When confronted with something too good to be true, should one fling it aside out of sheer principle? Cast it to the wind, grind it underfoot, and declare, “Nice try, Universe, but I’m not falling for that one!”? Or would that, in fact, be the very definition of a fool—the one who, upon finding a golden goose, promptly strangles it just to prove he’s nobody’s dupe?
Lionel J’Khall didn’t have an answer to that. What he did have was just the kind of opportunity he’d been seeking for years, knocking violently on his door.
***
“How much?” he asked, in the casual tone of a man inquiring about the price of cabbage, all while staring at a Dungeon right that could, in no uncertain terms, change his entire life.
His heart was pounding somewhere in his throat.
This was no ordinary thing. He could tell at a glance.
“How much do you have?” Ix asked, eyes brimming with the kind of honesty usually exclusive to used-cart salesmen and professional gamblers.
But Lionel didn’t need honesty. He didn’t even need a bargain.
For although he didn’t believe in fate, standing there, he was certain the universe had led him here for a reason.
“Enough,” he said, attempting a casual shrug even as his fingers kept trembling with excitement.
No matter what, he needed that Dungeon to become his, and nothing—nothing—could be allowed to stand in the way of the future he was already seeing in his head. This moment would change his life.
***
There are cannons, and then there are entire storefronts being fired in a generally outward direction.
If any of the undead, clogging the street as they swarmed toward the remnants of Mini-King’s Convenience Store that night, were surprised by the better part of a building suddenly becoming mobilized, well, then maybe that was understandable.
For when two massive explosions have already taken place—in a single day, and in the same neighborhood—what are the odds that it will happen for a third time? Anyone unfamiliar with Gremlin dealings would most likely misjudge those numbers by quite a bit.
This time, however, it was no accident.
This time, there was something eerily deliberate about it all.
At least anyone present for the warm-up act, taking place across those fateful seconds leading up to imminent destruction, thought so.
It began with a “Staff Only” door, abruptly evacuating its hinges to perform a violent series of bounces through the tightly packed throng of zombies outside.
Having spent the last several minutes bashing at that very door, the undead were momentarily confused to discover that, in a highly technical sense, they had won.
Before they could exploit said victory, however, something emerged from within: A shopping cart, suspiciously weighted down with an ominous payload, hissing, and spitting flames as it hurtled straight through their midst like a budget version of the Four Horsemen.
Even if the undead had been capable of stopping it, there was no time.
Because that was when everything went Boom.
KA-Boom.
Any zombies standing in the immediate vicinity were converted into a fine, pinkish mist with a mild undertone of charred regret. They were the lucky ones.
The survivors had to face the wave of destruction that followed.
It expanded with the subtlety of a socialite making an entrance, tearing through walls and ceilings and launching rubble with the force of a battering ram.
Concrete support beams, relieved of their previous employment, took to their newfound freedom with gusto, flattening anything unlucky enough to be standing in their way. Shelves shattered into a storm of splinters, industriously introducing themselves to undead flesh and the less structurally sound portions of zombie skulls.
There were also the general items.
An inspired mix of light fixtures, rubber slippers, and canned goods found themselves achieving great velocity, propelled outward with the approximate speed and accuracy of a building-sized blunderbuss.
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For anything in the path of the airborne projectiles—say, the shambling mass still attempting to queue their way inside Mini-King’s Convenience Store—a bad time was inbound.
And for those who somehow survived that, there was, of course, the fireball.
As the rest of the shopping cart’s payload detonated, a second wave of heat and concussive force ripped across the street.
Anything not already shattered was reduced to not-so glittering confetti. Anything not already burned was given a hasty sear on both sides. And the local property values plummeted so hard they left a crater.
Then came the final, thunderous CRACK.
It was deafening to anyone still alive to hear it, and worse still for anyone still inside Mini-King’s when the third and final set of chain-explosions tore through its now entirely theoretical aisles.
Whatever remained of the store’s structural integrity gave up with a resigned sigh, and the whole building sagged forward, like an actor taking a dramatic bullet to the stomach.
It groaned. It tilted. And just before it collapsed entirely, something spun out of the shattered storefront—mere moments before the whole thing slammed shut like the gaping maw of a retail-based predator.
And odd as people-eating buildings might seem, it was nothing compared to the figure who had just escaped it.
How, precisely, a sane person observing the scene might have asked, does strapping several spray cans to one’s feet, taping down the nozzles, and setting them alight constitute an effective form of locomotion?
To which the answer, firstly, was that it didn’t.
The figure in question was not so much flying as she was being erratically thrown in multiple directions at once.
Her trajectory resembled that of a deeply confused insect attempting to navigate a closed window: frantic, misguided, and occasionally featuring sudden, inexplicable changes in course.
Secondly…Well, the Bureau for Complaints Surrounding Gremlin Shenanigans is always open (in much the same way that a black hole is always open—meaning complaints could go in, but no one had ever seen evidence of anything useful coming back out). Historically speaking, their response to most reports tend to be along the lines of:
“It is what it is,” usually accompanied by a weary sigh and a quiet resignation to the nature of the universe.
Contact at your own discretion.
Thirdly, Annabel’s grand experiment in jet-powered footwear was, in most aspects, a short-lived flight of fancy.
She had barely cleared the first few ranks of freshly obliterated undead when one of her improvised thrusters sputtered, coughed, and promptly gave up, sending her into an aerial descent best described as "highly interpretive."
Below, the surviving zombies—either lucky enough to have been at a safe distance or built resilient enough to withstand several tons of rapidly relocating building—began closing in.
One specimen, Aggressive Leaper (Level 8), launched itself skyward to intercept her fall.
It was met, understandably, by a spinning, rocket-propelled boot.
It turns out that when something is whirling through the air at the approximate speed of oh gods oh gods oh gods, even an old boot becomes an instrument of divine retribution.
The Leaper took the hit squarely in the jaw and promptly ceased to be an issue, its head detaching in a manner that would have made even seasoned guillotine operators nod in appreciation.
Annabel, meanwhile, landed in a spray of gore, a now headless zombie beneath her, and several dozen not-headless zombies closing in from every direction.
Then again, the rough landing didn’t seem to deter her any more than the sudden head loss of their comrade deterred them.
With the flair of a duelist drawing her blades at dawn—albeit a duelist who had broken into a janitor’s closet first—Annabel promptly freed Excalibur and Durandal from her waist, where they had been secured by the ancient and noble art of duct tape.
Or, more accurately:
In one hand, she brandished a Toilet Plunger.
Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal: Activated
Equipped: Toilet Plunger → Abilities Gained:
- Active: Suction Smite – Strikes with such inexplicable force that it sticks to the target with a deep and resounding thwop, refusing to let go.
- Passive: Unplumbed Depths – Gains increased effectiveness against any creature that was never meant to crawl out of a drain in the first place. Deals bonus damage to slimes, sewer mutants, tentacled abominations, and anything that emerges from your general plughole.
And in the other hand, she held a Toilet Brush (Slightly Used).
Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal: Activated
Equipped: Toilet Brush (Slightly Used) → Abilities Gained:
- Active: Scrub and Smite – A relentless flurry of aggressively applied hygiene. Deals increasing damage to filth-based enemies and has a small chance to instill a deep, existential shame in sapient opponents.
- Passive: Toxic Carriage – Look, it was labeled “Slightly Used” for a reason. Contact with the business end of this weapon has a high chance to inflict mild to severe regret in the form of disease, discomfort, and the profound realization that some stains never truly go away.
And in her pouch, she carried enough homemade explosives and fire hazards to send even the most respectable TSA agent into a medical emergency.
The undead horde pressed in.
Annabel met them with her blades of legend.
***
It was a cut-throat battle.
Not the sort waged with swords and shields, but the more insidious kind—waged with numbers scribbled on scraps of cardboard, sly glances from figures barely half his height, and the relentless probing of creatures who definitely knew how to wring blood from stone, and coin from the unwise.
The imps had smelled opportunity, and opportunity smelled like money. They circled, they prodded, and they very nearly made off with every last credit Lionel possessed.
But in the end, he emerged victorious.
Admittedly, “victory” in this case looked an awful lot like “financial devastation,” but Lionel chose to focus on the important part as he strode back across the Neo Nexus Auction Hall—short of breath, sweating, yet undeniably satisfied.
The dungeon right was his now, and there was no regret in his step.
Maybe there was a hint of nervous energy. The sort of giddy excitement that comes from knowing you’ve just done something momentous, but not quite knowing if it was in the “history books” way or the “cautionary tale” way.
And yet…
As he clutched the dungeon right close, he couldn’t help but crack a smile as he half walked, half jogged toward the elevators—nay: toward his future.