Three cages also contained dead danger dingoes. I debated whether or not to have Donut raise them from the dead prior to the battle, but there didn’t seem to be a way to open the cages. Donut’s ten-mana Second Chance spell was now level five. Instead of reanimating the corpses for five minutes, once she hit level five, they now remained animated for ten minutes, which was usually long enough to finish out a battle. She could now apparently resurrect monsters up to five levels higher than herself.
She currently had a pool of 28 mana points. She had two pieces of mana toast and a pile of mana restoration potions, though with her two-minute cooldown between potions, their use in battle became negligible. So we decided to wait and see what we faced first.
My plan wasn’t too exciting, but it was safe. The door to the main chamber didn’t seem to be opening, at least not yet, so we were going to use our tried-and-true method of firebomb and run.
But just as I pulled a boom jug out of my inventory, our luck ran out.
The music abruptly stopped. My ears rang, feeling heavy in my head. Within the chamber, the cheering ceased. The double barn doors started to open. Behind us, the door to the secondary chamber slammed shut. Above, new, more familiar music started to play.
Boss Battle!
That’s right! You have discovered another lair of a Neighborhood Boss!
Put your game faces on ladies and gentlemen! Aaaand Here. We. Go!
“Shit,” I said, scrambling toward the barn doors. As I ran, I had a brief moment to marvel at how much I’d changed in the past week. My original instinct would’ve been to hide. Instead, I ran toward the danger.
I lit the torch on the jug, and I tossed it directly at the still-opening doors. Just as the jug took flight, the doors flew all the way open, revealing a mass of about 40 kobolds emerging from the room, cheering and chanting. I did not see any boss at all.
The world froze with the jug in midair. It hung like a comet. The group of kobolds were just starting to look up at the object in the air, rocketing toward them, their eyes registering surprise.
My eyes focused on the kobold in the center of the congregation. He still appeared to be one of the level-five kobold riders, but he was much better dressed. He wore what appeared to be a fur coat made out of dingo fur and wore spiked boots, making him a head taller than the others. In his hands he held a small, metal-reinforced cage, about the size of a shoebox. His hands were frozen in the act of pulling open the enclosure, the little entrance pointed directly at us like a gun barrel.
Uh-oh, I thought.
Our mugshots splattered into view, and the Versus stamped onto the image.
Ralph
Frenzied Gerbil
Level 11 Neighborhood Boss!
Before we send you off to certain death, it’s time for a short history lesson.
When the Black Death swept through 14th century Europe, killing upwards of 200 million people and forever altering the course of human history, one of the original culprits of the epidemic was said to be the black rat, carrying plague-infested fleas into population centers to wreak their destruction.
This is, in fact, not true. The true perpetrator was actually the Asian great gerbil, who took advantage of the warmer climate to travel the silk road and bring the disease into Europe.
This is only important to know because Ralph, champion pit fighter of the kobold training grounds, lives his life in a perpetual state of rage. Why? Because he feels that human death toll of 200 million is much too low, and he will do everything in his power to triple that number.
Starting with you.
The only survivor of a family of gerbils left to starve by a child who’d grown bored with the pets, Ralph had to commit unspeakable acts of cannibalism in order to endure.
Part earth rodent, part the embodiment of death, Frenzied Gerbils are regular mobs one might encounter on the fifth or seventh floors. But Ralph here is special. He has dedicated his existence to fighting and training in hopes that one day he might exact his revenge against the humans he so despises.
He is fast, he is angry, and by the time you’re done reading this, he’s already halfway to your jugular.
You might want to duck.
The moment the extra-long description ended, the world unfroze, and chaos erupted all around us.
I threw my body to the ground just as the furry, squealing rodent sailed over my head. He’d shot out of the carrier so fast I hadn’t even seen him.
At the same moment, the boom jug exploded in the midst of the kobolds, evaporating most of them instantly, including Ralph’s owner, the pimped-out kobold.
The fist-sized ball of fur screamed with rage as he landed harmlessly down the long hallway. Donut jumped to my shoulder and shot a magic missile at the tiny monster, and she scored a direct hit. It flew further back, sliding and tumbling. A health bar appeared, indicating she’d taken maybe 15% of its health away.
“Good shot,” I cried.
The tiny boss looked mostly like a regular gerbil with the exception of its mouth, which defied logic and physics. Its ravening jaw appeared normal when closed, but when the tiny, absurdly cute creature screamed, its mouth opened huge, just as wide as the dingoes it fought in the arena. It squealed angrily now, and its mouth burst open, obscuring the small creature attached to it. This was a round, frothing set of gnashing teeth big enough for me to stick my entire head within.
“All righty then,” I said, standing to my full height as the creature snarled at us and prepared to charge again.
“Carl, I can’t help but think this boss has been placed here for a very specific purpose,” Donut said. She shot it again with a magic missile, but this one missed. The gerbil squealed and jumped back.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Most of the kobolds were dead, but a few at the edges of the blast had survived. One kobold, trailing blood, dragged itself to the wall and pressed a button recessed against the wall near the barn doors. A deep rumbling filled the chamber as the cages all started to open.
“Bad idea, buddy,” I called to the kobold.
The dingoes emerged from their cages. Their dots on the minimap remained white. They slunk low, growling. Most of them were still injured, in obvious pain. But whatever spell had kept them under the control of their kobold slave masters had been broken by a simple act of kindness.
One of the dingoes—that first one we’d fed—leaped out and pounced right onto Ralph. It happened quick, lightning fast. The one-eyed dingo swallowed the rodent whole in a swift, snapping gulp. Just like that, and the boss was gone.
Behind us, the remaining kobolds fell back as the other dingoes turned on their former masters, dropping upon them and ripping them apart savagely. The kobolds weren’t armed, and there weren’t many of them. The barking, snarling dingoes finished them off in seconds.
If we hadn’t turned the dingoes on our side, this would’ve been a much more difficult battle. That had been the “trick” of this particular boss room. I silently thanked Mordecai for his advice. As unfair as this world was, it was still a game. There were puzzles and hidden paths to survival, and we needed to continue to keep our eyes open.
“Well, that was quite easy,” Donut said. “And a little anticlimactic, if I must say so.” She looked back at the first dingo, the one who’d eaten the boss. “I guess I was wrong.”
I looked about the room. The kobolds were all dead. From the main boss chamber, the sound of multiple, unknown creatures started to howl and trill and yip. These weren’t particularly loud or menacing sounds, and I could barely hear them over the background music. None of them sounded like dingoes. Now that the smoke was clearing, I could see within the boss chamber. Like I expected, it was a small fighting arena. More cages circled the distant walls. I couldn’t see the contents from this distance, but it was a mix of red and white dots. I suspected if we hadn’t killed the kobolds so quickly, one of them would’ve likely run back in and opened those cages as well.