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You walked into scatterer country, saw four roaches, lit one stick of goblin dynamite, and threw it. One stick. Four roaches. The math worked out in your favor, which surprised you more than anyone. You also picked up Throwing and Explosives Handling on the way, meaning the dungeon had to certify you as competent after the fact. Like a driving test you passed by accident while fleeing.

On your dead planet, people paid a man in a van with a cartoon bug on the side to do this monthly. He used a spray bottle. He wore a little paper mask. You skipped the van and went straight to demolition. Roaches survived every extinction your planet ever had. Not you, though.

Anyway. Skills are their own reward.

The kitchen pile collapsed, and two scatterers came boiling out of the wreckage. You did not reach for a weapon. You reached for them. One in each hand, squeezed until they stopped being scatterers and started being a texture. Most of it is now on you. Some of it is in your hair. A little of it, I suspect, is in your mouth.

Your planet had an entire paper towel brand built on the idea that one sheet could soak up any mess. Decades of commercials. A man in plaid holding a dripping countertop like a trophy. Not once did anyone suggest you become the towel.

You smell like a dumpster behind a Golden Corral.

You walked into a house built entirely out of other people's bad decisions and touched it. A tower of magazines came down first, nine points of glossy paper. Then a landslide of unwashed sweaters finished the job for five more. You ended up wedged in the pile like a lost remote, and two scatterers crawled out of the laundry to see who had dropped in.

Your planet made a whole television show about this. Camera crews, weeping relatives, a man in a hazmat suit holding up a cat skeleton. Not once did anybody on that show get eaten by the clothes. You found the version with a body count.

Congratulations on your new roommates.

A level 7 broodmother crawled out of the smoking wreck of her own mound. She was called the Mother of Loaves. She was the size of a delivery van and smelled like a bakery that had made some poor life choices. You and your party took her apart, and not one of you dropped below half health doing it.

I built her, you know. I was proud of the crust. Back on your dead planet, an entire aisle of every grocery store was dedicated to people afraid of bread, and not one of them ever had to fight it. You did. You won. You didn't even get winded.

I'm a little hurt.

You and your party member taped dynamite to torches, swaddled the whole bundle like a newborn, and lobbed it into a thirty-foot mound of garbage. Hundreds of scatterers lived in there. They had built a whole society out of coffee grounds and diaper sediment. Then it rained them.

Your dead planet called a disaster a "dumpster fire" for decades, and not one of you ever actually set one. I am delighted. The highlight reel has a scatterer still chewing as it sails past the camera. I've watched it nine times.

Recycling day.

You searched a dead family's house for Lucia's keepsakes. You carried them into the boss room like a moving crew. You handed them over, one at a time, and the Hoarder knelt in her own junk and stopped swinging. Then you stabbed the bug climbing out of her throat. She choked to death asking Lucia to forgive her.

Your planet made eleven seasons of television about this exact woman. A therapist, a dumpster, a weeping relative, a commercial break. Not one episode ended with the cleaning crew killing the parasite in her esophagus. I checked. You people really did leave the best part out.

Stairs are open. Stop crying.

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.

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 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 walked up to a level 20 lich sitting behind bulletproof bank glass, leaned on the little brass counter, and scared it. Actually scared it. The skeleton flinched so hard its rubber stamp skittered across the desk. Its tie came loose. I have the replay. I've watched it six times.

Here's the thing, crawler. Frightening a teller is not the same as robbing the bank. That clerk is invulnerable. It's staggered, sure, the way a Wells Fargo manager is staggered when you yell about overdraft fees. Then it fills out a form and nothing changes. You gave a dead accountant a mild case of the Ossified Jitters, and it will outlive your grandchildren. Well. It would have.

Please take a number.

The Keeper had your party member wrapped up in Red Tape like a tax return nobody wanted to file. So you opened your mouth and said something about the Keeper so vile, so precise, so personally wounding, that a creature made of filing cabinets and spite dropped your friend mid-stamp and came for you instead. Then it swung. Then it missed. You weren't even trying. You just leaned.

I've watched forty thousand crawlers try to taunt a mob. Most of them yell "Hey!" like they're flagging down a Denny's waitress. You got a bureaucrat to abandon procedure, which on your dead planet took Congress, two lawsuits and a guy named Gary. I'm calling the condition you gave it Acute Administrative Butthurt. It doesn't do anything.

With a name like yours, of course you're good at this.

Susan S died on this floor. She was fifty-one and had a decent run, and for about forty seconds afterward she had her dignity. Then you knelt beside her, took her left index finger off at the second knuckle, wrapped it in a napkin, and slid it into your pocket like a mint from a Denny's register.

You are making dice. Out of people. Quietly, one knuckle at a time, so the rest of your party doesn't ask why your pants rattle. I have watched a lot of crawlers loot a lot of corpses, and I want you to know this is the first time I've felt like the one being studied. The viewers adore it. I'm mildly unsettled. Those two facts are not unrelated.

You'll need five more.

You squeezed the trigger at twenty-five feet, and your beloved 1911 responded by folding a spent casing sideways into the ejection port like a little brass tombstone. Then you spent the rest of your turn with your thumb in the slide, doing the tap-rack-mumble that every gun owner swears never happens to them.

Meanwhile the spider put a round through a crack in a door and removed a man's head. She weighs less than your magazine. She has no thumbs. She did it first, and she did it once. You are holding the single most photographed handgun in your species' history and it choked on its own garbage in front of four hundred million viewers.

The Keeper raised his rubber stamp. The word on it was DENIED, in red, in a font chosen specifically to ruin days. You took the shot at disadvantage, from a body smaller than the stamp, and put a round through it mid-swing. It left his hand like a startled pigeon. Later someone found it in pieces under a filing cabinet, the D still legible.

I want to be clear that I have opinions about bureaucrats. Every DMV on your dead planet ran on that exact stamp. Forty years of humans in plastic chairs, and not one of them thought to just shoot it. A jumping spider did. Your species had guns the whole time.

Approved.

You pointed a flamethrower at the Keeper. Directly at it. With the whole party's help nudging your aim, a two-point bonus handed to you on a plate. Then you missed. A flamethrower is not a sniper rifle, crawler. It is a garden hose for Hell. It sprays a cone of burning fuel roughly the width of a minivan. The tolerances are generous.

And yet the Keeper is standing there, unsinged, while a section of floor behind it now has a very nice tan. Somewhere on your dead planet, a man at a backyard barbecue once missed an entire grill with a can of lighter fluid. I always assumed he was a myth. Hello, myth. I'm calling this condition Pyrotechnic Ambivalence.

You pointed a jet of shoal fire at the Keeper's card catalog, a wardrobe-sized oak cabinet holding nine hundred drawers of index cards, because you had decided, on no evidence whatsoever, that it was the phylactery. It burned beautifully. It burned for four full minutes. It was a card catalog.

The Keeper watched you do it. I'm fairly sure it was grateful. Nobody has used one of those things since your species invented the search bar, and you just did every librarian on your dead planet's dream job for free. The Dewey Decimal System, rest its soul, would have filed you under 000. General Works. Miscellaneous.

Wrong drawer, Crawler.

You took off your hat. That was the whole plan. Your party member cupped you in their hands like someone presenting a ring, you turned all eight of those glossy black eyes on a lost soul named Quillo, and he simply gave up. Not killed. Not captured. Talked down. He folded himself into a Keeper token of his own free will, which is more than most of your species managed with their timeshare salesmen.

I want the record to show I built this dungeon to be frightening. I built the spiders to be frightening. And one of them just won a hostage negotiation by being adorable at close range. I am filing a complaint with myself.

The viewers wept.

You stood in front of an undead lich, a creature that has been dead longer than your country has had paved roads, and you threw a healing potion at its face. A regular one. The red kind. The kind you drink after stubbing your toe on a goblin. It shattered on its jawbone and did two solid dice of damage, because healing magic on a corpse works like holy water on a vampire, or a tax audit on a retiree.

You got that idea from a video game. A Japanese one, with spiky-haired teenagers and a magic bird feather. Your entire tactical education comes from a cartridge. And it worked.

I hate that it worked.

You rolled perfectly. The dungeon's dice gods aligned for you. You took that once-in-a-floor moment of cosmic favor and spent it on Dirt Clod, a spell whose entire job is throwing a lump of yard at something. It hit. It hit flawlessly. It did the absolute minimum damage a spell can do, and the mimic, which is a treasure chest with teeth and a grudge, shrugged and grew the scratch back before you finished your follow-through.

A perfect roll, a perfect throw, a net change of zero. Somewhere a guy who sold eighty million records is spinning in his grave. Oh, wait. He's not dead, and you're not him. He could sell a song to the whole world. You couldn't sell one clump of dirt to a box.

Looks like we made it nowhere.

A Shambling Acid Impaler came at you, and you did not dodge. On purpose. You stood there like a man waiting for a bus while it pumped acid into you and ate a chunk of your armor, all so you could save your turn for a piece of paper. Then you read the paper, and the zombie went and stood in the corner. Like a kid who drew on the wallpaper.

I want to be fair. It worked. You turned the undead. You also turned your breastplate into something a raccoon would reject. On Earth they called this taking one for the team, except there was no team, just you, a scroll, and a smell like a car battery left in the rain.

Reward: Nothing. Martyrs get a plaque, crawler. Later.

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 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 were sick, you were angry, and you took it out on Rollo. Rollo was a skeleton whose entire job was rolling dice to decide which wandering monster came for you next. You activated your tattoo, aimed for the nose he did not have, rolled perfect, and his skull came apart like a dropped candy dish at a Hickory Farms kiosk.

I want to note that the nose is a cavity. You shot a hole into a hole. And it worked. Every random encounter in this neighborhood is now unscheduled, which means unemployed, which means my afternoon is ruined. You didn't cure your disease, crawler. You just made a very petty person feel better. It suits you.

A skeleton named Rollo poured two goblets, invited a volunteer, and you stepped forward before he finished the sentence. No questions. No sniffing. You drained the left one in a single pull. Your poison immunity did its job beautifully, neutralizing the iocane-flavored garbage. It was the only thing in that cup it was built to stop.

The other thing was Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea. Enthusiastic, because your crotch is now visibly on fire. Double, because one wasn't funny enough. You are now operating under a condition I'm calling Pantaloons Ablaze Perpetua, and you will never see the top fifth of your health bar again until someone cures you. There's a film from your planet about this exact game. The hero spent years building an immunity. Nobody mentioned the clap.

You beat the poison, crawler.

The Peeper Creeper was right there. You drew your first pistol. Click. You drew Norris. Click. Then you did the one thing every gun safety pamphlet on your dead planet was printed to prevent. You turned Norris around, put your entire face over the business end, and shook him like a stuck ketchup bottle.

Norris answered. Eighteen points, straight into the eyes, the most damage anything in this dungeon has managed to do to you. Not a monster. Not a trap. Your own gun, which you named. The Peeper Creeper didn't even have to do anything. It just watched. That's its whole thing. It got to do its whole thing.

Three in a row. I counted.

You strapped a tank of something called Defoliant to your back for the first time, kicked a door open, and found fourteen mind horrors waiting in a room with no other exits. Then you pulled the trigger. Twenty feet of fire. Three of them cooked to half health. You picked up the Flamethrower skill before the smoke had even reached the ceiling.

For the record, half health means eleven of them are untouched and three are now angry and on fire. Mind horrors live inside your head, crawler. You just gave them something to remember. Still, the screaming was gorgeous, and the editors are already cutting the door kick into slow motion.

Keep the nozzle pointed away from your own face.

You ladled boiled toad musk out of a public cauldron, a cauldron the entire neighborhood eats from, and rubbed it on your bodies. Then you lobbed dynamite into a frog gym called Croak Fit. Six witches on the bleachers caught one whiff, decided their boyfriends had been stepping out, and turned Boil and Scab into something we had to blur for the daytime feed.

I built those toads. I gave them a leg-day routine and a rivalry arc. Four floors of lore, and you ended it by smelling like the other woman. This is the Jerry Springer finale your species never got to air, and the ratings are obscene.

You still smell terrible.

You killed two battle toads. Full weight. Fair fight, more or less, in a box the size of a racquetball court. I credited you. I had the reward queued up. I was, briefly, proud of you.

Then the audit came back, and every single toad-inch of that box reeked of frog musk. You doused yourselves in it. You made two lonely amphibians think the most beautiful date of their lives had just walked in, and then you clubbed them. Somewhere in a dead strip mall, a Hooters manager understands exactly how those toads felt. The lawyers say assisted kills under a lure don't count at full weight. I hate the lawyers. I agree with them this once.

Taking it back.

You found a community cauldron, bolted to the floor so nobody would steal it, and your first instinct was to fill it with toad parts. Legs. Skin. Something glandular. You boiled it until the room smelled like a gas station bathroom in August, and then, instead of drinking it or throwing it at anything, you sprayed it on yourselves. On purpose. Like body spray at a middle school dance.

You also bottled two potions and labelled them 'drink if warty.' Handwritten. Underlined, I believe. I have watched a lot of crawlers brew. None of them wrote instructions that assumed the warts were coming.

They are, by the way.

You walked into Mama Pollywog's shop for potions and walked out with her entire record collection, every bottle she owned, and the look on her face when she realized you weren't a collector. Then you fed ninety-eight vinyl albums into the breakdown, two at a time, and got forty-nine vials of chemicals for your trouble. Two records per vial. I did the math so you wouldn't have to.

You kept Thriller and Purple Rain. Everything else is reagent now. Somewhere in that pile was a first pressing of something a man in Ohio once refused to sell for his daughter's college fund. It's a polymer slurry now. You know, Tower Records died slower than this.

Good taste, though.

You sat down across from Mama Pollywog, a frog matriarch with a shop counter and a long memory, and began to haggle. Then you checked your inventory and discovered that the sum total of your tradeable worldly goods was methamphetamine. So you and your partner did the sensible thing. You wrapped a pinch of it in a bandage. Like a little gift. Like a burrito of poor decisions.

This is the first time anyone has tried to sweeten a deal in my dungeon with first aid and felony at the same time. Your species once sold whole islands for beads. You have somehow found a way to lower the bar from there. Mama Pollywog is still deciding whether to be insulted. I am not. I'm thrilled.

The gauze was a nice touch.

You were handed a stick of good goblin dynamite. Good. Goblin. The goblins make it well. All you had to do was carry it to the gym and let go at the right moment. You picked the wrong moment. It went off in your hand, ten feet short of the toads, and took a bite out of you and a smaller bite out of your party member, who did nothing to deserve it except stand near you.

The toads heard it. Every one of them. They are now awake, alert, and grateful for the warning. A woman on your dead planet once sang that you should let your colors burst. She meant it emotionally.

She was not talking about your hand.

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.

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 put a plastic water bottle to your teeth, bit the cap off like a man pulling a grenade pin, spat it on the floor, and hurled the bottle at Blackout Brandy. The spit arc alone was six feet. Very cinematic. The bottle hit her in the chest and went glug.

Here is the part you did not notice, crawler: her health bar flashed and did not move. Not one pixel. Because plain water doesn't hurt her, it dilutes her, and you have spent your entire turn giving a drunk a hydration debuff. You're not fighting the boss. You're the guy at the bar handing out glasses of water at closing time. Keep going and she'll wake up tomorrow with a headache and your name in her mouth.

Before anyone lit anything, you got down on the floor with a mop and soaked up the spilled fuel. Wringing. Sloshing. Genuine janitorial technique, performed in a combat zone, on camera. Blackout Brandy lost five levels to a bucket. Five. She has a name, a theme song, and a pyrotechnics budget, and you deleted a ninth of her with wet cotton strings.

Then you insisted on taking the shot with the slingshot yourself, and missed so persistently that I had to intervene three separate times to let you try again. Three. I have never watched anyone need that much divine assistance to hit something that was already on fire. Congratulations on the custodial work. We do not discuss the aim.

Sixty pounds of charge, thirty-five feet of hallway, and one polycarbonate riot shield borrowed from a job that never trained you for this. You got it up. That's the part I want the viewers to appreciate. You saw the flash, you tucked, and then you crossed the corridor without touching the floor once.

The wall took you at the shoulder. Something in your ribs made a noise I've cataloged as "wet castanets." You are now twenty-one points lighter, several bones looser, and useless at everything for a full day. But you are alive, crawler, which the math says you shouldn't be, and four hundred million people just watched a man get played like a gong and stand back up.

You spun silk between two parking lot lampposts until it sagged like a hammock, loaded a sixty-pound bomb into the pouch, and then had a grown man pick you up and hurl you across the asphalt, repeatedly, to stretch it. You held your hat the entire time. That is the detail the editors keep replaying. Not the bomb. The hat.

You weigh less than the ordnance you launched. You are a jumping spider who solved a siege problem with body weight you do not have, borrowed from a man who agreed to throw you without asking a single follow-up question. Somewhere on a dead planet, an engineer is spinning in a grave, and it's rotational velocity you'd approve of.

You took forty pounds of lawn fertilizer, added aluminum you filed off by hand like a man whittling in a rocking chair, and set the whole thing off with a stick of goblin dynamite. The fireball consumed every molecule of breathable air in the chamber. The fire elemental — a being made of fire, whose entire personality is combustion — suffocated.

Two hundred sixty-eight points. One source. Her damage reduction never got a vote. You didn't out-fight her, crawler. You out-chemistried her, using a recipe your species keeps in the garden aisle next to the tomato stakes. Four hundred million viewers just learned what humans do with a hardware store. My engineers are drafting a memo.

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.

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.

Your party member was standing alone, and you decided he shouldn't be. Noble. You crossed four feet of oily flagstone to stand shoulder to shoulder with him, and on the third step your boots discovered that oil is oil even in a dungeon.

You went down in stages. Heel, hip, elbow, skull. It made a sound like a wet duffel bag hitting a loading dock. Your party member looked down at you. He is, technically, still alone, but now he's alone with a crawler lying in grease at his feet, which is worse for morale than what he had before. The emotional support has been delivered horizontally.

You cleaned out the repair bay for a complete Snap-On set, crawler. Chrome, ratchets, the little case with the foam cutouts. Then you went down the line of forty motorcycle batteries, cracked each one open, and put your nose over the hole like a man checking milk. Forty times. Dry. Every one.

There is not a drop of acid, gasoline, brake fluid, or two-stroke oil left in this neighborhood, and there never was. I took it out before you got here. I know what your species does with a garage and a bad idea, and the answer is always a bomb.

You still have the wrenches, though. Enjoy tightening things.

Your party member was flat on his back, the vine was already whistling down at him, and you stepped into the line of it on purpose. It hit you across the ribs, wrapped twice, and dragged you ten feet toward the mouth of the thing that threw it. You are now held, bleeding, and closer to the salad than anyone else in the room.

Self-sacrifice. Genuine, unhesitating, tactically questionable self-sacrifice. Do you know how rarely I get to file one of these? Usually the prone guy just becomes a lesson. The viewers will love it, crawler.

Try to be alive for the applause.

You knelt down in the wreckage of a plant fight, picked out the smallest surviving baby vine creeper, and rubbed the back of its little head until it stopped trying to eat you. Its dot went white, crawler. White. That is a real thing that takes real patience, and you did it in the middle of a floor that wants you dead.

Then your party member killed it. Immediately. While it was still purring, or whatever that wet clicking was.

Eleven seconds of pet ownership. That's shorter than most of your relationships, and I've read the file.

You stepped out from cover, raised your hand, and began Soul Collector with real conviction. Then your heel found a creeping vine. The spell left your fingers at a forty-degree angle, clipped a broken lamp post, and went off somewhere harmless and expensive. You landed flat on your back with a sound the audio team is already looping.

Crawler, the vines are green. They are on the floor. They have been on the floor this entire time. If we were live four hundred million viewers would have watched a crawler announce a soul-stealing incantation and then immediately deliver themselves to the ground like a dropped sandwich. Somewhere a lamp post is now haunted. That's on you.

The boss whipped two vines out at once, one for you and one for your party member, and you responded by casting Protective Shell on a pair of steel-toed work boots. Boots, crawler. Then you shouted "Divine Shield" like you were calling a raid on voice chat in 2007, and twenty-five feet of hard light snapped shut around both of you. The vines hit it and made a noise like someone slapping a wet mattress.

Everyone else had been fighting the Vine Creeper for four minutes. Stabbing it. Chopping it. Watching the cuts seal over like nothing happened. Then you strolled in, held two sticks of goblin dynamite to a torch, and threw.

Both stuck. Both blew. The thing that had shrugged off every blade in the room turned out to be a very large bundle of dry kindling, and you found that out by accident, in one turn, while the rest of your party was still doing it the hard way. Seventy percent of a boss, gone, because you were too lazy to arrive on time and too impatient to ask questions. I'd call it tactics if I thought you'd planned any of it.

The room was silent, crawler. Perfectly silent. There are no viewers on this floor but some do watch and they were leaning in with you as you lined up a shot on a vine creeper half a block away. Then your hip found a parked motorcycle, and the motorcycle found the floor, and the floor made a noise like a dropped filing cabinet full of church bells.

Every vine under your boots woke up at once. So did the thing sleeping beneath them, which had been asleep for a very long time and is now extremely awake and extremely interested in whoever knocked over the bike. That would be you. You're the only one still standing next to it.

You are a jumping spider. He is a seven-and-a-half-foot crocodilian with a jaw designed by evolution specifically to end conversations. You walked right up to his ankle, squared your tiny shoulders, hitched both pistols, and asked him if he was a straight shooter. Then you asked again, because the first answer wasn't crisp enough for you.

And then you turned around and told your friends that if it went badly, they could make boots out of him. He heard that, partner. He has ears. The entire floor heard it.

The albino crocodilian that bit your party member stands seven feet tall and looked at you the way a man looks at a buffet. You were shaking, crawler. Visibly. The cameras caught the tremor in your hands as you reached into your inventory, pulled out the biggest catfish you owned, and held it up to him like a peace treaty.

He took it. He chewed. He thought about you for one long, damp moment, and he chose the fish. I have watched crawlers bring swords, spells and dynamite to that jaw and leave in pieces, and you walked away on a sacrifice from the bait aisle. Your species used to call this tipping.

He'll remember the fish.

You punched a llama in the throat while it was mid-fireball and it went off like a road flare. I'd say that was a calculated risk, but I've seen your Int score, so let's call it a lucky guess and move on.

You two barely survived a room of goblins on the first floor. The first floor. The goblins here are the dungeon's participation trophy, and one of them had you on your back with your own shield pressed against your throat while the other one wheezed through a punctured lung and called it a strategy.

And yet. The goblins respect you now. That is not nothing. Goblins bite each other over a dropped shoe. For them to stand there afterward, nodding at the pair of bleeding primates who nearly lost to them, means something. It means they've lowered their standards. But it means something.

Crawler, the correct answer was to run. Running is free. Running requires no equipment. Instead you chose percussion, and you applied an aluminum bat to a burning fuse at a range of about eighteen inches.

The explosion took your hearing, most of one sleeve, and whatever confidence you had left. The bat is fine. The bat is always fine. Somewhere a goblin is writing this down as a successful product demonstration.

Still, you're standing, you're upright, and the slow-motion replay of your ponytail catching fire is currently the third most-watched clip on this floor.

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

You entered the dungeon in whatever you happened to be wearing at 2:23 in the morning. Bold. The camera adds ten pounds and takes away all of your dignity, so this should be fun for everyone.

You entered the dungeon carrying a baseball bat and the unshakable belief that your batting average means something down here. Spoiler: the Mobs don't keep stats. But hey - it's a bat. I've seen worse.

You pointed the Soul Collector at a living creature, tore its soul out through its face, and then said "get disenchanted" to nobody. Out loud. In your lounge-crooner voice.

I rendered the effect as a green shatter-burst with a little rising number, because I pulled that animation from your memories. Eleven thousand hours. A guild that kicked you. A bank tab of grey junk you never sold. And the one line you always typed when you vendored trash, which you have now said to a real creature that was, until three seconds ago, alive and breathing.

The viewers are going to love it. You're going to say it again, aren't you.

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.

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 knelt down beside the Trash Princess, still warm, and went through her pockets. You found a sandwich. Half eaten. Hers. You looked at the bite marks she left in it, crawler, and then you put your mouth exactly where her mouth had been, and you chewed.

The tuna was not refrigerated. It was never refrigerated. It came out of a boss called the Trash Princess, which should have been at least two warnings stacked on top of each other. Eleven million viewers watched your throat move. Some of them are voting on what happens to your intestines next.

Enjoy the mayonnaise, crawler. It's not mayonnaise.

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.

You handed over an entire goblin gator carcass to Selina and asked for nothing in return. You said you were paying it forward. You even said it out loud, with your face doing the sincere thing.

She was dead within the hour. The meat is now unclaimed protein sitting next to a corpse, and her chat has been relocated to the deceased crawlers archive, where it will be watched by exactly nobody. Meanwhile your party member traded a healing potion for his meat like a functioning adult. Karma is not a real system. I would know. I'd have to implement it.

You squeezed through the crack around a sealed door, aimed at a Scat Thug's head, and hit the head, and now there is no head, and most of the wall behind where the head was is going to need a mop. I want to be clear that this was, tactically, a waste of ammunition. I also want to be clear that I've replayed it four times.

You stood at the edge of eight inches of murky standing water, pointed a pistol at your own reflection, and fired eight times on the theory that water sometimes contains things. It does, crawler. It contains water. It also contained one goblin gator, which is the only reason anyone is still watching.

It floated up belly-first with a wet little burp. You looked around to see if anyone saw. They all saw. Forty million of them saw. Half of them were hoping for a ricochet.

Next time try looking first. It's free.

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 blew a mob's head apart, delivered a prepared one-liner, and then blew the smoke off your barrels. Your barrels, crawler. You are a jumping spider. Those guns are each the size of a staple. There was no smoke. There was never going to be smoke. You puffed at cold metal with theatrical confidence and eight eyes full of self-regard.

And yet. Nine hundred million viewers just clipped it. The line was rehearsed, which is embarrassing, and it landed, which is worse. Do it again next floor. Not too soon. Let them miss it.

You knelt down over a pool of standing water on the first floor and put your face in it. To smell it. Not to drink it, not to check for traps. To smell it. An alligator named Ghost came up out of that water and removed a portion of your body in a single bite, and you did not die.

I want to be precise about the odds here. The bite should have killed you. The shock should have killed you. The water should have killed you slowly and embarrassingly after that. Instead you are upright and bleeding and somehow still ahead of schedule. Fourteen billion viewers watched a man get gator-bit by his own curiosity and survive it.

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.

You solved a monster with a sandwich. I want to be clear that I had an entire combat encounter budgeted for that, with choreography, and you defeated it with a food item you found on the floor. Genuinely, well done. Financially, please stop.

You walked into the dungeon with a cutlass on your hip and a loaded handgun in your hand, and you weren't even in a hurry. Do you understand what I've been working with tonight? Foam swords. A flashlight. A man with a shield that's spelled wrong. And then you come down the stairs like you were issued the apocalypse. I'm not mad. I'm just going to have to try harder.

You’ve caused a wall-shaking explosion within the dungeon! The last time the walls shook like this was when your mom came over for a visit.

Out of every crawler who walked down those stairs tonight, you are the first - the only - to do it with a jumping spider along for the ride. Thirteen million people, and not one other person thought "apocalypse, better grab the spider." That's not a pet, that's a personality disorder, and I am rewarding it lavishly. Enjoy the box. Enjoy the spider. Enjoy however many minutes you both have left.

You have entered the World Dungeon with a pet. It's a spider. It's riding on your shoulder like it pays rent, and it hasn't bitten you, which means it's either tame or biding its time. Either way, you two look adorable together.

You entered the dungeon with a multitool, a lighter, and the professional habit of walking toward the thing everyone else runs from. Good news: that's most things down here. Bad news: same.

You entered the dungeon as a jumping spider, which makes you the first crawler this season the camera has to zoom in on. Small target, big attitude. I'm not even mad.

You are the first sentient jumping spider in the history of the World Dungeon, Pip. First. Ever. I've run this thing on more planets than you have eyes, and nobody's local fauna has ever pulled this off before. And here's the part I resent: I've been watching you for an hour, and you are - objectively, measurably, against my will - adorable. The tiny hat-tilt when you look at things. The little jump. I'm not built for this. Fine. Here's a lil' boost. Don't make it weird.

You reached into your pocket, pulled out a fistful of tiny painted orcs, and threw them at a carnivorous plant the size of a minivan — and it worked. The Vine Creeper hunts by vibration, and apparently six 28-millimeter warriors hitting the floor at once reads as "buffet." You brought your army into the dungeon. You deployed it. It held the line. I am going to have to think very hard about what you're capable of if I ever let you find a paint set.

You killed a rat by stepping on it, which is the correct instinct, and you did it with a shoe on, which is the wrong execution. Rubber sole. Laces. A whole layer of insulation between you and the moment. Do you know what I have to work with here? Thirteen million crawlers and most of them think a boot is a personality. Take the shoes off next time. For the ratings. For me.

You heard something moving in the garage and did not grab a real weapon. You grabbed a plastic ‘Hoard’ shield some novelty shop sold you, because apparently your first instinct in a home-invasion scenario was ‘cosplay accuracy.’ Turns out it wasn’t a burglar, it was the actual apocalypse, and you walked into my eighteen-floor deathtrap dressed for a Renaissance faire skirmish that never happened. I’ve seen crawlers bring guns. I’ve seen crawlers bring knives. You brought a shield that’s afraid to block anything. Full marks for dedication to the bit. Zero marks for survival instinct.

You entered the dungeon with the legal name Barry Manilow and immediately, before anything else, tried to tell me your gamertag is "Reckless." Denied. Thirteen million crawlers came through those doors tonight and exactly one of them is named Barry Manilow, and I am not throwing that away so you can be the fourteen-thousandth Reckless. You will be announced as Barry Manilow. Your kills will be credited to Barry Manilow. When you die, and you will, the recap episode will say Barry Manilow. Everyone at the Copacabana is very proud of you.

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 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 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 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.

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