Most of my own bomb-themed skills moved up to level nine. I now had a handful of mechanic and construction-themed skills as well. I received two achievements of note:
New achievement! Grease Monkey!
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dale. You built and deployed a wheeled device. When the primitive humans in Mesopotamia made the first wheel, they probably thought they were hot shit, too. It still took them another 5,000 years after that to invent the toilet.
Reward: You’ve received a Silver Mechanic’s Box!
New achievement! You call that a trap?
A mob has been injured because of something you purposely left lying around the dungeon. From scattered Legos to spiked pits to buckets of flesh-devouring Skinner Ants to dimensional rifts that instantly boil all the blood in one’s body, the art of trapmaking has a celebrated and storied history in the annals of Dungeon Crawler World.
So if you’re going to do it, you better do it right. Whatever it was that gave you this achievement, it was probably something stupid. This will help you make the next trap more… exciting.
Remember: If you don’t make it titillating, we will.
Reward: You’ve received a Gold Sapper’s Box!
I was a bit confused about what, specifically, gave me the trap achievement. I knew Donut had received this one, too. I guessed it was from either dropping the chain or the oil slick. Probably not the bombs, which were placed in another category.
The mechanic’s box gave me a tool called a Gorgon Marital Aid. It was shaped like a spatula. “What the hell is this?” I muttered, pulling up its properties.
Gorgon Marital Aid
A favorite amongst intergalactic porn stars, this is a hardening and de-hardening tool. May only be used at a workbench. Assists in fusing joints or creating varying degrees of plasticity in otherwise rigid materials without affecting material strength.
That seemed like a pretty useful tool. I put it in my inventory next to my goo-inator 3000.
The sapper’s box contained two items. A Sapper’s table that practically knocked me over when it appeared. It was a table just like my engineering and alchemy table. The description noted that explosive items or traps created at the table didn’t lose stability or couldn’t be prematurely set off.
The second item in the box was a trap-building item. There were ten of them, and each one was nothing more than a tiny black box the size of a dime with a long length of wire attached.
Proximity Trigger
Trigger Warning! Traumatizing content! Using a Sapper’s Table, the highly-valuable Proximity Trigger may be attached to any non-static trap. Allows for the establishment of activation conditions, including countdowns, mob-type triggers, etc.
Sure enough, the moment I put the item in my inventory, it placed itself near the top of the list in terms of value, right behind that ridiculous Fireball or Custard lottery ticket. And I now had ten of them.
After all of that, my level was still stuck at 11. It was near the edge of 12, but it had barely budged since the fight with Krakaren. The plan was, for now, to kill off the kobolds and then move out of the area. I was hoping to be at least level 13 by the time we hit the stairs.
Mukta (Admin): Transferring now.
Before I even had the chance to finish my thought, we disappeared and reappeared.
Donut, who had been sitting on a chair, reappeared two feet in the air. She yowled in surprise and fell. Her metallic crupper clinked onto the boat’s deck. The ground roiled. As always, my HUD snapped off.
We were on another boat, one much smaller than the last one. There were no windows and no doors. There were no features at all other than a pair of chairs that sat cramped together at one end of the room. The place was about the size of a large walk-in closet. I could reach up and touch the ceiling, which seemed to be made of plastic. The room smelled of salt water and was about twenty degrees cooler than the dungeon.
A floating frisbee thing descended from the low ceiling. The jet-black, metallic disk hummed. A single blue light flashed on the edge. It spoke in a soothing female, robotic voice.
“My name is Mexx-55. You are in a rental trailer owned and operated by Senegal Production Systems, Unlimited. This trailer is used by multiple tunnel productions related to the crawl. For this session, use of these facilities has been leased by the program Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem. Sit in the provided chairs and keep your limbs to your side while the table generates. The holo will commence in 60 seconds.”
“No green room?” Donut said, looking around, outraged. “No snacks?”
“Please sit down,” Mexx-55 repeated.
“What’s the host’s name?” Donut asked.
“The Maestro,” Mexx-55 said. Her previously-emotionless voice hinted an air of distaste.
“Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem?” I muttered, moving to the chair. The moment we sat, Donut’s seat raised up. A table formed out of the wall, grinding in place in front of us. It was only about two feet wide. “That’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah, wait until you see the show,” Mexx-55 said before rising up into the ceiling.
42
“I’m going to vomit,” Donut said as the floor heaved. “I’m going to puke on television, Carl.”
“You’ll get used to it,” I said. “I think when the holo starts, it stabilizes. Just breathe.”
“I don’t like puking. I don’t want to puke!”
I laughed. “Really? I seem to recall you had a thing for vomiting on my pillow.”
“That was different. I did that on purpose.”
“I knew it! I fucking knew it.”
Donut made a gagging noise. “The last place didn’t bounce around this much.”
“The seas were calmer, and it was a bigger boat,” I said. “Breathe.”
The dark, heaving room flickered, and the lights turned on, revealing an audience. They had no reaction to our sudden appearance, and I suspected we weren’t yet visible to them. The sensation of movement was suddenly much more muted. It was still there, but the holo had some sort of compensation effect.
I looked about the suddenly-bigger room. A table floated before us, much larger than the actual table in the trailer. This table curved, shaped like a smile. We sat in the second and third seat. To our left was a larger, more ornate chair. It was made of a dark wood with what appeared to be red velvet cushions. The arm rests were made of pig skulls. Four more plain, empty chairs appeared to our right, curving along the table.
I looked over my shoulder, and the backdrop was an elephant-like monster with three spike-covered trunks. The animation swung its head back and forth in a loop with the word “Extreme” exploding over and over in the midst of the image.
The crowd suddenly started screaming and cheering. I snapped my attention forward, but I couldn’t see what they were hollering at. Their attention was to my left. I realized the show had started, and the host had appeared, but for whatever reason, we couldn’t see him or her yet. This was a different setup to Odette’s show. I suspected we’d just magically appear when it was our turn.
This went on for several minutes. The crowd started chanting something. It took me a moment to understand what they were saying. “Die, die, die,” they seemed to be repeating. They were watching a video, I realized, their attention focused on the main screen, which for me, still showed the elephant graphic. They burst into screams of pleasure as whatever it was they were watching, died. “Glurp, glurp!” they screamed. “Glurp, glurp!”
I spent a few moments examining the crowd, who continued to laugh and cheer. The audience’s makeup was fairly similar to Odette’s crowd, with a glaring difference that made my stomach sink.
“Oh fuck,” I grumbled when I finally saw it.
I focused on a group of humans sitting in the second row, hooting and screaming and laughing boisterously. There was a cruel air to their laughter. It was almost a tangible thing, like a black, malevolent cloud that embraced the presence of
the entire audience. I was reminded of that day when my dad and his friends broke my slingshot. They’d been firing rocks at squirrels, laughing in a similar way.
These humans in the second row were all male, and they were all about twelve or thirteen years old. It seemed the entire audience consisted of young, pre-and early teen males. One of them was wearing a red shirt that said “GLURP!” on it.
“Glurp, glurp!” the audience yelled. “Glurp, glurp!”
“Donut,” I said, talking quickly. “This crowd is going to be a lot different than the last one. They’re all kids. I don’t think they’re the happy, cartoon-watching kind, either.”
“Carl, we’ve gone over this,” Donut said. “You sit there and look angry, and I do the talking. Remember?”
To our left, the host suddenly appeared. There was no warning. He showed up in mid-sentence. A floating note appeared in front of me. ON AIR SOON. BE READY.
“… know you little cunts are gonna love today’s surprise panelists! Your Maestro had to bang some slimy mudskipper tail to pull this one off. But nothing is too good for Maestro’s piglets! Suck it! Suck it good, piglets!”
“Glurp, glurp!” the audience screamed. “Glurp, glurp!”
The host—the Maestro—was an orc. A huge, muscular orc.
He looked a lot like a tuskling, but it was clear this was a different type of the same species. The tusklings were dwarf versions of these guys. Tuskling skin was bright pink, pig-like. The Maestro’s flesh was darker, covered in black, bristly hair. He reminded me of a wild boar. His left tusk was completely gold. He stood about six and a half feet tall, built like a tank. A line of earrings circled his left ear. He wore a hot pink, silken shirt, buttoned halfway up, revealing a hairy, well-muscled chest covered in gold chains. I couldn’t tell for certain, but I had the distinct impression he was only in his early twenties.
I hated him instantly.
To my right now sat two humans, two men about my age. Both of them were Asian. Their ragged, bewildered look pegged them as fellow crawlers. One of them noticed us and pointed, talking quickly to his companion. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it seemed like they recognized us. I waved, and they waved back, both of them bowing rapidly.
They turned and also waved at the empty chairs to their right. There was someone there, but we couldn’t see who it was.
“So we have six guests today. Two stupid, lame guests. Two VIP surprise guests, and then two more surprise guests for our VIPs. Our VIPs today are so hot, we are—for the very first time—coming to you live! That is how hard I am working for you. We’ll start with the lame guests. Watch this shit, piglets.”
A screen appeared in front of us. It showed a party of four crawlers running from a group of ten troglodyte bashers. The lizard monsters were armed with spiked clubs. The crawler group consisted of the two guys sitting next to us, a woman, and a third male. Only the male who wasn’t here appeared to be armed. He held a long, odd sword with teeth on it like a saw. None of them wore any sort of armor. They turned the corner and stopped dead.
I felt sick to my stomach, seeing what they faced. Just around the bend was a familiar sight. Five grub pupae sat, blocking their retreat. The middle sac was in the midst of ripping open. A massive hornet burst forth and buzzed into the air. The only resemblance it bore to the brindle grub was the top half of its bug face. The monster consisted of a huge, hornet-like body with a pair of arms with grasping, clawed fingers. It looked at the four crawlers and spat. A glob of white goo shot out and hit the male with the sword. It splattered directly on the man’s face. He screamed, falling to the ground, dropping the sword. The glob was like acid. It sizzled and crackled. His pain-filled screeches continued as the troglodytes stopped at the corner, boxing them all in. The other pupae started to pulsate and tear as four more hornets appeared. The woman reached down to pick up the sword. The world on the screen froze.
At first I thought they’d simply paused the scene, but then the two men disappeared. When they vanished, there was a puff of air, and the sword blew a foot away, clattering loudly. Everything else, including the mobs remained frozen.
The crowd burst into a mix of applause and jeers. The two men next us were now visible to the audience.
“You know what time it is, piglets?” the Maestro shouted.
“Death watch! Death watch!” the crowd screamed.
“Okay, so we got two crawlers here. Their full names are quite the snout full, and does it really matter?” Laughter followed. “The fellow with the acne scars is Li Jun and the bald fucker we’ll just call Zhang. Say hello, meat.”
It took the two men a moment to realize the Maestro was talking to them.
“Hello,” Li Jun said. “I don’t understand what is happening.”
“Okay, so let me catch you up since you’re too stupid to figure it out. You’re on Death Watch, a segment of my show. That means we just plucked you away from certain death. You’re welcome. Before, your plight was hopeless. Now you have a chance to survive. But we’ll get to that in a second.”
The Maestro waved up at the screen. “You all have been hit with a Time Freeze spell, and it will run out just as this episode ends. We have a little game we’d like you to play, to give you the opportunity to live past the next few seconds. Yeah?”
“Okay,” Li Jun said, exchanging a look with his companion. “What do we need to do?”
“Death watch! Death watch!” the crowd chanted.
“We’re going to show you a series of scenes, and you have to guess if the crawler survives or not. But before we begin, I want to know a little about you guys.” The Maestro waved his hand, the stats of the two men appeared floating over both them. Both were level seven. They each had a single bronze star over their heads. Both had a strength of eight, meaning they’d received some sort of enhancement. Also of note was Zhang’s constitution, which was at 15, making it one point higher than my own.
“Li Jun,” the Maestro said. “Did you know your three companions before the game started?”
The poor man seemed terrified and bewildered. “Yes. Yes, sir. We all work together in a warehouse. All except my sister, Li Na.”
“So that doll up on the screen there, the one reaching for the sword. She’s your sister?”
“Yes, sir.”
The orc nodded thoughtfully. “Would you do anything to save her?”
“Death watch! Death watch!” the crowd screamed.
“What do you mean?” the man asked.
The Maestro ignored him. He turned to Zhang. “And you, Zhang. What do you think about Li Na?”
“What do I think about her? She’s my best friend’s sister. She’s like my own sister.”
“And what about your fourth companion? The guy who just got his face spooged on by that Brindled Vespa? He’s your friend too?”
“Yes,” Zhang said after a moment. The bald man’s eyes were fixed on the frozen scene. “He’s our manager.”
“The big boss man, huh?” the Maestro said. “So, if you were forced to choose between saving him and saving Li Na, you’d pick the girl, right?”
Zhang just looked at the orc, refusing to answer.
“That’s okay buddy, you might not have to choose. We’re going to play a game. This is how it works. We’re going to show you four scenes, and we want you to guess if the crawler is going to live or die through the encounter. If you guess correctly, you will receive a teleport point. When we’re done, for every point you have, you can spend it to save yourselves or one of your companions. The recipient of each teleport point will be immediately transferred to the closest safe room. If you decide to throw a point at ol’ spooge-face, he will be healed, so don’t worry about that. Ready? Good, let’s go.”
The scene showed a woman running from a giant beaver thing holding a battle axe.
“Fuck this,” I said, and I stood from my chair.
“Carl, where are you going?” Donut asked.
“Come on, Donut. This is beyond
the pale. Fuck this guy.” The table was blocking my exit. I climbed up on it, feeling forward for where the real table ended. I reached it, and hopped down, my legs piercing through the illusion.
A moment later the lights of the chamber snapped back on, and the holo dispersed. Mexx-55 emerged, floating down from her spot on the ceiling. But when she spoke, the voice was different. This was a gruff, male voice. Also an orc if I had to guess.
“Get back in your seat, Crawler,” the voice said. “You’re scheduled to be on screen after this segment. This show is being tunneled live. We do not have time for tantrums.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
“Carl, you’re going to get us in trouble,” Donut said.
“You are ordered to sit,” the voice said. “We have paid the appearance fee, and you will participate in the program. If you refuse, we are authorized to drop you into this ocean, drowning you both.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re not Borant, and you’re not the Syndicate. There’s no way they’d authorize that. We are not participating in this cruelty.”
Nothing happened for several moments. Donut jumped up to my shoulder. “You’re gonna get us in trouble,” she said again, this time more quietly.
“Crawler Carl, this is Administrator Mukta,” a new voice said. “You are required to take your seat, or there will be consequences.”
“I’ll go on as many shows as you want, but we’re not doing this one,” I said.
“Carl, we will discuss this when you are done. If you do not participate, we will accelerate you. There are plenty of other crawlers to show on our program. This is not a bluff.”
Deep breath, I thought. You will not break me. You will not fucking break me.
“Can that other guy hear me right now?” I asked.
Dungeon Crawler Carl Page 34