I clung to the straps.
"No, I'm good, I got this," I said, panic thudding in my chest.
There was no version of this school where Vut took the pack to be kind. If I were hanging over an acid trap, fingers slipping on the stone lip, they would grab the pack before they grabbed me. As long as it was strapped to my back, I was inventory. Inventory had value.
I was not a fighter; I was a run and hider.
If I had been, I would not have lasted this long… though that was not entirely accurate. A few talented mundane fighters ended up slotted into groups. Talented was the keyword. There were no mediocre survivors that would put up a fight. If you fought back, you had to be exceptional. Exceptional enough that a ranked group decided you were worth the slot.
Working-class male mundanes who pushed back without that level of skill died early.
Even so, it was still better to be a man here than a woman.
Vut tore the pack from my hands.
The straps burned across my palms as they slipped free. I staggered forward, boots skidding on damp stone.
Jonas caught me, steadying me, and I knew that I was about to die. None of these guys cared about me. Jonas would rather trip me and laugh as I fell than steady me. I felt a sharp tug on the back of my neck, and then Jonas let me go, stepping back, a cut leather cord draping down either side of his closed fist. I reached up to touch the bare space where my most important possession used to be.
He'd taken the one thing I absolutely needed to survive the Dungeon.
"Please," I begged, reaching out to him. "Don't do this."
Should I drop to my knees? No, that wouldn't do anything. They would just enjoy the sight of me begging. Should I try to snatch it from him? If they left without me, I would die here. But if I attacked them and somehow managed to get it back, they would kill me anyway. My recall stone was set to the same location as theirs.
"We can't win games with a squire that can't kill a goblin," Heacur said. "It's not personal."
"Just fire me!" I said, trying to use words to talk some sense into them, as if words had the power to break through into theminds of people who didn’t see me as a person. "I can work in the kitchen or on the farms. You don't have to leave me down here to die! Haven't I been a good squire?"
"Firing you is too much paperwork," Olrik said.
"Consider the next few hours of life a reward for good service," Vut said.
"Come on, let's go," Jonas said.
"Wait!" I shouted, lunging for him, but my desperate moment of aggression was too late.
They all used their recall stones, small objects spelled to allow them instant transport out of the Dungeon and back to their home. I had worn my own recall stone around my neck, tied tightly to ensure that I would not lose it no matter what happened. It never occurred to me that they would take it. I always thought if I went, it would be because Vut ripped my head off in a fit of rage because I put the wrong amount of sugar in his coffee.
Panic flooded through me, but at the same time…this wasn’t what I expected.
I never thought they would just leave me alive.
I was alive, alone, and out of their control.
I was free.
Joy flooded through me, mixed in equal parts with terror. I'd been Dungeon Diving with the Barons for all this time now. I knew exactly how dangerous the Dungeon was. I had no weapons and no one to prod me with a sword to force me to walk into a room first to see if the doors would lock behind me and trap me in there with one of the more dangerous monsters. I had no supplies, but also no one who would start shouting in a quiet area, demanding that more monsters appear.
I was free, but I was in a Dungeon that could easily kill me and absorb the magic held in my body like I was a midday snack.
If it noticed me.
I was good at not being noticed.
I took a slow, deep breath, keeping myself calm.
I rolled up the sleeve on my jacket, double-checking that the tattoo was still there. I traced the familiar lines of the ink I'd gotten before I ever came to this place. It wasn't the perfect clean lines of the simple spells I'd learned in my first year. It was a complex thing, with intersecting lines and runes, most of which I didn't know how to read. My basics of spellcrafting class barely covered anything, and none of the runes had anything to do with healing or detection. I didn't even know it was a spell at the time I got it. I'd been drunk, and my new familiar had drawn out the design, insisting I go and get it marked somewhere out of sight on my body as a celebration of our bond. He explained what it was for before the interview, powering it for the first time.
