“Okay, Mongo,” I said. “You’re up.” He had those magical teeth caps, and those should do damage. “Go bite that elf’s head off. But you gotta be quick.”
Mongo croaked and looked at Donut for confirmation.
“Sic ‘em,” she said.
The dinosaur rushed forward, weaving at his target, snake-like. At the last moment, he turned his head to the side, like he was eating a taco. He chomped down on the dark elf’s head.
Crunch.
The barely-detached head caved in under Mongo’s alarmingly powerful bite. The head slopped to the ground, followed by a rush of organs and blood, as if her neck was a drain that had just been unclogged. The purple swirls of magic blinked off.
Mongo raised his head into the air and howled, blood cascading off his face.
The purple aura around the others blinked out. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Uh-oh.
Mongo, oblivious, moved deeper into the room, biting a second, then a third. He ignored the ones that were already headless. The dinosaur jump attacked at a fourth, but he moved through the body as if it wasn’t there. He howled in rage and turned to bite, this time latching on the woman’s legs, ripping her from the ceiling. She crumpled to the ground.
“Get back here!” I said.
“Mongo, return!” Donut cried.
All around the room, the krasue began waking up. They wailed, loud and high-pitched. The heads all started wiggling at once, working to fully detach themselves from the rest of their bodies.
“Donut, go long,” I yelled. This was one of our oldest plays, but it didn’t exactly fit the situation. Hopefully she would understand the idea.
“Carl, that’s not going to… Oh, I get it! With what though?”
“With light!”
She leaped from my shoulder and ran away, scrambling out into the other room and presumably to the roof. Once she was out of range of the muting, she’d cast her Torch spell and then return.
I rolled a smoke curtain into the chaos as I formed a fist, rushing toward Mongo, who was gnawing down on yet another creature. My feet splashed in the gore. I punched at a krasue as I passed, my magical gauntlet connecting with a wet splat.
I pulled a regular torch and lit it, tossing it to the ground. The women squealed in rage, dozens of them peeling themselves free. One by one, they righted themselves, floating into the air, trailing organs as their now-empty bodies waved back and forth, turning into Xs on my map. They backed away from the sputtering torch, which invaded the smoke-filled room with a pulsing, red glow. They didn’t flee like last time. The light wasn’t as powerful, and they were also blinded by the smoke. They started to swirl through the room like flocking birds, bumping into one another and the hanging bodies and the bone hoop in the center, which started to spin. A krasue whipped past me, smacking me in the face with a still-beating heart. I swung but missed.
“Back out the door,” I said to Mongo, pointing behind me. The pet looked up and screeched. He snapped at a krasue, connecting with a hanging lung, ripping it free. The creature squealed and plummeted to the ground, bouncing and rolling with arteries whipping about like a jellyfish.
We pushed through a hanging curtain of headless corpses as I yanked the Fireball or Custard lotto ticket from my inventory. We ran into the living room, which was also now filled with smoke. We stopped at the gaping hole, and I turned back.
This apartment was big, but I didn’t know how much more punishment it could take before the whole building collapsed. I wasn’t sure how powerful a level-15 fireball was. The last time I’d tried this, the 50/50 chance ticket cast custard.
Where the hell was Donut? I glanced at the map, and it appeared she was just above us, on the roof. There were more red dots now, circling the cat, keeping their distance.
“Fire in the hole!” I cried as I scratched the ticket. I was fully expecting it to cast custard again.
Fireball. Spicy!
The egg-shaped ball of fire leaped out of my hand and rocketed toward the doorway to the bedroom. The flaming projectile was the size of an opened umbrella. It didn’t move as quickly as one of Donut’s Magic Missiles, but that didn’t matter. It rolled directly through the open door, shattering the jamb on either side, cleaving through the smoke and detonating as it hit the upside-down corpse of Featherfall.
The entire building rocked again. The floor buckled. Burning heat washed over me, hitting me with a small amount of damage. The room turned to Xs before half collapsing down to the next level. Black, acrid smoke filled the air, mixing in with the white of the smoke curtain. Above, the red dots harassing Donut all disappeared.
A moment later, Donut leaped down and landed on my shoulder, trailing her ball of light. It glowed brighter than I’d ever seen before. I had to shield my eyes.
“Did we get them all?” she asked. “They all disappeared when you did that.”
“I think so. But I think we fried whatever loot Featherfall had.”
“Let’s go look.”
We re-entered the bedroom. The entire floor slumped down like a ramp down into the mall level. The fireball spell had crisped everything in the room. The ashes of Featherfall were scattered along the debris.
“He wasn’t the boss,” I said. “If he was, he’d have a neighborhood map on him, even after we destroyed the body.”
“Then it had to have been Miss Quill,” Donut said. “She was the boss lady all along. But her body is behind us, probably buried.”
The building shuddered again.
“It’s going to collapse,” I said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“But what about the quest? We haven’t figured anything out.”
I was about to say, we’re out of time, when I noticed the red dot on the map. One of the corpses, burnt to a crisp, had just switched from an X to a red dot. As I turned, forming a fist, the dot blinked again, this time turning white.
It was a woman, one of the headless corpses. She was on the ground, and her head had magically returned to her body. She was a familiar human with long, dark hair. She’d been marked as a krasue that brief moment her dot was red, but now that it was white, the system designated her as a human. The lower half of her body was nothing but darkened char. She looked up at us, blinking in pain. She had one pale blue eye and one brown eye. This was Burgundy, the same woman we’d run into on the stairs when we’d visited earlier. One of the assistants to the magistrate. Her face was oddly unmarred by the damage.
Donut leaped down, sniffing at her. The woman’s legs had turned to flaky, obsidian-colored logs of charcoal. “Carl, we have to help her.”
I knelt down and pulled a healing potion.
“No,” Burgundy said, her voice weak. “If you heal me, it’ll heal my body. Then I will turn into one of those things again. It’s too late for me. I am cursed. Damned. The kindest thing you can do is kill me while I’m still mortal. Hurry. Please. It hurts.”
“So, you’re a person during the day, and one of those things at night?” I asked.
“Yes,” she gasped. “I was brought here by the elves. I worked in another settlement, but they told me I could get a job at the Desperado Club. There was an entrance in this town. They talked me into coming. Everyone knows if you work in the club, there’s a chance you can descend. I could go to the Hunting Grounds. And then maybe even deeper, where it’s safe. But it was all a lie.”
“You were you a prostitute?” I asked.
Her lips quivered. “Yes, and if you don’t like it, fuck off. I’ve stabbed men for less.” She coughed.
“We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. Lots of your friends have been appearing in the alleys, twisted and dead.”
“It’s going to be okay, sweetie,” Donut added. She reached up and stroked at the woman’s hair. “Tell us as much as you can about Featherfall.”