Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  The baseball bat was actually a police baton, I realized. At first glance there didn’t appear to be anything special about it. But as Katia rolled it over in her hands, eyes wide, I could see the slight glow of enchantment. Her lips were tight with what appeared to be both irritation and fear.

  I picked up the large shield to examine it. It was absurdly light.

  Enchanted Shade Gnoll Riot Forces Crowd Control Shield.

  Sometimes the galaxy isn’t a happy place. Sometimes the unwashed masses forget their place in the machine. And sometimes these dregs bubble up to the surface, causing a phenomenon widely known as “Civil Unrest.”

  And when that happens, the powers that be don’t want to become the powers that were. So they hire backup. An outside force to come down and kick everything back into order, and maybe commit a few war crimes in the process just so the filth knows their place. One such outfit, trained specifically for this sort of situation, is the Shade Gnoll Riot Forces.

  This enchanted shield offers both offensive and defensive crowd control options. A frontline defender utilizing this item is afforded the following benefits:

  +5% to Constitution.

  +5 to the Rooted in Place Skill

  +Upgrades Rush ability to Crowd Blast.

  Warning: You may not equip this item. The Rush ability is required to equip this item.

  I immediately looked at Crowd Blast, the enhanced Rush ability. This was the same battering ram skill Katia had used to kill Hekla. She could only use it once a day. Crowd Blast had two huge differences. She still rushed forward, causing a ton of damage. But now everybody in a wide cone in front of her were also hit with the attack. The bulk of the damage was still from whatever she physically hit, but everything in the cone took 10-20% of the damage. The fact she’d managed to kill Hekla with the regular version of this skill meant this upgraded version packed a serious punch. Even those monsters not directly hit by it would take major damage. With her wrestling belt bonus, it would be the equivalent of hitting someone with, well, a monster truck.

  But more importantly, she could now use the ability once every five minutes. Not once a day.

  “It looks like you’ll be getting more practice in with that Rush attack,” I said as I looked up Rooted in Place. She made a noncommittal grunt.

  Rooted in Place

  This skill makes it much more difficult to knock you over or back. That’s not necessarily a good thing, physics being what they are. Be careful with this one.

  “Interesting,” I said, moving to the baton.

  Enchanted Shade Gnoll Riot Forces Telescoping Crowd Control Baton.

  This enchanted truncheon is designed to crack skulls and to teach those ungrateful bastards to show some got-damned respect.

  This item’s length is adjustable, from 25 centimeters to 3 meters.

  Automatically casts Level-five Cone of Knockback if swung at a group of 10 or more like mobs. This triggers only once every five minutes.

  “Those are both pretty awesome,” I said. “Especially the shield. I’m kind of worried about the wording on that rooted in place skill, but Crowd Blast is exactly what you needed.”

  “I can’t tell if people were trolling me with this or not,” Katia said. “People know I hate using Rush.”

  “It’s not very thrilling,” Donut agreed. “This is like getting an electric litterbox for your birthday. Indeed it’s useful. But it’s a litterbox for goodness sake. I was hoping for something with a little more pizazz.”

  “First off, that’s what Bea asked for,” I said. “I don’t understand how someone can get pissed for receiving what they asked for. Second, that thing was like 300 bucks. Anyway, Katia, this is definitely a good thing. Troll or not, you’re getting more and more powerful. Mordecai said he got a sex toy in his first fan box.”

  “Did you really buy your girlfriend a litterbox for her birthday?”

  “He did,” Donut said. “Miss Beatrice was quite rightfully upset.”

  Katia laughed as she attempted to equip the large shield. She frowned after a moment. “I guess I don’t need this anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t let me equip both at the same time.” She removed an item from her left wrist and placed it on the table. “You should take it. You need a shield anyway.”

  I picked up the wrist bracer. It looked similar to the bracer I had on my right wrist, the one that allowed me to form my gauntlet. I’d forgotten she’d had this thing. She pretty much only used it to increase her mass.

  Enchanted Auto Buckler of the Peach Pit

  Forms a metallic buckler on command. May be triggered via hotlist or by shaking your wrist like you’re thinking of your hot Aunt Lydia.

  This item is enchanted with Shatter. Any attack that lands upon this shield has a 1.5% chance to disarm the opponent. If the opponent is disarmed, there is a 90% chance the item will drop to the ground, a 5% chance the weapon will break, and a 5% chance the weapon will be immediately transferred to your own inventory.

  “Hey, this is cool,” I said. I put it on. I had to slide it over the arm of my jacket. I experimented making it appear. I could twist my wrist, and the small shield would pop into place. I could shake it in a similar way, and it’d disappear. “Thanks!”

  “Much better than a litterbox,” Donut said.

  Katia nodded, attention already on the next box. The benefactor box. “Okay. We ready?”

  “Do you think it’ll be something bad?” Donut asked.

  “We don’t get cursed items from boxes,” I said. “Let’s just see what it is.”

  Soon after Katia had been sponsored by Princess Formidable, the youngest sister of Prince Maestro and Crown Prince Stalwart of the Skull Empire, we explained to her everything we knew about the psychotic orc family. Maestro was dead along with the mom. Stalwart was in the dungeon, presumably walking around in the skin of the war god Grull. King Rust was supposedly in the dungeon, too, though we didn’t know where. I still wasn’t clear on how levels 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 worked. Mordecai always told us to not worry about them until we got there.

  We also didn’t know how the sister factored into all of this. If her brother was out of the way, I knew she’d become the heir apparent. But how close was she to her brother? In books and movies royalty were always murder hoboing each other in order to gain power. But since we knew literally nothing about Princess Formidable other than the fact she existed, there was no way to predict what sort of item Katia would receive.

  Katia opened the box. We silently watched the single, small item appear. Katia picked it up, saying nothing. She examined it and passed it to me.

  It was a crossbow bolt. She’d only received one.

  The Bolt of Ophiotaurus

  This is 1 of 100.

  This item acts as a regular crossbow bolt unless it is shot directly into the eye of a deity.

  Upon a successful strike to the god’s eye, the deity’s invulnerability pauses for fifteen seconds.

  “Well, shit,” I said. “I’m starting to think the sister isn’t a huge fan of her big brother.”

  * * *

  We had time to take showers before the show started, but that was it. Mordecai would return right after the show finished airing, and then we’d all need to take two hours to sleep.

  The recap featured a montage of people setting up and fighting in a wide array of stairwell stations. We watched as a group of twenty people stupidly faced off against a station 48 boss. The monster, a hulking conglomeration of screaming, gnashing ghouls made short work of the crawlers. It formed a giant pincer made of ghoul body parts and gathered the crawlers up. Mouths formed on the interior of the claw and devoured the crawlers as it crushed them. They all died screaming.

  “Jesus,” I muttered.

  “I can’t watch this. I hate this show,” Katia said, getting up. She produced a towel from I-don’t-know-where and moved around the common area, cleaning up the remaining blood splatters from where Mongo hadn’t licked it clean. “We need a maid in here.”


  The recap showed something unexpected. A group found a new stairwell, one that wasn’t listed on that early map. It didn’t say where they were, but this was clearly a different area we hadn’t seen. It was a dark, dripping cave, and it was only lit by the Torch spell of one of the crawlers. There was only a single stairwell here. It was clearly a level stairwell, but it was different than usual. It went both up and down, and I wasn’t sure why. Only the part of the stairs below the ground glowed, but it still reached upward, corkscrewing into the air and disappearing into the dark. It was only on screen for a moment, so I didn’t have enough time to investigate what that meant.

  “I think I know where that is,” I said, suddenly realizing what we were looking at. “That’s where we teleported the mimic away. That’s station 433. I bet there’s a stairwell there. Just like with Grimaldi. If a city boss is sitting on a stairwell, it’s invisible on the map until he’s gone.”

  “What?” Donut said, suddenly incredulous. “Are you saying we could’ve just gone back down to that place and used those stairs?”

  “That’s what I’m guessing,” I said. “But I’m not certain. This is a good thing. It means there’s a way to get home for anybody still trapped on that side of the tracks.”

  “I guess they won’t be needing the 150,000 gold’s worth of hats just sitting on the ground up there, either,” Donut grumbled.

  “They still gotta find that station,” Katia said over her shoulder. I did a double take. She’d grown thin and tall and was scrubbing one of the walls ten feet off the ground. “There are five more mimics up there. How did this blood even get up here?”

  “Shush!” Donut waved her paw. “Stop talking. We’re on!”

  “Oh fuck,” I said, seeing the scene laid out. They showed me standing over Growler Gary, the cowering gnoll. They’d altered the lights and colors of the scene to make the room dark, showing it from a low angle with me looming over the creature. Mongo materialized, coming into focus like a monster emerging from the fog, biting his hands off. Gary whimpered. The whimpering sounds were added in. Gary was always dead by the time we removed his hands. The scene switched to me wishing for duct tape while I attached one of the poor guy’s hands to the keypad. It showed us doing it over and over again. It never even explained why we were collecting the hands.

  It didn’t show the rescue. Instead it moved on to Lucia Mar beating a mantaur to death by smashing him against a train over and over. It appeared she was set up in one of the trainyards, but I couldn’t tell which one. Something had changed with one of her two rottweilers. It was huge now, twice as big as the other.

  “What is this?” Donut said. “They cut out the best part! They didn’t show everybody saying thank you to me. They usually get it wrong, but this is over the top. This is outrageous!”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “People are watching it happen live. More every day. They know what really happened. It’s the same with the other crawlers. By now everybody knows all of this stuff is pure propaganda.”

  “Do you think that means this Lucia kid isn’t as crazy as she looks?” Katia asked, coming to stand beside me.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I remembered what Lucia had done to the Desperado Club. And to Odette’s assistant. Odette had called her a psychopath. And Lucia had talked some serious shit about Donut on that one show. So there was probably some truth to it. But it had to be exaggerated. It had to be.

  “You did a good job,” I said, looking about. “The room is very sparkly.” I remembered what Katia had said about her mother being a clean freak, and how she’d rebelled against it. Apparently not so much. Then again, it was predominantly blood stains she was cleaning up. That’s not something most people wanted splattered around their living area.

  “It was mostly Mongo,” Katia said, patting the dinosaur on the head.

  Hello Crawlers,

  This will be your second-to-last message before the floor collapses, and I just wanted to say how proud we are of human tenacity. Quite frankly, we expected the number of deaths to be much higher on this floor. It’s making us rethink how easy the next floor was going to be. Hah.

  Odds are good you might have your hands full this time tomorrow, so we’re sticking all the important information into this message. The next floor will see the crawlers scattered throughout, further apart than usual. Parties will still travel together, but only parties that are formed before this message started. We love how you plucky humans are starting to all band together to defeat the big, bad monsters, and it’s great, it really is, but we wish to focus more on individual stories the next floor. Feel free to chat to your friends, but if they aren’t in a party with you right now, it’s best to get your goodbyes out of the way. There will still be Desperado Club and Club Vanquisher entrances throughout the level, so don’t worry about that. But if you haven’t trained yourself up, you might regret it.

  And speaking of chat, we’ve added a new and exciting feature to this season. For a small fee, all viewers may now subscribe to your private messages between other crawlers. Isn’t that great? Sign-ups started yesterday, and we are very pleased with how many have already joined up. The system goes live the moment this message ends.

  We have also patched a few persistent bugs with the inventory system. Effective immediately, you may no longer store liquids in your inventory unless they are in a container.

  That’s it for now. See you guys tomorrow. Now let’s get out there and kill, kill, kill!

  “Where is he? Where did that fuck face go?” a familiar voice yelled. It was Mordecai, skidding to a stop in the room. His eyes grew wide. Apparently, for him, no time had passed. He’d just blinked. “Oh. Oh shit. Oh fuck,” he said, eyes flashing as he read a page of notifications. “By his left tit. Seven days?”

  “Hello, Mordecai,” I said.

  The toad man just stared at us. His eyes immediately moved to the golden skull over Katia’s head and then to the skull over Donut’s. He straightened as Mongo squawked and jumped in circles all around him. “I see I missed a few things.”

  “A few things, yes,” I said. “We need to…”

  I didn’t finish.

  Katia exploded.

  At least that’s what I thought had happened at first. Blood erupted out of her. Gallons and gallons of it, flying in every direction. It just kept coming and coming, an impossible amount. We all cried in surprise. I was blasted in the face, getting bukkaked by the fetid, stinking liquid. I fell over trying to get away, gasping and choking. Donut squealed and leaped across the room. Mordecai also flew backward, stumbling over the couch, his frog legs sticking straight up into the air.

  And still, the red spray didn’t let up. It hit the ceiling and all the far walls, like it was being sprayed from a multi-directional pressure washer.

  Mongo shrieked in joy, spinning about like a child in the rain. It kept coming for twenty full seconds before trickling to a stop. Katia just stood there in the middle of the room, eyes huge. Once it stopped, the room was filled with the sound of my coughing and Mordecai’s croaking and the tap-tap-splash-tap of Mongo dancing in circles like he was playing in a wading pool.

  It took me a moment to understand what the fuck had just happened. Katia had stored all of the blood when she’d been attached to the front of the train. She’d had to put it directly into her inventory to keep her scoop clean.

  But the rules had just changed. One could no longer store liquids that weren’t in a container. Apparently this was how the system now dealt with the paradox.

  I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away.

  “Really, Katia,” Donut said, leaping to my shoulder. “If you need to borrow a sanitary napkin, just ask.
”

  A note from DoctorHepa

  It's Friday! I hope all of you are staying safe. It's looking like we're about to kick off again with heavy(ier) lockdowns. The local school district had in-person classes for kindergarten and first-grade kids, and they just canceled it after two weeks. I'm really missing going to comic cons and playing shows with my band. But at least we all have our entertainment. I've been reading a lot of horror lately. It seems appropriate.

  After the next chapter, I'll post a schedule for the endgame chapters as some of them end on cliffs. This floor ends on chapter 107 with 108 being an epilogue. Thanks everybody for continuing to read.

  Chapter 103

  The first thing we did was walk out to the main restaurant. Mordecai, who was somehow even more soaked with gore than I was, approached the counter with the Bopca.

  “We are purchasing a personal space upgrade,” Mordecai said. “A cleaner bot.” The Bopca looked distastefully at the blood dripping onto the counter. Mongo had the zoomies and zipped back and forth through the room, spraying little red dots everywhere.

  The upgrade cost 25,000 gold, making it one of the least expensive environmental upgrades we could get. That was still expensive as shit, but none of us complained. Donut didn’t even try to negotiate. Katia wordlessly paid for it, and we marched back into the personal space. The moment we stepped into the room, the new upgrade went to work. It was a frisbee-shaped robot, similar to the Mexx-class robots we sometimes saw in production trailers, though this thing didn’t look as if it could talk. It was basically a flying Roomba. Donut had to admonish Mongo not to attack it. It hummed like a muted drone as it buzzed about the room, blinking disdainfully at the mess.

  It went to work cleaning up all the stinking, congealed blood, hovering over it and magically zapping it away. It cleaned quickly, but it was still going to take time. A long time.

  “Let’s all just take showers, pretend like this never happened, and meet back here in five minutes,” I said. I had ghoul blood in my mouth, but I didn’t have anything clean to wipe it off with. It tasted like metal soaked in dead rat.