Empire Builder 1: Breed, Populate, Conquer by Dante King (free e books to read online txt) 📕

Getting down on his knees, and holding his scimitar facing down the stairs, Ben looked Nipper in the eyes. “We’ll keep you safe, alright? We have to rescue our friend in that dungeon.”

Nipper stared intently into Ben’s face with his piercingly purple eyes. He appeared to be weighing his father’s words with a strange intelligence.

Then the tiny kitten darted forward and snapped his tiny jaws. Ben darted back, narrowly avoiding having his nose nipped.

“You little shit!” he exclaimed. “Maybe I’ll just leave you to the monsters.” He scooped the kitten up playfully, and they continued down the steps.

The fear felt by everyone was not abated, but the women smiled, seeing how tenderly Ben interacted with the kitten.

Ben saw how Lulu and Imogen still looked at the stairway with trepidation. He gave a little of his courage to each of the women and to Nipper as well. He had enough to spare. His own confidence had been boosted by the victory he and Melody had won the night before. With a little extra courage, the women would be safer than if they reacted with fear at every threat.

They descended the last few steps, going down more than twice Ben’s own height into the ground. Looking back, Ben could only see a small patch of blue sky at the other end. Barely any daylight reached the bottom.

They emerged into a passageway, about fifty feet long and ten feet wide. It took a few moments for Ben’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. No doubt Melody and Nipper adjusted faster, having feline eyes. Once Ben’s own eyes had adjusted, he was able to see the nature of the chamber they found themselves in.

The chamber might have been narrow, but it was not low. The roof of the passageway was barely visible, at least ten yards above their heads. Ben wondered if that was even possible. The ground above had been fairly flat, but they had descended a lot of steps. Perhaps the hall roof lay just beneath the ground above.

The walls and floor were carved out of solid stone, with no cracks visible where mortar might have joined the stones. The whole room appeared to have been carved from one unbroken stretch of stone. Ben tried to imagine how craftsmen could have excavated so much stone with such skill. Then he considered that in all likelihood they’d used magic.

Colossal pillars jutted out of the walls, curving into a vaulted ceiling. Torches were ensconced on the pillars running all the way up their lengths. They looked like so many fireflies illuminating the grand stonework.

Ben wondered who had lit these torches. There were dozens of them. It didn’t make sense that Vinata would have lit them all on her way through the dungeon. Had someone else been here to light them? Or something else? Perhaps the voice that had spoken to them before. Maybe the dungeon really was sentient, as Melody had said.

“And this is just the entrance,” Imogen whispered, her faint voice echoing up to the ceiling. Her anxiety seemed to have momentarily been replaced by awe. “If only my parents could see this place.”

The entrance reminded Ben of how he expected the Mines of Moria to look, or the entrance to a cathedral. The great gothic arches carved in stone made an impression.

“I can’t see a way out at the other end,” Melody said, her voice joining Imogen’s to echo through the vaulted stone. “This looks like a dead end.”

She was right. The other end of the passageway ended in a wall, with a mighty statue in the middle. The statue depicted a robed warrior with a huge sword planted at his feet, plunging through the skull of some non-human creature. The sculpture had been carved with surprising detail, down to the expression of pure agony on the orc-like creature’s face and the blood that accumulated where the blade drove into the skull.

It was the only adornment in this gloomy passageway. The statue’s features were lit by the lurid glow of torchlight, giving his face a grim and menacing appearance. The folds of his robes were exaggerated in the light to look like the wings of a bat. Ben remembered the bats they’d faced on the rope bridge, wondering what sort of monsters they might face in there.

“Well, the dungeon has to be bigger than this one room,” Ben suggested. “Maybe there’s an exit that has to be triggered by some sort of mechanism. From what I saw in my vision, dungeons are supposed to have traps in them. So, they probably have secret triggers as well, only to be discovered by the cleverest adventurers.”

“You’re starting to think like a dungeon master already,” Melody said.

Imogen shivered. “But doesn’t that mean there could be traps in here too? Vinata might have already triggered them and be...” She trailed off.

“I can’t see any danger in here,” said Lulu, squaring her shoulders and speaking with far more confidence than Imogen had spoken with.

Ben suspected she was trying to look braver than she felt.

“And there are no monsters in here yet,” Lulu continued. “Maybe this is just the entrance where the dungeon welcomes adventurers.”

Ben shook his head, grimly. “If I can make any sort of guess about how a dungeon like this would operate, the monsters won’t appear until the adventurers are good and trapped inside.”

That was exactly how Ben would have designed such a place. He couldn’t give away that he was the actual designer however. He hadn’t had a chance to inform the nymphs of his identity yet. Given that they were about to face lethal danger, it did not seem like the time to explain that he had himself constructed all those dangers.

“There’s nothing else for it,” Ben said, resolve in his voice. “Let’s investigate that statue.”

He looked at the women standing with him. “If any of you want to turn back and wait outside, now’s the time.”

The women shook their heads. They seemed scared, but there wasn’t a trace of hesitation among