Chapter 33 (Patreon)

A couple quick retcons from the previous chapter....
I added a mention of the discontinued Rev-Up Smoothies in the brochure. 

I changed the name of the fairies from the Ouph to Laminak. I also rewrote the last couple of paragraphs of Chapter 32.  Instead of going over all the changes, I just added them here before Chapter 33.  




Chapter 32 (Ending) 

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. 

Laminak Rev-Up Consultant Elite – Level 6

The second tier of the Rev-Up empire, these Laminak 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 is especially valuable, prized as a shield against disease.  

In a dusty corner of the room stood what looked like a pair of child-sized stationary bikes, the kind gyms used for their spinning classes. There was some sort of goblin-style pulley system attached to it, but I couldn’t tell what was going on from here. A banner hung from the ceiling in the same corner, but it was only attached by one end, and it dangled vertically, forgotten. The banner read, “Rev-Up Smoothies! Invigorating!”  

“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 laminak things.”  

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

We peeked again around the corner, keeping low. 

“Do you think you can jump over there?” I asked, pointing at the far wall with the two fairies. “Using your spell, I mean.”  

“Oh, yes. Definitely.” 

I nodded. “Good. Here’s the plan.” 

Chapter 33

The two biggest problems with Donut’s Puddle Jumper spell was the cooldown and the mana cost. Once cast, she couldn’t do it again for five hours, which meant once she was in that room, she couldn’t teleport out.

Secondly, it cost 20 mana points. She only had 26 mana, and while she had plenty of mana restoration potions, she still had that awful two-minute cooldown between potions. Her points were restoring themselves more and more quickly, but it was still too slow to count on it for combat. She was going to be woefully underpowered, so if something went wrong—and something always went wrong—the only thing she had going for herself was her speed. 

We decided I would stay behind during this part of the assault. With my extra fairy aggro, we weren’t certain what would happen if we both showed ourselves. The plan was simple, but it made me nervous, mostly because I didn’t have any control. This was my idea, but the cat was doing all the heavy lifting.

“If you get in trouble, I’ll toss a smoke bomb,” I said. “Just jump and run, okay?” 

Donut nodded. She was putting on a brave face, but I could tell she was also anxious. 

“Okay, let’s do this,” she said.  

We moved back to the corner, peering around the edge. Donut cast her spell, which had a ten-second countdown. She flashed, her form starting to fade until she disappeared with a loud, wet pop.  

She reappeared at the far end of the room, right between the two laminak fairies. She started rapidly speaking with them as all the clurichauns in the room jumped to their feet and turned to attack. 

The soccer mom fairies were winged, therefore Donut had the ability to turn their dots white, removing their hostility. The problem was that only two of them were the airborne-type fairies. The other 40 or so were not. We were hoping Donut could talk to the two fairies, using her charm like she did with the goblins. The fairies would then tell their subordinates not to attack Donut.

From my side of the room, I could see that the two fairies had, thankfully, fallen under Donut’s charm. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but like the goblins, they’d been turned right away. 

One of the fairies yelled at the clurichauns, speaking in Syndicate Standard. “Get back to work,” she called. “This is a client, not an enemy.” The dozens of monsters looked at each other then reluctantly returned to their stations, but all of them kept their eyes on Donut, all grumbling and looking uneasy. 

The dots all remained red, at least on my interface. Donut confidently stepped into room, walking in my direction. She kept a wide distance from the toxic clurichauns, but she headed toward me. The two fairies followed. Sparkles trailed in the air as they bobbed up and down. 

“It’s just horrible,” Donut was saying. “It’s like someone came in and slaughtered them all. I, for one, was devastated. At first I thought it was one of those filthy crawlers, but then I saw one of those dogs with the painted faces. The dingoes.” 

“The kobolds?” one of the fairies said, sounding perplexed. “Why would the kobolds attack us? We get along fine with the kobolds.” 

“Come, come see,” Donut said. She looked about the room. “All of you should come.” 

“They need to stay and work,” the fairy said. The pudgy fairy swept her hair out of her eyes. Both of them wore an inverted bob haircut. The one doing the speaking wore what looked like a pantsuit made out of leaves. The other was in a dress made of the same materials. 

Donut stopped and looked directly at the fairy. “No, they should come, too. All of them.” 

“Everybody come on! We’re taking a break!” the fairy said. 

“A… a what?” one of the clurichauns asked. 

“Just come, the princess wants to show us something.” 

I pulled away from the corner and rushed down to the next chamber. In the center were three dead clurichauns. We hadn’t firebombed this room, though one of them had been zombiefied. I moved into the next hall down, just outside of the room. Like with most of these rooms, the entranceway was a small room of its own, like a foyer with a raised, rounded ceiling. A pair of brindle grubs were in the hall further down, inching their way toward the corpses. Jesus, I thought. These things were everywhere. I rushed over and stomped them both down and returned to the foyer. I waited for Donut to pied piper the group into the chamber.

Carl: Donut, I am in place. 

Donut: WE ARE COMING. THE DOTS OF THE TWO FAIRIES ARE WHITE, BUT THE OTHERS ARE STILL RED. DON’T LET THEM SEE YOU. 

“Look at this, just look,” Donut was saying a minute later as she strode into the room. She gave the dead monsters a wide berth, walking into the chamber. “Come, everybody, gather around. Take a look.” 

I could hear them crowding into the room as I leaned against the wall, hidden behind the entrance to the next hallway down. I pulled two boom jugs from my inventory and held one in each hand. 

“This was not a dingo attack,” one of the fairies was saying. “One of them has been hit with necromancy magic.” 

“No, no, come look at this, Caroline,” Donut said. “It’s in the hallway over here. Tell your workers to stay here. Uh, it’ll be good for them to look at what happens to those who don’t, uh, work hard or something.” 

“Okay,” the fairy said. She started shouting orders at the crowd of grumbling clurichauns.     

A moment later Donut and the two fairies floated into the dark foyer, moving past me. Donut stopped just as the two fairies noticed me standing there. 

“What’s this?” the pantsuit fairy said, floating away with surprise. She was smaller than I realized, no bigger than a crow. The laminak looked just like a miniature, 40-something woman. She carried no weapons.  

“Carl, I’d like you to meet Caroline and Max. It’s okay, ladies. Carl needs to show you something.”

They were looking down at the pair of jugs in my hands. 

“Where did you get it?” the other fairy asked. “What did you do to our product?”  

I grinned. “Let me show you.” I mentally clicked Activate on both the torches, stepped to the side to the room’s entrance, and I tossed both jugs in at the group of 40 monsters stupidly staring back at us. 

The hands of the pantsuit fairy started glowing red just as Donut leaped into the air and snagged the laminak out of the air, like she was catching a bird. She clasped the fairy between two claws as she chomped down. She shook her head, breaking the fairy’s neck. 

The second fairy zipped up to the ceiling of the entrance hall, lightning fast, out of reach, screaming as I swiped at her, trying to catch her in the air. Damnit. I wanted to kill them without hurting their fragile little bodies.

“Not fair,” the fairy screamed. The air crackled with her passage. “Not fair. We were going to move down to the third floor.” Her hands also glowed red, and she fired a magic missile right at me. 

It hit me square in the chest, and I flew backward, slamming onto my back, sliding a few feet into the room with the raging inferno. A note flashed. Warning: Damage Enhanced. It felt as if I’d been kicked by a damn horse. My vision flashed red, this time a health warning. I felt bones crack in my chest just as the searing heat threatened to catch my hair on fire. I clicked a healing potion as I scrambled to my feet. My chest crackled as it mended itself. I pulled myself back into the hall, out of the raging heat, the breath still knocked out of me. 

The plan had gone off without a hitch until now. The fairy remained up on the ceiling, screaming down at Donut, shooting magic missiles down at the cat, who was doing a much better job at dodging them. 

After a moment, the fairy seemed to run out of mana. She continued to scream down at us. She was trapped as long as Donut and I each guarded one of the doors to the foyer. 

“You can jump that high, can’t you?” I muttered. 

“Probably,” Donut said, out of breath. “Or I can hit her with Magic Missile. I have much better aim with my spell than she does. I can hit her with a three power, and it probably won’t hurt her body too much. She’s level six, after all.” 

“Missile her if she runs,” I said, pulling the slingshot out of my inventory. 

It took ten shots before I hit her. The rock caught her in the wing, and she dropped a few feet before recovering. Her health barely went down. She was a quick little fucker. She kept screaming for someone named “Damien” to come help. 

Damien never came.  

“She’s going to regenerate her mana before you get her,” Donut said. “Hurry up, or I’m going to do it.” 

I aimed and fired, trying to anticipate where she was going to be. The rock hit her in the wing again, and she cried out in pain, dropping again. 

Donut leaped into the air and caught her before she could recover. They hit the ground with a crunch.

“Honestly, Carl,” Donut said, spitting the dead fairy onto the ground next to the other one. “Must I do all the work?” 

“I’m training,” I said. I indicated the room behind me. “Besides, I just hit level 11.” 

“Me too, actually,” Donut said.  

My Slingshot skill remained at 3, but my Aiming skill went up to 4. 

Both of the fairies dropped 25 gold pieces, and each had five brochures in their inventory. 

The description said their “essence” was valuable, but the only thing that remained was their bodies.

Laminak Rev-Up Consultant Elite Corpse (Alchemy Material) 

“Damnit,” I said. I’d been hoping they would just drop potions, something to protect us against the Taint disease. 

Donut didn’t want the corpses in her inventory, so I took them both. When I pulled them in, their bodies disappeared, but their clothes and wings remained on the ground. I took those too. 

“Even though we didn’t get a good potion, that was pretty awesome,” Donut said as we headed back toward the filling room. 

I nodded. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like an asshole. The feeling wasn’t as bad as I felt after the whole thing with the goblin babies, but there was something inherently distasteful about using Donut’s charm ability to kill things. Yes, these were monsters that wouldn’t hesitate about killing us. But like with the goblins, once Donut turned them neutral, we saw a part of their personalities one didn’t normally see with monsters.

We were going to move down to the third floor. Jesus. Her voice had been filled with such longing, such despair.  

I remembered what Mordecai had said, that the mobs in deeper levels weren’t going to be as sympathetic. I really hoped so. I needed to remember who the real enemies were. The Syndicate. Borant. The Kua-Tin. I felt bad about killing monsters who were nothing more than pawns, but the fact was we needed to get as strong as we could. It was us or them.  

“You’re not going to break me,” I whispered. It’d become a mantra.  

“What?” Donut asked. 

“Nothing,” I said. 

We walked into the large room. I went to work grabbing all the empty and full jugs I could. I grabbed another two tables, including one called an “Alchemy workstation.” By the time we were done, we had 80 empty jugs and another 60 full ones. 

I decided against filling the empty jugs with the moonshine from the tub. The metal container was bolted to the ground, so I couldn’t take the whole thing, and I feared just touching the liquid would have some sort of nasty effect, like blinding me. Or worse. 

The liquid continued to drip in from the next room over. 

The door to the boss chamber looked like the entrance to some sort of community center. It had “Live, Laugh, Love” written on the top of the door in little cutout, wooden letters. Under that was a schedule of events. The next event scheduled was for noon on the day after the collapse. It read, “Good news, everyone! Little Breannlyne has the chickenpox! Potluck Pox party here at noon. Potluck. No peanuts. Let’s get that immunity!”  

“I think we should probably just leave this boss alone,” I said. “There might be more kids in there. And if there’s a moonshine still, it’ll probably blow up just as easy as that goblin engine. We only have one hobgoblin detonator left, and I don’t want to waste it if we don’t have to. If we just toss dynamite or a boom jar in there, we might not get away in time. I bet the explosion will be big. It’s not worth it to just go in there and fight face to face, not when we don’t have a real defense against that taint debuff. We don’t know how many of those things there will be.” 

I was afraid Donut was going to protest, but she didn’t. 

We moved to the corner of the room. I pulled the “Rev-Up Smoothies! Invigorating!” banner off the wall. It was made of a cotton-like cloth. I put it in my inventory as I moved to investigate the two stationary bicycles.  

A pully ran from the tire to a small, flat platform welded onto the front of the bike. A little, black, segmented wheel, no bigger than a half-dollar coin sat in the middle of the platform. Weird. 

I noticed a pair of dust-covered, wooden boxes tucked away in the corner. I picked one up, and the top slid off. I examined the contents. It was filled with empty, clinking glass containers with screw-on lids. The box held twelve of them. Also shoved into the box was another, similar black lid with little blades on it. 

I examined the little lid using the tooltips. 

“Oh,” I said. “I see. It’s a blender. A bicycle-powered blender. It looks like it hasn’t been used at all.” I pulled one of the glass tubes out and unscrewed the cover. I could screw the bladed cover onto the glass and pop the whole thing onto the platform. If I turned the pedals on the small bike, it’d turn the blades, supposedly blending whatever was in the glass. Then I could flip it over, remove the bladed cover and replace it with the original top, leaving me with a glass bottle of whatever I decided to blend. Like a smoothie. We had something similar, though not bicycle-powered, in our apartment.

I peeked in the second box, and this one only held six glasses instead of twelve. The bladed part of the blender was missing. A sheet of paper sat in the box, and I pulled it free.  

Rev-Up Immunity Smoothie Recipe. 

“Holy crap,” I said. The recipe only required two items. “No wonder they discontinued this. Gross.” 

“What, what?” Donut asked. 

“This is all game setup,” I said. “You’re supposed to find this and make the recipe. If you make the smoothie, you’ll have immunity from the Taint debuff and something called the Vigorous Measles. And then you’ll have the proper tools to fight the boss.” I swallowed. “It’s really gross, though. I don’t want to go in there. I think we should just take these…” 

I never finished the sentence.

The door to the boss room blasted open. A pair of pink tentacles, each at least fifteen feet long, reached out, swaying into the room. A terrible, ear-splitting screech filled the air, followed by a second screech. Then a third and a fourth. 

Each octopus-like tentacle was covered with mouths. Dozens of them. Each mouth was wide, big around as a frisbee, but human-shaped with bright, red, human lips. There were no eyes or other facial features. Just a cacophony of screaming voices, saying nothing. Just screaming.  

Familiar music started to play, barely discernible under the constant shrieks. 

At the far end of the chamber where we’d walked in, bars dropped down, locking up the room. 

“What the hell?” I cried, backing against the wall. “This isn’t a boss chamber!” 

A new achievement appeared, and it announced itself before I could wave it into the folder. 

New Achievement! Wait, Bosses Can Leave Their Rooms?

Welcome to the second floor, bitches. 

Reward: This shit plays great on the recap episode. If you scream loud enough, maybe you’ll make the show.