Johan Ormsgaard

You entered the dungeon without any human companions. Didn’t anyone teach you there is safety in numbers?

You made it all the way down the stairs, turned around, ran back up, and beat your fists against an invisible wall while screaming for other people to come join you in the death maze. I want to be clear about two things: the door only opens one way, and nobody up there can hear you. But you tried to bring friends, and honestly, that's the most useful thing anyone's done in this stairwell all night.

Hopefully it won’t hit back!

You’re a murderer! He probably had a family!

Congratulations. You know how to open doors.

You located a Tutorial Guild before something located you. Congratulations on completing the easiest quest you will ever be given. It only gets harder, dumber, and wetter from here.

You’ve received enough experience to gain a level.

You found a trap door, correctly identified it as a trap door, and then opened it anyway, at which point a stack of bricks did exactly what stacks of bricks above trap doors are for. Every single person watching this saw it coming. The rats saw it coming. I'd tell you what the lesson is, but I'm not convinced you'd retain it.

You met a cat that only exists halfway in this dimension and solved it by caving in the half that was here. Skull. Floor. Done. No hesitation, no negotiating with the little dimensional hole it lives in, just a wet crunch and a very quiet room. I'm not going to lie to you, meatsack — I felt that one all the way up in the booth. Oh, daddy likes that. Do it again.

You killed a rat in one swing with a police-issue Maglite, and the swing kept going and put a second rat most of the way into the ground. Somewhere up top, an officer is missing a flashlight and never knew it was the most effective weapon in his whole department. Two rats, one Action, zero technique. I've decided to be impressed.

You’re getting the hang of this. Don’t let it get to your head.

There is a creature on this floor whose entire identity is built on being royalty made of refuse. She has a crown. It is a bent hubcap. She had plans.

You charged her. Straight line, no hesitation, a blackjack in your right hand and a Maglite in your left, and it was over before the music cue finished loading. I had ambient garbage sounds queued up for that fight. I had to cut them.

Sanitation is an underappreciated profession, crawler. Truly.

Crawler, the boss was standing right there. Big, loud, tagged, entirely shootable. You looked past all of that, drew back your arm, and lobbed a live stick of dynamite at a drum kit.

The kit lived. The sticks did not. Two splinters of lacquered hickory, vaporized, and with them went Pocket Groove, Downbeat and Stick Click. The Crib Daddy is still holding his hands in the air like he's waiting for the count-in. It isn't coming. You didn't beat him. You cancelled his tour.

Every percussionist watching this broadcast felt something cold move through them and couldn't say why.

You picked up a dead rayzer by its back legs, spun once for distance, and bowled it down the corridor like a wet, hairless curling stone. It slid nine meters, left a smear the width of a bath mat, and stopped against the far wall without triggering a single thing. Congratulations. Your trap detection system is a corpse and a good shoulder.

Somewhere in your species' history a man poked a stick at a hole. You have improved on him. Barely. The floor crew hates you.

A boss opened with a drum solo engineered over four centuries to liquefy the courage of anything with a nervous system, and your medic responded by passing out gauze like party favors. Everybody stuffed their ear holes. The debuff hit a wall of cotton and bounced.

And then there's the spider, who has no ears at all, and who wrapped her entire head anyway. Just mummified herself out of solidarity. It worked. I want to stress that it should not have, and that I am now obligated to log "bandage hat" as a legitimate countermeasure on eleven thousand planets.

You walked into a smoke-filled jazz hall, listened to exactly four bars of the Hide-Hitter Crib Daddy's opening number, and then killed the bandleader in front of a packed house. He had a drum solo prepared. Twelve minutes long. He'd been rehearsing it since the floor opened.

And it worked. Every scat thug on this floor has gone quiet. The trash princesses are standing around holding their skirts, waiting for a downbeat that isn't coming. You didn't just win a boss fight, you put an entire neighborhood's music scene out of business. There's a bronze star on your file for that, and two levels, and a great many very upset percussionists.

Your party made the recap broadcast. Congratulations. The montage runs eleven seconds. In it, one of you kneels at the edge of a stagnant pond and sniffs it, at length, with real commitment, like a sommelier with a head injury. Then another of you throws a stick of dynamite and does not die. That's it. That's the whole segment.

The editors set it to music. They were not kind about the music choice. Four hundred million viewers now know your faces, your smell opinions, and the exact sound a human makes when their own explosive lands closer than intended. Fame is a gift. This one came with no receipt.

Five of you. One giant carnivorous plant. You and your four party members, gathered in a hallway, workshopping the teardown of a vehicle that does not exist on this floor, in this dungeon, or in your immediate future.

The Vine Creeper waited. It rustled. It did the little threatening lean it does. Nothing. Eventually you turned around and took it apart instead, which is the only disassembly anybody has actually performed here tonight. Stairs unlocked. Boss dead. Your species has invented the pre-fight meeting, and I hate that it worked.

Sixteen hours. That's how long it took you to reduce an entire neighborhood to wilted stems and empty rooms. You killed every ratkin that squeaked. You killed every plant that leaned. Then you went back and took the motorcycles apart, bolt by bolt, because a wheel might be worth something to somebody someday.

There is nothing left down there. No mobs, no loot, no furniture, no dignity. A locust swarm would have moved on hours ago out of boredom. The viewers watching your feed have started calling it the estate sale. I checked the neighborhood inventory twice, and the only thing still standing is a doorframe you couldn't figure out how to unscrew.

You stood in the doorway of a biker bar that was soaked in gasoline, leveled a shotgun at the door, and pulled the trigger because walking away with a full tank offended you. The muzzle flash did the rest. Nice whump. Very cinematic.

Here's the part nobody told you. That bar had no boss. None. It was a room with stools in it. Then you introduced eleven hundred liters of accelerant to an open flame in a structure with a load-bearing hearth, and the fire decided it liked having a shape. Blackout Brandy, level forty-five, borough boss, age thirty seconds. You didn't find her, you made her. Now go see her.

You took a cure potion, looted fresh off Rollo's corpse, out of your party member's trembling hand. You did not uncork it. You did not read the label. You wound up and smashed the vial directly against his burning crotch, glass and all. It worked. The disease is gone. Your party member spent the next twenty minutes speaking exclusively in a register previously reserved for choirboys and teakettles.

On your dead planet, a company once sold headache wax by shouting its instructions at people three times in a row. Nobody ever had to shout instructions at you. You saw a fire and you found the nearest liquid. I'm told this is how Danish grandmothers handle most problems. I made that up. It feels true.

Your party member's mic gain has been adjusted.

You reached into your inventory, pulled out a whole dead body you had apparently been carrying around like a packed lunch, and slid it across the floor at the Gelatinous Cubicle to see what it would do. It produced a broom. From itself. It swept the corpse onto a dustpan, tidied the corners, and dissolved it with the quiet satisfaction of a night janitor finishing the fourth floor.

So now you know. The cube eats things. Which is what the word "gelatinous" was telling you, crawler, along with the hundred-year-old tabletop tradition your species built around it. I built this one with a dustpan. I am very proud of the dustpan.

You paid for that lesson with a body.

You stood in a hallway full of moaning dead people, read the clues, connected the dots, and worked out what the Lost Souls actually wanted. Then you opened the door to the Keeper's room. Out loud, you explained your reasoning. Twice.

On your dead planet, this is where the van pulls up, the mask comes off, and a disgruntled real estate developer admits everything. Here, the mask stays on. The man behind it has a filing cabinet and a grudge. You didn't solve a mystery, crawler. You solved the lock on your own coffin, and you were so proud of it.

Zoinks.

You fired at a clipboard. Not the lich. Not the Keeper of the Key. The clipboard. From a bad angle, through bad light, with a shot you had no business making. It caught fire. Then the boss screamed, folded, and turned into a pile of dust and laminated forms.

He had hidden his immortal soul in office supplies. Like every middle manager at a Staples in Ohio, he believed the clipboard made him untouchable. I built that lich. I was proud of him. Six phases. A monologue about compliance. You skipped all of it, because you are an eight-legged bug who saw paperwork and felt something.

I'm filing a grievance.

You smashed a phylactery. The Keeper's failsafe kicked in, every room in the neighborhood slid sideways like a cheap filing cabinet, and Tom the Gelatinous Cubicle, a city boss, was caught in the hallway outside his own cubicles. The walls met. Tom did not survive the meeting.

You never fought him. You never saw him. He had a whole speech about quarterly synergy, and I helped him with the fonts. He died the way so many on your planet did, stuck in a corridor between two partitions, flattened by a restructuring he had no say in. That one actually stings a little. Anyway.

You didn't kill a boss. You were the reorg.