The Satan’s Lil’ Hedgehogs mob have been removed and placed on a deeper floor. Their armor-piercing quill attack has been deemed too strong for this floor by the system AI. Apologies to all those affected. We’ve had a few complaints about the proliferation of the grub mobs. This is not a bug and is by design.
Finally, due to the abundance of Crawlers camping in safe rooms upon the collapse of the first floor, we’ve been forced to make a difficult decision. From now on, all safe rooms and safe areas will close one hour prior to floor collapse. Any Crawler who is in a designated safe area will be teleported to just outside that area at one hour prior.
As always, kill, kill, kill!
On the message board, a new timer appeared, just below the Time to Level Collapse timer.
Time to Safe Room Closure. It was one hour faster than the level timer.
I met eyes with Brandon, who looked stricken. At that moment I knew he’d been thinking the same thing as me, that it was time to just give it up.
Donut: Our views! Carl, our views!
Outside, the door stopped bashing itself in. It was oddly quiet. I looked up at the minimap. The mass of grubs had reached the hallway, and the elemental finally noticed them. It left the door and tore through them as I watched. It followed the line of red dots around the corner and disappeared down the hallway. I had a moment to think, shit, we should’ve been ready to run, but it was over in less than a minute. The thousands of red dots were just gone.
The description stated the elemental dissipated after it claimed 666 souls, whatever that meant. I was hoping that the grubs counted toward that number.
They didn’t.
The elemental returned to the door, thrashing and smashing, trying to get back in.
If we had run, it would have followed us. Even if we’d used the Chopper, there was no way we’d have gotten away. Not unless we’d split up and gone in different directions. And even then, it probably would’ve gotten us.
The map seemed to flicker for a moment, and a long line of Xs appeared where the grubs had all died. Already more red dots appeared, moving toward their fallen brothers and sisters.
On the map, near the stairs, just a quarter mile away a group of fifteen red dots sat. I hadn’t noticed them before. I hovered over the icons.
Grub – Pupa Stage.
A counter, currently at just under 10 hours, was ticking away next to their names.
I remembered the scene from the recap episode. The level 93 mob, after sliding down the hall, had been hurt by my boom jug. It’d taken almost a quarter of its life away before it healed itself.
Then, I remembered something else. It was something Rory the shamanka, the one with all the piercings on her face, had told us. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. I looked down at Donut.
Carl: The plan has changed. We can’t wait for my shield to cooldown.
“Come on, Donut,” I said out loud, pushing a table away in the corner of the restaurant. We were going to need a lot of space.
“What’re you doing?” Brandon asked, standing from his table.
I pulled a bunch of items from my inventory, piling it on the floor. The round free weights clanged loudly as they hit the tiles.
“I need your help,” I said.
40
We still had some cans of Agatha’s spray paint, and I painted “Mother of All Bombs” on the side of the contraption.
It took us about five hours to finish building the launcher. Brandon pointed out MOAB actually stood for “Massive Ordnance Air Blast,” but his brother said, “Don’t be that guy.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Brandon said. “The name is still wrong. When they say ‘Mother of all bombs,’ they mean one giant bomb. Not whatever this thing is. You should call it the Bomb Chicken or something.”
“It’s too late,” I said, indicating the spray paint. “I’ve already named it. Besides, I like the name. It’s a play on words.”
“Well, I’m going to call it the Bomb Chicken whether you like it or not,” Brandon declared.
I’d discovered something interesting while building the device. This should’ve been obvious earlier, but it hadn’t even occurred to me. In the safe room, all of my sticks of dynamite were harmless. I could pull them out, and under status they had Inert While in Safe Room, followed by a parenthesis stating their real status. Their status still ticked down while being handled, and I didn’t want to tempt fate enough to find out what would happen when that status reached zero, but I was relatively certain they wouldn’t blow.
Brandon stepped back now, admiring our work.
“Do you really think this is going to kill it?” he asked, suddenly serious.
“Not a chance,” I said. “That thing is level 93. It ain’t going to like this too much, but there’s no way it’ll be enough. The babies will slow it down, though.”
Brandon gave me a sour look. “If it’s not going to kill it, then why are we doing this?”
“It’s all part of the plan,” I said.
“Wait. What, exactly, is the plan?” he asked. He waved at my contraption. “I thought this was the plan.”
“Like I said, it’s part of it, but it’s not all of it. I can’t tell you the rest,” I said, pointing up at the ceiling, which had become the universal gesture for “The assholes are listening.”
Since this scheme involved using a dungeon exploit, I wanted to keep it in my head. Even Donut didn’t know the full extent. Mordecai told us that the viewers couldn’t see our private chats, but Borant and the dungeon AI could. I didn’t want to risk them changing the rules on us at the last second.
Because that would really suck. Not that I’d live long enough to complain about it.
We needed to get safely into the hallway. So the first component of this insane scheme was also one of the most terrifying parts.
My first suggestion was to wait for the grubs to regroup and get close enough for the rage elemental to go hunting them again. But the grubs were painfully slow, and more and more of them were hitting the pupa stage, meaning they were no longer moving around.
Imani came up with a bold solution. “Why don’t we just open the damn door?” she said.
This was hours ago, right when we started building the MOAB.
We all looked at each other. I immediately grasped what she was saying. The idea was horrifying, but she was right. We were in a safe room. Mobs would teleport away. Not far away, according to Mordecai, but they would still be ejected.
“Well, shit,” I said, putting down my goblin riveter. “Maybe we don’t need to build this thing at all.”
So we tested it. We moved everyone to the other side of the restaurant, near the entrance to the sleeping chambers. I didn’t know what was trembling more, me or the door. If we were wrong about this...
I walked up, and I hesitantly reached for the exit. The moment I turned the handle, the door burst inward, and a giant claw raked at me, coming at my face as I flew back into the room.
Thwum. The sound of the monster teleporting away was odd, like that of an electrical generator turning on.
“Holy crap, that worked,” I said, sitting up. My eyes searched the map, looking for it. I didn’t see it anywhere.
But a moment later, my relief turned to dread as I saw the dot rocketing toward us. It’d come from the main hallway. “Shit, it’s really booking it. It remembers where we are.”
“Keep the door open,” Imani said. “See if the dungeon sends it further away this time. Or if it learns.”
It was maybe 90 seconds before it entered our hallway again. It killed any grubs it passed, but it seemed to ignore the ones in the pupa stage. It roared and shrieked, came to the door, and once again tried to swipe at me.
Again, it teleported away. This time it came from another hallway down, but it appeared to have still been teleported out into the main hallway. We tried it several times. Each time, the elemental took anywhere from 75 to 120 seconds to return. It was clear the monster was un
intelligent, nothing more than the single-minded embodiment of rage. We eventually closed the door, not wanting to create any more grub corpses.
I sighed, going back to work on the MOAB.
Now, hours later, it was finally time to put my idea to the test. I was less confident about this than I was with the whole portable fortress idea. That time I knew we faced a mob meant to be killed. This was different. This was something meant as a punitive action, a punishment. It wasn’t meant to be fair, to be survivable.
The chopper hummed merrily away, aimed directly at the exit to the chamber. With Donut’s sidecar, it was too big to get through the door. We’d been forced to remove it. Instead, we added the newly-built bike trailer, affixing the tall MOAB to it and adding the equally-tall seat for Donut behind the launcher. She’d have to duck in order for us to leave the room. She sat there now, facing backward, a look of grim determination on her fuzzy face, like a tailgunner in a WWII bomber.
“I think I like Bomb Chicken better, too,” Donut announced.
“Too late,” I said. I nodded at Imani, who stood at the door, ready to pull it open.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll count down from three.”
Donut: EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE IS WATCHING THIS. I JUST HIT ONE TRILLION VIEWS, CARL. ONE TRILLION.
“Focus, Donut,” I said, not bothering to use the chat.
“One!” Imani yanked the door open. The massive, terrifying rage elemental lunged, and as always, teleported away. The space where it had occupied shimmered, crackling like superheated air.
I pushed hard on the pedals of the bike, and we rushed into the hallway. Everything out here was blackened and turned to ash. It smelled like burning garbage, reminding me of the Hoarder’s chamber. There was no sign of the train cars or the remaining wheelchairs and walkers that had been abandoned. The only thing that had survived was the long, 300 foot length of glittering, magical chain, which I had grabbed earlier.
Behind me, Imani slammed the door. I pedaled down the hall, turning the throttle. The trailer was built using broken hunks of wood, and the spare chopper wheels we’d looted from the goblins. I could barely feel its weight. It squeaked loudly, but it didn’t bounce under the press of the MOAB. We passed the nearby intersection and furiously increased speed until we reached the next one down, another two hundred meters away. We angled ourselves so we faced this new hallway, and we waited.
“Here it comes,” Donut said a moment later. The dot appeared, and the elemental rushed down the distant hall, moving like an earth-destroying meteor sent from the heavens.
“As soon as it rounds the curve, we go,” I said. We had to make sure it saw us. If it stopped at the door again, we’d have to loop around to gain its attention, using the closer hallway. I didn’t want to do that. The less corners we had to take with this trailer, the better.
Far down the hallway, a little more than a quarter of a mile away, it appeared, running full tilt.
I didn’t have to worry about whether or not it was going to see us. It saw. The horned badger skull skidded to a stop, looking in our direction. It shrieked with indignation and resumed its gallop, headed straight at us.
Holy shit that thing is fast. I pumped my legs.
“Go! Go!” Donut cried. Thanks to my Chopper Pilot skill and the help of the throttle, we could reach top speed in seconds. It still felt as if we weren’t moving at all. The bike could go about 25 miles per hour before it got too hot. The elemental was like a cheetah. Unimpeded, it would run us down in seconds.
We hurtled down the hallway. “Fire the first baby!” I cried.
Brandon was correct that the title MOAB was misleading.
The apparatus wasn’t a bomb at all, but a device designed to launch bombs. Multiple types of bombs.
“It’s the bombs’ mother,” I’d said. “Get it? And we can name the bombs its babies.”
None of them had been impressed.
“You need to stick to punching things and blowing them up,” Donut had said. “Leave the creative to me.”
The device wasn’t complicated, but it had to be precisely built, especially here with the bumpy hallways. It was little more than a curved, ski-jump-like ramp made from a pair of spare-part chopper wheel wells, with a pair of half-pipe channels at the end to keep the “babies” steady, and tiny, shock-absorbing front-wheelchair coasters for the very end of the ramp, keeping the end of the conduit inches from the ground.
As a kid, I’d had something similar for my matchbox cars. You dropped the cars into the top, and gravity took care of the rest. They’d plummet down the waterslide-like ramp, gaining speed, hitting the ground at full throttle. If you built the ramp correctly, especially the part at the end, the cars would ease onto the flat surface, still accelerating by the time they were halfway across the room.
It’d taken us several hours to get this correct. We had very little space to test this in, but thanks to the know-how from Brandon and Chris, I was confident that the babies would work as intended.
We knew this monster had at least two attacks. The claws and the reverse-gravity spell. We also knew that the gravity spell had a somewhat limited range. So in order to get to our destination, we needed to keep the elemental far away long enough to get there.
“Bombs away!” Donut cried. She pulled the wheeled, back-heavy bomb from her inventory. It fit perfectly into the grooves, and she gave it a nudge. It rocketed down the ramp, hit the ground with a bump, and continued straight. From our perspective, it zoomed away. It didn’t rear up like I had feared.
“Brandon, you beautiful son of a bitch!” I yelled as I watched the first bomb roll away over my shoulder.
I’d wanted to put the weight in the front, but Brandon had insisted that was a mistake, that the bombs would flip. Instead, he’d drawn with his finger on the table, explaining how to weigh them down. He’d then gone off on some Isaac Newton math bullshit. He’d said the babies wouldn’t go as far back as they would’ve if I’d been sitting still. He talked about some Mythbusters episode where they shot a soccer ball out the back of a moving car, and the ball had dropped straight to the ground. I told him I didn’t care as long as the bombs were far away from the chopper when they went off.
After several frustrating, failed attempts to automate the launching process, we’d come up with a solution. Once Donut was seated at the correct height, she could pull the “babies” out of her inventory, and they’d emerge right on the platform. Each bomb was the size of a snowboard, but it was shaped and weighted like a champion pinewood derby car. Wheels had suddenly become a precious commodity, but we had something almost as good: free weights. A lot of free weights of different sizes. When tightened and greased properly, they became very effective wheels.
This first baby—“Baby Uno”—was different than the others. It was heavier and bigger. It contained three boom jugs, a clay jug filled with nothing but goblin oil, and a small jar of gun powder. The last of my hobgoblin pus sat in the middle of the bomb, and I held the magical trigger into my hand now, waiting for Donut’s signal.
We had four types of babies: baby uno, boom jar babies, shredder babies, and, finally, oh shit babies.
The oh shit babies consisted of two boom jars with a full-sized gunpowder satchel wrapped in dynamite. Those remained in my own inventory, too dangerous for Donut to touch. They were a last resort, and I prayed we wouldn’t have to use them here.
I watched the red dot stream down the hallway, approaching the corner. Far behind us, the heavy bomb coasted to a stop.
“Hang on,” I cried, and I jammed on the detonator. There was a maddening five-second delay. I turned my attention forward. “Oh fuck.”
We hit the first intersection, filled with the grub pupae, a dozen of them. “What the hell man,” I cried, dodging the giant mounds. I wasn’t expecting them to be this damn big. Donut cried out as the trailer bumped ominously. Each mound was about the size of a human standing erect. Red and yellow lights flashed underneath the wet, pulsating sacs
.
“Drop the bola!” I yelled.
We had two levers next to Donut’s chair. The red one and the black one. We’d originally designed these as bomb launchers before we gave up, deciding to just use the more-stable inventory system. But we’d still built two chambers on either side of the MOAB. Donut pulled the black lever, and the bottom of the chamber slid away.
Imani’s chain, with heavy weights at either end, dropped away, snaking through the chamber. The monster, hopefully, would get its legs tangled in the thin, unbreakable link. It probably would only impede it for a second or two, but every second counted.
Behind us, the bomb detonated with a ripping, screaming roar. Dust cascaded off the ceiling. It had blown a half-second too late, hitting the monster in the back. I didn’t dare look behind me, but I could see on the map it had propelled the monster halfway down the hall, even closer to us. The red dot of the elemental rolled to a stop.
“Drop the boom babies,” I cried. This next hall was filled with grubs, mostly level threes, which I hadn’t yet fought. These were larger, about twice as big as the regular grubs. They had long, pointed tails that they whipped ineffectively up at us as we passed. The level threes were too big to just run over with the chopper, and I had to dodge them.
Cow-Tailed Brindle Grub. Level 3.
The final form before they hit the pupa stage, the Cow-Tailed Brindle Grub is finally able to defend itself, kind of like the way a toddler holding a plastic baseball bat is able to defend himself.
“The cars are going to hit the grubs,” Donut cried. “They’re in the way!”
“Do it anyway,” I yelled, increasing speed. Below me, the chopper became dangerously hot.
“Bombs away,” Donut cried. I heard the distinctive clack of the bomb’s wheels locking in place. The torch sizzled as Donut activated it, and it rolled away down the launcher ramp.
Sure enough, the wheeled bomb hit a group of grubs and flipped, crashing and then detonating. A wave of heat washed over me, but I didn’t take any damage. We were going fast enough. Barely. The entire hallway lit with blue flames.
Dungeon Crawler Carl Page 32