Chapter 128 (Patreon)

Chapter 128

Time to Level Collapse: 4 Days and 22 Hours

The entire top half of the house was gone. It looked as if a group of blindfolded and drunk beavers had decided to do a remodel job. They’d ripped the top floor and the attic away, haphazardly decapitating the home about six inches below the first floor’s ceiling, which meant all of the rooms on the first floor were open to the elements. The tops of the walls were jagged and splintered. The fireplace and attached chimney had also been lopped away, but it still rose about five feet over the top of the walls. As I watched the balloon approach, a single brick fell off the stack, fell into what had once been the living room, and crunched onto something.

When they’d done their butcher job, they’d severed multiple electrical lines and water pipes in the process. They’d attempted to cap off the water, but one of the pipes appeared to have become dislodged in the journey to come pick us up. Donut and I watched as the balloon settled in front of Hump Town. Water arced into the air from the middle of the house like they’d sheared off a fire hydrant, and the main had been knocked sideways.

“What’s with the water?” I asked.

Firas jumped down off the edge of the garden and out into the sand dune. The tall man rubbed dust off his boots and stood to his full height, grinning at us. He stood with confidence, and I immediately saw the change in him. When I’d first met the guy, he’d only been level 22. He was now 30. That was still behind the curve, but he’d made up a lot of ground.

The water continued to arc away, causing a rainbow to form in the air. Mongo screeched joyfully and rushed into the spray and started dancing about. The sand around his feet was quickly turning to mud.

“One of those chainsaw buzz-ards lopped off the cap we had on that water line, and it blasted itself out of the sky. They’re like miniature versions of that giant boss that gave Katia the dangle saw. It was actually pretty damn funny. Still don’t know where all the water is coming from. I wish I had that much water pressure at my old place. It’s bizarre. The power still works, too. The things are a pain in the ass. The chainsaw buzz-ards, I mean. But they’ve been rare for the past few days.” He indicated the water arc. “The one who did that surprised us. I’ll cap it off after we land. Did Katia tell you about how she stuck the house in her inventory?”

“What?” I asked. “She can stick the house in her inventory? Balloon and all? Like, the whole thing? How?”

“Oh dude. You’ve been gone ages. A lot has happened. It was Louis’s idea. We had the thing floating just off the ground. Katia did that weird thing she does when she puts the backpack on, and it worked. Then that same night after the recap episode, they patched it, and the whole damn contraption just popped out of her inventory, floating over our heads. It almost smooshed all of us. We were all in a pub called Cuttlefish Point, and it pretty much blew up the tavern. The pazuzu guy that runs it was pissed. We all had to jump on the thing and fly away. Thought he was going to sting us for sure. It was pretty intense. Then Louis peed over the edge on the guy while he was still screaming up at us and it pretty much got us banned from town. I thought Gwen was going to rip his schlong off. Katia had to stop her from kicking his ass but she was laughing too, and that made Gwen even more mad.”

I just looked at the guy. I cursed myself again for missing so much. “Where’s the stairwell?”

“Oh yeah. So we had to hack the top of the house off just to dislodge the closet in the master bedroom. It wouldn’t let us leave the quadrant with the stairwell still attached to the house. It’s sitting about a half of a mile east of town. Close to where you landed the first time. Langley has a couple of his guys on it, keeping it clear of sand. It’s going to be tough starting tomorrow once the Red Equinox hits. They’re building something to protect it.”

“Shit,” I said. I’d completely forgotten about that. For the last few days in this bubble, the weather and night/day patterns were going change. It would be dark for something like sixteen hours a day, and the sand storm would be twice as long and intense.

“Yeah,” Firas agreed. “Down there the sand storm is a little different. Instead of it just blowing every which way, it always moves in a circle, like a clock around the island. And there’s a lot of lightning. It’s already getting darker early down there, too, so it’s now dark during the storm already.”

“Speaking of the storm, we gotta get moving,” Louis said, appearing from the inside of the house. The pudgy crawler had also leveled up to 30. “We need to hit the landing pad before it starts. Gwen said she’s going with the flood plan if we’re not back in time. Plus those feral Pazuzu fuckers come out at night, and I want a clear landing zone. Oh, hey Donut.”

“Hi Louis!” Donut said from my shoulder.

“Wait, more ‘feral’ monsters?” I asked.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Louis said, all business. He turned and went back inside.

“The feral thing is the mage guy’s fault,” Firas said. “Anything that gets stuck in the Nothing for more than a few minutes goes crazy. I don’t understand how any of it works. You’ll be assaulting the castle when you get down there. But only if that Gwendolyn lady hasn’t murdered Katia first.”

“Do you feel out of the loop?” Donut whispered. “I feel out of the loop.”

~

Part of me was proud that Katia had just rolled with us going missing. She’d gotten a lot done. She’d managed to get the whole house down to the land quadrant, and she’d figured out how to breach the magical door that guarded the front of the land quadrant castle. All without us. Firas told me that they would have finished with the castle already if Zev hadn’t asked Katia to wait for us.

At the same time, part of me stung at the notion that she could do this without me. It was stupid. Selfish. And it was more than a little narcissistic to think that without me and Donut, Katia and the others were absolutely screwed. But that feeling was there, and I was simultaneously relieved that I’d been wrong and horrified I’d been thinking it in the first place.

I still didn’t know if we’d get there in time, but Katia and the others’ actions while we were away proved that I wasn’t as indispensable as I thought. And in the end, I realized it was a necessary feeling.

You’ll die in a gutter without me. You need me. You think you’re just going to be fine? What will you do, you disrespectful little shit? You will break after just one day. And then you’ll die. That’s what you’ll do. Just like your fucking bitch of a mother.

I took a deep breath, clearing the memory away. I dove into my chat to check in on everybody.

Bautista had already cleared all four of his quadrant’s castles, though most people in his bubble hadn’t survived. He wasn’t a man to show his true feelings in his chats, but I had the impression he was having a hard time with it. Li Jun and Li Na and their team were about to storm some underwater castle, the last in their bubble. Meadow Lark were building a cannon to shoot oil into the sky which would hopefully take down the last of their castles. If that didn’t work, Elle was going to use her new Graupel spell to crash the air castle.

While we descended, Louis and Firas also gave us updates on some of the more popular crawlers. One of Lucia Mar’s rottweilers—Gustavo, the smaller one—had somehow “accidentally” killed a group of crawlers after a battle. The event had caused Lucia to undergo some sort of psychotic break—one worse than usual. They’d shown the strange crawler sitting alone in a room sobbing, which was the first real emotion they’d ever portrayed other than rage and pure insanity. Florin the shotgun crocodile guy had finally emerged into a quadrant to find everybody else in the entire bubble was already dead. He was desperately trying to make his way through it, but he’d only managed to clear one castle so far, and the general consensus was that he was screwed. The goat squad was almost done with their bubble, but Miriam Dom the shepherd lady was hit with some curse that ended up changing her into a goddamned vampire. Apparently she was a vegan before this, and the assholes thought it’d be hilarious to do that to her.

I listened to it all as I watched the side of the necropolis fly past us. The massive tomb was even bigger when you were looking at it from this angle. The volcano-shaped building was more mountain than actual structure. The exterior wall was covered with intricate carvings depicting pterodactyl-like creatures and other birds, all in an angular, Aztec-like style. I kept looking for a repeating pattern, but I didn’t see any two stones that were the same. There was probably a story there, in those carvings.

Nests dotted the side of the structure. Firas said that’s where the buzz-ards lived, but they were mostly gone now. We saw no mobs as we descended.

As for the poor assholes stuck in the subterranean quadrant, they were all still hiding in saferooms at the very top. Two of them—Mike, the one dressed like a goddamned banana and Bobby the trap-finder—had gathered several water-breathing scrolls and ventured out. They ended up setting off a trap in a water-filled tunnel. Mr. Banana got himself killed when a tube shot from the wall, pierced his stomach, and filled him with “Finger-sized Flesh Weasels.” That’s what the monsters were called. Finger-sized Flesh Weasels. They ate the poor guy from the inside out. Bobby had quickly retreated after that. The others were now paralyzed with fear and were waiting for us to drain the place before proceeding.

I examined the castle as we approached. The dark building was huddled against the side of the necropolis, making me think of a scared dog cowering against a wall. The castle looked as if it really was made out of sand. It wasn’t as huge as I thought it’d be based on Gwen’s description, but it still had the look of a medieval-style fortress. Or maybe a small casino that was medieval-themed. It stood about three stories high with thin watch towers on either side of the front façade. It appeared the castle was actually guarding the entrance to the massive tomb beyond it, and I wondered if there was an entranceway there. Probably, I decided.

Darkness spread across the landing zone. I caught quick sight of the receded beach. The exposed and dried coral reef looked like a forest of brambles in the darkening sky. It gave the O-shaped land quadrant a menacing, fairy-tale appearance.

“Does anything come out of the water?” I asked Firas.

“We see shark fins and the tops of giant jellyfish, but nothing comes out. Not anymore. There were snakes for a while. Big ones that could go in and out of the water. Gwen killed the boss, and they’re gone now. The two other survivors from that water quadrant are here, and they do not want to go back in there. They say there are horrors deep down near the ocean’s floor.”

I had forgotten that Chris had not beaten that level alone. “Did you tell them about Chris?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Neither of them were surprised.”

Donut stiffened at the mention of the water quadrant. She’d been relieved when we learned that it had been defeated. I knew the poor cat was terrified of the idea of getting wet. I hoped we could avoid it.

We landed in a circle painted on the beach with red rocks. Two crawlers stood nearby waiting for us. Katia was one of them. She stood there in her seven-foot-tall warrior form, crossbow over her shoulder, grinning up at us as we disembarked.

Mongo spied her and screeched joyfully, jumping off the still-descending platform to bounce all around her as she patted him on the head. Louis and Firas went to work securing the broken water main as Donut and I jumped down.

“So you just thought you’d take a vacation?” Katia asked. “Next time you plan on getting away for a while, please warn me.”

“They thought we killed Loita!” Donut said. “But it wasn’t us. It was robot Donut!”

“I heard,” Katia said. “Everybody has heard by now. The most dangerous toy I ever had growing up was a tiny Smurfette figure that I almost choked to death on.”

I patted Katia on the shoulder. “How was the Dungeon Sidekicks show?”

“Don’t ask,” she said. “They made me do karaoke with Miriam Dom.”

“Firas was just telling me that she’s turned into a vampire.”

Katia nodded solemnly. “She did. That was after. While she was on the show, apparently Prepotente had a panic attack and went berserk and went running off. When she got back from the show, she went looking for him, and that’s when she got attacked and cursed.”

“Christ, I can’t leave you guys alone for one minute.”

She grinned. “I’m glad you’re back. We really need you for this next part.”

I turned to face the short, chainmail-clad woman standing next to Katia.

“Hello, Gwen,” I said.

“Hello, bomber guy. Hello, Princess Donut. So you two finally fucking made it,” she said.

Now that we were face to face, I vaguely remembered her from the previous floor. We’d exchanged fist bumps when Donut was collecting all the now-worthless engineer hats. The woman was about 45-years old and solid. She’d remained human and stood just about five feet tall. I knew from earlier conversations she was from Canada, and I realized now she was of First Nations origin. She wore a glowing, metal skull cap with a fur lining, but from what I could see of her dark hair, it was cut short. She had a no-nonsense metal spear slung over her shoulder.

The most distinctive feature on the woman was the forehead tattoo. It was old and weathered and faded, and it was obviously from a time long before she ever ventured into the dungeon. It was a double-v tribal pattern. The backs her hands and fingers were also covered with simple, straight-line tattoos ending in arrowheads. They almost looked like doodles.

The woman examined me with hard, dark eyes. At first I thought maybe she was a little pudgy, but upon closer examination I realized my error. I recognized that look from my years working at shipyards. This woman had a body built on hard labor, a nose that had been punched so many times it likely crinkled when you touched it, and scarred knuckles that had probably finished just as many of those fights as they started. I guessed she’d been either a dock worker, a farmer, or in construction. Someone whose work required her to spend most of her days working at varying physical tasks and whose nights were likely spent at the bar drinking and fighting her paycheck away.

I knew the type very, very well. I examined her properties.

Crawler #1,293,776. “Gwendolyn Duet.”

Level 34

Race: Human.

Class: Boring Ol’ Fighter.

“Oh, I just love those tattoos,” said Donut. “What do they mean?”

Gwen laughed. “They mean that we are wasting time, little princess. Now you two get your asses in gear. Your partner has been stalling me for almost a full day now, and that clock keeps getting lighter by the minute.”

~

The weather down here was still warm, but it was much cooler than it’d been up above. It smelled like the beach, which was oddly comforting. The sand formed channels during the most-recent sandstorm, ringing the land quadrant with concentric circles, like lanes on a track. We walked in one such channel, approaching the castle.

“Sorry we can’t wine and dine you first, bomber boy, but we need to get trucking on this bullshit your friend is making us do,” Gwen said as we marched toward the castle. “The storm that’s about to hit is the last one before the weather change, and we don’t know if that’s going to fuck us over or not. We can only do Katia’s electric door thing during the sand storm.” The ring of walls spread in front of us, each about twenty feet tall. Each had been breached, allowing for a wide doorway.

We passed the remains of what looked like a siege tower made out wood and bicycle parts. I itched at the idea of just leaving all that good material just sitting there.

“That mechanical boss bird trashed that,” Gwen said, seeing my interest. “When you killed the thing, it saved our asses. The walls were a real pain. Each one had to be picked apart in a different way. But we did it. Of course this was before you guys showed up with a flying house. And now you two, and that Arnaaluk of a friend of yours are going to go in there and try to kill the mage for us.”

“And Mongo,” Donut said.

Mongo screeched in agreement.

“Just us?” I asked. I felt my eyebrow raise. I looked over my shoulder at Katia, who smiled sheepishly.

“Oh, she didn’t tell you of the deal, did she?” Gwen made a clicking noise with her mouth. “Why does that not surprise me?”

“She’s going to tell me now,” I said.

~

I decided it was for the best that we probably have this discussion over chat.

Carl: What are we walking into? Also, what’s the deal with you two?

Donut: I LIKE HER. SHE REMINDS ME OF A MINIATURE-SIZED HEKLA.

Carl: Yeah, because that turned out great.

Katia: She is an amazing fighter. She’s fast, too. I watched her use that spear to pierce a Pazuzu in the back, vault over him, and use the momentum to throw his body at another monster. The problem is she’s a real bitch. She is like Hekla in some ways, though instead of scheming in her head, she just says it out loud the moment she thinks it. And if she doesn’t like you, she will tell you. And then just to make sure you were paying attention, she’ll say it again, but in a different way. At least Hekla pretended to be supportive.

Carl: I was actually surprised when Firas said you two were always fighting. I thought you could get along with everybody.

Katia: I made a promise to myself not that long ago. I wasn’t going to take shit any more. When Gwen makes up her mind about something, it’s impossible to change her mind. And then she becomes a bully about it. I don’t like that.

Donut: THAT MAKES HER SOUND MORE LIKE CARL THAN HEKLA. HE’S NOT A BULLY THOUGH.

Katia: Agreed. Carl doesn’t insult you when you have a different idea.

Carl: She’s exactly the type of person who would survive here. So what’s the deal with the castle?

Katia: Okay, so here’s the problem. We’ve discovered that there are two ways to take the castle. Easy way and hard way. Gwen wants to do it the easy way. But if we do it her way, I think we’re going to lose our chance at getting that winding box from the mage. Honestly, I’d also much rather do it her way too, but Zev has been unusually insistent that we wait for you two.

Carl: So you told Gwen to wait for us. And now you’re fighting a lot.

Katia: Bingo.

Carl: Okay. Lay it out for me.

Katia: The castle is made of sand. There are no tunnels or rooms or anything inside. It’s just sand with a stairwell buried in the middle.

Carl: Wait, what about the mage? What was his name? Ghazi. That was it. The note I found in the air castle said he’d basically destroy everything before he’d allow the ghost in the last quadrant to escape. So we know there’s something going on in there.

Katia: Yeah, so most of this information is from a drunk scorpion guy. He’s like this quadrant’s version of Juice Box. The Mad Dune Mage—Ghazi—turned himself into a sand elemental while trying to search for the Gate of the Feral Gods. That’s how he managed to get that one part he has, the winding box. He’s all mixed in with the sand now. There’s a magical door to get into the castle, but you can dig behind it. At first I thought it was a portal, but it’s not.

Carl: So it’s just a door leaning up against a pile of sand?

Katia: Sort of. I’ll explain in a second. After they breached the last wall, Gwen’s team found a secret drainage panel up against the side of the necropolis wall. If they turn it, it will release all the water inside the necropolis and shoot it back out into the ocean through the main drainage tunnel, which is what the sand castle is built around. We wouldn’t even need to get through the magical doorway. It’ll just destroy the sand castle, like we were hitting it with a water hose. Easy, though apparently it would only half drain the necropolis because the water is still being pumped in. So the water will be running in a loop. The pump on the submarine needs to be turned off in order to fully drain the necropolis. Our friend Maggie didn’t do that before she left which means no matter what happens, we’ll have to go back down there.

Donut: NOT GONNA HAPPEN.

I sighed. I could see the game design, the hands of the bubble creator in all of this. I had no idea how the math worked out, but there had to be at least two dozen different ways this could’ve gone depending on the order in which these castles were taken. Because the water quadrant had gone first, the subterranean quadrant filled with water. And since it was filled with water, it allowed for the easy destruction of the land quadrant. But we were still screwed, even if we did take out the castle the easy way.

Carl: So if we blow it out with the water hose plan, we take the castle, but the mage guy gets turned to mud, and we’ll never find the winding box. What’s the hard way?

Katia: You see those two towers on either side of the sand castle? At the base of each tower was a coiled-up electrical line with clips at the end. If you attach the line to the tower and then to the door, when the sandstorm hits, lighting hits the towers, and they act like lightning rods. They electrify the doorway, and a glass hallway appears. If you examine it while it opens, the message says it only opens once per sandstorm. But the door closes really fast. There’ll only be enough time for a few of us to enter. I made a deal with Gwen that we would do it. She thinks we’re idiots for trying it this way when there’s an easier solution.

Donut: THAT’S JUST LIKE IN THAT TIME MACHINE MOVIE WHERE THE GUY MAKES OUT WITH HIS MOM.

Carl: Jesus, Donut. How much television did you really watch? What happens after the door closes? Wouldn’t the castle turn back to sand? Also, what about Louis and Firas?

Katia: Uh, so I was thinking that too. I asked Mordecai while you were coming down here, and he thinks it’ll probably remain intact, but only as long as the storm lasts. So about two hours. The storm will last longer starting tomorrow, but we don’t know if it’ll still work when everything changes. We have to do this now. I told Louis and Firas to stay outside to make sure Gwen doesn’t get all Hekla on us and decide to flood the castle while we’re in it.

Carl: So we’re just going to run inside the castle and then fight some crazy magic-user guy who has the power to toss us into a different dimension? Do we have a plan other than that?

Katia: You’re the one who wants that box.

~

The doorway to the sandcastle of the Mad Dune Mage looked like any other regular dungeon door. Like Katia said, it was not a portal. Just a magical door. There was a small moat in front of the castle, but there was no bridge, and the moat itself was empty. Like everything else, it was just made out of hard-packed sand. I knew if we followed the moat semicircle all the way to the necropolis wall, we’d find the panel that would allow one to open up a large pipe that would quickly turn the whole castle into mud.

A small group of battle-hardened crawlers watched us as we approached the doorway. The electrical lines that snaked from the bottom of the two towers were still attached to the entrance frame. One was pulled taut. The other hung loosely. The moment I saw that second wire I could hear the booming, teeth-rattling voice of my instructor at “A” school where I learned the basics of electrical repair. Loose wires cause fires! Loose wires cause fires!

These were high voltage jumpers covered with plastic insulation. Each cable was as thick as my leg, though they were light, made of some alien conductor. The line on the north tower was pulled taut against the contact atop the left side of the doorway. The line on the south tower was ridiculously long and sat coiled like a snake.

I looked up at the sky. The wind was starting to howl. There wasn’t any lightning just yet, but it would arrive at any minute. I also noticed another pair of cables high above, connecting the two towers.

“Gwen, Katia. Have you seen any other contacts anywhere? Anywhere else where these clamps might fit?”

“No,” Gwen said. “And we searched pretty good. It worked yesterday when the lightning hit.”

“Shit, did we do something wrong?” Katia asked, looking nervously up at the sky.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “These two towers are already connected, so this second, long cable is redundant. We either need to bring it in with us or it might attach to something out here we haven’t found yet.”

“There’s nothing metal to attach to,” Gwen said. She pointed at a human crawler, a level 28 human “Swashbuckler.” He was a tired-looking Asian man. That was the same class as Bautista. “Tran here has a metal-detecting ability.”

“There’s nothing?” I asked the man.

He shrugged. “Nothing except that wheel that opens the drainage pipe. Actually, you know what? There is a ring under the wheel. I thought it was a handhold.”

I had a thought. “Okay. Disconnect it from the tower so you won’t get zapped, but I want you to grab the other end and pull it all the way to the wheel. Let me know if it reaches.”

The man looked uncertainly at Gwen, who nodded. He ran off. We watched him disconnect the lead from the south tower and disappear around the side of the side of the castle, dragging the long cable behind him.

I returned my attention to the entrance. “The door should still open with only one lead attached. Also, I wonder how much power it requires to activate. We might be able to hook it up to a dwarven battery or even the flying house and test it to see if there’s any reaction. Even though lightning carries a pretty big…”

Bam!

I felt the hair on my arms stand on their ends. I remembered the moment when Gore-Gore the mantaur had been electrocuted by the third rail in the tunnels. The ground all around us danced as the sand momentarily electrified. The painful tingle of a near-miss washed over everything. Mongo yowled. Donut’s hair all poofed out as she hissed. A bolt cut low across the sky, and the two towers glowed.

The door was only five feet in front of me. It also glowed blue, the door disappeared, and with a crackling noise that sounded like all the ice in the world breaking at once, a hallway appeared, leading off into darkness.

“Let’s go!” Katia cried, bounding forward and disappearing inside.

****

I hope everyone is doing well. We had a small-sized blizzard event here, but it was nothing compared to what my Texan friends are going through. Everybody keep safe out there.

While I have everybody's attention, I have a question. This is not the poll I will be placing up soon, but I'd like to crowd source an idea.

Imagine an elite special forces style hit squad of six elf-hating creatures. They are all of the same race. What race would you like to see that you don't see very often? My initial instinct was dwarves, which would work, but we see a lot of dwarves. I'd like something we haven't explored too much plus something we don't see often in litrpg. Obviously this can't be a DnD-exclusive property, but I'd be curious to see your ideas. Err, no Naiads either.