Kelima eventually got tired of throwing rocks at him. Quite literally. She kept throwing until it looked like she didn't have the energy for it anymore. Somewhere in the middle, Terry had just gone back to punching the wall. The rocks hitting him were aggravating, but it was like being pestered by mosquitoes. The mosquitoes from his original world, not whatever obscenity passed as mosquitoes in Chinese Period Drama Hell. If the absurdity held true, those things would be the size of vultures and kill herds of cattle anytime they swarmed. He wondered if that would make them like airborne chupacabras. A shudder-worthy thought if ever there was one, in his opinion.

From time to time, he threw armfuls of shattered stone through the door like he'd done on the goblin floor. After thinking about it for a while, he realized that he'd only been thinking about the queen, but that was shortsighted. There were probably going to be more of the damn things in there to guard the queen. Bigger and stronger ones than what he'd faced so far. Honestly, he'd be more comfortable if Kelima waited outside if that were the case. Unfortunately, he didn't know if she'd end up trapped on the wrong side of the boss room door if they tried to do it that way.

Fighting through this dungeon once had been irritating enough. He didn't want to have to figure out how to get back into it, just so he could go looking for her. That was assuming that the dungeon didn't function like a video game, with separate instances for every person or group that entered. However, it hadn't separated them when they'd entered separately. That was hard to gauge, though. She hadn't gone wandering off, and he hadn't taken that long to make the choice to jump in after her. Better to avoid taking unnecessary chances.

Once he'd tossed in what had to be a hundred pounds of loose stone, he turned his attention back to Kelima. She was sitting about ten feet away, arms crossed, and staring resolutely away from him. Even when he'd been a teenager, Terry didn't think he'd had such an enduring ability to sulk. Maybe he just hadn't been wired for it. Or, maybe it was a noble thing. Either way, the time had come to face the music. It wouldn't be awesome rock music, but gross, stomach-turning insect music.

"Let's go. You can pout after we beat the boss," said Terry.

Jesus, man. She really is going to poison your food if you don't lay off, said other-Terry. If you get poisoned, I get poisoned. So, don't get yourself poisoned.

Your concern for my well-being is, as always, moving, thought Terry. Honestly, it's like hearing Beethoven's Ode to Joy for the first time.

Of course, it is, answered other-Terry without missing a beat.

Wow, thought Terry. That backfired spectacularly. I'm really not having a good day here with the verbal sparring.

Sighing to himself, he stared at Kelima until she finally deigned to look at him. He pointed at the open doorway to the boss cavern. She sniffed and turned her head away.

"For fuck's sake," he muttered under his breath. "This moral stand you think you're making right now may feel righteous, but our incredibly limited supply of food and water isn't growing while you waste time."

That got the girl on her feet after a pregnant pause. She stalked over to where he stood.

"I still haven't forgiven you," she said.

"Great pep talk," said Terry.

Then, he grabbed her arm and pulled her into the room with him. Once again, stone doors materialized out of the ether and slammed shut behind them. Kelima flinched a little at the booming sound that echoed in the cavern. Now that he was inside, Terry could see that it was even bigger than he'd first thought. He glanced up and was relieved that he could actually see the ceiling of the cavern. He focused for a second on a specific spot before his attention was drawn back to the ground. Several dozen elephant-sized cockroach monsters were standing in front of a positively massive creature that had to be the queen. She had to be as wide as a couple of city buses and longer.

"Is that the queen?" asked Kelima in a tiny voice.

Reaching down to grab a bigger rock in each hand, Terry said, "God, I hope so. I really don't want to have to fight something bigger than that. It's going to be really awkward trying to punch that thing in the face."

"Punch it?" demanded an appalled Kelima. "Why would you try to punch it?"

Terry shrugged.

"Anything that vile should get punched in the face, don't you think? First, though, I need to see how durable those guards are."

Terry hefted the rock in his right hand a few times, did his best to channel what he could remember of major league pitchers, and threw the rock. It struck one of the elephant-sized monsters. There was a crackling noise as a spiderweb pattern formed on its chitin shell. The pure force of the blow also knocked it back. It staggered into one of the others. Terry waited in hopeful anticipation that a fight would break out between the monsters, but no such luck.

"It didn't die," whispered Kelima.

"I noticed that. I guess I need to actually try a little harder at this. Especially now that they're getting ready to charge us."

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"How can you tell?" she asked.

She was staring intently at the monsters that just looked to be shuffling around. Terry frowned briefly. How had he come to that conclusion? He shook it off. It wasn't something that needed an answer right then.

"I just can," he said before sending another rock hurtling at the same giant cockroach he'd hit the first time.

This time, there was a satisfying splash of goo as the stone punctured the shell and did massive internal damage. The creature let out a kind of unsettling chirping noise before it staggered toward them. Terry nodded to himself. Now that he'd dialed in the right amount of strength to use, he figured that dealing with the minion monsters wouldn't take too long.

"Start grabbing the rocks that are about this size," he held up a chunk of stone about the size of a softball. "Hand them to me as we go."

He started abusing the monsters by whipping rocks at them like pint-sized mass drivers. Kelima dutifully handed him a stone every time he held a hand out. Whenever she wasn't ready, he'd lean down, grab a handful of the smaller rocks, and send those out like particularly lethal bird shot. They didn't do the same amount of damage, but it kept the monsters at bay for a while. By the time they figured out that hunkering down wasn't going to work, several of them were already dead. Most of the other had a dozen holes in them, leaking whatever the hell cockroach monsters had inside of them instead of blood.

"This is where it's going to get tricky," he told Kelima. "When in doubt, run like hell."

"What's going to get—"

Her question was cut off when several of the monsters made what Terry assumed was some kind of sacrificial charge. Maybe they wanted to take him with them. He wasn't sure. Since they'd volunteered themselves that way, though, he wasn't going to miss the opportunity. Focusing hard, he made the biggest fireball he could manage. He directed it at the lead cockroach. The sight of the fireball made the creatures hesitate for a moment. That indecision cost the lead cockroach. The fireball connected with its head, burst, and sent fire scattering over it. The thing's head more or less vaporized.

The two that had been flanking it weren't spared the fire's wrath either. While it didn't kill them, the flames did seem to panic them. Terry took that opportunity to hit them in their heads with bigger rocks that appeared to crush what served as their brains. The corpses in the middle of the room were going to make a nice obstacle for anything trying to come at them. Not that Terry intended to give them time to think that hard about it. He lobbed another fireball to where they were packed together the tightest.

That set off another round of panicked motion while he pelted them with stones. Terry reflected on the situation. While he wasn't having that much trouble, he didn't imagine that this dungeon would go very well for any rank three or rank four team of adventurers. Most of those teams wouldn't be able to brute force victories that way he had been doing. And strategy would only take you so far when your enemies might be made of solid stone or have the kind of durability he'd seen from these cockroaches. Solid teamwork was great, but meant surprisingly little when you had a thousand pounds of chitin bearing down on you.

Terry kept using the same fire and stone tactics until the queen finally reached her limit and came forward. He assumed that there had been some dungeon rule preventing her from taking part until he'd killed enough of the smaller ones. This time, it was Kelima who panicked.

"You aren't going to be able to kill that one with a fireball or a stone," she said. "What are we going to do?"

"You're going to do what I told you to do. Stay back and watch."

Terry confidently walked forward about ten feet and looked the queen right in her massive black eyes. He was sure that he could see the malevolence and anger in them. Either that or he was projecting. Yeah, he decided that he was probably projecting. Not that it stopped him.

"Well, come on, you big ugly monstrosity! Come and get me, if you can!"

There was a short moment, as if the entire dungeon was holding its breath, and then the queen charged at him. Terry didn't let himself look away. He just waited until the moment was right. Then, he looked up to the thing he'd started building from very nearly the moment they'd walked into the room. It was a spear of ice. Terry mentally corrected himself. It was spear-shaped ice as big around as a Corinthian column. It plunged downward at his command. The queen, perhaps noticing his gaze or sensing the danger, tried to change course. It didn't help.

The ice column spear drove straight through the monster. It was big enough, heavy enough, dense enough, and sharp enough that it even pierced the stone floor, effectively pinning the queen in place. She let out one of the weird, chirping noises. Terry could feel it in his bones, which was very unsettling. He still made himself walk toward the thrashing monster that was hopelessly trying to free itself.

"What are you doing?" hissed Kelima, like she thought the monsters could hear her.

"I'm going to go punch it in the face. Doesn't it look really punchable to you?"

"No! It looks like something you should set on fire from very far away!"

"There's no poetry in your soul, at all, is there?"

Terry ended up punching the queen in the face several times over the next few minutes. However, those punches had to be interspersed between killing the last of the guards. He'd been right, though. Punching that thing had been so satisfying. What he hadn't expected was for a chest to appear in the center of the room when the queen finally disintegrated. He walked over to it with Kelima in tow. He did several full circuits around the big, brass-bound chest. When that didn't reveal anything interesting, he poked it with a sword several times. Still nothing.

"Okay, I guess it's not a mimic," said Terry in response to Kelima's baffled look. "It's another kind of dungeon monster."

He had seen the question in her eyes and just cut out the middleman. With nothing left to do, he walked over and used his sword to lift the lid. He took several quick steps back and waited. Almost feeling disappointed that something terrible hadn't happened immediately, he walked over and looked down into the chest. Sitting in the center of what looked like a black void was a plain gold ring. Terry held his breath as he reached in and plucked out the ring.

"I better not need to throw this thing into a volcano," he said, mostly addressing the powers-that-be.

He frowned at the ring and then looked at Kelima. She shook her head to indicate she didn't know what it was supposed to do. Then, a mad idea struck Terry. He ran over to the massive source stone the queen had left behind. Sliding the ring onto a finger, he reached down, touched the source stone, and willed it to go into the ring. When it happened, Terry started to laugh maniacally with his fist shoved into the air.

"Finally!" he screamed. "It's mine! It's mine, and I'm never giving it up!"

"Wait! What happened? I couldn't see," said Kelima, running over to where he stood.

Maniacal expression of glee still firmly fixed on his face, Terry summoned the source stone from his ring.

"I finally got a goddamned storage ring!"

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