“I don’t know if we can,” I said. “They both have guns. He’s level eight, the same as us, and she’s level nine. Getting to nine is hard, so she probably has a lot of skills. Besides, I really don’t want to have one of those skull markers by my name. Even if they have it coming, everyone else we meet won’t know that. We will never get anyone to talk to us.”
“But if we don’t stop them, they’ll hurt somebody else.”
I stopped dead in the hallway. I looked at the cat. It was a very un-Donut-like thing to say. But worse, it was the truth.
“Goddamnit, Donut,” I said. I looked back over my shoulder in the direction of the safe room. They’d be awake already by now, though I suspected—and hoped—they wouldn’t just come running.
They probably were going to hurt somebody else. If they could find someone. But what could we do?
Donut fired a magic missile, killing a group of the regular level two rats that seemed to infest every corridor regardless of neighborhood. The rats sizzled and fell onto their backs. One of them dropped a poor rat skin and a rat steak.
“Don’t take that inventory,” I said. “Cancel it out.”
Donut huffed but complied. She loved looting corpses. The person to kill a mob had first right to loot for a couple minutes after the battle, but if they canceled out the box, the corpse became fair game.
I had an idea, but I didn’t know if it would work. We didn’t have time, but I needed to test it. I pulled one of the goblin smoke bombs out of my stash, lit the wick, and then quickly added it to the rat’s inventory. It let me do it. Like with most games, it allowed me to add items to the corpse’s inventory as if it was a chest. The rat had a grid pattern inventory that looked as if it couldn’t hold very much. This was how inventory had been for crawlers last season.
I had to see if the smoke bomb remained lit. They’d said that items didn’t retain their momentum, but what about this? Thanks to my level 5 in Explosives Handling, now when I examined incendiary items, I received some extra information:
Goblin Smoke Bomb.
Type: Deflagration.
Effect: Opaque smoke over a 10 meter radius for 3 minutes.
Status: Good. 89/100
Emits a stinking cloud of billowing, multi-color smoke that lasts for three minutes before disbursing. Use to either confuse enemies or as a stage prop at a hair metal concert.
It didn’t say the bomb was lit. I pulled the bomb out, and to my relief, the wick still crackled and spit. I quickly added it back to the rat’s grid. Everything was the same, but the Status had changed to Discharge Imminent 34/100.
I then examined my pile of goblin dynamite. They were all out of 50, not 100, and all of them were either in Detonation Imminent or Danger. It appeared the Danger warning appeared once the status was below 15.
I gingerly removed the most unstable piece of dynamite I had, one that was 10/50 and added it to the rat’s inventory without lighting it. I noted, despite me handling the dynamite as carefully as I could, it’d gone down to 9/50. Jesus. I was lucky I hadn’t blown myself to bits earlier. This next one was at 13/50. I lit it and then quickly added it to the rat’s inventory.
If they followed, they’d likely come down this same hall. That guy had picked Rebecca W’s corpse clean, including her clothes. People who did that were the type to loot everything. If they came across the rat, hopefully they’d think we’d been in too much of a hurry to stop and loot for ourselves. Rats didn’t normally drop stuff other than skin and meat. It was suspicious as fuck. But, maybe… maybe we’d get lucky. If Frank did pull the three items out of the rat inventory, it would literally blow up in his hands.
For now, it was the best we could do.
“Okay,” I said, nervously looking over my shoulder. I remembered they could go invisible, at least on the map. “Let’s go.”
We turned, and we kept running for the artery.
“How did you know?” Donut asked as we continued to jog.
“He was lying. He was lying right from the start,” I said.
“So he’s not a federal agent?” she asked. Her breaths were coming in wheezes, but the hallway was close.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he might be. He talks and acts like a cop. But his whole story was bullshit. That Rebecca woman was a level three. He said they’d gotten into a firefight right away, but that couldn’t be true. She had that apple core in her inventory. That meant she’d gone to a tutorial guild and gotten her inventory turned on. And then he ate that cookie, and I saw he received 9.8 experience instead of 10, which meant he was in a party with someone. Someone alive. Also, he had his arm draped over the chair, and I could see he was twitching his finger. He was typing into the chat. He hadn’t figured out how to use it with just his brain.”
Donut stared up at me as we ran.
“How is it you’re James Bond when it comes to strangers, but Miss Beatrice could date three different guys at once, and you had no idea?”
“Three different guys?”
“Well, you were one of them, so two, I guess. Then again, it’s three if you count Angel’s owner. Does it count as cheating when it’s with another woman? There's so many human nuances I don't understand.”
“Of course it counts as cheating,” I said. For fuck’s sake.
“But you were always watching those videos on your iPad with the two women rolling around and cleaning each other. Would it have been cheating if Miss Beatrice let you watch?”
“We’re not having this conversation right now, Donut.”
We reached the hallway and I pulled the chopper out of my inventory. This would be the first time we would actually drive the thing. I tossed a lump of coal into the hopper and prayed it wouldn’t explode on us. As we prepared to leave, the dungeon reverberated with an announcement. It was the daily update.
Hello, Crawlers. Another excellent, exciting day! We are very happy to have you with us, and we hope everyone is having a great time. You’re really bringing it, and we at Borant truly appreciate the enthusiasm you’re giving to this production.
I have a couple of announcements. First off, we want to assure everyone that we have quashed all the bugs with the new toilets. Both the exploding issue and the, ah, unfortunate suction issue with some of the units have been resolved. There is absolutely no need to be afraid of them. Those of you who have been using the hallways to relieve yourselves, please stop. We don’t want to have to start using punitive measures.
A couple additional patch notes… We have added support for all of the languages that were missing from our library. So for those of you who are hearing this and finally understanding what I’m saying for the first time… welcome. You’ll figure the rest out I’m sure. Also with the languages, we’ve implemented full cross support for native speech. So now Mandarin speakers will understand English speakers and so forth.
The Feral Rabies debuff is now curable with a health potion or spell. And the contagion is no longer airborne. Sorry about that, New Zealand.
We have removed the Blender Fiend mobs. The mob’s difficulty level appears to be too high. Their collective gets stronger each time they, uh, blend, and after working their way through a group of 15,000 crawlers in a single day, we’ve been forced to take action to prevent a premature extinction event. Rest assured they will be re-introduced on a lower floor. The Street Preacher neighborhood boss has been upgraded to a borough boss. In addition, we have tweaked the strength levels of a few dozen other mobs, too many to mention here. So just be aware of that.