Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  I told all of this to Li Jun, who nodded thoughtfully.

  “The monsters will likely come at us from all sides just before the stairs open, even if we do prevent the wrath ghouls from forming a boss monster.”

  “Probably,” I said. “The whole thing is designed to push the monsters toward the stairwells. We all have to work together to survive.”

  “Why do we not go to station 24?” he asked. “That station also has stairs but no ghouls.”

  “We still have three days,” I said. “It’s too late to stop the monsters from becoming a boss at station 48, but if we can prevent it from happening at 36, it’ll be our best bet. We don’t yet know what sort of monsters form once the creatures suffering from stage three die. But it looks like they’ll head to 24, and it’ll probably be something terrible. At least with station 36, we know what we’re facing.”

  He nodded. “Okay. What will you be doing?”

  “We have some more friends who are trapped all the way at the end of the line. We’re going to save them. Each and every one.”

  A note from DoctorHepa

  Whoohoo! It's Friday! It's book release day. Once again I'm anticipating being super busy this week, so I have this all prescheduled and set to go up on Royal Road automagically. Hopefully the world hasn't ended or I haven't died or something as that would be a major bummer. Anyway, I wish to reiterate that my book is now out and available on Amazon.com. If you are one of the folks who received an ARC, please leave an honest review over at Amazon. If you wish to support the story, buying a copy, telling a friend, sending me tasteful noodz, all great ways to support me. Seriously, I appreciate you all.

  * * *

  We are at the endgame for this floor, but a few things still gotta happen before it is done. Take this with you. It will help.

  * * *

  Chapter 98

  Views: 974.1 Quadrillion

  Followers: 5.2 Quadrillion

  Favorites: 1.9 Quadrillion

  Time to Level Collapse: 3 days, 3 hours

  “We’re saving those guys, too? Really?” Donut said after Li Jun left.

  Katia emerged from the small apartment. “We need to slow down. I think I see station 75 coming up on my map.”

  “Seriously, Carl,” Donut continued. “We just helped to save these guys. How are we going to help everyone at the end of the line?”

  “I have no idea,” I said as I moved back to the train’s controls. “But I won’t try if you guys don’t think we should.”

  Donut sighed. She whispered something to Katia. They both started laughing.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re going to get us killed one way or the other, Carl. It might as well be for a good cause,” Donut said.

  I grunted. “Well they do say I’m crazy.”

  * * *

  The ghouls streaming out of station 72 appeared to home in on the closest large gathering of crawlers. Before, they’d moved up toward the crawlers trapped at station 101, but after Li Jun led the 1,000 plus survivors to the stairwell platform at station 36, meeting up with the exhausted team Meadow Lark, the ghouls started flowing in that direction instead. That, added with the wrath ghouls traveling up from the trainyards, made it so they were besieged the moment they got off the train.

  That was okay for now. The way the platforms funneled passengers to the stairwell stations created multiple, defensible chokepoints. It’d be tough, but the group should be able to keep the station clear. Since we’d discovered the secret escape hatch that led to the employee line, the defenders could keep themselves supplied and refreshed. We sent out mass messages to everyone who would listen of the plan. Last we heard, there were multiple groups set up in other instances of station 36 doing the same, plus another group that was going to try their luck at holding a station 24 and a few more teams who were going to attempt to kill the ghoul generators at 12 and 72. Everyone was avoiding the boss at station 48. I wished them all luck.

  In addition to the people who’d managed to make it to the stairwells, there was a rising chorus of crawlers who found themselves trapped at the abyss. If they had those hats, they could just step through one of the thousand plus portals and teleport to a trainyard. But an increasing number were finding themselves at the edge of the pit with no way to escape.

  Despite my earlier thoughts, I now suspected there was only a single abyss. I was starting to get a sense of how the entire railway looked. The whole thing was shaped like one of those spirograph drawings. The trainyards dotted the exterior edges of the pattern, spaced at regular intervals. The colored lines looped around, over, and under each other, but all led to a single point in the center, which was the pit.

  Katia, who studied the map more than anyone, continued to insist there was something that we were missing. I didn’t care as long as we knew how to get from point A to point B.

  There were currently about 500-600 people trapped there at the end of the line, with more appearing by the moment. Word was starting to spread that you needed the hat to utilize that escape, so those without were mostly braving the “ghoul coaster,” as Elle had dubbed it, back to the trainyards.

  The crawlers had been desperately searching the interior walkways of the pit for the elusive, camouflaged exits that would lead to stop 436 where they could in turn get to the named-train switching stations. However, the lizard monsters appeared to be constantly generated, just like the ghouls, and that was making it difficult for them to search. A few battles later, and the interior gangways had started to collapse. That nixed my idea of going back to the trainyard and using the Nightmare to return to the abyss.

  That left us with only one option. We had to take the battered and half-destroyed Vermillion car all the way to the end of the line and distribute as many of the hats as possible. The trip would take about a full day and would be fraught with danger. If the train broke down or the line was blocked or the power went out, we’d be fucked. Surely there would be monsters crawling all over the line, and we’d have to plow through them all. It was a terrible idea, and I knew Mordecai would have a coronary if he knew we were even thinking about this. Still, what else could we do? We all agreed that was the plan for now unless someone came up with something better.

  We had about a day to find an alternative before it would be too late.

  We used station 75 to quickly disengage the front engine and send Li Jun up to the other engine. A few ghouls were out on the lines, but we sent a group ahead of us to deal with it while we worked. I saw no sign of Eva. The remaining daughters held back, disappearing into the crowd. Brynhild’s Daughters truly was no more.

  I couldn’t help but think that was for the best. Hekla had built the entire party around herself and that crossbow. They had too many healers and mages and not enough damage dealers and not a tank amongst them. The system had worked great early on, but I suspected the entire team would’ve fallen apart eventually. Maybe now they’d all find groups where they would be better utilized.

  We decided to keep Katia hidden while we unhooked the train, lest someone’s emotions get the best of them. I traded fist bumps as I loudly exclaimed that I needed people’s hats and any keys they’d gathered along the way.

  My fellow crawlers were standoffish at first considering what had happened with Hekla, plus Donut and I looked like extras from a Hellraiser movie. But once people learned about why I was collecting the hats, a chorus went out. I’d been expecting people to selfishly hold onto them just in case there was one last trick, or so they could sell them later, but that’s not what happened at all. People worked together. They coordinated. They spread the word. In twenty minutes, I had over 700 of the hats piled in front of me plus another fifteen colored-line keys that would also work for the portals. It was enough, for now. Hopefully it’d remain that way.

  Yes, I thought. There is hope for us. Not a lot. But it’s there.

  “Carl, we could sell these for over three million gold,” Donut whispered a
s I started pulling them into my inventory. Her eyes got huge. “Three and a half million! I bet I could sell them for even more. Carl, we’ll be rich!”

  “Yeah, that’d play great on the show. We’d be like Bea’s cousin who pretended she had cancer and got all that money on Gofundme.”

  “What if we figure out how to save the people without using the hats? Can I sell them, then?”

  I laughed. “Absolutely,” I said.

  * * *

  After the train left, leaving the three of us alone with the battered subway car, we spent some time exploring the strange station 75. This was one of the last major parts of the railway we hadn’t yet investigated. I hoped we’d find something to help us. We set Mongo free, and the dinosaur squawked angrily at us for being cooped up for so long. He quickly got over it, instead getting distracted by the blood and gore covering our bodies. I had to smack his beak several times to keep him from licking me.

  It was clear right away that this station was different from the others. Multiple tracks led off to a small-scale yard, consisting of a few dozen flatbed train cars designed to be occupied by no more than a handful of riders at a time. There were a few different kinds of the small cars. I assumed these were for the hobgoblins to get to the crashed trains in order to fix them. We would investigate once we cleared the station.

  We walked through a tunnel that led to a large, sprawling cavern filled with squat buildings, mostly warehouses with no doors and open-area workshops. The entire chamber had been turned to a graveyard. It had been overrun. Hundreds of ghoul corpses littered the ground. But there were also gnoll and hobgoblin bodies sprinkled throughout. There’d been explosions, too, as evidenced by scorch marks throughout the industrial-style station. Most of the gnoll bodies had been devoured, leaving nothing but broken pieces of spears and armor. I took it all, though little was useful.

  “I think someone was here already,” I said. “All of them look as if they’ve already been looted. I haven’t found a single gold piece.”

  Upon examination, the system indicated all the ghouls were killed by gnolls and hobgoblins, and the gnolls and hobgoblins were mostly kills by the ghouls. Though a lot of the gnolls were also killed by hobgoblins. That didn’t surprise me. Hobgoblins equaled explosives. And explosives equaled collateral damage.

  Right in the middle of the cavern were three intact buildings sitting next to one another. A gnoll armory. Something called a hobgoblin repair shop. And a saferoom. A glorious, beautiful saferoom. I saw with dismay that the armory’s door was open. Whomever had come before us had already gotten inside. I wondered if they’d also raided the hobgoblins’ stash. Probably, which was too bad.

  The closest transfer station was 73, but the Vermillion line did not stop there, and there was no secret entrance like with the employee line, making this saferoom especially valuable. We needed to figure out this station’s secrets as quickly as possible, but we also needed a shower and to sleep and to reset our buffs. Plus, the recap would be on soon.

  We made a line toward the bar, which was called “The Downward Dog.” A handwritten sign attached to the front door read, “Oi! No hobgoblins!” I pushed the door open to find the place was similar to most of the tavern-style bars on the third floor. It was not a converted earth restaurant. That was kind of odd.

  I realized what the difference was. There was still a screen over the bar, but there were no rooms for rent here. There was still an entrance to our personal space, but this was more like the local bars they had at the entrance to the Desperado Club, meaning this wasn’t a true saferoom. We couldn’t open boxes inside the bar, nor were we protected from mobs.

  The stench of beer-soaked wood assaulted my senses as we stepped deeper into the dark room. The tavern was empty except for a single gnoll bartender who was asleep on top of the bar, surrounded by empty bottles. He snored loudly. Mongo walked up and started sniffing the creature. I noted he was a Shade Gnoll, which was something we hadn’t seen before. He looked more like a hyena than a jackal.

  “There’s gotta be a story attached to this,” I said. “We’ll get it out of him after we shower.” I turned toward the doorway that led to our saferoom. We entered.

  “Don’t track blood on the floors,” Katia called as we all tracked blood on the floor. “God, I can just hear my mother now. Katia, take off your shoes. You’re going to grow up and have a filthy home. It turns out she was right.” She laughed as she tiptoed through the room and toward her space. She still left dirty, red prints on the floor.

  At that moment, it hit me. Katia was now and forever a part of the team. Nobody needed to say it out loud. We all knew. While this would never be “home,” this space was just for us and only us. The three of us.

  I grinned. “My dad once made me sleep in a tent in the yard because I had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop.”

  “Miss Beatrice once used scissors to get poop off my butt,” Donut said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Once?”

  “We’re having a moment here, Carl. Don’t ruin it.”

  * * *

  Despite all of that insane craziness of the past day, neither Donut nor I received anything except a handful of standard adventurer boxes. And one of my achievements didn’t have anything to do with the battle with Hekla or for killing all those ghouls.

  New achievement! Mentally Unstable Clothing Hoarder!

  You have over 500 of the exact same, stackable clothing item in your inventory.

  What the hell is wrong with you? You planning on opening a thrift store? You might want to see a shrink. One that your group doesn’t immediately kill.

  Reward: We don’t reward this sort of behavior. It’s weird.

  Katia, on the other hand, received 10 loot boxes. We all showered first before coming out to watch her open her loot. We came out to find Mongo “cleaning” the floors.

  “Gross, Mongo,” I said.

  The dinosaur squawked at me.

  Katia opened her first box and looked at me, grinning. “Sorry, Carl,” she said as the dagger tattoo formed on her neck. “I know you wanted to get me into Club Vanquisher.”

  “Oh my god, yay!” Donut exclaimed as she realized what had just happened. The cat had gone from a red, matted nightmare to poofed out and washed, ready for the stage. She smelled of lilacs. “We can go dancing now!” She gasped. “You can meet Sledgie! This is great!”

  “I can’t wait,” she said. I laughed.

  Katia sobered somewhat after opening her next box. A gold savage box, which she’d received for being a player killer. Instead of coupons, it contained a skill potion that gave her the Find Crawler skill. It was the same skill that Maggie My potentially had, though this was only level three. She downed it immediately. It put the name of all nearby crawlers on her map, and she could sort and find them using the list. It wouldn’t be until a higher level that she’d be able to actually hunt down and find those not currently on the map, plus I wasn’t so certain it’d find crawlers using stealth. Not yet. But it was a great skill to have.

  She received an achievement for collecting the bounty, and a legendary bounty box which was that 500,000 gold. She also received an achievement for being the first to collect a bounty, but it didn’t come with anything. Donut complained loudly about that one.

  However, she did snag one more awesome item. She got something called a Platinum Slam Master box. She’d gotten it for killing a certain amount of mobs using her momentum. I watched as the item appeared. It was a gold wrestling belt, like any regular heavyweight champion belt they’d give to a WWE star.

  “Who is Christopher Pallies?” she asked as she examined it.

  “I don’t know,” I said, taking the belt from her so I could look.

  Enchanted Wrestling Belt of the Great Gorgo

  While you’ll never be as amazing as the greatest, most beautiful wrestler of all time—Christopher Alan Pallies—you will look pretty snazzy when you wrap this bad boy around your waist.

  This enchanted be
lt offers the following benefits:

  +5% Strength

  +5% Constitution

  +The Avalanche benefit.

  The added stats alone made this a really good item. The Avalanche benefit was pretty badass.

  Avalanche.

  This benefit is straightforward. If you hit a living creature with your body while you are moving, the force exerted upon that body will be as if they were hit by twice the mass.

  Your entire body must be moving for this benefit to activate. This benefit’s power will not translate to weapons.

  You might want to take this off if you plan on getting busy with someone. Especially if you’re the top.

  “Man, we need to stick you to the front of another train,” I said, handing the belt back to her. Her rush ability would also be even more powerful, but I didn’t say that part out loud. She still didn’t want to talk about the Hekla incident.

  She was, however, mostly back to her regular self. She was laughing and joking with us. I couldn’t tell if she’d truly recovered from the trauma of the day, or if she was just good at covering it up. I suspected the latter. Either way, she’d grown into one of the most powerful crawlers in the dungeon, and I didn’t think that’d quite sunk in yet.

  “That leaves everything except the platinum fan box. I guess they’re voting on it now,” she said. “Do you think we’ll see that Chaco guy again?”

  “I hope not,” I said. She would get to open the fan box about 15 hours before Mordecai’s time-out expired. I actually did hope she’d get the prize carousel, so she could pick instead of being at the mercy of the fans. But I wouldn’t say that out loud.

  “What should we do with all of this gold?” she asked.

  Donut gasped. “Are we going shopping? Do you think if we buy a lot of stuff, they’ll have a shopping montage scene on the show, like in Pretty Woman?”