The princess was close. Soumis could feel it in his bones and his nose.

At his core, Soumis was a misunderstood artist, a genius centuries ahead of his time. Whereas other dragons considered princesses little more than trophies to parade around and put on display on their hoards before they released them back into the wild—so they could evolve into queens and eventually make more princesses—he alone understood that their royal kind required a proper throne to truly shine.

And what better throne would there be than a dragon's back? Soumis was convinced that it was there that princesses truly ascended to the highest of heights!

Soumis had jumped at the chance to test his theory when Fire Sultan Onyx sought a mount worthy of his daughters. Oh, the joy he felt when Princess Bloodstone climbed on his back and then pushed her ruby heel against the tiny space between his horns, hitting just the right spot. All of Soumis' forward thinking ideas had been instantly validated! It had allowed him to feel like a treasure, to become one with his hoard, to feel the essence of princessness flowing through him! To become one with royalty by being dominated like a peasant!

Soumis had been so happy… until that vile hydraslime and its Titan master committed the heinous crime of killing his princess. Her death still haunted the dragon and fueled his resolve to never fail his newest ward.

He would do anything to capture that rapturous feeling again, and he would not fail his new princess this time! No monster nor knight would put their grubby hands on his treasure!

Soumis had already been fired up to claim this castle on behalf of Lady Victoire—whose humble denial of her own princessness had only made her more appealing to Soumis—when he caught a whiff of another princess within its walls.

The scent had driven him absolutely feral, so much that he had flown through the castle's walls on his way to his prize. Hordes of skeletal knights had tried to stop him, but Soumis crushed them underfoot the same way Princess Bloodstone stomped him during their time together. Nothing would stand between him and the ultimate pleasure!

Unfortunately, this castle's layout made no sense, no sense at all! Soumis had run around for over a day now, crashing through walls and towers in the hunt for that elusive royal smell. He had ended up taking residence in a courtyard large enough for him to sleep in, and then took a quick nap before resuming the hunt.

It was then, with his head and tail coiled on a floor of stone, that he heard voices in the stone. He hardly paid it much attention since he was rather tired. It must have been those maid creatures that flocked to castles like moths to a flame.

"The barrier didn't work, sir…" one voice said.

"I told you we should have pulled the switch the moment he appeared in the sky… that's what the manual said…" A sigh echoed through the stone. "Is he interested in the lore, at least?"

"He doesn't seem to care about the lore, sir… and he's going to wake up the wendies at this rate…"

"Ugh… what does the manual suggest we do when they get in?" The faint rustle of flipping pages echoed in the air. "It says to release the Mimic Princess as a lure–"

"Princess?!" Soumis replied, his head perking up in an instant and his back tensing like a bowstring. "Where?!"

The voices immediately turned silent, but the courtyard's walls magically split apart to reveal a clear path into the castle. Soumis didn't question his luck, for the smell was far too strong. He immediately rose to his feet and walked through the pathway at a steady pace.

"Princess, princess?" Soumis whistled. "Pss… pss…"

He found her at the end, in a vast and immaculate salon worthy of a queen-to-be. She sat next to a table with a nearby window filtering light upon teaware.

The princess had no need for a chair, because she had no legs. Soumis didn't think he had ever seen a more beautiful creature. She was a brown chest with gilded straps, tentacles growing out of its bottom, a fluttering red cape, and a crystal tiara glittering atop her. A single eye looked up at Soumis with shining regal charisma.

"Princess! Treasure!" she said, teeth growing out of her lids as a tentacle raised a cup of tea at Soumis. "I am princess! Princess Treasure!"

A princess and a treasure all rolled into one perfect creature! This had to be the rarest kind of them all!

Soumis' heart fluttered with joy. He could have two princesses now, one who would mount on his back, the other on his hoard! The kind of roleplay they could set together in peace and harmony!

He was so happy that he didn't even notice the windows freezing up…

The tales of Neigebleue Castle were right about one thing: it was crawling with undead monsters.

Rapoleon's group had climbed into the hole Soumis opened up in the castle's left wing and stepped into a vast, grand ballroom with a vaulted roof of pink glass panels overlooking a dance floor covered in flower mosaics. They barely had time to take in the breathtaking sight before a song echoed out of nowhere and a group of faceless skeletal reapers in black clothes appeared to attack them.

Rapoleon's group danced with them for a while, his poisonous spear clashing with scythes while Bernard pounded a few into the dust with his axe. Lord Rickart brought down an undead with a skillful strike, his foster sister Viviane covering him with arrows while the Torc of Grand-Loup glittered on his neck.

As for Jarlack, he simply shattered four undead—alongside the nearest wall—with a swing of his own axe.

As it turned out, bringing a giant to a pygmy fight helped considerably.

"That was easy!" Jarlack rejoiced. The ceiling reached up to twenty feet tall, so Jarlack had to leave his helmet and boots behind so as not to crouch around. The added mobility ought to compensate for the loss of head protection. "And here I feared we would have a challenge on our hands!"

So did Rapoleon, but Lord Wepwawet's blessings had strengthened them all. The wererat hit harder, moved faster, and reacted quicker. Those monsters would have pushed him a few months ago, yet his group tore through them like a knife through butter.

Conquering this castle might prove easier than he thought.

"I thought Soumis would have cleared this room of monsters already," Lord Rickart said. It was relatively easy to follow the dragon's trail. They only had to follow the holes in the walls. "Either these creatures fled at his approach, or the commotion summoned them here."

"Mmmm…" Bernard studied the reapers' remains. "There's something odd about these creatures…"

Rapoleon had his doubts too. He recalled that the reapers had fallen down from the ceiling to surround them at the tune of music that still echoed across the room. He thought that the song was some magical effect that radiated from nowhere at first, but his ears indicated that the sound came from the walls. Viviane seemed to have her doubts too as she studied the dragon-sized hole in the wall.

"Do you see anything further ahead?" Rapoleon asked Viviane.

"Nope," Viviane replied. "The dragon cleared the path."

"Then let's not tarry," Rapoleon decided. "We should reconvene with the dragon at the first opportunity."

"Yes, let's hurry before it takes all the loot!" Jarlack said. The group thus left the ballroom without another word, though Bernard carried a few harvested legs from the reapers with him for further study.

The next room led them to some sort of parlor set at the intersection of a hall and a corridor of closed doors. Soumis had crushed the divans underfoot and tossed down a marble statue of a werewolf clothed like a nobleman. Rapoleon studied that one for a moment, but failed to recognize who it was meant to represent. The remains of skeletal warriors trampled underneath dragon footprints littered the ground.

Jarlack insisted on exploring past all the doors–in case the dragon had missed any loot–which turned out to just contain empty bedrooms. Though they were empty of enemies, Rapoleon noticed something peculiar about them.

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"The sizes don't fit," he said.

"What?" Lord Rickart asked.

"The ceiling is large enough to accommodate a giant, but the doors, beds, and windows are fit for werelings or humans," Rapoleon explained. "The furniture style is too… modern, too."

Neigebleue Castle appeared centuries in the past according to eyewitnesses, yet the shelves and beds hadn't gathered as much dust as Rapoleon would have expected. This impression of wrongness only grew once Viviane found a hidden trapdoor in the corridor.

"Can you crawl in?" Rapoleon asked.

"It's barely big enough for a child to fit in," Viviane noted as she put her head through. "I think the passage goes all the way to the ballroom and further into the castle."

"So creatures could crawl out of any room at any moment," Lord Rickart said. "Could this be how the undead managed to sneak up on us in the ballroom?"

"They're not undead," Bernard replied.

All eyes turned to the yeti, who had been hard at work studying the skeletal warriors' bones littering the corridor and comparing them with those he harvested from the reapers.

"They look dead enough to me," Jarlack said.

"Not quite," Bernard replied before pointing at a space between a knee and femur. "Don't you see?"

Rapoleon squinted at the spot until he spotted a tiny hole at the junction between the bones. He turned his head until he saw a glint of metal.

"Are those screws?" Viviane asked with a gasp.

"I think they're automatons rather than undead," Bernard confirmed. "Some kind of bone golems."

"This means somebody is building these creatures." Rapoleon glanced back at the trapdoor. "Could this be the work of andvaris? They're small enough to fit into those tunnels…"

"What would dwarves do in a haunted castle so far north?" Lord Rickart pondered.

Rapoleon drew a blank as well. Nothing about this place added up!

Since none of them were small enough to fit into the secret passages and Bernard couldn't gather much more information from the remains, they carried on with their exploration. They reached what seemed to have once been a dining hall with a broken table tossed against the wall. Family portraits showcasing a werewolf in fine clothes holding a human woman and child at his side adorned the walls. One of them bore a title plate with the name 'Count of Gevaudan.'

"Count of Gevaudan?" Rapoleon asked. "Is Gevaudan a number?"

"I believe count is a title human nobles use in Valentine," Lord Rickart replied. "I know of no werewolf that bore this name."

Neither did Rapoleon. Nonetheless, Jarlack paid much attention to the painting and seized it with his grubby fingers.

"Just a bit…" he said upon taking off the largest portrait and unveiling a hidden cavity with a small chest. "Aha! I knew it! There are always treasures hidden behind paintings!"

"How convenient," Napoleon said with mounting suspicion. Everything about this place seemed so… fake.

"As per the finders keepers rule, I think it's fair that I keep half of it for the effort required in this treasure's excavation," Jarlack said, trying to sugarcoat his greed beneath a layer of professionalism. "After expenses deduction to repay the Big Boss in the sky, of course."

Lord Rickart scoffed in disdain. "Does it contain anything useful?"

"It contains gold, which is all we need!" Jarlack replied after opening the chest, his large hand bringing out a small emerald. "And a few gemstones to boot!"

"His Majesty would have loved them," Bernard muttered behind them, his voice betraying a hint of anxiety. He seemed utterly distracted. "Do you think he's holding out well? It should be His Majesty's claw-clipping time right now…"

"He'll be fine, Berny," Viviane replied. The ranger continued to check the different portraits and the walls, perhaps looking for another secret passage. "It's been less than an hour."

This did not reassure Bernard at all. "I've rarely been separated from him for so long…"

Was this what codependency looked like? Rapoleon had heard of that syndrome, but never seen it in action until then.

Then a terrible roar shook the walls.

It was a howl akin to a winter storm and equally as cold, full of malice and hunger. Rapoleon sensed a terrible freeze sink into his flesh and bones. The chill wasn't as dreadful as the one he experienced in the Titan's presence, but it was a close second.

Only Viviane and Lord Rickart didn't freeze in place, but even they had drawn their weapons.

"What's that?" Viviane asked.

Bernard, though still frozen in fear, appeared to recognize the howl. "Wendigo," he muttered under his breath. "It's a wendigo."

Another chill traveled down Rapoleon's spine. "Are you sure?"

"I am…" Bernard shuddered. He pointed at the stones around them, on which a thin layer of ice had started to grow. "Look at the walls, they're already freezing."

"Wendiwhat?" Jarlack asked. He alone didn't recognize the danger they were in, largely out of ignorance.

"One of Verglane's rarest and most powerful monsters," Lord Rickart explained. A werelion backed away from no challenge, but his grip on his axe had slightly tightened. "It is said that Grand-Loup curses those who commit the heinous crime of cannibalism with unending hunger and chilling winds. Wendigos are the result. They are fast, vicious, and incredibly dangerous."

"That one sounds very big too," Bernard muttered.

Viviane's eyes widened, and she swiftly turned to Jarlack. "Didn't you say that those giant prisoners ate their captors before coming here?"

Jarlack marked a short pause as he put two and two together. "Oh."

Rapoleon clenched his jaw. Wendigos were already a pain when they arose from cursed werelings. He dared not imagine how dangerous those that arose from a giant would be.

"Fire wards the wendigos away," Bernard warned his allies. "Everybody grab torch–"

A chilling wind blew through the hall, and the portrait wall pivoted to the tune of grinding gears.

Rapoleon and Viviane—who were the closest to it—barely had time to blink before stone and paintings alike hit them straight in the face. The wall turned on itself along its middle axis, carried them forward, and then threw them into another room. Rapoleon managed to land on his feet and catch Viviane before she crashed onto the floor.

"Ricky?!" she called out in surprise, though the noise of grinding gears and machinery rang louder than her voice. The wall closed behind them, trapping them inside a large chamber with wooden stalls and shaking stone support pillars. "W-what's going on?"

"I think… I think the castle's layout changed on its own," Rapoleon guessed upon dropping her. They had landed in some sort of kennel room, going by the musky scent of dogs and slimes–of all things–hanging in the air. "I hear gears beneath our feet, like some kind of mill."

The noise grew quieter, shifting from a rumbling tremor to a soft crescendo of clicks, and then silence. The stone pillars became still again, and Rapoleon's fear of ending up buried in a collapse finally came to an end.

"I can't open the wall anymore!" Viviane hit the stones, searching for a switch of some kind. "I don't hear the others on the other side either–"

Rapoleon's ears heard the noise of footsteps nearby. He immediately moved to cover Viviane's mouth to silence her, the ranger blinking in protest until she heard it too.

"Which of you dimwits started a layout shift without authorization?!" a high-pitched voice all but shrieked a room away from them.

Rapoleon and Viviane exchanged a glance as he released her, then stuck to the shadows. They followed the shouts and the howls to the next room.

This one was by far the strangest in the entire castle. A colossal, cylindrical, and open-topped steel tank occupied the center of the room. A large multicolored crystal glowed inside it, ejecting energy that traveled through pipes engraved with magical symbols that traveled into the walls and ceiling to power a dizzying array of gears. Some kind of control panel of levers, rune-engraved switches, and other devices sat beneath the colossal device.

More surprising was a small crowd of a dozen creatures gathered in front of the machine; Rapoleon immediately recognized them, although he would have never expected to find them here.

Kobolds.

They were kobolds.

They looked unlike those who had served in the Lavaland army, however, with each of these critters boasting scales of different colors; from gold to silver and black. They all wore shirts with the word 'Furiland' written on the back next to a grinning skull symbol. Maybe it was a military uniform of some sort.

"—If the wendies hadn't eaten half of us, I would have fired you and hired slime immigrants to replace you already!" shouted the golden kobold, who appeared to be their leader. He didn't seem to speak in Verglanian common, but Rapoleon understood his words anyway. It was as if the sentences wormed their way into his very mind. "What about the lore? Do the customers care about the lore?"

"No, sir!" a silver kobold apologized.

"Oh, really? Who would have guessed?!" The golden kobold slapped the silver one behind the ears. "Oh, right, I did! I told you customers don't care about a dungeon's lore! Customers want blood on their hands and gold in their pockets!"

"Sir, I still think a good and consistent dungeon lore will attract high-value adventurer victims–"

"Customers, Stagiaire. They're called customers while alive and loot when dead. As for your lore, it's neither good nor consistent, and do you know why?" The golden kobold leaned in to better look down on his subordinate. "Because you're a hack writer with the talent of a half-slug Zmey, that's why!"

"Y-you don't have to be so mean to me, sir!" the silver kobold protested. "I'm not your whore!"

"That's right," his superior replied with heavy sarcasm. "Whores are compensated for their work, while you're an unpaid intern!"

The silver kobold struggled to hold back tears, while his comrades appeared too intimidated by their leader to either support him or complain. Not that it would have helped, since their leader appeared more interested in hearing himself speak than talking to his troops.

"We can still salvage this mess," he said. "With luck, the wendies and that dragon will kill each other, and we can claim the customers' loot when they di–"

He paused upon finally spotting Viviane and Rapoleon slithering out of the shadows.

The two groups stared at each other for a moment; with the kobolds not daring to attack, and the Champions unsure about what they were seeing. The golden kobold finally broke the stalemate with four simple words.

"Forget you saw us," he dared to demand.

"No," Rapoleon said flatly.

"Tucker, grab the amnesia jar! Grab the amnes–" Viviane shot the golden kobold in the right knee before he could finish his sentence. He ended up rolling on the floor while shrieking in pain. "S-she shot me! That intruder shot me!"

"She's a customer, sir!" the silver kobold said, with a little hint of glee in his voice. "Adventurers are customers while alive, sir! Those are your words, sir!"

"Stagiaire, I will have your ass for th–" Viviane shot a second arrow in the kobold's second knee and drew another scream of pain. "That hurts!"

The other critters wisely raised their hands in surrender after Viviane turned her bow at them. Rapoleon took a moment to process the situation, his eyes lingering on the machinery which he assumed controlled the castle's layout and the barrier outside. He also spotted art supplies in a corner alongside a half-finished portrait of an imaginary werewolf. Only then did it all click together.

This haunted castle…

This haunted castle was a scam!

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