I formed a fist, and I rushed at the two remaining monsters. I kicked one, who went flying, and then I drunkenly swung at another, connecting with his giant head with a right hook. I pulled back, an ear attached to my spike. I dropped to the ground as a tentacle swooped over my head.
Ahead of me, a clurichaun zombie rose up, groaning.
“Tell him to hold this over his head and run into the boss chamber,” I cried. I pulled a boom jug from my inventory as the zombie stood there, swaying, looking at me. For good measure I pulled the most stable stick of dynamite I had and shoved it down his overalls. Probably a bad idea, I thought right after I did it.
Oh well.
The zombie grabbed the jug on Donut’s instruction and held it over his head, like that guy holding the boombox in that Say Anything movie. I lit the torch and sent him on his way. He turned toward the doorway, which was currently empty, and he ran. He barely missed being swept away by another tentacle, and he reached the door just as a seventh tentacle broke through the wall and five more clurichauns emerged, who all stared, unmoving, at the zombie rushing right at them. They moved out of the way, uncomprehending what was happening.
I turned in the opposite direction and ran toward our small shield. I dove behind it, barely dodging another tentacle that swooped right over my head. As I jumped behind the metal shield, Donut yelled, “I thought you said the explosion was going to be too big to use it in here!”
I looked at my health, already perilously low. Donut didn’t have a scratch on her. I pulled the alchemy table out of my inventory, putting it directly over us, placing us within a clamshell. I felt as if I was going to vomit. My head continued to swim.
“It probably is,” I said. “And I’m probably about to die, but I think you’ll be okay.”
“Carl, no,” Donut said. “No!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Go back to Brandon. They’ll watch over you.” I wrapped myself around the cat.
“I don’t want to do this without you,” Donut cried. “Carl, I lied before. I won’t be fine on my own. I need you. No, no!”
I couldn’t answer her before the explosion came.
35
I wasn’t dead.
I was deaf. I was blind. I was in a fuck ton of pain. I couldn’t feel my legs.
But I wasn’t dead.
I gasped for air. My health indicator blinked, the lowest it had ever been. My eardrums had been blown out. My entire face felt burned, my eyes included. The pain was overwhelming, like hundreds of claws pulling at me from different directions at once. They were still pulling, ripping pieces of me away.
The Taint still had a minute left before it would run out. I wasn’t out of danger yet. I could feel Donut standing on top of me. I could feel the vibration of her voice. She was shouting, pawing at me desperately.
“If you’re saying something to me, I can’t hear you,” I said, shouting the words.
Donut: YOU HAVE TO STAND UP. THE ROOM IS ON FIRE. WE KILLED THE BOSS. THE DOOR IS OPEN, BUT THE FIRE IS GETTING CLOSER. HURRY.
“I can’t. I think my legs are broken. I can’t feel them.” I pulled up my health UI, looking at the damage to my body. The entire pie chart was blinking red, all except my feet. My health was at 6% and still ticking downward. I was bleeding internally. I had third-degree burns on my face. My legs were broken where the table had smashed into them.
A moment later, I felt myself moving through the debris. I realized it was Donut, dragging me by my cloak, pulling me from the room. My whole body screamed with pain. A blinking message warned I was about to pass out.
Donut: CARL, YOU NEED TO WORK ON YOUR CARDIO. YOU ARE MUCH HEAVIER THAN YOU LOOK.
“Ten seconds before you can heal me. Get scroll ready,” I croaked as darkness descended.
* * *
I awakened, my body screaming. I felt everything inside of me repair itself. Donut had used one of the healing scrolls, possibly at the last possible second. I jammed down on my healing spell also, which sped up the process. I felt my hearing return, my sight restored. The burn on my face smoothed out.
I didn’t move for several moments, sitting there, staring up at the ceiling of the hallway.
“You saved me again,” I said to the cat, who sat next to me, desperately cleaning herself. I still didn’t dare move, not trusting the bones in my body not to break again.
“That’s what I do,” she said.
Donut: I DON’T WANT TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD, BUT OUR VIEWS WENT WAY UP. ISN’T IT GREAT?
I groaned, rolling onto my side. My one-armed jacket was now scorched to hell. My cloak and other magical items didn’t have a scratch on them. I looked down at my toes, and they sparkled.
“I think I was saved by that damn pedicure kit,” I said. “The table should have severed my feet right at the ankles. Instead it bounced off and broke my legs. I would’ve bled out.”
The fire in the expanded boss chamber eventually died off, leaving nothing but melted slag. We wandered in.
The alchemy table I’d used as the top part of our shield was undamaged. The other table, the redoubt piece that I’d used here as a shield, was now shattered and scorched.
“Huh, weird,” I said. I touched the alchemy workshop table, and it was cool to the touch. I pulled it back into my inventory. I had two such tables now, designed to be placed inside of personal spaces. This one and the Engineer’s table. It seemed they were indestructible.
This was a bug. A bug I could exploit. I couldn’t say anything about it, though. Not out loud. Had the table’s invulnerability saved us? I was going to need to pay attention to the nightly list of patch notes to make sure they didn’t fix this one. In the meantime, I’d use it to our advantage.
The ductwork on the ceiling hung in tatters, a few pieces still clinging to the chamber by braces. The severed, skeletal remains of tentacles lay scattered. The ground was hot to the touch. Donut jumped to my shoulder.
“Let’s get the neighborhood map,” I said, hesitantly moving toward the main boss chamber. I cringed, afraid we’d find more dead babies.
I shouldered past the long, crumbling skeleton bones to behold the lair of Krakaren.
“It smells like that time you tried microwaving Fancy Feast in here,” Donut said.
“I was drunk,” I said. “And you ate that shit right up.”
More tattered ductwork filled the room. There had been banners on the wall, but I could no longer read them. I didn’t see anything that could be construed as baby skeletons, which was a relief. Dozens of clurichauns had been in here along with a few splatters that might’ve been laminak fairies.
The mechanical remains of a moonshine still sat in the corner, like I suspected, but it appeared the machine was much smaller than I had guessed it might be. It was probably why I was still alive. I’d assumed the thing to be huge. And explosive.
The remnants of copper tubes snaked from the machine to the main, dead body of the Krakaren monster. She’d been huge, twenty feet tall at least, an immobile, octopus-like creature. Her stinking, dead body leaned against the back wall as we stared at it. Half of her head was burned away, but it seemed she had a beaked mouth and a group of eyes. Black streaks ran down the massive corpse, like running mascara. She stank of rotting seafood.
They’d taken some sort of cosmic octopus creature and combined it with your average, suburban, anti-vax, let-me-talk-to-your-manager mom. At least that was my impression. The door on the outside of the room, this whole ridiculous storyline with the MLM moonshine certainly made it seem that way.
But there was more to it, too. I suspected the Krakaren “collective” or whatever they called it was a real thing. Sort of. This whole time it had seemed they were just combining absurd stereotypes from earth with random monsters just to fuck with us. It came to me now as I stared up at this thing that they were doing the opposite. After all, this was all really for the benefit of the audience, not us. They were taking something familiar to the viewers, like these interstellar, dumbass
octopus monsters and combining them with an earth analog in an effort to both teach the watchers about earth culture and to lampoon interstellar cultures and creatures they felt deserving of scorn. Kind of like the way cartoonists would sometimes personify rats and snakes as scumbags. Or foxes as shady, used-car dealers.
Or Persian cats as princesses.
A massive cage filled half the room, still intact. The creatures within had mostly burned to slag, but I could see that it had been filled to the brim with brindle grubs. They were all dead.
“We never got to see the boss up close,” Donut said as I moved near enough to loot the neighborhood map.
“Something tells me this isn’t the last time we’ll see this one,” I said as the twists and turns of the neighborhood populated onto my interface. “Ah, fuck.”
“What?” Donut asked.
“Look at the map,” I said.
At least 50 red dots filled the area. All of them slow-moving. Brindle grubs. It was like they could sense a battle, and they converged on an area. Killing them wasn’t a problem. They didn’t fight back. I could literally run over them and kill an entire hallway of them in seconds. But that was a lot of them. A whole lot.
I planned out the path to the tutorial guild. It wasn’t far. Just a few hundred meters away.
“Let’s go talk to Mordecai,” I said.
* * *
“That bitch really said that?” Mordecai said, outraged, after I told him about Odette’s offer. “She wants me to seek her out? I would rather spend another 2,000 years in this room than exist in the same solar system as her. I’d rather meet a woman, sire children, and then devour those children than have anything to do with her again.”
“So that’s a no, then?” Donut asked.
Mordecai was no longer a Rat Hooligan. He’d shapeshifted into a much larger, hairier, and obsidian creature called a Bugaboo. He was like a bear with no neck, with enormous, owlish eyes, and comically skinny legs. His long arms were also absurdly thin compared to the rest of the seven-foot-tall creature. He looked terrifying and cartoonish at the same time. I’d almost punched him right in the face when we first entered the room. It took a solid ten seconds for me to realize that this was still Mordecai.
I examined his properties now.
Mordecai – Bugaboo. Level 50.
Guildmaster of this guildhall.
This is a Non-Combatant NPC.
You know that creepy, unkempt guy who lives on the corner? He doesn’t seem to have a job. Has a van. Hangs out at the park with a pair of binoculars? Yeah, you get the idea. Solitary monstrosities that never settle in a single place, Bugaboos may be found anywhere on the dungeon’s lower floors, often lying in wait for Crawlers to pass by so they can jump out and… do things to them. They’ll tell you they just want to cuddle. That’s probably a lie.
“That’s quite the monster they chose for you,” I said.
Mordecai nodded. “These guys are pretty depraved. They have them on the first and second floors, but the third floor will be filled with them. Don’t wander near alleys at night.”
“At night?” I asked.
Mordecai waved. “I can’t tell you about that.” I looked up at him, but he winked at me. I understood.
“So, Odette,” I asked. “You don’t like her? Is there something we need to be worried about?”
Mordecai took a long, deep breath. “Odette cares about Odette. She is smart, she is cunning, and she is more self-centered than that thing at the center of the galaxy. But her current gig, it is perfect for her. She can be very useful and helpful to you. Until you’re not.”
It’s funny, that’s pretty much the exact same thing she’d said about the game’s AI. I didn’t say that out loud.
“If she invites us back on the show, should we go?” I asked.
Mordecai grunted. “Oh, you should go. Her program is one of the few I would recommend. Not that they’d give you much of a choice. Speaking of shows, there’s someone who wants to speak with you. I’ve been asked to ping her once you showed up here. She’ll arrive in about ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Another show?” Donut asked. She’d just started combing through her achievements and boxes. She didn’t seem to have gotten anything noteworthy except one item. Her boss box contained an Enchanted Fur Brush of the Ecclesiastic that worked in a similar fashion to my pedicure kit. As long as someone brushed her for ten minutes every night, she’d receive an extra two points to her constitution for 30 hours. It was better than nothing, but even with the buff, her constitution was only four.
“She’ll explain who she is when she gets here,” Mordecai said. He leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “Do not upset this woman. She has a lot of power over your fate.”
I swallowed. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a good thing.
“I have several questions,” I said, settling into the chair.
Mordecai settled uncomfortably across from me. Before, the chairs had been too big for him. Now they were too small. “Let’s hear it.”
“You said it’d probably be ten days, but it’s six,” I said.
“Is that a question?” Mordecai asked. He shrugged. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen it lower than the maximum. The minimum is one day longer. They gave a reason in the last announcement. That’s all I can say about that.” Mordecai lifted his eyes, looking up at the ceiling.
“Can viewers see us in this room?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mordecai said. “Like I said before, the only place they can’t follow is in restrooms. They can only hear or see you, however. Not me. Only those with press credentials can see or hear me. Those like Odette. Most people know this and only watch if you have a good loot box to open.”
Shit. I hadn’t thought about that. Before, Mordecai had been more forthright, but we also hadn’t been under a crazy amount of scrutiny, either. Getting straight answers out of him was now going to be more difficult.
“Do you know who Damien is?”
Mordecai looked as if I’d just slapped him. “Who told you that name?” he hissed. “Did Odette tell you about him?”
“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “Not Odette. It was a mob. A fairy. She called for him just before we killed her.”
Mordecai relaxed. “Those damn fairies. They’re always getting themselves in trouble. Damien is a location manager. Each ‘City’ area has one. There are only three for this floor. He is my manager’s manager. You’re not supposed to see or know about him. I’m only allowed to tell you about this sort of stuff if you ask directly.”
We spent some time talking about the borough boss fight and the last fight with Krakaren. I asked him what her weakness was, and he smiled, telling me he wasn’t allowed to say, which really told me my theory was correct. It wasn’t the last we’d see of that particular boss.
I asked him about Agatha, about them editing her out of the boss battle. He waved it off. “They probably didn’t want to confuse the narrative.” Again, I could sense there was more there. I tried not to let my frustration show.
I told him my theory about how they were combining real aliens with earth stereotypes.
Mordecai looked equally frustrated. He paused, as if thinking hard. “That’s mostly correct. Again, it’s not really something I can discuss. But this isn’t exactly some big secret, either. Some of these monsters are made by AI, some are simply the actual creatures from their world—the tusklings and the Ball of Swine, for example. And some, like you’ve deduced, are created by a team of writers. Like with anything that’s been put together by a team, what you end up with can vary wildly. Those llamas, for example. They are unique to your planet, and I don’t recall anything in your culture that suggests they should be anthropomorphized as drug-dealing gang bangers. Someone just thought it’d be an interesting combo. Not everything will be social commentary.”
“It’s usually just stupid,” I muttered.
“It’s entertainment,” Mordecai said, once again reminding me of
something Odette said. There was a much deeper story there, between those two. I wondered if I’d ever learn.
“Also, I’ve been meaning to ask you about this tattoo on my neck,” I said. “The Desperado Club.”
“Nope,” Mordecai said. “Off limits. You’ll learn about the third floors soon enough. Sorry. Now, you better open your boxes before Zev gets here. Once she’s here, the cameras will turn off. Cameras will always turn off when kua-tin are around.”
Shit. “Okay,” I said, opening up my folder.
My IED and Explosives Handling and several other explosives-based skills had leaped to seven thanks to my creation of the Carl’s Jug O’ Boom. I also received a pretty strange achievement:
New achievement! Dungeonpreneur.
You have invented a stackable weapon, device, or potion. You will be memorialized for eternity with your name in the Dungeon Codex. Just don’t let it go to your head, Elon.
Reward: For every kill made with this device by other crawlers, you will receive a single gold coin. If you survive the dungeon, you will continue to receive this benefit—even during future seasons—at the current gold to credit exchange rate for the remainder of your natural life. Our lawyers made us put that last part in, but between you and me, we both know you’re going to die, and we’re going to keep using your hard work for our own benefit.
Interesting. It was too bad nobody else would ever use these things. The main ingredient—the jug of moonshine—was probably pretty rare. And those jugs were more valuable when they were left unaltered.
I received a bunch of the usual stuff plus a couple hundred gold coins, bringing our hoard to just over 1,000 coins. I went over it all. More potions and torches and biscuits. I had enough food now to feed an army for a month straight. I received a couple goblin boxes and took in more dynamite, smoke bombs, and lighters. I received a bronze crowd control box and added two scrolls of Confusing Fog. This time, I would give them both to Donut.
Dungeon Crawler Carl Page 28