“You poor man,” Donut said at the end of his story. Her demeanor toward him had made a complete turn. “I am just devasted about your partner.”
He shrugged. “I appreciate that.” He went up and grabbed a cookie. He ate it, and the +9.8 EXP notification dinged over his head.
“Was this Rebecca the one who killed your partner?” I asked. I watched the notification over the man’s head fade away.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. The man sat back down. “It was one of her goons, the same guy who got killed by the vine creeper. He shot Maggie.” The man lowered her head.
The show had moved to the second half of the program, showing humans who were performing well. A woman dressed in snow gear and what looked like a Valkyrie helmet had an enchanted crossbow that shot firebolts. It showed her plowing through a group of dog-faced goblin things. Gnolls.
“Hey,” I said. “Since you looted those guys you killed, I don’t suppose you have any pants that might fit me in that bag of yours? Or shoes?”
He paused. “Sure, boss. If you don’t mind wearing the clothes of a dead man.”
Carl: Donut. Do not say anything out loud. Can you see this?
Donut: WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Carl: Don’t type in all caps. I think Frank is going to try to hurt or incapacitate us. This is important. Do not react. Do not fight back at all. Whatever you do, don’t fire a magic missile. Just let it happen. Trust me on this. I’m going to present an opening. I want to entice him into action.
Donut: WHAT DO YOU MEAN. FRANK IS AN AMERICAN HERO.
Carl: Frank is full of shit. He’s lying. I think there might be somebody else in here with us, and they are getting ready to jump us. I’ll explain in a minute. We’re going to have to run. Get ready.
Donut: I DO NOT LIKE THIS, CARL.
A pair of khaki pants appeared in his hand. They had an enormous blood stain down the side of them. He tossed them to me. “These are the biggest pants I have. I don’t know if they’ll fit you or not. I have a couple pairs of shoes in here, too, but it doesn’t say what their sizes are.”
“Thanks,” I said. I paused, waiting to see if he would toss me a pair of shoes, but he was making a show of pretending to sort through his inventory. He wanted me to try the pants on first, which I noticed right away were much too small. And they were women’s pants. I sighed. Oh well.
I stood and turned my back. I made motions like I was pulling my kneepads off.
Everything that happened next occurred over the course of less than a second.
I saw the blue dot appear in the bathroom hallway, just as the woman emerged from around the corner. At the same moment, Donut leaped into the air with a panicked yowl as Frank pulled his weapon from his inventory and fired at the cat.
The woman, pistol aimed directly at my head, also fired.
On the television, Lucia Mar, along with her two rottweilers, Cici and Gustavo 3, tore through a group of red, demon-like monsters. The girl was like a demon herself, savagely swinging her mace.
Donut landed on the table with the cookies. Her body slid, moving through the plate, which disappeared and reappeared as if it wasn’t really there. Her feet scrambled as she plummeted off the edge of the table. She hit the floor and bounced back up, screaming at the top of her lungs. “Carl, Carl! Help!”
“I’m here,” I said. “We gotta go now. We have less than two minutes.”
She paused, looking back and forth between me and the two frozen Crawlers. Both had the word Naughty blazing over their head. I recounted my earlier discussion with Mordecai. This was after Donut had eaten the enhanced pet biscuit and while we’d waited for her to transform.
“You said they teleport out of here if she turns into a monster. So monsters can’t ever get into safe areas? What if I leave the door open? They won’t be able to wander in?”
“Oh, they’ll wander in,” Mordecai said. “Always close the door. If it’s a mob, it’ll teleport away the moment it attacks you. But they’ll trash the place, too.”
“What if Donut doesn’t turn into a monster, but she also doesn’t recognize me? She sometimes bites people she doesn’t recognize. Will she teleport away then?”
“No. It’s different for crawlers. There’s no violence and no stealing in the safe rooms. It’s a strict, ironclad rule. You get three strikes. The first time, you freeze in place for about 100 seconds while you get an automated lecture on playing nice. The second time it’s for an hour. The third time you’re stripped of all your gear and teleported into a mob nest.”
So when Frank Q and his partner—her name really was Maggie. Maggie My—decided to kill us to take our gear or whatever the hell they were doing, they made the mistake of using a safe area as their point of attack. It obviously was their first—and last—attempt at doing it that way.
“But how did you know?” Donut cried, looking between the two frozen people. They had been frozen the very moment they’d pulled the triggers. The bullets didn’t appear to have even left the barrels yet. “Are you psychic? And where did this lady come from? I just don’t understand. This is very distressing.”
“We don’t have time,” I said as I added the pants to my inventory. I had a vague notion to pick Frank up, rearrange him so his gun was facing his partner, but I was afraid the system would count that as an act of violence on my part. “We gotta go now.”
Before we rushed outside, I took a precious second to examine the attributes of Maggie My.
She was about the same age as Frank, so around forty years old, athletic. A white woman with closely-cropped, brown hair. She wore shining, metallic pants and boots. She wore a leather jacket similar to my own—though hers had both of their sleeves. She didn’t appear to hold any weapons other than her gun.
Crawler #324,116. “Maggie My.”
Level 9.
Race: Human.
Class: Not yet assigned.
She had five skulls next to her name.
Between her and Frank, they’d killed eight people. Eight. They both had the ability to go completely stealth. I doubted they had been sleeping in the bathroom. They’d likely heard that explosion from earlier and tracked us to the safe room. We’d left a wake of dead rot stickers along the way, a literal path of destruction to this space.
Frank had said people turned translucent when they slept. Was that true? It certainly wasn’t true for Donut, but she was also in my party. Maybe they had meant to sneak up on us and kill us in our sleep, but when they realized they couldn’t, they’d gone to the bathroom to wait. Maybe the plan was to sneak up on me from behind while I went to the men’s room. I didn’t know.
We jumped outside, and I plotted a path to the closest main artery. I downed an Iron Skin potion and gave one to Donut, making her drink it. A couple of red dot clusters appeared between here and there. I didn’t want to waste time fighting them. The hallway was too thin, the ground too bumpy to use the chopper. Plus, one blast from a rot sticker was likely to turn the powered bicycle into a bomb. So we ran. I wanted to avoid the mobs if we could. Every mob we left alive was one they’d have to deal with.
“Why are we running?” Donut asked. “We can take them.”
“I don’t know if we can,” I said. “They both have guns. He’s level eight, the same as us, and she’s level nine. Getting to nine is hard, so she probably has a lot of skills. Besides, I really don’t want to have one of those skull markers by my name. Even if they have it coming, everyone else we meet won’t know that. We will never get anyone to talk to us.”
“But if we don’t stop them, they’ll hurt somebody else.”
I stopped dead in the hallway. I looked at the cat. It was a very un-Donut-like thing to say. But worse, it was the truth.
“Goddamnit, Donut,” I said. I looked back over my shoulder in the direction of the safe room. They’d be awake already by now, though I suspected—and hoped—they wouldn’t just come running.
They probably were going to hurt somebody else. If they c
ould find someone. But what could we do?
Donut fired a magic missile, killing a group of the regular level two rats that seemed to infest every corridor regardless of neighborhood. The rats sizzled and fell onto their backs. One of them dropped a poor rat skin and a rat steak.
“Don’t take that inventory,” I said. “Cancel it out.”
Donut huffed but complied. She loved looting corpses. The person to kill a mob had first right to loot for a couple minutes after the battle, but if they canceled out the box, the corpse became fair game.
I had an idea, but I didn’t know if it would work. We didn’t have time, but I needed to test it. I pulled one of the goblin smoke bombs out of my stash, lit the wick, and then quickly added it to the rat’s inventory. It let me do it. Like with most games, it allowed me to add items to the corpse’s inventory as if it was a chest. The rat had a grid pattern inventory that looked as if it couldn’t hold very much. This was how inventory had been for crawlers last season.
I had to see if the smoke bomb remained lit. They’d said that items didn’t retain their momentum, but what about this? Thanks to my level 5 in Explosives Handling, now when I examined incendiary items, I received some extra information:
Goblin Smoke Bomb.
Type: Deflagration.
Effect: Opaque smoke over a 10 meter radius for 3 minutes.
Status: Good. 89/100
Emits a stinking cloud of billowing, multi-color smoke that lasts for three minutes before disbursing. Use to either confuse enemies or as a stage prop at a hair metal concert.
It didn’t say the bomb was lit. I pulled the bomb out, and to my relief, the wick still crackled and spit. I quickly added it back to the rat’s grid. Everything was the same, but the Status had changed to Discharge Imminent 34/100.
I then examined my pile of goblin dynamite. They were all out of 50, not 100, and all of them were either in Detonation Imminent or Danger. It appeared the Danger warning appeared once the status was below 15.
I gingerly removed the most unstable piece of dynamite I had, one that was 10/50 and added it to the rat’s inventory without lighting it. I noted, despite me handling the dynamite as carefully as I could, it’d gone down to 9/50. Jesus. I was lucky I hadn’t blown myself to bits earlier. This next one was at 13/50. I lit it and then quickly added it to the rat’s inventory.
If they followed, they’d likely come down this same hall. That guy had picked Rebecca W’s corpse clean, including her clothes. People who did that were the type to loot everything. If they came across the rat, hopefully they’d think we’d been in too much of a hurry to stop and loot for ourselves. Rats didn’t normally drop stuff other than skin and meat. It was suspicious as fuck. But, maybe… maybe we’d get lucky. If Frank did pull the three items out of the rat inventory, it would literally blow up in his hands.
For now, it was the best we could do.
“Okay,” I said, nervously looking over my shoulder. I remembered they could go invisible, at least on the map. “Let’s go.”
We turned, and we kept running for the artery.
“How did you know?” Donut asked as we continued to jog.
“He was lying. He was lying right from the start,” I said.
“So he’s not a federal agent?” she asked. Her breaths were coming in wheezes, but the hallway was close.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he might be. He talks and acts like a cop. But his whole story was bullshit. That Rebecca woman was a level three. He said they’d gotten into a firefight right away, but that couldn’t be true. She had that apple core in her inventory. That meant she’d gone to a tutorial guild and gotten her inventory turned on. And then he ate that cookie, and I saw he received 9.8 experience instead of 10, which meant he was in a party with someone. Someone alive. Also, he had his arm draped over the chair, and I could see he was twitching his finger. He was typing into the chat. He hadn’t figured out how to use it with just his brain.”
Donut stared up at me as we ran.
“How is it you’re James Bond when it comes to strangers, but Miss Beatrice could date three different guys at once, and you had no idea?”
“Three different guys?”
“Well, you were one of them, so two, I guess. Then again, it’s three if you count Angel’s owner. Does it count as cheating when it’s with another woman? There's so many human nuances I don't understand.”
“Of course it counts as cheating,” I said. For fuck’s sake.
“But you were always watching those videos on your iPad with the two women rolling around and cleaning each other. Would it have been cheating if Miss Beatrice let you watch?”
“We’re not having this conversation right now, Donut.”
We reached the hallway and I pulled the chopper out of my inventory. This would be the first time we would actually drive the thing. I tossed a lump of coal into the hopper and prayed it wouldn’t explode on us. As we prepared to leave, the dungeon reverberated with an announcement. It was the daily update.
Hello, Crawlers. Another excellent, exciting day! We are very happy to have you with us, and we hope everyone is having a great time. You’re really bringing it, and we at Borant truly appreciate the enthusiasm you’re giving to this production.
I have a couple of announcements. First off, we want to assure everyone that we have quashed all the bugs with the new toilets. Both the exploding issue and the, ah, unfortunate suction issue with some of the units have been resolved. There is absolutely no need to be afraid of them. Those of you who have been using the hallways to relieve yourselves, please stop. We don’t want to have to start using punitive measures.
A couple additional patch notes… We have added support for all of the languages that were missing from our library. So for those of you who are hearing this and finally understanding what I’m saying for the first time… welcome. You’ll figure the rest out I’m sure. Also with the languages, we’ve implemented full cross support for native speech. So now Mandarin speakers will understand English speakers and so forth.
The Feral Rabies debuff is now curable with a health potion or spell. And the contagion is no longer airborne. Sorry about that, New Zealand.
We have removed the Blender Fiend mobs. The mob’s difficulty level appears to be too high. Their collective gets stronger each time they, uh, blend, and after working their way through a group of 15,000 crawlers in a single day, we’ve been forced to take action to prevent a premature extinction event. Rest assured they will be re-introduced on a lower floor. The Street Preacher neighborhood boss has been upgraded to a borough boss. In addition, we have tweaked the strength levels of a few dozen other mobs, too many to mention here. So just be aware of that.
One last note. A lot of crawlers are heading into the stairways prematurely. Again, it’s your choice, but it’s probably best for you to get as much experience as you can. And just so you know for later, we won’t feature you on the recap episode if viewers can’t tunnel into your feed. So if you hit the stairs three or four days before a collapse, you are going to miss out.
That’s it for now. Keep up the good work, and kill, kill, kill!
“We didn’t get to see the rest of the show,” Donut said. “Do you think we were on it?”
“I doubt it,” I said. I eased onto the alligator skull seat. Underneath me, the whole bike rumbled with potential energy. It had pedals like a bicycle, but it also had a throttle. I had to move the bike by pumping my legs, but once I reached the speed I wanted, I turned the throttle, and the bike would lock that speed in place. It was a strange setup.
The engine built into the chassis was already getting hot. I would have to spread my legs out to keep from getting burned to hell. I sighed. I really, really needed pants.
Donut jumped up into her sidecar seat. She started licking her paw as we zoomed off down the road, trying to put as much distance between us and that neighborhood as we could.
21
Time to Level Collapse: 47 hours
I did not receive any sort of achievement or skill for setting a trap, and it was a safe bet that’d be a thing here. I took that as a good sign. Donut and I did, however, receive an achievement for our “fight” with Frank Q and Maggie My.
New Achievement! Bitchmeat!
You’ve been attacked by a fellow crawler in a safe zone, and the system has been forced to save your ass. That usually suggests you’re either really annoying, or you snore.
If this were a prison, you would now be my bitch. Wait…
Reward: Bitches don’t get rewards.
I laughed. For the first time since we’d entered this ridiculous game, I laughed at one of the stupid notifications.
The ride was significantly smoother than I anticipated. We got about three or four miles per lump of coal, and I had an almost endless supply.
We only managed to travel east for a single junction before we hit a wall, and we were forced to choose between north and south. If the map in my head was accurate, we’d hit the edge of Lake Washington above, once again proving that the dungeon didn’t truly circle the planet. We went south, traveling down a rough approximation of the I-5 corridor for a short time before passages that went east and west started re-appearing. I strongly suspected we needed to head east and inland before we saw any stairwells. But the problem was directly east was a large mountain range up above, and if the dungeon had been desolate before, it’d be downright abandoned here. Not for another 100 miles.
We decided to resume our trek east anyway, heading further away from the western edge of the U.S. coastline.
We drove for hours, seeing no sign of people or mobs or stairwells. It was difficult to gauge how fast we were actually moving, but I guessed it was about 20 miles per hour. My Chopper Pilot skill rose steadily as I drove. Once I hit level 5, the throttle actually allowed me to increase our speed.
Dungeon Crawler Carl Page 15