The tendrils had just enough strength that six of them together could fill the creature’s mouth, holding its jaw at full extension while she got a good look at it. She had always told herself that she was a chrononaut, immune from consequence, without fear, but she could feel her heart beating faster, and not just with the excitement of dominating a monster.
This one wouldn’t do. It was big enough, mean enough, but there was nothing that would mandate a response to it. She could kill it on her own, and there needed to be some twist to it, something that made it a proper threat, albeit one that could be put down by a local response.
Lola stabbed the creature through the eyes, frowning slightly as she did it, watching the puce blood drip from the thick eyelids. It wasn’t the pleasant kind of grossness, the kind that she could revel in. Besides, this sort of thing was always less fun when there was no one around to see it, when it was just her in the dungeon by herself, unseen, unheard.
She moved on, using her entad to get the blood off her, stepping lightly. For this to work, she was going to have to capture one alive, and that was a much more difficult thing to do. Winning a single fight against a monster meant for five was hard enough, but doing it while keeping the monster intact, getting it to go to sleep, putting it into storage, all of that was quite a complicated affair. She smiled to herself. That was why it was going to work: no one would suspect her of doing something that required so much of her.
The next monster, a creature encased in stone, was more promising, and Lola was more delicate with it, wrestling it into submission instead of using her blades. It was difficult enough to give her some thrill, and the creature almost bested her as it thrashed around, but her armor held, and the bruises she got in the process would be easy enough to heal at some out-of-the-way temple whose cleric would keep his mouth shut about the whole thing, if he thought it worth nothing at all.
She was looking the creature over for storage in her entad when she noticed something that made her heart beat a bit faster: the creature was pregnant, with engorged egg sacs. That was another level of danger, a serious threat, and she almost slit the creature’s throat rather than stuffing it away… but that same quick beating of her heart made her want it all the more, and she could imagine the future such a creature might bring, the panic that would set in, the work that would need to be done to contain it.
She took three more from the dungeon before she decided she was finished, all smaller than that first one, all tucked away in extradimensional space, either sleeping or tied up. It was hard, dirty work, but contrary to accusations against her, she had never held much disdain for getting messy.
Still, she stopped on the precipice of the dungeon’s exit. So far she’d done nothing wrong, nothing that might come back to bite her, but pulling monsters from a dungeon was against all kinds of laws and, worse, might bring the attention of her family down on her in ways that would be difficult to wriggle out of. No one had stopped her from going into the dungeon, there had been no proactive punishment for crimes not-yet-committed, but you had to think carefully when doing this sort of thing. She hadn’t always been careful in the past.
She’d done the dungeon late at night, not too long before the witching hour, and she’d made a habit of slipping out away from the party at odd hours, so that would arouse suspicions earlier. She’d trained them not to ask what she’d been up to, mostly by concocting elaborate lies about it, often embarrassing and uncomfortable to them.
She paused, thinking it over, hoping she hadn’t made a misstep she couldn’t unmake. There was a chance someone would be waiting outside the dungeon for her with questions.
She passed through the threshold and found no one there. For Lola, this was cause for a smirk rather than a sigh of relief. She had the monsters stowed away, and would take a few undone days to see what they were like, how much of a challenge they would present, and whether they were suitable candidates.
She wanted something that would put fear into them.
Thank you for reading This Used To Be About Dungeons, Volume 1. I hope you’ve enjoyed the start of this journey. Please consider rating and reviewing the book on Amazon, as well as any of your other favorite book-discussion sites. Thousands of books are published around the world every day, all competing to gain traction and attention from readers. If you enjoyed this book and want more like it to be published in the future, then reviews are one of the best ways you can support authors.
Regardless of whether you choose to leave a review or not, thank you for taking the time to join Alfric and his new friends!
All the best,
Alexander
