I had been expecting the krasue to swarm at us, which is why we’d waited until now for Donut to cast her light spell. They should’ve been immune to the explosion, but I didn’t see them anywhere. We’d probably blown them halfway across town. I kept a wary eye out for red dots.
“Oh shit,” I said, examining the notifications. We had not received the one I’d hoped for, but I still had several interesting ones.
New achievement! Assassin!
You have killed a ranking NPC town official. *Sniff* It seems like just yesterday you were nothing but a scared, level-1 crawler with beautiful feet, pissing yourself as you faced down a rat. Now look at you. You’ve moved all the way up to political assassinations. What’s next? Killing a god?
Reward: You’ve received a Bronze Assassin’s Box!
New achievement! Ultimate Extreme Power!
Easy there, Charlemagne. This is only a medium settlement. It’s not like you’ve conquered most of Europe. But you have killed this town’s acting Magistrate.
You know what that means? Welcome to the wonderful world of public administration.
Reward: You’ve received a Platinum Tyrant’s Box! You have also gained control of the Medium Skyfowl Settlement. Good luck, Magistrate.
New achievement! CockBlock!
You have assassinated an NPC whose existence was required to complete another crawler’s quest. (NPC Killed: Miss Quill – Skyfowl. Level 30.) Who was that other crawler? What was the quest? Who fucking cares? You get the reward they were promised!
Warning: You may only receive this award once. The next time you do it, we tell them who you are. And then they get a new quest to kill you. Nobody likes cockblocks.
Reward: You’ve received a Silver Quest Box!
So it appeared we had killed both Miss Quill and Magistrate Featherfall in the blast.
“Are we jumping over there or what?” Donut said. “We’re supposed to be jumping!”
“Hang on,” I said. Every instinct I had told me to wait. “Something’s not right. Let me think for a second.”
“Hey,” Donut said a moment later. “Why did you get the fancy name change and I didn’t? This is an outrage!”
I looked at the menu. My title had changed from Royal Bodyguard to Magistrate Carl of Medium Skyfowl Settlement.
I didn’t laugh. Mordecai had already warned me that one of us would likely win the town if we killed the magistrate. But he’d also said when you killed the quest’s head boss dude, you either auto won the quest or it failed, depending on the situation. Given the mysterious circumstances of this quest, he’d given us a 50/50 chance of winning that quest box. And that was okay with me as long as the quest went away. Either way, we’d get a ton of experience since the guy was also the head of the town. But nothing had happened with the quest. It still sat there in my menu. Did we kill an innocent NPC? We hadn’t even met the magistrate, and we’d just blown his house to bits.
“Listen, we have a problem. I think we screwed up. Magistrate Featherfall is dead, but the quest is still there. That means he wasn’t the head bad guy. And it looks like Miss Quill wasn’t the bad guy, either, like I was suspecting. And to top it off, we fucked over some other crawler’s quest.”
The plan had been simple. Using the Mysterious Letter as bait, we were going to make Featherfall think we were about to breach through the ceiling, drawing him to the area to face us. After Ricky Joe had claimed that a female skyfowl was visiting the city elves, I thought perhaps Miss Quill was really the bad guy. That was just the sort of thing the AI would pull, which was why I’d mentioned something about burning the stuffed animals. Either way, whomever was listening in would hopefully be there. Mordecai said a lich would get blown to bits just as easily as a human. The only monster we’d have to worry about post-detonation would be the krasue, which wouldn’t be hurt by the explosion.
After the blast, if there was anything left, we’d storm the Magistrate’s office and mop up the remaining bad guys and hopefully figure out what the hell was going on over there.
“If Miss Quill was there to get blown up, then she had to be in on it. Why else would she be there this late?” Donut asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “She said he only came out at night now. Maybe she altered her schedule to match. Or maybe she lived there.”
“Or maybe she was a blood-sucking pawn of the lich. We don’t know, Carl. Let’s go look. Quit being a wuss.”
“Okay,” I said after a moment. “But let’s be cautious. I have a bad feeling about this one. Turn off your Torch for now, but be ready to snap it back on.”
“Wait, wait, look,” Donut said. “Look at our notifications again. There’s a bronze boss box in there. I told you one of them was a bad guy.”
I looked, and she was correct. I hadn’t noticed it buried there with the others. So, either Featherfall or Quill had been a neighborhood boss. That made me feel a little better. But which one was it? It didn’t say.
The dynamite had blown a massive hole in the roof, peeling it up like it had been drilled through from below. Thankfully the building wasn’t fully engulfed in flames. Not yet. Smoke continued to rise from the hole, but it was minimal for now. The boom jug from earlier this afternoon had managed to burn a building to the ground in a matter of minutes. The effect of this blast appeared to be much more powerful, but also much less incendiary. If I was going to be blowing shit up more often, I needed to know what to expect. This particular blast, while huge, was not what I’d anticipated. The physics surrounding this stuff was still beyond me, and that was dangerous. I needed to learn, and fast.
Donut used Puddle Jumper to get us over to the roof across the way. We went from the angled tiles to the flat beams, but the ground below us suddenly felt unsteady, ready to break.
“You, there!” a voice called. I looked up. A pair of skyfowl NPCs had grown brave enough to fly closer to the explosion. They hovered over us now. “What are you doing?”
“I’m the new town magistrate,” I called. “I’m on magistrate business.”
The two eagles looked at each other. I wasn’t certain how this sort of thing worked, if they’d recognize my authority or not. If this were the real world they’d say…
“Fuck off, you crazy assholes,” the skyfowl called down to me. “Go back to the Desperado or wherever you came from. You shouldn’t be up here. There’s been an explosion, and that roof you’re on is going to cave in. We ain’t saving your stupid wingless asses if you fall through.”
“Well, fuck you very much,” I called back to them.
The other skyfowl turned to his companion. “I don’t feel so well. There might be something in the air. Let us flee from here, my brother.”
The two circled a few times and then flew off.
I kept an eye out for mobs as we cautiously approached the hole. We looked down into what had once been the magistrate’s quarters. The epicenter of the explosion was still another 50 feet ahead. Through the hole in the roof, I could see all the way to the ground far below. Half of the magistrate’s home and front office were just gone, along with the entire south end of the building. The floor of the mall level was also a massive hole. And below that was a pile of smoking debris. However, deeper into both the mall and the living quarters above, I could see that the floor was mostly intact.
“No wonder there’s not that much fire,” I said. “It’s like we punched a hole right through the structure, both up and down. Weird.”