The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Chapter no 63

[ 63 ]

th <Note added by crawler Milk, 6Edition> If you have to fight a demon, and you have access to Sheol fire, do not use it. It makes the creature exponentially stronger.

th <Note added by crawler Ikicha, 11Edition> Gods, I am so lonely.

I PEERED AROUND THE CORNER, LOOKING AT THE CHURCH. I DIDN’T SEE any more demons, but I did spy a group of level-30 to 35 pox slugs eating the corpse of a ram cleric. The things were the size of wolves. They all had white dots. There were no zombies in the immediate area, though there were a few zombie birds circling above down the street. Just past the church was the road and then the coastline, and there was a ton of red dots down there, too Sister Ines had not yet made good on her promise to send more demons to the church. I suspected she couldn’t. With each passing minute, she was losing her grip over Amayon. I wondered if that two hour timer would change if she gave up. In fact, I wondered if she could give it up. There was clearly something else going on with her.

Donut looked upon the slugs with disgust. “Carl, I feel as if I should have been consulted before you infested my strippers with a slug-leaking disease.

Splash Zone is very particular about his skin care regimen, and I imagine he’s quite upset about all this.”

“We’re going to need all the soldiers we can get if we make it to the next floor. We can build a lot of fighters fast with this method.”

Two of the slugs appeared to be literally having sex atop the pile of gore.

The girl slug kept loudly whooping the whole time.

“We need to have a conversation about quality versus quantity, Carl.”

Carl: Imani, I think it’s clear. We’re going to move in. We’re in the alley on the other side of the grass square.

Imani: Stay put. We’re coming to you.

Carl: We? Who is we?

I blinked as a blue dot appeared on my map. Then another. Then another.

A large group of crawlers appeared, walking from the church. The slugs started to scatter, but Imani yelled something at them, and they all lowered their heads and turned back toward the church compound. One had a little hatchet attached to the side of its neck, and it started waving it threateningly at Imani, and she pointed a stern finger at it, and it backed off.

“Louis!” Samantha shouted and zipped off. She zipped across the distance and hit him like a tossed football. She clearly knocked the wind out of him.

Donut gasped. “Carl, what’s happening? How did they get here?” She freed Mongo from his cage, and he started bouncing all around. He turned and saw the group and rushed toward them, screeching and jumping. He almost bowled over Britney.

Elle came floating up, looking around. “You know, I always wanted to go to Cuba.” A distant crashing punctuated the air as another building collapsed.

“Gotta say it’s a little hotter than I was expecting. A little more run down.”

Imani fluttered up next to Elle. Her skeletal face and eyes had taken on an even more hollow glaze than usual. Still, she grinned down at me. “Surprise.”

“I told you,” Elle said. “The look on his face makes this suicide mission all worth it.”

It was Imani, Katia, Bautista, Louis, Britney, Tran, Li Jun, Li Na, Zhang, Chris, Elle, a few Meadowlark crawlers I didn’t really know, and a handful of others, most of whom were Asian. It totaled over twenty people.

“It’s too bad Florin already went down the stairs,” Louis said. “It

would’ve been the whole gang otherwise.” He was looking around, suddenly sad as Samantha orbited around him in circles. His five new player killer skulls looked unnatural above his head. “Wow, this place really sucks.”

“How…” I began, looking about.

“Yeah, you don’t like it when people leave you out of the planning phase for this sort of thing, don’t you?” Elle asked.

“I don’t like it when my friends put themselves at an unnecessary risk,” I countered. “Seriously, how did you get here?”

Li Jun stepped forward. He, too, had a pair of player killer skulls he didn’t have before. “It was Lucia Mar.” He swallowed. “They’re calling it the Battle of Beijing. Lucia, she never really collected any cards. She refused to play it. She got the six totems they automatically gave her, but they were all low-level monsters. And whenever a battle started, she discarded the first one, and she played the rest until her hand was empty which allowed her to use her spells and magic and inventory. She and her dog went in and killed everything. When she showed up at the Soho building, it turned into a big fight amongst all the people without keys. There were monster traps set up, too, and it was chaos. I didn’t see it, but I saw the aftermath.”

He paused, rubbing his arm. “She killed so many people. She set up a teleport trap, and Fang’s team got caught up in it. He had a key. She killed him and his wife and took it. After that, we thought she’d already gone down the stairs, but when we got there, she was waiting for us. She can hide her presence now. She said Florin had messaged her before he’d gone down the stairs and told her to help us.” He pulled something from his inventory and handed it to me. “She dropped five of these on the ground and then went down the stairs. We already installed one of them in Imani’s room. We don’t know how she got these, where she got them from, or why she had so many.”

“What the hell?” I asked.

“Yeah. She was really friendly, too, which was unsettling. My sister wanted to fight her.”

I examined the item. It was a personal space upgrade module. If you bought one of these from a bopca, they just installed it directly into your room, but if you got one from a box, it’d come like this. You had to put it in your inventory and then enter your personal space tab on your interface to use it.

“She shouldn’t have had one, let alone five of them. It’s a tier-3.

Mordecai says these shouldn’t be available until the ninth floor,” Katia

added. “He thinks Lucia stole them when she went on a show or something.”

Personal Space Upgrade.

Tier 3 Doggie Door.

So, you’re out adventuring, and you suddenly have a hankerin’ for those sweet pancakes you had two weeks back at some dive that’s now over two hundred kilometers away. What are you gonna do? Travel for several hours in the wrong direction just to get another taste? Psshh.

Okay, loser.

The cool kids use the doggie door.

Upgrades the door in your personal space to allow a selectable exit via any door you have previously utilized on this same floor, effectively creating a fast travel waypoint system. Allows shared gated access amongst guests and party members.

“Holy shit,” I said. “So you gave it to Imani, and she installed it in their room, and now anyone in the guild can go out that door into the church?”

“That’s right,” Katia said. “Or into Washington or into Detroit. Or into Belgium, where Elle’s squad went during the key phase. It works for the whole Meadowlark party.”

“Can we upgrade the entire guild to use it, so it works on my door, too?”

“We can,” Imani said, “but it’s pretty expensive. It’s a tier-three. Twenty- five million to give it to everybody. In the meantime, we still have four more and can install them on individual doors as needed. By the way, we already pooled all our money to buy that barracks upgrade.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I got almost five million off Quan.”

Elle spit on the ground. “You should’ve beaten him to death with his own

arm.”

“That’s what I said!” Donut quipped.

“I still have the key for the door,” I said. “I was going to give it to Imani.

You all have keys. You shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s not how this works, Carl,” Elle said. “You were right, what you said in your little speech. We’re all in this together. We’re all screwed if we don’t all make it to the next floor. If things really go south, most of us can still go back and use our keys. But until that time we’re here, and we’re helping.”

“And I’m not taking your key,” Imani added. “Donut told me about your dumbass idea to use one of your own bones or whatever to get out. People have bones for a reason, Carl. No. Like Elle said. It’s all or nothing.”

I looked again at the module and sighed. “These sure would’ve been handy a few days ago.”

“Tell me about it,” Elle said, looking pointedly at Imani. “It would’ve changed everything. I wonder how long that crazy kid has been holding on to these things. I also wonder if Florin knew about them. I already chewed him out just in case. We’ve been chasing a fast travel system since the whole guild system opened.”

Li Jun: This is just for you, Carl. There’s more. Lucia dropped the upgrades, and she said she was helping us because Florin had asked, but before she went down the stairs, she went from really friendly to mean again, and she said she was saving something special for herself because she had a score to settle with Donut and that she would be seeing her on the next floor. She said she was going to kill both Donut and her pet dinosaur. That’s why my sister wanted to fight her.

Carl: Holy shit. Okay, thanks for not saying that out loud.

I looked nervously at Donut, who stood on the edge of Tran’s flying wheelchair module for his missing legs. She laughed with delight, switched into her dragonfly tiara, and then cast Hover, showing them all her new skill.

I had to hold myself back from chiding her for wasting her five-times-a-day skill.

Tran, too, was smiling as he reached over and pet Donut. Britney was on the ground, on her back as Mongo snuffled against her. She was laughing as well. It was the first time I’d seen either of those two, Tran or Britney, so much as smile since the end of the Butcher’s Masquerade.

Actually, come to think of it, it was the first I’d seen Britney smile. Ever.

I felt it, too. The change in the air. It was an overwhelmingly welcome feeling.

Things were not looking up for us, but somehow that didn’t matter.

Despite Lucia’s new threat. Despite the overwhelming odds against us.

Despite all the death and pain. Still… still…

Ever since the horror of the Butcher’s Masquerade there’d been this feeling coming over me. It was like an extra layer of darkness on top of everything. It was an overpowering sense of futility that I hadn’t even realized was there. This was in addition to the hopelessness that permeated everything. Our humanity was slowly, slowly being siphoned away. With each passing challenge, each new death, each new twist we were becoming less of who we were.

I thought of Ren, and of the hopelessness that had broken her. Of all these crawlers who’d been forced to confront their own personal nightmares on this floor. Of my mother, who’d drowned in her own sorrow. Of the stepmother I’d never met, and what she’d done. Of the goddamned river that was so loud it was the only thing I could hear.

It was loneliness. It had always been loneliness.

That veil was ripped away. Nothing had changed about our situation. We were likely fucked, yes. But we were all together again. And there was hope.

Finally. Clarity filled me for the first time in a long while. It was isolation that would break us. We couldn’t let it happen.

I thought of Lucia, the most isolated crawler in the dungeon, yet she’d held onto something that could literally bring us all together.

I looked at Katia. I thought of that flower in her inventory, and of all the

potential outcomes.

We have to find another way.

But right here, right now, I’d never felt so grateful to know these people standing in front of me.

Elle clapped her little hands together, showering flecks of ice everywhere.

She gazed at me.

“Okay, warlord. This is your shitshow. What do we gotta do?”