“A human?” Wynne said, looking in my direction. “That’s a new one, Henrik. Do you think a human can talk me into revealing the spell?”
“It’s this way,” a voice cried. A man. The five crawlers rushed into the chamber, emerging out of the darkness. All five were male. All levels 23 to 26. It was an eclectic group. Three were human. One was an odd creature with a human head and torso, but the body of a tarantula. I didn’t know what the hell the last guy was. He looked like a dude wearing a goddamn banana costume.
“You bastard. You goddamn bastard,” a man said before I could greet them. “You destroyed the map.”
“Hello to you, too,” I said. I examined the man.
Crawler #4,778,551. “Low Thi.”
Level 25.
Race: Human.
Class: D-Bag Geek.
D-Bag Geek? Really? “The map was on the table back here out of your reach. It disappeared the moment I picked it up. It installed itself into my system.”
“Well, we’re now fucked. There were two maps, and we lost both of them. This place is a goddamn nightmare.”
“It’s Carl,” another crawler said. This was another human named Tyler Storm. A level 26 Weather Engineer.
“It’s not really a human,” Wynne the gnome said, looking between me and the newcomers. “He’s a changeling named Henrik! He’s torturing me, trying to get me to cast a spell that would give flesh to Quetzalcoatlus. He drugs me, and I won’t last much longer. I have the map to the temple. I know of your kind. If you kill me, you will have access. You can take it from me. Kill me. Kill me fast!”
“No,” I said as Low Thi pulled a spear from his inventory. He raised it and pointed it at the gnome’s head. “No, no, no!”
The man jabbed forward. The NPC slouched over, dead.
Quest failed. Free Wynne from his bondage.
Low Thi looked up. “Hey, I just got an achievement called Cockblock for ruining your quest. I guess you really are Carl.”
“This guy doesn’t have a map on him. He doesn’t have shit,” the banana guy said. His name was Mike Barnes 3. He was a level 23 Banana Farmer. “We’re screwed.”
Deep breath, deep breath.
“Do you assholes have any sort of towns or villages in there?”
“Yes,” Low Thi said.
“Do any of you have Desperado Club access?”
“I do,” the spider guy said. He indicated the third human. “Bobby and I are the only ones.”
“Meet me there in a goddamn hour.”
“Why?” the spider asked. His name was Morris Sp. A level 23 Freelance Psychiatrist.
“Because I’m going to kick your goddamn ass. And then I need to transcribe your map to you. That is if this town doesn’t get blown to hell in the meantime.”
7
New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure.
You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent.
Reward: Ha.
“Oh fuck off,” I muttered as I ascended the stairs just as Donut cried, “Get down!”
Louis and Firas hit the deck as the chock was hit with an explosive. Ka-blam!
Fire licked through the room, and everything tumbled as the incredible sound temporarily rendered me deaf. The chock was bent over and dislodged with a hole right in the center, peeled open like a baked potato. The brace that went from the floor to the ceiling held strong. The door itself was shattered. Smoke filled the room, black and choking.
One of the camels had blasted a rocket at the door. They’d probably shoot another one any second.
“Fire in the hole,” I coughed. I threw one of my new eighth-strength hob-lobbers through the mangled doorway, hurling it down the long hall. I crouched. The explosion came, but I couldn’t hear it. The walls shook, followed by a secondary explosion that was even bigger. Part of the ceiling caved in. Experience notifications scrolled by.
That’s why you don’t carry your explosives on the outside, motherfucker.
I still couldn’t hear anything, but the building continued to rumble. The stench of gunpowder and smoke filled the room. This was real smoke. The building was on fire. I downed a health potion, and the pain in my head eased. I knew from experience it’d take a full minute for my hearing to return.
Both Firas and Louis were on the ground. Louis was screaming, his hands to his ears, burn marks across his forearms. He had shrapnel wounds up and down his torso. That asshole needs armor. Firas had been blown across the room and was Unconscious, but otherwise looked okay. The rocket had propelled everything back, scorching the walls. But the metal block had protected them like a shield.
Donut jumped astride Mongo. Both had been in the back part of the room and appeared unharmed. She moved to Firas and used one of our precious healing scrolls on him. They hadn’t seen us yet, but that would change in a moment. I dropped one of my last hobgoblin smoke curtains at my feet.
Carl: Donut, let’s get out of here.
Donut: WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M DOING, CARL?
Donut cast Hole on the far wall, and it materialized, leading outside. It faced the side of an alley, but luckily, if we stood to the right of the hole, we had a line-of-sight down one of the main thoroughfares, all the way to where it curved away and toward the wall of the bowl. There were camels everywhere, all headed in this direction. The smoke curtain, much too powerful for such a small place, billowed out the magical hole. The camels on the streets all had white dots on the map, so the opacity of the smoke curtain wasn’t enough to obscure us when they got close. We couldn’t let them see us. We had to move fast. We moved to the side of the temporary hole.
“Louis, take a potion,” I hissed as I pulled the stuffed, Grulke infantry figure from my inventory. My ears started that familiar buzzing, letting me know my hearing was returning.
Bautista had given me the beanbag toy. He still had almost a thousand of the things, all different. He was going through them rapidly as he and his team explored through his subterranean level, which was really some sort of ant colony thing.
I ripped the tag off the beanbag and tossed it through the hole and out into the alley. We waited a few precious seconds for the creature to be summoned. Louis finally figured out the health potion and rose to his feet, whimpering, rubbing his arms. He was covered in splotches of blood. I hissed at him to crouch down and stay away from the room’s new window.
A mighty croak filled the chamber. The grulke creature stood to his feet in the alley. He turned to peek his head back in through the hole to look at me. He had a 25-second timer over his head. The level-15 frog creature looked just like Mordecai had on the last floor.
“What am I doing here?” he asked, looking directly at me. Half-opacity smoke billowed all around us. Shouting came from every direction. The entire building felt as if it was about to collapse. I thought of the protective sail over the building that safeguarded the town from the sand storm. The storm would be here in less than two hours.
“Think you can hop out onto the street, turn right and then hop over the city wall?”
I couldn’t see it from here, but the main entrance to the town was only a few hundred feet away.
“You summoned me just to make me run like a little bitch?”
“Yes. Hurry. Go!”
The frog only had ten seconds left. He grumbled but hopped out onto the street, landing in front of a pair of surprised camels. He bounded to the right, sailing up into the air, crashing loudly. He hopped once more and out of sight.
“Do it,” I said to Donut as I tossed one more smoke bomb, this time out on the street. I really needed a non-magical version, one that worked on NPCs and not just red-tagged mobs. Behind us and through the mangled remains of the interior door, I heard shouting. More dromedarians were coming into the building, despite it being on fire. Donut’s Hole spell would soon run dry. It was time to go.
Louis dragged the still-recovering form of Firas over, and we teleported away. Donut puddle jumped us all the way do
wn the street, right where the street started to curve with the wall.
I quickly looked around. There were several camels about, but all had their eyes on the city hall building, which billowed smoke into the air. Fire burst from a window on the second level.
“Whoa, that was way further than I expected,” I said, standing to my full height. “I wish you’d done that last time.”
“It lets me send us really far now,” Donut said, also looking around. A female camel standing about ten feet away looked in our direction and startled at our sudden appearance.
“Oh my, what happened?” Donut asked, sounding innocent.
The camel paused uncertainly. Her eyes focused on Firas who was being held up by Louis. I pulled an empty bottle of whiskey from my inventory and pretended to drink in an attempt to look like we’d just wandered over here from a nearby bar. She seemed to relax. She blinked twice and said, “The town hall was attacked by frog creatures. Nobody knows where they came from. I saw one with my own eyes. He jumped to the top of the house right there and then leapt straight out of town.”
“I never liked frogs,” Donut declared. “Filthy creatures. Have you seen their tongues? They’re sticky. Anything with a sticky tongue can’t be trusted. Can you imagine having something sticky in your mouth at all times?”
The dromedarian nodded and returned her attention back to the burning town hall. The tulip-shaped sail atop the building was not catching on fire, but the whole structure was about to collapse to the ground. Camels on stilts appeared, all pouring buckets of water on the fire. It wasn’t going to help.
Katia came strolling up in her regular, human form. She had what looked like an iced tea in her hand with a little umbrella. She sipped on it.
“What was the plan again?” she asked. “Oh yes, I remember. You were going to sneak in, figure out what they had hidden in there, and sneak out again undetected. Good job.”
“That’s why we have backup plans,” I said, still watching the burning building. “At least they don’t know it was us.”
“The frog con isn’t going to last,” she said. “This world is too small to pull that sort of scam off. They’re going to go out there and find no other frog creatures. Or worse, they’ll find that stuffed animal it turns back into. And then they’re going to realize the only ones who mentioned seeing the frogs were all the new people. It’s not rocket science.”
“I thought it went quite well,” Donut said. “Also, they’re toads. Not frogs.”
“Is it always like this?” Louis asked. He looked like he was going to vomit again. Firas had healed, but he was sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth.
“Like what?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
I turned my gaze back to Katia. “We have bigger problems than them figuring out it was us. The moment the gnomes realize their collateral is dead, they’re going to unleash hell on the town. I’d like to avoid that, but I don’t know how.”
“How will they even know?” Donut asked, looking up into the sky. Above, the twin suns were getting closer by the minute.
It was still unbearably hot. I snatched Katia’s drink and took a sip. It wasn’t iced tea. It was some girly alcoholic drink. “I don’t know. But they found out about the other town’s collateral somehow.” I told them exactly what had happened in the basement. “I’m guessing those subterranean assholes probably did the same thing on the other side. They killed the collateral, whatever it was, in an attempt to somehow get to the map, that was likely just out of their reach. Whatever happened, it caused the town to be bombed. I bet we just did the same thing here. We have a little more than an hour before the storm, two hours of storm, two hours of post-storm twilight, and then two hours of night. That’s about how long before that airship will be back in this general area. So whatever we do about it, we better do it quickly.”
To accentuate the point, the city hall collapsed with a mighty crash. The minaret atop the building tumbled over and landed on the street as camels scattered.
“You keep destroying governmental buildings, Carl,” Donut said. “People are going to start thinking you have a problem with authority.”
Soon after, several dromedarians went to work manually affixing the storm shield over the city. The town hall had been the tallest building, but they had prepared for this contingency. A group of dromedarians tirelessly set up a scaffolding system to hold the shield up. They worked quickly, unfurling the canvas, filling the town with shadow.
“That material looks like it used to be part of a balloon,” Katia said. “It’s definitely magical.”
I stared at the creatures feverishly working to protect the city. Were these guys real dromedarians? Or were they changelings? Katia had witnessed a shapeshifter murdering two dromedarians, so it was clear the camels didn’t know that their ranks had been infiltrated. This was some serious Invasion of the Body Snatchers bullshit.
Carl: Is there any way we can tell which ones of these guys are real?
Mordecai: I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I have an idea. Donut. Do your sunglasses have the ability to see based on heat signature?
Donut: I DON’T KNOW. THERE ARE LOTS OF MODES. PROBABLY.
Mordecai: If it does, a real dromedarian and a changeling will have almost an identical heat signature, but the brain of the changeling will be a lot hotter. That might make their heads a little hotter. It’ll probably be very subtle, but you might be able to make that work.
Donut: OKAY I WILL TRY BUT I WOULDN’T GET MY HOPES UP. THEIR HEADSCARVES WILL MAKE IT EXTRA HARD TO SEE.
I sent Louis and Firas off to a saferoom. There was only a single real saferoom in town for folks without a personal space, and it was in Weird Shit Alley. We hadn’t gone in there yet, but everyone was a little scared of the street. I told them to go anyway. They’d both received several achievements for participating in that fight, likely all boxes we’d already received. They were both marveling at the sudden influx of views and follows. After they collected their loot, they needed to hook up with Langley and the other archers, who were going to spend some time outside the gates grinding until the storm hit.
We needed to do that, too. This floor was going to require us spending a lot of time in the crafting room, which meant less time for regular experience. That was deliberate, designed to slow down our progress. We couldn’t keep relying on boss battles to give us big bumps of experience. Regular, old-school grinding was important, not just for experience, but to keep training up our skills.
We were always juggling. We were slightly ahead of the curve, but the archer guys were a perfect example of how lagging behind on a single floor could bite you on the ass.
“Hey,” I said to a passing dromedarian. Donut was playing with the settings on her sunglasses, trying to figure out how to overlay the heat signature setting. She wanted me to get one to pause close by so she could figure it out.
“Are the gnomes going to bomb the city now?” I asked. “Like they did to the other town?”
This camel was a woman. A level-30 named Emerald.
She looked at me with disdain, but then Donut complimented her headscarf, and the camel changed before our eyes.
“We need to get through the rubble. There’s something important buried in the basement of the town hall, and… and it may still be with us,” she said, though her voice held little hope.
They didn’t know if Wynne the gnome was alive or dead. They were going to be sorely disappointed.
“What if it’s not?”
She paused. I didn’t think she was going to answer, but then she said, “Then we move to the shelters. Every day after sunrise, we give the gnomes proof of collateral. If that doesn’t happen tomorrow, what happened to the Bactrians will happen to us.”
“Proof?” I asked. “What sort of proof?”
“Look, I’m going to help with the rescue efforts. But if I were you, I’d go find a different town.”
“There are no other towns,” I sai
d.
We headed toward the Desperado Club where I was to meet up with the idiots from the subterranean level. I was going to speak with them for a bit, maybe leave Katia and Donut in the club so they could transfer the map over the best they could. In the meantime, I had to get back to base as soon as possible. I was going to spend some time with the two-stage rocket, though I feared even that wasn’t going to be strong enough to reach the Wasteland. According to the guy Donut and Mordecai bought the rockets from, the projectiles could only hit planes that were 500 feet off the ground. Preferably under 300. That was no good. I was going to use my sapper’s table to build a rocket that would, hopefully, have much more range.
I checked in with Gwendolyn Duet as we headed to the club. They’d managed to breach a hole in the first of the four walls, which was made of sand. The second was made of seashell, and they felt they could break through that also instead of going over. She had them building siege ladders and catapults just in case. They hadn’t seen or met any resistance from the castle itself, but it was slow work because the mobs on the beach were a constant threat and were always attacking.
Worst of all, however, was this massive bird that kept harassing them. It was a giant version of the chainsaw buzzards she’d described earlier, only this one was a borough boss. It was constantly circling the structure of the necropolis. If it saw any crawlers out in the open, it would swoop down to attack. It had wrecked two siege towers they’d started building, causing them to abandon the idea. It was too strong for them to fight, so they had to hide every time it appeared. The thing was so fast, they couldn’t even get a good description off of it. The creature was seriously hindering their efforts.
Gwen: Oh, I do have some good news. I saw a pair of crawlers on the water. They were too far away to talk, but they were in some 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-looking submarine thing. It popped up like a cork. The two crawlers emerged and fought a jellyfish thing attached to the outside of the sub, and then they disappeared again. So we know somebody is working on it under there.
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 11