When it was over, the three dwarves sank to the ground, shaking from their exertions. All three dwarves had gone up a level and gained a silver title. “MEAN KID KILLER.”

  Jeremy felt sick inside. The Nrawth had been nasty, but they were living beings, and now they were dead. He'd gained some experience but no level or title. He quickly put another two levels on his fake stat sheet so the dwarves wouldn't suspect his stats were fake. If only he'd moved faster, not tried to speak to them, he'd be talking to the slave-girl seer, finding out what she meant. His reluctance to kill was becoming a problem.

  “Good thing their fighters lived down to Nrawth fighter expectations,” Thorg said. “They're known throughout the universe for making huge amounts of alcoholic beverages vanish, but little else. Their spellcasters are another matter. How did you fight off their mental control?”

  “I have a strong mental resistance,” he answered.

  “I thought I did, too.”

  “My resistance is racial, and this floor of the dungeon has raised it much higher than most beings are capable of.”

  “Must be nice,” Thorg said. “There is no hell like people trying to kill us and not being able to move. I'm pretty sure you saved our lives. If you see anything in their dungeon effects you want. It's yours.”

  Jeremy nodded, but didn't feel like he deserved much.

  The dead adventurer's bodies dissolved, and dungeon effect boxes appeared. “You'd think a prince would have at least one decent spatial storage ring,” Brosh grumbled, looking through the prince's stuff. “This is the only one I've found, and it's tiny. Almost no storage space.”

  “The dungeon may have claimed the good ones,” Thorg responded.

  “It's also booby-trapped.” Curious, Jeremy picked up the ring. It had far more storage than his. Maybe a couple of cubic meters. The ring was trapped, but it didn't look serious. He put it on. It pricked him with a poisoned needle. Nothing his Poison Immunity couldn't handle. He emptied the ring onto the dungeon floor and laughed. “This was where the prince kept his beauty supplies.” He drank a healing potion for his arm while studying the creams, grooming supplies, and a large bottle of pills labeled with symbols reading To Banish the Headache. “I bet he took these pills to kill his hangovers from all the drinking and horrible music.”

  “Oh, those pills are good,” Thorg said, “and impossible to find on my world.”

  Jeremy tossed him the bottle. “Pills don't work for me.” He studied the skin creams. Several were cosmetic, and he tossed those aside. He opened a jar of skin-rejuvenating cream and rubbed some onto his scarred hand. He felt a tingling as the scar faded a bit.

  “Speaking of drink,” Brosh pulled out a large bottle of the stuff Shothorapet had offered to them earlier. “I found this among Shothorapet's effects.”

  “Better let me check that for poison,” Jeremy said. Brosh handed it over. Jeremy took a sniff, then a taste. “No poison, but it tastes like garbage. I can't believe they drank this.”

  Brosh retrieved the bottle, took a hefty swallow, and grinned. “I like it. It's got a bite.” He passed it to the other two dwarves.

  “What do you suppose the seer was talking about?” Jeremy asked.

  “She was crazy,” Thorg said, taking a drink from the bottle. “They always give seers or oracles drugs to enhance their visions. The drugs drive them insane, so they spout nonsense. You remember she said the dwarves wouldn't kill them? Well, guess who killed them?”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Jeremy said, not so sure. Something in her prophecy gave him chills.

  “It's possible she was referring to me,” Flint said from behind him. “She saw me standing behind you. While I have no plans to make the universe bleed, I will if necessary.”

  “Why would that be necessary?” Jeremy whispered.

  “To prevent the universe from being destroyed. Sometimes, to save a universe tree, one must remove a few universe branches.”

  “To save the universe from what? And why would you need to cut off these hypothetical branches?”

  “I've said all I wish to on that subject,” Flint said.

  Great. Another problem for later.

  “The Nrawth seemed to know you dwarves. Do you have a history with them?”

  “Dwarves have fought wars with them over the millennia. Burned a few of their cities. I've heard some of our scholars believe we were hard on them. After what just happened, I suspect we were too easy on the evil bastards.”

  Thorg opened another effects chest and sighed. “They definitely killed the tuskers. Poor guys.” He pulled out six pairs of tusks as long as Jeremy's forearm.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The smallest effect chest belonged to the slave girl. It contained three things: a pendant with an eye on it. No magic, just a low-quality piece of jewelry. And two pieces of a folded paper-like material. When he unfolded the first, it was a picture of a younger version of the girl. She was with three other children and two adults who might have been her parents. She looked happy. The second picture was of the three children and the two adults, dead, their bodies hanging from a tree, with smoke and fire in the distance. On the back of the picture, someone had written, “The price of defiance.”

  “No wonder that poor girl was insane,” Jeremy said, feeling sick with rage. “They killed her family and possibly burnt her village or town. I wish I'd killed the prince myself.”

  “He'd have killed you,” Thorg said. “Remember what I told you about fighting like a rogue. You have no chance against a high-level fighter, but a rogue can do a lot of damage to a fighter or group of fighters from the shadows. Set traps, sabotage equipment, and learn their plans. Anything to inconvenience them. In that, you did an excellent job.”

  The other Nrawths' effect chests held many things, but little of interest to Jeremy. A charm of mental enhancement and protection that Thorg claimed, and some grainy, sour-tasting bread, and salty cheese they shared that evening in the safe room around the dwarves' fake fire.

  “The Tuskers were good people. They looked like big hairy orcs, but they came from an ice world and, unlike orcs, held no hatred for dwarfkind. We wish them a pleasant journey through the summer lands and that the poor slave girl is with her family.”

  “I thought dead souls were trapped in the dungeon,” Jeremy said.

  “People disagree,” Thorg said. “A dead adventurer's body becomes part of the dungeon, but the essence of their soul moves on. Either way, it can't hurt to give them a send-off.” He took another drink from the bottle and handed it to Jeremy, who took a sip to be polite. Then they poured a little on the ground for each of the dead.

  “Why did you enter this dungeon?” Jeremy couldn't resist asking. “You must have known how dangerous it would be.”

  Thorg took another drink from the bottle. “We knew it would be dangerous, but those who survive The Child Eater are some of the most powerful adventurers in existence. We had a king who claimed his success came from surviving The Child Eater.”

  Later that night, Jeremy noticed he was growing pubic hair. He was growing up, but still hadn't dealt with his reluctance to kill.

  ***

  The next day, Jeremy and the dwarves, tired from the previous night, met with Banxi in the last safe room on the fifth floor.

  “I'm certain the Nrawth had a large storage ring with food and supplies,” Thorg said. “What happened to it?”

  Banxi sniffed. “By supplies, I think you mean alcoholic beverages. Alcohol and junk food are bad for children, and we do our best to discourage such things.”

  “Alcohol is not bad for children!” Brosh protested. “Beer and ale are essential parts of a young dwarf's diet. My people begin drinking beer and ale at eight years of age!”

  “On your world, you may do as you wish, but The Children's Dungeon does not provide alcoholic beverages for children.”

  “You're not going to win this,” Jeremy said. “I've had similar arguments with him in the past.”

  “Ah, Jeremy,” Banxi noticed him and raised his eyebrows. “You've made it to... sixteenth-level rogue scout. Very impressive.”

  “Sure,” Jeremy said. “Why does the dungeon allow slaves?”

  Banxi sniffed again. “Some religions demand that the believer eat certain food at a certain time; others believe in the right of nobles to own slaves. As I told those humans from the fourth floor, you should be more tolerant of those with different beliefs from your own.”

  “Tolerance does not apply to owning slaves!” Jeremy shouted.

  He felt Thorg's hand on his shoulder. “Easy, Jeremy. In this universe, the strong do as they please and the weak suffer. It's just the way it is, and there's little point in crying about it.”

  “Well, I don't have to like it.”

  Thorg turned to Banxi. “What I was wondering about, Banxi, is why doesn't Jeremy have a mean kid killer title? I don't think we could have done it without him.”

  Banxi looked reproachfully at Jeremy. “To get a mean kid killer title, you must kill a mean kid. You didn't kill a mean kid, did you, Jeremy?”

  He heard Flint snort behind him. “Nothing is more worthless than an assassin who won't kill anyone.”

  “He helped by providing a necessary distraction,” Thorg responded. “In most of the universe, the person holding a murder victim down is just as guilty of murder as the one swinging the sword.”

  “No, he's right,” Jeremy said. “If I'd moved faster and not tried to talk to them, I might have saved the slave girl, but I was hoping they'd have the sense to back down and leave. I've never killed an adventurer.”

  Banxi sniffed. “In the past, Jeremy has come under criticism for not killing a group of goblins.”

  “You did what!” The three dwarves shouted at once.

  “Goblins are the dumbest, meanest, most vicious creatures in the universe. They will kill anyone, eat anything and anyone, and steal anything nailed down or not,” Thorg said sometime later, after they'd completed their business with Banxi and headed for the fifth-floor exit.

  Jeremy had purchased some high-grade dungeon rations and a few sets of clothes, but most of what he wanted to ask Banxi about, his stat sheet, for example, would have raised questions from the dwarves and could wait.

  “You must have fallen for one of their sob stories of how other beings mistreated them,” Tessi said. “If you see them again, watch your back. They won't thank you for sparing them; they'll see it as weakness.”

  “They seemed nice enough, once another adventurer convinced them I wasn't a human, so I hope you're wrong. The last time I saw them, they'd joined a group of gnomes.” Jeremy told them an abbreviated account of what happened on the fourth floor.

  “That is strange,” Thorg said. “If the gnomes were using guns, that means they were in charge. Goblins are the cheapest mercenaries in the universe, but of course, you get what you pay for.”

  “Payment disputes involving goblins and gnomes usually result in the gnomes getting eaten,” said Brosh. “But what's done is done; our prayers are with them.”

  Thorg put his hand on Jeremy's shoulder. “If it's any consolation, I don't enjoy killing either. But you do what you have to do to protect your people. If there's nothing else, it's time we headed for the sixth floor.”

  “Indeed.”

  They left for the sixth floor.

  A couple of announcements.

  The fifth-floor section is shorter than the others. I didn't plan it this way; it just happened. I plan to combine the fifth floor with the first part of the much longer sixth-floor section. By the time I finish this story arc, I expect to have seven novella-length works.

  I'm also going to drop the Dystion Stopher pen name. It's hard to spell and pronounce, and I don't think it's doing me any favors. I'm keeping Jman and adding a middle initial C. with Ashen for my last name and, hopefully, a more memorable pen name.

  Thank you all again for your support. It means a lot to me.