“This was not a dingo attack,” one of the fairies was saying. “One of them has been hit with necromancy magic.”
“No, no, come look at this, Caroline,” Donut said. “It’s in the hallway over here. Tell your workers to stay here. Uh, it’ll be good for them to look at what happens to those who don’t, uh, work hard or something.”
“Okay,” the fairy said. She started shouting orders at the crowd of grumbling clurichauns.
A moment later Donut and the two fairies floated into the dark foyer, moving past me. Donut stopped just as the two fairies noticed me standing there.
“What’s this?” the pantsuit fairy said, floating away with surprise. She was smaller than I realized, no bigger than a crow. The laminak looked just like a miniature, 40-something woman. She carried no weapons.
“Carl, I’d like you to meet Caroline and Max. It’s okay, ladies. Carl needs to show you something.”
They were looking down at the pair of jugs in my hands.
“Where did you get this?” the other fairy asked. “And what did you do to our product?”
I grinned. “Let me show you.” I mentally clicked Activate on both the torches, stepped to the side to the room’s entrance, and I tossed both jugs in at the group of 40 monsters stupidly staring back at us.
The hands of the pantsuit fairy started glowing red just as Donut leaped into the air and snagged the laminak like she was catching a bird. The cat’s crupper jingled and poofed out like a skirt as she fell. Donut clasped the fairy between two claws as she chomped down. She shook her head, breaking the fairy’s neck.
The second fairy zipped up to the ceiling of the entrance hall, lightning fast, out of reach, screaming as I swiped at her, trying to catch her in the air. Damnit. I wanted to kill them without hurting their fragile little bodies.
“Not fair,” the fairy screamed. The air crackled with her passage. She sounded desperate, on the verge of tears. “Not fair! We were going to move down to the third floor.” Her hands also glowed red, and she fired a magic missile right at me.
It hit me square in the chest, and I flew backward, slamming onto my back, sliding a few feet into the room with the raging inferno. A note flashed. Warning: Damage Enhanced. It felt as if I’d been kicked by a damn horse. My vision flashed red, this time a health warning. I felt broken bones in my chest just as the searing heat threatened to catch my hair on fire. I clicked a healing potion as I scrambled to my feet. My chest crackled as it mended itself. I pulled myself back into the hall, out of the raging heat, the breath still knocked out of me.
The plan, plan B at least, had gone off without a hitch until now. The fairy remained up on the ceiling, screaming down at Donut, shooting magic missiles down at the cat, who was doing a much better job at dodging them.
After a moment, the fairy seemed to run out of mana. She continued to scream down at us. She was trapped as long as Donut and I each guarded one of the doors to the foyer.
“You can jump that high, can’t you?” I muttered.
“Probably,” Donut said, out of breath. “Or I can hit her with Magic Missile. I have much better aim than she does. I can hit her with a three power, and it probably won’t hurt her body too much. She’s level six, after all.”
“Missile her if she runs,” I said, pulling the slingshot out of my inventory.
It took ten shots before I hit her. The rock caught her in the wing, and she dropped a few feet before recovering. Her health barely went down. She was a quick little fucker. She kept screaming for someone named “Damien” to come help.
Damien never came.
“She’s going to regenerate her mana before you get her,” Donut said. “Hurry up, or I’m going to do it.”
I aimed and fired, trying to anticipate where she was going to be. The rock clipped her in the wing again, and she cried out in pain, dropping again.
Donut leaped into the air and caught her before she could recover. They hit the ground with a crunch.
“Honestly, Carl,” Donut said, spitting the dead fairy onto the ground next to the other one. “Must I do all the work?”
“I’m training,” I said. I indicated the room behind me, where I’d received experience for killing 40 monsters all at once. “Besides, I just hit level 11.”
“Me too, actually,” Donut said.
My Slingshot skill remained at three, but my Aiming skill went up to four.
Both of the fairies dropped 25 gold pieces, and each had five brochures in their inventory.
The description said their “essence” was valuable, but the only thing that remained was their bodies.
Laminak Rev-Up Consultant Elite Corpse (Alchemy Material)
“Damnit,” I said. I’d been hoping they would just drop potions, something to protect us against the Taint disease.
Donut didn’t want the corpses in her inventory, so I took them both. When I pulled them in, their bodies disappeared, but their clothes and wings remained on the ground. I took those, too.
“We didn’t get a good potion, but that was still pretty awesome,” Donut said as we headed back toward the filling room. “My first solo mission. I bet I’d be fine crawling this dungeon all by myself.”
I nodded. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like an asshole. The feeling wasn’t as bad as I’d felt after the whole thing with the goblin babies, but there was something inherently distasteful about using Donut’s charm ability to kill things. Yes, these were monsters that wouldn’t hesitate about killing us. But like with the goblins, once Donut turned them neutral, we saw a part of their personalities one didn’t normally see with monsters.
We were going to move down to the third floor. Jesus. Her voice had been filled with such longing, such despair.
I remembered what Mordecai had said, that the mobs in deeper levels weren’t going to be as sympathetic. I really hoped so. I needed to remember who the real enemies were. The Syndicate. Borant. The kua-tin. I felt bad about killing monsters who were nothing more than pawns, but the fact was we needed to get as strong as we could. It was us or them.
“You’re not going to break me,” I whispered. It’d become a mantra.
“What?” Donut asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
We walked into the large room. I went to work grabbing all the empty and full jugs I could. I grabbed another two tables, including one called an “Alchemy workstation.” By the time we were done, we had 80 empty jugs and another 60 full ones.
I decided against filling the empty jugs with the moonshine from the tub. The metal container was bolted to the ground, so I couldn’t take the whole thing, and I feared just touching the liquid would have some sort of nasty effect, like blinding me. Or worse.
The liquid continued to drip in from the next room over.
The door to the boss chamber looked like the entrance to some sort of community center. It had “Live, Laugh, Love” written on the top of the door in little cutout, wooden letters. Under that was a schedule of events. The next event scheduled was for noon on the day after the collapse. It read, “Good news, everyone! Little Breannlyne has the chickenpox! Potluck Pox party here at noon. No peanuts. Let’s get that immunity!”
“I think we should probably just leave this boss alone,” I said. “There might be more kids in there. And if there’s a moonshine still, it’ll probably blow up just as easy as that goblin engine. We only have one hobgoblin detonator left, and I don’t want to waste it if we don’t have to. If we just toss dynamite or a boom jar in there, we might not get away in time. I bet the explosion will be big. It’s not worth it to just go in there and fight face to face, not when we don’t have a real defense against that taint debuff. We don’t know how many of those things there will be.”