Chapters 236 and 237 (Patreon)

Part II

The Father.

Chapter 236

Entering Monroe County, Florida.

It is December 24th.

Time Until Level Collapse: 6 days, 22 hours.

The Key location has been marked on your map.

You have 46 hours remaining to collect your key.

“Monroe County?” I muttered as I appeared in the dark, old house. The room was lit by Donut’s Torch spell, and it gave the room a ghastly appearance, like sallow skin. The dead corpse of Robert the Human remained there across the room as Mongo gleefully pulled him apart. Blood splattered as the dinosaur dove into the corpse like a pig at a trough, making loud crunching noises. There was a door leading off to a safe area, another leading outside. A third door led to a restroom.

“Carl, Carl, it’s broken!” Donut cried. “The game broke, and we won’t be able to get a key!”

She now wore the sailor hat on her head, and it looked ridiculous on her. She jumped up and down, her tail straight up. She ran up to me and started weaving in and out of my legs like she used to do when I came home from work.

“Okay. Calm down. Tell me what you mean.”

She took a breath. “It only gave us a few choices of places to go, but they all had labels on them. One of them was Iowa! Another was the Bahamas and another was Ibiza. It said one of them is Miami, and I picked that one, but then I got a message that said there was a problem with the location, and it was sending us to Iowa instead! But I got here, we were in the house, and we’re in the Miami area, but we’re at the bottom of the map. We’re really in the Florida Keys! The area is big, bigger than we have in Cuba. But it was quite strange because the location thingy said Iowa when I first appeared.”

“Really? It said we were actually in Iowa? That is really weird. It said Florida for me.”

When we’d gone on Shadow Boxer, Rosetta gave us two secret messages. One was about the yam. But the other was when they’d shown Donut the different television shows on the screen. Every single one was a program set in Miami. I had no idea why they would want us here specifically, but they’d gone to a lot of trouble to give us the message. It was something only a person who was obsessed with television would notice. I hadn’t noticed it.

I’d never been to Florida, let alone the Keys. Nor had I ever been to Iowa. I moved to the window and looked outside. It was the middle of the night, but I could see the distinctive form of a palm tree. Plus it was warm. There was no way this was the American Midwest in December. If this was somewhere in the Keys, we weren’t actually that far from our original location in Cuba.

Why would they say it was Iowa, then?

“Carl, look at the map. They said the key location is marked! But the key is still in Iowa!”

“Oh, fuck me.”

I pulled up the map. Sure enough, we were at the very southern tip of Florida. The distinctive island shapes were clear, and we were plopped right in the middle. I zoomed out as much as I could, and I didn’t see the marker at all.

I started to form a message to Zev to bitch, but I paused at the notification.

Please wait.

There was a pause and a flash, and the ground rumbled with a small earthquake. The map rearranged itself. The key was suddenly there, only a handful of miles west from our current location.

Thank you for your patience. You may resume normal activity.

I relaxed.

“It looks like it was a glitch, but it fixed itself.”

“I don’t like glitches, Carl. They make me nervous. Oh, oh, but do you see that dead guy?”

Mongo was grunting happily as he pulled out a line of intestine.

“He’s a little hard to miss, Donut.”

“The fight was really short! Mongo killed him before it even started. He only had two totems, and they were both stuffed animals. A person and a disgusting toy dog. It was quite an easy fight.”

“Good job.”

Donut continued to bounce up and down as I examined the house. It was just an old, Victorian-style, mini-mansion from the 19th century with creaking, wood floors. There was light switch, and I flipped it. It worked, and the room lit up. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, but it didn’t appear as if anyone was living here. The tree itself was generic, with only blue and silver ornaments and no lights. I could smell and hear the ocean.

Donut was talking rapid-fire, like she did when she had too much energy. “The fight was scary! His deck wasn’t very good except for a few cards. He had three consumable mystics that keep the opponent from playing a card. It makes them pause for fifteen seconds! I got them all before he could use them. Isn’t that great?”

“Actually, that is good.” 

“Mongo chomped him before he could play any good cards. It was quite spectacular.”

We only had two days to get the key. That seemed easy. Too easy, which meant it was going to be an epic pain. No time to rest. We had to get moving even though it was the middle of the night.

I had a few blinking notifications, and I pulled them up now. The first was from Emberus.

Quest Update. Find out Who Killed my Son.

It appears the primordial goddess Nekhebit has returned to the halls. She holds an ancient grudge against my family, especially Apito. Find a temple of Nekhebit and question the priestess, see what she knows. Do not be gentle.

I waved that one away. It was a headache for tomorrow, if we made it that far. My heart stopped in my throat as I pulled up the next message. This is what I was looking for. It was a note from Huanxin, using the spider quest chat.

Eileithyia: I watched your performance. I am not one to be forgiving of failure, but I acknowledge this was out of your control. Odette did not ask to be your adjutant like I told you she would. This is my fault. I shall honor our agreement, but if it becomes clear that you’d warned Odette about our understanding, I shall crush everyone you know and love, starting with sweet Katia and ending with that cat.

I let out a long stream of breath. Relief flooded me.

Quest Complete. Spiders.

Proceed to a temple of Eileithyia to receive your boon.

“Carl, Carl, we finished the spider quest!”

“I see that, Donut.”

“Well, that was the easiest quest ever. We barely did anything.”

But then Donut started to grumble when she saw we had to go to a temple to collect our reward. With her unable to access Club Vanquisher, that would be difficult. I doubted we would be getting anything anyway, as the whole quest had been so Huanxin could send me messages through Eileithyia. Since she didn’t need us anymore, we’d been cut loose. That was okay.

But now I was more worried than ever about sending Katia off to the 12th floor.

Carl: Katia. We should be good. But we gotta talk.

Katia: Can’t right now. Things got messed up during the selection. They only gave me one choice. Ukraine, but when I got here, it was actually Vietnam.

Carl: That seems to be going around. Ping me when you’re safe.

I moved to the door to the outside to take a better peek at where we were.

Zev: Donut, Carl. I apologize for that glitch. I know in the coming hours it’s going to look intentional. Believe me, it was not. At least not on our end. Things are just hectic. You should have only received three choices for a new location. One chosen by us, one by the AI, and one randomly selected spot. You received four, and we don’t know why. It wasn’t just you guys. Some crawlers had four choices. Some only had one. A few didn’t have any at all, and one squad leader had the whole globe to choose and dropped herself into the middle of the ocean for some reason. We’re still scrambling to fix it all. Talk soon.

Donut: I’M JUST GLAD IT DIDN’T KEEP US IN IOWA. DO I LOOK LIKE SOMEONE WHO WOULD VOLUNTARILY VISIT IOWA? THAT’S ALMOST AS BAD AS DELAWARE.

Zev: Uh, yeah. Maybe you should look outside when dawn comes. We’ve had to fudge a few things to keep from breaking the game.

“There’s nothing wrong with Iowa, Donut,” I said as I pulled open the door. “You’ve never even been there.”

“I have most certainly been to Iowa. It’s cold, covered with weird billboards, and it smells like potatoes. Plus, Carl, it was where I was robbed of a purple ribbon. One doesn’t just forget such a vile insult. It’s because the judges were racist against their betters.”

“I’m pretty sure that was Idaho, not Iowa.”

“That’s practically the same thing, Carl.”

I took a step outside into the humid, night air. The temperature was similar to where we’d just left. We were on a sidewalk in some narrow beach town. A two-lane road spread before us, lit by sporadic streetlamps. There were no cars. Still, despite the late hour, the road was moderately busy. I caught sight of memory ghosts floating back and forth along the road. The fact the cars were already gone suggested this area had crawlers in it for part one of the floor. Beyond the road was beach, though I sensed it more than saw it in the dark. I knew the other side of the narrow island was pretty close behind us.

Other than the memory ghosts, I didn’t see anyone. No dots of crawlers, NPCs, or mobs anywhere on the map. All I could see was the shining marker indicating the location of the exit key a little bit to the west.

I looked in that direction and saw nothing but black.

“Donut, what level is your Torch spell?”

“It’s stuck at 14. It has been for a while now.”

“Send it up there and make it as bright as you can, will you?”

She waved her paw, and the light shot into the air and zipped away from us like a fast-moving drone. It got impressively high and then light burst forth, illuminating the entire area like a stadium.

“Holy shit,” I said, covering my eyes.

“I know, right?” Donut said. “It takes a lot of mana to keep it like this though, so I can only keep it going for a minute.”

I looked west and did a double-take. At first I thought it was some weird artifact of Donut’s spell, or the edge of the map. A sheer wall of crumbling earth stood in the distance, like a cosmic dump truck had just upended its load over the island. It was a pile of earth, climbing into the clouds. I couldn’t see the top. It reminded me of the Temple of Anser from the bubble level, only more chaotic. I was pretty sure the pile was wider than the island. Dirt cascaded off the side as I watched.

I blinked a few times, trying to figure out what I was looking at. I consulted my map. The exit key was somewhere at the top of the pile. At least I hoped it was on the top and not buried there.

Carl: Zev, did you guys just rip the key location out of the ground in Iowa and plop it here to Florida?

Zev: Not my department, Carl. But, yes. It was the only way to do it without breaking anything further.

I just shook my head.

Carl: You might want to explain to your folks about the differences in sea level. Is that thing stable? This is a cay. It’s an island built atop a reef, and half, if not most, of that pile is in the ocean. It’s going to be washed away in a day.

Zev: Yes, Carl. We’re very busy right now. We’re aware of the situation. We’ll intervene if the key location becomes inaccessible.

I took another step toward the road. Donut jumped to my shoulder as Mongo padded out behind us. His face was completely covered in gore.

“Nice dixie cup, by the way,” I said, looking up at the white sailor hat sitting cockeyed on Donut’s head. “You look like you’re in the navy.”

“Oh, isn’t it divine?”

She looked absurd, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “I like it, but if you wear it, you can’t use your new Hover skill. Plus you lose 10 intelligence points.”

“I already talked to Mordecai about this, and I’m going to wear it until I run out of cards, and then I’ll put my new dragonfly tiara back on. This one lowers the card draw countdown by two seconds! Plus it’s quite jaunty. I do love jaunty.”

“Really? Huh. I didn’t know they’d have magic gear specifically for the cards.”

Donut reached up and made the cap sit even more sideways on her head. It looked like it would fall off at any moment. “So it’s called a dixie cup? I love it. It’s not too Donald Duck is it? Did you wear one like this?”

I grunted. “No. I wore a ball cap. We used to mock the poor bastards who had to wear those things.”

“A baseball cap? You were in the military, and you wore a baseball cap? I feel as if that’s a lie, Carl.”

“Did that Robert guy have anything else on him?”

“Just the rest of his uniform, but it was ruined. And the token.”

“The token?” I asked.

“Yes, Carl. Didn’t you hear the announcement?”

“No, Donut. I wasn’t here. Remember?”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s quite simple. You have to collect nine tokens before you can fight the last guy for the key. There are less monsters, but they’ll all have tokens and card decks on them. Wait, I see a red dot.” She pointed with her paw. “It’s that way, toward the mound.”

“Okay,” I said, cracking my neck. “Let’s see how this really works.”

“We’re fighting in the dark? It doesn’t let me keep the spell going when I activate my deck!”

I shrugged. “There are streetlamps, and I have a ton of torches. Time is not our friend here.”

“Okay,” she said skeptically. “Do we want to go get some of the boys to help us?”

“The boys?”

“You know. The Penis Paraders. Stevie is a troll for goodness sake. He’s great at bashing stuff, and he can balance his club on the tip of his finger for ten seconds straight. Oh, and Gluteus can break things with his butt! You get a mob’s head in there, and it’s game over.”

“I’m thinking we’ll keep them back until there’s an emergency. We want them fresh for the next floor.”

“Okay,” Donut said. “They’re all probably experience hogs anyway.”

As we started to move in that direction, keeping a wary eye for others and traps, Imani sent a message, demanding everyone check in. Only a few of us had experienced glitches. Florin was in Africa. He wasn’t partied with Lucia Mar, so he’d lost contact with her. Li Jun and his crew, which included Chris, were still in China, but further into the mainland.

Elle and Imani were separated. Elle’s squad ended up in Belgium. Imani was only given one choice. Detroit, and that’s where she was. Everyone else was equally scattered.

After some prodding, we learned Prepotente was somewhere in northern Italy.

Like with my area, Katia’s region was a mix between Ukraine and Vietnam, though she warned us of something that made me wary. The Vietnam portion of the area where they’d ended up was in a city called Da Nang. It was where Tran was from.

The key location was in his ex-wife’s apartment.

Detroit, Imani reluctantly offered, was where she grew up, and she would never have picked it if she’d been offered another choice. Her key location was also in the home of somebody she knew, but she didn’t elaborate.

Elle: I don’t know anybody in Belgium, thank god. You all try to keep your wits about you. These are just memory ghosts. And if they’re going to make us fight loved ones, remember it’s not really them. Don’t let them fuck with your heads.

“Carl,” Donut asked as we walked. “Do you know anybody who lives in Florida or Iowa? I most certainly don’t.”

“No,” I said, and I hoped against everything that it was true.

~

Our first opponent—Donut’s second—was a type of mob we’d fought before. The creature was just sitting there off the side of the road in a pool of light of a parking lot, waiting for us to approach. This setup wasn’t anything like we’d seen so far in the dungeon. This was more like something out of a real video game. It stood there, doing nothing while it waited for us to come closer. A circle of clothes from the memory ghosts lay piled all around it, implying the thing had been standing there for a while.

The parking lot featured both a safe room and a Desperado Club, but the map indicated the club was “Closed for emergency renovations.”

The last time I’d seen one of these guys, it’d been on the fourth floor, and they’d been suffering from a condition called the DT’s. It was a baboon/human hybrid creature called a Babababoon. I couldn’t remember what level they’d been on the third floor—probably around 17 or so—but this guy was level 45.

The wide-faced man wore a Santa hat and had a t-shirt that featured a wrapped present on it with the caption, “I have a huge package for you.” He started grunting and jumping up and down as we approached, like he’d been paralyzed until the moment we appeared.

Combat Started.

I pulled a sticky hob-lobber into my xistera and tossed it across the way. It splotched against his chest and exploded, killing him before he even drew his first card.

Combat Complete. Deck has been reset.

“Carl, you blew up his hat!” Donut complained as we moved to investigate the corpse. The guy had been turned into paste. Mongo grunted and started licking it up.

A group of twenty cards appeared floating in the air. None were exciting, but he did have a consumable flee card. He’d had three totems. Two more babababoons like himself and a rare, level 80 Skunk Ape. We could only examine the information on the face of the card, which was only part of the whole. While I was curious about that one, we’d have to literally give up one of our totems to try it out, which we weren’t willing to do.

He also had a token, which was just a poker chip-sized coin with the number two etched on it.

“Does the first token have a one on it?” I asked.

“It does,” Donut said.

“And what level was that first guy?”

“Level 40. Also, I see another red dot down the street. And another way past there. There’s a path of them leading to the dirt mound, all off the side of the road.”

“All right,” I said, looking west. I couldn’t actually see anything. Now that we were past the houses, it was just palm trees and bushes and the occasional business on either side of the road, with the sound of the ocean waves in the distance. “Come on. Let’s try this again.”

Chapter 237

It wasn’t until we were fighting for token number six did we actually have to use Donut’s deck. And even then, the fight ended quickly.

So far, they’d all been regular, intelligent monsters holding cards. All had been waiting for us under streetlights. They’d gone up by five levels each time. The third—a level 50 turtle thing—was by himself, but the fourth and fifth opponents both had two bodyguards working with them, designed to keep me and Mongo from one-shotting the deckmaster. It didn’t work. We finished all these fights before anybody could play a single card. None had great loot.

All of them were just waiting for us there along the path to the dirt mound. After some time observing this newest guy, I was certain my earlier theory was correct. They were literally frozen in place until we approached.

We were also receiving good experience for this, getting a decent chunk each time we defeated one. I was now level 68 and Donut was level 59. Mongo finally hit level 40.

Donut was bitching that this setup was “boring” and uninteresting to the fans, but I was happy to get it over with. I had an ominous feeling about what we’d find there up on top of that mound of dirt.

This opponent number six stood just to the side of the road at the base of the pile, which was situated at the end of the island, standing near a lit sign giving the distance to Key West. The heap completely blocked the road and covered a bridge that presumably led to the next island over. Even at the base, I couldn’t see the top.

The creature in our way was a Level-65 Reef Explorer, and he was wearing an ethereal, glowing deep-dive suit, similar to what Zev wore when she was in the dungeon. He had a group of four bodyguards. All four were level-50 Swordfish Interlopers. These guys were bipedal, human-sized creatures with the heads of swordfish, only the heads stuck straight up in the air, and they could barely move their necks. The vertical swords glinted menacingly. They didn’t have arms, but little flippers on each side. Their legs were short, penguin-like. The creatures waddled menacingly toward us as the squad leader guy shouted something, something we couldn’t hear through his helmet.

This guy was a ghost-class mob, so I pulled out one of my holy water-infused hob-lobbers and tossed it at him, throwing over the heads of the swordfish. But the moment I tossed it, one of the swordfish dudes, with surprising speed and precision, spit out a stream of water, knocking the small bomb off target, causing it to blow prematurely. He then made a chirping, staccato dolphin-like noise and launched himself straight into the sky. He hit the apex, paused in the night air, pivoted, and propelled himself at me like a goddamned missile.

“Oh fuck!” I cried, dancing out of the way. The guy smashed into the ground with a wet splatch, burying himself upside down in the dirt at the edge of the road. The long sword head completely embedded into the ground, all the way to his eyes. If he’d hit me, I’d have been turned into a kebab. Now stuck, he started to helplessly bicycle his short legs. I cast Talon Strike on my foot and started to kick at him.

At the same moment, a digital wave of water rushed across the space between us as two more of the Swordfish guys appeared, jumping out of the fake waves. They did a flip and landed right in front of the deck master. These were two cards played by the Reef Explorer guy.

The AI screamed with excitement:

Splish-Splash you gonna get slashed, it’s Swordfish Interlopers!

The two newcomers looked identical to the bodyguards already here, only these had totem notifications over their heads with little timers counting down from 90.

In front of me, the upside-down guy died, just as another of the bodyguards launched himself into the air at me. The card master guy added a buff to one of the totems, something called Precision. He then added a second of the same one on the same totem.

Mongo leaped through the air and chomped the flying swordfish like he was a dog catching a frisbee, his tail whipping. He hit the ground and his Earthquake ability activated, causing the remaining swordfish guys to fall off their feet and start flopping like, well, fish. The dive suit guy did not stumble. Mongo savagely tore at his prey.

We all paused as church organ music bellowed out, thick and loud. Fat, naked, digital babies with little wings fluttered around us, fountaining into the air as Donut summoned our team’s newest totem.

I hadn’t seen this guy yet, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was the card that Donut made when she’d used the combo card.

She’d combined Uzi Jesus and Asojano.

Sparkles rained from the wings of the cherubs as the totem rose from the ground, spinning and shrouded in smoke. The angel babies flew off, and a herd of digital street dogs burst away from the spinning figure, barking and running in all directions as the music swelled. Only then did the smoke clear, revealing the figure.

It was easily the craziest, most over-the-top reveal sequence of all our cards. Donut loved it, despite the appearance of the street dogs.

The figure was a dirty, sandaled, robed figure, hunched over and sickly. A glowing nimbus surrounded his head, lighting the area further. The light had an uneasy, green tint to it. His drooping hood obscured his face. He used his large weapon as a walking stick. The man took a tentative step forward.

He was level-140, just like Uzi Jesus had been, which was lucky. Asojano had been 130.

Jesus had an uzi. Asojano had a strange, large-sized wand made from shells.

This guy had a goddamned bazooka. A magical bazooka that fired something different every time.

“Here comes my favorite part,” Donut said.

The AI shouted the introduction like he was announcing a boxing match.

It’s the Son Who Fell. The Sinner, Resurrected. The Bringer of Disease, Bringer of Salvation. The Ender of All Blasphemy. It’s the calamitous, rapturous, and ultimately hazardous master of the life-death boomerang.

It’s Lazarus-A-Bang-Bang!

Yet another digital explosion appeared as the hunched man crept painfully forward. Our opponent and all the remaining bodyguards and totems were in the midst of pulling themselves upright. They paused to gawk at the newcomer and the ridiculous display.

“Is it really going to do all that every time?” I asked. Mongo looked up from the now-dead swordfish to growl.

“Isn’t it great?” Donut asked. “I wish I had an entrance theme like that!”

The hood fell back to reveal a boil-covered, dark-skinned man wearing a crown of thorns, but the thorns obscured his eyes like a blindfold. He stood to his full height, and I realized the decrepit, old man persona had been an act. He was definitely older, but he was ripped. His arms heaved with power.

Holy crap, I thought. That dude is intense.

He pulled the bazooka to his shoulder.

“Welcome to your salvation, motherfuckers.”

The man had a deep, strong voice. His accent was similar to Asojano’s but somehow reminiscent of Uzi Jesus at the same time.

He pushed the firing mechanism just as the remaining totems and bodyguards burst into the air. It was two swordfish totems and two regular mobs.

Thwum!

A cloud of ... something burst from the weapon, split, and corkscrewed in the air, hitting all four of the swordfish at the same time. All four—including the one that had been buffed with utility cards—dropped from the air like a sack of pennies. They all writhed on the ground.

Beetles. They were covered with iridescent, scratching beetles that glinted in the light like they were made of metal. There were thousands of them. The fish were devoured in seconds. Mongo screeched in terror and backed away. The two totems puffed away in smoke as the other two chittered in pain as they were turned to skeletons. The moment they were dead, the beetles turned to dust.

Donut summoned Raul the crab, who blasted onto the scene with a pale-by-comparison explosion. He scuttled sideways toward the backing-away Reef Explorer.

“He’s a ghost,” Donut called. “You have to use magic to kill him. Hurry before he summons another totem!”

Raul turned and bowed. He paused briefly, sat on the ground, and chanted a short spell. His right claw started to glow. He stood and continued toward the creature, who’d backed up against a tree as he desperately tossed away another card.

“Want me to blast him?” Lazarus asked Donut. There was a blinking countdown hovering over his bazooka. A stream of smoke rose from the business end of the large, cartoonish weapon. It was a cooldown timer, and it was at ten seconds. From what Donut had told me, the cooldown varied based on the type of ammunition he used.

Lazarus suddenly jumped in surprise upon seeing me standing there. He jerked the bazooka back up to his shoulder and pointed it at me. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Lazarus-A-Bang-Bang, you put that down this instant! That’s our friend, Carl!”

“Yeah, okay,” he said reluctantly. He lowered the giant weapon. But then he did that dude bro thing where he jerked his shoulders forward like he was going to rush me. He looked me up and down. “Yeah, I thought so. Made ya flinch.”

Mongo let out another angry squawk.

The robed man turned back to Raul, who continued to scuttle after the glowing ghost, who was now screeching and running away, weaving in and out of the dark trees. “Let me end this. That pansy is taking too long.”

Donut shook her head as she discarded one of her cards. She tossed a Greased Lightning card at Raul, and it spun off like a ninja star. It zipped across the distance and dodged a tree before hitting the crab in a sparkle of digital confetti. “You just stay here and protect me, Lazarus. Let Raul get some experience. It’ll build his self-confidence.”

“But I want to kill the bad guy. I’m gonna tell my father if you don’t let me do it.”

“Does he still think he’s Jesus?” I asked.

Lazarus made a scoffing noise.

“I’m not quite certain what he thinks,” Donut said. “It’s like he has the memories of both totems.”

Across the way, Raul snapped at the ghost. The Reef Explorer guy had a handful of cards, but he apparently couldn’t play any of them. The guy tried to run behind a tree, but the speed-enhanced Raul snapped again, cutting his leg off. Ghostly water flowed from the severed limb, the suit deflated, and the creature dropped dead.

Combat Complete. The deck has been reset.

“I could’ve done it a lot faster,” Lazarus grumbled as he and Raul poofed away.

I just looked at the space where the guy had stood. That card was ridiculously powerful. Stronger even than Shi Maria possibly. It gave me an uneasy feeling.

“Uh, has that guy fought alongside Shi Maria yet?”

“Yes!” Donut said. “They’re pretty competitive. They fight over who can kill the other guy first. They don’t seem to like each other much, and I think Mae-Mae is jealous of his reveal sequence. They both get along with Jola. Her reveal is pretty good, too. The good news is Raul and Geraldo are finally tolerating each other. Lazarus is mean to Raul but he and Geraldo get along great. And everybody just kinda ignores Skylar Spinach.”

Across the way, a group of like 40 or 50 glowing cards appeared floating in the air. We trudged toward them. Donut recast her Torch spell.

I held out my hand. “Let me see his card.”

Donut waved over my palm, and the orange card appeared. I examined it as we walked.

T’Ghee Card. Unique.

Totem Card.

Lazarus-A-Bang-Bang.

“I’m back, bitches!”

Level: 140.

Origin: This card was created via Combo.

Note: This card was frozen in place via a Glow-Up with active buffs. Available utility slots have been lowered.

Summoning duration: 270 seconds.

Constitution: 80.

This is a ranged mob.

This is a healer mob.

This is an affliction-dealing mob.

Notable attacks:

Oh Yeah? Well, I Have a Face-Melting Bazooka

Apocalyptic Plague

Resurrect Totem

+25 additional skills and spells.

Examine in the squad details tab of your interface for full stats and skills and spells.

I handed the card back to Donut. “His duration is great. His constitution is decent, but it’s a lot lower than both Asojano and Uzi Jesus. Wasn’t Jesus’s constitution at 200?”

“Yeah, he appeared with it really low. It started at 20, and I only got it up to 80 after I’d buffed him and made it permanent! It made him the same level as Jesus, and he has most of the same skills as both of them. Both Jesus and Asojano were undead, but he’s not. He has an ability called Back from the Dead, but it doesn’t say what it does. He hasn’t died yet, so I don’t know how it works. Also, if you look, he only has a single utility card slot. Both Jesus and Asojano had seven. His bazooka is great. Last time in the arena, it shot feathers! I thought that was going to be stupid, but they cut the guy into pieces, and it was really pretty. Even Mae-Mae said it was quite a stylish way to kill. He’s kind of a jerk, though. He calls everybody a pansy. Still, he’s not nearly as bad as either Asojano or Jesus. At least he does what I ask. Usually. You know, he reminds me a lot of Brad, but with worse skin.”

I grunted. Brad was Bea’s ex-boyfriend and the guy she’d gone to the Bahamas with. I never did ask what happened to him. If Bea had been outside during the collapse, that meant he’d likely been outside, too.

We reached the large display of cards floating in the air. Donut looked over it and sniffed with derision.

The Reef Explorer only summoned two minions, but he’d had four total. Another swordfish and a rare squid-looking thing. After a cursory glance, Donut discarded the totems.

“It’s no wonder he couldn’t pull any more cards,” she said. “Look at all these utility cards. It ruined his deck! He’s lucky he pulled two at the start. He doesn’t even have any traps! I see the attack he was going for, but I mean, really. He had to get the perfect draw to pull it off.” She scoffed. “Amateur hour.”

Sure enough, there were thirty of the Precision utility cards. I snatched one out of the air, and it let me. The card basically increased the totem’s capacity to land an attack. The cards had a special ability that made it so they stacked, so if one used ten on a single totem, it still only counted as a single buff. I felt a chill. He’d buffed one of those swordfish guys like four times. If that one had managed to attack, I wouldn’t have been able to dodge. That fight had been more dangerous than we’d realized.

I had a persistent itch at my neck, and I scratched at it. I’d had it for a few days now. The cause could be one of a few things, but I suspected it was because of the soul bar for my backpatch. The bar was almost full, but not quite. So far I hadn’t felt any obvious ill effects of having the Scavenger’s Daughter patch, but every time it started to get near full, I felt uneasy. I just needed to kill one or two more things before I could disperse the power. Still... I worried I might need the power for the last fight. If I unloaded it now, the bar wouldn’t refill by the time we needed it for the boss guarding the key. Not if the only mobs here were the deck master guys.

Donut collected the sixth coin after grabbing all the other cards. She was talking non-stop now about card theory and about what other crawlers were doing with their decks. She was really into it, and by this point, I was starting to realize she knew more about this game than I did.

“The next guy is all the way up there,” she was saying. “Do you want to go back to base first? We don’t know if there’ll be any safe rooms up there, and if I’m going to be climb all the way up there, I don’t want to have to do it multiple times. Or in the dark.” She gasped. “Do you think I can use my Hover skill to do it? That would be great!”

I examined the pile of earth. Part of it was already eroding into the ocean. We had multiple options on how to get to the top of the pile, which was about 700 feet up. Luckily, the edge of the mound wasn’t sheer, and I could just scale my way up it if I had to. I still had a few Levitation potions. Plus we could Puddle Jump up there. I’d probably try climbing first to see how long it would take, but I wasn’t about to do that in the dark. My neck itched again.

“Let’s go back to the saferoom, check in with everybody, and reset our buffs. Then we’ll come right back out. We need to get this done before the whole place washes away.”

~~~

Howdy all. I anticipate chapters will be coming a little faster in the coming days. I may or may not have cover art for y'all pretty soon, too.

I just added the Tucson Festival of Books to my list of shows, so if you're in the Ol' Pueblo, come see me there. I'll only be signing for a three hour slot. That's where I grew up, but I'm out of practice, so Imma die in the heat as that show is outside.  (Incidentally, that means I WILL NOT be at Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle this year.)

By the way, you only have yourselves to blame for Lazarus. We'll meet Jola, one of Iceland's most famouse legendary creatures next episode I hope.