Chapter 231 (Patreon)

WAIT!
WAIT!

Have you read chapters 229 and 230 yet? They were posted the same time as this one. I had to post this one separately because it was too long.

Seriously, don't fucking read this until you read the last chapter.

Link to map: https://www.patreon.com/posts/desperado-club-76055235



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Chapter 231

Job Update

The mark is dead, my little sweets. Excellent, excellent work. We are stronger because you have fulfilled your duty. Bring her filthy body to the guild to complete the task. Remember, she who brings the body is she who gets paid.

The voice came in the hissing speech of the Night Wyrm.

I was still reeling. So, the head of the Guild of Suffering was Astrid’s brother? I supposed that was nothing new for this world, but it still bothered me. Astrid had wanted to protect him, and he’d gotten us to kill her. And who the hell were her children?

Fuck this place. Fuck everything about it.

Katia reformed into her human shape as the terrifying crow on her shoulder poofed away. Her cards were gone, and she could now function normally. The body of Astrid remained clutched in her hand like one of Bautista’s dolls. She pulled it into her inventory.

The ground shook again, followed by more screams. The guards were dead, but that Minge thing was making her way through the NPCs, yelling for Samantha, who continued to scream at the creature. I could see on my map Samantha was clearly in the casino, which had a wide, open entrance adjacent to the restaurant, but for some reason the creature wasn’t getting close.

Katia had a wild look in her eyes. “Fannar, we gotta get back up there before the club is destroyed.”

“Go upstairs and finish the quest,” I said. “Use the secret bathroom stairwell. I’m right behind you.”

“Wait... What are you doing?” Katia asked, voice filled with alarm. She blinked a few times. “Carl, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I’m trying to figure something out. Go. I’ll be up there soon. Take another invisibility potion. And leave the door open in case I have to run. It’s okay.”

She hesitated, but then disappeared again and bolted back into the kitchens. She’d only be exposed for a half second if she went toward the secret stairwell. I remained in the bar, and I jumped into my messages.

Carl: Mordecai, do you know what a vorpal is?

Mordecai: In what context?

Carl: In the context where there are a bunch of monsters called vorpals behind a hidden door in the Desperado Club and they want to unleash them as a last resort against a minor feral demon Samantha accidentally released from the Nothing.

Mordecai: Holy shit, there’s a feral demon in the Desperado? Are you serious?

Carl: Do you know or not?

Mordecai: Man, it’s been a while since I’ve seen this one. Vorpal is a condition, not a species. Like feral means it has been touched by the Nothing, vorpal means they’ve been... deputized by the gods. Or better yet, turned into suicide bombers. They can be of any race or creature, and sometimes the condition hides itself, too, until a demon is near. They’re generally celestial guards. Foot soldiers of the deities. The closer they’re to demons, the stronger and angrier they get. They can sense where the demons are and are attracted to them, and they also draw demon aggro, too. They won’t wander far once the demon is dead, but they’ll still kill anybody near them. Listen. This is important. They explode when they die. If they get let out, you’re screwed. Stay the fuck away. They’ll eventually dissipate and get transferred back to the celestial realm if they’ve been fed demon blood. Don’t ever try to fight one close up. You kill it, and everyone in the room will be dead.

I remembered all the demon traps that’d been outside their room. That hadn’t been to stop the mobs from getting out. That had been to stop demons from getting close and activating them.

Carl: So, they won’t leave this floor once released? They won’t go up to the top level?

Mordecai: Eh, probably not, unless something draws them up. But I don’t know for sure. Li Na isn’t in there with you, is she? She’s a demon race. If they smell her, they will follow her upstairs.

Carl: No.

Mordecai: Good. Get the hell out of there and let security deal with it.

“THAT’S RIGHT, BITCH!” came Minge’s scream, followed by a crash.

Samantha screeched. There was another scream, too. Joshua the bartender was still, inexplicably, alive and with her. The shout was closer than before. Samantha had fled the casino area and was coming toward me.

Suddenly, one of the demon’s thin arms reached into the bar, and I had to jump back, falling backward into the kitchens. The kitchen staff NPCs were still in here, still huddled in the back against a group of doors.

I dived behind a station with a pair of smoking burners. I opened my inventory, moving to my automaton menu. I started pulling a few of my spider robots out. I’d been saving them for an emergency. One utility spider and three anti-undead ones I’d started working on when we’d been stuck in the ghommid village.

Demons weren’t undead, but several of the attacks that worked against undead were also effective against them.

The elf NPCs all stared at me, wide-eyed.

“You can’t stay here. Go into the offices,” I yelled.

“We can’t!” one of the elves cried. It was a line cook. He wore an apron spattered with blood. “The managers went in there and locked the doors!”

Crashing came from the badger bar. Another arm reached through the double doors, grasping blindly. It caught the edge of one of the doors and pulled, ripping it away. A large chunk of wall went with it. She was destroying the whole damn club. I took a hobgoblin smoke curtain and rolled it toward the restaurant. Minge started shrieking anew.

“There’s a stairwell in the last stall in the women’s bathroom,” I said, talking quickly, pointing. “The door is open. Go up there. It’ll take you to the top level, or you can go down if it lets you. Run before it reaches in again.”

They all just looked at me.

“Go!”

They ran.

As they fled, narrowly avoiding a grasping hand, Samantha burst into the kitchens from the side door. She was floating, high against the ceiling. She zoomed into the room, grunt-panting like a dog. She circled twice, and then noticed me crouching there, gawking up at her. She paused and did a little hair flip, like she was suddenly trying to act casual.

“Oh, hi Carl,” she said. “So, this place is really fun even though the casino is out of order. Did we do the assassination yet? Also, the music stopped. Can you start it up again?”

“What the actual fuck, Samantha! Let him go!”

“Who?”

Joshua the bartender dangled helpless below Samantha, his legs pumping as he tried to free himself. His right arm was shoulder-deep in the ragged bottom of her neck hole. Like, too deep. She’d either lopped his arm off and was somehow clutching onto his stump, or there was a deepness there that hadn’t been present before.

The “flesh” at the bottom of her neck had the consistency of uneven latex, like a soft children’s toy that had been ripped in half. There was no real hole there, but I had once hidden an unopened potion in the soft, pliable material. It’d slurped in easily, like I was pushing it into silly puddy. She’d recently started storing things in there, like sunglasses and shiny rocks she’d found. Before we’d gone into the club today, I’d given her 100 gold to drink at the bar, and she’d excitedly sucked it up. I hadn’t realized the hole was... deeper on the inside.

“Who?” I asked as I returned my attention to the automatons. “The fucking bartender. Let him go!”

There was more screaming outside. The monster’s arms had found some shop or door and had gotten more NPCs. There was another crash as part of the ceiling above us sagged, like the supports for the whole club were starting to fail. Dust cascaded into the room.

“PSAMATHE WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GO? I PLUGGED THE HOLE IN THE CASINO AND YOU RAN LIKE A LITTLE BITCH. I WILL TEAR THIS WHOLE PLACE DOWN.”

The smoke curtain out in the main room would soon dissipate, and I had to get this done. Midge would send her arms in here at any moment. I put the demon snare onto the trap slot of the first robot. I double-checked the spider’s yield and upped it using the menu.

“Oh, him? We’re on a date. His arm got stuck. I’m practicing my Kegels.”

“What? What the hell? Let him go!”

“Donut taught me about them. She said she learned about them from your ex-girlfriend who cheated on you a lot. You really shouldn’t let your women cheat on you, Carl. It’s a bad look.”

“Help. Please help me,” Joshua the badger said. “It’s burning.”

“Samantha. You’ve kidnapped him. Let him go. He’s scared.”

“Fear is a powerful aphrodisiac, Carl.”

I had a simple but highly-programmable door-opening bot from Dr. Ratchet’s automaton kit, and I pulled off the quick-release door arm, added the double arm, and re-attached the grasping claw and added the heavy-duty magnet, which would allow it to work more quickly. I put my hand on the machine, pulled up my menu, clicked the location, and added the instructions, giving it a sixty-second delay once it reached the wall. I sent the machine on the way. It would go down that hidden hallway, hopefully not set off any of the remaining NPC-only traps, and then dismantle the wall bracers I installed, unleashing the vorpals. It would take a few minutes to get through the sand bags. I was going to be back on the top floor before that happened. Hopefully.

I added another, specialized smoke curtain to the third and fourth bots, and then I sent them along with the trap bot out the main door. They skittered into the smoke, happily clicking like they didn’t have a care in the world.

Katia: Carl, we did it. I have the orchid.

Job Complete.

I have more work for you. Yes, yes, there is always more. Come to me, and we will spread our family’s power.

Relief flooded me.

“I didn’t kidnap him!” Samantha said, sounding offended.

She zipped toward the now-missing kitchen doors. Joshua trailed under her, crying. Samantha’s voice rose in volume as she shouted out into the smoke, “You stink like a marsh hog with an uncontrollable yeast infection! You smell worse than your maggot-infested, semen-stained corpse of a sister!”

“GOT YOU!” Minge bellowed as an arm shot into the kitchen and grasped onto Joshua’s chest.

“No, no, no!” Joshua cried as Samantha started squealing in outrage. She zipped away, moving back toward me.

And thus ended Samantha’s short courtship with Joshua Ellis the porsuk. The badger man ripped in half, spraying the kitchen with blood. All that was left hanging was the shoulder, neck, and head of the very-dead, very unlucky bartender.

“YOU KILLED MY BOYFRIEND!” Samantha shrieked.

Another arm reached into the room, grasping for the floating head. Samantha zipped out of the way. The arm shot over me, hit a door in the back of the room, and ripped it open. A shriek filled the chamber as a dwarf—one of the kitchen managers—was pulled into the restaurant.

Samantha made a grunting noise, and the rest of poor Joshua plopped out and onto the floor with a wet splash. The part that had been inside Samantha was black and melted, like it had been half burned with acid. His hand was nothing but white bone, the individual pieces scattering like rolled dice when they hit the counter. A few shiny gold coins also dropped out, tinkling as they rolled away.

From the restaurant came a crunch followed by, “YOU’RE NEXT, SKANK. Gahhhh!”

All three of the automatons had reached the body of Minge and activated. The demon squealed in pain.

With a demon as large as Minge, the snare trap going off next to her was the equivalent of using a mouse trap to catch an elephant. The snare would supposedly attach the demon in place, trapping them. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. Since the snare was affixed to the top of the spider automaton, it had the effect of attaching the spider to the demon’s bulk. The spider then detonated, splashing the demon with blood water from Emberus’s shrine.

At the same moment, the other two spiders set off their holy-water-infused smoke curtains, filling the room with burning. blinding fog. In ten seconds, the spiders themselves would also detonate, adding more holy water to the room.

Minge, at level 225, wasn’t going to be really injured by any of this, but it would probably hurt like hell. It caused her to shrink back. This was our chance. We had to get upstairs.

I jumped up and bolted for the exit. “Run! Samantha, on me!” I leaped over the bodies, my feet sliding on gore.

“I’m still having a tussle! She killed Joshie!”

“I swear to fucking god, come on! We’re going up to the top floor. To the strip club!”

I didn’t wait to hear her response. I figured that’d entice her, and if not... She’d probably be okay, assuming that thing didn’t actually eat her.

I went out the door, pausing long enough to look at Minge one last time. She remained planted in the center of the room, her arms twisted around her like thorns. She’d managed to reach into this floor’s version of the silk road and had several merchants in her hands as she waved about. She had a health bar, but it didn’t look like she’d lost any damage.

The club was absolutely trashed. There was a literal hole in the high ceiling, and the casino area was on fire. Jesus. Almost every door I could see was gone. Dozens of bodies littered the room.

I rushed down the hall toward the rest rooms, and I was surprised to find a small queue of NPCs trying to get into the stall. A pair of crocodilian guards were helping people get away. One was one of the guys who’d been hit by the last teleport spell, shooting him up to the top floor.

He’d been ready to sacrifice himself. He’d been sent into that hallway to open the vorpal door, likely knowing those things would kill him. But instead he’d been teleported away to safety. Now he was helping the others.

He grabbed my shoulder as I pushed into the bathroom stall. His tuxedo hung in tatters around him.

“Hey,” he said. “Have you seen Miss Astrid?”

“She’s dead,” I said, and I pushed my way into the stairs, mixed in with the scared and panicked NPCs. All of them were moving up, not down to the Larracos level. I didn’t know if that was because they couldn’t. Most of these guys had come from the secret areas of the club, I knew, including the drug den where Katia had gotten herself fucked up. I wondered how many were real NPCs and how many were former crawlers. I tried not to think about it.

Your Automaton has been destroyed before it can complete its assigned task.

Shit, I thought. Something had happened. But then I heard it, a chorus of shrieks. It sounded like screaming mixed with buzzsaws. They’d gotten out. Likely having broken down the door once the spider robot had cleared most of it away.

“Run! Fooking run!” the crocodilian called from the bottom of the thin stairwell. “They’s coming! They worse than the demons.”

“Move! Move out of the way!” came Samantha’s voice as she zipped into the tight, hidden stairwell. She came to hover next to me. She was covered in dripping gore.

“I hate it when the clubs get so busy,” she said. She shook her head like a dog, splattering gore onto a gnome I recognized as the proprietor of the jewelry shop. The older man sputtered but kept moving.

“Samantha, how the hell did that thing get out of the Nothing?” I asked, breathless as we reached the top of the stairs. We pushed our way out into the women’s room of the top level. A group of the elves from the kitchens were there, directing people. I pushed past them and out.

“I don’t know,” Samantha said, following. She was hovering off the ground, not rolling. “I saw the table with the knife game, and the guards were chasing me because I had my ex-boyfriend with me, and somebody lost the game at the same moment, and the guy got pulled into the Nothing, but when it opened, it tore and Minge came out. She’s Slit’s little sister. We used to be friends. It’s sad, really.”

The abandoned dance floor didn’t have a hole in it, but there was a crater. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Most everyone was headed toward the Silk Road. I knew there was a secret hall back there leading to dorm areas for NPCs. It was where they were going to shelter.

“I’m just glad it wasn’t Gash,” Samantha continued. “She’s the mean one. The hole stayed open and was sucking everybody away, too, and Minge pulled herself into the restaurant because she’s a dumb bitch. It didn’t pull me in though. Oh boy, is this the Penis Parade Donut’s always talking about? Is Anaconda working tonight?”

I pushed my way into the room to find an unexpected sight. It was completely packed. The music was off. I shouldered my way, deeper inside, looking for Katia.

I found Damascus Steel, sitting on the floor, sobbing. The older, stoic ifrit had his face in his hands as sizzling tears peppered the floor around him. The other one Donut liked, the purple-skinned, quarter naga named Anaconda was also weeping controllably. All the dancers and customers and that weird, skeleton DJ guy stood around them. Splash Zone, the little lizard stripper guy rubbed Anaconda’s back while Dong Quixote tried to give Damascus a cup of water.

But there were more people in here, too. The strippers from the Bitches room were all huddled with the men. They were of all shapes and sizes, all with equally-ridiculous names like the male dancers. Almost all their names were alliterations. There was a dwarf named Patty Pump-It-Up and a hairy bugbear lady with a blonde wig named Darla No-Dentures.

Another group of male and female strippers stood off to the side, all looking shell shocked. This group was covered in gore, and I realized they must have escaped from the middle floor. These were the dancers from the Penis Palace. The female strip club and brothel on the middle floor was named “Girls of Ill Refute.” Not repute with a P. These women were much better dressed than the women from Bitches. Or they had been better dressed before they’d had to endure that nightmare.

Katia cried out and rushed up to me, pulling me into a tight hug. She held me while we talked over message.

Katia: Oh my god, Carl. We did it. We won the quest, and the box opened. I have the orchid in my inventory. Huanxin messaged me. She said you just need to do one more thing, and then we’ll be safe. Do you know what it is?

I needed to make certain Odette became our adjutant. I was about to go on her show.

Carl: I do. It’ll happen in a few hours. When are you going to eat it?

When Katia ate the orchid, she would get transferred away to the 12th floor and temporarily turned to an NPC.

Katia: I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that worked. I can’t abandon my squad. I won’t eat it until we get down to the ninth.

Carl: What the hell is wrong with those stripper guys? Why are they crying?

Katia: I’m not sure. They somehow found out Astrid is dead, and they both started weeping. We better not tell them we did it, but Damascus is in that guild, so surely he’ll figure it out. I think he liked her.

Samantha had settled next to one of the male strippers, the troll bizarrely named Author Steve Rowland. She was chatting away with him amiably, telling him she still had some money left.

The whole club shook. The main stage suddenly plummeted away, and a Minge arm reached into the room as people screamed and scattered. But then the arm pulled away. A screaming, buzzsaw like sound emanated through the hall. A spray of yellow fluid shot into the air through the hole in the floor as Minge the demon screamed in pain.

It was the sound of her being killed by the vorpals. She cried in pain as more yellow liquid spewed into the room from below.

“PSAMATHE,” Minge shouted as she died. “WE’LL GET YOU. WE’LL GET YOU SOON!”

Samantha was suddenly next to me. “Carl,” she said. “We need to go clubbing more often! This place is great!”

By the way, you ever wonder what the Big Boi mob looks like? That's where Carl's boxers come from. (The Enchanted Big Boi boxers.) Well, wonder no more!