Half of the creatures were already dead.
I caught eyes with the next closest tuskling, a male in a tuxedo. He was unarmed and completely disoriented. He held what appeared to be a wine flute in his hand that was miraculously unbroken and still full of alcohol. The creatures were odd, much shorter than I had anticipated. They had large, wide bodies and torsos one and a half times as bulky as a regular human. Their large, warthog heads sat too close to their shoulders, making them look neckless. But from the waist down, their bodies were comically short. The beasts only stood about four and a half feet tall. I quickly examined his properties as the tottering creature pulled the wine flute to his mouth.
Tuskling Knight. Level 4.
When it comes to the Tuskling, their titles are about as accurate as their dating website photos. The once-mighty warriors conquered the Orcish Supremacy hundreds of years ago, defeating all the other clans. They are now shells of the mighty warriors they once were. The honorarium “Knight” roughly translates to “Overweight, alcoholic bureaucrat who spends his days making new laws to oppress the poor and his nights drinking and getting pegged.” Knights and their slightly-more dangerous female counterparts, Tuskling Courtesans, are only worthy adversaries when they come together to form an ancient, Tuskling battle formation known as a “Ball of Swine.”
I formed a fist.
“On my back,” I called to Donut. She was out of magic missiles, and she’d already taken a mana potion. She dove under my cloak, hanging onto the back of my jacket like a backpack. She’d pop up when she’d regenerated enough mana to cast another missile over my shoulder.
I pulled my arm back and punched the fat, tuxedoed knight with all of my strength. The pig man’s health was already in the red, and his face caved in under the crushing blow of the spiked gauntlet. He dropped, still clutching onto his glass of wine. Half of his snout remained attached to my fist.
Miraculously, I didn’t feel a thing. I only felt the impact in my arm. Not my hand.
“Yes,” I said, whirling on my next opponent as I shook the gore free. A female. A Courtesan. The men were all level four, and the women were all level five. This one was slightly taller and fatter than the others. She wore a glittering red gown with multiple leather straps looped over and around her like a vest. It was like some sort of weird BDSM getup. She, too, was looking around, dazed, and screaming in confusion. It seemed they had no memories of their time in the pig ball. They were victims, just as all the other bosses had been.
But their dots were red, time was running out, and they weren’t human. I took a step forward, and I swung. The punch knocked her health down halfway. She hit the ground with an oof, raising her arms to block the blows. I kicked at her savagely, screaming, maybe crying. I kicked and I kicked until her health bar went away.
Behind the woman, Imani was also screaming, swinging her sword as tears streamed down her face. She stood over the prone form of Yolanda, whose health bar was alarmingly low. Brandon had retrieved his giant maul, which glittered with lightning when he swung it. Chris twirled an ethereal, magic spear. The spear was a spell he could cast. It lasted for five minutes.
Agatha hadn’t moved, but she stood once the walls fell away. Blood gushed down the side of her head, her eyes wide as she watched the action. She clutched her hands together.
All of the internal walls had retracted once we’d popped the swine ball. We’d gone from a tight hallway to a wide-open field. The purple-hued arena spread around us, the size of an entire quadrant. The music still beat, and colorful lasers shot through the space like we were in a massive, 1980s themed roller rink. The roof raised the closer it got to the center. A bright light shone at the very center of the dome. The stairs. A red forcefield surrounded the stairwell.
I knew exactly what had to be done to get that forcefield to drop.
There were more of the tusklings than there were of us, but they were shocked and confused, having been transported from their own world to this place.
They were weaponless, they were untrained, and they were slaughtered.
27
The last tuskling to fall was different than the others. She was a level eight, a “Tuskling Dominatrix.” She fell after being crushed under Brandon’s hammer.
The music stopped, and the lights returned to normal. The world froze. The Winner! notification appeared. Behind me, Chris fell to his knees, and he hung his head low. We just looked at each other, nobody saying anything. Imani fed Yolanda a health potion, and the woman sat up, wobbling, holding the side of her head. Agatha shuffled toward me, shaking her fist. Half of the woman’s head was caked in blood, and she didn’t seem to notice.
“Give it back!” she cried.
“Here,” I said. I pulled the shopping cart into existence a foot off the ground, and it crashed down loudly.
“Hey,” she cried. She clutched an Ikea bag off the top and peered inside, as if afraid I’d stolen something. She poked suspiciously at the pink flamingo at the end of her cart.
“You know, you can put all of this into your own inventory,” I said. “You don’t need to wheel it around.”
“She hasn’t gone through the tutorial,” Yolanda said. The small woman, who still had blood all over her own face, pulled out a cloth and cleaned off Agatha's. "She doesn't have an inventory yet."
That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that Agatha was level two, not one. How had she done that? She wasn’t in the Meadow Lark party. That meant she must have killed a mob. I wondered what the story was there. Actually, no, I realized, looking at Agatha now. She’d hit level four, thanks to the boss. She hadn’t done anything, but she’d been in the room, and that counted for something at least. Donut and I were both now level 10. Halfway to 11. We’d received a ton of experience, more than I’d expected. Imani was level 11 now. Chris and Brandon had skipped level seven altogether and were level eight. Yolanda had jumped from five to level six.
I didn’t even want to think about how all that experience was distributed. It seemed there were a dozen different calculators running all at once to figure it out. It gave me a headache.
“We need to find whatever the boss dropped,” I said.
“It’s over there,” Donut said. “The Dominatrix lady has it. I already got mine.”
For the first time, I looked about, taking stock of the damage we’d dealt. All of us had managed to survive relatively unscathed, but this section of the room and everyone in it looked like someone had spilled a giant can of Spaghetti-o’s on us from above. The crushed and disemboweled tuskling bodies lay everywhere, mixed in with the shattered pieces of our fortress.
“That didn’t go as expected,” Brandon said. He shook his hand, spraying blood everywhere.
“We’re alive,” I said as I reached down to loot the persistent item from the tuskling’s corpse.
The AI seemed to be doing a whispery David Attenborough impersonation as he read the description of the item:
Borough Field Guild.
Ahh, look at you. The intrepid explorer. Alone. Lost. Afraid.
But there is no reason to be frightened. Not today, not now. Not when the trusty field guide has added monster types to this area of the map. Now when you gaze upon the unknown, that fear is somewhat lessened. Instead of delving into the strange, mysterious dark, being devoured by an unseen horror, you will now know exactly what it is as it chews upon your tasty innards.
I blinked at the description, then I pulled up my minimap, zooming it out. Sure enough, now the individual quadrants were outlined. Most of my screen was filled with the large arena, but the very edge of a few adjacent quadrants ringed the exterior of the map. I mentally hovered over one to the far southeast, in an area none of us had ventured. The fog of war obscured the hallways themselves, but when I hovered over it, a tooltip popped up.