Despite killing a dozen grubs, he remained at level one. We decided it was time to go back to Mordecai.
“So, pets,” Mordecai said after we returned to the guild. “I’m limited in what I can tell you at this point, but I can now reveal you’re on the right track. Keep doing what you’re doing. That’s the good news. The bad news is you need to hurry. If he’s not bonded by the time the floor collapses, you won’t be able to bring him with you.”
We had barely forty hours left.
“Oh no,” Donut cried. “Carl, we need to get back out there!”
“Just a minute,” I said. “I have a couple pet questions. Can we have more than one?”
“It depends,” he said. “There are multiple types of pets. The quick answer is no, you generally can’t have more than one. But there are lots of exceptions. Some classes and some races allow for crawlers to have multiple pets. Also, if you have an especially high charisma, like Donut, you can also have multiples of certain types of pets. Also, pets with crawler IDs don’t count toward that number. So if Donut had still been classified as a pet, you’d have been able to bond with another. Crawler pets and dungeon familiars are actually a different sort of thing. That’s why that Lucia Mar kid can have those two dogs without any issues. There’s also this one lady who brought like 15 goats in with her. She’s still alive, and so are the goats. It’s bizarre. There’s this one show that is obsessed with her.”
“Why isn’t he leveling up?” I asked. “It’s like he’s not getting any experience at all.”
Mordecai nodded. “Pet-class mobs are a little different. You got him from a treasure room, but it’s the same as if you’d purchased him from a shop. Mobs that start out as a pet class will always be level one regardless of what they usually are when you find them in the dungeon. And they’ll stay level one until they’re bonded. Only then will they start to level. Once they do start gaining experience, though, they will grow rapidly. He’ll get physically more mature each level up.”
“The description says he’s fully grown at level 15. Is that as high as he can get?” I asked.
“Oh no,” Mordecai said. “Not even close. He just won’t get physically bigger after that.”
“How big will he get?” Donut asked, looking down at the chicken who was running in circles around Mordecai’s room, shrieking.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “But that little cage you’ve been using isn’t going to work for much longer. You need to do more than just bond with him. You need to teach him restraint, or he is going to die, and he might just take you down with him if he aggravates the wrong mob. Any attempt at stealth is out the window until he learns to behave himself.” Mongo responded by running up to Mordecai and leap-attacking his leg.
It took us a good bit to find where he’d teleported to. He’d entered the hallway across from our current quadrant and was in the process of wrangling with one of those level-three cow-tailed brindle grubs. He didn’t quite yet have the chops to take one of those things out on his own, but the ferocious little dino was doing an admirable job of dodging the grub’s tail swipes.
We spent the next several hours trying to train him with dog commands. “Attack” and “come” and even “lie down” worked really well. “Stay,” was another story.
Donut was surprisingly patient during this time. It turned out Mongo was very food motivated, and he loved pet biscuits, which made him easier to train. After a full day, we managed to keep him from just outright charging every time he saw something. He’d snarl and squawk and hop up and down, but he wouldn’t plunge headfirst into battle until Donut said the command, which had somehow evolved from “attack” to “sic ‘em.”
When the timer was down to ten hours, we had to start carving our way toward the stairwell. We didn’t have a choice. Mongo still hadn’t officially bonded with Donut, and I was getting pretty worried it wasn’t going to happen.
We were now exclusively fighting the brindled vespas. Despite the dungeon halving the number of hornets in the dungeon, they were still everywhere. The mobs gave a decent amount of experience, and we both hit level 13.
Out of desperation, we finally allowed Mongo to participate in the fights.
If there were more than a couple hornets in a hallway, we didn’t fuck around. I tossed in an explosive. But if there was only one or two, I grounded them with my slingshot, and Donut hit them with magic missiles. Sometimes a single missile wasn’t enough to kill them. That’s when we’d send Mongo in to enthusiastically finish them off. The little beast was getting good at using his claw to rip open the thorax of the downed bugs.
In the hallway just outside the stair chamber, the same hallway we’d run through a few days earlier during our fight with the rage elemental, Mongo rushed in to finish off a hornet monster. The vespa grabbed at Mongo with his human-like hand, capturing the small creature. The mob had been mostly dead, but apparently not dead enough. It lifted the screaming and struggling chicken into the air and moved to toss him into its enormous, toothed mouth.
“Put Mongo down!” Donut screamed, flying across the hallway and slashing at the bug. I’d never seen her move that fast. She decapitated the monster with a quick slash, and all three of them fell into a heap on the ground.
“Carl, Carl, something happened,” Donut said a minute later.
“I see that,” I said, walking up. I felt an odd combination of relief and dread. “It finally worked. Congratulations.”
On the minimap, Mongo’s dot had turned from white to orange.
“Wait, I can officially name him now,” she said. “I have a new menu and everything!”
Mongo the Mongoliensis Level One (Pet of Grand Champion Best in Dungeon Princess Donut) has joined the party.
Mongo’s title has been changed to Royal Steed.
“We did it,” Donut cried, hopping up and down. “We tamed Mongo!”
Mongo also jumped up and down next to the cat. He squawked with delight, waving his little arms.
And then he bit Donut right on the nose.
So, with seven hours left—one before the recommended time to descend—we camped out in the room with the stairs.
I sat on the ground playing with my menus while Donut and Mongo ran in circles around the large chamber, playing energetically. Donut was instructing Mongo on the art of pouncing. I watched, smiling. My heart felt heavy as I watched them. What would the next floor hold? How much longer could we survive?
I thought of Mordecai and his brother, of that time we’d caught Mordecai unaware. He’d been drunk, holding onto that framed picture. This game, this terrible, cruel game left scars that spanned centuries. I thought of the cheering crowds, watching this all from the safety of their homes.
You will not break me. Fuck you all. You will not break me.
As we waited for the timer to hit six hours, I thought back to that odd boss prize I received after killing the gerbil. I would’ve thought that defeating the boss in such a manner would’ve garnered me a better prize. The dungeon AI wasn’t my friend. It wasn’t on my side. I knew that. But surely I should’ve gained something good.
I pulled up my inventory menu. I now had a new tab labeled History. I clicked on it, and it was filled with pretty much the same junk I had now, but with the chopper and a few extra potions and scrolls and bits of things I’d used to build other items. Curious, I clicked to sort it by value.
I practically choked. Listed at the very top of my menu were three items I’d never seen before. I clicked over to make sure I didn’t have them now. I didn’t.
What the actual hell?
I looked about, afraid to say anything out loud. Was this some sort of bug? I went back to the menu and examined the three items. The tooltips didn’t go into the same detail they would if I still had the items on me, though I could see their names and what category my inventory had placed them in.