“Your turn,” Donut said.
“Meth?” I said. I laughed at how absurd it was. I added the rest of the items to my inventory. My inventory added two new menus: Food Items and Pharmaceuticals.
I had a couple new achievements. One for looting a corpse and one for sharing experience. I received a pair of Bronze Adventurer boxes. Donut got the same, plus a couple additional achievements for casting her first spell and finally killing something, along with killing a mob higher level than herself.
“That was no good,” Donut declared as we continued our trek east. “Sloppy. You can’t be injuring yourself every time we get into a minor tussle.”
“Minor tussle? We need to be more cautious,” I said. “We can’t just blindly stumble around.”
“No, we need to level up,” Donut said. “And we need to do it quickly. I’m starting to think this main road is not the best choice for traveling or fighting.”
She jumped down a random hallway and I had to rush to keep up. A few turns later, and we were far from the main thoroughfare. Here, the walls were tighter and the ceiling much lower. The whole place glowed green from the lichen on the walls. Some of the halls curved and met dead ends. But thanks to the map, which built itself as we went, it was easy to keep from getting too lost.
The whole place was eerily barren. Occasionally I heard a screeching noise coming from the distance, and once I heard something that sounded like a man screaming at the top of his lungs, followed by gunfire. But it was far away, and I couldn’t tell exactly from where. We traveled like this for what seemed like hours, not coming across anybody or anything except a few random tutorial guilds. And bathrooms. The bathrooms were everywhere.
It was the strangest thing. There seemed to be a bathroom door about once every quarter mile or so. Each doorway was different, and it appeared the doors were taken from actual bathrooms in restaurants and bars and buildings from around the world. Some had the symbol for men or women on them. One had a hand-written sign in what looked like Korean. Another had a note saying it was for paying customers only.
I opened the first four bathrooms we came across, and each one was the same inside. A silver toilet and a roll of toilet paper. No sink, no mirror. Just a toilet and barely enough room to sit down in. No matter how wide or thin the door was, the room was the same each time. After the third room, I began to suspect it was the same room. To test it, I took the roll of toilet paper and pulled it out, dipping the end into the bowl of the waterless toilet. The next one we passed, I opened it up, and sure enough, the toilet paper remained dipped in the bowl.
After I closed the door, I had Donut open it up. She could open and shut doors just by looking at them as long as she was close enough. She opened the door I’d just been in, but this time it was a knee-high cubicle featuring a litterbox.
“Oh good, I gotta wee,” Donut said, entering the room and shutting the door. She emerged thirty seconds later, trailing litter all over the place. She looked over her shoulder at me. “You should go. You look like you need to go.”
What I really needed to do was sleep. The initial adrenaline rush from all of this was finally coming down, and I was exhausted. I’d only slept an hour or so before I’d woken up last night. Last night? It was barely five hours ago or so. In my health menu it listed me as Fatigued. It didn’t cure itself with my regeneration. We had to find one of the rest areas. Mordecai said they were all over the place. We could set up a temporary base of operations there and explore the area cautiously and deliberately. This aimless wandering was going to get us into big trouble sooner rather than later.
A couple minutes later, we were beset by a group of level two rats. There were five of them, and the screeching, hissing creatures were about half the size of Donut. The monsters weren’t too big, but the bastards were huge for rats. They bit and scratched, and one even inflicted me with a Poison debuff that only lasted for a second before my cloak canceled it out.
I ended up defeating them by punting them against the wall one by one. They hit the wall and exploded like water balloons. Their deaths were over-the-top, overly gory, almost like their bodies contained twice as much blood as they should.
Donut had leveled up to two after the llama battle. It appeared we received experience equal with the percentage of how much we participated in the battle. But the number wasn’t exactly equal with how much damage we dealt. I suspected support activities such as tanking and healing also counted, though we didn’t have nearly enough data to figure out if that was accurate or not. It also appeared that simply being in a party with someone and present at the battle garnered a nominal amount of experience. With the rats, I received nearly enough to level me up to three.
Donut, who hadn’t lifted a paw to help me, spent the next five minutes bitching about how her “mentorship” should’ve counted for more experience.
The cat was definitely making an effort to be less abrasive, but she was still a cat. She had a reckless streak to her, and a quick mouth, often making quips before realizing what she’d said. But she was also showing very cat-like signs of affection, too. One time I stopped and leaned up against a wall to rest, and she spent the time purring and rubbing up against my legs. I looked down at her, and she returned my gaze. “What?” she said.
By the time we finally found a safe room, we had participated in ten more skirmishes, all against rats and these large cockroach things called Scatterers. The bugs were the size of and shape of a loaf of bread. We didn’t receive any additional loot of interest except multiple rat pelts, and one cockroach dropped an item called a Scatterer Carapace which added itself to my Crafting Items menu. I killed every single one of them with my bare feet. I punted the rats and jumped on top of the cockroaches. The bug mobs crunched like potato chips under my feet.
While I did most of the fighting, Donut now made an effort to fire one magic missile each fight from the safety of my shoulder. Her skill level in the spell went up to three. I spent a moment examining her stats. My view was limited, but I could see she currently had a 17 in intelligence, giving her 17 mana points. Each zap of her spell cost five mana points. For me, the spell points regenerated very, very slowly, making magic almost useless. Donut regenerated much faster, at about one point a minute. I didn’t know why she generated the points more quickly, but one a minute was still pretty slow. Most of these fights were decided in seconds.
I hit level three and gained a skill called Foot Soldier, and a second one called Smush.
The Foot Soldier skill increased the damage I dealt by kicking.
The Smush skill was… something else.
The voice reading the skill description was deeper, more throaty than usual. I could actually hear him breathing like he was a dude beating himself off while he said it.
Smush: Skill Level 3
Killing with your feet. Your bare, beautiful feet.
Taking your bare foot, placing it on top of a living, conscious life, and then pressing lovingly down until that life ceases to be. Is there a more noble way to kill?
The amount of pressure you can bring to bear upon an enemy with your unshod foot is increased by 10% with each level of this skill.
I remembered the weird message I’d received before when I’d jumped on the goblin engineer. I’d thought it was just a throwaway joke, like most of the descriptions. But it seemed the AI—or whatever it was that controlled the game messages—really did have some sort of foot fetish. It was fucking weird.
“I guess we’re not getting you shoes,” Donut said after I made the mistake of describing the skill to the cat.
“Yes, we are. As soon as possible,” I said.