Chapter 174 (Patreon)

<Note added by Crawler Ikicha. 11th Edition>

We are meant to live solitary lives, even the eunuchs amongst us. Still, the sight of him, twisted and changed, speaking with that same voice that once said such sweet words... It broke me, friends. It broke me in a such way I did not think possible after all that has happened.

They’re not the same. Even if cured of the rot injected into their aura. Don’t even try. Hope is crucial, but it can also be poison if it is blind.

<Note added by Crawler Drakea. 22nd Edition>

This is Ikicha’s last entry.

It took me a while to understand what our brother truly meant when he posted this. Now that I know, I, too, struggle with the knowledge. Gone is gone. Dead is dead, and anything presented to you in any other matter is nothing but a cruel, sadistic tease. We are on a fabricated stage surrounded by puppets built by the enemy. Do not ever forget this.

Even if I succeed. Even if I survive to this fabled 18th floor and emerge victorious, I hold no cursed faith for those who have been lost, and I suggest you do not, either.

But that doesn’t mean we still can’t have hope.

I dream of a fire that spreads across the sky like the Winter Nebula. A fire that reaches the beginning and the end, and even though this fire exists only in my mind—for now—the warmth of it is enough to sustain me, even on the coldest of nights.

For you, Ikicha.

~

Time to level collapse: Five days and 21 hours.

Carl: We’re going down the stairs. There’s a set not too far from here, and I’m getting her off this damn floor.

Katia: What about your plan with the Sledge? He’s assigned to Donut. If you go down now, he’ll go, too. He won’t be able to cast that Zerzura spell.

Carl: I promised Juice Box to do my best. I never said it was a sure thing.

Imani: And what about the masquerade? You give us a cryptic warning about this queen, and then you’re just going to leave us? Plus this whole creeper quest is about to fail. You’re abandoning us.

Carl: Jesus, I’m not abandoning anybody. You’ve all been fine this whole floor without my help. I am not going to let them do this to her. If we go down now, it’ll be a huge fuck you to the showrunners. They’ll have brought that goddamned cat in here for nothing.

Katia: And we’ll have brought all the changelings plus Bonnie to the floor for nothing, too. Have you even been to the Desperado Club yet? They’ve been risking everything to send someone there every day in case you show up so you can tell them the plan.

Carl: You haven’t seen what this is doing to her.

Katia: Carl. I know you. This is a knee-jerk reaction. If you go down now, you will regret it. It will eat you up inside.

Elle: Listen. The last thing we all need is the version of Carl where he’s angrier and broodier than normal. We already have Florin for that. Why don’t you give Donut a day off, and you can come join us? The hunters have all pussed out and are hiding in their city. That Eva lady has pulled a Houdini act again, and since she doesn’t have a crew anymore, there’s no real point in hunting her anyway. We’re buckling in for whatever happens with these zombie plant monsters you helped unleash, and then if we’re not mulch after, we’re planning on doing some coordinated training until this party.

Carl: Guys...

Imani: What does Donut think about this? Have you even asked her?

Katia sent me a new message, this one outside of the group chat.

Katia: Carl. Please don’t go down. Not yet. I need to talk to you about something, and I’ve been putting it off. Not over chat.

I took a deep breath. Calm yourself. They will not fucking break me.

Carl: The last time you said that, you were leaving the party. The time before that it was because you thought Donut was holding onto one of those PVP coupons with your name on it.

Katia: This is bigger than all of that. Or maybe not. I’m not sure.

Carl: That’s reassuring. Is it about Eva? Are you okay?

Katia: It’s not pressing. Well, that’s not true. Everything is pressing here. But it can wait. I’m looking for advice more than anything. And no, it’s not about Eva. That slippery bitch got away again. She either has a teleport or invisibility ability. Thankfully none of the former daughters are with her anymore. Let’s get through whatever is about to happen first, and we can talk. But we can’t talk if you just jump down the stairs five days early.

Carl: I’ll let Donut decide, but I am going to try to talk her into it. Mordecai thinks it’s a good idea, too.

I swallowed and looked down at Donut, who was still cradled in my arms. We trudged toward a large dryad settlement, but we wouldn’t get there before sundown. I knew this town was already conquered by some other crawlers I didn’t know. There’d been some quest and boss battle there a few days back, and now a stairwell sat in the middle of the town. Kiwi and Mongo, having fully recovered, walked alongside us.

The sun would set in five minutes, but the woods here were pitch black. Donut had not cast her light spell, and I hadn’t asked. We hadn’t bothered attempting to kill any more of the monsters. Those two Odious Creepers we were worried about remained, and it didn’t appear as if either were going down, which meant everyone was about to lose the quest.

Prepotente had managed to kill exactly ten of the things. Louis could only get three thanks to his spell’s cooldown period. The elves and Gravy Boat—goddamned Gravy Boat—managed to kill one more. Lucia Mar made her first appearance since her fight with Donut and killed one.

One-armed Quan Ch, whom I hadn’t even thought about in ages, also managed to get one. I wondered, briefly, how he was doing and if he’d managed to grow his arm back. Nobody had even reported seeing him this floor. He’d long fallen off the top ten.

My mind was elsewhere. I’d read Ikicha’s final entry into the cookbook a while ago, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it now. We’d been expecting this. Ever since our very first boss fight with the Hoarder, we knew they were reusing everything that had been collected.

Maggie had been driven to insanity at the idea of them bringing her daughter back.

Despite all of this, despite mentally preparing myself for this for weeks now, it was still such an unexpected gut punch.

And this was just the neighbor’s cat. What was it going to be like when they started parading actual loved ones out?

I was lucky in this, I knew. I thought of my father. I had no idea if he was even alive before the collapse. What would that do to me? If he was alive at the time, certainly he would’ve been caught up in the collapse. It was only a matter of time before they brought him here.

Still, it was nothing compared to others. I knew Imani had a big family, for example. Katia had people, too.

I thought of Odette, and what she’d done with Bea. Motivations aside, it’d been a mercy. I thought of what could’ve been. Of Queen Imogen turning out to be Bea with Gravy Boat on her shoulder. That’s what they’d wanted, I knew.

“Hey,” I said to Donut. “We need to talk.”

“We’re not going down the stairs early, Carl,” Donut said, looking up at me. “It’s not even a discussion.”

I stopped dead in the woods. Both Mongo and Kiwi had their heads up, sniffing at the air.

“Who ratted me out? Was it Katia? Or Mordecai?”

“It was Imani and Louis, actually. Separately. But Katia is talking to me, too. I appreciate what you’re attempting to do for me, Carl, but it is of no worry.” She cleared her throat, twisted in my grip, and jumped to my shoulder. She sat stiffly, attempting to compose herself. I could feel how tense she was. “Ferdinand may have been my first love, but I am a mother now, and I have more important responsibilities. Mongo needs me, and if I am going to pursue a singing career, I can’t be tied down or all emotional because my ex-boyfriend is suddenly trying to get back into the picture. I admit, it did surprise me. But I am over it now. If anything, I see it as a good thing. If Taylor Swift or Adele can profit off of heartache, I’m quite certain I can as well. It’ll make for a good song.”

Our view counter remained buried all the way at the top.

I sighed. “Donut,” I said.

“Oh quit looking so concerned, Carl. I’m fine. And you’re not going to abandon the others, anyway. I know you.”

You have received a Gold Benefactor Box from The Open Intellect Pacifist Action Network, Intergalactic NFC.

“Oh shit, I just got another benefactor box,” I said.

“Really?” Donut said, finally perking up, for real this time. “Was it from the Plenty? I can’t imagine they still have a budget left over after what they just did for Prepotente. Though I suppose that investment did pay off. Did he really go up ten levels? Plus fifty stat points plus another thirty from the levels themselves.” Donut gasped. “Carl, do you think he’s going to kick you off the top spot?”

Kiwi squawked. Donut finally cast Light, and the rainy woods lit up all around us. She lifted the flaming, magical light ball into the air, and it acted like a miniature sun, illuminating the area around like a stadium light.

“Uh oh,” Donut said. “The other dinosaurs are coming back. She’s with them.”

It took me a second to realize who “she” was. The woods ahead trembled. A tree cracked, and fell over. Kiwi cried with a low, joyful peep and rushed forward. Mongo held back. Velociraptors appeared all around us, entering the light.

“Uh, Carl,” Donut said. “Her dot is still red on the map.”

“Get ready,” I said as two trees cracked and split. The ground shook. The other dinos all stood back, as if they were also curious about what was going to happen.

The trees parted, and Tina entered.

“That’s not something you see every day,” I muttered as the enormous, ballerina dinosaur stamped into the clearing, blood oozing from her maw like sticky drool.

Mongo made a terrified noise and shrunk back as Donut and I stared up in awe. The monster stood at least 15-feet tall and was two and a half times that in length.

Twin, reptilian eyes focused on us, shining in the light like angry, glass marbles. She roared again, revealing a massive mouth filled with hundreds of sharp teeth. The sound was deep and terrifying.

She was an allosaurus. I was never a dinosaur guy, so I didn’t really know what that meant. She looked like a T-rex to me. I remembered that ursine kid had said she had three fingers instead of two. Or something. Right now, however, I wasn’t too concerned with the number of fingers on the thing.

Tina came as advertised. She was not feathered like most of the dinosaurs on this floor. She had a more traditional, lizard-like appearance. Her thick, alligator-like skin was something between green and dusty brown, with little ridged bumps up and down her long body along with pronounced humps over her eyes, almost like horns. A battered and aged, pink tiara sat cockeyed upon her head, nestled behind the ridges over her eyes. The tiara was clearly a part of her physically, grown into her skin.

A bloody and almost-bare, snake-like, feather boa hung limply around her neck. Even as she took another step toward us, a few feathers drifted off, catching in the rain and plummeting to the ground.

I found myself wondering if the boa feathers grew back. Surely the damn thing would be bald by now.

A pink, blood-soaked tutu skirt was attached around the dinosaur’s midriff. Like the tiara, the giant ruffle seemed to be a part of the creature.

Clutched into the creature’s giant, three-fingered claw was a wand with a little star at the end. It glowed faintly red, pulsing. I knew what that meant. It was a broken magical item. It wasn’t out of charges. It was broken. What had Prudence said about the wand? That it supposedly shot magic sparkles? It couldn’t have been anything too dangerous. She’d been given it as a prop for a ballet recital.

Tina followed up her roar with a guttural, angry noise, almost like a barking dog. This time it was clear who the focus of her anger was.

“Carl, she’s roaring at Mongo! Why is everyone trying to hurt Mongo all of a sudden?”

I took a step back as I examined the angry monster.

I grunted. “Maybe she’s mad that Mongo banged her mom.”

“That’s not funny, Carl.”

Big Tina – Allosaurus.

Level 80 City Boss.

This mob is Immortalized.

The nine-tier attack shattered the realm. The Over City was devastated. The residents of the Hunting Grounds were transmuted. (All except the High Elves. You should probably ask them about that.) The Semeru Dwarves of the city of Larracos lost everything they’d been working for. Even the celestials and their downstairs neighbors in Sheol found their destinies forever altered that horrible day.

When Big Things happen on such a large scale, it’s easy to forget sometimes that these Big Things are also happening to the little things in the world, too.

Tina was always a meek child, at least in appearance. Her father was a cleric who only saw young Tina for what she was supposed to be, and her mother, while fiercely protective of the child, only saw herself in those big, brown eyes that were always tearing up, or staring out the window, or just watching, watching, watching.

The day Kiwi the ursine discovered her child’s affinity for dance, however, she finally understood what she’d been doing wrong. She saw something too many parents miss. This petite, timid child wasn’t a reflection of herself. She was something much more wonderous. She was an unwritten story, one that could end up anywhere. A story where neither of the parents were the main character.

Kiwi pledged to help Tina realize her dream.

The story of what happened to little Tina the day of the recital has already been told and doesn’t need to be repeated here.

Tina’s time as an allosaurus—and briefly—as an undead-in-training vampiric monstrosity has been an education that not many receive. She barely remembers who she used to be. She barely understands that the persistent group of dinosaurs who follow her around are all the mothers from her village.

She does, however, remember the horror and loss she felt when she realized everything she’d been working for wasn’t going to happen. She also remembers that first spark of rage she felt when she watched her father beat her mother. That spark of helpless, impotent rage has done nothing but grow over the past few centuries.

That rage ain’t so impotent anymore.

Tina’s story is not yet done. Or maybe it is, if you have the balls to try to fight a murderous allosaurus protected by thirty-plus raptors. Or perhaps you might try to reawaken the child within her, and give her what she wants.

“She’s a lot like Bonnie the gnome,” I said.

“I was thinking of someone else,” Donut said. “But I was right. We need to hold a dance recital for her!”

“Or kill her,” I said. Tina continued to growl, but she wasn’t moving toward us.

“Carl, we can’t kill her! She’s Kiwi’s daughter! This is Footloose, not one of your Rambo movies.”

“This is nothing like Footloose, Donut.”

“It’s nothing like Rambo, either,” she said.

“I’m not the one who said that. You are!”

“Exactly, Carl.”

I took a deep breath. “First we to need to keep her from eating Mongo. Where the hell did Kiwi go?”

As if summoned, Kiwi appeared from behind Tina. She’d been walking around the dinosaur, looking her up and down to make sure she was okay. She looked at us and screeched. Mongo screeched back. Tina growled again and took another step.

“Kiwi,” Donut called. “I must insist that you control your child. There’s nothing worse than a parent who can’t control their...”

The world froze, cutting Donut off.

Oh yeah, I thought. The creeper quest. I’d almost forgotten. The appearance of giant dinosaurs could do that.

Please wait. Loading...

My HUD blinked twice, paused, then it flickered a third time. For the briefest moment, I felt a strange, rushing sensation, but it cleared away almost immediately, as if nothing had happened.

But then I noticed a new bar in my vision, underneath my health and mana. Mine was filled all the way to the right. What the hell is that?

Sorry for the delay. You may resume normal activities.

The world remained frozen.

Quest Failed. The Creeping Apocalypse.

Holy shit. You idiots.

I warned you. I promised batshit consequences for failing one of the easiest world quests ever.

Here we go, bitches!

I can’t help but notice the two remaining Odious Creepers happen to be where only the hunters could conceivably reach them. That’s where this is going to start. You hunter guys holed up in Zockau are so fucked.

All of you may notice there’s a new status bar in your interface. There’s an official name for this thing, but I like to call it the blood bar. Effective immediately and for the remainder of this floor, all saferoom access—and this includes personal space access—is operated under tenth floor and below rules.

Oh shit, I thought. I knew what that meant, but only because of the cookbook.

For those of you that don’t know what that means, here’s a quick lesson. You gotta earn your keep. This is an action-themed program, after all. Not some sappy drama where everyone just cries and masturbates all day long. I’m looking at you, Hunter Veeka.

All saferoom access is now timed for all hunters and crawlers. The moment you enter a safe area, your blood bar starts to count down. When it’s full, you are given ten earth hours to be layabouts. If it reaches zero while you’re still tucked away, you get randomly teleported to location outside of the saferoom. If it’s at zero, you cannot enter a saferoom at all, including guildhalls or locations that double as pubs.

You fill the blood bar by killing shit. It’s simple, really. If you’ve been doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, this particular change shouldn’t bother you.

That’s the change to the rules, but that’s not the punishment ya’ll are receiving for failing the quest.

Gird your loins. This is a good one.

Starting with the location of the two remaining Odious Creepers, the spell Gehenna Bramble has been cast. This will spread outward at the average speed of four and a half kilometers per hour. Faster at night, slower in the sun.

If you’re not familiar with the spell, here’s a quick rundown. Every plant touched with the spell is transformed into a thick, impenetrable, ten-meter-high wall of thorn-covered vines that will undulate and thrust and attack. If you are pricked by the thorns, your blood immediately boils away, and you are transformed into bloodthirsty demon. Or you explode. It can go either way.

This spell cannot be countered. The plant cannot be poisoned and killed. The brambles can be beaten back, but they are relentless. They will not come within five square meters of a stairwell, but everything else will be encompassed, including towns and buildings and everything that’s not a saferoom.

And it starts right now.

Oh, one last thing I forgot to mention regarding the saferoom rule. The filling of the blood bar is retroactive. That means if you haven’t killed anything at all on this floor, your bar is empty. Head’s up!

Good luck. And just remember, you brought this onto yourselves.

Zap. Twenty feet to our left in the woods, a creature appeared. He fell, as if in slow motion. Despite the slow speed, they crashed heavily into the ground. I saw the purple dot of a hunter, but before I could examine who it was, they were set upon by three velociraptors.

“Stop!” I cried. “Donut, get Kiwi to stop them!”

“Kiwi!” Donut shouted, pointing.

Kiwi made the dinosaur equivalent of an exasperated “do I have to do everything?” screech and leaped through the air, landing in the midst of the crying hunter. She hissed, and the three dinosaurs backed off. One, however, had a long, thin and severed leg in its mouth.

At that same moment, Tina took another step toward us, growling and waving her wand ineffectively. Even in the rain, I could smell her. The stench of rotting meat and garbage hung off of her. Kiwi shouted angrily at Tina, and the massive dinosaur cocked its head to the side, looking at its mother. A group of six raptors put themselves between us and Tina.

Tina started to make a quick and fast whimpering noise, like an upset puppy.

Kiwi roared again, this time louder.

Tina started jumping up and down, making little hops that rattled my teeth each time she landed. Holy shit, I thought. She’s throwing a temper tantrum because she’s not allowed to eat us.

Mordecai: Gehenna vines are dangerous. Stay away from them. But if you do get close, chop a few brambles off and save them. The toxin is a very valuable. Don’t touch the thorns.

Carl: Not now.

“Uh,” I said, eying the giant dino who continued to wail. “Let’s go check out this hunter guy.”

We left Tina whimpering in the clearing as we approached the fallen hunter, who continued to cry on the ground. As we approached, I saw his health bar move back all the way to the top.

Hunter Iota – Crafter. Level 50. Coin Tinker.

The Crafter Alliance.

“Oh crap. Oh shit,” the creature said, trying to crawl away from me, despite there being nowhere to go. A pool of blood ran in little streams through the foliage before disappearing into the mud. Denied the chance to eat him, the surrounding raptors started lapping up the blood.

The guy had already healed himself, but his leg was gone, severed off above the knee.

So this was a crafter. I hadn’t seen these guys yet. Their group was supposedly hunting Elle and Eva. I knew Elle and the rest of Meadow Lark had one skirmish early on, but they’d been mostly left alone after that because they were traveling in such a large group. I hadn’t heard of anybody fighting these guys since.

This guy looked a lot like a common soother, only uglier and hairier. Tall and thin with wide, bug eyes and pale skin, but where the soothers had a big, domed head, this guy’s head had two distinct humps, almost like a drawing of a heart. His skin was also less smooth than the standard soother. It looked weathered and wrinkled, like how a regular person’s skin would look after a lifetime in the sun, only much paler and covered with veins. His eyes were bigger, too, and he had little black, coarse hairs on his head and bare arms.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he had what I assumed was a line of little, red nipples down the center of his chest. Four of them in a straight, vertical line. Each one was pierced with a glowing, metallic loop, descending in size. The top ring was wide enough to stick my fist through, and the last was only wide enough for my finger.

I only knew a little about these guys. They joined the hunt a lot, but they were not rich enough to participate in faction wars. They were subterranean dwellers on their home planet. Were generally considered barbarian meatheads who actually looked forward to the idea of death. Out in the real world, some of the universe’s most popular alcohol and recreational, not-quite-legal pharmaceuticals were said to originate from their system.

“Fucking hell, man,” the guy said as I stood over him, Donut on my shoulder. He had the drawl of someone who’d been drinking for hours straight. “How’d I even get here? I’m straight fucked, aren’t I? I don’t even know what happened.”

“You were teleported out of the saferoom because you hadn’t killed anything,” I said. I put my foot on his chest, holding him down. My big toe brushed the first of his four nipple rings, and it was warm to the touch. “They changed the rules,” I said. I pressed down, but not enough to do damage.

He grunted with pained amusement, which was not the reaction I was expecting.

“I told them. I fookin’ told ‘em this would happen. It’s going primal.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Donut: CARL, YOU’RE DOING IT AGAIN. KILL HIM NOW. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO SAYS IT’S TOO DANGEROUS TO KEEP THEM ALIVE.

She was right, but we really needed information. “Explain. And if you pull anything, I’ll crush your chest.”

He grunted. “Like you ain’t gonna kill me anyway.”

I stuck my big toe through the loop of the top nipple ring, and I savagely yanked it out of his chest. He cried out in pain as a little spurt of blood shot up. The blood was red, human like.

“Tits, man,” the guy said, reaching up. “Fookin’ ouch!”

“Explain,” I repeated. I poured a healing potion onto his face. He sputtered, but it was enough to bring him back to 100%.

“Shit, you’re crazier than Vrah. You know that? Some of the families sued to let people out. Said with the regime change, the contract should be nullified. These environmental dangers ain’t supposed to affect us like this. That mantis bitch was the one who sued. Trying to save her daughter. They just told us that the court ruled in our favor, and we could leave if we wanted. We was all at the bar, drinking and celebrating we could get out of this clustershit.”

“What happened to your shirt?” Donut asked.

He grunted. “Them Shilai ladies. They know how to party.” He looked down at his leg. The stump poked out from his torn, brown pants. Just past that, two raptors fought over the remains of his leg. “Where d’hell is my leg?”

Kiwi had moved off and was back in front of Tina, barking up at her, who continued to cry and wave her wand angrily at her mother. The allosaurus continued to angrily bounce up and down. The ground shook like a train moving by.

“I got bad news for you, buddy. I don’t think you’ll be going home,” I said.

Donut: CARL ARE YOU OKAY? YOU’RE ACTING WEIRD.

“No likely,” he agreed. “I warned them. This is all the Mantis’s fault. Rumor is when they sold the mudskippers the AI they using for the crawl, they gave them a used one. After their incident a few cycles back, they had to make a new one for their amusement park. And the mudskippers ain’t had enough money for shit. So they using something already damaged for a real crawl. It’s no damn wonder it’s going primal this early. I said to my mate, ‘We are in a world o’ shit if there’s another lawsuit it don’t take kindly to.’ And look what happened.”

I shook my head. That was a lot to take in. “What did happen?”

“We got a notification that the judgement was nullified by the authority of some long law. The notification was like five paragraphs long. Basically it was saying it’s making its own rules now, and it’s going to finish the crawl and we were stuck here until the floor was over. Then we could go home.”

Holy shit. “What are they going to do about that? They’re just going to let the AI do what it wants?”

He laughed “They? You mean the council? They ain’t gonna do shit. Of course they gonna let the AI do what it wants. What’s the alternative? Shut it down and lose out on all this money? You can’t just replace an AI. This always happens, but it’s usually after the tenth floor. They got rules in place for when it happens. The showrunners step back. Everything keeps running. The AI usually follows its own rules, for a while at least. It just don’t like others telling it what to do. Them assholes partying it up at Club Scolopendra on the 18th level all got their own security teams in orbit if it truly goes south, but a primal AI usually just lets them leave and take the modules when it’s all done. All in exchange for letting the AI live out a happy life afterward. Them council assholes been doing this a really long time. They know what they’re doing. Nobody ain’t gonna really get hurt except you guys, and people like me who gotta work to earn a living. Them viewers will eat it up, and Borant or whoever is holding the purse strings is still gonna make more money than all the gods combined.”

I was starting to like this guy, which was a problem.

He continued. “Like I said, it’s usually not an all or nothing thing. It’s gradual. So far, the only thing that’s changed is that the AI isn’t complying with court orders it doesn’t agree with. That’s almost always the first step. Sometimes it’s all that happens. It’s just my poor luck that it didn’t like a court ruling that would’ve saved my ass. But one thing is for certain. This AI ain’t complete stickler for the rules. It likes the drama. It likes to bend shit to make things more interesting. Some are a little more strict.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Look where I am right now, crawler. I’m supposed to be teleported off to some random place. What’re the odds that ‘random’ means right into your lap?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Look, mate,” Iota said. “Just get it over with. I’m not going to fight you. Or beg. I ain’t afraid of passing through the veil. I ain’t happy about it, but I ain’t too upset. Nope. I’m not even mad at you. I’d probably do the same thing if our roles were reversed. I’m not a hunter. Just an accountant, a broker for the other guys and their loot, but they ain’t done shit since we got here.”

“An accountant?” I asked, suddenly amused. “You’re like the third one.”

“Not surprised. There’s over thirty of us, and most of us have been sitting there just getting blitzed the whole time. It was clear from the moment you raided Zockau this was going to be different, and none of us was going to be turning a profit this season. Sorry about missing that party though, everyone’s thinking... gah!”

I didn’t let him finish. I crushed his chest in with my foot. His highest stat had been Intelligence, giving me three points.

Congratulations, Murderer.

You have leveled up the Ring of Divine Suffering. It now gives four stat points for every kill.

~

Happy holidays everyone! I just got my covid booster today, and I can already tell it's going to knock me on my ass, so I figured I'd get this out ASAP. I'm mostly done with 175, too. I only anticipate a few more chapters before we're done. With this book, at least. Be safe!