Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  Messages from deceased Crawlers.

  “Oh. Oh no,” I said. It hit me like a damn truck. I slid off the edge of the counter I was leaning on and to the floor. Everyone in the room stopped talking and turned to look at me.

  “Carl?” Donut asked.

  The message was right there. I didn’t want to read it.

  I took a deep breath, and I clicked on it.

  Brandon: Hey bro. I’m sending this message to Imani and Elle, too. You wouldn’t believe what’s happening with Elle. But just in case they don’t make it, I wanted to get this out to you, too. It looks like this is the end for me. The third floor is about to collapse. Me and Henry—he was one of the residents—we’re holding the line against the advancing Shade Gremlins. I hate those fuckers. Imani, Elle, and the others are getting away, but it’s already too late for me. The floor timer is down to ten minutes, and that stairwell is twenty minutes away.

  I saw your escape last night on the recap episode, so I know you made it to number four. Everyone knows about that bomb you now got stuffed down your pants.

  Look, man. I got into a fight with my brother Chris, and he left the party. He took a few of the guys with him, but I can see they’re all dead. All except Chris. I know he’s alive because he’s still on my chat. I can see he’s alive, but it says he can’t accept my messages. I don’t know why. I think maybe he blocked me, but I’m not sure. He was never much of a talker. Mom said there was something wrong with him, maybe he was slow. But he ain’t slow. And even if he was… I said something stupid, and he got mad. He left, and now it’s too late to tell him I love him. I never said it. I’m about to die, and it’s all I can think about.

  So if you see him, tell him I said I was sorry, and that he was right. He’ll know about what. Tell him I said if there is an afterlife I promise not to give him shit ever again. He can eat all the damn traveler biscuits he wants. I promise not to get mad about him taking risks. Not about girls. Not about him stealing my Matchbox cars. Nothing.

  And tell him I love him. That’s the most important part. It’s always been the most important part, but I didn’t realize it until it was too late.

  I gotta go. Damn shade gremlins. Get them for me, brother. Get them all.

  Note: This message is from a deceased crawler. When you close this message, the crawler will be removed your message list.

  Hey, at least you’re still kickin’.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, gasping. The sudden loss was so unexpected, so out of nowhere I thought I’d had the breath knocked out of me. This is just like with mom. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

  “What is it?” Donut asked again after a few minutes of me just sitting there.

  I told them. Brandon was the only one of the group we’d added to our chat, which was stupid. I couldn’t talk to Imani or Chris to see if they were okay. For all we knew, Mrs. McGibbons was the only one left. I thought of all the work we’d done to get them down to that third floor. What a waste. What a goddamned waste.

  I hadn’t known him long. But he was a good man. He was my friend. In all of this death, he would barely be a blip. And that enraged me unlike anything else that had happened so far.

  I got up and turned toward the training room.

  “You need to apply your buffs first,” Mordecai called.

  “Fuck off, Mordecai,” I said.

  I entered the room, and an interface popped up, listing all of my trainable skills.

  I clicked Bare Knuckles (Current Skill: 8). A one-hour countdown timer appeared. Wooden dummies rose from the floor.

  You will not break me. Fuck you all. You will not break me.

  I went to work.

  A note from DoctorHepa

  I hope everyone has a great weekend! Thanks so much for reading! We have some awesome stuff on the horizon, but we all need the occasional reminder that this isn't always a happy, uplifting place. Life comes at you fast.

  * * *

  Chapter 77

  It had been several hours since I’d beaten my knuckles raw on the wooden dummies. Both Donut and Katia entered the training room about twenty minutes after I did. Donut worked on her dodge skill, bouncing back and forth while the hologram of a four-armed monster holding four whips lashed at her. Katia was on the other side of the room doing something similar, but instead she was jumping in front of rocks as they were being tossed at a holographic puppy by the same four-armed, virtual opponent.

  Neither of them said anything to me. When I finished, my level in Bare Knuckles had not risen. I knew it would take more than a single session to raise it once it was this high.

  From there, I went into the crafting space, which at the moment was just a giant, empty room. Mordecai was already in there, looking about.

  “You have three tables,” Mordecai said. He didn’t say or acknowledge what had happened earlier. “Go set them up, and then go out on your business. I’m going to spend the next several hours studying what has changed and what’s new with the crafting system because it seems they’ve tweaked it some since last time. Leave everything labeled an alchemical supply on the alchemy table. I’ll start working on a few things while you’re out.”

  I nodded. I pulled out the alchemy table and shoved it against a wall. It clicked loudly into place, and several menu items appeared over it, mostly regarding upgrades. I started pulling everything from my inventory in the alchemy category, which was a lot of stuff, from rat meat to that chest of supplies we’d bought from the drug dealer. By the time I was done, the simple table now looked as if a mad scientist had set up shop at a swap meet.

  I then put the sapper’s table against one wall and my engineering table against the other. I knew I would spend most of my time at the sapper table, but for now, I stood at the engineering one, which Mordecai said was a general, catch-all table for using magical tools to fashion items. I pulled my tools, like the Goo-inator 3000, which was a “shaping” tool and the Gorgon Marital Aid, which was a tool that added plasticity to rigid items and placed them on the table. I had a dozen other, slightly-too-small tools from the goblins, plus a regular flathead screwdriver and a few wrenches that I’d picked up after the Juicer boss fight.

  I had a few ideas of items I needed to make. My raw materials were a little lacking. I moved to my inventory and sorted through the crap.

  I had the massive breastplate of a swordsman guard, and I pulled it out, clunking it onto the table. I had managed to grab three of these things, plus a helmet and one of the giant swords. All of their values were relatively low, which had been disappointing. This metallic breastplate wasn’t enchanted. I was thinking maybe I could refashion it into something for Katia, but it was way too big for her. The thing was the size of an opened umbrella. I knew I’d need an armorer’s workbench to properly make wearable materials anyway. Plus this thing was heavy as shit. It looked like maybe it was made from actual iron, and it varied in thickness from one to about two and a half inches. While I could easily lift it with my over-40 strength, I knew before I’d never have been able to even make it budge.

  I held the Goo-inator in one hand and pointed it at the curved hunk of iron.

  The whole breastplate started blinking. A menu of multiple shapes popped up. I could flatten the whole thing out. Because of the plate’s thickness, I could shape it like a sheet, lower the width, and I’d end up with a large chunk of metal, almost like it was made of dough.

  The last item on the list of the tool’s shapes was Freeform.

  I clicked on freeform, and then using the wand, I put a slight bend into the material. It was similar to manipulating a shape using a computer graphic program, something I’d never been very good at. The metal groaned loudly as it was shaped, but it didn’t break.

  New achievement! Martha Stewart!

  You used a workbench to craft for the first time. The next thing you know you’ll be fashioning bottlecap earrings, drinking oat milk, and selling your ugly crap on Etsy while you wax poetic on Instagram about your “journey.”<
br />
  Reward: You’ve received a Bronze Crafter’s Box!

  I immediately opened the box, and it contained a nice pair of unenchanted pliers, a standard tape measure, and a bucket of pink glitter. Not a vial of glitter. Not a cup of glitter. A goddamned bucket full of the stuff. Even before I could add it to my inventory, some of the tiny pink squares blew out of the container and spread to the floor. I knew from experience that it was now all over. The glitter would never go away. I sighed and added the tools to the pile.

  I turned to Mordecai, who was hunched over his alchemy table way on the other side of the room.

  “I need to weld. Do you think I can get something like that?”

  He looked up. “Of course. In the meantime, you can probably get creative with that shaping tool. It’s not very precise and has a tendency to lower the strength of the items you shape, so if you get too creative, you’ll end up with crumbly junk. But you can take a separate item and twirl them together like a twist tie. Or make a some sort of joint. Just be careful. Those tools are no joke. Being in a saferoom may keep you from dying if you fuck something up at a workbench, but if you fuck up good enough, you’ll wish you were dead.”

  “Oh, by the way,” I called out. “While I was training, I talked to Bautista. He’s grouped up with some other crawlers. He’s on the Azure and Brown line. They’re at station number 199. They don’t have a non-colored line at their station, but they’re going to go down the Azure line today. He also got a fancy base thanks to that upgrade.”

  “I’ll add it to the list,” Mordecai said.

  “Okay,” I said. I leaned over the bench and started shaping the plate.

  * * *

  After a shower and applying my pedicure kit, we went back out into the world.

  We first stopped at the general store. Limp Richard the mole man leaned on the counter, reading a book as we browsed through the items on the shelves. He had a wide array of products, but most of it wasn’t noteworthy or useful. We only ended up purchasing one thing, a large, padded mallet. He’d listed it for 250 gold, and Donut talked him down to 150.

  He did have one other item that was interesting. In a dusty corner of his shop he had a thing called a Battery Fabricator. It was listed at 75,000 gold. I remembered that the descriptions at shops weren’t always fully accurate as I examined its properties.

  Battery Fabricator.

  I don’t really know how this thing works. It was taken from a dwarven automaton factory. You pour a handful of mana potions in, stick one of these metal blocks in, and a charged battery comes out on the other side. Comes with a box of 50 of the battery things. Price not negotiable.

  I picked up one of the battery rectangles, which he had piled behind the machine. The description for the batteries was the same as the unit. The system wouldn’t give me a real description unless I purchased the item. Each battery was about the size and weight of a brick. “Do you know how much of a charge these things hold?”

  Limp Richard shrugged. “You’d have to ask a dwarf. The automatons they use can run a long time before needing a new battery, I know that. They’re better than the soul gems the elves use. Did you know soul gems run off actual souls? It’s quite morbid. Plus soul gems are very unstable.”

  “Yeah, I may have heard that somewhere,” I said drily.

  The machine was about the size of a microwave. I knew a bit about the chemical processes required to make real batteries, and this didn’t make much sense. But nothing in this place made sense, especially once you added magic into the mix. Still, the moment I saw the unit, I knew I wanted it. But the price seemed outrageous, and even if we had that much money, I couldn’t justify spending that much on something just because I thought it might be cool.

  We ended up selling a bunch of random junk for a couple thousand gold. As Mordecai warned us more than once, we didn’t want to sell too much stuff to a general store. They never offered the best prices. By the time Donut was done negotiating all the patience out of the talking mole, the creature was in a pretty foul mood.

  “What’s that book you got there?” I asked, leaning in after Donut and Limp Richard finished their negotiations. It looked like a tattered English-language sci-fi book. There was a cat on the cover. I recognized the author, but I hadn’t read the book. “Hey, Donut, check it out. It’s a book about cats.”

  Limp Richard nodded, his expression brightening just a hair. “It’s an Andre Norton book. A lot of his books are about cats.”

  “Andre Norton was a woman,” I said. “May I?” I picked the book up. I flipped it over. My dad had owned several of these. I’d mostly read the westerns, but I’d read a few of the old sci-fi books as well. My dad hated cats, though, so he never had any books with cats on the cover.

  “I’ve read this one a few dozen times,” Limp Richard said. “There are a lot of earth books floating around the dungeon, but there’s never enough.” He sighed. “And now it’s too late to get more, and I don’t have anybody nearby to trade with. Shopkeepers like myself don’t have access to the entertainment feeds like the guides and guildmasters. And most of those guys just access the tunnel or watch earth television and movies. All I can get is physical media, which means books and comics. All I have is 15 books. Sixteen if you count the one with the last few chapters torn out.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. I pulled five Louis L’Amour books from my inventory. I’d read each of them already, from Sackett’s Land to Lando. “I’ll trade you these five for five of your books. Straight-up trade.”

  He picked up the first book. “A western? I’ve never read one of your westerns. Is it any good?” He frowned. “They’re short.”

  “They’re good,” I said. “These were pretty popular books. But you’re right. They tend to be short.”

  “Okay,” he said. He went to the back and returned with a handful of books, spreading them out. “Pick some, and it’ll be a deal.”

  All of the books were science fiction or 80’s horror. I noted the one that was missing the last few chapters was a book I’d read long ago. Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon. I left that one on the table and picked up five sci-fi books. Three Andre Norton books including the one he’d been reading, Breed to Come. I also picked up The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

  “I don’t know if we’ll be back this way,” I said to the mole as I added the books to my inventory, “but if we are, and if you like the books, I’ll trade you the rest of the ones I’ve already read.”

  “Okay,” Limp Richard said as we left. “There are a lot of my kind on this floor. Don’t give them away to any of those other guys. They’re all book hogs!”

  “You should have asked for more,” Donut said as we walked out. “You’re a terrible negotiator, Carl.”

  “Oh don’t worry about that,” I said. I looked over my shoulder, and the mole had already picked up the first book. “If I learned anything from my time in the coast guard, it’s the value of entertainment to a bored man who has run out of books to read. In a couple of days, he’ll be jonesin’ pretty hard. Once we figure out how to backtrack on the rails, we’ll need to swing by this place again.”

  * * *

  We decided against just jumping onto the Nightmare Express until we had more information, but I wanted to see the train and examine the sign. It turned out the train only came once every hour and a half, and we’d missed it while we were in Limp Richard’s shop.

  We didn’t need to see the train to know it was obviously a different type. The tracks were wider, and while the train was still underground, there was no electrified third rail. While that other platform for the red line was especially long, long enough to accommodate all the cars, this one was even longer. It looked twice as long.

  The red line had been a one-way line that started at station #11 and ended at #435. This one traveled in a figure-eight pattern, which meant once one got on it, they’d eventually end up back at this station. That was good to know. The tra
in only had five stops total, though it appeared there was a good distance between each stop. Four of the five stops were transit stations. The one stop that was not a transit station was station #436, and it appeared at the very top of the figure-eight.

  Unlike the map outside of the red station, this one gave slightly more information. It gave the colors for each of the transit stations it intersected. This station was yellow and red. The next one on the track was station 283, but it was the mauve and purple line. The stop after that was stop 436, then stop 283 again, but this time was the green line and the yellow line. Then it was station 83 again, but a different station 83. It was the tangerine and plum line.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said after I relayed all the info to Mordecai. “They weren’t kidding when they named this thing ‘the Iron Tangle.’ My head hurts already. I hate math.”

  “I’m not a fan of math myself,” Katia said. She was examining the map, but I knew for her, all it showed was the figure eight and a single dot indicating our current station. “But you said up here is the green and yellow station? That means it crosses the yellow line twice. That seems like it’s important to know.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I guess if we ride the yellow all the way up to 283, we can hop on this nightmare train to backtrack. But the stairwells are at stations numbered 12, 24, 36, 48, and 72. So we need to find one of these loops that goes lower than 72.”

  From there, we went to the landing of the yellow line. The map here was identical to the map of the red line. The transit station numbers were the same, though the line itself was shaped differently, like a giant, upside-down fishhook. As I was looking at the map, the train pulled up.

  There were monsters on board. Not nearly as many as there’d been as the red line, but there were enough to give me pause.

  The train slid to a stop, and the door opened, revealing a squat, gray-skinned creature with no neck and a shark-like mouth and a pair of black, beady eyes. Wisps of black, oily hair dusted the top of the thing. The monster stood about four-and-a-half feet tall and wobbled on a pair of toothpick legs that seemed woefully unprepared for the job of holding up the creature’s corpulent, pig-like body. The monster held a wooden club filled with nails. It howled gibberish at us.