The looming threat of Isabelle Thorne's hero party, a team that apparently ran on pure justice and premium hair conditioner, meant he couldn't afford any weak links.
She was strong. Too strong. If he didn't tighten his ranks, he might as well lie down and let her holy sword stake him through the heart while she gave an inspiring speech about friendship.
Nope. Not today.
He just felt this urge of testing his armies again.
He glanced at the Lycanthrope. And this time, Ragnar paused.
He then glanced at the kobold beside it.
Gary. The same kobold who, in a previous test, had single-handedly flattened this creature with one well-timed club swing.
Ragnar still couldn't believe it.
"There's no way that should've happened," he muttered, crossing his arms.
"Gary's clumsy. He trips on flat ground. He once lost a duel to a chair, and the chair won.
This has to be a fluke."
But no matter how many times he reviewed the mental footage, it had all happened: the Lycanthrope charged, tripped over its own feet like a drunken toddler, and Gary calmly swatted it into the wall like a bothersome fly.
It didn't sit right with him.
His gamer instincts, honed by years of analyzing broken game physics, wouldn't allow it.
"Rematch," he declared, pointing between them.
"Same matchup. I need to be sure. My sanity depends on it."
The other kobolds exchanged confused glances.
Gary just shrugged, dragging his crude wooden club behind him as he walked into the ring.
He looked less like a fearsome warrior and more like a bored janitor about to deal with a spill.
The Lycanthrope let out a mournful howl, a sound filled with the sorrow of a thousand unfulfilled dreams, and charged forward.
If "charging" could describe a flailing, uncoordinated scramble that immediately involved tripping over its own massive claws.
It stumbled, tried to recover its balance with a desperate pinwheeling of its arms, and ran straight into Gary's patiently waiting swing.
BOOM!
The wind shrieked for a fraction of a second as the simple wooden club moved, a blur of motion that defied its humble origins.
CRACK!
The club connected solidly with the werewolf's ribs.
The werewolf flew across the room like a kicked sack of laundry and hit the far wall with a heavy, wet thud.
The sad man-wolf slid to the floor, groaning, and lay there twitching.
Again.
Ragnar just stared, his mouth slightly agape.
"I was really, really hoping that was a fluke."
He rubbed his temples and furiously opened the monster menu on his phone.
There it was again, the fine print mocking him, laughing at his poor investment choices.
[Special Condition: This unit's true power can only be unlocked in a [Moonlit Night] environmental field.]
He threw his hands in the air. "Yeah, I know!
It needs its special blankie and a nightlight to work properly!
Thanks for nothing, cosmic game developers!"
Just as his frustration reached its peak, a harsh, blaring alarm echoed through the dungeon, a sound he hadn't heard before.
[WARNING: Unidentified Entity Detected. Domain Perimeter Breach in Sector 3-Gamma.]
"What now?" Ragnar groaned. A red dot appeared on his dungeon map, moving erratically.
It wasn't a hero. It wasn't one of his own.
The creation appears to be a Rift Crawler
A non-aligned monster that sometimes slips through weak points in reality.
They are feral, territorial, and extremely aggressive.
Ragnar looked from the whimpering Lycanthrope on the floor to the blipping red dot on his map.
An idea, born of pure, spiteful annoyance, sparked in his mind.
"You," he said, pointing a dramatic finger at the downed werewolf. "Get up. This is it.
Your one, final chance to prove you are not a complete and utter waste of 40 Creation Points.
Go kill that thing. Or die trying. I'm fine with either outcome at this point."
The Lycanthrope looked up with its sad, yellow eyes, then slowly, painfully, pushed itself to its feet.
With a final, pathetic whimper, it loped off towards Sector 3-Gamma.
Ragnar followed, watching the confrontation on his phone's live feed.
The Rift Crawler was a horror show. A six-foot insectoid creature made of jagged black chitin, with too many legs and a pair of razor-sharp mandibles that clicked hungrily.
The Lycanthrope arrived and let out a hesitant battle-snarl.
The Crawler responded with a terrifying chittering sound and charged.
BOOM!
The ground itself exploded as the Crawler scuttled forward, its legs a blur of sharp points.
The Lycanthrope lunged to meet it, claws extended. The wind shrieked as their forms collided.
CRACK!
A claw met chitin. A shockwave erupted from the impact.
The Lycanthrope was strong, but clumsy.
It swiped, but the Crawler was faster, ducking under the blow and ramming its armored head into the werewolf's chest, sending it stumbling back.
Gary, who had followed at a distance out of sheer curiosity, decided to "help."
He picked up a loose rock and, with a mighty grunt, hurled it at the Rift Crawler.
However, in classic Gary fashion, he tripped on a perfectly flat section of floor during his wind-up.
The rock flew in a wild arc, sailed past the Crawler, and connected squarely with the back of the Lycanthrope's head with a loud thwack.
The Lycanthrope went down for the third time in ten minutes, knocked out cold by friendly fire.
Ragnar buried his face in his hands.
"I'm running a circus. A circus of violent, incompetent morons."
He'd seen enough. He stormed into the corridor himself.
The Rift Crawler, having defeated its opponent, turned its attention to him, its mandibles clicking menacingly.
"My turn," Ragnar growled.
He pointed his palm at the creature and focused.
"Dark Arrow."
A jet of pure, condensed shadow, darker than the gloom of the dungeon, shot from his hand. It moved with silent, lethal speed.
BOOM!
The bolt struck the Rift Crawler dead center in its carapace.
The impact wasn't a simple puncture; it was a detonation.
The wind shrieked as a violent, purple-black shockwave exploded outwards from the point of impact.
The Crawler's tough chitin shattered, and the force of the blast lifted the creature off its many feet, slamming it into the far wall where it burst into a shower of black ichor and splintered limbs.
Ragnar stood in the now-silent corridor, panting slightly.
That felt good. Finally, a win.
He turned and marched back to the Mess Hall, leaving Gary to frantically try and wake up the unconscious Lycanthrope.