“If you’re saying something to me, I can’t hear you,” I said, shouting the words.
Donut: YOU HAVE TO STAND UP. THE ROOM IS ON FIRE. WE KILLED THE BOSS. THE DOOR IS OPEN, BUT THE FIRE IS GETTING CLOSER. HURRY.
“I can’t. I think my legs are broken. I can’t feel them.” I pulled up my health UI, looking at the damage to my body. The entire pie chart was blinking red, all except my feet. My health was at 6% and still ticking downward. I was bleeding internally. I had third-degree burns on my face. My legs were broken where the table had smashed into them.
A moment later, I felt myself moving through the debris. I realized it was Donut, dragging me by my cloak, pulling me from the room. My whole body screamed with pain. A blinking message warned I was about to pass out.
Donut: CARL, YOU NEED TO WORK ON YOUR CARDIO. YOU ARE MUCH HEAVIER THAN YOU LOOK.
“Ten seconds before you can heal me. Get scroll ready,” I croaked as darkness descended.
I awakened, my body screaming. I felt everything inside of me repair itself. Donut had used one of the healing scrolls, possibly at the last possible second. I jammed down on my healing spell also, which sped up the process. I felt my hearing return, my sight restored. The burn on my face smoothed out.
I didn’t move for several moments, sitting there, staring up at the ceiling of the hallway.
“You saved me again,” I said to the cat, who sat next to me, desperately cleaning herself. I still didn’t dare move, not trusting the bones in my body not to break again.
“That’s what I do,” she said.
Donut: I DON’T WANT TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD, BUT OUR VIEWS WENT WAY UP. ISN’T IT GREAT?
I groaned, rolling onto my side. My one-armed jacket was now scorched to hell. My cloak and other magical items didn’t have a scratch on them. I looked down at my toes, and they sparkled.
“I think I was saved by that damn pedicure kit,” I said. “The table should have severed my feet right at the ankles. Instead it bounced off and broke my legs. I would’ve bled out.”
The fire in the expanded boss chamber eventually died off, leaving nothing but melted slag. We wandered in.
The alchemy table I’d used as the top part of our shield was undamaged. The other table, the redoubt piece that I’d used here as a shield, was now shattered and scorched.
“Huh, weird,” I said. I touched the alchemy workshop table, and it was cool to the touch. I pulled it back into my inventory. I had two such tables now, designed to be placed inside of personal spaces. This one and the Engineer’s table. It seemed they were indestructible.
This was a bug. A bug I could exploit. I couldn’t say anything about it, though. Not out loud. Had the table’s invulnerability saved us? I was going to need to pay attention to the nightly list of patch notes to make sure they didn’t fix this one. In the meantime, I’d use it to our advantage.
The ductwork on the ceiling hung in tatters, a few pieces still clinging to the chamber by braces. The severed, skeletal remains of tentacles lay scattered. The ground was hot to the touch. Donut jumped to my shoulder.
“Let’s get the neighborhood map,” I said, hesitantly moving toward the main boss chamber. I cringed, afraid we’d find more dead babies.
I shouldered past the long, crumbling skeleton bones to behold the lair of Krakaren.
“It smells like that time you tried microwaving Fancy Feast in here,” Donut said.
“I was drunk,” I said. “And you ate that shit right up.”
More tattered ductwork filled the room. There had been banners on the wall, but I could no longer read them. I didn’t see anything that could be construed as baby skeletons, which was a relief. Dozens of clurichauns had been in here along with a few splatters that might’ve been laminak fairies.
The mechanical remains of a moonshine still sat in the corner, like I suspected, but it appeared the machine was much smaller than I had guessed it might be. It was probably why I was still alive. I’d assumed the thing to be huge. And explosive.
The remnants of copper tubes snaked from the machine to the main, dead body of the Krakaren monster. She’d been huge, twenty feet tall at least, an immobile, octopus-like creature. Her stinking, dead body leaned against the back wall as we stared at it. Half of her head was burned away, but it seemed she had a beaked mouth and a group of eyes. Black streaks ran down the massive corpse, like running mascara. She stank of rotting seafood.
They’d taken some sort of cosmic octopus creature and combined it with your average, suburban, anti-vax, let-me-talk-to-your-manager mom. At least that was my impression. The door on the outside of the room, this whole ridiculous storyline with the MLM moonshine certainly made it seem that way.
But there was more to it, too. I suspected the Krakaren “collective” or whatever they called it was a real thing. Sort of. This whole time it had seemed they were just combining absurd stereotypes from earth with random monsters just to fuck with us. It came to me now as I stared up at this thing that they were doing the opposite. After all, this was all really for the benefit of the audience, not us. They were taking something familiar to the viewers, like these interstellar, dumbass octopus monsters and combining them with an earth analog in an effort to both teach the watchers about earth culture and to lampoon interstellar cultures and creatures they felt deserving of scorn. Kind of like the way cartoonists would sometimes personify rats and snakes as scumbags. Or foxes as shady, used-car dealers.
Or Persian cats as princesses.
A massive cage filled half the room, still intact. The creatures within had mostly burned to slag, but I could see that it had been filled to the brim with brindle grubs. They were all dead.
“We never got to see the boss up close,” Donut said as I moved near enough to loot the neighborhood map.
“Something tells me this isn’t the last time we’ll see this one,” I said as the twists and turns of the neighborhood populated onto my interface. “Ah, fuck.”
“What?” Donut asked.
“Look at the map,” I said.
At least 50 red dots filled the area. All of them slow-moving. Brindle grubs. It was like they could sense a battle, and they converged on an area. Killing them wasn’t a problem. They didn’t fight back. I could literally run over them and kill an entire hallway of them in seconds. But that was a lot of them. A whole lot.
I planned out the path to the tutorial guild. It wasn’t far. Just a few hundred meters away.
“Let’s go talk to Mordecai,” I said.
“That bitch really said that?” Mordecai said, outraged, after I told him about Odette’s offer. “She wants me to seek her out? I would rather spend another 2,000 years in this room than exist in the same solar system as her. I’d rather meet a woman, sire children, and then devour those children than have anything to do with her again.”
“So that’s a no, then?” Donut asked.
Mordecai was no longer a Rat Hooligan. He’d shapeshifted into a much larger, hairier, and obsidian creature called a Bugaboo. He was like a bear with no neck, with enormous, owlish eyes, and comically skinny legs. His long arms were also absurdly thin compared to the rest of the seven-foot-tall creature. He looked terrifying and cartoonish at the same time. I’d almost punched him right in the face when we first entered the room. It took a solid ten seconds for me to realize that this was still Mordecai.
I examined his properties now.
Mordecai – Bugaboo. Level 50.
Guildmaster of this guildhall.
This is a Non-Combatant NPC.
You know that creepy, unkempt guy who lives on the corner? He doesn’t seem to have a job. Has a van. Hangs out at the park with a pair of binoculars? Yeah, you get the idea. Solitary monstrosities that never settle in a single place, Bugaboos may be found anywhere on the dungeon’s lower floors, often lying in wait for Crawlers to pass by so they can jump out and… do things to them. They’ll tell you they just want to cuddle. That’s probably a lie.