Chapter 102 (Patreon)

Time to Level Collapse: One day and 16 hours.

The group turned and headed toward the gate. We’d instructed them on how to find the employee line, which would be free of monsters. Bautista and about twenty others held back as I went through the complicated process of trying to get the cart switched over to one of the regular colored lines. It didn’t matter which one, as long as it had a platform at both 60 and 75. I walked ahead, switching the lines while Katia eased the cart forward.

“Whoa, hey. I just got a box from my sponsor,” Katia suddenly said. “A silver benefactor box.”

“Yay!” Donut said. “That means you have a sponsor box and a fan box to open!”

“I got a sponsor box not too long ago, too,” Bautista said. I reached up and manually slapped the transfer switch. It made a loud clunk. “But I haven’t had the chance to open it yet. I’m on my way to do it now.”

“Who is your sponsor, anyway?” I asked the tiger man.

“Jaxbrin Amusements, Limited. The same folks who make my babies.”

“Your babies?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this. Did you get any of them? Some do what I say, but sometimes they don’t, and I don’t know why. One even attacked me once. A green variant Slizzer. But the other Slizzers were fine. I still have another green variant, but I don’t dare use it now.”

I just looked at him. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

“Miss Quill? The old skyfowl lady from the last floor? Remember her?”

“I remember,” I said. I reached up and fingered the necklace with the small charm. How could I forget? She ended up being the head bad guy of the area. Her failed spell was the reason I had the about-to-explode nuke in my inventory. Bautista had a quest to kill her. A quest that failed because we’d inadvertently killed her when we blew a hole in the ceiling of the magistrate’s office. Bautista had been trying to get into her apartment at the time, but he’d found it empty except for…

“Are you talking about the beanie baby things?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled one from his inventory. A brown frog wearing a spiked helmet. It still had the tag on it. It was the same type of creature Mordecai was currently shape-shifted into. Bautista tossed the bean bag to me, and I caught it. I rolled it over in my hand.

Stuffed Grulke Infantry Figure. (With tags)

This is the most common variation of the Grulke line of collectible figures. In terms of rarity, these things clock in just below frat boys with early-onset liver disease. It’s literally not possible to enter a waystation kinder shop and not find one of these for sale on the shelf. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a collector who will buy this off you.

It sure is cute, though.

“Miss Quill had more than 1,000 different stuffed monsters in her apartment. So far, I’ve used about 40 of them. You can keep that one if you want. I have four more just like it, though one has a different colored hat. They’ll attack bad guys for you, and they’re pretty strong, but they’re common, and the common ones only last about fifteen to thirty seconds before they’re done.”

I read the little paper tag on the stuffed creature. All it said was “Grulke Infantry. Jaxbrin Amusements, Ltd.” There was a symbol of a smiley-faced star on the other side. That was it.

“Wait, these things turn into real versions?” I said. “I didn’t know that! How?”

“You pull the tag off. Like a grenade. And then you throw it. Takes about 10 seconds for it to work. Depending on what it is, it’ll fight for you. Or, like I said, attack you. The rarer it is, the longer it lasts. When they’re done, if they haven’t been killed, they turn back to the beanies, but the tag is gone, and you can’t use them again. If they do get killed, the little beans fly everywhere when they die and then disappear.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “We only have one. It’s a dude riding a horse. Named Kimaris. How did you figure it out?”

“The first one I did was called a Crane Crasher. A bird thing. We were sitting in a safe room, and I was just playing with it, and the tag came off. It came to life in my hands and flew to the ceiling, screaming. Then it attacked a guy in my party and teleported away. After that, I found another one. A Sage Sprite Lecturer. It said he was a teacher, so I pulled the tag. I thought he looked a little like my grandfather. He was helpful, but I should have saved him for later when I was better prepared. He was really rare and valuable. But he told me what was up with these things. Acted like I was an idiot for not knowing. He was one of my most valuable. Legendary rareness. Only one of five, but I didn’t know how to see that until he taught me. Lasted two whole hours. He was in this weird glass case. I have five more legendary rares, but I’m afraid to open the cases now because the description says there’s a chance I’ll be blasted with fire if I open the door.”

He was talking about a Sheol Glass Reaper Case. The same protective case my Kimaris figure had been in, but now housed Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. My Kimaris figure was a demon. It was also Unique, not legendary or rare.

“You just rip the tags off, and they appear?” I asked.

“That’s right. But you can actually rip the tag off inside of your inventory, which is what I do. It takes about two seconds off the summoning time. You gotta be careful, though, because if it’s a monster you’re not familiar with, you don’t know how big it’s going to get. Or how mean. Some of them are huge. Also, the sprite lecturer. His name was Atwin, by the way. He said these are actual summonings. So you must be careful. It looks like you’re making a new one because of the way the die. But you’re actually teleporting one of those creatures to you. I don’t really see the difference, but he insisted that was a big deal. I guess there are spells that say they’re summoning, but they’re really just creating a temporary, fake version. This is a true summoning.”

I thought of Donut’s clockwork triplicate spell. That was most definitely not a real summoning.

“What was the name of the one you had?” Bautista asked.

“Kimaris.”

“I don’t have that one. You should probably hold onto it until you know how valuable it might be. Anyway, I am worried I’m going to run out of these things. My class is something called a swashbuckler, and I need to practice more with my sword.” He patted the glowing, orange sword on his belt. “But I’ve been relying on these monsters a lot. That’s why I’m glad I got sponsored by Jaxbrin. I hope maybe they can replenish my supply.”

“You should train with your sword as much as you can anyway,” I said, suddenly worried for the man. “You can’t rely on somebody else’s goodwill to keep you supplied. Also, some of your friend’s levels are too low. The guy with the sling is good at 28, but his friend is only 21. That’s not enough. He’s getting left behind.”

“I know,” Bautista said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

~

Bautista and his team’s plan was to go find that free station 72. He promised they’d train on ghouls on another line until it was time to go. Apparently Tizquick, the dwarf with the daughter who never existed, was standing vigil at station 60, helping all the passing crawlers to find their way from one colored line to the next. I was actually starting to get worried about too many people congregating in the same place at once, though apparently there were actually two different stations 72s with blown ghoul generators now. And there were rumors of a station 12 that had also blown. The last I’d looked we still had just under 275,000 people running about the floor, and it would be much too easy for too many of them to crowd into the same place and get overrun.

In fact, that number of remaining crawlers actually seemed too high based on the number of people we had in our circle. I had at least one person in over a dozen different station 36s, but none of them had more than a thousand people. Most were more like 50 to 100. I talked about this some with the others, and we realized we simply didn’t know enough about the true nature of the floor to get an accurate picture of where all these people really were. Katia had, for a few days now, been saying that we were missing something when it came to the way the Iron Tangle was set up. She kept saying, “I don’t understand how there can only be six station mimics.” I told her it didn’t matter, not as long as we had an exit to our back and we’d done everything we could.

We said our goodbyes to Bautista’s team, and we found ourselves on the zomp line. We had two interdiction carts. The “E” cart, the one we’d driven all the way up the line, and the “Q” cart which we now called the Def Leppard cart. We dragged it behind us, facing backward so we were sandwiched between two portals, both tuned to the abyss. Nothing could get to us while we were on the track. Not unless it attacked us from the sides.

The plan was to make our way to Imani and Elle and Li Jun and reunite with their teams who were now camping and guarding station 36. They said they hadn’t seen a monster in hours. Even the number of ghouls was starting to wane. I told them we’d be there later. And to stay away from trainyard E, which now featured a brand-new resident.

In the meantime we were going to pick a random transit station and hit the safe room, open Katia’s boxes, watch the recap show, and then have ourselves a reunion.

~

We ended up stopping at station 59. The track was filled with ghouls and baby krakarens, who were now all about the size of small dogs. We teleported them all to the abyss as we rushed up the line. The only time we were in any sort of danger was as we passed station 24. The juvenile monsters covered the platform. There were thousands of the octopuses, swarming over each other. I tossed a precious jug o’ boom off the side of the train as we passed. Even then, almost a dozen of them were fast enough to leap onto the cart. Katia’s crossbow made short work of them. They didn’t drop any loot at all, and their blood sizzled against the metal deck of the cart.

We stopped the two carts outside of platform 59 and left the portals on, both tuned to the abyss. Then we sent a message to everybody to stay off the zomp line. As long as the batteries held, and they appeared to last a really long time, nobody would mess with the carts. The transit station also had six other lines attached to it, but it was all clear as we walked to the saferoom, which was down stairs this time instead of up.

The swarming Krakaren babies appeared to be remaining close to station 24. For now. Meadow Lark was setting up a flame-thrower based kill zone at the choke points in case they invaded. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

The saferoom at station 59 appeared to be a restaurant from Costa Rica called “Soda.” We pushed our way through the small room, past the Bopca, and into our personal space. It seemed like we hadn’t been here in forever.

“Open your boxes now,” I said, collapsing into the chair. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

Katia straightened. “Okay. I’m doing the fan box first.”

We’d already agreed we had to get this done as soon as possible, before Mordecai got back. The last thing we needed was that Chaco guy showing up and getting into another fight.

But we needn’t have worried. Two items popped out. A goddamned baseball bat and a shield. The shield was tall, about six feet high, and curved, shaped like a half cylinder. There were loops in it for her to either hold with both hands or to slide a single arm through.

There was a small, plastic-like window in the top of the shield for her to see through.

It had the words “Get Back” in Syndicate Standard emblazoned on the front in white, blocky letters.

“It’s a riot shield,” I said.

The baseball bat was actually a police baton, I realized. At first glance there didn’t appear to be anything special about it. But as Katia rolled it over in her hands, eyes wide, I could see the slight glow of enchantment. Her lips were tight with what appeared to be both irritation and fear.

I picked up the large shield to examine it. It was absurdly light.

Enchanted Shade Gnoll Riot Forces Crowd Control Shield.

Sometimes the galaxy isn’t a happy place. Sometimes the unwashed masses forget their place in the machine. And sometimes these dregs bubble up to the surface, causing a phenomenon widely known as “Civil Unrest.”

And when that happens, the powers that be don’t want to become the powers that were. So they hire backup. An outside force to come down and kick everything back into order, and maybe commit a few war crimes in the process just so the trodden-upon know their place. One such outfit, trained specifically for this sort of situation, is the Shade Gnoll Riot Forces.

This enchanted shield offers both offensive and defensive crowd control options. A frontline defender utilizing this item is afforded the following benefits:

+5% to Constitution.

+5 to the Rooted in Place Skill

+Upgrades Rush ability to Crowd Blast.

Warning: You may not equip this item. The Rush ability is required to equip this item.

I immediately looked at Crowd Blast, the enhanced Rush ability. This was the same battering ram skill Katia had used to kill Hekla. She could only use it once a day. Crowd Blast had two huge differences. She still rushed forward, causing a ton of damage. But now everybody in a wide cone in front of her were also hit with the attack. The bulk of the damage was still from whatever she physically hit, but everything in the cone took 10-20% of the damage. The fact she’d managed to kill Hekla with the regular version of this skill meant this upgraded version packed a serious punch. Even those monsters not directly hit by it would take major damage. With her wrestling belt bonus, it would be the equivalent of hitting someone with, well, a monster truck.

But more importantly, she could now use the ability once every five minutes. Not once a day.

“It looks like you’ll be getting more practice in with that Rush attack,” I said as I looked up Rooted in Place. She made a noncommittal grunt.

Rooted in Place

This skill makes it much more difficult to knock you over or back. That’s not necessarily a good thing, physics being what they are. Be careful with this one.

“Interesting,” I said, moving to the baton.

Enchanted Shade Gnoll Riot Forces Telescoping Crowd Control Baton.

This enchanted truncheon is designed to crack skulls and to teach those ungrateful bastards to show some got-damned respect.

This item’s length is adjustable, from 25 centimeters to 3 meters.

Automatically casts Level-five Cone of Knockback if swung at a group of 10 or more like mobs. This triggers only once every five minutes.

“Those are both pretty awesome,” I said. “Especially the shield. I’m kind of worried about the wording on that rooted in place skill, but Crowd Blast is exactly what you needed.”

“I can’t tell if people were trolling me with this or not,” Katia said. “People know I hate using Rush.”

“It’s not very thrilling,” Donut agreed. “This is like getting an electric litterbox for your birthday. Indeed it’s useful. But it’s a litterbox for goodness sake. I was hoping for something with a little more pizazz.”

“First off, that’s what Bea asked for,” I said. “I don’t understand how someone can get pissed for receiving what they asked for. Second, that thing was like 300 bucks. Anyway, Katia, this is definitely a good thing. Troll or not, you’re getting more and more powerful. Mordecai said he got a sex toy in his first fan box.”

“Did you really buy your girlfriend a cat litterbox for her birthday?”

“He did,” Donut said. “Miss Beatrice was quite rightfully upset.”

Katia laughed as she attempted to equip the large shield. She frowned after a moment. “I guess I don’t need this anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t let me equip both at the same time.” She removed an item from her left wrist and placed it on the table. “You should take it. A gift. You need a shield anyway.”

I picked up the wrist bracer. It looked similar to the bracer I had on my right wrist, the one that allowed me to form my gauntlet. I’d forgotten she’d had this thing. She pretty much only used it to increase her mass.

Enchanted Auto Buckler of the Peach Pit

Forms a metallic buckler on command. May be triggered via hotlist or by shaking your wrist like you’re thinking of your hot Aunt Lydia.

This item is enchanted with Shatter. Any attack that lands upon this shield has a 1.5% chance to disarm the opponent. If the opponent is disarmed, there is a 90% chance the item will drop to the ground, a 5% chance the weapon will break, and a 5% chance the weapon will be immediately transferred to your own inventory.

“Hey, this is cool,” I said. I put it on. I had to slide it over the arm of my jacket. I experimented making it appear. I could twist my wrist, and the small shield would pop into place. I could shake it in a similar way, and it’d disappear. “Thanks!”

“Much better than a litterbox,” Donut said.

Katia nodded, attention already on the next box. “Okay. We ready?”

“Do you think it’ll be something bad?” Donut asked.

“We don’t get cursed items from boxes,” I said. “Let’s just see what it is.”

Soon after Katia had been sponsored by Princess Formidable, the youngest sister of Prince Maestro and Crown Prince Stalwart of the Skull Empire, we explained to her everything we knew about the psychotic orc family. Maestro was dead along with the mom. Stalwart was in the dungeon, presumably walking around in the skin of the war god Grull. King Rust was supposedly in the dungeon, too, though we didn’t know where. I still wasn’t clear on how levels 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 worked. Mordecai always told us to not worry about them until we got there.

We also didn’t know how the sister factored into all of this. If her brother was out of the way, I knew she’d become the heir apparent. But how close was she to her brother? In books and movies royalty were always murder hoboing each other in order to gain power. But since we knew literally nothing about Princess Formidable other than the fact she existed, there was no way to predict what sort of item Katia would receive.

Katia opened the box. We silently watched the single, small item appear. Katia picked it up, saying nothing. She examined it and passed it to me.

It was a crossbow bolt. She’d only received one.

The Bolt of Ophiotaurus

This is 1 of 100.

This item acts as a regular crossbow bolt unless it is shot directly into the eye of a deity.

Upon a successful strike to the god’s eye, the deity’s invulnerability pauses for fifteen seconds.

“Well, shit,” I said. “I’m starting to think the sister isn’t a huge fan of her big brother.”

~

We had time to take showers before the show started, but that was it. Mordecai would return right after the show finished airing, and then we’d all need to take two hours to sleep.

The recap featured a montage of people setting up and fighting in a wide array of stairwell stations. We watched as a group of twenty people stupidly faced off against a station 48 boss. The monster, a hulking conglomeration of screaming, gnashing ghouls made short work of the crawlers. It formed a giant pincer made of ghoul body parts and gathered the crawlers up. Mouths formed on the interior of the claw and devoured the crawlers as it crushed them. They all died screaming.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

“I can’t watch this. I hate this show,” Katia said, getting up. She produced a towel from I don’t know where and moved around the common area, cleaning up the remaining blood splatters from where Mongo hadn’t licked it clean. “We need a maid in here.”

The recap showed something unexpected. A group found a new stairwell, one that wasn’t listed on that early map. It didn’t say where they were, but this was clearly a different area we hadn’t seen. It was a dark, dripping cave, and it was only lit by the Torch spell of one of the crawlers. There was only a single stairwell here. It was clearly a level stairwell, but it was different than usual. It went both up and down, and I wasn’t sure why. Only the part of the stairs below the ground glowed, but it still reached upward, corkscrewing into the air and disappearing into the dark. It was only on screen for a moment, so I didn’t have enough time to investigate what that meant.

“I think I know where that is,” I said, suddenly realizing what we were looking at. “That’s where we teleported the mimic away. That’s station 433. I bet there’s a stairwell there. Just like with Grimaldi. If a city boss is sitting on a stairwell, it’s invisible on the map until he’s gone.”

“What?” Donut said, suddenly incredulous. “Are you saying we could’ve just gone back down to that place and used those stairs?”

“That’s what I’m guessing,” I said. “But I’m not certain. This is a good thing. It means there’s a way to get home for anybody still trapped on that side of the tracks.”

“I guess they won’t be needing the 150,000 gold’s worth of hats just sitting on the ground up there, either,” Donut grumbled.

“They still gotta find that station,” Katia said over her shoulder. I did a double take. She’d grown thin and tall and was scrubbing one of the walls ten feet off the ground. “How did this blood even get up here? Plus there are five more mimics up there.”

“True,” I said.

“Shush!” Donut waved her paw. “Stop talking. We’re on!”

“Oh fuck,” I said, seeing the scene laid out. They showed me standing over Growler Gary, the cowering gnoll. They’d altered the lights and colors of the scene, showing it from a low angle with me towering over the creature. Mongo materialized, coming into focus like a monster emerging from the fog, biting his hands off as whimpering noises rose. The whimpering sounds were added in. Gary was always dead by the time we removed his hands. The scene switched to me wishing for duct tape while I attached one of the poor guy’s hands to the keypad. It showed us doing it over and over again. It never even explained why we were collecting the hands.

It didn’t show the rescue. Instead it moved on to Lucia Mar beating a ManTauR to death by smashing him against a train over and over. It appeared she was set up in one of the trainyards, but I couldn’t tell which one. Something had changed with one of her two rottweilers. It was huge now, twice as big as the other.

“What is this?” Donut said. “They cut out the best part! They didn’t show everybody saying thank you to me. They usually get it wrong, but this is over the top. This is outrageous!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “People are watching it happen live. More every day. They know what really happened. Plus it’s the same with the other crawlers. By now everybody knows all of this stuff is pure propaganda.”

“Do you think that means this Lucia kid isn’t as crazy as she looks?” Katia asked, coming to stand beside me.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I remembered what Lucia had done to the Desperado Club. And to Odette’s assistant. Odette had called her a psychopath. And Lucia had talked some serious shit about Donut on that one show. So there was probably some truth to it. But it had to be exaggerated. It had to be.

“You did a good job,” I said, looking about. “The room is very sparkly.” I remembered what Katia had said about her mother being a clean freak, and how she’d rebelled against it. Apparently not so much. Then again, it was predominantly blood stains she was cleaning up. That’s not something most people wanted splattered around their living area.

“It was mostly Mongo,” Katia said, patting the dinosaur on the head.

Hello Crawlers,

This will be your second-to-last message before the floor collapses, and I just wanted to say how proud we are of human tenacity. Quite frankly, we expected the number of deaths to be much higher on this floor. It’s making us rethink how easy the next floor was going to be. Hah.

Odds are good you might have your hands full this time tomorrow, so we’re sticking all the important information into this message. The next floor will see the crawlers scattered throughout, further apart than usual. Parties will still travel together, but only parties that are formed before this message started. We love how you plucky humans are starting to all band together to defeat the big, bad monsters, and it’s great, it really is, but we wish to focus more on individual stories the next floor. Feel free to chat to your friends, but if they aren’t in a party with you right now, it’s best to get your goodbyes out of the way. There will still be Desperado Club and Club Vanquisher entrances throughout the level, so don’t worry about that. But if you haven’t trained yourself up, you might regret it.

And speaking of chat, we’ve added a new and exciting feature to this season. For a small fee, all viewers may now subscribe to your private messages between other crawlers. Isn’t that great? Sign-ups started yesterday, and we are very pleased with how many have already joined up. The system goes live the moment this message ends.

We have also patched a few persistent bugs with the inventory system. Effective immediately, you may no longer store liquids in your inventory unless they are in a container.

That’s it for now. See you guys tomorrow. Now let’s get out there and kill, kill, kill!

“Where is he? Where did that fuck face go?” a familiar voice yelled. It was Mordecai, skidding to a stop in the room. His eyes grew wide. Apparently, for him, no time had passed. He’d just blinked. “Oh. Oh shit. Oh fuck,” he said, eyes flashing as he read a page of notifications. “By his left tit. Seven days?”

“Hello, Mordecai,” I said.

The toad man just stared at us. His eyes immediately moved to the golden skull over Katia’s head and then to the skull over Donut’s. He straightened as Mongo squawked and jumped in circles all around him. “I see I missed a few things.”

“A few things, yes,” I said. “We need to…”

I didn’t finish.

Katia exploded.

At least that’s what I thought had happened at first. Blood erupted out of her. Gallons and gallons of it, flying in every direction. It just kept coming and coming, an impossible amount. We all cried in surprise. I was blasted in the face, getting bukkaked by the fetid, stinking liquid. I fell over trying to get away, gasping and choking. Donut squealed and leaped across the room. Mordecai also flew backward, stumbling over the couch, his frog legs sticking straight up into the air.

And still, the red spray didn’t let up. It hit the ceiling and all the far walls, like it was being sprayed from a multi-directional pressure washer.

Mongo shrieked in joy, spinning about like a child in the rain. It kept coming for twenty full seconds before trickling to a stop. Katia just stood there in the middle of the room, eyes huge. Once it stopped, the room was filled with the sound of my coughing and Mordecai’s croaking and the tap-tap-splash-tap of Mongo dancing in circles like he was playing in a wading pool.

It took me a moment to understand what the fuck had just happened. Katia had stored all of the blood when she’d been attached to the front of the train. She’d had to put it directly into her inventory to keep her scoop clean.

But the rules had just changed. One could no longer store liquids that weren’t in a container. Apparently this was how the system now dealt with the paradox.

I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away.

“Really, Katia,” Donut said, leaping to my shoulder. “If you need to borrow a sanitary napkin, just ask.”

~
Howdy ya'll. I hope you're having a great week. I'm about to go away for the weekend, so I might be a little scarce. But the laptop is coming with me, and I will hopefully get lots of work done. I appreciate all of you. I just passed 500 patrons, which is like insane, and I know that number goes up and down, especially at the end of the month, but I wanted to say I love every one of you. Ya'll rock.