Princess Donut Versus Cici and Gustavo 3!
“It’s a feud of epic proportions! Princess Donut has thrown the gauntlet down, directly challenging Cici and Gustavo 3, the two beloved pets of current front-runner, Lucia Mar!” The orange-hued lizard announcer breathlessly intoned.
“I have done no such thing!” Donut said, incredulous. “They’re lying!” She turned to me. “Carl, I do not like this. Since when has the news been allowed to lie?”
Donut’s image appeared on the screen, her leaning over her cocktail. “Those dogs sound just awful. Bitch-ass rottweilers. Almost as bad as cocker spaniels. Think they’re so smart.”
“Lucia Mar appeared earlier today on Knuckle Cracking, and this is what she had to say.”
The screen flickered, changing to a shot of Lucia Mar. She sat on the couch next to a wolf-headed host. Lucia was in the strength-based, skull-faced cycle of her Lajabless form. She and the wolfman laughed cruelly as Gustavo and Cici ripped apart some small, fuzzy animal while the audience howled encouragement.
“What the hell is this bullshit?” I asked.
“It’s an arena fight show,” Mordecai said. “I already told Zev to never let you on one. The fights aren’t real. It’s complicated.”
The scene cut to Lucia Mar’s face, zoomed in super close. Her skull eye sockets teemed with bugs.
“What do you say to the challenge? Will you come back to this show? We could make it a main event. Donut versus one or both of your boys?” the wolfman asked off screen.
“No,” Lucia Marr said. “This show is a waste of time. Every moment spent not gaining experience is a waste of time.” Her voice came out raspy with her thick, Spanish accent. “I will find this Donut in the dungeon, where her death will be forever. Cici and Gus will tear this puta apart. And then I will rip Carl to pieces and take all of his shiny toys.”
“She seems nice,” I said.
I had to remind myself that this was a little kid. What kind of fucked-up childhood did she have?
“This is an outrage!” Donut said. “That wasn’t a challenge! Carl, we need to tell them that it was a mistake. I don’t want to fight those two stupid dogs. We’d kill them easy, sure, but I don’t want those ugly skulls after my name.”
“Goddamnit,” Mordecai said, looking up at the screen. “Goddamnit to hell.”
“They’re going to bring us together somehow, aren’t they?” I asked.
“Of course they are,” he said. “But not yet. They’ll want some buildup first.”
“Will it happen on this floor?”
“No way. It won’t be until after the third round of sponsorships, so on or after the sixth.”
“Does that mean they’ll go easy on us until then?”
“Maybe,” Mordecai said. “But probably not.”
“Whatever happened to them trying to kill us off early?”
“They’re still trying to end as early as possible. But they need money, so you high performers are going to be treated differently. All of this ties in with what I need to talk to you guys about. Borant is warning the shopkeepers and pub owners to be extra careful not to anger crawlers. It doesn’t explicitly say this in the newsletter, but I can read between the lines. Some of you guys are getting much stronger than you should. That kid trashing the Desperado Club two nights ago is proof of that. Most loot boxes are controlled by the system AI, and it appears the system is attempting to compensate for the shorter time limits. Borant controls the mobs and the experience earned, for the most part, but the System AI is still the ultimate arbiter and is using that strength to even out the odds.”
“Is that why you didn’t have a fit when we decided to take on this quest?”
He shrugged. “You were already snagged in that quest’s net. It happens. I could tell this was a good one from the get-go. Usually you have to just bring something from point A to point B, and it’s done. Or you just have to kill someone. These more elaborate quests are also a symptom of the shorter floors.” He paused as the announcement came on. It was nothing new. “Now, you two get a couple hours of sleep. Once Donut’s Puddle Jumper resets, you’ll go back out there. And since you’ve pissed off the guards, we need to make sure you finish this before the sun is up. In the meantime, I’m going to help Katia train her face. She’s not going out with you tonight. But when you’re done with the quest, you’ll spend the rest of the time on the floor grinding together.”
Mordecai: Try to keep her alive. But if she does die, make sure you get those rings off her finger.
Carclass="underline" You are stone cold, Mordecai.
This late in the evening, the entire town was asleep. The pubs were all closed. Nobody walked the main streets. The only light was from the sign of the Desperado Club a few streets over, towering over the city. An eerie silence punctuated the night, broken occasionally by horrific, unearthly screams that seemed to come from everywhere.
In order to break into the magistrate’s home, we first needed to get into an alleyway, scale the exterior of a small building we’d scoped out earlier, and then use the Puddle Jumper spell to hop over to the roof of the magistrate’s building.
The alley contained a group of level-14 monsters called Shadow Leaks. They were smoke-like, ghost-class mobs that swarmed at us as we approached the side of the building. They utilized a stinging cold attack, which I was resistant to thanks to my Nightgaunt Cloak. Thankfully my magical gauntlet was able to damage them just as easily as if they were made of flesh, and Mongo’s magical teeth caps could also hurt them. The ghosts gave off an unusually high amount of experience and were easy to kill. Mongo hit level 13 and got noticeably larger, rising to the height of my chest. He’d gone from dog-sized to pony-sized just like that.
Donut leaped from my shoulders to the back of Mongo to see if she could ride him. But the dinosaur got so excited that he started jumping up and down, tossing Donut away. She poofed all her hair out in anger and returned to my shoulder. “We’ll work on that later,” she mumbled.
This residential building was ringed by a series of conveniently-placed trellises on the exterior that made for easy scaling. Mongo went into the carrier as Donut leaped from window to window, quickly reaching the third-floor roof. I followed, scaling the trellis, which creaked ominously. But I quickly made it to the angled, shingle-covered roof, my heart thrashing.
The long magistrate building spread before us. Earlier, we’d come in from another side, using a different building’s roof to enter through the main entrance and into the mall below. This building we stood upon now was a full story higher than the last one, and we were going to jump straight to the magistrate building’s roof.
That was assuming if anything was left after I blew the three sticks of dynamite. I had hidden them inside the shelves that held up Miss Quill’s beanie babies. When I’d reattached the shelves to the wall, I’d found that they were hollow inside. I’d placed three sticks and a glob of Hobgoblin Pus, the remote detonator, in the second shelf. We wouldn’t be able to blow through the magical door that protected the next room over, but just by knocking on the wall, I could tell we could easily breach directly through the wood.
I spent a moment examining our surroundings, searching the air for flying mobs. I didn’t see anything. Just one building over from this one, directly across the opposite street was the large, warehouse-like building that held all of the inactive swordsmen guards. I could feel it there, an ominous presence, sandwiching us between the equally-imposing magistrate’s building. I hoped the guards remained within like they were supposed to. Mordecai insisted they’d remain inactive all night, but I was worried. We were about to cause a very large, very loud ruckus.