"What? I mean, uh, ma'am," Timrat says, touching his forehead and turning to follow Tanth. As he steps up behind them, Tanth steps around to Pona's front in a practiced maneuver, to let them both face the slimes.

Timrat stabs one, making it blurble angrily and lunge for his shoe. He hops backwards and takes another swing, which it deflects with its hat.

Pona crouches, and uses the lower position to make a shot between the swordsmen. Her accuracy suffers a little, but she puts a dagger through the first slime on the left, popping it.

Tanth pops another, and then the remaining three are quickly mopped up. The adventurers warily check to see if any more are in evidence, but Yarold instructs the others to stay hidden. He wants to see where Kose was going with her aborted speech.

The adventurers tromp into the core room. Timrat discreetly bends to remove the stone from his shoe and wipe up some of the blood from his nose on a handkerchief. Tanth crosses his arms.

"Greetings, brave adventurers," Kose says, with just as much dignity as the first time. "You have faced the challenges of the dungeon, and you have overcome them. Allow me to present your final reward."

She hands Tanth the light-up stone that Yarold made.

He takes and nods gruffly. "It was a well-made challenge," he responds. "I look forward to being surprised by the dungeon's ingenuity again in the future."

Yarold remains silent, paying attention to the body language that Kose and Tanth display. After a long moment, Tanth nods his head. The others bow, and then they turn and file silently out of the core room.

As they leave, Yarold feels a sense of lightness, as though he might float away. He feels as though he could run a dozen miles, if he still had legs. He sweeps his attention along the corridor, restoring the expended monsters and closing the trapdoor.

He already feels as though he has so many ideas for improving their performance. His skeleton needs work, but it also needs armor. His trapdoor worked perfectly, but now he feels as though he can deepen its pit. First, though, he needs more than just a single, straight corridor. He needs storage space! Testing rooms!

"... Yarold. Yarold!" Kose calls, catching his attention. "That was great! Now that you've had your first challenge, we should talk about how it went and what future adventurers will expect, as well as plan your first expansion."

Yarold is deeply ambivalent about the prospect of sharing his planning with Kose, who he is by now pretty sure has some connection to the adventurers. He's still not sure what it is, though. Maybe they're paying her off for insider information about his dungeon? But he doesn't think she had any contact with them after she entered his core room for the first time until just now.

"Sure," he says, mentally bifurcating his plans. Some of them are obvious, and he might as well discuss them with her. The others? He's going to hold them in reserve. He has lots of ideas; he can afford to sacrifice a few while he works out more of what Kose is angling for.

He divides his attention between listening to Kose talk about difficulty standards and encounter balancing, and carving out a testing chamber above his core room to see which of his ideas actually work.

He tries many things. Monsters that act like fiberoptic cables! Monsters that are made out of acid! Monsters that are railguns, and servers, and fire suppression systems.

And he tests to see whether or not he can make a monster which looks exactly like his crystal.

He listens to Kose's descriptions, and he shares the least of his plans with her, and builds out a maze populated with skeletons under her watchful eye.

And eventually, she goes to sleep.

He drops his pedestal through the floor (gently, slowly), and replaces it with an identical pedestal and crystal monster. He moves his crystal through the floor, to a randomly selected spot under his maze. He builds his more lethal ideas into the walls, and creates a management process that can coordinate lethality levels between the different defenses (fail deadly).

And he documents it all thoroughly, and writes integration tests, and does end-to-end user testing with monsters that play at being human. He is an engineer, and he has his pride.

When Kose wakes up, he greets her cheerfully.

"Good morning!"

"Good mor—" she begins, before staring at his decoy crystal in alarm.

In a flash, she is on her feet, a spectral longbow made of rainbows in her hands. She aims through the walls and floor of the dungeon at the place where he has secreted his crystal, and she fires.

Yarold dies a second time.