Chapters 238 and 239 + Book cover reveal for The Eye of the Bedlam Bride. (Patreon)

-----> Cliffhanger alert. Sorry about that. <-----

Chapter 238

We had to hike a good ways to the saferoom, which was within a small, side-of-the-road shrimp shack. As we traveled, Donut continued to chat, rapid-fire about card theory, but somewhere along the way, she trailed off, and we finished the walk in mostly silence.

I continued to talk with the others. All were pushing their way through the first nine opponents. People were trying all sorts of ways to cheat, attempting to kill the enemy squad leaders before the fight actually started. Nothing worked so far.

Because the enemy deck master only activated and became corporeal when the squad leader approached, people were getting creative, like ringing the frozen NPC with traps or sitting right there with weapons poised. None of that worked. The moment the fight started, any traps or placed structures in a ring around the enemy literally disappeared, teleporting off to god knew where. Crawlers who were within the ring were knocked unconscious, which had disastrous results for some.

Tserendolgor had a long-range sniper guy in her group, someone who used an old-school sling and some sort of targeting spell, and she’d had him posted up on a hill, overlooking the opponent from a distance. He said the moment the fight started, the targeting spell failed, and the opponent moved a meter to the left, which screwed up his aim. But he managed to kill the guy anyway a minute later.

It was like they were desperately trying to fix how unbalanced the card game was, but they still hadn’t gotten it right. Most of these fights were still ending before the totems could be useful.

The Bopca eyed us warily as we pushed our way into the saferoom, not bothering to stop to talk. When we got into the guild, I found the main room filled with sleeping strippers and changeling children, all piled around the base, many of them snoring loudly. The room was an absolute mess. It appeared they’d had a water balloon fight. I had no idea where they’d gotten the balloons, but the broken latex pieces were everywhere, and the whole place was wet. The main screen was showing the movie Encino Man, but the sound was off.

I looked about and spied the cleaner bot in its spot in the top, right corner of the room, and it gave me a quiet, sullen beep, almost like the whine of a dog locked in his cage. Mordecai must have told the thing to wait until morning to clean, so not to wake everyone up.

Samantha was in the room, and she was the only other one awake. She’d been cleaned since the Desperado Club incident, and she rolled toward us and hopped up on the kitchen table. She opened her mouth to say something, but I put my fingers to my lips, indicating for her to be quiet. I patted her on the head, and she growled and snapped at me.

I didn’t see Mordecai, and I assumed he was asleep. Or more likely, working in the crafting room.

Mongo moved to the pile of sleeping, half-naked men and curled up in the middle of them. He was still covered in gore.

I had several notifications and achievements to wade through, but we decided to do it in Donut’s room, and we moved there.

“Carl,” Donut said as I closed the door. I was exhausted, but I could tell she wanted to talk. She’d been full of energy for a bit, but it was like it had drained away all at once.

“Yeah?”

She took a nervous glance at her social media interface and seemed to deflate. “You know what, never mind. Let’s open our boxes.”

I sat down on the lone chair in the room, and I pulled her into my lap. I stroked the side of her head. She was matted and dusty and needed to be brushed.

“Don’t worry about anybody else. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

She sniffed. “I keep thinking about that fight with the diving suit guy. It was easy, but he had this strategy that could’ve worked if we hadn’t killed him so fast. You would’ve been smooshed. I didn’t see it coming. There’s so many cards out there. Like thousands of different ones, and we don’t know what the bad guys will have. It’s not fair.”

I continued to stroke the side of her head. “No, it’s not fair. But that’s why we have a strategy of our own. We move fast. We finish the fights as soon as possible and make it so it doesn’t matter what the other guys have.”

She swallowed, building up to what she really wanted to say. “What happens if you die? What would I do? And if something happened to me, what would Mongo do?”

I just sat there, holding her warm body against mine, waiting for her to continue.

“The more I study this card game, Carl, the more I realize how easy it is for us to lose at any moment. That last guy was only number six. Each one after him is going to be harder.”

I continued to stroke her. “It’s always dangerous, Donut. We can only do our best.”

“I don’t like being in charge of the deck. You’re usually in charge of the important stuff. When I went from Odette’s show to that room, and I was by myself I had this terrible feeling for a second that I would never see you again.” She inhaled. “We’re already losing Katia no matter what happens, and nobody is talking about it. Doesn’t anybody see what it’s doing to Bautista? To me? To her? I can’t even imagine how scared she is. Sometimes when I think things like that, I can’t breathe. It’s like I’m being crushed.”

I leaned all the way back in the cushioned chair. We were in the corner of the room, facing away from her social media board, which beeped and clicked behind us as people made comments about our conversation. I caught sight of someone’s comment.

I’m going to drop this stupid feed if she keeps being so whiny.

Go fuck yourself, I thought. I didn’t dare say it out loud. I didn’t want her to see the comment. I reached over and clicked the screen off.  Donut continued to snuggle in my arm.

Her candle was sitting there, right by the screen, along with the photograph of Bea and Brad, which she’d never put away. That was okay. I pushed the photo aside, pulled a lighter, and I lit the candle. The scent of home filled the room.

“You know what, Donut? Forget the magic bed for a minute. Let’s just take an old-fashioned nap together. Right here in this chair. Not a long one, but a real one. We can open up our boxes after. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Sunrise still wasn’t for a bit. I sent a quick message to Mordecai and told him to wake us in two hours.

Mordecai: I’m in the crafting room, working on some potions. I’ll wake you.

Donut was already asleep. I tried to sleep myself, but I couldn’t. It was as if I’d forgotten how. So instead, I just sat there alone with my thoughts. My thoughts and the river, which was still there. Always.

I thought of Mordecai, and I pictured him there at his table, working on this or that. I thought of the baggage he carried on his shoulders, heavier each year. I thought of Odette, and the guilt she claimed to have over it all.

I thought of Frank Q, and the ring of Divine Suffering and what he’d told me so many weeks before. About how he was feeling crushed by it all. Just like Donut. Just like me.

I thought of that pile of dirt, and of the climb we’d have to make in a few hours. I thought of the man I knew I’d find up there.

You will not break me. Fuck you all.

~

I eventually did drift to sleep, only to wake on my own like 40 minutes later, about five minutes before I’d told Mordecai to wake us. Mongo was in here now, curled up on the floor, his large and heavy head on my foot. Samantha was here, too, and she was sitting to my right on the table, looking up at the social media board feed, which she’d somehow managed to turn back on. She was angrily muttering to herself.

“Let me read it. Let me read it, or I will find your mother and you know what will happen.” She turned and noticed me awake and let out a big smile. “You talk in your sleep.”

“Samantha, don’t mess with that thing. You’re going to break it.”

Donut yawned and stretched as I tried to wake myself up. I felt like such utter, fatigued crap that I immediately moved to the magic rest pad and reset my exhaustion.

I both hated and loved how well it worked, how it was so easy to just step over the pad and let the energy flow into me.

Donut was back to her regular self, clucking over the gore splatters in the room from Mongo. Like always, she made no mention of her earlier mood.

I moved to my notifications. The message boards were awash with people talking about a lootbox most everyone got. I had private messages from Katia, Li Jun, and Elle, all asking for updates. Katia had apparently visited us, noticed the mass of sleeping people, and slipped back out there. I’d message them all back in a minute.

I actually had more achievements than I was expecting, including one for killing the swordfish guy with my foot. That one resulted in a bronze spicy box. My Smush skill base was now at level 12. My bonus for using my pedicure kit supposedly raised it an additional three levels, but it was still listed as 14. Like always, the skills got wonky when items buffs attempted to push them toward 15.

I was starting to realize we were getting some seriously padded experience from these card fights. I needed to work on my Powerful Strike. Most of my other achievements weren’t too interesting. The notable ones were:

New Achievement! Cascadia’s Turquoise Taco!

It’s important to explain to you how much work it took for you to get here, to this point, Crawler.

Long, long before any of you monkeys were even born, this planet was chosen to be used for this season of Dungeon Crawler World. When that happened, the then-showrunners, the Borant Corporation, needed to submit their proposal for all 18 levels of the World Dungeon. That proposal included an outline for how this floor, the eighth level, would proceed.

As you now know, it was a game involving T’ghee cards. Artists, engineers, and writers, both flesh and artificial, went to work designing the system. It takes a gargantuan effort to make something like this viable, something that can be played by thousands of people at once. It takes a lot of work to create and balance all the cards to make a game that’s both fair to play yet entertaining to watch by the viewers. Millions of work hours have gone into this moment, where your squad now faces an opponent with a card deck of their own.

Mudskipper Cascadia, the recently divorced lead engineer and the current executive producer of Dungeon Crawler World: Earth, has already been humiliated over the disaster on the previous floor. Combine that with her utter inability to control what is still happening on the ninth, and you know what you get? An administrator who is on the edge, that’s what you get. She’s right there, man. Right. There.

So, imagine if you will, how she’s going to feel when she realizes most of you monkeys keep ending these carefully-set up fights before either side can draw a single, damn card.

You ended a card fight before it even began.

Reward: You’ve received a Gold Prepotente Box!

I refused to believe it’d really taken that much work to design this ridiculous card system. It felt more like a half-assed YuGiOh! ripoff duct-taped together by someone on an Adderall bender. It wasn’t balanced. It wasn’t fair. My opinion, from even before the dungeon, was how could any card game be fair when not everyone had access to the same pool of cards? My friend Sam had been a big player of the card game, Magic: The Gathering. We’d argued about this more than once.

I finally noticed the name of the box, and I laughed. This was the same one many others had received, but I still wasn’t sure what it was. There was another version of this achievement for the squad leaders, but the prize was the same. I knew Donut would have this one, too.

New Achievement! Smeat!

You participated in deck combat as a bodyguard for a squad leader!

Do you know what that makes you? Expendable. Cannon fodder. Spreadable Meat. The raw materials used to lubricate the forward momentum of the galaxy’s inevitable downfall.

Hey, don’t feel so bad. Lubrication is an important component of any machine.

Reward: You’ve received a Silver Spam Box.

I’d gotten that one the moment our first real fight started, which meant most everyone in the dungeon would have this one also.

Next to me, Donut was going through her rewards. She had many more than I did, most involving specific card moves from her first and last fight.

I opened my boxes, which were mostly bronze adventurer boxes.

The Silver Spam box contained a pile scrolls:

Scroll of Build Trench. (x5)

Boy, I hope you’re up on your knowledge of the fighting techniques of the first world war.

Allows for the placement of a permanent trench two point three meters deep and two meters wide. Length of trench is variable based on user’s intelligence plus strength. Combine scrolls to add reinforced sleeping quarters and other front-line accessories.

I put them away and waited for the Prepotente box to open. The box itself was made of wood painted gold and was made to look like Prepotente’s head.

“Carl,” Donut asked, looking up from her own set of adventurer boxes. “Why is there a floating Prepotente statue in my room?”

It appeared it was going to open with some hinges at the top, as if opening a compartment to the brain.

“Man,” I said. “I actually wish he was here so I could see the look on his face when...”

The box screamed. I almost jumped out of my skin. The noise was loud enough to wake Mongo up from a dead sleep, who scrambled to his feet and started looking around wildly.

I grumbled as the prize appeared. It was a heavy book. Not a magic tome. A thick, diary-like book filled with blank paper. There were probably three or four hundred pages. The cover was a hard, black leather with no title.

The Filthy Little Crawler’s Book of Voodoo.

Warning: You may not trade this item. This item may not be destroyed. You may remove it from your inventory to use it, but you will not be able to throw it away. If you drop this book, it will automatically return to your inventory.

Way back in the old days before you flesh sacks invented pagers and cellular telephones, it was difficult for people on the go to get a hold of one another. And if you were at a large event such as a science fiction convention, forget about it. You were on your own.

But then came the Voodoo Board.

They started popping up at all the nerd conventions. It was simple, really. It was just a big board with the name of everybody attending the convention upon it. If you had a message for somebody and wanted to let them know your mommy was coming to pick you up at a certain time, you would take a pin and place it by their name. They’d stroll by the board, see they had a message, and they’d move to an alphabetical file and find the note. Privacy be damned!

It was called the Voodoo board because of the pins. This book is the same thing. It’s called a book of voodoo because it’s named after the message board. Not because it can secretly be used for any sort of nefarious purpose which will become clear later, so just get that out of your head this instant, mister.

When you meet a crawler who owns this same item, their name will permanently appear in this enchanted book. You may use the book to exchange messages. You may write your message under their name, and only they will receive it. If you write under your own name, everyone who has your entry will see the message. You may write your message manually or using the messaging interface while turned to the page. One must open the book to read the message, but you will have the option to copy the words. Message will erase on demand, allowing one to write a new note.

This book is not retroactively filled with the entries of people you have already met. You must be within three meters of them for their name to be added. Works only with crawlers who also own this book.

“Huh,” I said, turning the book over in my hand. It was basically a combination between my Coffee Shop Author’s Kit and the regular messaging system. It allowed for easier mass messages, but one would have to physically pick up the book, turn to the page with the crawler’s name and read. I wasn’t certain of the utility.

Still... why would they give this to most everybody in the dungeon? The description was a little alarming. You never really knew when the AI was being serious or not. I thought back to the new achievement message attached to the box. It’d been about Cascadia, the kill, kill, kill lady. The loot box was presumably named after Prepotente because he’d really upset her. He’d more than made her angry. He’d broken a floor.

Across from me, Donut had received the same box and was opening it now. She looked at it suspiciously. The moment it appeared, the book, still in my hand, buzzed like a telephone. I opened it up, and sure enough there were now two entries. The first was my own name. The second was Donut. As I stared at her entry, a new type of window popped up into my interface. It was similar to a chat window for a group quest chat.

I mentally wrote:

You have bedhead, Donut.

I watched the book buzz, and Donut leaped back and batted it with her paw. Then she hesitantly reached forward, and it magically opened on its own. She read the message and scoffed. She flipped the page to my entry and stared at it for a moment. The book buzzed in my hand, and I turned to Donut’s page.

THIS IS A STEP BACKWARD, CARL. THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF CHATTING BY LEAVING POST-ITS ON ONE’S FRONT DOOR. THE REAL MESSAGE SYSTEM IS MUCH BETTER, AND I WILL NOT USE THIS.

I stared at the words, and they highlighted themselves on the page. I copied the text and added it to my scratchpad.

“Interesting,” I said out loud and stuck the book into my inventory. “Come on. No training today. Shower and buffs, and then we’re going back out there.”

~

In the daylight, the relocated chunk of land looked even more haphazard and unstable. The entire mountain had turned to mud. It was, I realized, a mix between the ocean battering it at the base and the snow melting off the top. Still, the slope wasn’t that steep and not too muddy on the side facing where we’d killed the deep dive guy. I tried my hand at scaling it with Donut on my shoulder, which was a mistake. She spent the time commenting loudly in my ear about my climbing skills.

I’d forgotten my new backpatch also came with a climb skill. It turned out to be really useful. Despite the slippery mud, I started to make my way up the slope. Donut didn’t seem to notice my new ability, however, and she was constantly offering me “tips.”

As I ascended, I caught up on the group messages. Most everybody in my groups had made their way through the first four or five opponents with little trouble. Imani’s seventh opponent used a flee card, and when she approached the eighth, it remained incorporeal and frozen, which meant we had to fight these guys in order. So Imani was now running through the streets of Detroit attempting to find where the guy had gone to. Katia was on her way to her seventh fight as well. She’d ditched one of her totems for what sounded like a giant, Vietnamese cow thing called a kting voar or something like that.

Li Jun’s team was still experimenting, attempting to circumvent the protections and kill or trap the opponents before the squad leader approached. They were having little luck. Chris had ranged forward to scout out the final boss, but the area was locked. He said there was a giant vending machine blocking the entrance to the area, and you had to feed it the nine tokens for it to open.

Louis wanted to know if we were all going to get together for Christmas celebrations once midnight passed.

Carl: You know, it’s not really Christmas. It’s like early March or something.

Louis: Oh man, really? It feels like we’ve been here a year.

Donut: CARL HADN’T EVEN PUT HIS TREE AWAY YET WHEN EVERYTHING HAPPENED.

Carl: We were just barely a week past Christmas! And my “tree” was a foot tall thing that I bought at the grocery store. You’d gnawed all the pine needles off it.

Donut: AND THEY WERE EVERYWHERE. IT WAS QUITE THE MESS, CARL, AND YOU HADN’T EVEN CLEANED IT UP. WE WERE PRACTICALLY LIVING IN SQUALOR.

Louis: Still, we should do something. Maybe we could give each other presents.

On my shoulder, Donut audibly gasped.

Imani: Let’s make sure we all get our keys first, okay?

The slope was about 700 feet up, which wasn’t so bad if one was just walking. Even with my enhanced climbing, it was a chore. I put my head down and continued to ascend.

Chapter 239

Entering Dallas County, Iowa.

I pulled myself onto the crumbling edge of wet asphalt. I had to jump forward as the ground under my feet broke off and started sliding away. Christ, I thought, looking over the precipice. About five feet of the ground had just fragmented off and fallen. It was a clear day, and I could see the ocean spread out on either side. I moved away from the edge and turned to look upon the area. Spread before us was a street dotted with farm-style houses followed by a sparse trailer park. Immediately to our left was half of a commercial farm. A few large buildings dotted the property along with a corrugated silo that stood precariously close to the edge.

“Carl, it smells really bad up here. It doesn’t smell like potatoes at all. It smells worse. Mongo will be quite upset.”

The whole area was bigger than I’d realized. The ground rumbled ominously. I searched for our next opponent and saw nothing.

“Carl!” Donut suddenly shouted, pointing at a dilapidated farmhouse just to our right. “On the roof! There’s a bunch of invisible...”

Combat Started.

“...moth things!”

Warning: Your equipped cloak has aggravated the Nightgaunt.

“Oh, shit,” I said as Donut’s card deck started to form. I pulled a quarter hob-lobber and tossed it at the house, aiming for the roof.

I regretted my decision the moment the ball left my xistera. We had two major rules regarding my explosions, and I’d just broken both of them without thinking: Don’t toss at invisible monsters, and don’t blow things up when we were in an unstable environment.

Bam! The roof of the old, wooden house exploded in a shower of shrapnel. The fireplace structure fell over and landed in the driveway, crushing an ancient Ford truck. The entire truck and driveway collapsed and started sliding down the hill.

Experience notifications flowed down my screen as the ground under our feet rumbled.

I pointed. “Crap! Run! Forward!”

We moved down the street as more of the ground slid away. A long, ominous crack formed down the asphalt, right along the center of the street.

A terrible screech filled the air, loud and high-pitched like nails down glass.

“Carl, Carl, I didn’t pull Mongo out yet! It won’t let me do it now!”

“That’s okay.” I looked about the air. “Where the hell is it?” All I could see was the multiple Xs of dead minions.

“I think you got a couple, but the bad guy is there, hovering,” she said, pointing up. “It’s a big bat guy with a bunch of moths. Oh good, they’re naked. Invisible and naked. Watch this.” She swept her paw forward, summoning her other new card. The one Katia had given us.

Jola.

The sky went black, and digital snow flurries swept through the air. Fake, digital Christmas lights appeared on the houses and trailers around us, overlaid oddly on a set of real Christmas lights from the memory.

The storm grew in intensity, becoming a swirling blizzard. In that moment, I could see the outline of the opponent creature. It was enough for the description to pop up.

The Visitor. Level 70.

This is Deck Master Number Seven of Ten.

Ahh, the Visitor.

This is one of the rare urban legend cryptids that actually existed, believe it or not.

First, you need to know what a Nullian is. The Null. You know those annoying, little fuckers with the giant heads? Won’t ever shut up? You called them “The Grays” which is giving them way too much credit.

There’s a reason why you earthlings knew what these twits looked like. They were always poking about this planet illegally.

This thing you’re facing is obviously not one of those. It’s actually a creature called a Nightgaunt.

Nightgaunts exist outside of the dungeon. We use them as demons here in the game because, well, look at the fuckers. But in reality, they’re part of a semi-intelligent species that normally lives in a Nullian world. Real Nightgaunts are peaceful, vegetarian, nocturnal creatures. Think of them like bats mixed with Neanderthals mixed with donkeys.

But that’s boring, so this version is much more intense. And deadly.

The Nullian like to capture the peaceful bat creatures and ride them or use them as pack animals, which is even more fucked up the more you think about it. These guys are semi-intelligent. It’d be like you guys kidnapping dolphins, caging them, and forcing them to do tricks for fat, sunburned tourists. Oh wait...

Anyway, for some inexplicable reason, way back in 1903, a Nullian brought a Nightgaunt with him during an unauthorized site-seeing trip to Earth. It got out. Why did he bring the monster with him? Why does that lady with her underwear on the outside bring her pet hedgehog on the subway? Who the hell knows!

The poor creature ended up shotgunned and splattered all over the Iowa countryside. They called it “The Visitor.” An urban legend was born.

It was looking directly at me. It waved its arm, like it was trying to cast a spell. Since this thing was the deck master, it wouldn’t be able to cast anything.

A low tinkling filled the air, like Christmas jingle bells but slowed down and distorted. The air flickered between night and day. There was a howl, a distant, female opera singer performing a haunting dirge. The music rose in volume and then abruptly stopped as white fireworks exploded in the sky. The lights turned to snow and showered down.

A large, yellow, lumpy and half-melted candle, the size of a big garbage can appeared floating in the sky. It bobbed up and down as the wick burst into light, revealing that the candle was sitting atop the head of the summoned creature.

The moment the candle lit, it fully revealed the hidden nightgaunt and all of his companions. The enemy deck master had a half-dozen minions with him, things called Quench Moths. They were all level 30. The dog-sized moths swirled about in confusion around the bat-like demon.

I barely noticed the moths as I stared up at Jola. Katia had given up the card because this thing was a pain in the ass. According to Donut, the totem just sorta did what she was asked, not talking with or aggravating the others. Though sometimes she just sat there and refused to fight, which was usually okay, too. She had a lot of health.

Either way, her size would make fighting in certain situations problematic.

I gawked, craning my neck.

Jola wasn’t floating in the air. She was just huge. Bigger than Shi Maria.

She was also a cat. A fat, hairy, dirty-brown, house-sized, Persian cat. A cat with a giant candle melted to the top of her head. She let out a bass-heavy, ground-shaking growl.

She had a 75-second timer over her head.

Beware, beware, little children, beware!

Through the flurries and through the cold,

Jola comes.

She hungers for the indolent and the naked,

For the lazy and the unclothed,

For those who have tasks yet undone.

And for the sweet, sweet taste of severed toddler tongue.

It’s Jola the Yule Cat!

I just stared. “What the fuck?”

The moths all suddenly dive-bombed themselves into the candle as the Nightgaunt continued to ignore its own card deck—and the giant fucking cat—as it tried to cast another spell. It screeched and dived through the air at me.

“Hvar eru fötin þín?” the Yule Cat said. She was speaking to the Nightgaunt.

I scrambled out of the way as the cat leaped forward, pouncing. Its massive paw slammed against the demon creature. She could attack him directly because he didn’t have any summoned totems. She slammed the creature violently to the ground. More earth rumbled and split away.

“Hvar eru fötin þín?” the cat repeated, leaning her moon face into the creature. I had no idea what she was saying.

The grievously injured demon still had eyes for nothing but me. Mordecai had warned me that my Nightgaunt cloak would aggravate this type of mob, but I hadn’t realized how passionate it would be. The thing was so blindly enraged he never even played a single card. He glared at me—at my cloak, really—and screeched one last time as the cat reached down, picked him up with her jaws, and shook him violently back and forth, killing him. She tossed the now-dead mob in the air and caught it in her mouth. She crunched loudly.

Combat Complete. Deck has been reset.

Jola looked at me. Her giant, yellow eyes gazed upon me impassively. I could feel the warmth off the candle atop her head. A bead of wax dripped down and disappeared into her fur.

“Hvar eru buxurnar þínar? Hvar eru skórnir þínir? Næst mun ég borða hold þitt.”

With that, she disappeared into dust. The eaten, deformed demon corpse reappeared, floating in midair. It crashed to the ground with a wet splat. Its head was bent grotesquely to the side and facing the wrong direction.

I swallowed.

Donut examined the dead body and made a disgusted noise. “That guy did not like you, Carl. Is your cloak made out of his mother or something?”

I just kept staring where the giant cat had stood. Its paw prints remained in the mud. “Is that thing really from Icelandic folklore? What the fuck?”

“Yes, she is quite intense, isn’t she? Very food motivated. I once knew a British Shorthair named Chitty-Chitty Chubbywumps who acted just like her. He would bite his owner’s fingers if he so much as smelled a treat. He once nipped a judge, and that was the end of that. Anyway, Katia says they did it all wrong. With the fairy tale, I mean. The real Yule Cat is a big grump, but this one is quite the serial killer. Her candle can see invisible stuff, and if the opponent is either naked or a child, it makes her even stronger. Isn’t she great? It makes me wish our entire deck was cats.”

I shivered.

~

The opponent dropped a total of 30 cards, and 18 of them were totems. One was a legendary level-110 called a Demon Queen that looked like a fat, upright ant thing wearing a crown. But the rest were more of the Quench Moths. He also had ten consumable trap cards. All called Lamp. The card paralyzed a totem for ten seconds and caused them to glow brightly. That ended up being a great prize.

“Eighteen totems,” Donut scoffed as she looked over the looted deck. “How is that fair? Why do we have to follow rules when he doesn’t? We’re lucky he hated you so much that he forgot how to play the game.”

If the Nightgaunt had actually played, he might’ve been a tough opponent. His strategy was straightforward. It was actually similar to the method we’d used to finish off Queen Imogen at the end of the Butcher’s Masquerade. He’d play the trap cards on our totems, and the moths would swarm. The quench moths were given a speed and constitution bonus when touching a light source, so they’d be doubly powerful.

It hadn’t helped them when they’d suicided themselves into Jola’s head candle.

We took the token and all the cards we could, leaving the totems.

What just happened—the opponent not properly using his own deck—was becoming a regular occurrence. I saw several comments where the same thing happened. Li Jun told me one of their opponents literally ate his own cards.

The ground continued to erode, crumbling away slowly but surely. We had to keep moving.

“I see the next one!” Donut said as she unleashed Mongo. The dinosaur appeared and sniffed about. He screeched at the corpse of the bat monster. He picked up the leathery wing and started gnawing on it.

Donut pointed toward a large, corrugated building in the middle of the farm off to our left. The massive building looked like an airplane hangar, but much longer. “He’s in there. Carl, it smells really bad that way. This is way worse than the last time I was here.”

The ground rumbled again.

“Again, Donut, you’ve never been here. Iowa and Idaho aren’t even next to each other. And this is what farms smell like. This whole area was just covered with snow, and it melted after it got transferred here. So everything is wet. Everything smells worse when it’s wet.”

“Well, it’s disgusting. Mongo is appalled.”

Mongo spit out the wing and grunted in agreement.

I started moving toward the farm. “It’s about to smell worse.”

~

As we approached, I grabbed my left hand with my right. My arms were shaking, and I was pretending like they weren’t. I needed to keep my head about me. We weren’t going to get to the key boss if I didn’t concentrate on these next two fights.

“Carl, there are NPCs in the farm building. Lots and lots of them. I think it might be animals.”

“I see them.” The opponent was right in the middle of the mess of white dots.

We reached a door on the side of the enormous building just as the silo at the end tumbled away and off the edge of the cliff with a tremendous crash. Electrical lines sparked. On the side of the barn, a pipe started spewing some sort of seed or feed over the edge like a waterfall. We needed to hurry this up.

I put my hand on the door, and it was warm. I could hear it. I knew what we were going to find inside.

We pushed our way in and looked upon the giant, open room.

~

“Wow,” Donut said.

“Yup,” I agreed. “That’s a lot of goddamned turkeys.”

One walked up and just looked at me. I examined it.

Turkey. Level 5.

This is a turkey. You know, gobble gobble. Roast at 325 for about 13-15 minutes per pound. Season with rosemary, sage, and thyme.

You should step on it.

There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. It was a massive, open room with a white, fluffy bedding spread on the ground, though I could barely see the ground because the things were everywhere. Multiple pipes led back and forth, all part of a feeding and watering system. Parts of the room were once separated out with chain-link fencing, but the fences were knocked over, and the turkeys were all mixed in together.

These were regular, adult turkeys. They weren’t brown with the semi-circle of colorful tailfeathers like one normally associated with turkeys. They were all just large, fat, white birds with bright, red wattles.

It was loud as fuck. The gobbling and cheeping and barking or whatever noises of the adult turkeys were called was tenfold once we opened the door.

“Carl, do you remember that turkey Prepotente and Miriam Dom killed at the end of the bubble level?”

“I remember.” We’d never actually seen the feral god, but that one had been the size of the entire bubble.

Heaters hung along the ceiling, and the temperature of the room was oppressive. In fact, I realized, it was too hot. Some of the turkeys looked like they weren’t doing so well. The majority seemed fine, but several were sitting down or laying on their sides. Quite a few were dead.

I looked again at the heaters. This barn was supposed to be in Iowa, where it was likely below freezing outside. They’d transported this whole barn here to Florida where the outside temperature was much warmer. The heaters were still on overdrive. Surely they should have some sort of thermostat that would turn them off, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t working.

Another few hours, and these turkeys would all be dead. That is, if the whole barn didn’t first erode into the ocean.

So far, all the animals and people we’d seen were part of the memory ghosts. This was the first time they’d taken a living creature from the past and made living versions. They were breaking their own rules. I wondered if the heat thing was on purpose or not. Based on that last fight, I guessed not.

I looked for the next opponent. I could see him, standing frozen deep in the giant room as the turkeys flowed all around him. I couldn’t tell what it was. Some sort of large, ogre thing covered in spikes. It was far enough away that we wouldn’t activate him unless we waded a good hundred feet deep into the throng.

I paused, thinking as I looked about the mass of gobbling birds, all waddling back and forth, poking at the red feeders. This was a trap. It had to be. There was no other reason to set it up like this.

It would be best to just kill all the turkeys and then take the bodies. Clear the room before we faced the boss. That would be the safest way to do it, but how long would that take? Killing them would be easy. It would be a dick thing to do, but it would be easy. Getting rid of the bodies was another story. I looked over my shoulder at the massive double doors leading to the edge of the ever-encroaching cliff. If we opened those doors, maybe we could pied-piper the turkeys out of the room and over the cliff. That’d certainly be faster than killing them. As long as Donut kept her distance from the ogre thing and didn’t activate him, it wouldn’t be so hard. I’d spotted a tractor out there. Maybe I could get that working and clear out the room that way.

“Carl,” Donut shouted as I continued to look over our options. “It’s no wonder it smells like the underside of a...”

She was interrupted by a loud squeal of joy.

“Mongo! Mongo, no! Bad! Bad!”

Mongo, who’d been invested in something outside the barn, finally noticed what was going on here on the inside. The moment I heard his squeal, I realized our mistake. We should’ve kept him in his carrier. For Mongo, this was like a never-ending, all-you-can-eat buffet.

He squealed again and jumped within the closest mass of birds. He let out a gleeful howl. He picked one up and crunched it, and then tossed it aside. He sat there for a moment, his beak opening and closing a few times, as if he was contemplating the taste.

Unfortunately for the turkeys, he decided they were delicious.

He started tearing his way through the oblivious, dumb birds like a goddamned weed whacker. He was picking them up one by one, ripping them apart, shaking them, and eating their heads before tossing their bodies and moving to the next. The turkeys barely reacted.

“Mongo!” Donut cried. “You get back here this instant. I will not have you eating the heads off of turkeys like some common circus performer! You’re going to ruin your dinner!”

“Wait,” I said to Donut, who was about to run in there. “Stay back or you’ll activate the ogre guy. I’ll get him.”

Donut jumped to my shoulder. She’d stepped in turkey gore and started desperately wiping it on my shoulder.

“He’s way over there, Carl. Mongo isn’t going to come to you. He’s too well trained to follow anybody’s instructions but my own.”

A turkey flew through the air, trailing guts.

“Well trained, huh?”

“It’s small farm animals. You know he can’t control himself around small farm animals, Carl. It’s just like you with Japanese porn.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Mongo! Mongo!”

I started to wade in, my feet squishing on the trail of corpses as I stepped over a long pipe designed to distribute feed.

“Mongo!” I yelled. He’d made his way to the center of the room, leaving a road of dead, headless birds. “Goddamnit, stop. Holy shit. This is really fucked up. Stop!”

I moved closer to the idiot. I warily eyed the ogre, still several hundred feet away. I’d never seen anything like it. He was similar to regular ogres, like Dmitry and Maxim would be if they hadn’t been ejected from the game, but it held a back full of haphazard spikes, poking out this way and that. The spikes also erupted from his knees and elbows.

“Carl, don’t yell at him! He’s sensitive!”

Mongo actually had stopped and was biting at something over and over, screeching with frustration. I took another step toward him, trying to see what he was doing. He was biting at a turkey, but his teeth were going through, not connecting.

“That’s weird,” I said, pausing. “Why is that one turkey a memory ghost when the rest aren’t?”

“Uh, Carl,” Donut said. “It just popped up on the map! That’s not a memory ghost. I think that’s actually number...”

Combat Started.

The turkey burst into the air, flying up to the rafter as Mongo fell over, unconscious.

“Mongo!” Donut cried.

At the same moment, all the turkeys in the room, every last one, stopped gobbling. They turned to face us, completely silent.

Uh-oh, I thought.

The boss turkey landed high in the rafters as a card deck appeared, floating in front of it. At the same moment, a new roar filled the room, coming from my right. I turned to see the ogre had woken up, and a group of cards formed in front of it as it strode in our direction.

New Achievement! Prepare for Trouble!

....And make it double!

You’re being forced to fight against two card-wielding opponents at the same time! The good news is, if you win this fight, you’ll have enough tokens to face the head bad guy!

The bad news is, these two guys work really, really well together. This ain’t gonna be like anything you’ve faced so far.

Reward: If you survive, you’ll receive a turkey deep-fryer and access to the archived posts of the Grandma’s Cooking Recipes group on Facebook!

Gobble-Gobble, Motherfucker. Welcome to Iowa.

~~

~~

Next time: finally, a proper card fight. Sorry about the cliffhanger.

Hey Everyone! Thanks again for your support! A few quick updates. I am officially going to DragonCon now, and we will be doing the free Medieval Times event again. (You don’t have to have a DragonCon ticket for this) I know we’re several months away, but at least my participation is official.

Also, with the decision by Hasbro not to be douchebags regarding the Dungeons and Dragons licensing fiasco, for the time being at least, our DnD project is still moving forward slowly but surely. More soon.

Oh, and here’s the cover of the next book. Please don’t share this outside the group. This isn’t the final final version, but you get the idea.