The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Chapter no 31

[ 31 ]

th <Note added by Crawler Rosetta, 9Edition> As fragile as they look, fairies and sprites can be difficult to kill.

They’re fast. They’re magical. They’re always on alert. They say luck is not a real stat in this place, but I think it is. The luck of these little monsters… it’s unnatural. Something crazy always happens when I try to fight one. Be wary, comrades.

But if you must fight them, pull their wings off. They come off easily. That’s where they store their magic.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN YOU HERE BEFORE,” CLARABELLE SAID, GLARING DOWN at Samantha. “I’ve seen you on the recap a bunch of times, but I never noticed the pass on your neck.”

Samantha growled and made a hissing noise at Clarabelle. She snapped her teeth a few times.

“In the Nothing, there’s a goddess who looks a lot like you. Maki.

Maraka. Makara? Something like that. I can’t remember her name. She has the head of a crocodile and body of a fish, and she makes sushi rolls out of her own innards. They keep growing back, and she keeps making more and selling it. She has a little stand and everything. She’s quite the entrepreneur.”

Samantha made a spitting sound. “It tastes terrible.”

“What’s your point?” Clarabelle asked.

“My point is that I am going to kill your mother.”

Clarabelle crossed her arms. “Is that so?”

“Oh it be so, lady. Now let me in!”

“You know what,” Clarabelle began, “I don’t think…”

I scooped Samantha up and held up a hand, interrupting. I slammed her jaw shut with my arm before she ruined everything. “Listen. Sorry about her.

We just finished a quest where she killed someone, and they put the tattoo on her neck.”

“It is disgusting,” Samantha said, her voice muffled by my arm. She wriggled her head free. “I hate tattoos more than I hate sushi. Though I did have alligator nuggets once. They tasted like chicken! When I get my body, I will never have a tattoo again!”

“…But now she wants to try a drink,” I said, talking over her. “I promised I’d take her before phase two started. That’s all.” I flipped Clarabelle a gold coin. “Sorry, I know she’s an ass.”

“Whatever,” Clarabelle said and waved us through. “Just keep her away from the guards, or they’ll kick you all out. For good this time.”

“Oh boy,” Samantha said as she squeezed out of my arms. She hit the ground, bounced once, and she rolled through the door and into the main restaurant.

“Sorry,” I said again to Clarabelle before I followed after her.

“Yoohoo! What’s a girl gotta do to get a shirty dirly?”

“It’s dirty Shirley,” I called. “And don’t get drunk!”

“You! Elf lady! Point me to the bar! The good one, not that boring one. I

know there’s a few up here!”

I sighed.

Carl: She almost ruined it already, but she’s in. Are you in place?

Katia: Yes. We have a problem. There’s a few crawlers in the club.

We need to make sure they stay out of the way.

Carl: Any of our people?

Katia: No, but they’re all on the top floor, dancing. They’ll probably be okay, but we should try to kick them out just in case.

Carl: Okay. I’ll take care of them when I go up there. How are you feeling?

Katia: I’m feeling like people keep asking me that. It was a blip.

Don’t worry about me. Let’s do this.

That was more than a blip, but I wasn’t going to say that now. Katia was drugged to the gills with Imani buffs until we could get her truly cured of all her new addictions. Mordecai seemed to believe she’d be okay like this for a

few days at least.

Carl: All right. Here we go.

I consulted my recently-enhanced map, and I headed deeper into the club, passing by the bar. Samantha was already there, sitting on the counter demanding that the badger bartender add extra cherries to her drink order.

“Don’t forget my straw. And you will have to feed the cherries to me,” she was saying. I was pretty sure she was trying to sound throaty and seductive. “Put one on each claw, and I will eat them off.” She snapped with her teeth and did a little growl. “One by one.”

“You got gold?” the bartender asked, not impressed. I gave the badger man a cursory inspection. He was a level-25 Porsuk, which was the name of the badger race in this game. The man’s name was Charles.

“Oh, yes,” Samantha purred. “I got a coin pouch in my nussy. You make that drink right, and I’ll let you use those sexy claws of yours to… dig it out.”

“In your what?”

I shuddered as I moved into a side hallway. This was on the other side of the badger bar and led down to a few shops, including the gnome jeweler and a few other odds and ends on one side. On the other side of the hall was a “Meat Shields” location where one could purchase mercenaries. Donut and I both had coupons for that place, but we were saving them.

Carl: Good job. Don’t piss him off too much yet. Wait for my signal.

Samantha: YOU DIDN’T TELL ME HOW GREAT THIS PLACE IS. I DON’T WANT TO GET KICKED OUT ANYMORE. I WANT TO KEEP COMING BACK. MAEMAE WOULD LOVE IT HERE.

Carl: Stick with the plan. If this works, you’ll only get kicked out for a day or so.

That was absolutely a lie, but I needed her to focus.

I pushed my way down the long hallway until I found the utility closet at the very end. I had already gone this way a few days back, making sure the supposed monsters that lived back here weren’t roaming freely. They weren’t.

I entered the closet and opened the hidden door, quietly closing it behind me. I pulled a torch from my inventory and lit it. The passage led into the

darkness. This secret corridor ran parallel with the hallway I’d come from, but it was behind all the shops.

When Astrid came from the top floor to the middle one to deal with any sort of problem on this half of the club, she would pass through here. It was the perfect place for an ambush.

The location presented a few problems, however.

A few days back, Katia had planted a cherry bomb in the men’s bathroom, designed to go off while she was on the other side of the club. She did it to watch how the guards would react, and to see if Astrid would respond.

Astrid did respond, briefly, but it wasn’t until almost an hour later. She came out to yell at a few guards before returning to her office. We quickly dismissed using a second bomb to lure her out, instead opting to use Samantha, which would guarantee a swifter response. Still, that first experiment wasn’t without benefit. Katia used the opportunity to drink a Size- Up potion and get a read on Astrid’s spells and abilities.

The fairy was terrifyingly powerful. She had an intelligence of 150 and a whole arsenal of spells designed to kill you from the inside out. She could boil blood. Deprive it of oxygen. Turn it to acid. She had a spell that literally animated your heart and turned it into a mob, using your veins and arteries as limbs.

She also had a host of psionic abilities, mostly focused on keeping rock creatures, lizard creatures, and “The Armored Sai,” in line. The sai were the regular guards of the Larracos level, though I’d never seen one. Apparently they were like samurai rhinoceroses.

She had a passive ability called Cosmic Sense, which appeared to be like my skill that warned me when a god was present, but hers worked on both gods and demons. That was probably a good thing to have when one was in charge of security at a giant nightclub.

One of her skills was worrisome. Five times a day, she could invoke Summon Guard, which would instantly teleport backup to her location. Each casting would bring “between one to three guards” from the club to her.

There was no cooldown, and the casting was instantaneous, meaning she could fill the hallway with up to 15 guards at the snap of her finger.

We didn’t want to fight the guards. We didn’t even want them to know we were involved at all.

That meant in order to kill her, it had to be immediate, and it had to be a

surprise.

Still, we needed to set up contingencies. I came up with the plan that took care of the summoned guards, if it came to that.

If my IED worked, Astrid would never get a chance to summon anyone.

But we couldn’t rely on it. I took a page from Lucia Mar’s playbook. If Astrid summoned any guards, they would immediately fall onto teleport traps. I was going to fill the hallway with them, designed to teleport any NPCs to a locked closet on the top floor. Since Astrid flew everywhere, she wouldn’t trip the traps, but I specifically called out fairies just in case she decided to purposely slam into one.

Any guard she summoned to the room would flash, appear, and flash again before they even knew what happened. Hopefully.

The second problem with this ambush location was the monsters.

At the end of this corridor was another room with a closed door. Behind that door was a group of fifteen mobs. We didn't know what the red-tagged monsters were, but according to the map, the room was an abandoned practice arena of the now-defunct “Demon Tamer's Guild.”

I moved my way deeper into the hall. Between me and the monster door were about fifty traps, including silent alarms for both crawlers and monsters, several “Demon Snares,” and a few summoning traps designed to call specific guards to the location should the other traps get triggered.

Astrid also had that Cosmic Sense ability, which probably warned her if these things got out. We’d toyed with using that as a trigger to get her down here, but dismissed the idea as too dangerous, even for us.

I quickly made my way down the passage, disarming everything except the demon snares, though I did take five of them for myself. As I moved, I set up my two-part teleport traps. After this, I still had to get upstairs and place the second half of the traps—the beacons—into the hidden utility closet.

The door at the end of the hallway was secured with a simple, hanging, unenchanted padlock. It was just a regular door, similar to all the others in the club with a rusted lock hanging off it. The only indication of what was inside was the dust-covered, paper sign hanging off the door: Warning. Do Not Enter. Extreme, You’re-Going-To-Die-In-A-Lot- Of-Pain Danger. Seriously. Don’t open this fucking door. Posted by Management.

According to the Night Wyrm, nobody knew what the monsters were.

Only that they were outrageously dangerous. There’d been numerous

attempts to clear the room, and the parties who entered all died. The fact they’d let this room just exist here with only a few traps as a stopgap was ridiculous. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t real life, but game setup.

This was obviously part of some quest we didn’t want to get involved with.

The problem was if there was a fight in this hallway, I just knew that this goddamned door would get blown open. Especially since there would be a few small explosives going off. I had to reinforce the door the best I could.

I worked quickly. This was all something that I should’ve done earlier, but we’d run out of time. I’d been tempted to skip all this, but I didn’t dare. I just had a feeling that these monsters, whatever they were, were awful.

I listened at the door, but I didn’t hear anything. I could see them on the map, just sitting there. I pulled a thick, metal, blast-resistant wall from my inventory and set it in place, perfectly blocking the door. The first time I’d come in here, I’d measured the hall’s dimension’s carefully, and it fit seamlessly. I used the ratchet bracers to make sure the wall was firmly locked into place.

I started stacking sandbags against the wall. When I was done, I would add a second wall and ratchet that one in place as well. I glanced nervously at the clock. We had an hour and a half left before Donut and I would get

whisked away to be on Odette’s show.

As I worked, Katia messaged me.

Katia: Carl, how’s it going?

Carl: I’m almost done here. Are you okay?

Katia: Do you feel guilty about this?

Carl: About killing Astrid?

Katia: Yeah.

I did, actually. A little bit. She hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d barely had any interactions with the tiny fairy woman, and the ones I did have were mostly negative. That hardly warranted death. But she was an NPC. She wasn’t one of us. Both Katia and I had killed literally thousands of them by this point. I didn’t want to do it, and I would avoid it if at all possible. But, again, my earlier opinion on this hadn’t changed. We were doing them a favor, breaking them from this hell.

I thought of those kids Mordecai was fostering. Was it a contradiction to want to keep them safe? Hypocrisy? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I was moving forward the best I could.

Carl: We’re doing what we have to, Katia. We didn’t come up with this quest on our own. We didn’t ask for any of this.

Katia: Yeah. You’re right… it’s just…

Carl: What?

Katia: Sometimes, I think about the futility of it all. I never want anyone to get hurt. The only time I ever did, it was Eva. And look what happened.

Carl: What happened was you stopped her from hurting anybody else. Don’t let them break you. That’s what they want.

Katia: Carl…

Carl: And don’t you dare tell me you’re already broken. You’re here, and you’re doing this with me. That tells me you still have fight in you, and that’s all that matters. I’m not going to give up, and I’m not going to give up on you. Now let’s do this.

Katia: God, you are the master of cheeseball motivational speeches.

Thank you. I needed that.

I chuckled softly. On the other side of the wall came a low growl, like a noise a sleeping dog would make. A wave of goosebumps passed through me. I went back to work.