But the rules had just changed. One could no longer store liquids that weren’t in a container. Apparently this was how the system now dealt with the paradox.
I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away.
“Really, Katia,” Donut said, leaping to my shoulder. “If you need to borrow a sanitary napkin, just ask.”
30
The first thing we did was walk out to the main restaurant. Mordecai, who was somehow even more soaked with gore than I was, approached the counter with the bopca.
“We are purchasing a personal space upgrade,” Mordecai said. “A cleaner bot.” The bopca looked distastefully at the blood dripping onto the counter. Mongo had the zoomies and zipped back and forth through the room, spraying little red dots everywhere.
The upgrade cost 25,000 gold, making it one of the least expensive environmental upgrades we could get. That was still expensive as shit, but none of us complained. Donut didn’t even try to negotiate. Katia wordlessly paid for it, and we marched back into the personal space. The moment we stepped into the room, the new upgrade went to work. It was a frisbee-shaped robot, similar to the Mexx-class robots we sometimes saw in production trailers, though this thing didn’t look as if it could talk. It was basically a flying Roomba. Donut had to admonish Mongo not to attack it. It hummed like a muted drone as it buzzed about the room, blinking disdainfully at the mess.
It went to work cleaning up all the stinking, congealed blood, hovering over it and magically zapping it away. It cleaned quickly, but it was still going to take time. A long time.
“Let’s all just take showers, pretend like this never happened, and meet back here in five minutes,” I said. I had ghoul blood in my mouth, but I didn’t have anything clean to wipe it off with. It tasted like metal soaked in dead rat.
We returned to find the blood was still everywhere, but the cleaner bot was working as quickly as it could. It’d thankfully started at the kitchen counter, leaving the area habitable. Katia sat there eating a pineapple she’d gotten from the Bopca. She sat there as if nothing had happened, humming a little song to herself. She used her hand to form a knife to cut and core it. She offered me a piece as I approached. I declined. All I could taste was the blood.
“Okay,” Mordecai said, holding up his hands as he emerged, clean, from his room. “Before you say anything, I know it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that at Chaco. It won’t happen again. And, no, we are not going to talk about it.”
“Someone told us if you do it again, you’ll be gone for good,” I said.
“I assure you it won’t happen again,” Mordecai said. “You have my word. Now what did you pick from that prize carousel anyway?”
“He got a stupid recipe book,” Donut said. “It was a joke prize.”
“Really?” Mordecai said. “Can I see it?”
“Later,” I said, trying to change the subject. “We don’t have much time, and we still need to sleep. We need to catch you up, but then we need to get back out there.”
“Did you see my sunglasses?” Donut asked. “Aren’t they just the greatest? I got them from Princess D’Nadia. If I hadn’t gotten them, we wouldn’t have known Hekla was trying to kill Katia. Oh, oh, and I have over 100 in charisma now, and I got the Love Vampire skill. Just like you told me to get. I’ve cast it a few times, but it never triggered.”
Donut’s love vampire skill allowed her to basically reflect any damage to a mob that was a lower level than her. She hadn’t used it yet because we’d been careful to keep her from getting hit on this floor.
“Okay,” Mordecai said. His eyes got huge at the mention of Hekla. He once again zeroed in on that golden skull floating over Katia. “That’s great, but slow down. We have a lot to go over, but we don’t have to do it all at once. First explain the circumstances regarding the player-killer skulls you two have, how Katia is the highest level of all of you, and then we’ll go over all of your new skills and…” he trailed off, his eyes fixed on my left hand. He took two steps toward me, grabbed my wrist and held it up so he could look at the ring I’d gotten from Frank. The Ring of Divine Suffering.
“Take this off,” he said. “Take it off right now.”
“I’m not going to use the Marked for Death skill,” I said. “It gives a five percent bonus to my stats.”
“If I wasn’t afraid I’d be kicked out of the game for good, I’d smack you into the next floor. Even if you were a player killer, you’d be an idiot to keep this on you, let alone on your finger. Every season, several of these rings are generated, and every season, the crawlers who own them are the first to be tracked down and killed by the hunters on the sixth floor. The bonuses for this ring work both ways. One of the reasons why those idiots flock to the hunting grounds is to obtain one of these things.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in the hands of a sadistic bastard, a combatant can raise his power exponentially. Once it is charged up enough, its owner gets massively stronger each and every kill. I don’t think there has ever been a faction wars where the victorious army is led by a champion who doesn’t have one of these rings, amongst several other items. And those rich assholes who fight it out on the ninth floor will do anything they can to win. This sort of item can’t be brought in from the outside. But the factions can collect them if they can convince an idiot to go hunting for one on the sixth floor. And if there’s one thing this universe doesn’t lack, it’s idiots. You need to sell this ring. Otherwise you’ll have a huge target on your back. Bigger than the one you already have.”
I just stared down at the ring on my finger. I didn’t want to take it off. “So the faction wars winner always has one of these?”
He smacked me, then. Thwap, right on the side of the head. He did not freeze or teleport away. If he had hit me just a little harder, it probably would’ve gone bad for him. My father used to do the same thing, though he’d done it much harder. I felt my eyes narrow.
Mordecai looked at his webbed hand, just as surprised as I was. So much for promising to hold his temper.
“Carl. I shouldn’t have done that. But out of everything I just said, that’s what you’re holding on to? Crawlers don’t get involved in winning or losing faction wars. They ride out the ninth floor like it’s a tornado passing by overhead. They keep their heads down, and they pray it doesn’t sweep them away. We already have one impossible task to deal with when we get to that floor. You attempting to hold onto a Divine Suffering artifact when the entire universe knows you have it is just another level of idiocy we don’t need.”
I started a retort, but he held up his hand, interrupting me.
“Plus, don’t you remember the magic pulses on the last floor? Events that activate magic are a real danger. There will be traps that activate your spells and items. Triggering something like that could be devastating. Despite what its description says, this item is not meant for crawlers. It’s meant for tourists, designed to get them to gather up combatants by the hundreds and farm them for power. It is evil, and if you don’t get rid of it, gods help me, I will tell Donut to stay the fuck away from you the moment you hit the sixth floor.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, pulling the ring off. I felt my strength lower, which pissed me off further. “We’ll talk about selling it on the fifth floor. Before we get to the sixth. Don’t touch me ever again.”