Chapter 32 (Patreon)

Again, chapters are a little rough. This one might change a bit based on how the next chapter finishes up.


Chapter 32
 

Time to Collapse: Five days, ten hours

Views: 69 Billion
Followers: 635 Million
Favorites: 149 Million

As we approached the quadrant with the stairwell, we could now see that there was a tutorial guild and another saferoom just beyond the stairs. The plan was to probe the monsters, see how difficult they were. If it was something we could handle, we’d clear them out. Once we found the boss room, we’d make a judgment call on how to proceed. After that, we’d escort team Meadow Lark into the stairwell. 

We’d gone to sleep and woken up with our social numbers in the stratosphere. Donut’s views and follows were about equal with my own, but her favorites were twice as high. It made sense. Mordecai had said people only got a limited number of favorites to use, and Donut was the more entertaining member of our duo. I was okay with that.  

I tried not to think about it. We had important work to do today. Even Donut, thankfully, began to pay attention to the task at hand as we saw the first few red dots appear on our map. She’d been saying some motivational bullshit about seizing the day and fighting for the honor of our elders, but I think even she realized she was being annoying. A couple followers had ticked away, and you’d have thought that someone had stabbed her in the face with the way she’d reacted. 

The dots were just off the main thoroughfare. The main arteries on this floor weren’t as wide as they’d been one floor up, and the ground was less even. Within the actual quadrants, we had to watch our step. The concrete floor was cracked and splintered. Little sharp rocks were everywhere. 

I kicked a rock away. Below, my shiny toes glittered. I’d tried to get Donut to show me how to use the pedicure kit, and she’d laughed at me. It was Imani, of all people, who’d sat down with me and showed me what each of the twelve items in the pedicure kit did. The stoic girl pulled the tools out one at a time, matter-of-factly explaining how they worked. 

The buffs all activated after about fifteen minutes of work. I didn’t need to use all the items. I just had to make a show of it. But now my feet glittered, and while the sensation wasn’t any different than it had been before, I could sense the unbreakable aspect of my foot bones. I knew if I dropped a boulder on my toes, they wouldn’t splinter. It’d still hurt, but they’d remain intact and unscarred and as pretty as ever for the psychotic AI.

I peered around the corner at the monsters. There were three of them sitting in a wide room lit by torches. They sat in a circle, playing dice. They were small, troll-like humanoids with oversized heads. Each had hook noses, ruddy cheeks, and mouths with only a few teeth. They wore tattered green overalls covered in patches. Each had pilgrim style, buckled shoes. Much too small for me. 

If it wasn’t for their mottled skin and curly black hair, I’d think they were goblins. All three of them had runny noses. They coughed and sneezed and snorted and rubbed their sleeves with their arms as they played their game.

All three of them had slingshots on their laps. Distance weapons. I didn’t like distance weapons.      

Unvaccinated Clurichaun Rev-Up Consultant – Level 3

If you hear banjo music, run. 

Clurichaun are distant, hillbilly relatives of the Leprechauns. And while the Leprechauns are said to guard vast piles of gold, the only thing the Clurichaun might hoard are Polaroids of their own sisters sitting on the can and questionable business schemes. This particular sect is of the unvaccinated variety. Don’t let them sneeze on you. 

WARNING: This is a fairy-class mob. Mobs of this class inflict 20% more damage against you due to your goblin pass. 

I eased back around the corner.

“Man, I really wish we could figure out a way to turn their dots white. Then we could use your charm skill.” 

“Do they have wings? My butterfly collar charm causes winged fairies to like me.” 

“I don’t think they do,” I said. 

“Maybe if we capture one, we can talk to it,” Donut said. 

“I’d say that’s a good idea,” I said. “But not with these guys. We need to kill them from a distance. They’re toxic. I’m pretty sure they inflict something like your sepsis debuff on us. Let’s try hitting them with three magic missiles, super quick. Do a four power for each one and see what happens. If they don’t go down, hit them again.” 

Donut nodded and jumped to my shoulder. “Ready,” she said, all business. 

We popped around the corner. Thwap, thwap, thwap. 

Donut struck each one with a headshot. They didn’t even know what hit them. They died where they sat.

“How many mana points do you have left?”

“Fourteen,” Donut said. 

“Do you want to try your new Second Chance spell? It costs ten, right?” 

I didn’t have to ask her twice. Donut’s whole body glowed a neon purple. A moment later, one of the clurichauns twitched. It glowed purple, matching Donut’s hue. It stumbled to its feet and just stood there, its scorched and blown-in head listing to the side. A moan emanated from its wet, snotty mouth. On my shoulder, Donut shuddered. A one-minute timer hovered over the undead creature. A clear liquid oozed out of the hole in its head. It moaned again, this time louder.  

Undead Minion of Crawler Princess Donut – Unvaccinated Clurichaun Consultant – Level 1

It continued to sway, not moving from that spot.

“This is most unpleasant,” Donut said. She made a sound like she was going to retch. “I do not like this, Carl.” 

“I wonder if they’ll always be level one,” I said, fascinated. “Can you control it?”

“I don’t know,” Donut said hesitantly. “I don’t have any sort of controls.” She made a kind of uncomfortable whimpering noise, something I’d never heard from her before. “You,” she said, calling to the zombie. It didn’t seem to react. “Rip up the dead bodies of your friends.” 

It swayed there for another moment. The countdown was down to 25 seconds. Then it went to its knees and started taking apart one of his companions. It reached into the stomach and just yanked a line of intestines out like a magician pulling streamers from a hat. They just kept coming and coming. The zombie groaned with an almost sexual pleasure. I felt a twinge of sickness gurgle in my own stomach. 

“Yeah, that’s really gross,” I said. 

The zombie clattered over, dead once again a few short seconds later. It’d left its job unfinished. 

I eyed the remains dubiously. I knew we needed to destroy the corpses, but there were only so many ways the game could warn me that these guys were toxic. I didn’t even know if getting close enough to loot them was a good idea.

Before I could protest, Donut jumped down and looted them anyway. As a quadruped, she could pull the loose, non-slotted items like the slingshots and the dice into her own inventory without actually touching them as long as they weren’t too heavy or too far. I had to physically pick them up, which meant getting close to the contaminated bodies.  

“Each of them has a clay jug of something called toilet-grade moonshine,” Donut said.

“They’re like the llamas,” I said. “They probably sell the stuff to the other mobs.” 

We decided to forgo destroying the corpses for now. We’d angle back on our way out and kill any grubs skulking around the area. I contemplated just blowing the bodies up, but that seemed like a waste of perfectly good explosives. I could probably concoct something that would burn them. I had gallons and gallons of flammable liquid. Their moonshine would probably work, too. But it would take some thinking and trial and error. I really needed to get my hands on something like a poleax I could use to chop things up from afar. 

“Did they have any slingshot ammo on them?” I asked as we creeped deeper into the hallway. 

“Yeah. They have little bags of rocks,” Donut said.   

“Give me one of the slingshots and a couple bags. I want to try it out.”

It look me about three seconds to realize I wasn’t going to be a deadly wielder of the slingshot any time soon. But I was going to practice. I needed some sort of distance weapon, one a bit more subtle than my usual stick of dynamite. As a kid, I’d had a slingshot, and I’d been pretty good with it. I used to set toy cars up on the edge of the fence and try to hit them. 

The memory suddenly turned sour. I remembered my dad, finding my slingshot. He and his friends had played with it, breaking the band. He’d promised he’d get me a new one. He never did. 

For the next hour we cleared out all of the Clurichauns along the outer ring of the quadrant. And by we, I mean Donut. So far, all we found were the level three version. After each skirmish, Donut would raise one of them from the dead, and I would practice hitting them with the slingshot. 

The weapon did hardly any damage at all, though I was getting good at consistently hitting the monsters in the head. My Slingshot skill eventually raised to three, but it didn’t want to budge past that. 

Donut’s skill in the Second Chance spell also rose to level 3. The spell wasn’t any more powerful, but the monsters now hung around for three minutes instead of one.

Donut looted something unusual from one of the bodies. A pamphlet entitled Rev-Up. Make Money. Be Your Own Boss. Move to the next floor down. It didn’t appear to be magical. It was just a regular, trifold pamphlet. 

“Let me see it,” I said. The colorful front showed a group of three, laughing, female clurichauns holding jugs of the moonshine. Several little phrases covered the pamphlet, written in Syndicate Standard. Things like “Girl Boss.” And “Your own hours” and “It’s not a pyramid!” and “Safe!*”

I opened the pamphlet, and it was a wall of text of mostly gibberish about the benefits of becoming a “Rev-Up Moonshine Consultant.” On the right was a picture of a pyramid with “It’s not a pyramid!” written all over it. 

The bottom of the brochure stated, “See Krakaren or one of her downline consultants and learn how you can Rev-Up your life today!” 

“Do you think we can become consultants?” Donut asked after she spent an inordinate amount of time reading the pamphlet. “It says as business owners we gain power over ourselves and can seize our own destinies.” 

“That doesn’t even mean anything,” I said. “They’re just making fun of pyramid schemes. You remember when Bea wanted to start selling those leggings? It’s like that.” The closet in Donut’s trophy room had been filled with boxes of the things. Donut had gotten into one of the boxes and peed in it. I smiled, remembering. Bea had raged at the poor cat. 

“It’s not a pyramid, though. It says so right here.” 

“Come on,” I said. “These things are hostile toward us, so it wouldn’t work anyway. I think these pamphlets are for other mobs on this floor, not crawlers. Besides, we can just kill them and take it all for ourselves.” 

Donut put the pamphlet away. “Yeah, that does seem easier. We won’t have to pay our upline or make the initial seed investment when we do it that way.”       

As we finished our circle of the outer ring of the quadrant, I was forced to kill one of the clurichauns with a punch to the head. Donut missed a shot, and the little monster came running right at me, impossibly fast. It didn’t bother with its slingshot, opting to grapple. It gurgled, sounding pug-like, clawing at me with little, pocked hands. I formed a fist, but it happened too fast. My gauntlet took two seconds form, which was a long time when one was having to react. My first, bare-knuckle hit stunned it. I hit it a second time, this time with the gauntlet, and the monster went flying, his head caved in. When I opened my hand, my fingers were covered with a lime green, oily residue. 

Warning: You’ve been infected with the Taint. 

A blinking, five-minute timer appeared. In a panic, I pulled up my health screen to see what that was. 

The Taint.

Having the Taint is like having the giggles. Or like having the time of your life. But instead of it being a good thing, you are balancing on the precipice of death. You may not heal your health using any method while you are inflicted with the Taint.  

Receiving the debuff scared the everloving crap out of me. I could deal with poison and several other attacks thanks to my armor, but we had no protection against this type of assault. Our heal spells, potions, and scrolls didn’t help. We needed something to ward off stuff like this. In those five seconds before I could read the description, I was genuinely scared I had received something that was going to kill me.  

On its own, the debuff wasn’t a big deal. I simply had to wait it out. I suspected it was part of a one/two punch. They first inflicted you with the taint, then they hit you with something else that seeped your health away.

“We’re not fucking around with these guys anymore,” I said. “I have an idea.”  

We’d collected 25 jugs of the moonshine. Donut gave me one, and I examined the large, clay container. 

Rev-Up Toilet-Grade Moonshine

Type: Accelerant. 

Effect: Highly flammable liquid. Explosive fumes. 

Status: Will not activate until introduced to flame. 

At 180 proof, this moonshine will take the hair off your chest and then put it back on. The Rev-Up version is distilled using two types of sugars: the slime trails left behind by the passage of the Brindle Grub, and a secretive, proprietary sourcef. Created exclusively on the dungeon’s second floor by the Clurichauns, jugs of this concoction are highly sought after by the drinking establishments that populate the third, sixth, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, and eighteenth floors. Drinking a swig (defined as 1.5 ounces) of this “potion” will immediately cause you to gain the Shit-Faced debuff and has a 50% chance to render you Blind for a period of 30 hours, a 5% chance to immediately kill you, and a 45% chance to permanently raise a random stat by two points.  

“It does say they’re valuable,” Donut said. “Do you think we can really sell them if we don’t become consultants?”  

“That’s what it sounds like,” I said. “Other than that tiara of yours, this is the first time we’ve really seen anything that clues us in about the deeper floors.” 

Donut indicated the tattoo of the dagger on my neck. “The Desperado Club,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be on the next floor. I bet they’ll buy them all from us because we’re members of the club! We’ll be rich!” 

“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see if we have any jugs left when we’re done.”  

“What do you mean?” Donut asked. “What are we doing with them?”

I grinned. “I don’t suppose you have any extra torches?” 

~

Carl’s Jug O’ Boom

Type: Incendiary Tossable  

Effect: When lit and tossed, results in a small explosion, followed by burning splash damage over a wide area. Flames will burn for 15 seconds per level of attacker’s level of Incendiary Device Handling.  

Status: Inert until torch is activated. 

Created by an unstable, pantsless man who talks to a cat, Carl’s Jug O’ Boom takes the bigger-is-better approach when it comes to hobgoblin fire bottles. Burns hotter, bigger, and faster than your normal Molotov Cocktail. The use of a standard torch instead of a cloth wick makes these devices much more stable. Just don’t drop it once it’s lit, lest you find yourself doing a Joan of Arc impersonation.   

I received a host of achievements after I finished the bottle. I read the description again and sighed.

“Carl, look, they named it after you!” 

“Yeah, Donut. I see that,” I said. 

“Do you think everybody will see it like that?” 

“I don’t know. I hope not,” I said. 

My Incendiary Device Handling skill had jumped up to five immediately upon the construction of the “device.” All I had done was open up the jug, pour a splash or two out until it was about 3/4's full, added a couple ounces of goblin oil from my inventory, and then stuck a torch in the hole. The short, tapered torch fit perfectly into the mouth of the jug, sealing it like a cork. It was almost like it had been made for it. 

We tested one just to see if it would actually work. The clay moonshine jugs seemed pretty solid, and I was afraid they wouldn’t break. The bottles had “Rev-Up” written on the side of them. 

The cool thing about torches was that I could just look at them and mentally select Activate, and it started burning. No lighter required. 

I lit the torch, grasped the jug by the little round handle, and tossed it high in the air, arcing it toward a group of three, dead clurichauns. 

Whoosh! The jug shattered easily. The explosion itself was insignificant, but the angry flames splashed like water over a wide area, crackling and hissing angrily, glowing blue. We had to step back. 

“Wow!” Donut cried, hopping up and down. “Would you look at that!”  

The flames reached the ceiling, and we had to step further out of the room due to the heat. When it finally died out a minute and fifteen seconds later, all that remained in the room was blackened, crumbly husks of bodies and ash. 

“Well that’s pretty damn cool,” I said. 

We sat down and made ten more of the devices. After the fire, the room smelled oddly of whiskey and toast. Most of the jugs were already about 3/4's full, which was good. I didn’t have to waste any of the moonshine. 

Out of curiosity, I examined the jugs in my inventory and compared their value to my other explosive devices. The jugs were pretty high on the list, just above the smoke bombs. 

The full, unaltered jugs of moonshine were more valuable, however. In fact, they were near the top of my list, just above the Engineer’s Table I still had, the only intact table I had left after our construction of the redoubt.  

These things were much less dangerous—to me at least—than the sticks of goblin dynamite. But they were a little too good. We lost the ability to loot the corpses when they burned away, meaning we lost our ability to get more jugs. We moved toward the staircase. We decided to incinerate every other room, which would keep our jug supply stable. We continued our pattern of Donut raising the dead and me practicing with the slingshot which slowed our progress but gave us some much-needed training. My slingshot skill remained constant. However, I received a few other skills, including Aiming and Steady Hand. Donut’s skill in Second Chance ticked up to level four.   

We finally came across a new type of mob just outside of the boss room, which was thankfully separate from the stairwell. This room was big, and like the goblin workshop, filled with dozens of the little assholes. There wasn’t any sort of giant machinery, but a tube ran along the ceiling from the far boss chamber to the center of the room, curving down into what looked like a filthy, aluminum bathtub. There were piles of the bottles, both empty and full in the room. The snot-covered level threes were taking the jugs and tipping them into the tub to fill them up. At the far end of the room was a doorway guarded by a pair of small, floating creatures. These weren’t clurichauns, but small, fat fairies who buzzed about with a pair of hummingbird wings. They looked like miniature, winged soccer moms. I peered around the corner and examined their properties. 

Ouph Rev-Up Downline – Level 6

The second tier of the Rev-Up empire, these Ouph consultants don’t need to speak to a manager. They are the managers. They run their business with a brutal efficiency. It is said if one of their underlings falls behind on their sales quotas, they punish them by requiring them to take a sip of their own product. Those that survive are repurposed as workers for the filling room, or worse, as still engineers, working directly under Krakaren herself. 

These mobs do not have any special abilities other than immunity to most health-seeping attacks. Having survived years drinking their own product, it is said their essence can be used as a powerful, protective potion. 

“Okay,” I said. “We need to kill everyone in the room, but if we want to keep those jugs and that moonshine, we can’t blow them up or burn them out. Plus it sounds like we can get something good from the corpses of the ouph things.” It was pronounced “Oaf.” 

“Goodness me,” Donut said. “How can we do that?” 

We peeked again around the corner, keeping low. I pointed at the long pipe that snaked across the top of the chamber. It emerged from the boss room, almost like a heating duct, hanging about a foot off the ceiling by metallic braces. It reached about halfway across the room, curving downward toward the tub thing. A constant drip, drip, dribble, drip came from the tube, filling the tub. 

“Do you think you can jump up there?” I asked, pointing at the pipe. 

“Not from here,” she said. 

“No, not from here,” I said. “But if you were in the back of the room by the door to the boss chamber, do you think you can reach it?”  

“Oh, yes. Definitely.” 

I nodded. “Good. Here’s the plan.”