Marked for Death.
It’s not just Steven Seagal’s magnum opus. It’s also one of the dungeon’s greatest, most infamous skills!
Once activated, you will be presented with a list of all crawlers within your map’s range. Only crawlers with 100% health will be selectable. Once a crawler is chosen, they will be marked. It takes 30 seconds for the mark to fully set and become active. When a crawler with an active mark dies, no matter the cause, you will receive a permanent +1 stat point to whatever that crawler’s current highest stat is.
The +1 stat benefit increases by one for every three marks you kill.
Warning. Once a mark is set, you may no longer heal. If you are injured, or poisoned, or if you get a hangnail, you will suffer the ill effects and pain of that injury until the moment your prey is killed. So choose your marks carefully. Don’t let them get away.
You may only mark those designated as crawlers, except on the Scolopendra Lair levels (3, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18) where you may also mark any non-dungeon-generated combatants. You may only mark one crawler at a time except on the ninth floor. This skill has a five-hour cooldown on floors 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8. It has no cooldown on the sixth floor. Also on the sixth floor, marks will form instantly. There is a 15-minute cooldown on the ninth floor, but there is no limit to the number of simultaneous marks. All remaining floors have no cooldowns or delay to mark formation.
Confused yet? Here’s a cheat sheet:
Current Marks killed: 0
Current Mark benefit: +1 Stat Point.
Current floor cooldown: 5 hours.
Marks take 30 seconds to form on this floor.
Happy hunting.
That was an insidious skill. The risk/reward didn’t seem worth it, even if I was a murderous asshole. I didn’t see why it was that big of a deal unless I became a full-on murderhobo which wasn’t going to happen. Plus it was super dangerous to use. If you marked someone, and they got away, you couldn’t heal. You’d be fucked. Still, that 5% to stats was no joke.
“You got this in a box?”
“Yes,” he said. “And now it is yours. Got it for fighting a family member while I entered the dungeon. A legendary ‘That’s the Spirit’ box or some shit like that.”
“Fighting a family member?”
“My ex-brother in law. Not even a real family member, but the dungeon didn’t see it that way. I choked him out, and then we got attacked by rat-kins, these rat monsters that walk on two legs, and they killed him while he was still unconscious. Jesus. Do you remember that day, when it first started? One minute we were outside the annex, fighting, and then the buildings were just gone. What a mindfuck.”
“Of course I remember…” And then it hit me. I trailed off. Holy shit. I remembered the video from the Maestro’s show. Yvette had been injured by the dynamite. She’d been screaming in pain. I looked at the ring in my hand, horror dawning on me.
I waved the bartender over and ordered a drink. “Whiskey,” I said, voice hoarse. He poured, and I drank.
“You let your daughter use the ring before you attacked us?”
“Not ‘let,’” he said. “Made. I made my daughter use it. She refused to fight. She wasn’t going up levels. This was the compromise. She wore the ring. Mags told her which mark to choose. We’d picked you. I figured the cat might get away. Never imagined you would. It was the only way we could make her stronger. She marked you, we waited thirty seconds for the mark to settle, and we attacked. Would’ve had you, too, if you hadn’t been saved by the saferoom.”
That was why Maggie had killed her own daughter. She was in pain from the explosion. She wasn’t going to heal. The pain wasn’t going to stop. Not as long as I was alive.
“She was beautiful, you know. On the inside, I mean. She didn’t have that anger in her. Not like her mother. Or her dad. When she ran away, it wasn’t because she was a bad kid. It was self-defense. Kids aren’t always a product of their parents. But sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes parents can cast a shadow so thick, you can drown in it.”
That poor girl. Jesus, she must’ve been so scared. I felt no sympathy for the man next to me. He deserved all the pain he was feeling right at that moment. But I understood him a little better now.
It was as if he read my mind. He suddenly erupted in anger. “You don’t understand what it means to be responsible for somebody. You don’t have a kid in here with you. You don’t understand what that responsibility means, what a weight that is on your shoulders. And when you fail, it’s like being crushed, constantly crushed, only you don’t die. And the pain never stops. It just keeps coming and coming.”
A silence hung between us for a long time.
“Were you really a cop?” I finally asked.
“Yup,” he said. “Customs Enforcement. Maggie was a detective at Seattle PD.” The bartender refilled my glass without asking and pushed it toward me. “Cheers,” Frank said. “To the end of the world.”
“But you were divorced?” I didn’t know why I was asking this stuff. It didn’t matter, not really. This man didn’t deserve for his story to be told, not after what he did. In a way, people like him were worse than the Syndicate and the aliens who’d destroyed us. He was one of us, and he’d turned against his own.
But we all have that in us, the curiosity. The need to know the truth. And I really wanted to know why someone like him could exist. I understood, philosophically at least, that he was killing people in part to strengthen his child. But that was a choice, not the only path. I felt nothing but revulsion for him.
“Mags and I separated five years ago.”
“But you were together the night it happened. You went into the dungeon together. With your daughter.”
“Yvette ran away. Again. Got picked up by the Pierce County Sheriff. My brother in law was a deputy. He was Maggie’s little brother. Always protective of her. Blamed me for all of Yvette’s issues. He called us to come get her. It pulled me off a surveillance. Two in the goddamn morning on the coldest night of the year, and the four of us were in the parking lot, all screaming at each other when it happened. Yvette ran into the tunnel. Maggie tried to run in after her, and I pushed her, which made her brother mad. He didn’t understand what was happening. He tried to put cuffs on me. We went in fighting.”
“Come on, Carl,” Donut said. “It’s time for us to leave.”
I turned to see her standing there on The Sledge’s shoulder, glaring at Frank. Both her and The Sledge now had pink feather boas around their necks. The Sledge now also wore a cowboy hat. Hanging from the boa on the Sledge’s neck was a giant pinback button that read, “I like my sausages extra-large. Penis Parade. Desperado Club Floor One.”
“Did Maggie ever take that potion?” I asked, standing from my chair. The Maestro had given them a legendary skill potion that would max out the “Find Crawler” skill.
“That’s what we were fighting about. I wanted to sell the potion and the ring. Use the money to buy gear and to train properly, but all she wanted was revenge. She has the potion, but I don’t know if she’s taken it or not. Our guide suggested that she wait until she picked a class to take it. Something that would let the skill rise up to 20, not 15. But I don’t know if she did that or not.”
I suddenly thought of those PVP coupons. I wondered if Maggie had one. I wondered if she’d received extra rewards for killing her own daughter. I shuddered.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry your daughter had to die. She didn’t deserve that. Goodbye, Frank.”
I met eyes with the man one last time. He was no longer a threat. His wife—ex-wife—was dangerous, possibly even more dangerous than I realized, but Frank was done. I had no doubts he wouldn’t be getting off this floor. Maybe not even up from this bar.