A pause. “No, he cannot,” Mukta said.
“As long as I don’t talk shit about you guys, will there be consequences for what I say? As long as I participate, I mean?”
Another pause, and this one was longer than before. “They have paid for your appearance. Nothing else.”
“All right,” I said, “Tell him we want on the show. Now. Before this Death Watch segment ends.” Without waiting for an answer, I returned to my seat. The table once again pushed itself out, and the holo resumed.
“Carl, what are you doing?” Donut asked as she settled back in place.
“I’m the one who talks this time,” I said.
The studio reformed. The crowd was screaming and laughing. On the screen, a dead man convulsed on the ground as a group of baby-faced winged fairies splashed about in his corpse like it was a kiddie pool.
“Sorry, it looks like you got that one wrong, too. You have two teleport points,” the Maestro said. “I need a decision.”
Neither of the men said anything.
The Maestro leaned forward in his ornate chair. He smiled wickedly. “I need a decision, or nobody gets saved.”
“Then nobody gets saved,” Li Jun said. He looked at Zhang. “We die together.”
“Aw, isn’t that fucking sweet?” the Maestro said. “Very well, if that’s what you want. Piglets, should we give them what they want?”
“Death Watch! Death Watch!”
“No, wait,” Zhang said. “Save Li Jun and Li Na.”
“No,” Li Jun said. He reached out and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We stand together.”
A sour look passed across the Maestro’s face. He said something, but it was muted. He paused, then nodded. A moment passed, and the cruel smile reappeared on his face.
“We’re going to do something a little different, piglets. Our VIP guests have been watching backstage, and it seems like they have something to say.”
The crowd screamed its approval.
ON AIR IN TEN SECONDS.
The Maestro was playing this off like this was his idea. “Okay, piglets, my next two guests do not need any introduction. The last you probably saw of these two, they were stuck in a room with a bunch of old fucks. Are they going to escape? Spoiler alert, they just got out. We were going to show what these crazy assholes did to get free, but since they want to suck on it so bad, we’re going to bring them on early.”
“Glurp, glurp! Glurp, glurp!”
YOU ARE NOW ON AIR.
The studio became brighter, and the crowd went berserk. Donut made a show of licking her paw, looking aloof.
“Crawler Carl and Princess Donut,” the Maestro said. He drew out the word “Princess,” and it dripped with sarcasm. “Piglets, you probably don’t know this. These two just broke a record for the most-watched second floor battle in the history of Dungeon Crawler World. If it were me, I would’ve killed every last one of those geriatric sandbags and reaped the experience, but you know how it is with humans.” He looked down at Donut. “And cats, apparently. All that effort, and what did they get? No experience, no real loot.” He shrugged. “But you can’t argue with results. Carl and Donut, say hello to my piglets.”
“We want in on the game,” I said, not bothering to greet the crowd. “We want to play Death Watch, too.”
The Maestro laughed, an uncertain timbre to it. “That’s not how it works, Carl. I knew you were a crazy mother…”
“They have two points. Let’s use them to transfer me and Donut to that spot.” I looked at the crowd. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
The crowd roared. “Death watch! Death watch!”
It took a moment for the large orc to recover. “People talk about how stupid you are, Carl. But I never realized you were this stupid. If you’re feeling suicidal, then…”
I leaned in, pointing my finger. “No, you listen to me, pork boy. If you’re going to fuck with people like this, then at least make it fair. They played your game, and they won two points. You said they can use those two points to transfer people away. I don’t see why it can’t be used to transfer people in, either.”
The crowd seemed to love this idea.
“It doesn’t work that way,” the Maestro repeated. “You’re not part of the game. It’s against the rules.”
“Yeah, fuck the rules.” I looked at the crowd. “I think we should tell the rules to suck it. What do you think?”
“Glurp, glurp! Glurp, glurp!”
The Maestro did not like his audience glurping for someone else. I recognized that look on his face, of fulminating, under-the-surface rage. I felt a deep satisfaction at that. I didn’t know if this was a good idea or an incredibly dumb one, but I felt the urge to keep poking at him.
The truth was, I didn’t really want to be transferred to this battle, likely halfway across the world. I felt for these guys, and I wanted to help them. But if helping Brandon and crew taught me anything, it was that I needed to balance it out. There was a difference between giving aid and sacrificing yourself for people you didn’t even know. Still, this felt like the right thing. I knew my argument was nonsensical. I also knew how this sort of crowd thought. This Maestro guy was the worst kind of a bully. A bully with an audience. I had to do something. For the moment I didn’t have a plan other than pissing him off as much as I could.
I looked over at the two empty chairs to the right of Zhang and Li Jun. A thought struck me. What had he said? Two more surprise guests for our VIPs. So it was somebody we knew. I had a sudden, strong suspicion who it was. If I was right, then I knew I could push the Maestro even further. He had a plan. A cruel plan, and going down this path was doing nothing but detracting from the narrative he was attempting to build. That meant the more I pushed, the more it would piss him off, and the more desperate he’d get to get to steer the conversation back on track.
On television shows and in kids’ books, they always repeated the “Bullies will back down when stood up to” mantra. That was utter horseshit. It always has been. That only worked when the one standing up to the bully was stronger than them. The Maestro and I were not on equal footing. But my short confrontation in the production trailer taught me something important. I didn’t need to be stronger than him. Donut and I were something better. We were expensive.
I had a hunch that they’d spent a lot of money to get me and Donut on this show, maybe even overextended themselves. We were popular, and Donut had proven herself a reliable guest. The fact they were using a shitty rental trailer and didn’t have their own suggested this production ran on the same sort of shoestring budget most YouTube shows had.
The Maestro, seething, said, “You dumb shit. These guys were dead! I saved them. I’m giving them a second chance. Maybe I will transfer you into that fight. How would you like that? And we’ll transfer the other four out, so you have no backup at all. Your ridiculous luck wouldn’t save you then. I don’t think you’ve fought a Brindled Vespa yet. In a second, there’ll be five of them in that hallway. You’ll be utterly fucked.”
I smiled. “You’re too much of a pussy to do it. I dare you.”
“Death watch! Death watch!”
The Maestro looked so angry I thought he might actually cry. I suspected—and hoped—he couldn’t do it. If I knew one thing about Borant, it was that they nickel and dimed everything. This Death Watch segment probably cost a lot of money, and that was with regular, low-view crawlers. There was no way they’d be able to send one of the game’s highest-value streams into danger like that.
When people became red-zone angry, they were, in general, unpredictable. That wasn’t true with bullies. I knew this from experience. It was the opposite with bullies. I knew exactly what was about to happen.
I turned to Li Jun and Zhang who sat next to me, mouths agape. I quickly whispered, “Grab your sister and the other guy and run toward the troglodytes and through them. Leave the sword. The lizards are really dumb and slow, and their attention is on the hornets. You’ll only have
a few seconds.”
“But,” Li Jun said. “You wanted to trade places…”
The Maestro growled, “You don’t tell me what to do on my own show, meat.” He slammed down on a button on his table, and the two men to my right vanished.
The words “Death Watch Extreme!” appeared on the giant display. The two men appeared back in the scene in the hallway, caught between the hornets and the troglodytes. For a moment, everything remained frozen except the two men.
Zhang reacted first, shouting, “grab your sister!” as he reached down to pick up the fallen third man.
Just as he moved to pick him up, the scene unfroze. The sister stumbled as the sword she was grabbing for was suddenly several feet away. Li Jun grasped her wrist and pointed. “Run!” he cried. The three of them scrambled directly at the crowd of troglodytes, who stood like turkeys, watching the hornets.
The monsters—Brindled Vespas he’d called them—didn’t care who their victims were. Multiple globs of white spit shot out, splashing into the lizards, who in turn raised their clubs and charged at the bugs.
Both groups of monsters ignored the four humans, who managed to slip away and out into the hall. The scene ended with Zhang forcing a healing potion into the mouth of their companion before they slipped into a safe room. The video snapped off to a mix of jeers and scattered applause. The audience’s reaction was subdued, as if they weren’t sure how to respond.
I looked up at the Maestro, a huge smile on my face.
“Glurp on that, motherfucker,” I said.
43
“Uh, let’s now watch how our two guests escaped that safe room,” the Maestro said after the audience’s laughter died down.
The stage went dark as the screen replayed our desperate escape from the rage elemental. It showed the scene from the point of view of the hallway, with the chopper bursting out of the room, screeching around the corner, Donut sitting high on the contraption. The audience roared their approval. Next to us, the Maestro screamed and ranted at some unseen producer. It was all muted. The large orc seemed to be out of breath and enraged.
“Carl, you scare me when you get that angry,” Donut whispered.
I reached over and scratched her head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not really as mad as I look. I’m just trying to make him angry.”
“It worked. Now he hates us. I don’t like people hating us. Our followers are going to go down.”
I grunted. “Yeah, I don’t think you need to worry about that. Look, Donut. The show isn’t over yet. See those two chairs over there. I think it’s…”
“Do you think it’s Miss Beatrice?” Donut asked. “Maybe her and her boyfriend?” She gasped. “Or maybe it’s Miss Beatrice and Ferdinand.”
“No, Donut,” I said. “It’s not going to be Bea and whoever the hell…”
“Listen here, pukes,” the Maestro said, interrupting. He smiled big, but his words held no mirth. He’d calmed himself, probably after getting some advice from his producer. The audience continued to watch the recap of our escape, oohing and ahhing at the explosions. They couldn’t hear this exchange. “This is my fucking show. You need to learn your place.”
“You were never a crawler were you?” I asked.
He seemed genuinely offended by the question. He laughed with derision. “You savages are all the same. I come from a civilized system. My family has a long history with the dungeon. We were there when the Syndicate created the crawl. We are of gods and royalty.” He indicated the tiara on Donut’s head. “If you pukes make it to the 9th floor, you’ll learn all about what my family can do.”
I looked at Donut’s small, jeweled tiara, trying to remember the exact description. I hadn’t thought about it for several days. The tooltip system didn’t work here, but I recalled part of it. It’s what gave her ability to imbue the Septic debuff. Because she’d put it on, she’d become a royal member of “The Blood Sultanate.” We could only get off the ninth floor if all other members of that family were killed, including the Sultan himself. I had no idea what any of that meant.
I remembered what Mordecai had said. That… That will be a challenge. You can always leave the party. That crown is on her head, not yours.
“Your family?” I asked. “Wait, are you guys part of the Blood Sultanate?”
He laughed again. “Do I look like a fucking Naga to you?” He sat straighter. “My family’s Skull Clan has been victorious six times out of the last ten Faction Wars. Top three every time. The pitiful Blood Sultanate is almost always the first of the nine to get eliminated. You idiots have been dead since the moment she put on that crown.”
I tried to ignore the pit of dread that had formed in my gut. “What about you? Are you going to be on the ninth floor?”
On the screen, Donut and I stood at the edge of the hole to the next floor down. The camera was positioned from the POV of the rage elemental. We looked tiny standing there, a trail of black smoke rising behind us. The entire crowd held its breath as the monstrosity charged.
“I will be there. I was of age last season, but the stupid Squim Conglomerate always plays Battle Royale, which doesn’t have a Faction Wars or Celestial Ascendancy segment. But I will be there this year. I’m on my way to your stupid planet right now.” He pounded his chest like he was a gorilla. “I will be War Leader Maestro of the Skull Clan.”
I nodded. It always astounded me how easy it was to get assholes to talk, as long as they were talking about themselves. “So, if you’re in the dungeon, what happens if you get hurt? Do you guys really die?”
He scoffed. “You think you could actually…”
The crowd went absolutely apeshit as the scene ended, and the lights snapped back on. Donut stood on her hindlegs and raised her two front paws in the air. “That’s how it’s done!” she yelled. “Next time, we’ll kill that thing ourselves and send pictures to his mama! We’ll tell her to… what was it, Carl?”
“Suck it,” I said.
“Glurp, glurp! Glurp, glurp!” the audience cried.
The Maestro was back to his sneering, condescending self. His unseen producer was smart enough to explain that having a tantrum during a live program would make this spiral even further out of his control. I sighed. Whatever happened next, it wasn’t going to be pleasant. Might as well get it over with.
The Maestro waved for the crowd to quiet down. They eventually did.
“So that’s how you did it. You used the dungeon’s rules to save yourselves.”
I shrugged. “That thing was level 93. We weren’t gonna kill it.”
The Maestro grinned. “Nobody, not even me, can say you don’t have the balls of a Taurin. But a lot of my piglets seem to think you have had it too easy. Some say you’ve been stumbling your way through the dungeon, only surviving because you’re the AI’s pet. That happens from time to time, that the dungeon turns a crawler into its bitch.” He reached over and scratched at his hairy chest. His fingernails were disgusting.
He continued. “I have two surprise guests for our VIPs. You have any guesses who they might be, meat?”
I put my hand on Donut before she could say anything out loud. The last thing we needed right now was to give the Maestro ammunition to mock her.
“Can they see us now?” I asked, turning to look at the empty chairs.
“They’ve been watching this whole time,” the Maestro said. “And man, they do not like you.”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who this was. Other than Brandon and crew, we’d only come across one other group of crawlers. I’d been thinking maybe it was Rory and Lorelai, the goblin shamankas. I didn’t know if bringing mobs out of the dungeon was a thing. But I remembered that Zhang and Li Jun had waved at them, and I doubted they’d have reacted like that toward a pair of scary-looking goblins.
“Hi, Frank Q. Hi, Maggie My,” I said. “I see you didn’t find the present I left for you. That’s too bad.”
The Maestro smiled huge and for a terrifying moment,
I thought I had guessed incorrectly. Could it possibly be Beatrice? No, I decided. No fucking way.
“Watch this, piglets,” he said. “Let’s see if they’re right.”
The video started and I relaxed. It was a recap of Frank and Maggie’s journey so far. I watched as the two player killers stumbled into the dungeon. But, curiously, they had someone else with them. A teenaged girl. It showed them coming into a tutorial guild. We watched as their guide—one of those floating brain Mind Horrors—sat the three of them down and told them the only way to survive was to kill other crawlers. The guide had a deep, rumbly voice, unlike anything I’d heard before. It was terrifying. The teenager wept as the guide explained what had to be done. Maggie clutched onto the girl, hugging her tightly.
The scene switched to the girl on the ground, injured and crying. We hadn’t seen what had happened. It looked as if she’d maybe been hit with a glob of Bad Llama lava. Frank was also injured, convulsing nearby as blood pooled around them. The woman, Maggie, sobbed as she went to her knees in front of the girl.
“Mom,” the girl said. “It hurts.”
“I know baby,” Maggie said. She reached down, and to my utter astonishment, she wrapped her hands around the girl’s throat. She choked her own daughter until she died. When it was done, Maggie leaned against the dungeon wall and wailed.
“What the hell?” I asked, astounded. I turned to the empty chairs. “You didn’t have to do that. She wasn’t dead. She would’ve recovered.”
The recap continued. We were being shown these scenes out of order. This was now something from before the daughter’s death. We watched Frank and Maggie and the daughter come across a much larger group. This group included Rebecca W and several other men. Frank and Maggie introduced themselves as a married couple, and the teenager was their daughter, Yvette. They waited until the others’ backs were turned, and Frank and Maggie ambushed them. They pulled their guns and shot them all. Yvette cried for them to stop. Rebecca and another man fled, and Frank chased them. It showed the man running directly into some plant mob thing I’d never seen before, and of Frank finally tracking Rebecca down, cornering her in the quadrant with the scatterer bugs. The screen split, showing Yvette screaming while Maggie tried to calm her. One of the other men they’d shot wasn’t dead. Maggie put a gun in Yvette’s hand, told her to shoot the man, to get the experience. The girl refused.
Dungeon Crawler Carl Page 35