Plucked directly from a Tuskling High Caucus moments after it formed, this particular ball has been transferred here to this dungeon for your entertainment, ladies and gentlemen. The magic of the ball won’t allow them to stop until every last drop of Crawler blood is squeezed right out of their human bodies!
The world unfroze, and the ball continued its trajectory, rolling away down the path. Ahead of me, more walls moved and shifted, grinding loudly. The walls and entranceways were creating new paths, guiding the massive ball in our direction.
“Wow,” Donut said from my shoulder. “I’m feeling really ignored right now. Why is it always human this, human that? Why can’t it be ‘blood squeezed out of their human and feline bodies?’”
Looking to my left and right, I could see what was about to happen. With the lowering of the walls, a new path opened up, and we were on it. The heavy, pounding music was deliberate. We could no longer feel the oncoming train of the giant pig ball. At its current speed, it would circle around onto us in a minute, maybe less.
“Move!” I cried.
“Where?” Brandon called.
“Away from here,” I said.
I pulled the first of several spike strips from my inventory and dropped it on the ground before rushing forward. We moved toward the long, wide path the ball had just rocketed over. A moment later, the ball rushed past again, right where we’d been standing, missing Agatha and her shopping cart by inches. The woman cackled with joy as the squealing wind blew up the flaps on her hat.
In the brief moment it passed by, I caught sight of a tuskling face jutting from the center side of the ball, spinning like an ornamental car rim. The orc creature was large and meaty from what I could tell. It held a tusked, wild boar of a face that was twice as wide as a person’s. The face had four tusks. Two long, curved tusks and a second pair further back, crossed in front of its ugly face. This one was female, I guessed. Purple eyeshadow ran from the top of its bulbous, black stare. Her crossed tusks were pierced in multiple places. She also appeared to have a giant, purple flower on her head, but the flower was pressed into the pink flesh of the ball, completely flattened. Her mouth was open in a constant, angry squeal.
Above the monstrosity appeared a health bar. It was fully green, but the spike strip had damaged it for at least a single point. That was good.
A wall rose into the air, blocking us from going back the direction we’d just come.
Our plan hadn’t anticipated that the walls were going to change. Looking at the ground, I could see a groove had formed onto the stone, multiple, concentric circles leading toward the center of the small arena. Some of the grooves led directly into walls.
Amongst the grooves, dozens of long, straight lines crisscrossed the ground at right angles. This was where the walls would go up and down. We needed to find a flat area wide enough for our redoubt. The deeper we went, the closer to the stairs, the more quickly the pig ball would circle around.
“Look for solid hunks of ground. Big ones with no grooves!” I called as I threw a second spike strip onto the ground. “And go!”
An entranceway to the next ring appeared about ten feet behind us. “Move!” I cried. We rushed for the small gate, Agatha going in first. A hunk of stone started rising from the ground as I rushed through, stumbling.
“There!” Imani called, pointing to a large square on the ground through a second doorway, yet another circle deeper. It was like a gap in the path, designed to encompass two circles at once.
“Go!” I cried, rushing forward and dropping a third and a fourth strip. Despite the heavy bass, I felt the ball hurtle past on the other side of the wall. High-pitched squealing rocketed away like the whine of a racecar. It’s getting faster.
We rushed to the center of the square. This chunk of the floor was like a railroad switch, a place where the ball could change paths. The space was about 15 feet by 15 feet with no crevices. Perfect.
“It’s coming from this way,” I said, pointing right. “I think it needs two loops to get here. Let’s do this. Just like we practiced. Go!” I pointed at Agatha. “You, sit your ass down on the ground in the middle, and don’t move.”
“I ain’t leaving my… Hey!” Agatha cried as I grasped the heavy cart from both sides and lifted it into the air, wasting a few precious seconds to put it into my inventory.
“Thief!” she cried. “Thief!”
“Agatha, he’ll give it back. Sit down!” Yolanda cried as she started pulling her V-shaped braces from her inventory.
I ignored the screaming, crazy woman as I pulled the heavy goblin table from my own inventory and placed it on its side. All around me, the others went to work. We’d been practicing this for hours. We’d gotten it down to less than 20 seconds for the main structure, and another 20 to put it all together. Hopefully that was enough time.
It had taken us almost five hours to build the pieces of the redoubt, or as Brandon called it, “The Speedbump.” Brandon and his brother weren’t nurses at the facility. They were the maintenance guys, and these dudes knew what they were doing. They didn’t normally work after hours, but they’d been there that night, pushing overtime, trying to fix an oven that was on the fritz before the morning staff showed up to make breakfast. I had described my idea. I spread out a bunch of the looted goblin tools for them, explained exactly what I wanted to do, and we went straight to work.
We created a portable, modular fortress. Consisting of tables, weight equipment, and loads of other odds and ends, the angled, four-foot-high structure looked like a lopsided tortoise shell when it was completed.
We didn’t have any sort of welding equipment, but the goblins had hand-cranked drills and large, toothed bolts designed to screw into the holes the drills created. They also had these small, half-moon saws that cut through steel with alarming ease. We removed the legs from the workshop tables then bolted new ones on, utilizing the load-bearing legs from the weight equipment. The tables were designed to sit solidly at a low angle when we put them on their side. After, we bolted weight benches onto the sides of the tables, like attaching shutters to the edges of a door frame.
Both Brandon and Imani had received items that gave them boosts to their strength, and they each had two sections of wall to place. The pieces were large and unwieldy, and heavy as shit, but when placed down in the correct order—Imani, then Brandon, then Imani, then me with the largest piece, and then finally Brandon—the multiple pieces slid together, bolts moving into precisely-placed holes. Brandon and I moved to the roof—made of the cross bars of weight racks—while Chris and Imani twisted massive, fist-sized butterfly bolts, affixing the pieces together. Yolanda pulled the rest of the angled braces out of her inventory, sliding them into place one after another, moving in a circle around the circumference of the pentagon-ish defense.
“This is just like something they’d do on that show, The A-Team,” Donut had exclaimed when we’d practiced this earlier. “Or maybe MacGyver. The real MacGyver with the hair and the stargate. Not that abysmal remake.”
“I liked that show,” Chris had said as he worked. It was the first and only time I had heard him speak.
“Which one? The A-Team or MacGyver?” Donut asked. “Or do you mean the remake? Please tell me you don’t mean the remake.”