“I’m guessing they’re a sign of my new religion,” I said as we trudged toward the stairwell. We wanted to examine it to make sure Quan really went down there. Plus there had to be a saferoom around here somewhere. Even if everything got destroyed, they would persist.
The ground was too hot for Donut, and she rode on my shoulder. We’d had to put Mongo away, too. The area was barren. “Religion? Whatever do you mean? You can’t join a religion, Carl. You wake up at noon on Sundays. I don’t even know what the ten commandments are, but I’m certain I’ve watched you break almost all of them multiple times.”
I told her what I did and why I did it. Before I could finish, we were interrupted.
Mordecai: Which one of you two idiots is responsible for this?
Carl: What?
Mordecai: A shrine just appeared in the saferoom. It’s a sun disk with a cup and a skull. It doesn’t say what god this is for, but I’m guessing it’s Emberus.
Donut: CARL DID IT. DON’T GET MAD AT ME.
Donut sighed. “Really, Carl. We could’ve avoided all this just by going down the stairs earlier.” She examined the twin suns again and clucked with disdain. “With your new jacket and bandana and tattoos, you look like someone whose picture gets put on the news because he did something involving indecent exposure and a Wal-Mart. What does this new religion actually mean for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, grinning sheepishly. “I’m kind of scared to click on the notification.”
“Don’t be a baby, Carl. Guys covered in disgusting tattoos shouldn’t be babies. Look, there’s a saferoom that way. You can find out what you did while we walk. Let’s get inside before Imani and Katia start blowing everything up.”
I sighed, and I pulled up the notification as I turned toward the saferoom. I couldn’t see the room in the darkness, but it was only about a quarter mile beyond the stairwell.
Congratulations, Crawler. You have devoted your life and fate to one of service. You are now an adherent of Emberus, God of Sun and Ash!
Your ranking in the church: Acolyte.
Warning: You do not have a cleric or paladin class. As such, you may not ascend past Devotee. See the Deity tab for more information.
Emberus, the personification of a star’s destructive power, welcomes you into his warm embrace. He welcomes all who accept his core philosophy. Emberus believes power, once held, must never sit idle. It is to be used and never squandered.
Because of your new-found faith, you must adhere to the following rules, lest you provoke the god’s wrath.
You mustn’t cause harm to fellow worshippers of Emberus.
You must stop and offer a single drop of blood at an Emberus temple at least once a day. If no temples are found in a 30-hour period, you must make the offering at the sun shrine that has now appeared in your personal space.
Five percent of all looted gold must also be tossed into the shrine.
You may not own or wield any magical gear that is blessed by the god Hellik.
You must successfully complete all issued church quests.
A drop of blood and some coins once a day didn’t seem so bad.
I didn’t know what a “Church quest” was. I couldn’t remember seeing anything like that in the cookbook, but that was the most worrisome of all the rules. Donut was going to be pissed by the 5% gold payment, but we could work around it by making her loot the majority of our kills. I didn’t have anything in my inventory that had anything to do with Hellik. I moved on to the benefits.
All adherents in good standing with the God Emberus receive the following holy benefits:
Access to all Temples of Emberus.
All temples of Emberus now appear on your map.
All temples of Hellik now appear on your map.
All worshippers of Emberus will be indicated with a symbol.
All worshippers of Hellik will be indicated with a symbol.
All Hellik-worshipping NPCs, crawlers, and mobs killed by you will now offer 100% more experience.
Immunity to Burn effect.
All physical attacks by you have a 10% chance to inflict Burn.
Free access* to Club Vanquisher, regardless of previous and current affiliations.
Every five consecutive days of worship, you will receive a boon from the god.
Additional benefits and responsibilities will become available as your worship circle increases.
That was actually pretty good, especially the access to Club Vanquisher. There was an asterisk after “Free Access” without any sort of corresponding information, which was worrying. But I guessed I’d figure that out when I tried to get inside. Last I heard, however, the club was still closed thanks to Prepotente going apeshit.
The burn effect was good. It was similar to poison, where it continued to damage the target over time. I wasn’t sure what the benefits of temples were. There was very little information about this stuff in the cookbook, likely because this was all cleric territory, a class that’d never receive the book in the first place.
The only temples I could recall seeing were entrances to Club Vanquisher, but I hadn’t noticed if they were for different deities. I knew all clerics and paladins had to pick a god upon class selection, and they’d all been doing this stuff since the third floor, so temples had to be all over the place. I had one additional notification waiting for me.
Message from Emberus.
I swallowed. It was set up just like a regular chat notification, but it glowed with a golden light. I clicked on it.
Emberus: My child, you have reunited me with my son’s lost pet. I am grateful. I have granted you a boon. But our work is not done. I have two tasks for you.
You have a received a boon from your god!
Your constitution has been raised by 25% for 30 hours!
The message seemed so normal. It was odd that the message came to me this way. The system described him as unhinged, but nothing about any of the benefits or requirements seemed too crazy. If all the boons were this good, then it was totally worth it. The moment I clicked away from the message, I received two new notifications.
Unlike regular quests, these came in the god’s gravelly voice.
New Quest. Find Out Who Killed My Son.
Geyrun was murdered. Find out who did it and why. My only clue is that the most obvious suspect, my brother Hellik, was in council with the rest of us when it happened. Visit the high cleric at the Emberus Shrine at Club Vanquisher for additional details.
Time Limit: There is no time limit for this quest. However, you will receive a smite if you attempt to exit the 18th floor of the world dungeon before this task is complete.
Reward: That depends on who did it.
Based on all the previous hints at this, I figured this was coming. At least there was no hurry. I clicked over to the next notification. Emberus’s voice took on a decidedly angry tone for this one.
New Quest. Kill Hellik.
My twin brother Hellik, god of Sun and Life seeks to kill both me and my older brother, Taranis God of Thunder and regent to the Celestial Throne. He is a fool. He is a danger. He has no right to exist. As an adherent, it is your task to kill him. You will receive a bonus if his death is painful.
Time Limit: Hellik must die before you reach the 12th floor. If he still lives, you will receive a smite.
Reward: Slaying Hellik will result in a Celestial God Box.
Warning: Killing a god may have some unintended consequences for all crawlers.
I took a deep breath. If Hellik looked anything like Emberus did, killing him wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Gods were invulnerable and level 250.
Again, this was something to worry about later. The idea of a celestial box was intoxicating, but the notion of harming one of those things was absurd. Even with Katia’s special bolt that removed their invulnerability for a few seconds, it just seemed impossible.
We paused at the stairwell as I explained to Donut and Mordecai all of the god’s benefit
s and tasks. As expected, Donut lost her mind at the 5% tithe.
“Well you’re just going to have to immediately remove yourself from this religion. It’s as simple as that, Carl. I don’t know what you were thinking. We’ll just have to live with whatever this smite business is. Surely it can’t be worse than five percent. It’s an outrage!”
“Five percent is a lot, but it’s nothing compared to some religions. You know Bea’s parents paid twenty percent of their income to their church? They used to get mad at her when she didn’t donate, too.”
“Twenty percent? I find that hard to believe, Carl.”
“It’s true. And her dad was a lawyer. They made a ton of money.”
“Wow. It’s no wonder they were always so grumpy.”
Mordecai also called me an idiot, but he was distracted. He said we needed us to get back to the saferoom as soon as possible. Thanks to Samantha’s help, he’d figured out the yam thing. He had a potion for me.
The stairwell was placed atop a perfectly-square, large sheet of metal with a small lip around it, like a giant cookie sheet that was about 10x10 feet. The stairwell was just a magical hole cut in the center. I wondered what had happened here in this bubble.
Fresh blood splattered on the metal. That was from Quan’s passage. I smiled, looking down at the bare arm still in my hand. Had I just been walking with this thing in my hand? Huh. I hadn’t managed to rip or tear the robe, unfortunately, but I was pretty sure I’d stopped him from using his lightning attack for good. Some crawlers had a limb regeneration benefit, but the spell was pretty rare. And apparently the limb didn’t just regrow right away. Hopefully he learned his lesson.
“He’s going to try to hurt us now,” Donut said, looking down at the arm. “We already have Maggie and Maestro and Lucia after us. You should have killed him.”
“I would have, but he got away,” I said.
“Are you really going to keep the arm? Because that’s really gross, Carl.”
“Of course I’m going to keep it.” The saferoom now appeared on my map, but I still couldn’t see anything. Donut said it was a hatch into the ground.
He had three rings on the fingers. I pulled the first one off. It was a simple plus two ring of strength. These things had been pretty common on the first two floors. I put it on, making it my fifth ring. I could wear a total of ten rings, but I’d try to avoid putting one on my thumbs if I could.
The second ring was more interesting.
Rockard’s Ring of Sniping.
This amber-stoned ring is named after Rockard, one of the dungeon’s most infamous crawlers. This orcish warrior was known for his uncanny ability to swoop in at the last moment and steal glory from other crawlers, gaining the best loot and experience. Everybody hated him. It was great!
Fun fact. This guy led his season’s top 10 list until he was knifed in his sleep by his own mother. Luckily for you, crawlers can’t be killed by other crawlers in saferooms anymore. A shame, really.
Wearing this ring imbues the following benefits:
The Ripe benefit.
The Loaded benefit.
I looked up both of the benefits.
Ripe.
All creatures with less than 50% health are indicated on your map. This does not increase your map’s view, but used in conjunction with other skills such as Pathfinder, it makes being a glory-stealing asshole really easy.
No wonder Quan had received such a reputation. The description was correct. Something like this made experience sniping simple. I remembered what had happened at the end of the last floor when he’d attempted to kill the province boss that Miriam Dom and Prepotente had been trying to kill. He’d screwed it up and fled.
The next benefit probably hadn’t been too useful thus far. That would’ve changed for him starting the next floor. I grinned.
Loaded.
All non-hidden creatures wearing magical gear are indicated on your map. Particularly useful when you only want to hang out with the real fashionistas and not just the posers wearing fake shit. Also good if you want to sneak up behind someone, bonk them on their head, and steal all their stuff.
I also added this ring to my finger.
The last ring wasn’t enchanted. I blinked at that until I realized this was a ring from before. It was a gold band stuck on his index finger. It didn’t come off easily, like it was too small. I twisted and pulled. The finger crunched. “Whoops,” I muttered.
The description just said Sappy gold ring. Worthless. Toss it. I held it up to the light orb floating over us, and I could see a few faded characters carved on the inside of the band. “For Daddy.” I shoved the ring back on the finger, but it wouldn’t go all the way. I pushed it to the first knuckle and then pulled the whole thing into my inventory.
I touched the metal sheet containing the stairwell. I was expecting it to be burning hot, but it was cool to the touch. I pushed it like a sled all the remaining way to the saferoom. It moved easily.
I figured it’d be best to have an escape directly outside the safe room. I didn’t want to stay here in this weird world since we had so much to do, but we were stuck for the moment, and it was better to be prepared.
Katia: Louis just ate some monkey soup and got sick. He rushed into the personal space bathroom before I could stop him.
I cursed and immediately moved to my menu, clicked over to the second tab of my scratch pad, and I erased everything in the notes section, including the map and the coordinates. I wrote: Louis, if you see this, don’t say a word. The words underlined themselves one by one as the magical quill started to write on the paper attached to the inside of the toilet-stall door. The underlining stopped at Louis, if you see.
Warning: You are out of ink.
I suppressed a growl. Last I’d checked, we’d still had half of a jar left. The container sat on a little shelf I’d installed on the inside of the stall, and both Katia and Donut knew by now to be careful when they pushed the door open since the whole thing wobbled. That idiot must have spilled it, especially if he was rushing toward the toilet and slammed into the door.
The main bathroom in the personal space was like the bathrooms in regular saferooms. You walked in, and there was a sink and mirror against one wall. The upgraded shower was on one side in the pink-tiled room, and the stall was on the other. The metal stall door had a lock on it and looked just like any typical bathroom stall one would find anywhere from before. They were not exclusive spaces like the random ones throughout the dungeon. Inside the wide stall there was a single toilet, a stand-up urinal, and a magical litter box. Mordecai, as a shapeshifter, apparently didn’t ever use the bathroom unlike Katia.
NPCs couldn’t enter the bathrooms, or any of the other rooms like the training room or crafting room, without being escorted in. When the dromedarian kids needed to go, we sent them back out into the safe room or just told them to hold it. If that wasn’t possible, like when a god was outside trashing the world, Katia escorted them in and removed the paper, ink, and quill before they could see it and say something out loud.
Fellow crawlers were a different story. They had free access to the bathroom once they were inside. However, we told everyone to use the bathrooms out in the attached saferooms instead. Katia said it was because they gave us limited supplies, which was true, but it was also because the stall was now the only place we could trade messages without anybody seeing.
We’d started trading messages by using one of Mordecai’s dry erase markers against the interior metal, but the cleaner bot kept erasing it. I eventually figured out that the magical paper, pen, and quill set—the Coffee Shop Author Kit—worked even better since it was two ways. I attached the paper to the interior wall using a magnetic clip I’d looted from the Juicer’s boss room all the way on the first floor. If Katia wrote something using the magical pen, It’d appear in my scratchpad, and I could respond right away. Donut could also use it, but it required her to jump on the shelf housing the ink and to write on the paper using her mouth. She�
��d only attempted it once. She wrote, I AM NOT USING THIS, CARL, and that was it.
Katia had removed everything once we packed the personal space with refugees, but she’d just replaced the quill and paper to relay some information about the coordinates from her latest calculation. She had failed to remove it before Louis barged in.
Louis: Hey Carl, you didn’t tell me your bathroom was haunted! Also, don’t eat the monkey soup. It’s gross.
Carl: We’ll be inside in a minute. Why don’t you check out the magical shower? You won’t get the buffs, but I think you can still use it.
Louis: Uh, okay.
That would shut him up for a minute.
We finished positioning the stairwell by the saferoom hatch, which was a round, trap door in the rocky ground. I pulled it open, and I went down a short ladder into a standard-looking pub.
Entering the All-Seeing Spleen.
The saferoom’s proprietor was a human-sized cyclops guy who appeared surprised at our entrance. He was dressed in rags and had a homeless look about him. His name was Xander.
“Hey,” the man said. “I thought you lot left. What was all that rumbling outside?”
“Just a god,” I said. “He’s gone now.”
Xander the cyclops nodded. “At least the prophet is dead. If you want food, you’re out of luck. All of my supplies just disappeared. I only have cans of Jimbo soup. And crackers.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’re just passing through.” I paused before the entrance to the personal space. “Hey, do you know if there are any Desperado Clubs near here?”
The man leaned back and rubbed his grizzled chin. “There was one the next crater over, but it’s quite a walk. Dunno if it’s still there. There was one in the tunnels, too, but since the Rat Queen died, the bloodworms took over, and I wouldn’t dare go in there.”
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 48