Dozens of responses to my group chat post poured in as I pulled my gear off, including my underwear. I also removed my xistera, just to be safe. Removing the stuff was easy, a lot easier than putting it on. I could just transfer it directly to my inventory. Goddamnit, I thought, reading the messages in the chat. Three different crawlers had given me the same response. The entrance to the back room at the Desperado Club had disappeared when the safe rooms closed off. They were insulating the club from the impending disaster.
That left us with only one escape.
Katia came jogging up, along with a handful of other crawlers, mostly human. I didn’t know any of them. Daniel Bautista was not among them.
“Okay, guys,” I said. “If you haven’t already, magical gear off. We have sixteen minutes, and we need to run at full speed. We’re out of time.”
The group just looked at me. Finally, one of them said, “Dude, why are you naked?”
I pointed east. “Go!”
The next pulse occurred just as we left town. A man near the back of the group exploded, just like that. His name had been Conrad E, and he’d had a Russian accent. He’d been a level-12 Ranger.
“What the hell was that?” I asked as I ran. Ahead, three emu-like mobs appeared, screeching. They were called Ruin Flockers. Donut hit two of them with Magic Missile as another mage hit the third with a lightning burst. That third ostrich didn’t die, but hit the ground. I stomped its neck as we continued running.
“His quiver. All of his arrows blew up, I think,” Katia said. “He’d put his bow away, but he’d forgotten about his arrows.”
“Donut,” I said. “I don’t like this. I think you should take it off.”
Donut remained on my shoulder, despite being faster than me. Behind, someone shouted about another mob. “Leave it!” I yelled.
“I’ll lose five intelligence!” Donut whined. “And my Sepsis debuff. And I really like it.”
“These bursts are attacking our magical gear,” I said.
“But if I lose it, somebody else will get it and put it on. We’ll have to fight them. I don’t want to hurt a person.”
“I know,” I said. I didn’t want that either. I didn’t add that only an idiot would actually put the thing on after reading the description. Anybody still around at this point would know better, so I wasn’t too worried about that anymore. I leaped over a pile of rubble. We were coming up on ten minutes. A pair of dead crawlers appeared on my map, surrounded by the red dots of Street Urchins. We didn’t have time to investigate.
Before, I’d never been the fastest runner. I had good endurance, more so than a lot of the guys who only trained on weights, but I’d never been a speed guy. I’d always hated jogging, but I played a lot of basketball. Not many team sports trained cardio like basketball, except maybe tennis or soccer. And probably jai-alai, too.
Now, I ran through the city with ease, moving much, much faster than I’d ever been able to before. My breaths came in ragged gasps, but my body didn’t slow down. It was an odd, disconcerting feeling. If we survived this, I really needed to push myself more physically, to test my limits. My brain still thought of myself as a normal human. As a group, even the slowest amongst us moved faster than a squad of Olympians ever could’ve. I recalled my poor, long-lost chopper. It wouldn’t have done well on this level, not with all the debris in the streets.
“Well, I’m not taking it off,” Donut said.
“That dude blew up, Donut,” I said. To our left, a group of four more crawlers appeared. They merged with us.
“Are we sure it’s there?” one of them, a shark-headed creature, called.
“It’s there!” another yelled back. “I can see it on my map already.”
I turned my attention back to Donut. The next burst was due at any moment. They weren’t coming at exact five-minute intervals. “What’s going to happen if you permanently lose five intelligence, and then you lose the tiara anyway? Then you’ll be down ten instead of five.”
“But it was my first item,” she said.
“It also might catch your damn head on fire. Besides, remember the description? You’ll still be an official princess.”
“Donut, he’s right. You better take it off,” Katia said.
“Oh, all right,” Donut grumbled.
The Sepsis Crown atop her head crumbled into dust, disappearing like ash.
“Hey!” Donut yelled. To my left, one of the newcomers also cried out. His pants vanished. “It disappeared before I could remove it!”
The second pulse had apparently activated all magical weapons. This third one had destroyed any still-equipped armor.
The fourth pulse ripped through the party just as we pulled up to the small, decrepit building. We’d run the distance in record time.
Chaos tore through the group. A lightning bolt ripped through the party, glancing off a human, who tumbled and hit the ground, almost dead. Another person simply teleported away. Katia’s whole body glowed, and she leaped forward, clipping me in the process and throwing me down. She ran directly into the wall, and blasted through it like the Kool-Aid Man. I bounced off the floor, crying out. Donut hissed and leaped away. I felt my arm break in that moment Katia slammed into me, but it was healed by the time I finished rolling.
You have been poisoned!
It took me a long moment to figure out what the hell had just happened. Normally, I was immune to poison, but that came from my Nightgaunt Cloak. Donut had also been poisoned, but she was also now immune thanks to her Former Child Actor class.
The first two items in everyone’s hotlist had activated themselves on their own. So much for items in our inventory being safe. For both me and Donut, it was a healing potion and then a mana potion. We’d both ingested the second potion before the potion timer ended, inflicting us both with potion sickness. I knew Katia had an active skill called Rush, something she could only do once a day, and that’s what’d happened to her.
The poison effect kicked me in the stomach, doubling me over. Once the fifteen seconds passed, I took an antidote potion and surveyed the crowd. We’d all stopped dead in the street outside the building. Katia returned, a dazed look in her eyes. Her nose had been knocked completely sideways and was now just below her ear. She didn’t seem to have noticed.
“That really hurt,” she said.
Nobody had been killed, but we didn’t know what happened to the guy who’d teleported away. I leaned over the human who’d been cooked with the Lightning spell. He was unconscious. I poured a healing potion into his mouth. This was one of the newcomers who’d met us as we’d run here. The Asian man’s eyes fluttered then snapped open.
“Please get your dick out of my face,” he said. I grinned and backed away.
I looked over my shoulder, and through the hole in the wall Katia had created, I could see it. I glanced at the timers up in the corner of my vision. We had three minutes before the big detonation.
We also had two days and 18 hours left before this floor would collapse.
A familiar face appeared, jogging up with a new group. Daniel Bautista.
“I told you it was here,” he said, indicating the stairwell down to the fourth level.
I clapped him on the shoulder. The man nodded and turned toward the stairwell, disappearing down to the fourth floor.
We didn’t have a choice. I was going to just send everyone without Desperado Club access to the stairwell, but with the club closed off, it was either this or death.
“Go,” I said. “Everybody down the stairs.”
We watched as the procession of people lined up and rushed down the hole.
Carclass="underline" Mordecai, are you in your room?
Mordecai: I’m safe.
Carclass="underline" What’s going to happen to us when we go down early? Or you?