Jason skittered back. “As you were, mate.”

Clive stood next to Jason as they watched Humphrey hammer away at the wall.

“That mouth of yours is going to get the cream kicked out of you someday,” Clive said.

“Been there, done that,” Jason said. “You can live your life avoiding consequences or accepting them. I tried the first way in my old world, and I’m trying the other here.”

“And how’s that working out?”

“It feels good,” Jason said. “Wouldn’t recommend it without healing magic, though. Cripes, he’s putting a dent in that wall.”

Humphrey’s hammer blows were crashing into the wall with the regularity of an aggressive metronome. The stone was covered with impact marks all clustered together, spiderweb cracks spreading out. In short order, the hammer breached a hole in the wall, which let out a wave of wet air, stinking with rot.

All three hurried away from the hole.

“That is foul,” Clive said.

“It’s not dissolving monster bad,” Jason said, “but it’s bad.”

Humphrey looked disconsolately at the hole in the wall.

“We have to go down there,” he said unhappily.

Jason nodded.

“I wouldn’t want that to be my final resting place,” he said. “We have an adventurer to bring home.”

“How did they get down there?” Humphrey pondered. “It looks like all the entrances are sealed up.”

“That smell means the water got in somewhere,” Clive said. “Best guess? Some monster burrowed all the way down here, found a hole in the lower level and made it their lair. They killed the adventurer up on the surface, then dragged them down into whatever entrance the monster made for itself.”

“Makes sense,” Jason said. “We were expecting some kind of worm monster.”

Humphrey took a deep, unhappy breath.

“Enough stalling,” he said. “I’m going to bring down that wall.”

Soon there was enough of a hole for a person to pass through and Humphrey leaned in for a look.

“Looks like the stairs were reshaped to make this wall,” Humphrey said. “Can we get some light in here?”

One of the floating motes of light drifted through the hole and Humphrey looked again.

“Yeah, we’ll have to drop down,” he said.

They took another of Jason’s metal stakes and Humphrey hammered it into the floor to anchor a rope. Jason was the first one through the hole, drifting down a stairwell now more like an elevator shaft. He stopped when he reached water flooding the level below. Taking out his ten-foot pole, he tested the depth.

“There’s water down here,” he called up. “Shallow enough to walk through.”

The others slid down the rope, ending up knee-deep in black, icy water.

“I don’t care for this,” Clive said.

“Look around,” Jason said, standing on the surface. “We might find our answers down here.”