"It's not safe for you, not like this."

  Lacie scowled. "I'm not made of paper."

  "I know, but I think we can protect you a bit more, still." I started removing magic items.

  "What on earth are you doing?"

  I held out the Shimmering Faulds of Midnight and Shadow-Twined Mesh Top. "The +5 Hide in Shadows and Sink Into Shadow Benefit can be applied before we start. You'll be basically invisible. Once we're in there, I sincerely doubt I'll be able to hide from the boss, so these don't matter to me. In fact, ignoring hiding, I can get the +2 Light On Your Feet from those ballet-flats.

  "I hate that I'm taking your armor," she grumbled while she put them on. "Although, fair warning, I look way hotter with these on, and you look way hotter with them off."

  I blushed so hard I had to look away.

  She giggle-snorted at my reaction. "Now, come here."

  I walked over, letting her take my hands. "I'll be safe. You worry about you."

  She gave me a quick kiss on the lips, then started casting spells. She'd cast her full stack of spells, then potioned and began draining mana with some ability-pairing I didn't entirely understand, specifically Deep Magic and Ley Line Weaving, to extend the durations. It took her five minutes and three potions to get the buffs to their max-possible duration. Once everything was there, I had Soothing Stream for twenty hours, Symbiotic Barkskin for seven hours, and Windswept Crags and Strength of the Wilds for just over four hours.

  Soothing Stream was a very slow heal, but it was constant. Barkskin reduced the damage I took from physical attacks. Windswept Crags was one she was just now hoping to level aggressively, as it hadn't been useful before; it increased movement speed and jump distance. Strength of the Wilds increased strength by 15, which meant it almost doubled my direct damage but did nothing for my ruptures.

  It took a bit to find a good position, but I eventually settled in the middle of the wall, facing out towards the ruination. I could get a decent spin going partly on the wall, make six or seven rotations, and send a fastball straight down. At lower speeds, it richocheted and could be dangerous. Once I was past five rotations, the heavy steel ball embedded into the stone and sent shards of rock flying.

  It took me ten minutes to clear one level of stone. We looked down at where I had demolished a two-foot gap in a meter-thick stone, only to find another course of stone below. It turned out that second course was the last, my final fastball shooting into brightly-lit depths.

  She activated Sink Into Shadows as I tucked my arms tight and dropped through the hole I'd cut. As soon as I was clear, I began skating on the wall. I didn't slow, I just turned aside, pushing against the wall to divert my speed more horizontally, spiraling downwards.

  The center of the room was dominated by a massive column of little brass panels, all at different angles, articulated by servo-like mechanisms. As I slid down, they clicked through various positions.

  Not "little" brass panels, I realized. Each panel was a square meter, but the column as a whole was so massive they seemed small. It ran floor to ceiling, about a kilometer tall, and was probably twenty-five meters wide. Obviously, this is what that shaft was driving.

  As I got going around, I sped to the other side, into sight of a platform connected to the column. A small man poked at a control panel. He look at me. The world froze.

  B-B-B-Boss Battle!

  Thumping music, fit for the sort of club Mom would blame of satan worship, began to pump.

  A golden VERSUS slammed into the middle of my interface. On the left, it put, The Situationship of Maddy and Lacie

  Maddy: Lacie, did you name our party that?

  Lacie: No. I realized we hadn't selected a name and wanted to bring it up next time we were in a safe room. We should just be Party #1,019,277. The AI is screwing with us.

  Our portraits slammed into place, mine looking frazzled with my faulds and mesh top gone, hers looking incredibly hot in her make-up, which somehow was still un-mussed.

  Lacie: We should talk about it, though. It is kinda a situationship right now, us just together in a dungeon.

  I mentally slipped, and was glad time was currently stopped.

  Maddy: Uh, yes, but not while we're fighting a boss, okay?

  Lacie: Of course. Sorry.

  Across from our portraits slammed the portrait of a green-skinned gnome who looked like the mad doctor from a cartoon, with giant tangles of gray hair sticking out to the sides. Doctor Calcul. The column of clicking brass plates raced up behind him, spinning in place, plates clicking away. And Calcul's Complex Contraption!

  Calcul and Calcul's Complex Contraption! Mechagoblinome Inventor And His Invention!

  Level 74 City Boss!

  Gnomes love their refined, precise machinery, while goblins haphazardly craft whatever devices they can think up with little regard for how they're about to blow themselves up. Rarely do these two meet in romance, but two such star-crossed lovers succeeded in broaching that taboo.

  Calcul was their child, and he sought a home in either world, but was denied in both. The gnomes thought he was too reckless, willing to risk anything to prove his worth. The goblins thought he was too picky, always saying a design wasn't ready just because he could point out at least one reason it would definitely explode.

  Spurned from the world, he fled their lands, searching for a place to call home. Finding none, he settled deep beneath the mines of the dwarves. Alone, he studied automata, creating the perfect device. Now the Complex Contraption calculates away, coming ever-closer to sentience, to becoming the accepting person he has always sought.

  Also, it shoots lasers and shit. I did say it was a boss.

  The world unfroze.

  "You dare interfere in my calculations? Go back to those dwarves and tell them I don't care what they say, my work will continue!"

  I braked hard, a laser warming me even as it missed by ten feet. Braking sent me down, and I had to speed up to recover. On the one hand, moving so fast that I was pressed against the wall and could go uphill meant that anything aiming at me had a lot of trouble. On the other hand, I lost a lot of maneuverability because I couldn't reverse direction without falling to my death.

  If I ground the edge of my shoe-skates against the fall consistently, I could fight gravity and go slowly uphill, or I could slow and go rapidly downhill, but I knew if I ever reached the bottom I'd struggle to get going up the wall again.

  Still, I kept moving, not even trying to attack.

  Lacie: Holy crap you're going fast.

  Another laser blasted out, but this one was blue. I hit behind me and washed me with frigid air.

  Lacie: Are you going to attack it?

  I swerved down as I evaded another red-hot beam. I started typing a reply, then had to nearly stop and start falling to come short of a yellow bolt that crackled and left my hair sparking.

  Speeding as best I could, I tried to climb, occasionally dipping a bit or tweaking my speed to be less predictable.

  "Fool," Calcul bellowed. "You cannot evade my Complex Contraption's Calculations!"

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Lacie: I might be able to shoot it without it seeing me.

  Maddy: No!

  My eyes flickered her way a moment, and I barely recovered in time to speed out of the way of another yellow electrical bolt.

  Maddy: Just wait. I'm fine.

  Lacie: What if one hits you?

  I evaded two more, still speeding around it.

  Maddy: Just look for a weakness, but don't send--I curved lower and avoided more—I need to focus.

  She stayed silent. I kept moving. I was hoping for a rhythm, but it just seemed random. The thing could shoot seven colors of beams. Red was heat, yellow electrical, blue cold, purple something arcane, black felt like dryness for some reason, green felt like an itch on my skin that vanished as soon as it began, and white let a little shockwave out around it.

  Slowly composing a message in bits and pieces, I sent that update on the damage types to Lacie. There wasn't reliably any lull, and I soon learned it could actually fire two blasts at once, it just hadn't been doing so at first.

  Calcul, the whole time, was ranting about the dwarves, gnomes, and goblins, but being as the entire bubble had been blown to smithereens, I had no idea what he was talking about.

  Finally, he yelled, "Calculations complete!"

  I tried to swerve, but all seven beams blasted in at once. I felt myself slide aside, that free dodge from my 15 skill moving me out of the way, and I was suddenly sliding backwards instead.

  "No! Impossible!"

  Lacie: Oh my God I thought you were dead!

  I kept skating backwards, then threw my first fastball while spinning about. It bounced off a blue shield about Calcul. A blue bar flickered up above him. As fast as the bar appeared, it vanished again, his shield recharging.

  I really hoped this was possible. We were supposed to do something before fighting him, probably to turn off either the machine or the shield. Maybe both. At least Lacie, outside the room, was probably safe.

  I readied another fastball, canceled it as I dodged again, then sent it at the tower. The Heavy Steel Ball hit a bronze panel and clicked it into a different position.

  Maddy: Did you see that?

  Lacie: No? What happened?

  I dodged three relatively quick double-beams and lost about fifty meters of height.

  Maddy: Watch my next throw.

  It took five more loops to have a chance to throw where she could see it.

  Maddy: Now.

  Lacie: You flipped a switch!

  Maddy: If you can figure out something useful to flip, maybe that helps. I gotta

  Almost a full minute later, I sent, focus on dodging, to finish that message.

  It felt only moments later that he yelled, "We'll get you this time!"

  Terrified, I leapt off the wall, no plan for how to land. Seven lasers blasted where I'd been, three cutting close to me as I twisted through the air. Sending an attack back while airborne was almost reflex by then, and I sent an Extremely Sharp Fastball at the gap between panels, seeing no effect.

  A double-jump got me back to the wall, almost twenty meters lower. The impact left my legs hurting and I lost more height as I struggled to recover my rhythm, but I was alive.

  Lacie: Can you hit one before it fires?

  Maddy: I can't see any sign before they shoot.

  Lacie: Then how the fuck are you dodging?

  Maddy: They don't move instantly. I dodge after they start shooting but before they hit me.

  The actual conversation had lots of long pauses as I evaded death, but the focus was the same.

  Lacie: How far down does it go?

  Maddy: I think it's 1 kilometer tall.

  Lacie: Can you flip all the switches on one band around it?

  I tried several times to get a Breaking Ball to set several, but it always stopped within 4 hits.

  Maddy: No.

  Lacie: The way it's all connected, I suspect that it only has one power source, which should mean that firing lasers is weakening that shield, so what we need to do is find a way to trigger lasers that the boss doesn't want us to.

  In addition to asking me to hit the panels in certain ways, she started asking me to adjust height, to alter pace, all sorts of things to spot a pattern in its responses. She didn't seem to be finding anything.

  The sixth time I almost died from one of its everything blasts, Calcul screamed, "Enough of this nonsense. We will destroy you!"

  Lacie: This isn't working. Get the fuck out of there.

  Maddy: It can blast through that ceiling, I promise you. Now, I need to focus.

  I sped up, and sped up, and sped up, constantly pushing for speed as more and more panels started to glow without firing lasers. Lacie sent some message that I ignored. I could feel what was about to happen, deep in my bones, and I just didn't know how to dodge it.

  As I circled, which panels were lit circled with me. One third of the column, top to bottom, was lit up. It wouldn't hit one spot, it would hit the entire wall, and I was on that wall.

  Well, half the wall. A third? Yeah, it was one third of the column that was glowing, the glow clicking around the thing to track me.

  That had potential. I was probably going to die anyways, but that didn't mean everything. I began spinning with the Heavy Steel Ball in hand. I'd figured out that I could get the fastball started by ducking into the pitch, another technically-valid way of throwing. That let me use both legs to spin, which meant I could get Flippy-Shit rotations while moving along the wall.

  As best I could while twisting and turning, I kept an eye on the panels, looking for any sign of the actually attack coming.

  A panel gleamed brighter. I loosed my pitch, releasing the ball a centimeter from the wall directly before me. The physics of that throw with all those damage buffs meant I was hitting the wall far harder than I was actually capable of. The blastwave of that hit hurled me away. As I launched clear, I used my double-jump to kick off of nothing, speeding my flight.

  I slammed a potion instantly. I could feel the blast brush me, wiping away the healing potion's effects, but I did get clear.

  As I plummeted, I saw the array of lasers blast a full third of the entire wall with solid white light. Not having any real plan, as I passed the pillar, I threw the knife at the gnome.

  It finally sank in that I wasn't dead. No, I was alive, plummeting, blinking for focus as the blurry edge of that blast turned my vision into flickering white after-images. Everything hurt. Crap, I was plummeting.

  I'd already used my double-jump, but that had been to send me straight across the chamber. Twisting, I got a foot on the pillar itself, kicking off of a brass panel, desperate to reach the far wall.

  I finally remember I could hit my heal spell and push back the pain of my burned, frozen, necrotized, poisoned, torn, melted, blasted skin.

  I barely got enough speed. In some ways, I didn't as staying off the ground involved hitting it with a hand hard enough that I broke my arm and was stuck cradling it as I tried to regain altitude. As I'd burned through all of my mana on heals, I had to endure the pain for seven more dodges before I could slug a healing potion.

  Lacie: Oh my god, how did you survive that. I thought you were dead!

  I started composing a reply.

  Lacie: No! Don't say.

  Maddy: What's up?

  Lacie: Do you know anything about the next floor?

  Maddy: No.

  Lacie: The hunting grounds. The people that make this dungeon, some of them come in with super powers and shit and try to kill us for sport.

  I got distracted by the boss resuming regular attacks, but I was starting to get the hang of this and could send a reply soon.

  Maddy: What the heck?

  Lacie: Yeah, and they're allowed to watch us, listen to our conversations, and read our chats. But they can't check our UIs. So, don't ever tell them something that will help you survive their attacks.

  Ah. She was assuming I'd gained a new buff or ability of some sort, not just figured a way around the blast. Still, she was right about keeping secrets.

  Lacie: But we still haven't figured out how to hurt this guy.

  Maddy: Nah, he's toast. Probably.

  Lacie: What?

  Maddy: You were right about it having only one power source. That blast took all the energy for a split second and threw a knife at the Calcul guy running it. He has a rupture debuff. He hasn't healed it yet, and I can hit him again when he next tries that, anyways. He'll die eventually.

  Lacie: When?

  I was finally high enough, and he low enough, that I could see his health bar.

  Maddy: He's dropped 0.09% health since I threw it.

  Lacie: Well fuck. At that rate, it's like seventy hours until he dies.

  He was distracted now, trying to staunch the bleeding in his arm. It wasn't working, as he didn't have actual healing magic at his disposal.

  "Should have designed some healing magic for your dumb computer!" I yelled.

  As it was going to be a while, I started really sending attacks at the Complex Contraption. Heavy Steel Breakers, entirely. I could trip four switches at a time, then got the hang of it and could manage six, and eventually ten.

  Soon enough, he tried another big blast, and I dodged it the same way. I pulled it off far better this time, only needing one healing spell and not breaking my arm at the bottom. I didn't get another rupture, unfortunately.

  Maddy: Aw, crap.

  Lacie: What?

  Maddy: The rupture faded. He's not healing, but there must be something that removed it.

  We were almost an hour in and I'd done just over 1% of the boss's health.

  Lacie: Not to be all Eeyore, but we only have 9 days and 7 hours until the floor collapses.

  Maddy: I know. I can speed this up. If you have a new plan, tell me. Otherwise, just have faith.

  Lacie: I wish I could help more.

  Maddy: You know, your buffs saved my life. This is your win, too.

  Lacie: I can siphon some damage whenever the barkskin is overwhelmed. I went into the red from that first big blast.

  Maddy: Oh my god, I'm sorry!

  Lacie: Sorry that I got to save my girlfriend? Don't be.

  Oh my God she called me her girlfriend! I had a moment of just dancing with my shoulder while I skated around the wall. She said it.

  I managed to compose myself.

  Maddy: Well, thanks, then. If I hadn't had the protection on that first blast, I wouldn't have been able to figure it out enough to dodge the second.