Chapter 69 (Patreon)

Two quick notes. One, when I said the arc would end at chapter 70, that was a filthy lie. I should know by now not to say shit like that when it always goes off the rails. This final sequence for the floor keeps getting bigger.

And two, when I started writing this story, I wanted to set the tone right away and left a note for myself as a reminder to keep that tone on point. It was first thing I'd written.  That note has been sitting at the bottom of my Word file this whole time. It was "Chapter 69 - Nice."  

Chapter 69

“Nice,” I said, examining the gaping hole in the building. 

Below, the entire town had been jarred awake by the explosion. Lights turned on throughout the village. Cries and shouts rose. The dark shadows of Skyfowl burst into the air all around us, but most stayed back from the destruction. The magistrate’s quarters burned. We’d blown up half of the building. But not all of it.   

Admin Notice. A new tab is available in your interface.

Admin Notice. Your title has changed. This change will revert upon collapse of this floor. 

A wall of notifications scrolled by, surprising me. I jumped up two levels to 21. Donut also jumped two levels to 19. 

“Well that was easy,” Donut said as she cast her Torch spell, filling the rooftop with brilliant light. The smoke bomb sputtered to a stop, and the light reflected off the remnants, pulsing. It reminded me of the dance floor of the Desperado Club. 

I was expecting the krasue to swarm at us, which is why we waited until now for Donut to cast her light spell. They should’ve been immune to the explosion. But I didn’t see them anywhere. We’d probably blown them halfway across town. I kept a wary eye out for red dots. 

“Oh shit,” I said, examining the notifications. We had not received the one I’d hoped for, but I still had several interesting ones.

New achievement! Assassin!

You have killed a ranking NPC town official. *Sniff* It seems like just yesterday you were nothing but a scared, level-1 crawler with beautiful feet, pissing yourself as you faced down a rat. Look at you. You’ve moved all the way up to political assassinations. What’s next? Killing a god? 

Reward: You’ve received a Bronze Assassin’s Box! 

New achievement! Ultimate Extreme Power!

Easy there, Charlemagne. This is only a medium settlement. It’s not like you’ve conquered most of Europe. But you have killed this town’s acting Magistrate. 

You know what that means? Welcome to the wonderful world of public administration. 

Reward: You’ve received a Platinum Tyrant’s Box! You have also gained control of the Medium Skyfowl Settlement. Good luck, Magistrate. 

New achievement! CockBlock!

You have assassinated an NPC whose existence was required to complete another crawler’s quest. (NPC Killed: Miss Quill – Skyfowl. Level 30.) Who was that other crawler? What was the quest? Who fucking cares! You get the reward they were promised! 

Warning: You may only receive this award once. The next time you do it, we tell them who you are. And then they get a new quest to kill you. Nobody likes cockblocks. 

Reward: You’ve received a Silver Quest Box! 

So it appeared we had killed both Miss Quill and Magistrate Featherfall in the blast.  

“Are we jumping over there or what?” Donut said. “We’re supposed to be jumping!” 

“Hang on,” I said. Every instinct I had told me to wait. “Something’s not right. Let me think for a second.” 

“Hey,” Donut said a moment later. “Why did you get the fancy name change and I didn’t? This is an outrage!” 

I looked at the menu. My title had changed from Royal Bodyguard to Magistrate Carl of Medium Skyfowl Settlement. 

I didn’t laugh. Mordecai had already warned me that one of us would likely win the town if we killed the magistrate. But he’d also said when you killed the quest’s head boss dude, you either auto won the quest or it failed, depending on the situation. Given the mysterious circumstances of this quest, he’d given us a 50/50 chance of winning that quest box. And that was okay with me as long as the quest went away. Either way, we’d get a ton of experience since the guy was also the head of the town. But nothing had happened with the quest. It still sat there in my menu. Did we kill an innocent NPC? We hadn’t even met the magistrate, and we’d just blown his house to bits.  

“Listen, we have a problem. I think we screwed up. Magistrate Featherfall is dead, but the quest is still there. That means he wasn’t the head bad guy. And it looks like Miss Quill wasn’t the bad guy either like I was suspecting. And to top it off, we fucked over some other crawler’s quest.” 

The plan had been simple. Using the Mysterious Letter as bait, we were going to make Featherfall think we were about to breach through the ceiling, drawing him to the area to face us. After Ricky Joe had claimed that a female SkyFowl was visiting the city elves, I thought perhaps Miss Quill was really the bad guy. That was just the sort of thing the AI would pull, which was why I’d mentioned something about burning the stuffed animals. Either way, whomever was listening in would hopefully be there. Mordecai said a lich would get blown to bits just as easily as a human. The only monster we’d have to worry about post-detonation would be the krasue, which wouldn’t be hurt by the explosion.

After the blast, if there was anything left, we’d storm the Magistrate’s office and mop up the remaining bad guys and hopefully figure out what the hell was going on over there. 

“If Miss Quill was there to get blown up, then she had to be in on it. Why else would she be there this late?” Donut asked. 

“Maybe,” I said. “She said he only came out at night now. Maybe she altered her schedule to match. Or maybe she lived there.” 

“Or maybe she was a blood-sucking pawn of the lich. We don’t know, Carl. Let’s go look. Quit being a wuss.”

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “But let’s be cautious. I have a bad feeling about this one. Turn off your Torch for now, but be ready to snap it back on.”

“Wait, wait, look,” Donut said. “Look at our notifications again. There’s a bronze boss box in there. I told you one of them was a bad guy.” 

I looked, and she was correct. I hadn’t noticed it buried there with the others. So either Featherfall or Quill had been a neighborhood boss. That made me feel a little better. But which one was it? It didn’t say. 

The dynamite had blown a massive hole in the roof, peeling it up like it had been drilled through from below. Thankfully the building wasn’t fully engulfed in flames. Not yet. Smoke continued to rise from the hole, but it was minimal for now. I tried to remember if the interior walls were made of wood. The boom jug from earlier this afternoon had managed to burn a building to the ground in a matter of minutes. The effect of this blast appeared to be much more powerful, but also much less incendiary. If I was going to be blowing shit up more often, I needed to know what to expect. This particular blast, while huge, was not what I’d anticipated. The physics surrounding this stuff was still beyond me, and that was dangerous. I needed to learn, and fast. 

Donut used Puddle Jumper to get us over to the roof across the way. We went from the angled tiles to the flat beams, but the ground below us suddenly felt unsteady, ready to break. 

“You there,” a voice called. I looked up. A pair of Skyfowl NPCs had grown brave enough to fly closer to the explosion. They hovered over us now. “What are you doing?”

“I’m the new town magistrate,” I called. “I’m on magistrate business.” 

The two eagles looked at each other. I wasn’t certain how this sort of thing worked, if they’d recognize my authority or not. If this were the real world they’d say…

“Fuck off you crazy assholes,” the SkyFowl called down to me. “Go back to the Desperado or wherever you came from. You shouldn’t be up here. There’s been an explosion, and that roof you’re on is going to cave in. We ain’t saving your stupid wingless asses if you fall through.” 

“Well fuck you very much,” I called back to them. 

The other Skyfowl turned to his companion. “I don’t feel so well. There might be something in the air. Let us flee from here, my brother.” 

The two circled a few times then flew off. 

I kept an eye out for mobs as we cautiously approached the hole. We looked down into what was once the magistrate’s quarters. The epicenter of the explosion was still another 20 meters ahead. Through the hole in the roof, I could see all the way to the ground far below. Half of the magistrate’s home and front office were just gone, along with the entire south end of the building. One level lower, the floor of the mall level was also a massive hole. And below that was a pile of smoking debris. However, deeper into both the mall and the living quarters above, I could see that the floor was mostly intact.

“No wonder there’s not that much fire,” I said. “It’s like we punched a hole right through the structure, both up and down. Weird.”

Donut pointed to the side of the building. Across the street, another structure had half caved-in. Thankfully it was a business and not a residence. I’m glad we’d chosen a different building to stand upon. “Your explosion went up, down, and to the side. But it didn’t blow this way. I wonder if that magic door protected it.” 

“Maybe,” I said. “But either way, that reception office is just gone. If that’s where Miss Quill and Featherfall were standing at the time, they wouldn’t have had a chance.”

“Those poor stuffed animals,” she said. “Now let’s go down there.” 

Donut started to wiggle her butt, and then she jumped deftly down into the magistrate’s quarters as I tied my rope to a chimney. This was starting to get cumbersome. Donut was right. I needed a better way to go up and down. I descended. I swung my way into the chambers. I left the rope there, hanging all the way past the mall level. The full length of the rope ended about 15 feet off the ground. 

A few fires crackled here and there. I gave them a wide berth as we explored deeper into the large home. Donut released Mongo, who immediately moved to a small, empty cage against one wall and started sniffing at it. 

The magistrate’s office had been just on the other side of the reception door, which meant it was now gone. And past the office was the living quarters, which extended the entire length of the mall below it. There wasn’t much here. A few tables and T-shaped roosts. There was a chest against a wall, but it was open and the contents empty. 

Donut inspected the small cage that interested Mongo. It appeared as if it once held regular-sized mice or rats. The door was open. She said it smelled moldy, like it hadn’t been used it a while. All I could smell was smoke. She pulled the cage into her inventory and came to examine the chest, which I poked at with my foot. 

“Hey Donut, look. The clasp is broken. That didn’t happen with the explosion.” 

“So it was sitting here already looted before we blew it up?” 

“That’s what it looks like.” 

“Maybe another Crawler broke into here before us,” she said. 

“Maybe,” I said. “We’re the ones who killed Featherfall, though. Keep one eye on the map.” 

I looked around. The entire apartment seemed oddly empty. There were shelves, but nothing was upon them. Nothing hung on the walls. That empty cage had been a food box, but it hadn’t been used in a while. There was a heavy door against the far wall, leading deeper into the house. I leaned into it, opening it slowly. 

The moment I pushed against the door, I saw the X appear on the map. I pushed the door all the way. The moment I did, several dozen additional red dots appeared, along with an equal number of Xs. I froze as I formed a fist, ready to defend myself. Nothing happened. Nobody moved. 

Holy crap. 

“Mongo, shush,” I hissed as the feathered dinosaur forced his way into the room. He opened his mouth to howl, and I pressed my left hand down on his beak. “Shush,” I repeated. 

Donut leaped to my shoulder, putting herself in the firing position. Still, nothing in the room stirred. Donut gasped, her entire body going rigid. 

“Carl,” Donut whispered, her voice terrified. “You were right, Carl. This was a bad idea. I don’t like this. Please, let’s go. Let’s go now.”

I swallowed, examining the horrific sight before me.  

We’d stepped into a serial killer’s wet dream. 

The entire room was filled with naked female corpses, hanging upside down from the ceiling like we’d just walked into a meat locker. There were human and elves and dwarves, along with a scattering of others, such as orcs and a single ogre. The ones that appeared as Xs on my map were all missing their heads. The others, at least thirty of them, still had all their parts, but the heads were detached, hanging a good six inches below the neck, with only the white of bone and straw-like arteries keeping them attached. It appeared almost as if someone had grabbed their heads, given it good yank, and then left them there, bobble-heading in the room. Wisps of purple energy swirled around the red-dotted ones, like they were being recharged. 

They all appeared to be asleep. Their eyes remained closed. 

The horrors didn’t stop there. At the center of the room, hanging upside-down in a massive dreamcatcher made of bone, was the naked, emaciated corpse of Magistrate Featherfall. His featherless wings were spread all the way out, with nothing but goosebumped, gray skin left, like a pair of uncooked chicken wings with grasping fingers at the first knuckle. His milky white, dead eyes stared out at us under a cracked beak. A clear fluid dripped from both his mouth and eyes. At the top of the hoop-shaped construction, his taloned claws were spread out and splayed, facing the ceiling. The whole sight was reminiscent of a fucked up, inverted parody of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. His body was lashed to the bone structure with old, frayed rope. It appeared as if he’d been there for some time. His body was in the process of being mummified. The circle twisted slightly in the air, rocking back and forth, creaking. 

Lootable Corpse. Former Magistrate Featherfall. Dark Cleric. Level 32.

“How did we get credit for killing that guy when he was like this?” Donut whispered. “He looks like he’s been dead a long time.”   

“I don’t know.” 

This was a nest of krasue. The original description said to truly kill them, one had to find their bodies and destroy them. The ones without heads were, I assumed, out and about in the town. But if that was the case, then why did they appear as corpses on the map? The descriptions just said they were regular NPC corpses. Were the bodies technically dead until the krasue returned? I supposed it didn’t matter as long we killed the bodies. But could we? I knew we couldn’t kill the ghosts without using magic. But what about their bodies? 

The entire ground was sticky with gore and lumps of fallen, forgotten body parts. The smell was almost unbearable.  

If we wanted to approach Featherfall, we’d have to brush by several of the hanging women. The closest one, a blue-skinned elf, was a mere five feet away. She was young and thin, hanging from the ceiling with her ankles in a noose. Her long, dark hair cascaded below her, not quite long enough to reach the ground. I resisted the urge to punt her head. 

“We need to get closer to loot his body,” I said.  

“Yeah, no, I’m not taking another step in there. Those things are going to wake up.”     

“If that explosion didn’t wake them, then maybe they’ll stay unconscious.” 

“Of course they’re going to wake up, Carl. Have you ever watched a horror movie?” 

She was right. And with the blood splattered all over the room, I strongly suspected whomever the head bad guy was, he probably had that Suppurating Eye spell going. We couldn’t stay here long. I sent a quick query to Mordecai, who said the headless ones were maybe fair game to physical attacks, but the ones with their heads and the purple swirls were likely protected. But he wasn’t certain. 

“Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s kill this one here and see what happens. If it works, we’ll carve a path. We’ll loot and run.” 

“Okay, let’s step back. I’ll hit her with a missile,” Donut said. “If they all wake up, I’ll cast my Torch. Maybe it’ll scare them away again.” 

“Hey,” she said a moment later. “Not fair. It says the area has been muted. I can’t cast spells.”

I sent another note to Mordecai.  

Mordecai: Spells in your menu and scrolls won’t cast if you’re in a muted zone. Everything else, including magical items, potions, and spells you’ve already cast will still work.

“Okay, Mongo,” I said. “You’re up.” He had those magical teeth caps, and those should do damage. “Go bite that elf’s head off. But you gotta be quick.” 

Mongo croaked and looked at Donut for confirmation. 

“Sic ‘em,” she said. 

The dinosaur rushed forward, weaving at his target, snake like. At the last moment, he turned his head to the side, like he was eating a taco. He chomped down on the dark elf’s head. 

Crunch. 

The barely-detached head caved in under Mongo’s alarmingly-powerful bite. The head slopped to the ground, followed by a rush of organs and blood, as if her neck was a drain that had just been unclogged. The purple swirls of magic blinked off.

Mongo raised his head into the air and howled, blood cascading off his face. 

The purple aura around the others blinked out. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Uh-oh. 

Mongo, oblivious, moved deeper into the room, biting a second, then a third. He ignored the ones that were already headless. The dinosaur jump attacked at a fourth, but he moved through the body as if it wasn’t there. He howled in rage and turned to bite, this time latching on the woman’s legs, ripping her from the ceiling. She crumpled to the ground. 

“Get back here!” I said. 

“Mongo, return!” Donut cried. 

All around the room, the krasue began waking up. They wailed, loud and high-pitched. The heads all started wiggling at once, working to fully detach themselves from the rest of their bodies.

“Donut, go long,” I yelled. This was one of our oldest plays, but it didn’t exactly fit the situation. Hopefully she would understand the idea. 

“Carl, that’s not going to… Oh, I get it! With what though?” 

“With light!” 

She leaped from my shoulder and ran away, scrambling out into the other room and presumably to the roof. Once she was out of range of the muting, she’d cast her Torch spell and then return. 

I rolled a smoke curtain into the chaos as I formed a fist, rushing toward Mongo, who was gnawing down on yet another creature. My feet splashed in the gore. I punched at a krasue as I passed, my magical gauntlet connecting with a wet splat.  

I pulled a regular torch and lit it, tossing it to the ground. The women squealed in rage, dozens of them peeling themselves free. One by one, they righted themselves, floating into the air, trailing organs as their now-empty bodies waved back and forth, turning into Xs on my map. They backed away from the sputtering torch, which invaded the smoke-filled room with a pulsing, red glow. They didn’t flee like last time. The light wasn’t as powerful, and they were also blinded by the smoke. They started to swirl through the room, like flocking birds, bumping into one another and the hanging bodies and the bone hoop in the center, which started to spin. A krasue whipped past me, smacking me in the face with a still-beating heart. I swung, but missed. 

“Back out the door,” I said to Mongo, pointing behind me. The pet looked up and screeched. He snapped at a krasue, connecting with a hanging lung, ripping it free. The creature squealed and plummeted to the ground, bouncing and rolling with arteries whipping about like a jellyfish. 

We pushed through a hanging curtain of headless corpses as I yanked the Fireball or Custard lotto ticket from my inventory. We ran into the living room, which was also now filled with smoke. We stopped at the gaping hole, and I turned back. 

This apartment was big, but I didn’t know how much more punishment it could take before the whole building collapsed. I wasn’t sure how powerful a level-15 fireball was. The last time I’d tried this, the 50/50 chance ticket cast custard. 

Where the hell was Donut? I glanced at the map, and it appeared she was just above us, on the roof. There were more red dots now, circling the cat, keeping their distance. 

“Fire in the hole!” I cried as I scratched the ticket. I was fully expecting it to cast custard again. 

Fireball. Spicy! 

The rounded, shell-shaped ball of fire leaped out of my hand and rocketed toward the doorway to the bedroom. The flaming projectile was the size of an opened umbrella. It didn’t move as quickly as one of Donut’s Magic Missiles, but that didn’t matter. It rolled directly through the open door, shattering the jam on either side, cleaving through the smoke and detonating as it hit the upside-down corpse of Featherfall.  

The entire building rocked again. The floor buckled. Burning heat washed over me, hitting me with a small amount of damage. The room turned to Xs before half collapsing down to the next level. Black, acrid smoke filled the air, mixing in with the white of the smoke curtain. Above, the red dots harassing Donut all disappeared. 

A moment later, Donut leaped down and landed on my shoulder, trailing her ball of light. It glowed brighter than I’d ever seen before. I had to shield my eyes. 

“Did we get them all?” she asked. “They all disappeared when you did that.” 

“I think so. But I think we fried whatever loot Featherfall had.”

“Let’s go look.” 

We re-entered the bedroom. The entire floor slumped down like a ramp down into the mall level. The fireball spell had crisped everything in the room. The ashes of Featherfall were scattered along the debris. 

“He wasn’t the boss,” I said. “If he was, he’d have a neighborhood map on him, even after we destroyed the body.” 

“Then it had to have been Miss Quill,” Donut said. “She was the boss lady all along. But her body is behind us, probably buried.” 

The building shuddered again. 

“It’s going to collapse,” I said. “We gotta get out of here.” 

“But what about the quest? We haven’t figured anything out.” 

I was about to say, we’re out of time, when I noticed the red dot on the map. One of the corpses, burnt to a crisp, had just switched from an X to a red dot. As I turned, forming a fist, the dot blinked again, this time turning white. 

It was a woman, one of the headless corpses. She was on the ground, and her head had magically returned to her body. She was a familiar human with long, dark hair. She’d been marked as a krasue that brief moment her dot was red, but now that it was white, the system designated her as a human. The lower half of her body was nothing but darkened char. She looked up at us, blinking in pain. She had one pale blue eye and one brown eye. This was Burgundy, the same woman we’d run into on the stairs when we’d visited earlier. One of the assistants to the magistrate. Her face was oddly unmarred by the damage. 

Donut leaped down, sniffing at her. The woman’s legs had turned to flaky, obsidian-colored logs of charcoal. “Carl, we have to help her.” 

I kneeled down, pulling a healing potion. 

“No,” Burgundy said, her voice weak. “If you heal me, It’ll heal my body. Then I will turn into one of those things again. It’s too late for me. I am cursed. Damned. The kindest thing you can do is kill me while I’m still mortal. Hurry. Please. It hurts.” 

“So you’re a person during the day, and one of those things at night?” I asked. 

“Yes,” she gasped. “I was brought here by the elves. I worked in another settlement, but they told me I could get a job at the Desperado Club. There was an entrance in this town. They talked me into coming. Everyone knows if you work in the club, there’s a chance you can descend. I could go to the Hunting Grounds. And then maybe even deeper, where it’s safe. But it was all a lie.” 

“So you were you a prostitute?” I asked. 

Her lips quivered. “I was an escort. And I’m proud of it, too. So if you don’t like it, fuck off. I’ve stabbed men for less.” She coughed. 

“We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. Lots of your friends have been appearing in the alleys, twisted and dead.” 

“It’s going to be okay, Sweetie,” Donut added. She reached up and stroked at the woman’s hair. “Tell us as much as you can about Featherfall.”

“Featherfall?” she asked. Her voice was getting weaker. “Can you make that light brighter? I can feel it keeping the curse away, but it’s fading.” Donut’s torch was like a blazing sun. She couldn’t make it brighter. “Featherfall wasn’t the one who did this. He’s been here the whole time, hanging on that thing. He was dead when I got here. His body was turned into a dark fetish, one to keep our bodies safe at night. Miss Quill’s the one who has been running the city the whole time. She’s the real magistrate.”

I felt an odd amount of relief wash over me. Miss Quill was the bad guy. We’d killed the correct person. When the system said I’d killed a public official, it was her, not Featherfall. Also, this was like the hundredth time in the last day that the AI’s description of something had been inaccurate. It’d said Quill was the assistant to the Magistrate. It’d said Katia was a human, when she was really a doppelganger. It said Burgundy here was also human, when she was really one of those vampire things. The map labeled all these corpses with an X, when they could still turn into monsters. That was important to know, that we couldn’t trust anything.

But if Quill was the mastermind, why hadn’t the quest ended? I reread the last line in the menu 

Nobody knows who they are or where they come from. Find out why. 

The quest didn’t tell us to save the women. Or to kill who was responsible. We just needed to find out what was going on. We were almost there. We just had to get it out of this woman before the entire building crashed down.

“Okay,” I said. “So how did you get like this?”     

“The elves had me go to their temple, and once I was there, Miss Quill came and got us. She asked us so many questions. I didn’t know why at the time. I thought she was going to take me to the club. Instead, she brought me to him.” 

“To who?”    

Below, something crashed. It reverberated throughout the entire floor. The smoke bomb had cleared, but the black smoke from the fires was now thicker.  

“To her husband. He’s in another place. It’s across the street. It is where the swordsmen guards stay in the evening. He is on the floor above. The guards don’t know he’s there, or they don’t care. They can’t look up.” 

“Her husband?” I asked. 

I tried to remember what Miss Quill had said about him. It wasn’t much. She’d said he was dead. And that he’d been magistrate before Featherfall. That was it. 

“Yes. His name is Remex. He’s doing something, casting a big spell. I don’t know what. He’s not alive, nor is he dead. He’s something in-between, something monstrous. He’s trying to bring himself fully back to life.” 

Fuck. Another bad guy. I’d been hoping all the bosses were dead. 

“But what does that have to do with you guys?” I asked.

“Do you know what I am? What I have become? I am a krasue. A woman who lived a life of sin. One who died in anger and pain, and returned from the dead. During the day we live and work in this building, working as assistants and in the shops below. Collecting. At night, we are his army, doing his bidding, helping the city elves, whom he has also glamored into his control.” 

“Collecting what? And what about the women we find in the alleys?” 

“Every time a new Skyfowl or Chickadee comes into one of the shops in the mall, we are to pluck a feather from their plumage. I do not know why. We give them to Miss Quill.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” said Donut. Mongo grunted in agreement. 

“As to the women… they are those whose sins aren’t enough. They are women who have come to work at the Desperado Club, but when they are brought to Remex, when he twists them, when their heads sometimes fly from their bodies, they do not always turn into krasue. It is not a perfect thing, this transformation. Sometimes they simply die. When this happens, he allows us to feed upon them. Then one of his avatars picks them up and drops them in the alleys. Miss Quill says they have to drop them within a few blocks of his lair. He controls the avatars as if they are his own limbs, but they can’t go far. Not yet.” 

“Avatars?” I asked. “Are they other Skyfowl? I don’t understand.” 

Crack! The rest of the room slumped forward. Burgundy’s body began to slide away. 

“Kill me, please!” she cried as the roof above her started to cave in. 

Donut hit her with a Magic Missile in the moments before her body disappeared.