[ 26 ]
Time to Level Collapse: 6 hours 30 minutes.
“ARE YOU READY?” I ASKED BRANDON AS WE POISED AT THE ENTRANCE TO the borough boss chamber.
“No,” he said, smiling sadly. He clutched onto his massive war hammer for a moment. It disappeared into his inventory. The giant weapon could only get in the way during the first part of the plan. Donut perched on my shoulder while the others crowded behind us.
We didn’t have time left for any more training, any more preparation. It was now or never.
The third episode of Dungeon Crawler World hadn’t offered any additional insight. Donut and I had sat in the Taco Bell watching it on the screen while the proprietor, another Bopca Protector named Sebastian, sat next to us and brushed Donut’s hair with one of his own brushes, which he’d gifted to her after her third shower. Her insane charisma of 41 caused the level-21 NPC to practically fall in love with her the moment we entered the safe zone. I sipped on a delicious Peruvian beer and picked at my T-bone steak as we watched crawlers by the dozens get slaughtered while the host breathlessly described the action.
The second half of the program had zeroed in on five different groups of adventurers, including that woman with the magical crossbow and Lucia Mar
with her two rottweilers. The other three groups were larger, including one that comprised of 150 African soldiers armed with AK-47s. All of these groups, if the show was to be believed, were just moonwalking their way through the dungeon. All of them had found stairwells down already and were camping near them, waiting for the clock to tick to exactly six hours before they descended.
Much to Donut’s dismay, we were once again snubbed by the program. I didn’t care. I was much more occupied with that number. I couldn’t get it out
of my head.
2,552,085.
From thirteen million to this in just under four days. A cataclysm. Every single one of those numbers was a person, someone who had lived, breathed, hoped, laughed. And they were just gone. The announcement hadn’t offered any additional insight, either. Another, more stern warning about using the hallways as a bathroom. A litany of changes regarding spells and power levels of mobs, none of which affected us. After sleeping for a few hours, we headed back to the encampment, and I related my dubious, off-the-cuff plan to the group of crawlers who had all appeared shocked that we’d actually returned.
“Here we go,” I said now, stepping across the drawbridge and through the giant archway.
Brandon, Chris, Yolanda, and Imani followed. We hesitantly entered the round courtyard to the spiral maze.
“No, Agatha, don’t!” I heard a voice behind me. It was Yolanda, yelling at the woman with the shopping cart, who’d wheeled up behind us.
The woman didn’t listen to Yolanda and pushed her way into the entrance hall, cackling with delight. “You’re not doing this without ol’ Agatha.”
“We don’t have room for you, Agatha!” Yolanda yelled. “Get back!”
“Crazy bat,” Brandon said. “You’re gonna get us all killed.”
“I think that roly-poly is the one that’s gonna get us all killed,” Agatha said.
“Shut up. Everybody shut up,” Imani said, raising her hand. “Listen for the monster.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s going to announce itself at any moment.”
The gate behind us slammed shut as music rose. Metal bars magically appeared, locking us in.
This was different music than usual. Faster, more frenetic. An EDM beat
mixed by a DJ hopped up on Adderall. A deep bass reverberated the ground.
The lights flickered, then went dark. A moment later, they came back on, filling the area with the purple hue of a blacklight. Neon lights appeared on the ceiling. Lasers ripped across the hallways, flashing in beat with the music.
We’d stepped into a rave. The sound of rock scraping filled the room, louder than the song. I turned in a circle, trying to find the source.
It was the walls of the courtyard, I realized. They were sinking into the
ground, leaving us exposed.
B-B-B-Boss Battle!
The voice was distorted, even louder than last time.
You have discovered the lair of a Borough Boss!
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is time for the main event! Are you ready?
Can you feel it coming? I SAID ARE YOU READY?
I want you to put your hands together.
Aaaand here. We. Gooooo!
I grimaced as I waited for the walls of the round courtyard to finish sinking into the earth.
I turned to Brandon. “Get ready.” I had to shout the words.
The man nodded. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Behind, the three others spread out. Chris and short Yolanda both looked absolutely terrified. Imani clutched her sword in two hands, looking grim. Agatha stood there, seemingly oblivious, scratching a hair between her two bulbous eyes.
Our seven mugshots appeared floating in the air, one by one. I noted we were in three groups. The Royal Court of Princess Donut. Meadow Lark.
And Agatha was just Crawler Agatha. The giant Versus slammed into place. The metallic word was in a silver font instead of a bronze one this time. The words burst into flames, and even though this was supposedly
virtual text, I felt a blast of heat.
And that’s when we saw it.
With the wall fully retracted, a hallway spread before us, like we were standing on the landing before a tunnel in a subway, but without the drop.
The round tunnel was about as wide a single lane freeway, about fifteen feet tall. The creature roared by right in front of us, startlingly fast, moving from right to left. It was massive, made of flesh, rolling like a pinball. It stank of sewage and rotten meat. It grunted and squealed, a high-pitched, angry pig noise. The flesh was pink, rippling, covered in eyes and random hairs and tusks. But there was something else there, too. Random flaps of black and
white cloth were embedded in the flesh, mixed in with swaths of red- sequined fabric.
“What in the holy hell is that?” Brandon shouted. “It looks like there
are…”
The world froze.
The
Ball
of
Swine!
Level 15 Borough Boss!
Also known as the Porkchop Express, the Ball of Swine is one of the rarest, most deadly battle formations of the Tuskling. Encompassing at least 30 Tuskling knights and their lady loves, a Ball formation requires a specific set of circumstances to create. Combine a gathering of Tuskling aristocracy, add an alcohol-fueled, sexually-charged orgy of war lust, and sometimes, just sometimes, the wild, ancient battle magic that permeates their war-torn world casts the spell, forming the ball. The Tusklings, the ruling class of the Orcish Supremacy, shape into an inseparable sphere that rolls onto the countryside. The ball of pork won’t stop its night of terror until it has crushed the poor, the weak, and the lesser citizens under its unstoppable weight.
Plucked directly from a Tuskling High Caucus moments after it formed, this particular ball has been transferred here to this dungeon for your entertainment, ladies and gentlemen. The magic of the ball won’t allow them to stop until every last drop of Crawler blood is squeezed right out of their human bodies!
The world unfroze, and the ball continued its trajectory, rolling away down the path. Ahead of me, more walls moved and shifted, grinding loudly.
The walls and entranceways were creating new paths, guiding the massive ball in our direction.
“Wow,” Donut said from my shoulder. “I’m feeling really ignored right now. Why is it always human this, human that? Why can’t it be ‘blood squeezed out of their human and feline bodies?’”
Looking to my left and right, I could see what was about to happen. With the lowering of the walls, a new path opened up, and we were on it. The heavy, pounding music was deliberate. We could no longer feel the oncoming train of the giant pig ball. At its current speed, it would circle around onto us
in a minute, maybe less.
“Move!” I cried.
“Where?” Brandon called.
“Away from here,” I said.
I pulled the first of several spike strips from my inventory and dropped it on the ground before rushing forward. We moved toward the long, wide path the ball had just rocketed over. A moment later, the ball rushed past again, right where we’d been standing, missing Agatha and her shopping cart by inches. The woman cackled with joy as the squealing wind blew up the flaps on her hat.
In the brief moment it passed by, I caught sight of a tuskling face jutting from the center side of the ball, spinning like an ornamental car rim. The orc creature was large and meaty from what I could tell. It held a tusked, wild boar of a face that was twice as wide as a person’s. The face had four tusks.
Two long, curved tusks and a second pair further back, crossed in front of its ugly face. This one was female, I guessed. Purple eyeshadow ran from the top of its bulbous, black stare. Her crossed tusks were pierced in multiple places. She also appeared to have a giant, purple flower on her head, but the flower was pressed into the pink flesh of the ball, completely flattened. Her mouth was open in a constant, angry squeal.
Above the monstrosity appeared a health bar. It was fully green, but the spike strip had damaged it for at least a single point. That was good.
A wall rose into the air, blocking us from going back the direction we’d just come.
Our plan hadn’t anticipated that the walls were going to change. Looking at the ground, I could see a groove had formed onto the stone, multiple, concentric circles leading toward the center of the small arena. Some of the grooves led directly into walls.
Amongst the grooves, dozens of long, straight lines crisscrossed the ground at right angles. This was where the walls would go up and down. We needed to find a flat area wide enough for our redoubt. The deeper we went, the closer to the stairs, the more quickly the pig ball would circle around.
“Look for solid hunks of ground. Big ones with no grooves!” I called as I threw a second spike strip onto the ground. “And go!”
An entranceway to the next ring appeared about ten feet behind us.
“Move!” I cried. We rushed for the small gate, Agatha going in first. A hunk of stone started rising from the ground as I rushed through, stumbling.
“There!” Imani called, pointing to a large square on the ground through a second doorway, yet another circle deeper. It was like a gap in the path, designed to encompass two circles at once.
“Go!” I cried, rushing forward and dropping a third and a fourth strip.
Despite the heavy bass, I felt the ball hurtle past on the other side of the wall.
High-pitched squealing rocketed away like the whine of a racecar. It’s getting faster.
We rushed to the center of the square. This chunk of the floor was like a railroad switch, a place where the ball could change paths. The space was about 15 feet by 15 feet with no crevices. Perfect.
“It’s coming from this way,” I said, pointing right. “I think it needs two loops to get here. Let’s do this. Just like we practiced. Go!” I pointed at Agatha. “You, sit your ass down on the ground in the middle, and don’t move.”
“I ain’t leaving my… Hey!” Agatha cried as I grasped the heavy cart from both sides and lifted it into the air, wasting a few precious seconds to
put it into my inventory.
“Thief!” she cried. “Thief!”
“Agatha, he’ll give it back. Sit down!” Yolanda cried as she started pulling her V-shaped braces from her inventory.
I ignored the screaming, crazy woman as I pulled the heavy goblin table from my own inventory and placed it on its side. All around me, the others went to work. We’d been practicing this for hours. We’d gotten it down to less than 20 seconds for the main structure, and another 20 to put it all together. Hopefully that was enough time.
It had taken us almost five hours to build the pieces of the redoubt, or as Brandon called it, “The Speedbump.” Brandon and his brother weren’t nurses at the facility. They were the maintenance guys, and these dudes knew what they were doing. They didn’t normally work after hours, but they’d been there that night, pushing overtime, trying to fix an oven that was on the fritz before the morning staff showed up to make breakfast. I had described my idea. I spread out a bunch of the looted goblin tools for them, explained exactly what I wanted to do, and we went straight to work.
We created a portable, modular fortress. Consisting of tables, weight equipment, and loads of other odds and ends, the angled, four-foot-high structure looked like a lopsided tortoise shell when it was completed.
We didn’t have any sort of welding equipment, but the goblins had hand-
cranked drills and large, toothed bolts designed to screw into the holes the drills created. They also had these small, half-moon saws that cut through steel with alarming ease. We removed the legs from the workshop tables then bolted new ones on, utilizing the load-bearing legs from the weight equipment. The tables were designed to sit solidly at a low angle when we put them on their side. After, we bolted weight benches onto the sides of the tables, like attaching shutters to the edges of a door frame.
Both Brandon and Imani had received items that gave them boosts to their strength, and they each had two sections of wall to place. The pieces were large and unwieldy, and heavy as shit, but when placed down in the correct order—Imani, then Brandon, then Imani, then me with the largest piece, and then finally Brandon—the multiple pieces slid together, bolts moving into precisely-placed holes. Brandon and I moved to the roof—made of the cross bars of weight racks—while Chris and Imani twisted massive, fist-sized butterfly bolts, affixing the pieces together. Yolanda pulled the rest of the angled braces out of her inventory, sliding them into place one after another, moving in a circle around the circumference of the pentagon-ish defense.
“This is just like something they’d do on that show, The A-Team,” Donut had exclaimed when we’d practiced this earlier. “Or maybe MacGyver. The real MacGyver with the hair and the stargate. Not that abysmal remake.”
“I liked that show,” Chris had said as he worked. It was the first and only time I had heard him speak.
“Which one? The A-Team or MacGyver?” Donut asked. “Or do you mean the remake? Please tell me you don’t mean the remake.”
Chris never answered.
Once the top was bolted into place, Brandon, Imani, and I moved to the last, crucial part. The braces for the roof: five heavy-duty barbell poles designed to hold more than a thousand pounds of weight each. I discovered if I held my hand in just the correct place and called the heavy pole from inventory, it wedged itself perfectly between the roof and ground, solid as a concrete pillar.
Our mini fortress had a usable area of about ten by ten feet, and we had to move about on our hands and knees. It was tight when it was just the six of us, but with the addition of Agatha, who continued to wail about her damn shopping cart, we could barely move without slamming each other. And because she’d joined us, we didn’t have room to place the final, center pole.
I looked worriedly at that center cross-section of the roof just as Donut exclaimed, “Here it comes!”
If this boss had any sort of fire or lightning or acid attack, we were absolutely fucked. So far it seemed each boss only had one main attack, and this one’s was pretty obvious. It rolled right the fuck over you.
My kneepads had an attribute that canceled out momentum-based attacks.
But if my experience with videogames was any indication, one couldn’t count on that sort of thing when it came to bosses. Plus there was no way I was going to test it.
Once, as a kid, I was riding down a country road with my mom and dad.
They’d been fighting, as usual, and I’d climbed into the very back of the SUV, as far back as I could get. I’d oftentimes do this, staring out the rear window as the world whipped by, pretending like I was in the cockpit of a spaceship. On this day a large, yellow truck was behind us. It was one of those box trucks, a Penske, something people rented to move.
It happened so fast. One moment, I was staring up at the guy, who was getting so close to my dad’s ass that I had to crane my neck up to see him, and then, the truck was just stopped, pulling away from us, the top peeled off like a sardine can. We’d gone under a bridge, and the truck was too tall. As I watched, the sides of the truck fell away, spilling furniture and boxes all over the road with a resounding crash! The main cab of the truck tilted violently to its side, broken away from the rest of the body. My dad heard the accident, looked up into the rearview mirror, muttered, “That’s a shame,” and just kept driving as my mom yelled at him to stop. He didn’t.
That’s what I was hoping would happen here. This massive ball of flesh filled the hallway, from the ground to the ceiling. My forward section of the redoubt was wider, giving a more gradual angle, just enough to wedge the ball between us and the ceiling nice and tight.
Like Mordecai had suggested, I needed to look at the clues. Those strange entrances dotting the side of the arena were there for a reason. It was so we could catch a glimpse of the monster. All I could see was that it was big, round, fast, and shoved tightly into the tunnel.
My first idea was to build a solid wall, but as we observed the ball from one of the many portcullis entrances, the track forced the monster directly into a 90 degree angle. It bounced right off, barely losing speed as it turned away. There will always be clues.
It never lost momentum. It just kept going and going. So we needed to
stop it somehow, and we needed to be in a position to do something about it once it did. I was hoping it’d hit our structure and get wedged in good. From there, Imani would stab, Donut would shoot missiles, Chris would cast his spells, and the rest of us would jab our makeshift ninja-star-tipped spears up into the boss until its health ran out.
Most of the goblin tables were made of thick, hefty steel, which was why they were so damn heavy. The wide table we used for the front of the redoubt also had a pitted wooden covering. Brandon, Chris, and I had spent a good five minutes throwing fifty of my ninja shuriken deep into the wood, adding black spikes to the ramp. Spikes that would hopefully damage the boss each time they pierced its flesh. Unfortunately, only about 20 of the stars remained unbroken.
That part had been Brandon’s idea. I’d shown him the shuriken and allowed him to read the description.
“These things are way more powerful than you realize,” he’d said, voice filled with awe. “Do the math. Compounding damage means if you poke something 200 times, it’s like literally millions of points of damage.”
“I don’t do math,” I said. “But I do know we ain’t poking anything 200 times with these things. Look.” I pulled a single star out. I’d tested it earlier to see if I had any sort of ninja skill. It’d received a single chip, and the red enchantment had faded away. Mordecai wasn’t kidding when he said these things were fragile. They were clearly meant to only be used once, tempering their value.
Despite their fragility, we’d used several of the stars to create the spike strips, nothing more than a pair of stars placed between two pieces of bolted- together wood. They’d survive one or two stabbings before breaking. The strips wouldn’t be stopping the monster by themselves, but each time it rolled over one, the amount of damage inflicted on the boss would increase by 8%.
“Brace,” I cried, grasping onto the wall as the monster barreled toward us,
impossibly fast.
Crash!
The entire structure shuddered and slid with a horrifying screech. All four of the ceiling braces popped out of place and went flying. One bounced hard off Yolanda, throwing her over. The terrible stench filled the now-dark chamber. An unending, high-pitched squealing filled the air.
We’d done it.
The ceiling sagged, bending ominously as dark squares of flesh pushed
through the empty spaces of the lattice pattern. The ceiling was going to break. We were going to be crushed. The ball had managed to squeeze itself between the top of the tunnel and our fortress, the massive pressure pushing down against our defense.
“Stab!” I cried as the stick appeared in my hand. It was half of a chin-up bar with a goblin clamp at the end, clutched onto a tied-together cluster of three stars. I hoped they’d be less likely to break if bunched together. I jabbed upward, poking the flesh. It felt as if I was doing nothing. Next to me, Imani struggled to get her longsword angled and through the holes in the ceiling.
She was pushing her sword all the way in and pulling out, over and over. Pigs squealed, blood rained. The music quickened. To my left, bolts popped from holes, shooting off like bullets. One clobbered Agatha, who didn’t appear to notice despite a well of blood that appeared. She was still screaming something about her shopping cart. Above, the pressure grew. I stabbed, and I stabbed.
And then, just as the top collapsed, I pierced upward and there was a mighty Pop! like a balloon.
Tuxedoed male and female tusklings in glittering, formal gowns rained down upon us as our ill-fated fortress collapsed. The lattice-patterned ceiling broke into pieces, the metal clanging and bending where it was bolted together. My hobbled-together spear was caught in one of the ceiling’s holes.
It ripped out of my hands as I was violently crushed onto the ground. I arched my back, protecting Donut under my body. Squeals and screams and hollering filled the hall as my minimap turned into a mass of red dots.
A fat, heavy orc crashed into me, and we both rolled, tangled in pieces of ceiling. Donut yowled and leaped away. The ninja star-covered tabletop lay broken to my right. A handful of stars still glowed red, and the creature rolled onto them, squealing with pain. I pulled myself to my feet just as Donut leaped onto my shoulder. She was screaming something incoherent, shooting magic missiles point blank at the tusklings, who rocketed backward with each hit.
I stepped on the squealing tuskling, smushing him deeper into the shuriken-covered wood. His health bar dropped, slowly at first and then just plummeted away as the exponential damage bonus kicked in.
Half of the creatures were already dead.
I caught eyes with the next closest tuskling, a male in a tuxedo. He was unarmed and completely disoriented. He held what appeared to be a wine
flute in his hand that was miraculously unbroken and still full of alcohol. The creatures were odd, much shorter than I had anticipated. They had large, wide bodies and torsos one and a half times as bulky as a regular human. Their large, warthog heads sat too close to their shoulders, making them look neckless. But from the waist down, their bodies were comically short. The beasts only stood about four and a half feet tall. I quickly examined his properties as the tottering creature pulled the wine flute to his mouth.
Tuskling Knight. Level 4.
When it comes to the Tuskling, their titles are about as accurate as their dating website photos. The once-mighty warriors conquered the Orcish Supremacy hundreds of years ago, defeating all the other clans.
They are now shells of the mighty warriors they once were. The honorarium “Knight” roughly translates to “Overweight, alcoholic bureaucrat who spends his days making new laws to oppress the poor and his nights drinking and getting pegged.” Knights and their slightly- more dangerous female counterparts, Tuskling Courtesans, are only worthy adversaries when they come together to form an ancient, Tuskling battle formation known as a “Ball of Swine.”
I formed a fist.
“On my back,” I called to Donut. She was out of magic missiles, and she’d already taken a mana potion. She dove under my cloak, hanging onto the back of my jacket like a backpack. She’d pop up when she’d regenerated enough mana to cast another missile over my shoulder.
I pulled my arm back and punched the fat, tuxedoed knight with all of my strength. The pig man’s health was already in the red, and his face caved in under the crushing blow of the spiked gauntlet. He dropped, still clutching onto his glass of wine. Half of his snout remained attached to my fist.
Miraculously, I didn’t feel a thing. I only felt the impact in my arm. Not my hand.
“Yes,” I said, whirling on my next opponent as I shook the gore free. A female. A Courtesan. The men were all level four, and the women were all level five. This one was slightly taller and fatter than the others. She wore a glittering red gown with multiple leather straps looped over and around her like a vest. It was like some sort of weird BDSM getup. She, too, was looking around, dazed, and screaming in confusion. It seemed they had no memories of their time in the pig ball. They were victims, just as all the other bosses had been.
But their dots were red, time was running out, and they weren’t human. I took a step forward, and I swung. The punch knocked her health down halfway. She hit the ground with an oof, raising her arms to block the blows.
I kicked at her savagely, screaming, maybe crying. I kicked and I kicked until her health bar went away.
Behind the woman, Imani was also screaming, swinging her sword as tears streamed down her face. She stood over the prone form of Yolanda, whose health bar was alarmingly low. Brandon had retrieved his giant maul, which glittered with lightning when he swung it. Chris twirled an ethereal, magic spear. The spear was a spell he could cast. It lasted for five minutes.
Agatha hadn’t moved, but she stood once the walls fell away. Blood gushed down the side of her head, her eyes wide as she watched the action.
She clutched her hands together.
All of the internal walls had retracted once we’d popped the swine ball.
We’d gone from a tight hallway to a wide-open field. The purple-hued arena spread around us, the size of an entire quadrant. The music still beat, and colorful lasers shot through the space like we were in a massive, 1980s themed roller rink. The roof raised the closer it got to the center. A bright light shone at the very center of the dome. The stairs. A red forcefield surrounded the stairwell.
I knew exactly what had to be done to get that forcefield to drop.
There were more of the tusklings than there were of us, but they were shocked and confused, having been transported from their own world to this place.
They were weaponless, they were untrained, and they were slaughtered.
