I sighed and moved to jump off the path, but the brigand grasped my ankle.
When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It was Weed, the demon. My blood froze in my veins.
“We miss you, Jonah. Please visit soon. Mother Reaver sends her love. Drip drop, Jonah. Drip drop.”
“Oh I’ll be visiting you soon enough,” I said, pulling myself together as I unleased Triple Fang from my waist. I removed the arm from my leg, leaving the brigand crying and bleeding on the ground.
Archibald: They’re coming in quick, mate. You going to be here or not?
His Royal Majesty Jonah: I won’t be there in time. Just keep me updated.
I turned and ran back toward Fort Bloodgasm, trying to keep the tremor out of my hands.
Gretchen Note 4
From the top of my tower, I watched the mass of red and blue chickens rush toward the pool trap. Tiatha stood next to me, and a female pollywog cleric named Cera was in charge of loading. They’d just hit the first barracks, coming to a crashing stop as they clashed against the white jackets defending the archway. The chickens breathed a terrible, caustic fire that melted stone and cooked soldiers alive in their armor. We might’ve been able to make a stand, but Colonel Holder had them fall back, to keep the soldiers alive if nothing else. As it was, we’d lost 30 soldiers, just like that. The chickens broke through the gate, and they were now rounding the corner toward the trap.
We were out of range of the Sentinel Tower here, so it was up to us. The chickens were mostly bunched together, which was good. I held my breath as they entered the long, flat stretch leading up to Castle Three. This was it.
The ground here was a fine sand, produced by Spritz. She’d carved a gigantic hole, as deep as she could along the almost quarter-mile long walkway and then filled it with sand. This had taken a better part of a day to build, but it had helped the rock singer rise up to level 25. Walking along it, it felt like hard-packed beach. One would have no way of knowing that it was almost 20-feet deep, going to the very bottom of the spiral path and scraping the top of the immense, unexplored mazes that lived under Castellane. The way Jonah described it, the Catacombs obstacle was a tiny, tiny fraction of the world that existed down there. In the real world, the underground caverns circled the entire city.
“Hey mate, do you know what a fluidized bed is?” Archie had asked Jonah when they’d first started planning this trap. I’d been nearby and heard this exchange, but I could see the vacant look in Jonah’s eyes. They’d already put together the other trap—which was further down the path. This one was all Archie’s idea. Interested, I’d come forward to look at the map where Archie was pointing.
“I know what fluid is,” Jonah said. “I know what a bed is.”
“You know those sand hot tubs?” I interjected. “That’s a fluidized bed, well sort of.”
“Those things that got banned?” Jonah had asked, eyes going wide.
“Yeah,” I said, grimacing. Pretty much everyone knew the story. A few years back, sand hot tubs had become a popular thing. Fill a tub with solid sand, introduce air to it using multiple jets, and the sand acted like a liquid. It was really interesting to watch. The process had been used for well over a hundred years for all sorts of applications from boilers to powder coating. But more recently, the technology had been used for saunas and beauty regimens. Despite the risks, people had started making DIY sand hot tubs. They’d print a tub, attach a compressor, add the correct type of sand, and the solid turned to a warm liquid that could be splashed about in like it was water.
A guy in the states—Arizona, I think—had the bright idea to do it in a larger scale, with one of those above-ground pools.
The thing with liquified sand was that when the air source went away, the sand immediately returned to its solid state. In this case, the brownout had occurred with 25 second and third graders in the pool, all trying to hold their breath at once, and no supervising adults to help pull them out. Only ten had lived. Both children of the man who had made the pool survived. The man, however, ended up murdered a few weeks later by one of the fathers of the other children, but they could never figure out which one, and no one had been arrested.
Remembering that tragedy, I knew then what Archie was planning.
“Those chickens look pretty strong,” I’d said. “I think they’d probably be able to pull themselves free.”
Archie tapped the line of fire and lightning towers on either side of the path.
“Ohhh,” I’d said.
“Jesus,” Jonah had muttered. “Archie, you’re more evil than I am.”
“Mate,” Archie had said, grimacing. “I don’t doubt that for a moment. I only wish we had more time.”
War Party> Custom Pool Trap in B4 triggered.
War Party Admin> Calculating casualties… Calculating. 632 casualties so far. 357 invaders remain.
I watched in fascinated horror as the trap triggered, and the chicken and their riders plummeted over their heads, disappearing from sight in the now-liquified pool of sand.
Gretchen: Fire!
The line of four level three plasma towers unleashed their blue-hot flames on the sand, which immediately started to glow red. The lightning towers on the other side went to work, first the level three thunderclap towers to stun any survivors, and then chain lightning to bounce from survivor to survivor. A thick cloud of smoke rose into the night, made worse by the final tower, a level three freeze tower upgraded to cast Slick on the roadway, rapidly-cooling the glass and adding a white steam in the air.
Gretchen: Cease fire! Let’s see what’s left.
I watched, using the looking glass from the Ladies’ Choice tower.
Holy crap, I thought, looking at what had happened.
Gretchen: Hey Popper. How far away is the boss?
Poppy: You could probably read War and Peace by the time she gets there.
Gretchen: Good. You want some extra experience? Get your butt down here. But don’t take too long. I’m going to get some practice shots in with my new spear.
* * *
You have gained a level! You have received a training token.
You are now level 30. Accessory slot upgraded!
I spun, reveling in the god-like speed my new spear imparted on me, cutting down two more of the pale creatures. They spit and swore at me in a language I didn’t understand as I swept through them. I felt like that cartoon creature that turned into a tornado as he attacked.
I felt bad, almost. The chicken mounts were all dead. The bald-headed creatures—called Mikoshi-nyūdō—couldn’t fight back. A few had frozen in the glass with their hands above ground, but the vast majority of them—over 300 of them—were nothing but heads on long, rubber band necks, bobbing up and down like cotton swabs, screaming and wailing in agony, a glassy sea of tortured souls. The heads could stretch long and far, and they screamed as they waved ineffectually about.
The Orochi beasts appeared to be resistant to fire and immune to lightning, which is why most had survived. But they were trapped in the glass, which swirled about in odd, milky-red patterns. It crunched underfoot, but the top glass layer was still thick, thick enough to hold Alice’s weight.
Popper and Alice were like polo players, making a game of the slaughter. He leaned off the side of the hippo as he mowed through them with his axe, which he’d inexplicably renamed Battlefield Surgeon. He and Alice screamed joyfully, the heads flying away like dandelions under a weedwhacker.
“Level 25!” Popper called. A few minutes later, “Level 26!”
Alice took turns killing some of the high-experience monsters herself. She preferred the horn-in-the-face method of killing, but her giant maw could also slam down and crush a head easily. She sounded like she was crunching down on lollipops. The hippo giggled in delight.
“I love Orochi food!” she said, her mouth full.
“Eat as much as you can,” Popper said. “You’ll be hungry again in a few hours.”
Once they were all dead
, I was halfway through level 30, and Popper and Alice were both level 27. Not bad.
He and Alice pulled up. “How come you didn’t call Bruce Bruce out?” Popper asked.
I hadn’t yet told anyone about the rejection.
“He’s homesick,” Alice interjected before I could respond. “We’ve been talking, and he misses his friends. He wants to go home.”
“You’ve been talking?” Popper asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, he’s okay. I guess,” Alice said. She had an eyeball stuck on one of her teeth, and it was hard to concentrate with it there.
I sighed, then told Popper what had happened. I looked at Alice.
“He’s very sensitive about this, so you don’t go giving him a hard time. I promised him I wouldn’t tell you because you’re mean to him.”
“I would never be mean to someone who is sad,” Alice said, sounding offended. “What sort of monster do you think I am?”
We separated, Popper going back to the defense cockpit to meet up with Jonah. Jonah would come back after his curse cycled.
We should have set this up much earlier in the path, but there was no way to know she’d be so slow. Every minute we wasted was a minute we couldn’t spend building for the next wave. I returned to my tower, settling in. While I waited, I alternated between writing in this journal and reading. I’d been reading Jonah’s book.
It was a strange, uncomfortable read. Everything he’d written was mostly accurate, but he perceived things much differently than I did. I’d forgotten most everything about that first night after we’d left Icardi, when I’d gotten so drunk I’d passed out. I promised myself I would never drink again. Not as long as I had people depending on me.
I came back to the Ladies’ Choice tower to find Tiatha reading the book, which I had left on the floor. The strange NPC had her head cocked to the side as she thumbed through the hand-copied pages.
“This is an odd book,” Tiatha said. It was the first time the druid had said anything on her own since I’d met her. “What is The Hibiscus? I’m not certain I understand what it’s saying here.”
I pulled the book out of her hands, trying to not let my voice quaver. “It’s just a story,” I said.
“It’s not for me?” she asked.
What an odd question.
“No,” I said.
Tiatha nodded. “The shaman was right about you.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. She blinked, moved back to her position, and said nothing further on the subject for a long time.
Then, out of nowhere she added, “It will mean war when the world learns who you really are. New gods are always challenged by the old.”
Gretchen Note 5
It was pushing four A.M. when Kiyohime rounded the bend. We’d ordered the towers not to shoot directly at her, but we’d lit torches along the path here so we could see. She was so small, a diminutive shadow of a woman, floating forward with her parasol.
I’d already felt out-of-sorts, not sure how to deal with what Tiatha had said. And then this demon appeared with her thousand-yard stare. It was a phrase synonymous with soldiers coming home from war, but it always made me think of my sister. She always seemed to be looking at something just over the horizon, showing no emotion whatsoever. Nadia was always cold and emotionless. Until she wasn’t. There was never any warning for her outbursts, her anger spewing out of her in a head-on-collision of rage and screaming.
Kiyohime picked her way over the bloody sea of glass, moving like a cold, detached robot. Just like Nadia. When I saw the woman, I had that same feeling as when I looked upon my sister. This is a live grenade.
Across the way stood the brand-new, level one freeze tower. Freeze towers required a minimum crew of five but were most effective with twelve. It required a lot of pumping and priming and the attachment of hoses. They were the most convoluted of the towers, but their upgrades at level three had the ability to slow down large groups of creeps.
I held my hand up as Kiyohime passed off the edge of the pool trap. She seemed oblivious to our presence. I hoped it remained that way for just a few more moments. My heart thrashed in my chest.
I aimed directly at her head. I lowered my hand, shouting “Fire.”
The freeze blast shot from the tower just as Tiatha pulled the trigger. The net arrow flew true, hitting her a mere second after she was rendered temporarily immobile by the freeze blast.
Jonah rushed forward from the side street along with Vern the half-ogre, Bingo and his three gorcupines, and Ace the bard, whose real name was actually Malik.
The loader slammed another net arrow into place as I watched the boss monster through the looking glass. The net had fully entangled her, rendering the woman immobile. She did not seem to fight. Bingo picked the woman up, slung her over his shoulder, and the small crew turned and ran toward Castle Four, the recently-cleared prison. A specially-made cell waited for her there.
“Okay guys,” I said to Tiatha and Cera. “Form up outside the prison with the others in case she blows it up or something.” I gathered up my items and rushed down the stairs, coming out into the cold, dark night.
Castle Four looked imposing from the outside. The tall, black, and daunting walls held no windows. Twin, obsidian parapets flanked the angular structure. Hobgoblins sometimes stood in those parapets shooting crossbows at you as you passed, but they weren’t real towers. Torches flickered in each of the two watchtowers now as I rushed up the main gate.
Entering Castle 4
This dungeon has been cleared.
I turned a few corners to find the group of warriors standing in front of a simple jail cell, looking upon the small woman who lay prone on the floor.
This was a blue cell, made for containing magical beasts. It was similar to the cells in the Menagerie. One could see and hear through the walls, but one could not pass through.
She was just starting to stir. Winston and another gorcupine stood on either side of the cell, their large hands on the failsafe levers we had installed earlier. One pull, and a hollowed-out square rock would drop from above, blocking her in. A second pull, and the two plasma tower ammunition orbs would drop into the hole in the rock, filling the enclosed space with enough plasma to incinerate anything. Archie said it was the same system the chamber imps used to dispose of bodies. Spritz and Archie had developed a third failsafe that basically dropped the entire castle on her. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to use any of them.
Chauncey the coypu was also here, clucking over the controls for the cells. He looked about nervously. He’d rarely left the castle since the waves started, and it was clear he didn’t want to be here now. We needed him to control the opening and closing of the jail cells. For some reason the game only allowed him to do so.
Jonah twirled Kiyohime’s parasol in his hands as he regarded her. “Jesus. She’s just looking at us. Are we sure she’s the real boss monster? We took her down so easily, and she hasn’t fought back at all.”
Archie came into the castle just behind me. He looked between the woman and the parasol in Jonah’s hands.
“Mate,” Archie said, an edge to the badger’s voice. It was the first time I’d ever heard the texugo sound like that. “Do me a favor and open up that cell door right quick.”
We all looked at him. “Why?” Jonah asked.
“Do it, mate. Trust me. Do it now. Get ready to close it straight away.”
Jonah nodded at Chauncey, who threw up his two little hands in frustration. “Whatever you wish, monsieur.”
A door-shaped hole appeared in the glowing, blue forcefield. Archie took a step toward Jonah, and quicker than I thought possible, snatched the parasol out of his hands and threw it at the open door.
The umbrella snapped open on its own, blocking itself from being put in the cell. Although the parasol appeared to be small, when it opened, it opened huge, with a diameter of at least 10 feet, causing us all to jump back in surprise. Dozens of screaming, fang-filled mouths were on the inside
wall of the flesh-like umbrella.
“Get it in the cage,” I roared, jabbing my spear at it. Each jab penetrated the flesh-like skin but didn’t seem to do any damage.
Bingo grasped the handle of the umbrella and started pushing it forward toward the open door. The whole thing bent in on itself as he pushed, straining with the effort. It did not break. It did not go into the cell.
A long tongue lashed out from one of the mouths and wrapped around Bingo’s forearm, who grunted in surprise. Bingo inexplicably started being pulled toward one of the open mouths on the umbrella. More tongues lashed out, grasping at all of us.
I parried one with my spear, and it felt as if I was hitting against stone. Jonah spun away from a tongue, unfurling his blade as he spun. A quick lash with his sword, and Bingo was free.
Both Vern and Chauncey were caught up in similar tongues, being pulled toward the open mouths, which weren’t much bigger than normal human-sized mouths.
Jonah freed Vern, who howled and smashed at the umbrella with his maul, the hammer smashing ineffectively against it.
I jabbed at the tongue pulling Chauncey in, but I was too late.
The small, screaming creature was pulled to a mouth on the inside of the umbrella, where it clomped down on its furry arm. Chauncey screamed, his entire body turning purple. He started to swell like a balloon.
Archie had fallen back. He screamed, “Hit the deck! The little bugger is going to blow!”
I dove for the ground. Jonah dove also. Bingo did not. Nor did Vern or the other gorcupines in the line of fire.
Chauncey exploded, purple goo flying in every direction. It sizzled as it hit. I felt my back get sprinkled with burning, caustic fire. It continued to burn as I pulled my cloak off and tossed it away.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 37