Our World Is Now A Dungeon World

Whats In The Dark

The screaming had stopped around ten minutes ago.

 

That was worse.

 

Riley sat at the kitchen table, phone in hand, listening to the silence press against the windows. His fingers trembled as he swiped through the new interface that had appeared the moment synchronisation completed. Ten columns of data unfolded beneath his class header, each labelled with an attribute he half-recognised from games he'd barely played: Strength. Agility. Vitality. Perception. Endurance. Intelligence. Willpower. Charisma. Luck. Lunar Affinity.

 

Every value read the same: 10.

 

Except they didn't stay that way.

 

As he watched, the numbers trembled and climbed. Strength: 20. Agility: 20. All of them doubling, one after another, as if the moonlight pouring through the kitchen window was feeding directly into his blood. A footnote appeared at the bottom in small, clinical text.

 

LUNAMANCER PASSIVE — LUNAR TIDE: Under direct moonlight, all attributes scale to 200%. Under solar exposure, all attributes reduce to 50%. Stored lunar energy permits ability usage during daylight at reduced efficacy.

 

"That's generous at night," Riley muttered, his voice too loud in the quiet. "And miserable during the day."

 

"What do you mean?" Amber leaned over, wincing as she shifted weight off her injured leg. Her hand pressed against the makeshift bandage, and Riley could see blood seeping through the fabric.

 

"My stats double right now because the moon's out. But in the morning they halve. I'll be weaker than baseline." He turned the phone so they could see, his hands still shaking. "I can still use abilities during the day from whatever moonlight I store, but they'll hit softer."

 

Something crashed in the distance. Glass breaking. All four of them froze.

 

Miko's hand drifted toward the glass shard on the table. "So you're a vampire without the teeth."

 

"Cheers for that." Riley tried to smile. It felt wrong on his face.

 

"Just saying. When the sun comes up, I'm carrying the team."

 

Her own stats were uniform tens across the board, no conditional modifiers. But beneath her attribute panel her class description read differently. SWORDSWOMAN PASSIVE — EDGE RESONANCE: Combat proficiency increases incrementally with consecutive engagements. Stats sharpen through repetition. The blade remembers what the body forgets.

 

She read it aloud, her voice tight, and flexed her fingers. The ghost of a hilt shimmered between them again, more solid than before.

 

Amber's Paladin panel showed a split. Her offensive stats sat at eight, lower than baseline, but her Vitality and Willpower both read fourteen. A note read PALADIN PASSIVE — DEVOTION ANCHOR: Healing and protective abilities scale with emotional conviction. Proximity to bonded allies increases Willpower by 2 per ally within ten metres.

 

"Twenty Willpower," she said, staring at the number. "Just from being near you lot." She laughed, but it came out strangled. Her injured leg was trembling.

 

Arianna hadn't looked at her phone yet. She sat with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the dark hallway beyond the kitchen door.

 

"Ari," Miko said gently. "You should check yours."

 

"Where's Biscuit?" Arianna's voice was barely a whisper.

 

Riley felt his stomach drop. He'd been so focused on the stats, on the immediate threat outside, that he hadn't noticed. The golden retriever that had been following Arianna around since they'd arrived—

 

"He was here," Amber said. "Wasn't he? When we came in?"

 

A low whine echoed from somewhere deeper in the house.

 

Arianna stood so fast her chair scraped against the tile. "That's him. That's—"

 

"Wait." Riley grabbed her arm. His doubled Perception was screaming at him that something was wrong. The sound had been too deep. Too resonant for a dog Biscuit's size.

 

Another whine. Closer now.

 

The smell hit them next. Copper and meat and something wild.

 

The door to the hallway creaked.

 

Every head turned. Riley felt the moonlight tighten against his skin, his doubled stats humming, but nothing in the data told him what to do with the raw cold fear that locked his joints.

 

The golden retriever walked into the kitchen.

 

Except it wasn't golden anymore. Its fur had darkened to a deep rust-brown. Each strand stood rigid, catching the moonlight with a metallic sheen. The thing was enormous, nearly double the size of the dog Arianna had adopted two years ago and named Biscuit. Its shoulders reached the height of the kitchen counter. Muscles bunched and coiled beneath the bristling coat.

 

Its mouth hung open and its teeth—too many of them now and too long—dripped something dark and red.

 

Blood. Fresh.

 

"Biscuit?" Arianna's voice broke on the name.

 

The creature's eyes found her. They were still brown. Still soft in a way that nothing about its body matched. It whined, a low sound from deep in its barrel chest, and took a step forward. Its claws clicked against the tile, each one the length of Riley's finger.

 

Miko's hand went to the glass shard. Riley felt moonlight condense around his fist without thinking, a half-formed construct buzzing against his knuckles. Amber shifted in front of Arianna, gasping as her injured leg nearly buckled.

 

But Arianna pushed past Amber's arm.

 

"It's my dog," she said. Her voice was shaking but her feet kept moving. "It's still my dog."

 

"Ari, don't—" Miko started.

 

"He's scared." Arianna crouched until she was eye level with the massive skull. The blood on its muzzle was inches from her face. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to press them against her knees. "You're scared, aren't you, boy? You don't understand what happened."

 

The dog whined again. Its tail, thick as a baseball bat, twitched once.

 

Arianna's phone chimed.

 

BEAST MASTER PROMPT — COMPATIBLE ENTITY DETECTED. MUTATED CANINE (LEVEL 3). INITIATE BOND? Y/N

 

She looked down at the screen, then back at the dog. At the blood. At those too-many teeth.

 

"Yes," Arianna whispered.

 

The kitchen exploded in light. Not the silver of moonlight or the gold of Amber's healing warmth but something organic, alive—green threaded with deep earthen brown, spiralling out from Arianna's chest and the dog's chest simultaneously like twin roots reaching for each other. The light wrapped around both of them, weaving between Arianna's fingers and through Biscuit's bristling fur, sinking beneath skin and hide until their outlines pulsed with the same emerald rhythm.

 

Riley stepped back, throwing up an arm against the brightness. The light was warm and cold at once, and it smelled like soil after rain and blood and something ancient he had no name for.

 

The light entered Arianna's eyes, her mouth, her ears. It poured into the dog the same way. For three heartbeats neither of them moved, suspended in that green-brown glow. Then the light sank inward and vanished, leaving the kitchen darker than before.

 

Arianna swayed. Biscuit sat, panting.

 

Riley's eyes struggled to adjust. "What the—"

 

"That was trippy as hell," Miko finished, her voice shaking.

 

Arianna's phone screen had changed. Her greyed-out stats were no longer greyed out. Her Strength read sixteen. Agility: fourteen. Endurance: fifteen. She was staring at her hands as though she could feel the numbers, feel the new strength coiled in muscles that had never held it before.

 

"I can sense him," she murmured. "Not hear. Feel. He's scared. He doesn't understand what happened to him. He's scared and he's—"

 

Her voice caught. She looked at the blood on Biscuit's teeth, still wet and dripping. Then at the dark hallway behind him.

 

The hallway where her parents' bedroom was.

 

Nobody moved.

 

Nobody wanted to know.

 

"Ari," Amber said softly. "Where are your parents?"

 

Arianna stood up slowly, like someone in a dream. She walked past the dog, past Amber's reaching hand, into the hallway.

 

Riley followed because not following wasn't something he knew how to do. Miko came behind him, the glass shard now gripped in her white-knuckled fist. Amber limped after them, leaving a thin trail of blood from her reopened wound.

 

The living room light was dead like everything else, but moonlight slanted through the bay window and painted the scene in silver.

 

Arianna's mother was on the floor by the sofa. Her father was slumped against the bookshelf. Neither of them had made it far. The wounds were ragged and deep and there was too much blood for anything to be uncertain.

 

Arianna made a sound that wasn't a word. It was something deeper than language, something that came from the same place screams came from.

 

Miko caught her before her knees hit the ground. Amber pressed a hand over her own mouth and turned away, her shoulders shaking. Riley stood in the doorway and felt the cold static behind his ribs crack open into something vast and black and howling.

 

Biscuit padded to Arianna's side and pressed his massive skull against her hip. He whined again, that low guilty sound, and she buried her face in his bristling fur and wept.

 

Outside, something howled. Not a dog. Something bigger.

 

Riley's doubled Perception caught the sound of claws on pavement. Multiple sets. Moving closer.

 

He gave her thirty seconds. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. But the blood on the floor was still wet, which meant everything that smelled it was already on its way.

 

"We need to go," he said. His voice sounded foreign to him, too hard and too cold. "Not tomorrow. Now."

 

Arianna didn't lift her head.

 

"Ari. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But every pet in this city just became what Biscuit became. Every rat. Every pigeon. Every fox." He crouched beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, feeling her shake beneath his palm. "They're coming. And when the sun rises, the desperate people will be worse. We need to get out of London."

 

Another howl, closer. The sound of breaking wood from a neighboring house.

 

Miko met his eyes over Arianna's bowed head. She nodded once, her jaw set.

 

"South," Amber said from the doorway, her voice raw. "Away from the centre. If the landmarks are dungeon floors, we move away from them."

 

Riley stood. The moonlight settled around him like armour that wasn't quite real yet. He looked at Arianna, at Miko, at Amber's blood-soaked bandage, at the dog that had killed the people who raised it and didn't understand why.

 

"We move. We stay together. And we don't stop until we're clear."

 

Arianna lifted her head. Her eyes were red and her jaw was set and something behind her expression had calcified into stone. She stood, one hand on Biscuit's scruff, and wiped her face with the other.

 

"Then let's go."

 

Glass shattered somewhere upstairs.

 

They ran.