I pulled up the town map. Where the shops of Kinnegad had all been scattered about in tin can-like buildings, the shops here were all out in the open. Like a shopping mall with no walls and only the occasional support column to delineate the individual stores. Shelves and tables and racks sat openly about the room.
“You’re welcome to visit any place on this first level, and you may visit the second level. But please don’t go above that,” J-Beefy said. He pointed to the far corner of the room. “You’ll find Crust Sock over there.”
We thanked him and started walking toward the stables. I could see it from here, a large corral filled with animals, ranging from millipedes and beetles to actual horses and what looked like an oversized kangaroo.
We stopped at an armorer. While he sold nothing worth our while, he was happy to purchase a handful of items that Banksy vomited on the floor, including that enchanted helmet. All the nerve agents seemed to prefer black, leathery armor, making them look like bikers and heavy metal enthusiasts. Banksy had plenty of that in his stomach. We ended up bringing in an additional 3,000 teeth. A weapons guy a few shops down gave us another 2,000. And we still had plenty in Banksy’s storage.
We stopped at a third shop where Clara loaded up on candy apples and popsicles. She had a spell that kept her from starving, but she hated using it. They didn’t have any of the blood nuggets she needed to refill her celestial magic, but she said she still had a good handful left. For now.
“You there,” another shopkeeper called as we headed toward the stables.
“Yeah?” I said, examining the woman nerve agent’s handle.
Sausage Becky – Harmacist (Level 30).
“Warble needs his vaccinations,” she said. “Would you be willing to administer them for me?”
Before I could respond, a quest notification appeared. I cringed, worried it would be another one of those compulsory quests, but it was not. The quest disappeared into the folder.
“I don’t know where Warble is,” I lied. The nerve agent kaiju was hanging out near the rift. I’d checked before we’d entered the town.
“If you agree to administer them, I will throw in a few extra series of vaccinations for some of the others who need it. I’m guessing all twenty-two of the guardians need boosters. I don’t have enough here to go around, but I do have a total of three sets for you.”
I looked at Clara, who didn’t look too excited by the idea. “Err, how big are they?” I asked.
Sausage Becky produced a canister that looked like a 16-oz bottle of soda from a vending machine. “Not too big,” she said. “A full series is six shots. The first two can be administered from the outside. The next three can be done during deep dive.”
“And what about the last one?” Clara asked.
“So, the final is a suppository.”
“Oh hell no,” Clara said.
“We’ll take them,” I said.
Sausage Becky beamed. “Great! I’ll be right back.” She ran to a shelf in her open shop, picked up a wooden crate, and dropped it in front of us. It clinked like a case of beer. I nodded at Banksy, who swallowed it up.
“Are these really necessary?” Clara asked.
Sausage Becky looked scandalized. “An unvaccinated guardian is a weak guardian. Each of the six doses kills and prevents further issues with one of several guardian ailments. You can kill a parasite infection, but what’s to stop it from happening again a few days later? How can we possibly hope to beat back the demon horde with weak guardians? Poor guardian management is what led to this mess in the first place.”
“We’ll get it done,” I promised. I turned to Clara. “Come on. Let’s get to the stables.”
If Crust Sock had been a human, I’d have guessed his age to be about 120 years old. The ancient, stooped and gnarled nerve agent poked at a scorpion mount with an electric stick as we approached. He hurled obscenities at the black bug, who seemed nonplussed at the old ogre’s jibes. The nerve agent stopped at our approach and beamed widely. He wiped his hands on his apron and opened the gate to the corral, beckoning us inside.
I looked uneasily at the scorpion mount. The bug was the size of a Volkswagen. It snapped its forward claws but backed away when Banksy growled.
Crust Sock rubbed the side of Banksy’s head. “Yes, sir,” he said, examining my worm up and down. He peeled open one of his mouth flaps and peered inside, poking at his fangs with a very brave finger. “Yes sir, indeed. This is a fine mount you have here, mister worm surgeon. I’ll give you a cool two million teeth for him right here and right now.”
Banksy looked insulted. “I am not for sale,” he said. “My father would never sell me… Right?”
“He’s not for sale,” I agreed. “I need him outfitted for riding.”
Crust Sock looked annoyed. “Very well,” he said. “Do you plan on leveling him up further? What are your plans for when he has to evolve again?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when he evolves, but I do want to level him up.”
“You’ll need an expandable saddle. It’ll only work for a few more levels before he evolves when he hits 25. You can give yourself the freeriding skill if it’s available to you. I don’t know if you ghouls can do it or not. Otherwise, you’ll be out of luck. I don’t carry howdahs. You’ll need to go to Colossal’s Supplies in Medina for those. But you can’t get to Medina unless you figure out how to fix our transport gazebo.”
I had no idea what a howdah was, but I did know I’d have access to the freeriding skill when I hit level 30. I’d been familiarizing myself with the list of skills after the near disaster inside of Moritasgus.
A quest notification chimed and fell into the folder. Yet another fix-the-broken-gazebo quest.
“So how much for one of these expandable saddles?” I asked.
“Do you want burrowing support added in? Otherwise you’ll have to dismount when he goes to ground.” He smiled broadly, revealing several missing teeth. “That’s what I specialize in.”
“Yes,” I said.
I thought for a moment. “I reckon 7,500 teeth, plus another 1,000 for the installation will do it for the basic model. Prices go up significantly if you want long-term burrowing support. I’d wait until he grows to his full size before you make that sort of investment.”
We had just under 11,000 teeth now, so it was well within our budget.
A notification blinked, warning me my charm was about to revert back down to eight.
“Let’s do it,” I said, quickly shaking his hand.
Chapter 33
The guards growled at us as we left town. One of them, the one named Dank Tank, shouted something about my mother as we rode back south.
“It’s crazy what a difference only five charm points can do,” I said.
We wouldn’t reach the Shrill until it got dark, so we decided to wait until morning. The plan was to skirt the edge of the old city until sunset. We’d spend the time until night hunting and working on our experience. We’d overnight inside one of the abandoned buildings and head out at first light.
With me mounted, we moved at least three times faster than before. Banksy zipped along, burning a deep rut in the ground. Clara flew alongside, easily keeping up with her wings.
Banksy shuddered underneath me. He complained about the saddle for the tenth time in so many minutes. I was still getting used to the odd feeling. I’d ridden horses a few times in the real world, and I practically lived on the back of a horse in half the games I played, but this was nothing like that. This was like being whipped back and forth in a carnival ride. I’d received an Unsteady debuff the moment I pulled myself onto his back the first time. It took several minutes for my stomach to settle.
“Don’t pull those things. It hurts my face,” Banksy complained as I grabbed the reins. “I know where I’m going.”
“Do you?” I asked. “Because it seems like you’re headed toward those trees when we need to go up that hill.”
“Then why don’
t you say so?” Banksy asked.
“I am saying so. I am saying so by pulling on the reins. That’s how this works.”
“Why don’t you just tell me where to go? You know, with your words. Tugging on the side of my face is a very aggressive way to do it.”
“Just go up the hill,” I said, exasperated.
“You see? That wasn’t so hard,” he muttered. He continued to complain under his breath for the next several minutes.
“I think your pet has entered the surly teenager part of his development,” Clara said.
I grunted. “I know all about that.”
“Yeah, sure you do,” Clara said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. We all seemed on edge. We pulled out of the hills by late afternoon and traveled along a wide field on the edge of the city. We kept a wary eye out for demons. This area was ripe with medium-difficulty monsters. Clara and I took turns sniping at them from afar.
“Banksy,” I said after we entered a long, clear stretch of land. “Let’s try burrowing. Don’t go too deep. I just want to know how this works. Remember, he said I can’t be underground for more than thirty seconds.”
The idea of going into the dirt on the back of something that could dig seemed counterintuitive. If I hadn’t seen the much-larger nerve agents do it earlier, I’d never believe it was possible. It seemed I’d be ripped right off the worm the moment he started to dig. Or worse, I’d tumble off of him as he turned back up to the surface, leaving me underground.
“You sure about this?” Clara said, hovering next to me. Winky had returned a few minutes earlier. The bat looked between me and the worm and hissed gleefully, like she was excited at the prospect of watching me get buried alive.
“Do it,” I said.
“Okay, father. But don’t die,” Banksy said. He reared up, his mouth flanges splaying. I dug my boots into the stirrups. I clutched onto the reins for dear life as I flew up in the air, curved, and smashed face-first toward the ground like I was doing a belly flop into a pool.
Banksy moved easily into the dirt, traversing the rock just as quickly as he would on the surface. My world went black. I felt the rock and dirt and tree roots all around me, disintegrating as they came in contact with my face. It felt odd, like I’d turned my bare face into a showerhead. But I wasn’t getting wet. Just dirty. A moment later, I was outside again, coughing as rock and dirt showered all around me. We were a good thirty meters away from where we started.
Underneath, my saddle vibrated. Some blend of gears and earth magic combined to make the shield that enveloped me during the burrowing. As long as my butt remained in the saddle, and as long as I didn’t remain underground for more than 30 seconds at a time—with at least another thirty seconds between diggings—I’d be safe.
“That was really cool,” Clara said, zipping up toward us. “With some practice, it’ll be a very useful method of sneaking up on somebody.”
“I hope so,” I said.
Over the next several hours we killed a few dozen monsters and a few pairs of demons, jacking our experience up a few notches. It was getting harder to level, but between the two of us and Banksy, we were a powerful team. Most everything that was green or yellow tagged went down easily. Clara was four levels ahead of me thanks to her ability to clear out entire encampments. There wasn’t anything else like that on our way toward the Shrill, not without going out of our way.
There was an “infestation” on the map in the middle of the city, smack between us and the kaiju. I had no idea what that meant, but the map indicated it was much too dangerous for me.
By the time the sky began to darken, I was on the edge of level 20. By my count I had killed almost thirty of the ant demons. The zippers. Clara and I had collaborated on taking down a couple of these tough, horned alligator things that came from the city and charged at us. Also, the area was covered with small, easy-to-kill tortoise things that threw rocks at you if you got close enough. My new breastplate was powerful enough to deflect the trajectory of the rocks. Banksy took great pleasure in pouncing upon and cracking their shells.
We caught sight of a new type of demon. They lurked within the abandoned buildings on the edge of the city, usually spying at us from broken-out windows and rooftops.
These were knee-height, red demons, bright red in color with horned heads. They were armed mostly with spears, though some carried what looked like blowguns and hand-held slings. None attacked, but the little bastards could jump. I watched a gaggle of them leap from the roof of one building to the next, a good ten meters away. Each of them were yellow and red-tagged, which was worrisome. It was usually no problem to kill a yellow-tagged monster when Clara, Banksy, and I worked together. But killing a horde of them would be impossible.
“What are those things?” I asked, pointing out a group of the beasties watching us from afar. They watched us impassively.
“I don’t know,” Clara said. “I’ve never seen them before.”
I pointed to the sky. “Look, the flyers always avoid areas where they are.”
“Most demon kinds don’t mix very well,” Clara said. “Remember how I said there’s something like 71 different demon lords and barons and princes and whatnot? Each one of those guys commands his own legions. And we already know they don’t always get along with one another. So it would make sense that their demons don’t like each other, too.”
We found a large, abandoned building, right on the edge of town that appeared to be perfect. We waited, looking for the red demons. Clara sent Winky inside, and the little bat reappeared a few minutes later.
“She says it’s clear except the basement level, which has a few monsters lurking within.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
We approached the building carefully. There were no obvious entrances on this side, so we had to cross a short fence, crossing what I realized was the remnants of an old freeway. The cracked asphalt showed through in random places, but otherwise it was a flat area punctuated by ankle-high weeds.
We reached the other side of the road and crept into the city
Entering Neo-Austin, Terry
There were no suburbs or any other sort of gradual increase. It went from the empty plains to a thick wall of skeletal, decrepit buildings reminiscent of any urban metropolis. Some were nothing but bombed-out shells, and whole swaths of buildings were just gone in some areas, nothing but smeared and pulverized bands of dust. I suspected if I were to look at the damage from above, it would indicate clear travel paths of a guardian. The buildings in this neighborhood were all about twenty to thirty stories high. Deeper into the city were higher buildings and a few places of note, like what appeared to be the remnants of a stadium or maybe an airport and a few tall, needle-thin towers. The bottom half of what once might’ve been a statue dominated the skyline. The buildings stretched out for miles and miles. According to my map, the city covered several hundred square miles.
Despite the destruction, some buildings still appeared untouched. The gray, nondescript building we now faced seemed featureless, a building that was drawn as background filler. One of those buildings in older games that you’d never be able to actually go into. Office? Residence? It was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing but gray blocks and windows.
The front door had long ago rotted away, big enough to easily allow Banksy within. We crept inside, revealing a large lobby. A bank of what was probably once elevators stood on the opposite wall. It smelled of mold and must. A stiff breeze penetrated the lobby from the open door. Rubble and rusted hunks of objects so old it was impossible to tell what they once were lay strewn across the lobby.
“Watch the floors,” I said to Banksy, remembering what Winky had reported. The ground creaked ominously. “Make sure you don’t fall through.”
“Let’s see if we can go up a couple stories, find an interior room, something defensible where we can wait out the night,” Clara said. She pointed to an open doorway
, revealing rickety-looking stairs.
“We should clear the basement first,” I said. “I won’t be able to rest if I know there’s something crawling about below us.”
Clara paused, looking uncertain. “Okay,” she said finally. “Let me send Winky in to get a better look. She’d only sensed them earlier.”
I nodded. Clara said something to the bat, who made a screeching noise. The small creature bobbed up and down as she fluttered toward the stairs.
In the distance, the Shrill rumbled. We’d probably be able to see him if we went high enough.
Looking at my map, the Shrill appeared to be the only guardian who lived within the city. I wondered why. That was assuming there weren’t more hidden ones lurking about. After the discovery of Moritasgus, I’d made a more deliberate survey of the 22 kaiju. Six of them were missing. Of those, I strongly suspected where a few of them were. The fish-looking water creatures—the dagon—had a large lake on the other side of the map, and their kaiju was a salamander thing called the Opera. Renault had mentioned it in passing once, of how they’d trained it to defend their town. So I knew it was probably in the middle of that lake. Similarly, I remembered from the character creation sequence that the kaiju of the Mole Men was a tentacled mole creature. Their main town wasn’t too far from here, and I suspected their guardian was underground, just like Moritasgus was.
Also, the distant town of Little Cibola seemed to be the only place other than Medina that was fully intact. It was a town of the mysterious sundered, the technology-based humanoid robot things. Their guardian was not listed on the map. Neither Clara nor I knew what sort of creature it was, but I suspected it had something to do with their town’s continued existence, especially so close to the rift.
That left three missing kaiju, and any one of them could be hidden somewhere in the city.
Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon Page 28