[ 17 ]
MY INVENTORY HAD ABOUT 10 NEW TABS BY THE TIME WE WERE DONE clearing out the goblin workshop. I took another five piles of coal. We looted tons of tools from shovels to wrenches to hammers. Most of them were much too small to use as weapons, but I would examine them all later to make sure.
We had engineering supplies, coils and coils of wick, multiple types of explosives, about fifty gallons of various alchemical liquids, and a pile of those black discs they used for chopper tires. I even took all the tables I could lift. By the time we were done, all that was left were some of the bigger tables, the giant steam engine, a greatly-reduced pile of coal, and a set of barrels with XXX on them, all placed neatly on the cart and tied down with a length of rope.
I’d managed to take almost a ton of the black powder, but it required me using the discarded leather sacks they had lying around. This stuff was distinctly the old-school, coarse black powder, not the more refined smokeless powder used in modern firearms. I wasn’t quite strong enough to lift the barrels until they were less than half full. But when they did get that empty, I didn’t put them in my inventory. Instead, I lifted the barrels and placed them on the cart.
We placed the cart in front of the door to the boss room. On top of the powder, I placed shovelfuls of nuts and bolts and other metal odds and ends.
Then I placed the tops back on the barrels before an errant spark from the still-humming steam engine blew us all to hell.
Donut “directed” the action from the seat of her sidecar. I would put the chopper into my inventory before we proceeded.
“Do you think Rory and Lorelai will be mad at me?” Donut asked as we
prepared the trigger. Unlike last time, I wasn’t going to use plain goblin dynamite, which was inherently unstable. I found a blob of a C4-like explosive called “Hobgoblin Pus” that was detonated with an actual trigger.
There was only a small amount of the material, but the description said it caused a big explosion. I had the sense that it was valuable, probably the real prize of this room. I was going to use it all. Next to the hobgoblin pus was a set of magical triggers. There were only three of the mechanisms, and I had to waste one in order to test it, to see how they worked.
The triggers were both genius and foolproof. You broke the tip off of the mechanism, which looked like a stick of underarm deodorant. You stuck the broken-off part into the explosive, and you pressed the button to set it off.
Easy. The detonators were single use, but you could break off up to 10 pieces for each stick, so you could simultaneously blow 10 different bombs. It had a five-second countdown after you pressed the button. The description said the trigger had a range of about ten kilometers.
“Will they be mad? Probably,” I said. “But Rory doesn’t seem to like this boss guy too much, so who knows? I hope we never find out.”
“Do you think this is enough?” Donut asked, looking over the four barrels. “I feel as if it’s not enough.”
I shrugged. “Black powder isn’t really meant for blowing stuff up. But it’s good at throwing metal. If he’s in there and out in the open, we’ll turn this guy into a pincushion for sure. But I doubt the explosion itself is going to be bigger than when that murder dozer blew up. Either way, if this doesn’t kill him, more probably wouldn’t either.”
The plan was a more refined version of what we had done with the Hoarder. From what I could see, the room that this war chieftain occupied was identical in size and shape to the one from the last boss battle. This was still the first floor, after all, so I doubted the guy was that powerful. We were going to open the door, push the cart in, close the door, run until we had several walls between us, and hit the trigger. If we killed the boss, we’d get a notification and a star by our names. If we didn’t, we’d keep running. We’d pull out the chopper and put some distance between us and the whole neighborhood and forget this ever happened.
I’d put a hunk of the hobgoblin pus in each barrel, and I added the last of it to the top of the first barrel. I placed the detonator into the pus, sticking half out of it. I tried to make it look obvious, but not overly obvious. If the goblin chieftain had time to react, he’d hopefully spend his last moments digging the
detonator out of this chunk of explosive, not realizing we had four more ready to go buried in each of the barrels.
It was a chickenshit way to do it, but I didn’t care. Not when one got locked in the room with the boss otherwise.
“You ready, Princess?” I asked.
I stood directly behind the cart, poised to shove. I’d pulled it back a good ten feet, just enough to give me momentum. Donut would open the door using her menu, eyeball the room to make sure the path was clear, tell me to go, then slam the door after I heaved. Hopefully the floor would be flat enough for the cart to travel a good distance.
“Ready,” she said. “I’m opening the door now.”
From my vantage, I couldn’t see into the room, but I heard the heavy
creak of the door yawning open.
“Do it!” Donut cried.
I kicked my legs, and I crashed into the cart like it was a football sled. I’d greased the wheels, and the heavy cart moved quickly and easily. I shoved with all my might and watched the cart rocket into the room as the large door slammed.
Donut had already turned and was bolting for the exit on the opposite side of the room.
I scrambled up and followed. We’d practiced this part. We turned three times, making sure we were out of any line of direct blast. I didn’t want to wait too long, but we had to put a few large rooms between us in case there was a shockwave that needed to be disbursed. We stopped at the prearranged spot, and I leaned against the wall, my heart thrashing. I pulled the detonator trigger from my inventory.
“Did you see him? Was there a giant goblin in there?” I asked.
Donut heaved for breath. “Yes. A huge. Ugly. Goblin. My word. I do not like running. He was sitting down, reading a book. Blow it, blow it good.”
I jammed the button.
“There sure were a lot of babies in there, too,” Donut said in that last moment before the blast.
