Donut “directed” the action from the seat of her sidecar. I would put the chopper into my inventory before we proceeded.
“Do you think Rory and Lorelai will be mad at me?” Donut asked as we prepared the trigger. Unlike last time, I wasn’t going to use plain goblin dynamite, which was inherently unstable. I found a blob of a C4-like explosive called “Hobgoblin Pus” that was detonated with an actual trigger. There was only a small amount of the material, but the description said it caused a big explosion. I had the sense that it was valuable, probably the real prize of this room. I was going to use it all. Next to the hobgoblin pus was a set of magical triggers. There were only three of the mechanisms, and I had to waste one in order to test it, to see how they worked.
The triggers were both genius and foolproof. You broke the tip off of the mechanism, which looked like a stick of underarm deodorant. You stuck the broken-off part into the explosive, and you pressed the button to set it off. Easy. The detonators were single use, but you could break off up to 10 pieces for each stick, so you could simultaneously blow 10 different bombs. It had a five-second countdown after you pressed the button. The description said the trigger had a range of about ten kilometers.
“Will they be mad? Probably,” I said. “But Rory doesn’t seem to like this boss guy too much, so who knows? I hope we never find out.”
“Do you think this is enough?” Donut asked, looking over the four barrels. “I feel as if it’s not enough.”
I shrugged. “Black powder isn’t really meant for blowing stuff up. But it’s good at throwing metal. If he’s in there and out in the open, we’ll turn this guy into a pincushion for sure. But I doubt the explosion itself is going to be bigger than when that murder dozer blew up. Either way, if this doesn’t kill him, more probably wouldn’t either.”
The plan was a more refined version of what we had done with the Hoarder. From what I could see, the room that this war chieftain occupied was identical in size and shape to the one from the last boss battle. This was still the first floor, after all, so I doubted the guy was that powerful. We were going to open the door, push the cart in, close the door, run until we had several walls between us, and hit the trigger. If we killed the boss, we’d get a notification and a star by our names. If we didn’t, we’d keep running. We’d pull out the chopper and put some distance between us and the whole neighborhood and forget this ever happened.
I’d put a hunk of the hobgoblin pus in each barrel, and I added the last of it to the top of the first barrel. I placed the detonator into the pus, sticking half out of it. I tried to make it look obvious, but not overly obvious. If the goblin chieftain had time to react, he’d hopefully spend his last moments digging the detonator out of this chunk of explosive, not realizing we had four more ready to go buried in each of the barrels.
It was a chickenshit way to do it, but I didn’t care. Not when one got locked in the room with the boss otherwise.
“You ready, Princess?” I asked.
I stood directly behind the cart, poised to shove. I’d pulled it back a good ten feet, just enough to give me momentum. Donut would open the door using her menu, eyeball the room to make sure the path was clear, tell me to go, then slam the door after I heaved. Hopefully the floor would be flat enough for the cart to travel a good distance.
“Ready,” she said. “I’m opening the door now.”
From my vantage, I couldn’t see into the room, but I heard the heavy creak of the door yawning open.
“Do it!” Donut cried.
I kicked my legs, and I crashed into the cart like it was a football sled. I’d greased the wheels, and the heavy cart moved quickly and easily. I shoved with all my might and watched the cart rocket into the room as the large door slammed.
Donut had already turned and was bolting for the exit on the opposite side of the room.
I scrambled up and followed. We’d practiced this part. We turned three times, making sure we were out of any line of direct blast. I didn’t want to wait too long, but we had to put a few large rooms between us in case there was a shockwave that needed to be disbursed. We stopped at the prearranged spot, and I leaned against the wall, my heart thrashing. I pulled the detonator trigger from my inventory.
“Did you see him? Was there a giant goblin in there?” I asked.
Donut heaved for breath. “Yes. A huge. Ugly. Goblin. My word. I do not like running. He was sitting down, reading a book. Blow it, blow it good.”
I jammed the button.
“There sure were a lot of babies in there, too,” Donut said in that last moment before the blast.
18
“Goddamnit, Donut,” I said.
We’d both been knocked over, but unhurt, by the shockwave. It’d been big, bigger than I’d expected. Dust cascaded from the ceiling. A terrible hissing noise followed the explosion. I suspected it was from the boiler of the giant engine. The whistling noise eased over the next several minutes. Occasional, smaller blasts went off. But eventually even those stopped. An entire wall of notifications appeared, most of them achievements. But we had, indeed, killed the neighborhood boss. There was no fanfare this time, but another bronze star appeared by both of our names.
“Were there really babies in there? Like goblin babies?” I asked.
“Oh yes, there were a bunch of them. I only saw them for but a moment, but they were quite cute. Some of them were wearing little oversized jackets, like Baby Yoda. Adorable. I think you hit one with the cart. There were old ones and pregnant ones, too. Did you see your level? We’re both level eight now. You’re welcome.” Donut looked up into the air. “We didn’t get to see our faces all big. I suppose they don’t do the boss battle graphic thing if you’re not locked in the room with them. That’s too bad. It’s quite entertaining.”
“Goddamnit,” I said again. I was all about killing as many goblins and monsters as I could, but killing babies? That was pretty fucked up, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Actually, I knew exactly how I felt about it. It made me feel like an asshole. I didn’t like feeling like an asshole. I stared at that blinking box of achievement notifications. I sighed. I didn’t even want to click on the box.
“What?” Donut said, looking up with what appeared to be genuine curiosity. “It’s not like they didn’t have it coming. You didn’t ask to be here. They’re goblins! What kind of vile monster sticks babies in the boss room anyway?”
I shook my head. “We need to get back over there, grab the neighborhood map, and get our asses out of Dodge before the others return. They’re probably on their way now. There’s no way they didn’t hear that. We’ll go north, heading into the next neighborhood over.”
The workshop had been completely obliterated. All that was left was blackened rubble. The lights on the walls were all out, but the entire north side of the room was a fifteen-foot wall of fire. The smoke billowed. I absently noted that the smoke was being sucked away into the ceiling. The dungeon masters were cheating, offering some sort of ventilation system. Otherwise this entire area would’ve been filled with black smoke by now. We could only take a couple steps into the room before it got too hot. I looked about. The large tables were just gone. Large chunks of stone had fallen from the ceiling. Donut jumped on my shoulder as I examined the room.
The boiler on the enormous steam engine looked like a baked potato that been peeled open with a bunch of copper sticks coming out of it, like tentacles. A steady cloud of angry steam still hissed from the interior of the wreckage, mixing with the black smoke. The room was ankle-deep in water, and the water sizzled and steamed as it came into the contact with the burning wall.
“We probably should have taken all of the coal from that pile, not just half of it,” Donut said. “We’re not getting to that dead boss now.”