Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon

by Matt Dinniman

  I sighed, pressing down on the Shoggoth button. I clicked Yes on the Are You Sure? There was no secondary warning this time.

  A tentacle descended into the room, surprising me. The pink tentacle was only about two feet long. It featured a single, cat-like eye and a round mouth filled with stubby teeth. Octopus suckers with small hooks dotted the other side of the appendage. The eye glared angrily at me.

  “No Shoggoth,” the mouth said. It retracted into the ceiling with a slurp.

  “Hey!” I said, calling up at the roof. “Now you talk to me?”

  It didn’t answer. “Can you at least tell me what it does?” No answer.

  I clicked the Shoggoth button again anyway. And again. Nothing happened. “What the hell?” I called. “This isn’t how it works!”

  Silence.

  I sighed, giving it up.

  ***

  By the time I was done training myself, it was my worm surgeon body, not the body of the Shrill that felt incomplete. I found myself trying to complete tasks with limbs that simply weren’t there.

  Experience gained using the guardians was next to nothing, so we spent most of our time power leveling with the guardians in reserve.

  In just a week, I’d gained six levels and amassed several million teeth. But my returns were diminishing. It’d taken two whole days of fighting and healing just to get from level 45 to level 46. Clara, who’d been at my side this entire time actually had fewer experience points than when we started thanks to her death at the hands of an exploding cyclod. I shuddered, remembering.

  In the single-player version of this game, I suspected one needed to be about level 40 to successfully slay Baal and win the game. Clara’s 52 and my 46 was about as good as we were going to get using traditional leveling methods.

  I still hoped to level a few more times before the end. This last week was going to be eventful.

  Winky zipped around the carnage, picking up teeth left and right. The bat dropped a ring in Clara’s hand. She examined it, then grunted. “It’s an artifact. Worth a fortune. But it’s only useful to those who use steam magic. We need to make another Medina run to sell all this crap.”

  “I’ll do it while you sleep,” I said. “I’ll probably hit the ten million teeth limit, though.”

  “Might as well open a bank account and put the extra in there. Or spend some of it. Buy yourself something pretty.”

  I grunted. We’d scoured the hell out of the city looking for additional items to purchase to help with the plan. We’d spent millions already on equipment and upgrades. I had 99 of each type of potion. I’d upgraded my Epiviper with a scope and a retractable laser bayonet. Most of the really good stuff one could get had to be obtained via quests, and the time for quests had passed.

  Clifford the Big Red Slug emerged from under the fallen pavilion. He made an unusual hissing noise followed by a trio of pops.

  “The demon is over there,” Clara said, pointing at her slug. “Good job, Iffy!”

  Clara had obtained two additional familiars in the time we’d been separated. One was a cherry-red, level 22 slug the size of a golden retriever. The thing couldn’t fight, but he had the ability to go deep dive and use BloodBorne to zip around the interior of a guardian and to administer trauma-based healing. She’d named him “Clifford the Big Red Slug” which had been shortened to “Cliffy” and then eventually just “Iffy.”

  The slug smelled like a steaming pile of horse manure. He liked to curl up in Clara’s lap and make farting noises while she stroked his head.

  Her third familiar was a purple and green dragonfly the size of a horse. His name was Dickinson. He was content to fly well above the action. He was technically a mount, but she didn’t use him as such. If he was nearby, he gave Clara a mapping improvement similar to my cybernetic enhancement, though his upgrade added all the mobs to the map, whether they were hidden or not. He was level 16. Clara said he was one of the most expensive familiars in the game, even pricier than Banksy had been.

  The problem with Dickinson was that he got killed by the flying demons. A lot. Sometimes he’d regenerate at Clara’s side, fly back up into the air only to get ripped apart again minutes later. The process would repeat. In the week I’d known him, he’d died at least 70 times. The bug had developed a twitch in the front right leg that hung underneath his bulbous eye.

  None of the three familiars could speak out loud like Banksy.

  We approached the popping and farting slug. A green glow buried underneath a flaming hunk of wood caught my attention. I shot my four-pincer forward, shattering the wood. Iffy burped in annoyance and slurped away, coming to ooze next to Clara’s leg. Winky landed on Iffy’s head.

  Seal of Morax added to library.

  I now had over 20 demons listed in my library. I had yet to use my Evocation spell. That would change tomorrow.

  “Damnit,” I said, coming to stand over the dead demon lord. His corpse had finished the transformation to the bull body, human-headed form. The horns weren’t there. It was rare for the demons to have body parts I could upcycle, but when they did, they usually came with a low rejection chance. But most demons had two forms, and they’d almost always switched to the one without the upgrades just before death.

  I had still managed to snag two upcycles in the past week. One was a nub of a tail that imparted +3 to deftness. I’d received it from a ravening, slobbering demon thing that was a cross between a bulldog and a giant, jumping flea. I regretted giving myself the tail almost immediately. I’d been forced to cut a hole in my pants, and sitting down on most normal chairs was now awkward. I’d had to rip out the back spring on the newly repaired driver’s seat for the chaser.

  The second upgrade was a pair of long incisor fangs I’d received from a vampire-like demon named Flauros. She’d turned into a leopard thing just before death, but the fangs remained. The upgraded teeth gave me +25% damage when fighting demon lords. Clara said I sounded like I was talking with rocks in my mouth after I got the upgrade, but I got used to it after a while.

  Necroshire Mystical Upcycle Emporium didn’t look any worse for wear when I received my upgrades. The only difference was the drill demon who performed the surgeries now wore a red headband, Rambo style. He also insisted on high-fiving my forehead before the surgery started.

  Morax’s countdown was at seven minutes by the time I managed to loot and examine him for upcycles. Unlike every other creature in this game, demon lords regenerated where they fell. To my surprise, he did have an upgrade. He had a pair of balls the size (and probably the weight) of a pair of lead shotputs. If I switched out my own testicles with the bull’s balls, I’d gain a spell called Charge and +1 to my charm. There was a 95% chance of a successful upgrade. But the testicles would hang down to my knees. I considered it for a half-second before moving on.

  “I think we’re done here,” I said. We prepared to head out.

  And just like that, it was time.

  Chapter 55

  Feedings Left: 6

  The plan to win this game and get our about-to-starve asses out of here consisted of six equally important parts. And the success of each element depended upon the completion of the component before it. One part a day. Parts one and two were intrinsically tied, and if the next two days didn’t go well, we were dead. Literally dead.

  We parked Nipper on the edge of the ruins of Charnel. We cleared out a large circle next to the still-functioning but knocked-over transport gazebo. Banksy positioned himself underground in case of an emergency. I started drawing the Andras sigil on the ground in salt while Clara manned the mounted gun on top of the newly repaired chaser.

  We’d managed to get the tracked vehicle repaired at the Yelm garage several days earlier, just after Clara and I took out our first pavilion. We’d gone to the city to complete the repair-the-gazebo quest and earn some free experience. When we were there, I’d discovered they had a mechanic’s garage. I’d used the rusting hulk as cover during the earlier firefight, and it’d take
n several shots, bringing its durability down to a mere 5%.

  The cost to repair the armor and install my upgrades was ridiculous. Almost two million teeth. I really wanted to trade it in for a flying vehicle, but they only had one, and it was fifteen million. A person couldn’t even carry that much teeth on them at one time. You had to pay in installments. Plus that thing was a death trap. The nerve agent proprietor told me if I really wanted quality flying machines, I had to make my way to the city of Little Cibola. I’d laughed bitterly at that.

  So instead, I had the garage fix the armor up all the way back to 100%. I even had the ability to choose a paint job. The default skins were all lame, but the system allowed me to hand-draw a design using a palette of spray cans.

  I didn’t have too much free time, so I did a quick and dirty job. It was my take on one of Banksy’s—the real Banksy’s—first murals. The chaser’s default was a rusty black. With a white can, I painted out a white dog with a bazooka on his shoulder. I painted one on each side.

  The system also allowed me to pick a name for the vehicle. I named it D.C.A. Nipper. Nipper was the name of the dog portrayed in the original Francis Barraud “His Master’s Voice” painting that Banksy prime was parodying in his mural. D.C.A. stood for The Duke and Clara Army.

  Clara had rolled her eyes at that, but then she had laughed. She’d been distant since her revelation about how I’d really gotten here. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with her either, but I needed her to think I had forgiven her. We had to work together, and we couldn’t with a wedge between us. The name was stupid, but its intended effect worked.

  Nipper now looked brand new and ready for war. I’d had all the busted guns removed and replaced with a single gun emplacement on the roof, all surrounded with concertina wire. The gun was a smaller version of the manned turrets that Charnel had once used to protect itself. This was basically the pulse version of a .50 cal. It didn’t pack as much punch as the brass-shooting option, but it also didn’t require ammo.

  And then I added my favorite upgrade ever. With a press of a button, three separate, fat, chainsaw blades surrounded the equator of the bus and started hula-hooping around it. The first blade appeared about ankle level, controlled by a steam magic spell that grew straight out of the tracks. The second blade emerged just below the windows, and the third surrounded the circumference of the roof, just below the concertina wire. The blades screamed like a real trio of chainsaws when I turned it on. It was useless as an offensive weapon, and the chains traveled underneath the front plow, but any demon crawling about the exterior of Nipper would immediately regret it.

  When we traveled now, we did it in the chaser. I drove, and Clara manned the gun. Banksy followed underground while Iffy bounced around on the inside. Winky blinked back and forth and Dickinson flew high above, warning us about demon movements until he inevitably got eaten by something.

  Clara could move more quickly if she flew on her own, but we were all safer in the tank. Battered, half-assed dirt trails crisscrossed the map, and we stuck to them until we approached our target. The roaming demons usually left us alone unless they were in larger groups. A couple shots from the mounted pulse usually chased them off.

  I kept the Shrill near the rift, and Clara also positioned the Opera near the giant rent in the world. We retained Avvinik and Moritasgus nearby in case we needed them. Guardians were worse experience hogs than Banksy, so we only used them in absolute emergencies.

  For now as I prepared the Andras sigil in salt, we kept both guardians in the middle of the forest. They couldn’t get this close to the edge of Neo-Austin, and even if they could, they’d be useless in the first two parts of the plan.

  For the binding sigil I had two options. I could just draw a circle of salt and allow the spell to draw the sigil itself. Or I could draw the circle and hand draw the sigil myself using the salt. If successful, this second method offered much greater control over the summoned demon. But if I screwed up the symbol even a little bit, the results could be disastrous.

  I chose the second option.

  I took Count Fronz out of my bag and placed him on the side while I worked. I’d been taking the caterpillar out more and more often, chatting with the little demon. Ever since we’d managed to crash Epsilon, the little guy was downright personable toward me. He stopped asking to be freed. That didn’t mean I was going to let him go, and I would take his advice with a grain of salt, but I enjoyed his company.

  “Have you ever met this guy?” I asked as I drew. The symbol looked like a circuit board with a pair of facing fishhooks. I had the library version of the symbol floating in midair while I worked.

  “Andras?” Fronz asked. “Yes, lad. He’s very… intense.”

  “Why does Stolas hate him so much?”

  “The potion dealer?” Fronz said, incredulous. “Stolas hired you to kill Andras?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Fronz laughed and laughed. “Stolas pretends to be all high and mighty, but he’s a right proud little bitch, isn’t he? There’s only two of us who take on the owl form, and when Stolas learned that Andras could also appear as one of those big-eyed birds in this realm he wouldn’t shut up about it. He went on and on and on. Andras is a shapeshifter, you see. He can take any form he wants. But he keeps the owl form just to make Stolas mad. If that whiny bastard hadn’t made such a big deal about it…” Fronz shook his tiny head. “Wow, lad. I knew Stolas was mad, but hiring you to attack another demon? Oh mate, wait until Beleth hears about this. He’s going to pluck that little asshole until he’s bald. Asmodeus, too. It’s a pointless quest, too. Killing him while he’s on this side of the rift isn’t going to do anyone any good, anyway. He just comes right back.”

  I pulled out the black sprout Stolas had given me. “Do you know what this does? I’m supposed to stick this in his body.”

  Fronz’s demeanor instantly changed. The worm pushed to the back of his lantern. “Mate, be careful. Where did you get that? Did… did Stolas give that to you? And he wants you to stick it into Andras?”

  “Yeah, what does it do?”

  Fronz looked like he wasn’t going to answer.

  “Look, Fronz,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to obey me.” I tapped the lantern. “You being bound and all.”

  The caterpillar sighed. “Lad, that’s a black sprout. They’re very rare. They grow at spots of treachery. The last ones I know of appeared on our side of the rift. Where Epsilon and Paskunji killed my da and the others. Baal had ordered them burned and destroyed. Even he fears them. You throw that into a body, and it permanently binds them. Not like how you have me bound. I mean bound in place. Tied down. The roots come out of it, go into the body. It puts them in a fugue state, one of constant pain. They look dead, but they ain’t dead, mate. They can’t go home, can’t talk, can’t move. They just start bleeding from their eyes. It’s awful. Just awful. So if Stolas wants you to stick that into Andras, then his hatred runs even deeper than I thought. By Baal’s left tit. Stolas is fucked when they hear about this.”

  I looked up at Clara who had been listening. She nodded. We knew all this already. We’d learned about the fabled flower from both Fiona and the viceroy guildmaster whom I had discussed this with a few days before. But it was good to get confirmation.

  I finished drawing the sigil. Next went the circle around it.

  “You’ll be happy to know, my friend,” I said to Fronz, “I won’t be using the black sprout today. That’s not why we’re summoning Andras.”

  “Wait, I thought you had a quest to… Oh never mind. Just do me a favor and put me away so he doesn’t see me in this thing. It’s embarrassing.”

  I stowed the lantern in my pack. I looked up at Clara. “We ready?”

  She gave me a thumb’s up.

  Duke: Banksy, I’m going to evoke the demon now. If I say the word, come up and eat him. Hopefully we won’t need to.

  Banksy: You have this terrible habit of repeating the plan when I alr
eady know it.

  I cast Evocation. Almost all of my soul power leeched out of me and seeped into the circle of salt, which pulsed blue.

  Lightning cracked across the sky. Smoke billowed from around the circle. The ground rumbled. I popped open one of the soul power vials on my belt.

  “Fuck you!” the small demon in the vial cried before falling over dead. The vial and demon poofed away. The potion filled my soul bar to about 90%.

  The smoke coalesced into a form. A slight man appeared, dressed in a fine cloak. He wore a thin, black sword around his belt. Unlike the great horned owl visage of his enemy Stolas, Andras had the round head and heart-shaped countenance of a barn owl. It gave him almost Asian features. I examined his properties:

  Marquis Andras

  Rank 63 in the demonic hierarchy. A vassal and personal bodyguard of King Asmodeus.

  May be evoked to assassinate or kidnap entities. In addition, may cast Glamor on an entire encampment, causing it to attack another. Requires Evocation level 3.

  Warning: Any attempt to use Andras to kill another demon will result in him hunting you after the evocation has expired.

  Has two forms: an Owl-Headed Angel or a Hell Guardian. Note: Andras also has the ability to temporarily take on any form he pleases. These illusions are not his true form, and if killed, he will revert to his base form.

  His rank was much lower than I expected. But then I read the line about him being the personal bodyguard of one of the kings. That explained why Clara had been so easily defeated when she attacked his pavilion. It wasn’t Andras’s pavilion. It was this King Asmodeus’s headquarters.

  “How dare you summon me?” the demon roared, his voice louder and angrier than one would expect from such a small man.

  “Answer me! Answer me now!” the demon screamed before I could even respond. He looked down, examining my salt work. “When I am free of this binding I will return here, and I will force suffering upon you and your kin unlike anything your feeble mind can comprehend!”