I returned my attention to the Valtay upgrade. I now had the ability to add my current speed and altitude to my UI. I dove into my interface and tried to figure it out. I clicked a toggle that only showed speed if I was moving more than six kilometers an hour. There were multiple displays showing different velocities at the same time, and I had no idea what the hell that meant. Luckily there was a toggle titled Relative Surface Speed. I clicked it, and all the other information disappeared, leaving only a single gauge that currently had me standing still.
The elevation display was equally complicated. I turned it on, and it filled my screen with a page of information I did not understand. It didn’t have feet or miles as a unit of measurement, but it did have kilometers and meters, so I selected that. There were some very big numbers in there. I tried toggling Planetary Sea-level Only, but that was a mistake. It had me at just over -92,000 meters. I realized that meant I was standing 92 kilometers under the surface of the planet. That was crazy. Was earth’s crust even that thick? Wasn’t it all magma and oil and gooey shit once you got deep enough? I’d never paid attention in geology class.
After some adjusting, I finally found two different gauges that gave me what I needed. One was adjustable. I set it at 0.00, giving me a gauge to the surface of the tomb. The second was at 8,932 meters. It was labeled Gravitational Zone Sea Level. If I was reading it correctly, that meant we were nine kilometers above the water quadrant. That was damn high. Thankfully all the little things that came with such great heights weren’t in play here in the bubble, which seemed to be equally pressurized throughout. I didn’t even pretend to understand the science. If I was doing the conversion correctly in my head, that meant we were standing about the same height as the peak of Mount Everest. That also meant that the Necropolis of Anser was fucking huge. I didn’t know how tall the tallest building in the world was before the collapse, but it had to be way less than 1,000 meters.
We needed to give as much support to those assholes in the tomb as we could. Because if they failed, that meant we’d have to go in there once we figured out the gnome castle. And that was something I did not want to do.
The storm ended, and the town survived. The camels did not retract the sails as usual. Langley told me they now had guards at the main gate, and the camels were setting up anti-air defenses all around the city. They still allowed us to come and go, but they interrogated everybody about grulke toads and gnomes, demanding to know if they’d seen any.
We were now four hours from when the gnomes would know for certain the collateral was dead, and probably five from when the bombs would fall. The casual, laid-back atmosphere of the town had changed to that of a city under siege.
I now had four modified missiles in my inventory. With Mordecai’s help along with my level-four sapper’s table, I’d created a missile that might reach high enough. We wouldn’t know until we tested it. And it just so happened a perfect opportunity to test it was about to present itself. Something that would help both us and Gwen’s team down below.
Katia and Donut returned from the Desperado Club as I was standing outside of the Toe, waiting. They’d spent the entire two hours of the storm in the Desperado. Katia had a feather boa around her neck. Mongo was free, and he also had a boa, dangling freely from his collar. He kept snapping at it, and feathers were flying everywhere. Donut and Katia had gone into the Penis Parade together.
“Really?” I asked.
“Eight more visits, and I get a free dance from Anaconda!” Donut announced.
“Wait, how much money are you guys spending at this place?”
“Oh, oh, Carl, guess what? I got another box from Princess D’Nadia!” Donut exclaimed, ignoring my question. She hopped up and down on Mongo’s back. “It’s only a bronze this time, but I bet it’ll be awesome!”
“You haven’t gotten the one Loita mentioned?”
“Not yet. She messaged and said it’ll come later today. She said the sponsor wants to make sure we survive the bombing before they send the prototype. Isn’t that exciting? I’m going to open Princess D’Nadia’s present now!” She and Mongo scrambled inside. Katia and I watched her go.
Katia looked up at the sky, which was still covered with the sails. In the twilight, the whole town was prematurely dark. “No bird yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “How’d it go with spider boy and the other guy?”
Katia had given them a general map of the entire structure and a more detailed path to another town about halfway down to the crypt. Assuming we all survived the next 24 hours, they’d meet up again to get the rest. The lower half of the necropolis featured much-larger rooms, and oftentimes the map showed the only entrance and exit to each chamber was on the ceiling and the floor. They’d need ladders and ropes to descend.
“They’re not as bad as Louis and Firas, but those subterranean guys are total trainwrecks,” Katia said. “Their stress levels are off the charts. It’s understandable, but they’re very tense. Too tense.”
I laughed. “That’s what Mordecai said about you when we first met. He called you a train wreck. Also, we’re calling them the tomb raiders.”
She did not find any of that funny. “If something happens to that Bobby guy, the entire team is dead. He’s the only one who can detect traps, and he’s already missed a few. They make others go in tunnels ahead because he’s too valuable, and they keep dying right in front of him. They described a trap where needles popped up from the floor and injected the crawler with a potion that filled his sinuses with flesh-eating beetles.” She shivered. “Maybe you can make some really low-level explosives for them, something they can roll down the hallways to set off the traps.”
“They need a spell like Donut’s Clockwork Triplicate,” I said. “Something where they can make or control minions. The spider guy is a psionicist. He should try to find something. I bet there’s something in that town of theirs that’ll help them. Their situation sucks, but it’s not impossible.”
Katia grunted. “They kept asking when they thought we might storm our castle. I have the impression they want to hold back and wait for us to have access so we can ‘help.’”
I shook my head. Goddamnit. “We need to push them. We don’t have time for that.”
“I agree, and I did. I lied and told them that we don’t expect to complete the air quadrant until time is almost up.” She looked at me, worry evident in her eyes. “At least I hope it was a lie.”
I instinctively returned my gaze to the air. The protective sail, deflated balloon, whatever it was, shimmered in the meager light. A camel on stilts walked by, turning on lamps throughout the town. I knew the Wasteland was still over the water. But right now we were waiting for something else.
“It’s coming,” Katia said. “I can see the dot on my map.”
I heard the low, angry buzz of a flying creature.
After my most recent discussion with Gwen on the land quadrant, I’d asked the Toe’s barkeep about the creature, but the camel had been reluctant to tell me anything. Juice Box, however, was happy to tell me all about the borough boss in exchange for a gold coin.
The bird’s name was Ruckus, and she was a giant version of the more common buzz-ard. She came to roost nearby every night after the storms.
The bird was half biological, half machine. A steampunk cyborg. Juice Box claimed she didn’t know why the mechanical birds lived around here, as everything else in the area was purely biological. She said they were either a failed gnome invention that had escaped during the second war, or it was something left over from the time before that. What she called the “treasure hunter” era. The waster patrols avoided Ruckus, but one of their responsibilities was to cull the regular-sized buzz-ards if they saw them.
“If it flies over the city every night, why don’t they shoot it down with their anti-aircraft missiles?” Katia asked.
“Apparently there used to be a third camel city,” I said. “They tried that, and it didn’t go well for them.”
Katia went pale. “And you want to fight this thing?”
I shrugged. “We’ll be like a mile away. I have a missile I need to test. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
9
Part of me felt bad about stealing from little Skarn and his burgeoning charge-people-to-look-through-his-telescope business, but we didn’t have time to debate the morality of the issue. I knocked on the door of his house to talk to him. I wanted to make sure Flint the adult wasn’t there—he wasn’t—and I told the kid that I just wanted to check in on him.
“If they start to drop bombs, I want you to run to the Toe, okay? Tell all your friends. Go there. Nowhere else.”
Skarn turned into the creepy human child form. “Flint says we’re supposed to go to the Spit and Swallow or the Wiggle Room.”
I knew neither of those were true saferooms, and they wouldn’t be safe.
“No. The Toe. Nowhere else. I will give you and every one of your friends a whole gold piece if they go there instead. It’ll be the safest place in town. And you can tell Flint to go there, too.”
While I talked to him, Donut scaled the wall and leaped to the roof of the home, stealing the Gnomish farseer telescope. She stole it in ten seconds flat. She was in and out.
I’d told Donut to leave thirty gold pieces on the roof as payment, but she told me she’d “forgotten.”
“Why don’t you tell them to go to the A.O.?” Donut asked. That was the only real saferoom tavern in town. It was in Weird Shit Alley. It stood for the Acrotomophilia Oasis. I didn’t know what that meant, but none of the other guys liked going over there. “The Toe isn’t a real saferoom either.”
“No, it’s not. But our personal space is. We can fit a lot of camels in there.”
“Mordecai’s not going to like that.”
“Mordecai can suck it if he doesn’t like it,” I said.
Donut didn’t have a response. She was still a little salty about the contents of her benefactor box, though she was putting on a brave face. The box had been empty, but then she’d received a notification that her sunglasses had received an update. An update that greatly enhanced her ability to determine the surface and the subsurface temperature of anything she looked at with precise detail.
Mordecai said that was a common tactic of benefactors. It cost a literal fortune to send exceptional items. It was more economical to send an item on one floor, and then send an upgrade for that same item on the next. And then another. Eventually, you’d end up with an item that would be Legendary or even Celestial box-worthy. The cost of four or five silver and bronze boxes was a fraction of the cost of sending a single Legendary.
Of course you’d have to survive through five floors to get the benefit. It was possible for them to send more than one box a floor, but according to Mordecai, the cost of that was even more astronomical.
In addition to its intended purpose—to help Donut root out changelings—I could see multiple useful applications of the upgrade, including the ability to find weaknesses on mobs. She could possibly use it to help me find traps and secret doors. She could set parameters and get a warning when things reached certain temperatures. There were dozens of options. Unfortunately, Donut had little patience for all of that. I couldn’t wear them, so Katia and I were baby-stepping her through customizing the glasses.
By the time we reached the town’s exit, which was now guarded by multiple dromedarians, she had figured out the overlay system.
Donut: TWO OF THE GUARDS ARE DIFFERENT THAN THE OTHERS.
I still didn’t know if all this changeling/dromedarian drama really meant anything. As always, there were layers upon layers of backstory, and only some of it was relevant. I knew from the last floor it was important to learn as much as we could because it usually revealed victory paths that would be otherwise obscured. But I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d already burned out any benefit we could get from this storyline when the tomb raider dudes killed the collateral guy.
I suspected that it didn’t matter anymore. But if it didn’t, why did Princess D’Nadia spend money to send Donut that upgrade? She possibly was as much in the dark as we were. In fact, considering the lack of people in this bubble, that was a very distinct possibility. She sent the upgrade because she thought she was being helpful and not because she knew something we didn’t.
We had an hour until it was fully dark. Once night descended, more mobs appeared. We wanted to get this done before then. The moment we were outside the gates, we went to work assembling the Chariot. It took four minutes this time.
The Chariot had a new addition since the last time we’d tested it. I mounted a four-chamber missile tube to the right of my seat. My seat was raised, and I could swivel 360 degrees. I controlled the Y axis of the tube with a handle on the side, allowing me to swing the launcher up and down. They were fired by me pulling a pin on the back. There was only a one-second delay between me pulling the pin and the missile firing, which wasn’t ideal. I needed to pull my hand away quickly, or it would be turned into a piece of charcoal. And I needed to be careful about where the back of the launcher was pointing when I fired. It’d be easy to accidentally blast the back of Katia’s head with flames. I had a better design in my head, but it would take too long to build. As always, safety came last.
Thanks to the neighborhood map we’d received from the dead goose, I could now also see the boss’s location. She was only about a half of a mile east of town, settled right atop a sand dune. She was just sitting there, recharging her batteries or whatever it was cyborg death birds did at night.
“She’s too close,” I said. “We’ll need to go west. See if we can get a mile and a half away.”
We wanted to see how far the missiles could go. I knew I couldn’t get far enough to test the full range, but I wanted to make sure the second stage portion actually worked. I knew in real-world conditions, the achievable propulsion distance was different between horizontal and vertical flight, but Mordecai seemed to think that didn’t matter. Especially since we were using the magical guided upgrades on each of the four missiles.
“If we move too far from town, we won’t be able to retreat as easily if the missiles don’t work,” Katia said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” She eased forward on the throttle, and we were off, moving across the desert. The chariot moved smoothly and quietly. She gradually increased the speed, the hot wind whipping at our faces.
“There,” I said, pointing to a raised dune near the center of the bowl. We climbed easily, coming to a stop. From our position, I had a good view of the entire area. Far to my right, the remnants of the Bactrian town continued to smolder. A few of the male thorny devils lumbered about, but they were all too far away to bother us.
High above, I caught the twinkle of the Wasteland. It was on the far edge of the bubble, glowing red against the dark sky. I knew once the sun rose, it’d be back, almost directly above our position now.
“Hand me the telescope, Donut.”
“I don’t like this, Carl,” Donut said. She sat on a little shelf just behind my head. “It’s still hot out here, and the sand gets everywhere. It’s five degrees hotter in the middle of the bowl than it is on the edges. I don’t understand why the ground is still so hot now that the sun is sinking away. It is not acceptable.”
I was starting to regret the new upgrade to her sunglasses. She’d been commenting on the temperature difference of items for an hour straight now.
“Just keep an eye out for mobs and give me the damn telescope.”
She grumbled some more but then produced the large, heavy scope. It had a clamp on the bottom, designed to be attached to either a table or the gunwale of a boat or airship. I attached the clamp to the left side of the chair and swung it over. I could use the telescope and aim the launcher at the same time.
I turned the chair 90 degrees and sighted the scope, looking for the borough boss.
“There you are,” I said, zooming in.
Even in the dwindling light, the magic
al telescope gave me an excellent view of the beast. Ruckus. The house-sized bird sat on the ground, head hanging low like it was asleep. The body of the creature vibrated up and down, like an engine.
I was expecting it to be more vulture-like, but it resembled a colossal hawk. A hawk wearing steampunk-style body armor. A real beak protruded from a brass, pipe covered helmet that obscured the bird’s eyes. A few wheels and cogs spun along the exterior of the armored main body. The folded wings on the sides of the creature appeared to be regular, organic wings.
I moved the telescope slightly, focusing on the giant bird’s main weapon. The regular-sized buzz-ards flew around with a chainsaw-like device attached underneath their bodies. They swooped down and cut through anything that tried to fight them. I knew Gwen’s team had a difficult time with them, and even the veteran waster patrol had to work to take one of them out. They used their guided missiles on those things more than they did against gnomish airplanes.
Ruckus had something similar, but much larger. The weapon sat on the ground next to the bird. It was permanently attached to the monster by a pair of thick cables which I knew it could retract and lengthen. It wasn’t a chainsaw, but more like a twenty-five-foot-long stick with ten spinning buzzsaws on it. The weapon hung vertically under the bird as it flew. I’d seen something similar once attached to a helicopter. They used it to easily sheer through trees and branches along power lines in remote areas. Gwen had said the flying multi-buzzsaw had trashed their under construction siege towers in seconds.
I moved the telescope back to the bird. I zoomed in one more tick, and the description popped up.
Ruckus. Spring-operated Chicken Hawk Sentinel.
Level 55 Borough Boss!
This is a bereft Minion of Shamus Chaindrive.
The great bugbear treasure hunter Shamus Chaindrive was known as both a paranoid and a greedy bastard. Having been betrayed one too many times, he no longer trusted any living soul. That is why his crew was always comprised of constructs and automatons.
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 13