The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Chapter no 41

[ 41 ]

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.

Even with my Climb ability, getting up here had been a chore. I was now

filthy.

New Achievement! Cliffhanger!

You scaled a cliff face with your bare hands!

You know, we have scrolls and spells and stuff so you don’t have to do things like that anymore. I suppose it is honest work, but boy was it boring to watch.

Reward: I will not point out how disgusting your toenails are right now. I’ll want to, but I won’t say a damn word.

“You could’ve given me a fly ability instead of climbing,” I grumbled as I continued to wipe dirt off of myself.

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.

“Okay, get ready,” I said. “Remember the plan. Take out your…”

“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! I didn’t summon my headset, either.”

“That’s okay. We’ll be 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 Deckmaster 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 deckmaster, 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 deckmaster 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 he was asked, not talking with or aggravating the others.

Though sometimes he just sat there and refused to fight, which was usually okay, too. He had a lot of health.

Either way, his size would make fighting in certain situations

problematic.

I gawked, craning my neck.

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

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

ground-shaking growl.

He had a 75-second timer over his head.

Beware, beware, little children, beware!

Through the flurries and through the cold, Jola comes.

He 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. He 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. Jola could attack the enemy deckmaster directly because he didn’t have any summoned totems.

The cat slammed the Nightgaunt violently to the ground. More earth rumbled and split away.

“Hvar eru fötin þín?” the cat repeated, leaning his moon face into the creature. I had no idea what he 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 his jaws, and shook him violently back and forth, killing him. He tossed the now-dead mob in the air and caught it in his mouth. He crunched loudly.

Combat Complete. Deck has been reset.

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

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

With that, he 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, he is quite intense, isn’t he? Very food motivated. I once knew a British Shorthair named Chitty-Chitty Chubbywumps who acted just like him. 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. His candle can see invisible stuff, and if the opponent is either naked or a child, it makes him even stronger. Isn’t he 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 snare 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 snare 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 tail feathers 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 the noises of 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.

“Donut, get ready to cast Clockwork Triplicate. And pull out your microphone.”

The headset microphone poofed onto her head. Donut couldn’t cast magic while her deck was summoned, but spells cast before the fight started still worked as long as they didn’t require mana to keep going, like her Torch spell. Her bard songs wouldn’t work, either, because she had to activate the spell using her interface. But we found if she had her headset on, she could still amplify her voice and give orders from a distance. We also wanted to make sure we had three Mongos for these last few fights.

“Okay. Mongo. Put that down! Don’t just eat everything you find on the ground. No, put that away. Come here. Come to mommy. We’re going to call your friends out.”

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, oblivious. 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.

She hadn’t yet activated Clockwork Triplicate, thank goodness. The other two versions would be doing the exact same thing. We needed to get him calmed down before we approached the deckmaster.

“Mongo!” Donut cried, her voice amplified. “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 cloak.

“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 Dmitri and Maxim would be if they hadn’t been ejected from the game, but he 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 a good forty feet away, 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, Bitches. Welcome to Iowa.