Chapter 15: Camel Abuse (Patreon)

On his first Climb, William Oh singlehandedly engaged in combat with over a thousand carnivorous camels. Corrupted and turned foul by Miasma, each one was big enough to build a city between the humps on their back. He grabbed the Boss by its nose hairs, the only part small enough for him to hold on, and used his prodigious strength to steer the creature into slamming its head into the mountainside.

When that didn’t work, William Oh grabbed the mountainside, and steered it into the monster! The Earth bucked like a fly-bit mule and launched the Monster into the sky, where it resides to this day among the broken mirrors.

-Jason Salazar

As it turned out, Relic Worms were bad business, occupying a special place in local infamy. They were technically floor four monsters, but were notoriously difficult to hunt due to a combination of environment and their penchant for infesting a Climber’s relics, disabling them and making a ‘normal’ fight suddenly life-or-death without warning.

They were a palm’s length, thin as a few hairs, and liked to burrow through flesh and Relics with equal voracity.

They attacked in swarms of tens of thousands, swimming through the murky, concealing swamps of floor four to attack Climber’s legs as they waded through the water.

Low level Climbers died, and high level ones weren’t interested in risking extremely valuable Relics while hunting them, as one could easily lose more than the value of the worms themselves if they ate your boots or weapon.

Not to mention the sudden loss of power might actually pose a risk to the high-level Climber’s life.

The only people who might safely hunt Relic Worms were Climbers who were so high level that they could safely subdue them entirely without Relics.

But their relatively modest value prevented that from being an attractive option for Climbers who by all rights should have a Demesne in the upper Floors.

No, if Will wanted the obscene power promised by the Relic Worm upgrade to his Phantom Hand, he would have to go get it himself from the swamps of the fourth floor.

His spending done, Will gave his remaining eight gold coins to Gertrude, on the condition that she earmark half of them for Jason’s Sacrifices.

Despite Jason going above and beyond following through on his promises, Will wasn’t about to trust a twelve-year-old with enough money to get a Class right now, which is what he would inevitably do with it.

 In a week, Will was Charged, his stitches were out, and he was eager to get back to the Climb.

New Quest!

Ascend to the 2nd Floor.

Congratulations on reaching level five on your first Establishing Quest! Among this year’s Aspirants, your performance thus far places you at rank 1053rd.

Now that you have reached level 5, experience gain in the Hunting Grounds and the 1st Floor have been nerfed.

If you wish to continue to accumulate power, you must Climb to the 2nd Floor.

There are two ways to reach the 2nd Floor: the first is to follow established routes, this is slow, safe and reliable.

The second is to clear a Key Location on the 1st floor, opening an inter-floor Door. This Method is quick, dangerous and rewarding.

It should be noted that above the 5th floor, ‘established routes’ no longer exist, and the only way to Ascend or Descend is by securing Key Locations, so The System recommends acclimating to these trials early.

Do you wish to clear a Key Location to gain access to the 2nd Floor?

Y/N?

“One thousand fifty-third out of what?” Will asked aloud, but was met with silence from The System. Will knew he didn’t do bad, since his quest reward had been ‘exceptional’, but below thousandth place? How many people joined The Climb every year?

 Will set those thoughts aside and waited to accept the quest until Loth was with him, opening up the orange door that their party could share.

“What are you doing?” Loth asked as Will backed up to the glowing door hanging in empty air outside the orphanage, getting as close as his body would allow him.

“It’s a long story,” Will said, tucking in his arms and legs and falling backwards.

Will’s back slammed into the dusty arid land of the 1st Floor.

Cull the herd.

A wild flock of camels have begun to camp out around the Key Point. Investigate, cull any showing aberrant behavior and drive the rest away from the Key Point.

“Camels, seriously?” Will asked, sitting up as Loth stepped gingerly past him.

“That’s what I read,” Loth said,

“Where’s the Key Point?” Will mused, rising to his feet, glancing around.

Wordlessly, Loth pointed off to the side, where a beam of light shone straight up into the unnatural blue sky.

“Yeah…that’d probably do it.”

Together, the two of them crouched and began trotting in the direction of the light.

Only a few minutes later, they arrived at the hill.

The Key Point was an unnaturally round, pointed hill that resembled an enormous stalagmite. The only thing ‘natural’ about it was the scrub brush growing off its sides.

Resting camels dotted the hill, some with their long limbs folded up beneath them while others simply slept standing up. At the top was a beam of solid light piercing high into the sky.

A single camel stood at the top of the hill, rubbing its long neck against the beam of solid light and shuddering in a way that made Will feel…icky.

Its coloring was darker and redder than the others, and it seemed to be at least half again larger than the next largest camel.

“I think that’s probably our target right there,” Will said, pointing at the creature standing on top of the hill.

“What is it doing?” Loth asked, cocking his head in confusion.

Will shrugged. “Something aberrant, I guess?”

“Well, how do you want to handle this, Party leader?” Loth asked, looking up at him expectantly.

Will squinted at the camel in the distance making love to the beam of light, squinting in thought before he glanced back at Loth.

“I wanna drop a rock on it.”

Fifteen minutes later, several hundred of Loth’s seekers released their payload, sending a man-sized stone hurtling downward, gaining an alarming amount of inertia as it plummeted to the ground.

The camel-lord never stood a chance, vanishing in a plume of dust as its long neck was driven into the ground like a tent stake.

This explosion did half the work for Will and Loth, as every normal Camel immediately fled at top speed with their gangly, awkward gait.

Every aberrant camel began scanning the surroundings before locking on the two of them, immediately breaking into a gangly charge that Will simply couldn’t take seriously.

“Ahahahah!” Will broke into laughter as the braying animals descended the hill, charging toward them, looking for all the world like fools from the fair on stilts.

Then their mouths opened to reveal the mutated tubelike tongue pulsing with ichor, the distinctly carnivorous teeth.

“Yikes.”

The creatures began to spit as they charged, sending remarkably accurate streams of nastiness in their direction.

The two of them turned and fled. No sense hanging around to get spat on by whatever pre-digestive fluids those monsters were trying to slime them with.

By the time they stopped running, every single one of the aberrant camels was dead or disabled by Loth’s traps.

“What did I need you for again?” Loth asked as the two of them surveyed the carnage.

“I’m not sure.” Will said, taking aim at one of the wounded camels and whipping his sling around.

The magical sling grew a mote heavier as a lead bullet filled it from the feeder pouch, then Will released.

ZZZZ.

The bullet flew out, creating a scintillating curtain of orange and green that came to an abrupt halt against the wounded camel’s skull.

The gangly monster dropped like a rock, its mutated tongue twitching until the very end, seemingly still seeking out something to spit at or latch on to.

Together the two of them retraced their steps, putting any survivors of the monstrous camels out of their misery.

“I wonder what causes them to mutate like this,” Loth said as they walked, recovering trap components as they did so.

“It’s gotta have something to do with the Key Point, doesn’t it?” Will asked, pointing at the pillar of light they worked their way back towards it.

“That seems to be the case, but the why of it escapes me. Did the Key point make these camels into monsters? If so, were they deliberately lured in or attracted by a byproduct of some other process? The fact that The System sends people like you and me to cull them suggests that it is not deliberate. Would you and I mutate into some awful creature if we spent too much time here, or do our Classes protect us from this effect?” Loth asked.

“What’s it like, asking questions no one has the answers to all the time?” Will asked.

“It’s awful.” Loth said with a sigh.

“Sounds like you might get along well with my parents,” Will said, patting Loth on the head. “You’re a type-two Climber if I’ve ever seen one. Destined to find the answers or die trying.”

“What type are you?” Loth asked, looking up at him.

“I make it a point not to think too hard about the weird shit that I’ve seen,” Will said, tapping his temple. “But I’m also not going to rest on my laurels once I reach a high level. I’m the William Oh type of Climber.”

“I’m gonna conquer the Tower,” Will said, clenching his fist. “Once and for all.”

PSST!

The distinctive sound of a camel spitting was their only warning.

Cloak of Misty Escape

9/10 Charges Remaining.

BOOM!

An explosion of cloud cover shot out in every direction as Will felt his body grow lighter than air, his limbs filled with a singular purpose. To MOVE.

He scooped up Loth and ran, nearly shitting himself as he underestimated triple speed and as a result of that overconfidence, nearly broke his neck.

Triple speed for five seconds doesn’t sound like a lot until you are running blind across rocky desert at roughly the speed of insanity.

“Dear Gods!” Will gulped out as the Boots of Outflanking did their job, sending him tripping over a rock so quickly that he flipped in midair twice before his feet hit the ground again.

He kept running.

Will burst out of the thirty feet of could cover at about the time he heard the camel spit hit the ground where they’d just been a second ago.

Will didn’t have the leeway to look over his shoulder, but Loth did.

“Left!”

Will juked to the left, narrowly avoiding another stream of the camel spit flying over his shoulder, despite running at the speed of light.

I wonder if that stuff’s even dangerous, Will wondered, until the rock he passed by dissolved like cotton candy.

“The Boss is still alive!” Loth said.

“REALLY!?” Will finally risked a glance over his shoulder, and spotted the dark red camel. It looked significantly worse for wear, with a broken leg and a not-insignificant amount of missing flesh from it’s neck.

But it still hobbled along on the remaining three legs, it’s wound-covered head tracking them with the single-minded murderous intent only Monsters could harbor.

Will tripped again, tumbling through the air, his feet touching down an instant before the effect of the Boots of Outflanking vanished, returning gravity and inertia to normal.

They skidded to a halt, Will’s heels cutting deep furrows in the ground as he desperately tried to stop.

When they finally came to a halt, they looked back at the creature charging at them. They’d left it in the dust, but it was charging at a rapid, if painful-looking pace.

“Can you set up something to defend us?” Will asked, sizing up the range.

“Indubitably.”

“Does that mean yes or no?” Will asked, winding up the sling.

“Means ‘yes’.” Loth said, pulling his trap supplies out of the satchels around his waist.

ZZZZ

The first shot went wide because of the creature’s awkward, lurching, three-legged gait which caused its head to flail wildly as it charged.

The shot missed, but the camel’s neck bumped into the orange-and-green tracer that lingered along the projectile’s trail.

The creature gave a nerve-rattling shriek that didn’t belong in the throat of a terrestrial animal as an additional layer of fur and skin was carved away by the tracer of fire and acid hanging in midair.

The camel stumbled in it’s charge and was forced to step to the side to avoid running directly into the deadly scintillating curtain stretching between them.

This lost the creature time. Time that Will used to line up another shot.

ZZZZ

The bullet whizzed out into the distance, carrying a curtain of acid and fire along behind it.

Will missed again, but it was a close thing, forcing the monster to take more precious time to weave around the curtain of burning death.

The next shot hit.

The camel reeled back as a bullet struck its cheek, turning part of the monster’s long snout into a bloody mess.

It shrieked in pain and frustration, reeling back to spit at him again with it’s wormlike tongue.

Will took a step to the left, interposing the curtain of fire between himself and the creature.

The camel’s vision was partially blocked by the curtain, and it’s spit went wide while Will lined up another shot.

This one flew a bit lower, catching the creature in its oversized neck, causing a great gout of blood to splatter against the scrub brush beneath it.

“It’s set up,” Loth said, tugging his shirt.

On Loth’s signal, the two of them began backing up.

“Those two boulders,” Loth said, pointing to a pair of rocks slightly ahead of them, one medium sized, the other massive.

Will could barely make out a tripline stretching between them.

He nodded, keeping one eye out for further spit from the mutated camel.

He sent his Phantom Hand out beside the larger boulder, and when the camel came into the right distance, he had the hand accelerate as fast as it could, releasing a handful of bullet stones as it did so.

Much to Will’s delight, the Armguard of Tracers applied to ranged attacks made by his Phantom Hand.

The bullets flew out in front of the Boss, creating a curtain of fire directly in front of the creature.

The camel attempted to stop, but ran directly into half a dozen curtains of fire, burning and melting the majority of its upper body to the bone as it did so.

An instant later, it must’ve hit the tripline, because the smaller boulder leapt forward as if it’d been kicked by a giant, slamming into the larger one in an explosion of stone shrapnel…with the camel directly in between them.

Will didn’t have to wait long for the confirmation of the kill:

Thank you for clearing the Key Site. You may advance to the 2nd Floor at your discretion.

+ 200XP

The two of them looted the monsters as they dissolved into foul-smelling gunk with wisps of pale blue light escaping from their skeletal remains.

They found a Tap of Plenty, Still-Boots, a nonmagical flamberge that neither of them wanted, and fifteen gold.

“Not bad for an hour’s work,” Will mused. Sure, the possibility of death was there, but still…

“How did that camel have a giant piece of finely worked steel inside it?” Loth demanded.

“There is a story among my people,” Will said solemnly “That when the gods created The Tower, they knew they must bind the miasma in monsters into Relics so that it might be put to better use and not poison the land, but they could never know the perfect things to give Climbers, so they created…the Loot Table, which automagically assigns Relics and loot,  weighted by the creature slain, the slayer’s class, and a dash of randomizer on top, so that no one class/monster combination can be guaranteed to produce a certain item, for that would lead to a stagnation of society.”

“That’s stupid.” Loth said.

“You’re stupid.” Will shot back.

“I’m a genius.”

“That was pretty smart of you, choosing me to lead,” Will said with a shrug.

“That remains to be seen,” Loth replied, motioning for Will to open the Door to the 2nd Floor.

Will did so, and a moment later, a brilliant orange Party door opened beside them.

Will psyched himself up before standing in front of the door and allowing himself to fall backwards through it while Loth watched on, a single scaly brow raised.

Will fell through the Door.

And fell.

And fell.