“So? Are you saying if someone else comes, they might kill all the old people? Just to get experience? Oh, Carl darling. Nobody is quite that evil,” Donut paused. “Are they?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t want to find out, either.”
“But what if a big group of good guys comes through? And they miss it because you covered it up?”
“Look where we are, Donut. We were lucky to find these people. There aren’t any big groups of good guys, not in these parts. It’s only sharks and minnows. Now come on. Let’s find that Taco Bell.”
“So which one are we?” Donut asked as we trekked off.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
Brandon said they’d put dozens of signs up all over the place. As we headed north, I either defaced or changed all the ones I could find. There was no way I’d get to them all, but it made me feel better.
I was busy changing a sign from saying “2 blocks south” to “12 blocks south” when Donut lifted her head, sniffing. “Two more rats around the corner.”
A moment later, their dots appeared.
“Your sense of smell is getting better,” I said.
“No, I think the rats are getting stinkier,” she said.
We’d killed at least 30 rats between here and the encampment. These rats were bigger and fatter than the ones we’d fought earlier. They were all level three. Before we’d left, I’d quietly asked Brandon if they’d looted the corpses of the folks who’d been killed right when they’d entered the dungeon. He’d been horrified at first until I explained that I needed pants and shoes. He’d given me directions. They’d looted the extra wheelchairs, walkers, and canes, but they hadn’t touched their clothes. It would’ve required them to physically remove them. The thought made me ill. It also gave me a new burst of hatred for Frank Q and Maggie My, who had stripped the body of Rebecca W. They’d probably removed the clothes of the other ones they’d killed, too.
When we got to where the elderly folks had died, all that was left was piles of bones and shredded clothes, nothing usable. I picked up the gnawed remains of a slipper, tossing it down with disgust. The rats had devoured everything else, tearing through the corpses like a hurricane. And now the rats in the area were bigger.
We turned the corner and entered a new quadrant. A pair of humanoid creatures with loincloths and crude clubs saw us and hopped in our direction, hissing. These were three-foot-tall lizard monsters, like Brandon had stated, the tallest of them almost as high as my hip. They looked like upright Komodo dragons from the waist up. Small but muscular. Their legs were long and bent, kangaroo-like and scaly.
Troglodyte Pygmy – Level 2
Oh, these fuckers. With an intelligence just shy of an oft-dropped toddler, the standard troglodyte pygmy warrior would be harmless if it wasn’t so damn fast. Or venomous.
Brandon had warned me about their special attack, so I was ready. Donut hit the first with a magic missile while the second leaped right at me, hissing and baring his giant fangs.
I hit it with a right hook, my chain-covered fist smashing its head, changing the creature’s trajectory so it splattered against the wall of the tunnel. It exploded like a damn tomato. Donut’s target had practically vaporized under her single missile strike. Her Magic Missile spell had risen to level five, and she now had the option to choose how many mana points to put into each casting, from three to six. Her intelligence was currently 24, meaning she could fire eight missiles if she kept the power setting at three.
I poked at the burnt-out husk of troglodyte with my bare toe. It’d only been a few days, but I barely felt the ground now when I walked. Random rocks still hurt, but not so much as they would’ve before. “That didn’t look like a three-mana missile.”
“That was a six,” Donut said, sniffing at her handywork. “They really need to make this less disgusting.”
“If it’s a level two monster, a three will probably one-shot it,” I said. Neither dropped any loot, but I took their clubs.
“If it’s about to bite my face off, it’s getting a six,” said Donut.
We spent the next hour hunting down and killing all the troglodytes we could. The level threes were called Troglodyte Bashers and the level fours were Troglodyte Virtuosos. The Bashers were twice as big, making them almost human-sized. They didn’t have any other special abilities, and they had more regular legs. The virtuosos had a tongue attack that surprised me at first. They were the same size as the level twos, but they could shoot their tongues almost fifteen feet. The thin, wet tongues stung like a whip, inflicting poison, which was immediately canceled thanks to my nightgaunt cloak.
Donut and I were starting to become adept at fighting as a team. She’d wait for an opening to fire her missiles, and I’d move in to finish them off with a kick or a punch. I could tell just by her stance when—and where—she was going to move. She jumped on my shoulder with ease, using my height to fire on her targets from above. She’d hide behind me, easily slipping between my jacket and cloak, hanging on my back with her claws to avoid a poison attack. Well, any attack really. We didn’t level up yet to nine, but we were well on our way. It seemed after level eight, the amount of experience it took to hit the next level was absurdly high. We were plateauing. Even though I couldn’t distribute my stat points, my fighting skills were steadily climbing, giving my attacks more and more damage. The difficulty would probably start all over again when we went down a floor.
If we went down a floor.
After killing a Troglodyte Basher, all that was left from one of Donut’s missile strikes was the lizard’s head, rolling about like a lumpy soccer ball. She jumped down and idly batted at it while I caught my breath. With a single swipe, the skull flew across the hallway and shattered into the wall, leaving a crack in the stones.
“You need to practice with your claws,” I said looking at the damage. “My strength is nine, and yours is 18. You are literally twice as strong as I am, and I’m pretty damn strong now. You could probably swipe through steel if you just tried.”
“Fighting with one’s claws is just so inelegant,” she said. “It’s not ladylike.”
“And shooting lasers out of your eyes is?”
“Oh my, yes. With my Magic Missile I don’t get blood on me like a common house cat. I don’t end up matted and filthy. I can’t even imagine it. I’d end up looking like Ferdinand.”
“Who the hell is Ferdinand?”
“Nobody you’d know.”
I sighed. “Just think about it, okay?”
She didn’t answer.
We found the troglodyte boss room after a couple hours of grinding through the hallways. This one was a little differently shaped than the others. The room was a long rectangle with what appeared to be a smaller room at the entrance, meaning I wouldn’t be able to pull off my bomb-from-afar method of boss killing. The highest mob in this area was a level four, meaning—hopefully—the boss wouldn’t be too strong. Probably a level seven or eight.
It was dangerous, but if we couldn’t handle a floor one neighborhood boss by now, we’d have no chance against whatever was guarding those stairs. We decided to go for it.
We hesitantly approached the boss room. The front door to this one was one of those glass, automatic sliding doors, though I couldn’t see inside. The sign on the door was in English. It said, “Open 24 Hours” and “Fitness, Weights, Gains.”
I grabbed a cigarette and lit it. It was my second to last one. I took a deep drag.
We stepped inside.
24
Like the door indicated, this was a high-ceilinged gym. Where we entered was a small receptionist’s desk with a turnstile. Signs hung on the wall filled with slogans like “Today is the day you gain” and “Excuses don’t lose calories” and “Release the beast.” The place smelled of sweat and oil and testosterone. From around the corner I could see racks of fitness equipment. While not tiny, the place was much smaller than the last boss room. I didn’t dare throw a dynamite stick in here.