The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Chapter no 7

[ 7 ]

AFTER WE COLLECTED THAT SECOND CARD, ADDING GERALDO THE MONK seal as our first squad member, we abandoned the coast and started to move into the city in hopes of finding a saferoom. It didn’t take long. Donut spotted one a few blocks deeper into the city. This was a less touristy area, filled with homes and small shops. We all traveled together. After that last fight, everyone was more comfortable with each other. Donut even seemed to have eased off on her distaste for Sister Ines.

We passed through an intersection filled with a pile of crashed cars and bicycles and mopeds, but the circle of cars wasn’t very big. No cars came from any direction, but there were still people out and about with clothing on.

A few bicycles still appeared. We squeezed between a wrecked, classic Chevrolet and the wall of a building as Zev messaged.

Zev: Hi guys.

Donut: HI ZEV! HOW ARE YOU?

Zev: So, I have some news. You were scheduled to go on Odette’s show tonight, but she has decided to take several days off.

Donut: OH NO. IS SHE OKAY?

Zev: She’s fine. She usually moves to the system’s orbit for Faction Wars, and Prepotente’s little stunt accelerated everyone’s schedule, so she’s traveling. We moved your scheduled interview to later. Plenty of Plenty also wanted you on, but I turned them down on your behalf. We have multiple offers on the table, but we wanted to get you on something quickly since it’s been a while. I have you two scheduled on a program called Shadow Boxer. It’s an interview about your lives before the crawl.

You’ll be going on tomorrow after the recap.

Carl: Yeah, I’m not interested in rehashing all that bullshit with Bea again. Nobody wants that.

Zev: I’ll tell them Beatrice is off-limits. That won’t be the subject anyway. This is more like that Earth Beautiful program you went on a few weeks back, but this one is exploring the tale of Earth through storytelling and vignettes about the lives of some of the contestants. It won’t be live, and it’ll be a documentary-style interview. They want to focus on your life, Carl, when you were 15 to 18 years old. So, the time when you were left without a guardian until your age of majority when

you joined the Navy.

Donut: WHAT ABOUT ME?

Zev: They want to talk to you about how certain television programs shaped your perceptions. You two will go up to the show together, but your interviews will be split into two different programs. You’ll be together the whole time.

Carl: I was in the Coast Guard. Not Navy. And, no. All that crap is nobody’s goddamned business. Pick something else. We can just do the Donut interview, but that’s it.

Zev: They want to interview both of you. I should note that this program is also listed as an NFC non-profit, and it is owned by one of your sponsors. The Open Intellect Pacifist Network. I’ll be required to be there, and because it’s a program owned by a sponsor, a liaison will also be present to make certain the sponsor doesn’t give you an unfair advantage. They really want you on that program. The both of you.

Goddamnit. I considered this for a few moments. A liaison? I remembered what Orren the liaison had said to us near the end of the previous floor. He’d been trying to warn us about something, but I still didn’t understand what it was. Still… if this program was put together by the Open Intellect Pacifist Network… There had to be something to it.

Carl: Okay.

Donut: YAY! I CAN TALK ABOUT GOSSIP GIRL AND RIVERDALE AND THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.

She audibly gasped on my shoulder as she realized something.

Donut: ZEV, THEY SHOULD INTERVIEW YOU, TOO!

Zev: Sorry, Donut. I’m not allowed to make media appearances. But that reminds me. You two also have a preproduction meeting in a few days. I’m not certain of the exact time yet.

Carl: What does that mean?

Zev: It’s for the ninth floor. A team of reps from all nine Faction

Wars participants will attend. Usually the meeting is relegated to lower- tier executives from each team, but your army currently consists of you two, your lawyer, a bunch of NPCs, and Donut’s fan club. Since policy items for the game will be discussed, I took the liberty of assuming you’ll want to be there. You’ll be getting a glimpse of something very few people ever will. And yes, Donut, before you ask, these events are usually

catered.

Carl: Wait, will this be in-person?

Zev: Don’t get too excited, Carl. They’re insisting your presence be virtual. You’ll be at the production facility.

Donut: BUT IT WILL STILL BE CATERED, RIGHT?

Zev: Yes, Donut.

“Is everything all right?” Sister Ines asked as I stepped to avoid a man riding a bicycle rickshaw. The bike slammed right into a crashed car, and the ghost of the rider disappeared into the mess. I moved to grab the bike, but the front tire had bent in the crash. I left it.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re dealing with our interview schedule.”

“It must be a lot of work,” she said with a hint of sarcasm. I held up my hand as another message came in, this one from Bautista giving an update on Tran. The man, who’d lost both his legs and his good friend Gwen at the end of the previous floor, was finally out and about, learning how to use his new floating wheelchair. Anton let out an exasperated breath.

As we made our way to the saferoom, both Donut and Sister Ines sensed a group of small monsters a few streets over, pinging about. We went to investigate and found a mass of hairy, gnome-like creatures crawling over a pile of wrecked cars. These were common, level-20 monsters called duendes.

They were all over the place. There had to be at least a hundred of them, and those were only the ones we could see.

I quickly pulled out the Book of Lore. I remembered seeing these guys in the first section under common monsters. Each one was about a foot tall and dressed in rags. They all looked like tiny, angry, homeless men.

I didn’t have time to read the entire entry, but it said they didn’t have any special or magical attacks. The portrait in the book depicted one of them holding what appeared to be a giant pair of nail clippers. None of the ones

here were armed with anything at all except their sharp teeth.

They were small, but they were big enough that if they got hit by a bike or a moped, it would knock the bike over. Which meant these little assholes were likely the cause of most of the car crashes in the area.

As we approached, I watched a pair launch themselves at a ghost riding a bike. They tackled through his clothes, causing the bike, his pants, and his shoes to go flying off his body. The oblivious ghost continued on his way.

The little monsters emerged from the wreckage, each holding onto one of the man’s shoes. They both ripped the shoes up, growling like dogs with a chew toy. I saw another duende had amassed a whole pile of shoes and was upside down in a boot, legs dangling in the air, like he was dumpster diving for something. He emerged, angrily chittering.

The AI’s description on the mobs was strange. It was unusually short. I

examined the one in the boot.

Mordecai. Duende. Level 20.

Screw these guys. Kill them.

“Carl, look, he has the same name as Mordecai!” Donut said. “We should put him in our squad!”

I laughed. “I don’t think these guys are squad worthy.”

A moment later, one of them spied us, and combat initiated. Screams rose up and down the street. The monsters growled and charged, but they were physically weak and didn’t coordinate with one another, some of them even fighting each other for the chance to get to us first.

We moved into three separate groups. Sister Ines’s squad moved across the street, Donut and I posted up near the line of buildings, and Mongo rushed out, gleefully ripping them to pieces.

He ate Mordecai the duende first.

Killing them was not difficult.

As we fought, my new essence bar quickly filled. It only took about ten kills to fill it all the way to the top. The bar itself took on a sickly, brown hue that swirled oddly with yellow and green flecks, reminding me of sewage with oil spilled in it. Just looking at the bar made me feel a little ill.

Once the essence bar became fully charged, I received a notification. It was in a new voice, deep and ominous.

The Scavenger’s Daughter has been fed. Unleash her wrath.

A new skill appeared in my interface. The Daughter’s Kiss. Once activated, it would completely drain my essence bar and make my next melee

attack extra powerful. I needed to use it as soon as possible because it was apparently dangerous to walk around with a full essence bar. I still wasn’t clear on how it was unsafe, but I wasn’t about to wait around to find out.

Each time I filled and then drained the bar, the bar itself grew, requiring more souls to fill for the next attack, which would also be more powerful.

Donut spit a glob of poison at a screaming duende. The green, sticky poison blob stuck to the monster’s face, causing him to fall over. The consistency of the stuff reminded me of the slime from the Ghostbusters movies. The mob’s skin started to bubble, and he quickly died. It was a skill, not a spell, and it was currently at level five, but with low-level monsters, it was especially effective. She had a short cooldown for it, too. Like fifteen seconds.

“Carl, that awful back patch on your jacket is glowing. What did you do?

Mongo, no! You’re going to ruin your dinner!”

Mongo flew through the air and landed atop a bus, metal screeching against his claws. He had a squealing duende in his mouth. He crunched down and swallowed.

“It’s probably because my new essence bar thing is full. What does it look like?”

“Hang on. It’s hard to see because of your cape thing.” She jumped to my shoulder and pushed it aside. She made a disgusted noise and jumped back down. “Those weird stitches all around the pile of skulls are glowing, but they’re glowing brown, and I can’t tell what it’s supposed to be. Not all of them are lit up. Maybe an aardvark. It looks just dreadful.”

“It’s not an aardvark” I said. I zeroed in on a single duende. It was rushing down the street away from Mongo. He was looking over his shoulder at the dino atop the bus, screaming. The creature dragged a shoe with him as he fled. I activated the Daughter’s Kiss skill. I jumped toward the fleeing monster, and I crushed down with my foot. I was expecting to knock him over with the attack, as he was just a little too big to simply smush.

The creature exploded into nothing. There was no resistance at all. The concrete sidewalk under my foot shattered into dust and rocks. A small shockwave burst forth, throwing all the remaining duendes to their backs.

Mongo screeched in outrage as the crashed bus he stood upon rocked. A window in a nearby building shattered.

Across the street, the three other crawlers stopped fighting to look at me.

I just stood there for a moment. A bolt of something whipped through me,

like an aftershock of the souls leaving my body. That ill feeling I’d momentarily felt was gone. Mostly.

“Wow,” Donut said, jumping up to my shoulder. “Now that was impressive. And the aardvark image on your back went away when you did it.”

“It’s going to get stronger each time I do it, too,” I said. I lifted my foot, and it wasn’t even gory. I’d vaporized the damn thing. There wasn’t anything left to even loot. The shoe it had been dragging was scorched and flattened, like it’d been crushed with an industrial press.

“Carl, are you okay? You have a weird look on your face.”

“I… I think so. I just wasn’t expecting it to feel like that. Come on, let’s mop the rest up.”

After it was done, Donut and I collected a total of three common utility cards. Two of them were Time Extend cards, which doubled the amount of time a summoned totem would last, and the third was a Stout card, which added 25% to a mob’s health for the duration of combat. The cards were not one-time consumables like our combo card.

Team Sister Ines also received three cards. Two were the same Time Extend cards. They also received an uncommon “special” card titled Flee.

That one could only be used once, and it teleported the whole squad away from combat. It didn’t say how far or where it teleported them to.

We still weren’t sure how deck combat worked. Donut said she’d tried to summon the monk seal when we were fighting the duendes, and she got an error message. I knew we’d receive an explanation soon during the next announcement.

We made our way to the saferoom, which was a small coffee shop name “Cuba Libro.” A street over was a park with dozens of more mobs within.

Donut said these were more human-sized. We’d check it out later.

“So, are you guys in a guild?” I asked Sister Ines as we entered the shop.

“No,” the nun said. “Team Flamenco wants us to join up, but we’ve decided to stay alone.”

“You should definitely join with us,” Donut said. “We share in all of the upgrades, including this really nice shower. And beds that make it so you hardly have to sleep at all. You get the training room upgrade, and there’s a

really nice bopca in the common area. Also, you can meet Katia and Bomo and Mordecai! The real Mordecai, not the duende that Mongo just ate.”

“We like it the way it is,” Ines said. “We have the upgraded bed already.”

“What about the upgraded litterbox? I bet you don’t have the upgraded

litterbox.”

“I don’t use a litterbox, Donut.”

Donut made an outraged noise and mumbled something under her breath.

We moved into the situationally-generated hall leading to our personal space doorways. We agreed to meet up again after the recap. We’d clear out the park and start moving out of the city and into the rural areas in search of more powerful mobs to hunt and capture.

We watched the three enter their personal space. As they opened and went inside, I could see they had one of the smaller-sized ones where everyone slept in the same room.

Donut: I LIKE PAZ, AND I THINK ANTON IS OKAY EVEN IF HE’S GRUMPY AND IS COMPLETELY UNEMPLOYABLE WITH THOSE TATTOOS, BUT I DON’T TRUST THE WOMAN. AND IT’S NOT JUST BECAUSE SHE’S A CAT GIRL. THERE’S SOMETHING WEIRD ABOUT HER.

Carl: I’m still on the fence. I think they’re okay, but they’re scared of us. It doesn’t help that they’d been told you were going to kill them.

Every new person we meet will have gone through some serious shit to get to this point, and we have to keep that in mind.

Donut: SHE DOESN’T EVEN USE A LITTERBOX, CARL. IT’S HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS.