“Keep the door open,” Imani said. “See if the dungeon sends it further away this time. Or if it learns.”
It was maybe 90 seconds before it entered our hallway again. It killed any grubs it passed, but it seemed to ignore the ones in the pupa stage. It roared and shrieked, came to the door, and once again tried to swipe at me.
Again, it teleported away. This time it came from another hallway down, but it appeared to have still been teleported out into the main hallway. We tried it several times. Each time, the elemental took anywhere from 75 to 120 seconds to return. It was clear the monster was unintelligent, nothing more than the single-minded embodiment of rage. We eventually closed the door, not wanting to create any more grub corpses.
I sighed, going back to work on the MOAB.
Now, hours later, it was finally time to put my idea to the test. I was less confident about this than I was with the whole portable fortress idea. That time I knew we faced a mob meant to be killed. This was different. This was something meant as a punitive action, a punishment. It wasn’t meant to be fair, to be survivable.
The chopper hummed merrily away, aimed directly at the exit to the chamber. With Donut’s sidecar, it was too big to get through the door. We’d been forced to remove it. Instead, we added the newly-built bike trailer, affixing the tall MOAB to it and adding the equally-tall seat for Donut behind the launcher. She’d have to duck in order for us to leave the room. She sat there now, facing backward, a look of grim determination on her fuzzy face, like a tailgunner in a WWII bomber.
“I think I like Bomb Chicken better, too,” Donut announced.
“Too late,” I said. I nodded at Imani, who stood at the door, ready to pull it open.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll count down from three.”
Donut: EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE IS WATCHING THIS. I JUST HIT ONE TRILLION VIEWS, CARL. ONE TRILLION.
“Focus, Donut,” I said, not bothering to use the chat.
“One!” Imani yanked the door open. The massive, terrifying rage elemental lunged, and as always, teleported away. The space where it had occupied shimmered, crackling like superheated air.
I pushed hard on the pedals of the bike, and we rushed into the hallway. Everything out here was blackened and turned to ash. It smelled like burning garbage, reminding me of the Hoarder’s chamber. There was no sign of the train cars or the remaining wheelchairs and walkers that had been abandoned. The only thing that had survived was the long, 300 foot length of glittering, magical chain, which I had grabbed earlier.
Behind me, Imani slammed the door. I pedaled down the hall, turning the throttle. The trailer was built using broken hunks of wood, and the spare chopper wheels we’d looted from the goblins. I could barely feel its weight. It squeaked loudly, but it didn’t bounce under the press of the MOAB. We passed the nearby intersection and furiously increased speed until we reached the next one down, another two hundred meters away. We angled ourselves so we faced this new hallway, and we waited.
“Here it comes,” Donut said a moment later. The dot appeared, and the elemental rushed down the distant hall, moving like an earth-destroying meteor sent from the heavens.
“As soon as it rounds the curve, we go,” I said. We had to make sure it saw us. If it stopped at the door again, we’d have to loop around to gain its attention, using the closer hallway. I didn’t want to do that. The less corners we had to take with this trailer, the better.
Far down the hallway, a little more than a quarter of a mile away, it appeared, running full tilt.
I didn’t have to worry about whether or not it was going to see us. It saw. The horned badger skull skidded to a stop, looking in our direction. It shrieked with indignation and resumed its gallop, headed straight at us.
Holy shit that thing is fast. I pumped my legs.
“Go! Go!” Donut cried. Thanks to my Chopper Pilot skill and the help of the throttle, we could reach top speed in seconds. It still felt as if we weren’t moving at all. The bike could go about 25 miles per hour before it got too hot. The elemental was like a cheetah. Unimpeded, it would run us down in seconds.
We hurtled down the hallway. “Fire the first baby!” I cried.
Brandon was correct that the title MOAB was misleading.
The apparatus wasn’t a bomb at all, but a device designed to launch bombs. Multiple types of bombs.
“It’s the bombs’ mother,” I’d said. “Get it? And we can name the bombs its babies.”
None of them had been impressed.
“You need to stick to punching things and blowing them up,” Donut had said. “Leave the creative to me.”
The device wasn’t complicated, but it had to be precisely built, especially here with the bumpy hallways. It was little more than a curved, ski-jump-like ramp made from a pair of spare-part chopper wheel wells, with a pair of half-pipe channels at the end to keep the “babies” steady, and tiny, shock-absorbing front-wheelchair coasters for the very end of the ramp, keeping the end of the conduit inches from the ground.
As a kid, I’d had something similar for my matchbox cars. You dropped the cars into the top, and gravity took care of the rest. They’d plummet down the waterslide-like ramp, gaining speed, hitting the ground at full throttle. If you built the ramp correctly, especially the part at the end, the cars would ease onto the flat surface, still accelerating by the time they were halfway across the room.
It’d taken us several hours to get this correct. We had very little space to test this in, but thanks to the know-how from Brandon and Chris, I was confident that the babies would work as intended.
We knew this monster had at least two attacks. The claws and the reverse-gravity spell. We also knew that the gravity spell had a somewhat limited range. So in order to get to our destination, we needed to keep the elemental far away long enough to get there.
“Bombs away!” Donut cried. She pulled the wheeled, back-heavy bomb from her inventory. It fit perfectly into the grooves, and she gave it a nudge. It rocketed down the ramp, hit the ground with a bump, and continued straight. From our perspective, it zoomed away. It didn’t rear up like I had feared.
“Brandon, you beautiful son of a bitch!” I yelled as I watched the first bomb roll away over my shoulder.
I’d wanted to put the weight in the front, but Brandon had insisted that was a mistake, that the bombs would flip. Instead, he’d drawn with his finger on the table, explaining how to weigh them down. He’d then gone off on some Isaac Newton math bullshit. He’d said the babies wouldn’t go as far back as they would’ve if I’d been sitting still. He talked about some Mythbusters episode where they shot a soccer ball out the back of a moving car, and the ball had dropped straight to the ground. I told him I didn’t care as long as the bombs were far away from the chopper when they went off.
After several frustrating, failed attempts to automate the launching process, we’d come up with a solution. Once Donut was seated at the correct height, she could pull the “babies” out of her inventory, and they’d emerge right on the platform. Each bomb was the size of a snowboard, but it was shaped and weighted like a champion pinewood derby car. Wheels had suddenly become a precious commodity, but we had something almost as good: free weights. A lot of free weights of different sizes. When tightened and greased properly, they became very effective wheels.
This first baby—“Baby Uno”—was different than the others. It was heavier and bigger. It contained three boom jugs, a clay jug filled with nothing but goblin oil, and a small jar of gun powder. The last of my hobgoblin pus sat in the middle of the bomb, and I held the magical trigger into my hand now, waiting for Donut’s signal.
We had four types of babies: baby uno, boom jar babies, shredder babies, and, finally, oh shit babies.