WARNING: This is a fairy-class mob. Mobs of this class inflict 20% more damage against you due to your goblin pass.
I eased back around the corner.
“Man, I really wish we could figure out a way to turn their dots white. Then we could use your charm skill.”
“Do they have wings? My butterfly collar charm causes winged fairies to like me.”
“I don’t think they do,” I said.
“Maybe if we capture one, we can talk to it,” Donut said.
“I’d say that’s a good idea,” I said. “But not with these guys. We need to kill them from a distance. They’re toxic. I’m pretty sure they inflict something like your sepsis debuff on us. Let’s try hitting them with three magic missiles, super quick. Do a four power for each one and see what happens. If they don’t go down, hit them again.”
Donut nodded and jumped to my shoulder. “Ready,” she said, all business.
We popped around the corner. Thwap, thwap, thwap.
Donut struck each one with a headshot. They didn’t even know what hit them. They died where they sat.
“How many mana points do you have left?”
“Fourteen,” Donut said.
“Do you want to try your new Second Chance spell? It costs ten, right?”
I didn’t have to ask her twice. Donut’s whole body glowed a neon purple. A moment later, one of the clurichauns twitched. It glowed purple, matching Donut’s hue. It stumbled to its feet and just stood there, its scorched and blown-in head listing to the side. A moan emanated from its wet, snotty mouth. On my shoulder, Donut shuddered. A one-minute timer hovered over the undead creature. A clear liquid oozed out of the hole in its head. It moaned again, this time louder.
Undead Minion of Crawler Princess Donut – Unvaccinated Clurichaun Consultant – Level 1
It continued to sway, not moving from that spot.
“This is most unpleasant,” Donut said. She made a sound like she was going to retch. “I do not like this, Carl.”
“I wonder if they’ll always be level one,” I said, fascinated. “Can you control it?”
“I don’t know,” Donut said hesitantly. “I don’t have any sort of controls.” She made a kind of uncomfortable whimpering noise, something I’d never heard from her before. “You,” she said, calling to the zombie. It didn’t seem to react. “Rip up the dead bodies of your friends.”
It swayed there for another moment. The countdown was down to 25 seconds. Then it went to its knees and started taking apart one of his companions. It reached into the stomach and just yanked a line of intestines out like a magician pulling streamers from a hat. They just kept coming and coming. The zombie groaned with an almost sexual pleasure. I felt a twinge of sickness gurgle in my own stomach.
“Yeah, that’s really gross,” I said.
The zombie clattered over, dead once again a few short seconds later. It’d left its job unfinished.
I eyed the remains dubiously. I knew we needed to destroy the corpses, but there were only so many ways the game could warn me that these guys were toxic. I didn’t even know if getting close enough to loot them was a good idea.
Before I could protest, Donut jumped down and looted them anyway. As a quadruped, she could pull the loose, non-slotted items like the slingshots and the dice into her own inventory without actually touching them as long as they weren’t too heavy or too far. I had to physically pick them up, which meant getting close to the contaminated bodies.
“Each of them has a clay jug of something called toilet-grade moonshine,” Donut said.
“They’re like the llamas,” I said. “They probably sell the stuff to the other mobs.”
We decided to forgo destroying the corpses for now. We’d angle back on our way out and kill any grubs skulking around the area. I contemplated just blowing the bodies up, but that seemed like a waste of perfectly good explosives. I could probably concoct something that would burn them. I had gallons and gallons of flammable liquid. Their moonshine would probably work, too. But it would take some thinking and trial and error. I really needed to get my hands on something like a poleax I could use to chop things up from afar.
“Did they have any slingshot ammo on them?” I asked as we crept deeper into the hallway.
“Yeah. They have little bags of rocks,” Donut said.
“Give me one of the slingshots and a couple bags. I want to try it out.”
It look me about three seconds to realize I wasn’t going to be a deadly wielder of the slingshot any time soon. But I was going to practice. I needed some sort of ranged weapon, one a bit more subtle than my usual stick of dynamite. As a kid, I’d had a slingshot, and I’d been pretty good with it. I used to set toy cars up on the edge of the fence and try to hit them.
The memory suddenly turned sour. I remembered my dad, finding my slingshot. He and his friends had played with it, breaking the band. He’d promised he’d get me a new one. He never did.
For the next hour we cleared out all of the clurichauns along the outer ring of the quadrant. And by we, I mean Donut. So far, all we found were the level three version. After each skirmish, Donut would raise one of them from the dead, and I would practice hitting him with the slingshot.
The weapon did hardly any damage at all, though I was getting good at consistently hitting the monsters in the head. My Slingshot skill eventually raised to three, but it didn’t want to budge past that.
Donut’s skill in the Second Chance spell also rose to level three. The zombies weren’t any more powerful, but the monsters now hung around for three minutes instead of one.
Donut looted something unusual from one of the bodies. A pamphlet entitled Rev-Up. Make Money. Be Your Own Boss. Move to the next floor down. It didn’t appear to be magical. It was just a regular, trifold pamphlet.
“Let me see it,” I said. The colorful front showed a group of three, laughing, female clurichauns holding jugs of the moonshine. Several little phrases covered the pamphlet, written in Syndicate Standard. Things like “You’re the Boss Now” and “Your own hours” and “It’s not a pyramid!” and “Safe!*”
Inside the pamphlet was a wall of text of mostly gibberish about the benefits of becoming a “Rev-Up Moonshine Consultant.” On the right was a picture of a pyramid with, “It’s not a pyramid!” written all over it.
The bottom of the brochure stated, “See Krakaren or one of her downline consultants and learn how you can Rev-Up your life today!” On the back page it read, “Coming soon! Rev-Up Smoothies! Portable! Delicious! Invigorating!” The entire line was crossed out with “Discontinued” written under it.
“Do you think we can become consultants?” Donut asked after she spent an inordinate amount of time reading the pamphlet. “It says as business owners we gain power over ourselves and can seize our own destinies.”
“That doesn’t even mean anything,” I said. “They’re just making fun of pyramid schemes. You remember when Bea wanted to start selling those leggings? It’s like that.” The closet in Donut’s trophy room had been filled with boxes of the things. Donut had gotten into one of the boxes and peed in it. I smiled, remembering. Bea had raged at the poor cat.
“It’s not a pyramid, though. It says so right here.”
“Come on,” I said. “These things are hostile toward us, so it wouldn’t work anyway. I think these pamphlets are for other mobs on this floor, not crawlers. Besides, we can just kill them and take it all for ourselves.”
Donut put the pamphlet away. “Yeah, that does seem easier. We won’t have to pay our upline or make the initial seed investment when we do it that way.”
As we finished our circle of the outer ring of the quadrant, I was forced to kill one of the clurichauns with a punch to the head. Donut missed a shot, and the little monster came running right at me, impossibly fast. It didn’t bother with its slingshot, opting to grapple. It gurgled, sounding pug-like, clawing at me with little, pocked hands. I formed a fist, but it happened too fast. My gauntlet took two seconds to form, which was a long time when one was having to react. My first, bare-knuckle hit stunned it. I hit it a second time, this time with the gauntlet, and the monster went flying, his head caved in. When I opened my hand, my fingers were covered with a lime green, oily residue.