Descent’s heart as long as it’s known, only awakening to feast. For the first time, intruders have entered its lair. Its meals are finally coming to it; truly, this is a great day for The Cancer.

  Before the boss could free its two gigantic, bladed claws, Tori hit it with a Crush. It wasn’t enough to kill it—she was only a few levels higher than its Twenty-Eight—but one of its legs shattered, and the others buckled before it shifted its weight. I rolled my eyes. “Hit it again!”

  “You’re sure you don’t want to just pop it?” she called back.

  “Yeah, pretty sure. This one’s all yours.”

  I’d been power-leveling Tori in all our previous Tier One Dungeons. She’d gotten comfortable with me going in for the final blow, and why not? Her spells weren’t geared toward huge amounts of damage, but they could be debilitating or open up gaps in a monster’s defenses for me to exploit. It had made our Tier Ones the other day easy, but it hadn’t set Tori up for success as a soloist.

  If I wanted her to be clearing Tier Ones and first-floor Tier Twos—if I wanted her in Tier Twos before the Tier Three Dungeons opened—I needed her focusing on damage, not just control and debuffs.

  The Cancer was the ideal boss for her to figure it out on, too.

  For starters, it wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t subtle. What it really wanted to do was catch Tori with its gigantic blades and start slicing limbs off, and as Tori backpedaled and I stayed close enough to respond if something went wrong, it did everything in its power to maneuver her around the room and pin her against a wall—or the gigantic pit that had opened in the cave’s center.

  She didn’t let that happen, though. Every time the monstrous crab’s blades got close to her, she had a spell ready—a Pull or a Gravity Well—to buy herself some space. She was working her Inertia Balls into the fight, too, slowly crumpling The Cancer’s armor.

  After almost a minute, though, I hadn’t seen a single piece of white crab meat, and Tori hadn’t used Crush again, either. I knew she could use it more frequently than that, and what she was doing was only wearing her down.

  “Tori, you need to go for the kill!” I yelled. “You don’t have the stamina to outlast it!”

  “I know!” Tori shouted back. She used another Push and shoved the crab back, then hurried to the other side of the pit. It was pretty much locked onto her and followed her on five skittering legs—the one that she’d Crushed earlier moved, but it wouldn’t put weight on it.

  She kept fleeing, though, slowly using Inertia Balls to dent and ding its armor, and as she went, a pattern started to emerge from the chaotic strikes. Tori was focusing her attacks on the front right joint—right where the first blade claw connected to the crab’s carapace. The entire joint glowed orange, a massive, glaring weak point in my Awareness. But she kept holding the Crush I knew had to be coming.

  The crab kept coming, its claws slicing shut over and over with a horrible snicking sound, but this time, Tori held her ground. As the claws closed again, she threw herself onto the ground, avoiding their razor-sharp edges by only a few inches. She cast another spell—a Push that launched both of The Cancer’s arms straight up.

  Then she followed it with the Crush I’d been expecting.

  A snap broke the cavern’s still, quiet air as the Push torqued the arm at the same time the Crush shattered The Cancer’s shell all around it. The blade cartwheeled through the air and sunk into the ground, slicing almost a foot and a half deep before wobbling menacingly.

  The Cancer didn’t even scream. It clacked its remaining blade claw, seeming to try to reach out with the muscles inside the shattered hole in its armor. That didn’t work.

  Tori pushed herself to her feet, and this time, every Inertia Ball she threw hit the giant crab’s brand-new weak point, tearing into soft, white flesh and spouting fountains of gore with every impact. It was only a matter of time before Tori wore it down.

  I thought about finishing it off with the Trip-Hammer, but Tori had earned the kill, so I settled back to watch her finish dismantling the boss.

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