Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  “I don’t think it’s the bolts,” she said. “I think the body might be like living armor. When I hit the tentacles, it did a lot more damage. But they’re hard to hit. My crossbow skill is still only four.

  We’d try again, but these things usually came in groups. It was going to take a lot of practice before I’d be comfortable facing two at a time.

  Donut and Mongo jumped down from the platform. Mongo sniffed at the remains of the exploded monster. He made an odd, whimpering noise. Donut jumped down to inspect. She also sniffed at the remains. She froze.

  “Carl,” Donut said. “Um, I think you might want to see this. It’s quite disturbing.”

  Donita Grace: Holy shit. Holy shit. Guys. Don’t go to stop 24. They’re everywhere. Millions of them. Worse than the grubs. Don’t…

  Warning: This message is from a deceased crawler.

  My message screen exploded with people asking what was going on as I jogged up to the corpse of the monster.

  “What the shit,” I said as the tiny, little red dots started appearing on my screen. I wasn’t reminded of the grubs. Instead, I thought of the fire ants.

  That explained the lack of experience. We hadn’t killed the monster at all.

  It had hatched.

  When the creature had exploded, he’d dislodged several thousand, teeny-tiny, squirming monsters.

  The AI took on a mock-motherly voice, as if it was trying to emulate a kindergarten teacher.

  Krakaren Crotch Dumpling. Level 1.

  Gather around little crawlers. It’s storytime.

  Once upon a time, on a very lively planet, there lived a lonely creature. This planet teemed with flora and fauna, all of them growing and evolving and generally thriving and having a great time as they dashed forward through the eons. This creature also wanted to thrive, she also wanted to have a great time. But there was only one of her. She could not have children of her own. And this made her very angry, very cranky, but also very sad. More importantly, it made her determined.

  And as Doctor Ian Malcom once famously said, Life finds a way.

  The creature had a special ability. Her stomach was like a gas-station coffee vending machine, one where you could pick one of a thousand different choices. You could mix and match. She soon discovered if she ate this creature, she could make this substance. And if she ate that creature, she could make a different one. So she began to experiment. The creatures of her world thought of her as an apothecary. She could cure all ails.

  But what she truly wished for was to create a child of her own. And after a thousand generations, she did just that. Almost. It’s a complicated process that involves a lot of failures. A lot of troublesome ghouls. But as another Earth saying goes, you need to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, no?

  What these wriggling parasites you see really are, are clones. The next part of the Krakaren story, where she discovers the ability to speak to all of clones telepathically, and then eventually form a collective mind, where she starts spreading across the universe and making a general nuisance of herself is for a different time.

  All you need to know now, little crawler, is that you have to kill these things, and you have to kill them fast. After all, like all children, they grow up so very fast.

  I suggest a nice, firm stomp.

  I was already smashing them with my feet before the long-ass description ended. There were thousands of them, all about the size of a grain of rice. But they were already growing. And we were on gravel, which made my smushes ineffective.

  “Step back,” I said, and we all jumped back, jumping onto the platform. I’d killed most of them, but a few red dots remained. I had a half-full jug of moonshine in my inventory, and dumped it onto the track and tossed a torch, lighting the whole area on fire.

  “Growler Gary had said they’d turned the whole place into a Krakaren nest,” Donut said. “He wasn’t kidding.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I hope they stay at station 24,” Katia said.

  A note from DoctorHepa

  Howdy all! Had a long, out-of-town weekend, but we are back, baby! (Actually, not really since this weekend is going to be crazy busy.) But we are almost back, baby! Over on Patreon, the folks just received the second-to-last update before the Iron Tangle comes to a crazy end. They will get the climax in a few days. Woohoo!

  I already posted this, but here's a reminder of the end-game map:

  Chapter 101

  The second cart for the Mindaro line never arrived. That was Bautista’s, leaving his group stranded at the end of the line. So without any further fanfare and very little discussion about how terrible of an idea this was, the four of us loaded up onto a rapid response cart and dialed ourselves onto the Mindaro line and headed down the track in an attempt to find the source of the problem.

  “What color is Mindaro, anyway?” Donut asked as I pushed the throttle forward. We had to remain in the small, raised cockpit with the windshield, otherwise Donut would get blown clear off the train. We were going insanely fast. The cart moved smoothly over the track, making very little noise. We kept the portal tuned to the abyss in case more mobs came at us. The line’s power was out, so we had to run on batteries.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know what any of these colors are. Ask the art professor.”

  Katia shrugged. “I think it might be a shade of chartreuse.”

  “What the hell color is chartreuse?” I asked.

  “It’s between yellow and green. It’s named after a French liqueur. Actually, there’s some controversy on what the exact shade should be. It’s very interesting.”

  “I’m sure it’s riveting,” I said.

  Katia stuck her tongue out at me. And then her tongue formed into a little hand with a tiny middle finger pointing up.

  I laughed. “Holy shit, that’s weird. You’re getting fast at that.”

  “It still hurts to make big changes, but little stuff like that I can now do with very little effort.”

  The cart plan had worked as intended for the other two lines. For the Sinopia and Grullo line, the abyss cart appeared, still blasting its music (“Mack the Knife” for the Grullo line), and the trainyard cart appeared soon thereafter. In both cases, the portal-to-the-trainyard carts arrived just minutes after the first, which suggested that the carts sometimes slowed down if they hit something big, allowing the second trains to catch up.

  Which, we realized, was what had probably happened with the Mindaro line. It was a stupid mistake. If the second cart had caught up with the first, the portal in the front would have tossed the whole abyss cart back to the train station. So when Bautista’s crew only saw one cart—this one playing “Rock of Ages” by Def Leppard—it was actually the cart they needed to jump in front of, but they had no way of knowing that.

  I shouldn’t have put delays on those alarm traps. I should have known what song went with what cart. It would have saved us this trip.

  That cart had been tuned to trainyard Q. I warned my contact there that we may have accidentally hurled a bunch of monsters in their direction. That plus a cart with a dangerous portal attached to it.

  When the carts hit the portals at the edge of the abyss, they didn’t plummet over the edge like I’d been expecting. Instead, they worked like engine cars and punched right through back to the trainyards.

  Since the abyss gate at the end of the Sinopia and Grullo line did not line up with the associated trainyard track of the rapid-response carts, those who got transported through never saw the carts again. Instead they joined up with the defenders at the closest nearby station 36. It was 800 people between the two groups, and we had gotten them all to a stairwell station. That was the best I could do for them.

  At first I worried that the rogue carts would now start looping up and down the tracks. But a group happened to be grinding their way through yard M when the first cart—the same one playing “Physical” by Olivia Newton John—appeared. Because of the way the switching sta
tions worked, the cart was automatically routed into a dead-end parking space intended as a holding area for the train engines. The cart reached the end of the track and flipped. It caused the entire awning system to be sent into the abyss. But the portal automatically shut itself off a moment later. The cart remained on its side, wheels still spinning.

  A few minutes after that, the second cart showed up and also flipped over.

  That group at yard M then managed to get enough people together and physically flip one of the two carts back over and then bring it to a track. They managed to get the thing turned back on, giving them a new weapon to keep at least one of the nearby tracks clear.

  The tunnels were eerily quiet and empty as we rode up toward Bautista. I kept the portal on in case something else was on the track. I tuned it to the abyss, but I kept an eye out for the tell-tale blue dot of crawlers on the track. I could switch it back to station E, but we had to be careful. It took the portal a good ten seconds to make the switch, during which time it wasn’t on at all, making the cart vulnerable.

  Katia’s fan box became available while we rode down the line, but we didn’t dare stop. We now had less than two days left, and every second counted. Seven hours in, and we still saw nothing on the tracks except the occasional exploded corpse of a post stage-three monster. The baby krakarens were nowhere to be seen.

  Back at the front of the line, Elle’s away team, with the help of Tizquick the dwarf, found the correct colored line, making their way to the exploded station 72. Loads of other crawlers had the same idea, and she found a group of people waiting there. The ceiling had caved in, but the circle of stairwells remained, and people had cleared the rubble. We sent out word that it was a place to descend without fighting, and people were now flocking to the area. The crawlers who’d died blowing the soul crystal had, at the very least, not died in vain.

  Others, like Imani and Li Jun, thought it was best to remain put. The monsters approaching station 36 were trickling to a stop, and the crawlers had built a solid, defensible position. So far the Krakaren babies were staying put at all the station 24s. The wrath ghouls, it turned out, formed a similar boss to the one parked at stop 48 if they were allowed to congregate. This one was also a province boss.

  Our plan was to get Bautista’s crew, get everyone to trainyard E, and then work our way to station 60. From there people could decide to go wherever they wanted, either to one of the many heavily-defended station 36 stairwells or to the free station 72. A few people were also putting together raiding teams to take on the station 48 boss. Nobody else was braving station 12, 24, or the other occupied station 72s.

  As for us, we’d decide what we were going to do when the time came.

  “People on the track!” Katia suddenly yelled just as we passed station 432.

  “Shit,” I said, flipping the switch to change the portal. The cart was like a boat and didn’t have brakes. I cut the throttle just as the blue dots appeared. The train slowed. I mentally calculated our trajectory, and I saw we’d make the switch in plenty of time. The dots were moving fast, probably running away from us once they saw our light. Poor guys. They had to be terrified.

  “Get ready,” I said. “If they don’t know who we are, they might shoot at us.”

  Sure enough, the crawlers appeared a moment later. They were a group of five people running full speed down the track and away from the cart, and one of them had presence of mind to shoot an ice bolt directly at us. It hit the portal and disappeared. I didn’t know if the bolt went through or what, but the poor guys didn’t have a chance. We plowed right through them, teleporting them to train yard E, which had to be a serious shock. They all probably thought they were about to die.

  “Sorry,” I called back over my shoulder as we continued down the track, approaching station 433, which appeared much more quickly than I anticipated. This was where the mimic lived. As far as I was aware, nobody had killed one of these things yet. Dozens of Xs appeared on my map, all of them on the platform where the previous portal cart hadn’t been able to scoop them up.

  God, so many dead. Every time I saw something like this, I felt the anger start to rise in my chest.

  “What is that?” Katia asked, pointing ahead. There was something on the tracks right outside the platform to station 433. Whatever it was, it didn’t appear on my map.

  A red and white wooden crossbeam appeared to be sitting across the tracks, blinking. It had a stop sign attached to it. What the hell? This was like a regular railroad crossing, though usually these things went across the road, not the tracks. I just stared at it, confused for a good two seconds, not sure what to make of it. The track beyond the barrier appeared to be fine. There was no cross traffic. Where had it come from?

  “Fuck,” I said the moment I realized what it was. It had only fooled me for a pair of seconds, but it was enough. You idiot. I moved to flip the switch back to the abyss, but I hesitated. Too late. Too late. We were going to hit it. A long, fleshy appendage snaked from the end of the crossbeam, leading up into station 433.

  We hit the crossbeam a moment later. There was a mighty thwum as the portal sucked it away.

  We’d just accidentally teleported the entire station mimic city boss to trainyard E.

  “Whoops,” I said.

  * * *

  “Bautista,” I said, stepping off the platform. I shook hands with the hairy, orange tiger man. He’d reached level 28. We’d stopped about 100 meters before the giant, swirling portal that led into the abyss. There was a wide space on either side, along with a small doorway that led to the now-collapsed interior walkway. A pair of crawlers, both human, stood guard. One had an enchanted, old-school sling. The thing crackled with purple and black energy. He twirled the weapon and shot a rock, likely aiming at one of the lizard monsters who crawled up and down the pit’s interior. The crawlers both cheered, presumably after scoring a direct hit.

  “Hello, Carl,” Bautista said, clasping me on the shoulder. “You have saved us. Again.”

  “We ain’t done yet,” I said, looking over the ragtag group. There were about 600 people gathered here. I quickly told him what had happened with the station mimic as I shook hands and traded fist bumps with dozens of crawlers, who ranged in level from the distressingly-low 18 to 30. Most were human, but there was a scattering of orcs and elves and other oddities.

  “So we have to fight that thing again?” Bautista asked, sounding sick. “Carl, it’s a city boss, and it’s really strong. I don’t know how to kill it. If you chop a part off, it turns into a spider and crawls back to the whole. Bashing weapons don’t do anything. It’s magic resistant. Maybe blowing it up will work, but you’ll have to go big. Like really big.”

  I stepped in front of the portal attached to the front of the cart and took a screenshot.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered.

  The station mimic was so large it took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at. It was significantly larger than I anticipated. The monster had taken up residence in the middle of the trainyard and hadn’t yet changed shape into anything. It looked as if the wall of the trainyard had moved, swallowing half of the station. Only after staring at the image did my brain start to figure it out. It was a potato-shaped blob the size of a neighborhood block. The damn thing reached all the way up to the ceiling, taking a huge portion of the yard. It seemed much too big, like the total mass was enough to mimic five or six or more stations.

  The blob looked disturbingly like how Katia looked when she was not formed into anything.

  I thought of that group we’d accidentally teleported to yard E. They were probably dead. We’d sent them to the yard, and less than two minutes later, we’d sent that thing through the same portal. Maybe they’d gotten away. I hoped so.

  It seemed much too big to be only a city boss. Which begged the question, how strong were those things at the stairwell stations? The province bosses? For fuck’s sake.

  Carl: Elle. Do me a favor and ask your manager if there’s
a secret way to kill a mimic.

  I’d already looked it up in my book, and there wasn’t much in the monster section. There was a warning that mimics were all over the place on the 8th floor, but I had the impression they were more of a nuisance than a real threat, implying that this huge mimic was a new thing, or something no previous cookbook-owner had come across.

  Elle: Are you about to do something really stupid, or have you done it already?

  Carl: Both.

  Elle: Hang on. Let me ask. Don’t get your hopes up.

  I looked over at Donut, who was preening at the attention of the other crawlers. She was mounted on Mongo while a group of people surrounded her and the dinosaur. She talked animatedly, telling them about the ride up here.

  Katia held back shyly, leaning up against the side of the cart. People kept looking at her. Everyone by now knew exactly what had happened, but that golden, shining skull over her head was hard to ignore. I watched as Bautista approached her and held out his hand. They shook and started talking.

  I walked up to the massive portal that overlooked the abyss, and I took a screenshot. The cart behind me with the much-smaller portal led to yard E. This one led to yard H. There was no mimic here. I could see the interdiction cart, the one that had been playing the Def Leppard song. This one hadn’t flipped and was sitting stopped a short distance away, having gotten itself wedged against the wall. The portal appeared to still be on. It’d jumped the track at the service bay but remained upright until it hit the cavern wall which, thankfully, hadn’t teleported the entire cave system away. I didn’t see any mobs, though there were dozens of corpses spread throughout the abandoned trainyard.

  Elle: She says you don’t fight giant mimics. Little ones are easy to kill if you know what they are, but this thing is a whole different story. If you slice part of them off, the pieces grow legs and return to the main body. If you can get more than 50% of the mass off the main body at once, it’ll no longer be able to heal or transform. And then it’ll be vulnerable. But the separated pieces, unable to return to the main body, will instead attack you. They only die when the mimic dies.