“I want to find one of the dungeons,” John announced when I came back into the livingroom from starting my laundry finally. I was in some of the clean clothes I’d just bought and felt so much better.

  “Ok, so I remember you told dick-face that there was a time limit on the dungeons and all. What kind of timeline are we looking at to clear them before we have to worry?” Ashley asked.

  “We are closing in on do it now or risk a dungeon break territory,” he answered. “Officially at least once a ten day, but that’s just an average and it seems like from the notifications that we’re sitting on an above average amount of ambient mana. That’ll speed things up. I don’t know how much though. The sooner we find and start clearing dungeons the better.”

  “Sure, sure. But can we wait until I have clean clothes again?” I pleaded.

  “Yeah, yeah. No one wants to smell you two anymore,” Mara laughed as she pointed at me and John.

  “Look, we don’t all fantasize about the end of the world making us prepared for said end of the world,” I argued.

  “I didn’t fantasize about the end of the world. I just liked certain types of books,” Mara said.

  “Yeah, ones where the MC grew a bigger and bigger harem the more powerful he became,” Ashley joked.

  “Sue me for wanting to have a harem full of catgirls and buxom elves,” Mara laughed back.

  I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, as long as I get a chance to finish my laundry I’m fine with searching for a dungeon. If we find one do we just jump in?”

  “I mean…we don’t have a lot of time,” John said into the quiet.

  “So everyone needs to pack another go-bag?” I asked.

  “And this time that means more than diet coke and Little Debbies,” Mara laughed at me.

  I stuck out my tongue. “I also packed some water and Hostess as well.”

  “So sorry. Didn’t mean to offend your snack cake dedication,” Mara waved her hands sarcastically.

  I gave her the finger while the others laughed around me.

  “Let’s hit up the grocery store and come at this from a less rushed space than last time,” Oliver interjected before I could throw a pillow at Mara.

  “That’s an excellent idea, baby,” John cooed.

  “Yeah. There is a distinct lack of snack cakes in the house,” Mara cackled. I threw a pillow off the couch at her. She ducked out of the way and stuck out her tongue. I returned the gesture and I caught Oliver off to the side rolling his eyes at us.

  An hour and one trip to the grocery store later we were all loaded up and ready to go. Ashley volunteered to help me pack my bag. Apparently no one trusted me not to sneak in a bunch of junk food. You do it one time…

  We drove to the police station of all places. John said we needed to find the nexus of monster activity. That should lead us to each dungeon. We just hoped that the police had been tracking the monster activity they’d been assigning to everyone.

  There was an older woman behind the reception desk in the station when we went in. “What can I help you with today?” She asked kindly.

  “Hi!” Mara greeted her cheerfully. How Mara had gotten elected as our go-to social interaction person I had no idea. I mean, yeah she’s friendly, but she doesn’t always have the best…tact. “We’re some of the monster hunters ole bootlicker hired to help defend the town.” Case in point. “We need some information about the monster sightings to help us locate the dungeons that have popped up around town,” she leaned back with a smile.

  The woman’s face was deadpan as she absorbed our unusual request. She silently picked up a phone off the desk in front of her. She dialed a number and waited a moment as it rang. “Hey, Mike. I’ve got a ten fifty-one up front. Uh huh. No, no. Uh huh. Of course. Thanks, Mike.” She turned her attention back to us as she hung up the phone, “The Lieutenant will be out to speak with you shortly. If you could just take a seat,” she waved at the waiting room behind us.

  I shrugged and followed the others over to the seats. They were uncomfortable as fuck. Unfortunately we were stuck waiting around for over twenty minutes before Lt. Dan decided to show up.

  “I thought you said there were drunks out here?” He turned to glare at the woman behind the desk.

  “They were spouting off about monsters and dungeons and whatnot,” she argued. Fucking bitch.

  “Hilda, just because you have chosen to ignore the situation we’ve found ourselves in does not mean it’s not happening!”

  “Those messages are just temptations from the devil meant to tempt us from our path. The Reverend says–”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “I don’t care what Jeb says!” Montgomery shouted. “These people help keep the town safe. They need to be able to trust that when they come to see us that they’ll be treated like allies not fucking drunk and disorderlies.”

  The woman, Hilda, harrumphed from her seat. Her arms folded across her chest, she refused to make eye contact with us as Montgomery lead us back into the bullpen of desks from our last visit.

  “I’m sorry about her. She’s insistent that the system is a test of her faith or something,” he let out a weary sigh. “It doesn’t help that so far none of the monsters have wandered into town, so she hasn’t had to see what the fuck is out there.

  “But you didn’t come here to listen to me complain about Hilda. What can I do for you folks?” He sat behind one of the desks in the middle of the room and gestured at us to pull up chairs if we wanted.

  John jumped in before Mara could this time. “Remember we talked about clearing the dungeons the other day?” Montgomery nodded. “Great, well there are ways to track dungeons that have popped up. But we need more info. Have you been tracking the monster sightings you’ve been sending us and the other groups after?”

  “I’ve got a list of them, yeah.”

  “Can we map it?” John asked eagerly.

  Montgomery stood up and waved for us to follow. He stopped at another desk and rummaged around until he found a small stack of papers. Then he lead us further into the back. We stopped in a little room with several rows of fold-out chairs. At the front of the room was a small map. Like it was maybe the size of a pair of pages side-by-side. And it appeared to cover a lot of territory. The town itself only appeared to be the size of a half dollar, maybe a little larger. The rest was wilderness and scattered farms.

  It took us another forty minutes to place little pins in the map to represent the monster sightings. Between its size and none of us being familiar with the area it was pretty much the Lieutenant placing everything and us waiting for a pattern to form.

  “This really is a lot more hurry up and wait that I was prepared for,” I complained. “Does anyone want lunch? Hey,” I called out to Montgomery, “who delivers out here?”

  He paused for a minute to glare at me, “Rudy’s is good. Order me the number three, extra pickles.” Then he went right back to placing pins.

  “Order me a number three,” I groused quietly. I pulled out my phone and went around and made orders for everyone.

  Lunch arrived right as Montgomery was placing the final pins. Hilda brought it in for us with a disgruntled huff. I ignored her to gather around the map with the others. There in front of us were three distinct patterns of monster sightings.

  They looked like metal filings under the direction of magnets. Further away from the disturbance that we assumed was the dungeon the pins appeared genuinely random. Closer in the pins began overlapping rapidly. It wasn’t perfect because there were plenty of unoccupied land all around the area. In the middle of all three disturbances sat a small area of calm where nothing had been reported. Like the eye of a storm.

  John reached out to one of them and pressed his finger in the small circle of space. “There. Those are your dungeons, Lieutenant. We’ll take this one,” he indicated a space to the north of Whitcomb. It was perhaps closest, though not by a significant margin. We knew absolutely nothing about what we were going to find there, and we wouldn’t until we walked in as far as I knew.

  John had explained that there was an interface we’d interact with before entering the dungeon that would tell us more about it. We just had to be at the dungeon entrance in order to do that.

  I was nervous about entering into something like this. Dungeons would be filled with monsters. So far we’d fought small packs of monsters and larger monsters single at a time. Who knew what we would encounter in the dungeons.

  But John had explained in detail the danger of not clearing these things regularly. The monsters popping up now were bad enough. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if a dungeon break occurred and monsters from the dungeon were allowed to escape. And who knows, maybe clearing a dungeon would reduce the number of monsters drawn to the area as well.

  “Alright. I’ll figure out teams for the other two dungeons,” Montgomery drawled.

  Mara marked the area on the map on her phone for us to search with some help from Ashley. We thanked Montgomery. Mara and Ashley were even civil about it. Mostly.

  We drove for twenty minutes past the city limits before we came close to the area we needed to search. Unfortunately the map indicated that it was in the middle of an old forest with no roads going through it. Looked like we’d be hoofing it. Ugh.

  “This counts as my cardio,” I grumped at Ashley as we parked the van and piled out on the side of the little country road. She just laughed.

  There was no fence of anything to jump. We just shouldered our packs and marched into the woods. Mara dropped a pin on the System map for all of us so we could find our way back to the van. I dropped one in my phone’s map in case we had anything like signal out in the forest. I very much doubted it, but it felt better to try than do nothing.

  John walked to the front of the group with Ashley and Mara behind him. Ashley had her purple army gun in her hands with the belt or whatever wrapped around her shoulders. Oliver was next and I took up the rear.

  John coated his hands with mithril and used his skill to chop us a path through some of the tougher undergrowth as we followed the pin John had dropped earlier in the System map.

  We only got mildly side tracked when a family of deer wandered by. They were much bigger than anything I’d seen in the US. A trio of adults and two much smaller fawn. All of us stopped and froze as they wandered through the forest maybe a hundred yards away. So cute.

  Once they’d wandered out of view we continued on. It wasn’t much longer before the forest began to quiet around us. I of course didn’t notice until Ashley urged everyone to stop. I looked and listened and couldn’t see or hear anything living. No bugs chirped. No frogs croaked. No birds sang. No squirrels skittered through the leaves. It was eerie.

  When nothing jumped out to eat us right away we all kind of shrugged our shoulders and continued on. We were so close now.

  Another few minutes of slow walking and we came upon a clearing. It wasn’t a natural one though. I could see trees that had literally been bisected down the middle, limbs shorn off others, and everything living that should have been there simply wasn’t. There was no wreckage where limbs lay scattered around. No fallen trees. Everything in the clearing had been cleared away down to the topsoil.

  Looking up, the clearing’s circle went straight up through the branches. It was a clean circle all the way around. In the center of the circle stood a tall black obelisk. It was beyond black. It seemed to suck the light into itself.

  The obelisk stood about ten feet tall and had three faces. Each blank. We circled around the clearing to check every angle. The clearing seemed to be a perfect circle and the obelisk seemed to sit in the dead center. Eventually we came back to where we started and John stepped forward. The rest of us kept our eyes open for anything to happen.

  John crept up to the obelisk and laid a hand on one of the faces. He smiled as he looked back at us. “Looks like we found the Funhouse Dungeon.”