Chapter 31: High as Balls and Full of Darts

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuck!”

  I screamed as I plunged through the trapdoor, into a shimmering portal and appeared somewhere else. My cry echoed as though I were in an amphitheatre, but at least I was no longer tumbling out of control.

  My inventory was still open. I pulled a glowing, sticky vine and its sickly, greenish illumination lit the space, reflecting off mirror-smooth obsidian walls that stretched hundreds of feet away on either side. A ceiling of the same stone was just above.

  I was falling down the centre of an enormous cavern.

  I snapped the vine like a whip, and to my utter astonishment, the end hit the ceiling above and stuck fast. My arm was almost ripped from its damn socket as the vine pulled taut. For a sickening moment, I thought it might snap under my weight. But it held.

  My relief was short-lived. One of the poison darts I’d accidentally released while sliding down the slip-n-slide pinged off my armoured arm. A moment later, another hit, and sunk in right at the base of my damn neck.

  My HP dropped by about 10%.

  “Owh shrit…” I slurred, as whatever the hell was on the thing took immediate and potent effect.

  The world wobbled like it was made of jelly, and everything took on a bright, iridescent rainbow effect.

  Music blared, replacing the Benny Hill theme with some hippy-ass synth bullshit. That weird Indian guitar thing, a sitar, twanged to no particular tune.

  Fuck me. I was high.

  The faint glint of Ebonrage caught my eye as it spun away, down into the depths. I tracked its sparkling descent… it was beautiful.

  But as I followed its rainbow arc down the shaft, something moved deep below. Something enormous, twisted, and toothed.

  “Orh, fruck nah.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was the poison messing with my eyes. Shit, I really hoped it was. The thing looked like the inbred offspring of a T-Rex and an alligator snapping turtle that had been dropped on its head as a child. The gargantuan beast hopped up and down on a bed of corpses, bone, and gore, roaring and waving its little arms with unmistakable excitement.

  My dog Gazpacho gave the same look when I gave him treats.

  Identify Overlays activated. A blazing title in flaming font appeared above the thing’s head. I squinted through eyes that wouldn’t focus properly.

  The Masticator: Secret Boss

  Quadrant Champion

  Level 30 Elite

  Yeah, that was not good.

  But… though I knew I should, I couldn’t quite bring myself to worry about it.

  The music was growing on me—catchy—and everything was so bright, so beautiful. I found myself wiggling a little, bopping to the beat.

  Ebonrage still fell, spinning like a rainbow scythe, end over end. I watched it go with a big dumb grin on my face.

  “Bye, bye misshter axe,” I slurred.

  We had to be hundreds of feet up.

  A memory unfurled in my mind, languid as honey.

  I’d dropped a drill from the roof of a new build once. A real big bastard of a house, three stories and a rooftop terrace. I guess the drill had fallen forty feet, maybe more, and by the time it came down—landing on this fat arsehole Barnaby’s left foot—it had been moving at a fair clip.

  Hit like a damn meteor. Powdered all the little bones in his boot.

  The blokes on the site called him ‘Flipper’ after that.

  Told him he should get a job building oil rigs.

  We’d thought it was hilarious.

  He’d been sneaking off to the servo for his third choccy milk and meat pie of the day.

  I giggled at the memory.

  Why had the UE suppressed that one?

  A new sound seeped through my pickled skull—Priorita was back. I guess she’d dealt with whatever had pulled her away.

  That was nice.

  She was yappin’ away about this or that. The synth-wave made her hard to understand, but her voice was pretty. High. Smooth. It was like I was back in school. Mrs Hoskens had been so kind to me…

  *Ding* *Ding* *Ding* *Ding* *Ding*

  The sound cut through the hippy-synth, and the music stopped as my Cognitive Dissonance and Poison Resistance skills levelled rapidly.

  Priorita was squealing.

  I sobered up in an instant, my eyes focusing just in time to see Ebonrage, falling like a comet, hit the secret boss right between the eyes like the fucking hand of God.

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  THWACK.

  The monster reeled and nearly fell. Its health bar appeared, and the red evaporated in a moment.

  What a goddamn relief.

  But the HP bar remained. It showed just the slightest sliver of red.

  Still alive.

  And as I watched, its HP ticked up a notch.

  Ah shit.

  I guess it had some regeneration ability.

  The darts hit a moment later—a hail of death that hammered the thing’s misshapen head like buckshot.

  I hung there for a long moment, squinting down at the monster deep below. Level 30. I didn’t want to go near the bloody thing.

  Its HP bar persisted, but some new text had appeared. It wasn’t quite bright enough for me to read.

  I summoned more glowing sticky fruit, careful to make them appear an inch from my skin. They fell, mixing red and blue with the green of my vine.

  What did it say?

  Was that a timer?

  A scream came from right behind me and I almost shat myself. I swung around to see a blue, stumpy, bipedal alien fall through the same portal I had arrived through. All I caught was its name as it whizzed by, Sage Monarch. It squealed and flailed hopelessly, short limbs waving ineffectively.

  The hapless bastard skydived all the way down the shaft and landed atop the Secret Boss with a crunch I felt as much as heard.

  Sage Monarch? I shook my head. The thing must have thought it was the main character or something.

  Its HP bar ticked down again, the red shrinking—then regained a hair once more.

  I needed to kill the damn thing before it recovered.

  The build menu opened, and in a few short minutes I had what I needed in my inventory: a half dozen stone spikes like stalagmites, each of them as thick as my torso.

  I dropped them in one big cluster and after ten seconds or so, they hammered into the prone boss.

  “God fucking damn it,” I growled, as the HP dipped and rose over and over.

  Didn’t look like I could cheat this.

  I could read the text by its name now.

  I knew what I had to do—and I had to do it fast.

  The Masticator: Secret Boss

  Quadrant Champion

  Level 30 Elite

  STATUS: Crippled / Drugged / Unconscious (T=47:55)

  I sighed. The timer was counting down, and I was still hundreds of feet in the air. If I didn’t kill the thing before time ran out, I’d be toast.

  This was going to suck.

  At least two dozen aliens spilled through the portal while I made my slow descent. Most were the stumpy kind—I’d seen them often enough to read their Identify Overlays as they fell. Ranging between levels 3 and 6, and were a type of alien called U’l Ciacco. They hit the ground like sacks of potatoes and spattered into chunks.

  Just once, I saw one of the beautiful, elf-like Lutantha. It fell in silence, and that made me sad.

  I reached the cavern floor with just under seven minutes remaining. Or at least I think I was at the floor. It was a charnel house that stunk even worse than that first, blood-crusted chamber in this vault.

  What was truly at the bottom was a mystery—I had to pick my way across a sea of corpses.

  Only a few were fresh. Aliens that had fallen from above, easily identifiable by the way they had splattered on impact. The rest were old, decomposing, and rotting corpses or ancient, bleached skeletons of bizarre diversity. I saw creatures with dozens of limbs, multiple heads, skin like metal, bones of stone or twinkling crystal.

  The poor bastards. What a place to find your eternal rest.

  There was shit too. Giant reeking piles of the stuff, steaming hot and taller than I was, filled with matchstick-sized fragments of pale bone.

  The Masticator had eaten well.

  The Secret Boss loomed before me, even larger and more horrific than it had seemed before. It had to be the size of a large whale, covered in thick, warty skin and shell.

  I’d seen one of those before—a whale—washed up at a popular beach. The poor creature had died days before and had been partially eaten by sharks before the waves pushed it ashore. You could smell it from nearly a mile away. The local authorities didn’t have a damn clue how to get rid of it, and didn’t want to tow it back into the ocean lest the sharks be attracted and eat someone.

  So they stuffed it full of explosives and blew it up.

  And in all the history of dumbass ideas, that had to rank pretty highly.

  Chunks of reeking blubber and bone had rained down over the local town, punching through roofs and crushing cars.

  Two people and a horse had died.

  Fucking ridiculous, I thought, as I started climbing the beast.

  Its body rose and swelled beneath me in deep breaths. Muscles thicker than my body twitched beneath the skin.

  Ebonrage’s long haft just barely protruded from between the thing’s eyes. I only spotted it because the stone glinted like a jewel in the dim light. I reached down and tried to pull it free. With it I hoped to hack my way into its braincase and finish it.

  The timer, now enormous, was ten feet above my head and counting down from three minutes.

  The HP bar retained just a hair.

  I tried not to think about what would happen if it woke up.

  I gripped Ebonrage and yanked with all my superhuman strength, but the damn thing didn’t budge. Guitar screamed as I activated Predator and my strength surged—but still it didn’t move.

  I cut the perk and summoned my Gosporian dagger. I tried stabbing through one of its glassy, basketball-sized eyes, but the blade shattered like I’d struck stone. It had been the only weapon I had left.

  My inventory was almost empty now and showed nothing that would help. Rope, food, some broken darts.

  I flicked a glance at the corpse pile and wondered if I could hide within it. Wait out the stage. But what then?

  Nah. I had to end this thing.

  I hopped over to one of my stone stalagmites. Though it had hit with the force of a speeding car, it had shattered on impact and barely penetrated.

  The timer was under two minutes now. I didn’t even have time to construct something crude with BP.

  My mind raced as I inspected the monster. What fucking hope did I have? I was like an ant attacking an elephant.

  The only real wound I’d inflicted was Ebonrage.

  Above, the numbers above continued to tick down.

  Just over a minute left.

  I pulled the broken darts from my inventory, hoping I could drug it again and buy myself more time. But one look at them and I knew it was hopeless. I chucked them up one of it’s nostrils anyway.

  Ebonrage glinted at me, just peeking from the things face.

  The wound my falling weapon had caused was a jagged, bloody line—Ebonrage’s axehead had penetrated deep and was far wider than the haft.

  I eyed that line.

  That was the only way in.

  The inside of the creature’s body was hot as I shoved my arm into the wound. Its tissue seemed to press against me, to reject me. But inch by inch my arm sunk deeper. At elbow depth I felt the smooth hard surface of its skull. I pressed further, feeling my skin catch and tear as I pushed through the bone.

  My fist popped through, and into its brain.

  The creature rippled like an earthquake beneath my chest.

  I was shoulder deep now, nowhere else to go.

  Above me, the timer showed less than half a minute.

  I activated Predator again, and Soldertouch for good measure, flexing my fingers and trying to scramble the thing’s brain.

  It roiled and spasmed beneath me.

  Steam and a stink like roadkill burst from the wound, right in my face.

  But the damn thing didn’t die.

  I couldn’t reach in enough to kill it.

  With ten seconds to go I braced my boots against a nobby ridge on the boss’ snout, and with my shoulder I pushed against Ebonrage. Leveraging the hole just slightly larger.

  My hand slipped deeper.

  The beast seized.

  I pushed harder, and felt a plink as the axe haft snapped.

  Ebonrage shattered into a fine powder. I froze for a heartbeat, then sucked the remnants of it into my inventory.

  Reaching deeper.

  I needed a weapon. Something. Anything.

  But had nothing.

  I was fucked.

  But sudden inspiration struck, and I opened the prize menu. That never-ending list of corporate advertising sent to me from Earth.

  I clicked the first weapon-like thing I saw, without even reading the description.

  A champagne sabre appeared in my fist inside its skull, and I whisked and whipped the damn thing like I was scrambling eggs.

  The monster bucked. Shuddered. Froze.

  Priorita trilled so loudly she almost deafened me—her words so high-pitched, so frenetically excited that she sounded like a parrot hopped up on amphetamines.

  She was so excited that I wouldn’t have understood her, had a blazing message not appeared in my HUD.

  GLOBAL WAR-WORLD MESSAGE:

  A CHAMPION HAS FALLEN