The store had finally closed after another record-breaking day, and Chadwick was beat.

He locked the heavy glass front doors and strolled back to the manager's office. He picked up his scavenged cell phone, disconnected it from the store's AI DJ, and switched it over to his personal offline playlist.

Mike Einziger started with a heavy, scratching guitar riff before Brandon Boyd belted smoothly over the speaker. He fucking loved Incubus, and he was so glad Sara had shown the band to him back on Earth. He grabbed his stash box, cracked open a cold Pamplemousse LaCroix, picked up his heavy Aegis vape mod, and made his way out to the concrete patio.

As he approached the fire pit, his after-shift Shafted crew greeted him warmly.

“We did 224 gold over our daily projections,” Chadwick said proudly. He pulled his heavy-duty Kong chair up to the fire and plopped down, setting his stuff on the metal side table. “Whatever Sara is doing is actually working. I’ve never seen anything like it, Cumference.”

“Shit,” Sir Cumference kicked his heavy Orcish boots up on the table and drained a warm Guinness, incredibly thankful to drop the stiff Butlerguard routine for the night. “This is the first time in my existence I’ve actually felt valued as an employee.”

“That says a lot,” Lacuna Coal sparked up one of her signature, magically thick blunts. She took a deep, dragging inhale and let out a thick cloud of smoke. “Especially considering you spent your whole life workin’ for Roblethan Marcdonavis.”

Chadwick took the blunt from her as she passed it. He took a deep draw, holding it in his massive Minotaur lungs as he passed it to Cumference. “How does that work, anyway?” he asked, still holding the smoke before letting it go with a heavy, rumbling cough. “Like, you actively work for the giant frog, but you’re contracted to Sara now?”

Cumference had long since passed the blunt further into the circle of goth-dwarves and pulled out his own polished wooden pipe. “Technically, we worked for Roblethan, and we were temporarily contracted to Simone and Cody for the rescue mission.” He took a hit before continuing. “But Sara looked at our employment contract, found half a dozen illegal loopholes since Marcdonavis was created by Mark's sloppy homebrew rules, and she officially bought out our contracts entirely.”

“Holy shit!” Lacuna marveled, her spiked boots tapping the concrete. “She did?”

“Yeah,” Cumference grinned, ripping open a scavenged bag of Funyuns. “Just yesterday, right before she left with Raven.”

A sudden, violent commotion clattered inside the dark store.

Someone slammed hard into the reinforced glass window from the inside and bounced back with a muffled shriek. Chadwick sprang to his hooves instantly. The rest of the crew drew their weapons and rushed the glass to see Simone picking herself up off the floor. She hastily unlocked the patio door and pushed it open.

“Knoblins!” Simone gasped, pointing frantically back into the dark store. “Under the shop!”

Chadwick shook his head, his heavy high just starting to kick in. “Knoblins? All the way up here by the surface?”

“That ain’t—that isn’t good,” Cumference corrected himself, slipping instantly back into his formal Butlerguard posture. “Let’s go down there and send them on their way.”

Chadwick put a massive hand up. “No, bro. We don’t need dead Knoblins stinking up the foundation of the store. We need to herd them. Lead them away. Preferably back down into the deep caves.”

“Why did they have to be so horribly cute in person?” Simone shuddered, shaking her head. “How do we even do that?”

“I got just the thing,” Lacuna said, her dark eyes lighting up with a dangerous, chaotic idea. “Knoblins absolutely love IPAs and Jack Johnson music, right?”

Chadwick nodded his heavy, horned head, appraising where she was going with this. “Well, yeah, everyone knows that lore. Are we just going to bait them like fish?”

“In a way, yes,” Lacuna scratched her black hair. “You know that big, empty iron ball that Cody commissioned from the forge last week, right before Sara formally rejected his giant piñata idea?”

“That thing already weighs a literal ton,” Chadwick said. “You wanna fill it with IPA?”

“And strap one of the small JBL Clip speakers to it,” she added. She was referencing the twenty-eight Bluetooth speakers that Mark had bought over the course of two summers back on Earth because he wanted synchronized music in every room, but constantly neglected to remember he could just carry one with him. “We rig it, and chuck it down that main subterranean shaft.”

“Where does the main shaft actually go?” Simone wondered, shivering slightly.

“Nowhere,” Lacuna answered. “I mean, technically it leads everywhere, but the caves get so impossibly small after a mile or so that a humanoid can’t physically continue.”

“Where’s the iron ball gonna go, then?” Chadwick raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Chino and I have been talking about using explosives to blow a wider tunnel through there anyway,” she shrugged. “There’s a high probability this heavy ball can crush the rocks and give us a straight shot down to Rocksylvania. Cut our travel and trade time down by half.”

Chadwick nodded his head slowly, his Assistant Manager brain calculating the logistics. “That’s a highly efficient business move. Let’s do it.”

“Meet us down there,” Lacuna said, handing the smoking joint to her girlfriend, Courtney Glory-Hole. “The Shafted just excavated a new access hatch in the ceiling above the back tunnel. We can drop the ball right through there.”

As the Dwarves jogged away to rig the trap, the remaining Orcs stood at attention, looking to their Assistant Manager for tactical guidance. After the conversation about Sara's brilliant legal maneuvers, Chadwick felt a bit out of his league, but he stepped up.

“Cumference, you and the boys set up a hard, physical stop at the front doors. Everyone else, grab the heavy netting from the back room and string it across the hallway. Do not let those things out onto the sales floor. The absolute last thing we need right now is the Forest of Nihilism being overrun with sentient dicks.”

He looked around at his team, genuinely proud of them. “Little to the left, Chud. There ya go. Lock it down.”

“Come on,” Simone said, leading Chadwick through the dark store and past the manager's office to the heavy metal back door. “They’re down there in the cave. I saw maybe ten of 'em.”

He could hear them already. Their deep, unnerving, man-like honks echoed up through the floorboards.

As Chadwick pushed the heavy metal door open to look down into the dark, his bovine eyes pulled wide. The door opened to a sheer, ten-foot drop to the actual cavern floor below, creating a perfect natural overlook. But looking down, he realized there weren’t ten monsters. There were, at best guess, fifty of them.

Three-foot-tall, sickeningly adorable, fleshy penises were running wildly around the cavern below using their testiculegs. They were shouting aggressively from their meatusmouths, which were filled entirely with tiny, razor-sharp teeth.

“Hoooooooooonnnnnkkkk!”

One of them looked up with its giant, kawaii puppy-dog eyes and saw Chadwick standing in the doorway, instantly alerting the rest of the throbbing horde.

Chadwick slammed the metal door shut just as he saw their primary projectile-vomit weapon spray up toward him. The heavy door rocked and shook violently under the force of the collective semen-blast.

“Hey, Simone?” Chadwick yelled over the honking, bracing his weight against the metal.

“Yeah?” she asked, already unshouldering her longbow.

“Can you go get my Vapehammer for me?” He planted his hooves, struggling to hold the door closed. “It’s in the breakroom next to my acoustic guitar.”

Simone ran into the room. A second later, a horrific, heavy scraping sound came from the linoleum. “Fuck, this is incredibly heavy! How do you even lift it?”

“Minotaur,” Chadwick reminded her gently as her head popped out of the room, still dragging the weapon across the floor.

“Oh, right,” she panted.

Chadwick reached out with one massive hand and easily hefted his weapon. It was a custom-forged warhammer he had meticulously crafted out of a hundred dead GeekVape box mods fused to a heavy Vorpal steel head.

Chadwick took a deep breath and let out a heavy sigh. He hated dealing with Knoblins. They weren’t particularly hard to kill; they were just a massive, sticky mess to clean up. “Have you ever been cum on before?”

Simone shook her head, blushing furiously at the memory. “Umm… recently…”

“Get ready to be again.”

He swung the metal door open wide. He expertly dodged the first volley of Knoblin spit as it sailed past his horns and splashed across the back wall, completely coating Simone in the crossfire.

Chadwick didn't hesitate. He leapt off the ten-foot ledge, using his massive, thousand-pound Minotaur weight to drop like a bomb into the cavern, instantly crushing several of the creatures beneath his hooves.

He swung his Vapehammer in a massive, devastating arc, the Vorpal steel cleaving cleanly through a dozen of the tiny, screaming dicks. They honked in furious unison as they swarmed his legs. Chadwick swung again, and again, acting as the ultimate meat-shield, but there were far more Knoblins down here than he thought. They kept pouring up into the cavern from the main descending shaft.

From her perfect ten-foot vantage point in the doorway, Simone's Ranger mechanics took over. Her arrows rained down from above in a deadly, rhythmic blur, finding their marks directly inside the Knoblins' open mouths.

But they were quickly being overwhelmed by sheer volume. Several sneaky Knoblins had already scrambled up the cavern walls, trying to reach Simone's perch.

Then, a sliver of light pierced the darkness from the ceiling further down the tunnel. A newly excavated, heavy iron hatch was hauled open by the Shafted.

“Fuck me, that's heavy!” Chino yelled from the access tunnel above, looking down into the swarm. He turned to someone out of sight. “Now! Drop it now!”

Seconds later, a massive, solid iron ball—as tall as Chadwick himself—smashed down through the ceiling hatch and landed squarely in the middle of the Knoblin horde. It was completely covered in Cody’s requested iron spikes and colorful, rainbow papier-mâché.

Chadwick roared, slammed his way through a row of biting Knoblins, and delivered a massive, full-force Minotaur kick to the back of the spikey ball, sending it rolling heavily down the sloping shaft.

“Now!” Chino called out as the ball gained momentum.

The familiar, soothing acoustic chords and soft vocals of Jack Johnson's Banana Pancakes suddenly blared at maximum volume from the Bluetooth speaker strapped to the rolling iron sphere.

The music instantly called the attention of every single Knoblin in the tunnel. In a bizarre, trance-like fashion, they entirely ignored Chadwick, whipped out their long, sticky foreskin-tongues, and latched themselves securely onto the rolling ball.

Chino and Lacuna jumped down through the ceiling hatch into the pit behind the ball, swinging their massive Dwarven battleaxes to clear the stragglers, while Simone pelted the remaining runners from her sniper perch.

The immediate threat was over. But the mystery had just begun.

“You okay?” Chadwick asked the Shafted team, leaning heavily on his hammer. “You good up there, Simone?”

Simone hopped lightly down the ten-foot drop into the dirt, wiping Knoblin spit off her cheek with absolute disgust. “Never better.”

“We’re good, boss,” Chino panted, watching as the massive, beer-filled ball leaked IPA as it rolled deeper and deeper into the darkness below, completely covered in a swarm of hypnotized, tiny dicks. “But did ye say they came from down there?”

“Yeah,” Simone nodded, shuddering. “I was down here shitting, and that first fucker just came out of nowhere and tried to… I don’t wanna even talk about it.”

“What’s actually down there?” Chadwick asked, pointing his hammer down the dark, sloping tunnel. “Lacuna said the caves got too small to pass.”

“By all geographical accounts, that tunnel should just lead straight to the Void,” Chino answered, scratching his beard.

“What’s the Void?” Chadwick perked up, having never heard the term used as an actual physical location here.

“Just endless miles of un-rendered, undeveloped game content,” Lacuna responded quietly. “The absolute edge of Mark's map.”

Chadwick tugged thoughtfully at his blonde goatee. “I gotta go see what’s actually down there. I gotta make sure they stay gone so they don't threaten the store.”

“We can just blow the tunnel now,” Chino offered, gesturing to his mining explosives. “Seal it shut permanently.”

Chadwick held his hammer at the ready and proceeded slowly down the dark slope. “Maybe. Let’s see what we’re actually dealing with first.”

As they descended deeper into the earth, a sudden, unnatural chill crept up Chadwick's spine.

“Do you hear that?” Simone whispered, scouting a few paces forward, her Ranger senses on high alert.

Chadwick stopped and listened. “Nothing. That iron ball should have hit the bottom of the cavern by now.”

“No,” Simone said, shaking her head. Something seemed terribly wrong with the very atmosphere of the cave. “It’s like… static.”

The air grew freezing cold as they descended further. Chadwick noticed Simone’s hair and clothing violently whipping forward in a wind that shouldn't possibly exist in a sealed cave.

As their magical torches pushed the darkness back, the solid ground suddenly, terrifyingly fell away.

The tunnel abruptly ended at a sheer, jagged cliff face.

Beyond the ledge was a massive, impossibly open, cavernous void of glitching, un-rendered blackness. Floating in the absolute center of the empty space, at least ten stories down, was a violently rippling tear in the fabric of the game engine itself. It buzzed with the harsh sound of digital static, acting like a vacuum, actively sucking the dead Knoblins and the iron ball out of the air and into the ether.

Chadwick felt the immense, unnatural gravity pull at his heavy frame, but his Minotaur strength easily anchored him against the rock.

Simone panicked. She tried to step backward, but the wind caught her. Her boots slipped cleanly on the loose gravel at the edge of the precipice.

Chadwick roared, charging toward the edge and diving forward. He reached out with his massive hand, his fingers brushing her leather armor—just missing her terrified grip by a fraction of an inch.

“Simone!” Chadwick cried out into the dark.

She screamed as she was sucked instantly down into the abyss and swallowed whole by the glitching, static portal.

A split second later, the anomaly violently collapsed in on itself with a deafening, digital crack, disappearing completely and leaving nothing but an empty, silent, black cavern behind.

Before the Minotaur could even get back to his hooves, Lacuna stepped up to the edge, staring down into the terrifying, empty space.

“We need to get Sara.”

 

[SYSTEM ALERT: Encounter Cleared.]

[XP Awarded: 1,000]