[ 20 ]
I WAS AWAKENED BY THE START OF THE SHOW ON THE TELEVISION SCREEN.
“Day two,” the orange, lizard-like announcer was saying. It still spoke in that odd, barely recognizable version of the Syndicate common speech. It was like trying to understand someone speaking with a deep Cajun accent. Sure, they were speaking English, but to my brain, they might as well be speaking Klingon.
“Do you think we’ll be on it this time?” Donut asked, scrambling out of bed to sit on one of the chairs. “We blew up half the dungeon! That’s gotta count for something, don’t you think? My word, I am so excited I could just wee. Actually, I do gotta wee.” She scrambled from her chair and headed toward the women’s room, which would have a litterbox waiting for her.
But she rocketed back from around the corner just a minute later.
“Carl, Carl! He’s here. He’s in the bathroom! The women’s bathroom.
The killer! The guy who killed Rebecca W!”
I leaped to my feet. I immediately saw the blue dot on my map, right there.
How? Surely I would’ve noticed it the moment I woke up. I’d gotten used to keeping one eye on the map. I was always looking out for others. I mentally kicked myself as I rushed forward. I focused on the dot.
Crawler Frank Q.
That was him, all right.
“Come on,” I said. I pushed my way toward the side hallway with the bathrooms.
We met in the hall, the man stepping out of the restroom, smiling apologetically. We came to a stop just a few feet away from one another. We
just stared for a couple moments, sizing each other up. Donut stood between my legs and started hissing.
He was a tall man, lean, but not quite as tall as me. About forty. I pegged him as either military or a cop based on the way he carried himself. He was a white dude and he hadn’t shaved in a few days. Good looking, but not remarkably so. A Seahawks beanie covered what I guessed to be a bald head.
He wore filthy, ripped jeans and a black t-shirt. He was also equipped with what appeared to be football shoulder pads, but they were made of glowing black metal, obviously enchanted. The shoulders were spiked. It wouldn’t let me examine the properties. He wore heavy boots, which I eyed jealously.
I assumed he had a gun hidden away somewhere, but I didn’t see it now.
Instead, he carried a massive battle axe over his shoulder. The iron, single- headed weapon looked well-used. He also wore a belt with a line of throwing knives.
I examined his properties as he did the same to me.
Crawler #324,119. “Frank Q.”
Level 8.
Race: Human.
Class: Not yet assigned.
He did not have any stars by his name, which meant he’d never killed a
boss. But he had something else.
Three skulls.
I knew exactly what the skulls were going to indicate even before I
focused on them.
Crawler Killer X 3.
I suddenly felt very cold.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle your cat,” the man said. He had an authoritative voice. Definitely a cop, or some sort of law enforcement. They taught you to speak that way in training. “That is a cat, right? I thought if I slept in the bathroom, nobody could sneak up on me. I didn’t realize the bathrooms in the safe areas were different than the ones out in the hallways.”
He paused. “Where are your pants? And your shoes? Have you been walking barefoot this whole time?” He looked me up and down, alternating between me and the cat, a look of wry amusement. “Also, what’s up with your name?
Royal bodyguard?”
“So you were asleep in there, in the women’s room?” I asked, ignoring his questions.
He paused. He tilted his head, as if deciding whether he wanted to answer or not. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I hadn’t slept in over 24 hours. I found this safe room, dragged one of those cots in there, and I passed out. I must’ve been out for 12 hours straight. Stupid, I know.”
If that was true, then he’d have been asleep when we’d arrived. Hadn’t Donut used the bathroom? I couldn’t remember.
Carl: Donut, did you use the bathroom before we went to sleep?
Donut: I DID NOT I WENT IN THE HALLWAY BATHROOM BEFORE WE FOUND THIS ROOM.
“I never saw your dot on the minimap,” I said.
“You don’t see the icons of sleeping crawlers,” he said. “Have you ever seen someone outside your party sleeping in a safe room? Their bodies become translucent. If you touch them, your hand moves right through them.
Are you from Seattle? I’m still pretty close to where I came in, but I haven’t been able to find any staircases down to the second level.”
Donut, who had been hissing and growling this whole time, couldn’t take it anymore. “You killed Rebecca W!” she shouted.
The man just stared at the cat for several moments. “Holy shit,” he finally said. “I thought that’s what I’d heard. A talking cat. This fucking place.”
Donut hissed in response. Behind us, I heard the clash of steel on the television screen. They’d started showing the day’s recap.
“Did you know her?” the man asked. “Rebecca Wong?”
“He admits it! The criminal has confessed!” Donut cried. “I’m gonna hit him with a magic missile.” She jumped up on my shoulder and started to wiggle her butt.
“Wait, wait,” he said. He took a step back and held up his hands. “I didn’t… It’s not what it looks like. I didn’t have a choice.”
“We didn’t know her,” I said. “We just came across her body.”
He seemed to relax. “Look, I can explain,” he said. “It wasn’t just her.
There were five of them. My partner got one, I got three, and you would not believe the thing that killed the fifth guy. It’s a long story. Can you, uh, put
down your cat?”
“Put me down?”
“That’s not what he meant,” I said. “Donut. Chill.” This was the first living human we’d run across, and I wanted to get his story. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, but I wanted to hear what he had to say first.
Donut grumbled something under her breath.
“Where’s your partner?” I asked.
He paused. “She’s dead. Shot.”
After a moment, I nodded. “Let’s go to the other room. We’re missing the show. We can talk in there.”
“Okay,” he said. He eyed Donut warily, who made a spitting noise. Her fur was completely poofed out.
“Did you see the last episode?” I asked.
“Yes,” the man—Frank—said. He took a seat about 10 feet away, near the exit. He draped his left arm over the chair, trying to appear casual, but I could see his entire body was tense. “There’s another rest area about three miles east of here. That one has a restaurant in it. That whole block is now overrun with thorny, creeping plants that will eat you whole. I found this place while looking for the stairs. The rot stickers outside pack a punch.”
On the screen it showed a group of about 40 middle-eastern men fighting a borough boss. The creature was an armored, elephant-sized, six-legged rhinoceros-like monstrosity with tentacles on its back. The tentacles seemed to have an ability that turned the men into stone. The monster had been hurt badly, but it ended up killing all 40 of the men. Half of them had been turned to stone. A moment later, the creature fell over and died. The display froze, and Match Draw appeared on the screen.
“Tell us your story,” I said, “and then we’ll tell you ours.”
I kept one eye on the screen, which was showing one adventuring disaster after another, and one eye on the man as he recounted his tale. Frank claimed he and his partner, a woman named Maggie, worked for “Customs Enforcement,” which was a nice way of saying he was a fed, and he worked for ICE. They’d been in plain clothes, outside in that ridiculously cold weather doing some sort of surveillance on a warehouse. The place was right on the water, supposedly employing a large group of undocumented Chinese workers. When the collapse came, the warehouse disappeared, revealing a group of about 15 men and women who’d been outside, smoking on a patio.
Frank and his partner identified themselves, and everyone just started shooting at each other. The dungeon opened up right in the middle of their firefight. His partner, Maggie, stumbled into the stairwell, and it wouldn’t let go of her. So he went in with her. Five of the others, for reasons he said he couldn’t fathom, followed them in.
He went on to recount a firefight in the hallway. Of a confrontation with their leader—Rebecca W—who’d shot him three times before he got her
right in the heart. He’d thought he was going to die, but he’d healed amazingly fast. He’d looted her body and chased down the last one, only to see the man get eaten by a plant monster, a thing that came out of a giant pod.
It was called a vine creeper. I’d seen one of them during the show’s premiere.
From there Frank found a tutorial guild, his wounds were fully healed, and here he was. He’d been using his gun and the ones he’d looted from the others, but he was now out of ammo.
“That one,” he said. “Rebecca. Rebecca Wong. She was the boss of the operation. A human trafficker. A modern-day slave driver. We were days away from taking down the whole operation.”
“You poor man,” Donut said at the end of his story. Her demeanor toward him had made a complete turn. “I am just devasted about your partner.”
He shrugged. “I appreciate that.” He went up and grabbed a cookie. He ate it, and the +9.8 EXP notification dinged over his head.
“Was this Rebecca the one who killed your partner?” I asked. I watched the notification over the man’s head fade away.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. The man sat back down. “It was one of her goons, the same guy who got killed by the vine creeper. He shot Maggie.”
The man lowered her head.
The show had moved to the second half of the program, showing humans who were performing well. A woman dressed in snow gear and what looked like a Valkyrie helmet had an enchanted crossbow that shot firebolts. It showed her plowing through a group of dog-faced goblin things. Gnolls.
“Hey,” I said. “Since you looted those guys you killed, I don’t suppose you have any pants that might fit me in that bag of yours? Or shoes?”
He paused. “Sure, boss. If you don’t mind wearing the clothes of a dead man.”
Carl: Donut. Do not say anything out loud. Can you see this?
Donut: WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Carl: Don’t type in all caps. I think Frank is going to try to hurt or incapacitate us. This is important. Do not react. Do not fight back at all.
Whatever you do, don’t fire a magic missile. Just let it happen. Trust me on this. I’m going to present an opening. I want to entice him into action.
Donut: WHAT DO YOU MEAN. FRANK IS AN AMERICAN HERO.
Carl: Frank is full of shit. He’s lying. I think there might be somebody else in here with us, and they are getting ready to jump us. I’ll
explain in a minute. We’re going to have to run. Get ready.
Donut: I DO NOT LIKE THIS, CARL.
A pair of khaki pants appeared in his hand. They had an enormous blood stain down the side of them. He tossed them to me. “These are the biggest pants I have. I don’t know if they’ll fit you or not. I have a couple pairs of shoes in here, too, but it doesn’t say what their sizes are.”
“Thanks,” I said. I paused, waiting to see if he would toss me a pair of shoes, but he was making a show of pretending to sort through his inventory.
He wanted me to try the pants on first, which I noticed right away were much too small. And they were women’s pants. I sighed. Oh well.
I stood and turned my back. I made motions like I was pulling my kneepads off.
Everything that happened next occurred over the course of less than a second.
I saw the blue dot appear in the bathroom hallway, just as the woman emerged from around the corner. At the same moment, Donut leaped into the air with a panicked yowl as Frank pulled his weapon from his inventory and fired at the cat.
The woman, pistol aimed directly at my head, also fired.
On the television, Lucia Mar, along with her two rottweilers, Cici and Gustavo 3, tore through a group of red, demon-like monsters. The girl was like a demon herself, savagely swinging her mace.
Donut landed on the table with the cookies. Her body slid, moving through the plate, which disappeared and reappeared as if it wasn’t really there. Her feet scrambled as she plummeted off the edge of the table. She hit the floor and bounced back up, screaming at the top of her lungs. “Carl, Carl!
Help!”
“I’m here,” I said. “We gotta go now. We have less than two minutes.”
She paused, looking back and forth between me and the two frozen Crawlers. Both had the word Naughty blazing over their head. I recounted my earlier discussion with Mordecai. This was after Donut had eaten the enhanced pet biscuit and while we’d waited for her to transform.
“You said they teleport out of here if she turns into a monster. So monsters can’t ever get into safe areas? What if I leave the door open? They won’t be able to wander in?”
“Oh, they’ll wander in,” Mordecai said. “Always close the door. If it’s a mob, it’ll teleport away the moment it attacks you. But they’ll trash the place,
too.”
“What if Donut doesn’t turn into a monster, but she also doesn’t recognize me? She sometimes bites people she doesn’t recognize. Will she teleport away then?”
“No. It’s different for crawlers. There’s no violence and no stealing in the safe rooms. It’s a strict, ironclad rule. You get three strikes. The first time, you freeze in place for about 100 seconds while you get an automated lecture on playing nice. The second time it’s for an hour. The third time you’re stripped of all your gear and teleported into a mob nest.”
So when Frank Q and his partner—her name really was Maggie. Maggie My—decided to kill us to take our gear or whatever the hell they were doing, they made the mistake of using a safe area as their point of attack. It obviously was their first—and last—attempt at doing it that way.
“But how did you know?” Donut cried, looking between the two frozen people. They had been frozen the very moment they’d pulled the triggers.
The bullets didn’t appear to have even left the barrels yet. “Are you psychic?
And where did this lady come from? I just don’t understand. This is very distressing.”
“We don’t have time,” I said as I added the pants to my inventory. I had a vague notion to pick Frank up, rearrange him so his gun was facing his partner, but I was afraid the system would count that as an act of violence on my part. “We gotta go now.”
Before we rushed outside, I took a precious second to examine the attributes of Maggie My.
She was about the same age as Frank, so around forty years old, athletic.
A white woman with closely-cropped, brown hair. She wore shining, metallic pants and boots. She wore a leather jacket similar to my own—though hers had both of their sleeves. She didn’t appear to hold any weapons other than
her gun.
Crawler #324,116. “Maggie My.”
Level 9.
Race: Human.
Class: Not yet assigned.
She had five skulls next to her name.
Between her and Frank, they’d killed eight people. Eight. They both had the ability to go completely stealth. I doubted they had been sleeping in the bathroom. They’d likely heard that explosion from earlier and tracked us to
the safe room. We’d left a wake of dead rot stickers along the way, a literal path of destruction to this space.
Frank had said people turned translucent when they slept. Was that true?
It certainly wasn’t true for Donut, but she was also in my party. Maybe they had meant to sneak up on us and kill us in our sleep, but when they realized they couldn’t, they’d gone to the bathroom to wait. Maybe the plan was to sneak up on me from behind while I went to the men’s room. I didn’t know.
We jumped outside, and I plotted a path to the closest main artery. I downed an Iron Skin potion and gave one to Donut, making her drink it. A couple of red dot clusters appeared between here and there. I didn’t want to waste time fighting them. The hallway was too thin, the ground too bumpy to use the chopper. Plus, one blast from a rot sticker was likely to turn the powered bicycle into a bomb. So we ran. I wanted to avoid the mobs if we could. Every mob we left alive was one they’d have to deal with.
“Why are we running?” Donut asked. “We can take them.”
“I don’t know if we can,” I said. “They both have guns. He’s level eight, the same as us, and she’s level nine. Getting to nine is hard, so she probably has a lot of skills. Besides, I really don’t want to have one of those skull markers by my name. Even if they have it coming, everyone else we meet won’t know that. We will never get anyone to talk to us.”
“But if we don’t stop them, they’ll hurt somebody else.”
I stopped dead in the hallway. I looked at the cat. It was a very un-Donut- like thing to say. But worse, it was the truth.
“Goddamnit, Donut,” I said. I looked back over my shoulder in the direction of the safe room. They’d be awake already by now, though I suspected—and hoped—they wouldn’t just come running.
They probably were going to hurt somebody else. If they could find someone. But what could we do?
Donut fired a magic missile, killing a group of the regular level two rats that seemed to infest every corridor regardless of neighborhood. The rats sizzled and fell onto their backs. One of them dropped a poor rat skin and a rat steak.
“Don’t take that inventory,” I said. “Cancel it out.”
Donut huffed but complied. She loved looting corpses. The person to kill a mob had first right to loot for a couple minutes after the battle, but if they canceled out the box, the corpse became fair game.
I had an idea, but I didn’t know if it would work. We didn’t have time,
but I needed to test it. I pulled one of the goblin smoke bombs out of my stash, lit the wick, and then quickly added it to the rat’s inventory. It let me do it. Like with most games, it allowed me to add items to the corpse’s inventory as if it was a chest. The rat had a grid pattern inventory that looked as if it couldn’t hold very much. This was how inventory had been for crawlers last season.
I had to see if the smoke bomb remained lit. They’d said that items didn’t retain their momentum, but what about this? Thanks to my level 5 in Explosives Handling, now when I examined incendiary items, I received
some extra information:
Goblin Smoke Bomb.
Type: Deflagration.
Effect: Opaque smoke over a 10 meter radius for 3 minutes.
Status: Good. 89/100 Emits a stinking cloud of billowing, multi-color smoke that lasts for three minutes before disbursing. Use to either confuse enemies or as a stage prop at a hair metal concert.
It didn’t say the bomb was lit. I pulled the bomb out, and to my relief, the wick still crackled and spit. I quickly added it back to the rat’s grid.
Everything was the same, but the Status had changed to Discharge Imminent 34/100.
I then examined my pile of goblin dynamite. They were all out of 50, not 100, and all of them were either in Detonation Imminent or Danger. It appeared the Danger warning appeared once the status was below 15.
I gingerly removed the most unstable piece of dynamite I had, one that was 10/50 and added it to the rat’s inventory without lighting it. I noted, despite me handling the dynamite as carefully as I could, it’d gone down to 9/50. Jesus. I was lucky I hadn’t blown myself to bits earlier. This next one was at 13/50. I lit it and then quickly added it to the rat’s inventory.
If they followed, they’d likely come down this same hall. That guy had picked Rebecca W’s corpse clean, including her clothes. People who did that were the type to loot everything. If they came across the rat, hopefully they’d think we’d been in too much of a hurry to stop and loot for ourselves. Rats didn’t normally drop stuff other than skin and meat. It was suspicious as fuck.
But, maybe… maybe we’d get lucky. If Frank did pull the three items out of the rat inventory, it would literally blow up in his hands.
For now, it was the best we could do.
“Okay,” I said, nervously looking over my shoulder. I remembered they could go invisible, at least on the map. “Let’s go.”
We turned, and we kept running for the artery.
“How did you know?” Donut asked as we continued to jog.
“He was lying. He was lying right from the start,” I said.
“So he’s not a federal agent?” she asked. Her breaths were coming in wheezes, but the hallway was close.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he might be. He talks and acts like a cop.
But his whole story was bullshit. That Rebecca woman was a level three. He said they’d gotten into a firefight right away, but that couldn’t be true. She had that apple core in her inventory. That meant she’d gone to a tutorial guild and gotten her inventory turned on. And then he ate that cookie, and I saw he received 9.8 experience instead of 10, which meant he was in a party with someone. Someone alive. Also, he had his arm draped over the chair, and I could see he was twitching his finger. He was typing into the chat. He hadn’t figured out how to use it with just his brain.”
Donut stared up at me as we ran.
“How is it you’re James Bond when it comes to strangers, but Miss Beatrice could date three different guys at once, and you had no idea?”
“Three different guys?”
“Well, you were one of them, so two, I guess. Then again, it’s three if you count Angel’s owner. Does it count as cheating when it’s with another woman? There's so many human nuances I don't understand.”
“Of course it counts as cheating,” I said. For fuck’s sake.
“But you were always watching those videos on your iPad with the two women rolling around and cleaning each other. Would it have been cheating if Miss Beatrice let you watch?”
“We’re not having this conversation right now, Donut.”
We reached the hallway and I pulled the chopper out of my inventory.
This would be the first time we would actually drive the thing. I tossed a lump of coal into the hopper and prayed it wouldn’t explode on us. As we prepared to leave, the dungeon reverberated with an announcement. It was the daily update.
Hello, Crawlers. Another excellent, exciting day! We are very happy to have you with us, and we hope everyone is having a great time. You’re really bringing it, and we at Borant truly appreciate the enthusiasm you’re giving to this production.
I have a couple of announcements. First off, we want to assure everyone that we have quashed all the bugs with the new toilets. Both the exploding issue and the, ah, unfortunate suction issue with some of the units have been resolved. There is absolutely no need to be afraid of them. Those of you who have been using the hallways to relieve yourselves, please stop. We don’t want to have to start using punitive measures.
A couple additional patch notes… We have added support for all of the languages that were missing from our library. So for those of you who are hearing this and finally understanding what I’m saying for the first time… welcome. You’ll figure the rest out I’m sure. Also with the languages, we’ve implemented full cross support for native speech. So now Mandarin speakers will understand English speakers and so forth.
The Feral Rabies debuff is now curable with a health potion or spell.
And the contagion is no longer airborne. Sorry about that, New Zealand.
We have removed the Blender Fiend mobs. The mob’s difficulty level appears to be too high. Their collective gets stronger each time they, uh, blend, and after working their way through a group of 15,000 crawlers in a single day, we’ve been forced to take action to prevent a premature extinction event. Rest assured they will be re-introduced on a lower floor.
The Street Preacher neighborhood boss has been upgraded to a borough boss. In addition, we have tweaked the strength levels of a few dozen other mobs, too many to mention here. So just be aware of that.
One last note. A lot of crawlers are heading into the stairways prematurely. Again, it’s your choice, but it’s probably best for you to get as much experience as you can. And just so you know for later, we won’t feature you on the recap episode if viewers can’t tunnel into your feed.
So if you hit the stairs three or four days before a collapse, you are going to miss out.
That’s it for now. Keep up the good work, and kill, kill, kill!
“We didn’t get to see the rest of the show,” Donut said. “Do you think we were on it?”
“I doubt it,” I said. I eased onto the alligator skull seat. Underneath me, the whole bike rumbled with potential energy. It had pedals like a bicycle, but it also had a throttle. I had to move the bike by pumping my legs, but once I reached the speed I wanted, I turned the throttle, and the bike would lock that speed in place. It was a strange setup.
The engine built into the chassis was already getting hot. I would have to spread my legs out to keep from getting burned to hell. I sighed. I really, really needed pants.
Donut jumped up into her sidecar seat. She started licking her paw as we zoomed off down the road, trying to put as much distance between us and that neighborhood as we could.
