Nikos | Injured Rogue

Paul fucked up, and Nikos would never forgive him, for the simple reason that Paul had made it impossible for Nikos to forgive himself.

But the story of their collective disaster didn't start with Paul. It started with Angila, their cleric and healer, who had died first. She was supposed to be unkillable, armored in the goddess's favor, a thousand times more vital than the rest of them. It was Angila who'd spent weeks poring over the temple's archives, stitching together the old stories of saints and lost relics. It was Angila who'd found the cryptic marginalia, the diagram with the tiny five-pointed star, the promise of something powerful and holy on the 15th floor in the megadungeon of Lostarot. She'd sold them on it over a dinner of bitter greens and smoked meats, fixing each of them with her unwavering blue eyes as she explained how one trip—one relic—could set them up for life.

The sheer, blundering optimism of it. Nikos felt sick when he remembered how quickly they'd agreed.

They'd been overconfident, but that was part of the act. Paul had been their muscle, their first line, the one who'd take the brunt of the damage so the rest could keep breathing. Frank was the wizard, their only serious ranged firepower, soft-spoken, always slightly overdressed for the dungeon. Katherine, the ranger, did the impossible: mapped the unmappable, found traps before they found you, never once got lost in a labyrinth even after too much wine.

Nikos, the rogue, the utility man—he'd always felt like the unnecessary fifth. But someone had to open the locks and count the coin. Someone had to make sure their thin margins could actually afford this trip.

It went smoothly, up until the guardian. That golem, all jagged stone and impossible metal, animated by a monomaniacal will that seemed to recognize only Angila as a threat. Nikos could still see it: the shock of it, the way it ignored the rest of them and went straight for her, as if drawn by an invisible hook through her heart. Her shield had shattered on the third blow; her helmet—and the head inside—caved in on the fourth.

He remembered the sound it made: not a scream, not even a human sound, but a wet, thick crunch. He could taste it in the back of his throat.

The party had called themselves Devil’s Dance, half-jokingly, half in the hope that the name would become truth: a sort of merry, daredevil immunity, a promise that no matter how low the odds or deadly the opposition, they’d always find a way to dance out of hell. The instant Angila’s body hit the flagstones, Nikos believed—on some level—they would call it, pull back, cut their losses and slink upstairs to regroup and lick wounds. But Paul—Angila’s widower—was already howling himself hoarse, hacking at the guardian’s stone knees, swinging the big saber as if each blow could somehow reverse time and uncrush Angila’s head.

The golem ignored Paul. Its head turned, metal and stone groaning and echoing in the chamber, and its eyes landed instead on Frank, just as Frank's spell went off. A lance of fire struck the golem in the head, sending molten shards of metal and stone scattering across the floor and the walls, and for a moment, Nikos was optimistic. Angila was dead, but maybe, the rest of them would get out of this.

Then everything went to hell. The golem, wounded but far from defeated, seemed indifferent to the injury, and wound it's arm back. Without hesitation, Katherine sprung into action, her bow drawn taut as she released arrow after arrow at the golem, hoping to distract it from Frank. But it was too late. The golem's massive stone hand swept out, knocking Frank off his feet and sending him crashing against the wall. As Nikos watched in horror, he saw the life drain from Frank's eyes, a look of disbelief frozen on his half-crushed face. Another member of Devil's Dance, gone in an instant.

Katherine nearly died within the next thirty seconds, a ragged slash across her thigh and two broken ribs from the ricochet of stone fists and melted metal. The blood was poured out of her in great arterial spurts onto the mosaic floor. Nikos himself was caught by another swing of the golem's fists, that sent him rolling with a crunch through Angila's remains. Even through the adrenaline he could feel his arm shatter, his ribs crack from the blow.

Nikos pulled himself to his feet, assessed the situation, and felt, in some cold, reptile part of himself, the exact moment when the odds passed the point of no return. He looked at Paul, who hadn’t even noticed Katherine was down, and then at Frank. He remembered Angila’s blue eyes across the dinner table, the way she’d said, “None of us die for nothing, ever.”

And then he ran.

He did not remember physically deciding to run. His body made the choice for him, a kind of primal override, and when he looked down he was already barreling through the side corridor, feet slapping unevenly in the ankle-deep blood of the slaughtered lesser monsters. He could still hear Paul’s screams of rage cut off abruptly, which Nikos chose not to interpret.

He ran, tripping over corpse after corpse of their previous triumphs, the little trophies and marks they’d left for themselves, the chalk arrows and grease pencil notes: “This way up,” “Trap here.” He found himself admiring, in a sick ironic way, the foresight of his own prior self, the one who’d so neatly mapped these death traps and then survived them. He followed the escape route he’d planned two weeks ago, praying it hadn’t been sabotaged or altered by the living dungeon.

He staggered onto floor 12 when his left boot slipped in a puddle of his own blood, he realized with distant horror. His arm wasn't just broken; it was a mangled sack of bone shards swimming in meat. Each heartbeat pumped fresh crimson down his fingertips, marking his retreat like a coward's signature. The adrenaline abandoned him all at once. Nikos crashed face-first onto stone that seemed to devour what little warmth remained in his body. The dungeon ceiling whirled above him—ancient, indifferent, eternal. Then footsteps. Coming closer. He tried to scream but produced only a wet gurgle, copper-tasting froth bubbling between his lips. His good hand clawed uselessly at the floor. "Please," he rasped, voice cracking. "Gods—anyone—I'll give anything. Just don't let me die here."