by DoctorHepa
I turned the corner, and I stood face-to-face with one of the round clowns. The thing was shorter than me, but almost three times as wide. He wore a brightly-colored, but filthy pink and blue gown with a dirty white ruffle around his neck. The gown cascaded over his lumpy, misshapen body. Unlike the stilt clowns, which only had shark-like mouths, this thing had a much more human face, but with pointed teeth. The white, red, and blue grease paint seemed overly thick, like the frosting on a cake. The clown’s stomach made a rumbling noise, and his entire belly shifted, like his flesh was alive.
The stilt clowns were armed with butcher knives. These guys just had long, yellowed fingernails, like the claws of a badger.
Clammy the Clown – Level 9
With a face not even a mother could love, the circus was the perfect escape for the young, portly boy who would grow to become Clammy the Clown. An expert at tumbling and with a solid work ethic, Grimaldi was happy to add Clammy to the family.
Kids always love the fat clowns. They’re jolly. They’re happy. They make you laugh. The resurrected Clammy clones still exhibit all of these qualities. Except, perhaps, the making you laugh part. They sure are happy and jolly when they’re eating you, though.
The clown hissed at me, but I held up the ticket, brandishing it like a shield. The enormously fat clown leaned in and sniffed the ticket, like I was holding a treat up to a dog. He hissed again, blasting me with the stench of raw meat. But he stepped aside and allowed me to pass.
And thus I entered the main arena of Grimaldi’s big top.
As a kid, one of my earliest memories was going to the circus with my mom. My fourth birthday. She’d temporarily left my dad and run away to her parent’s house all the way down in the middle-of-nowhere southern Texas, dragging me along. It was during this time that she brought me to the circus. This wasn’t one of the major traveling circuses, like Ringling Brothers, but a small, ghetto one. Anyone who has ever lived in the American southwest knows exactly what I’m talking about. Even little kid me registered that this was a low-rent version of the real deal.
They’d had clowns and acrobats plus a bunch of other weird attractions, like guys on motorcycles riding around the inside of a sphere and women juggling chainsaws.
They’d also had animals. I remembered camels and dancing poodles and a clown who walked around with a small monkey on his shoulder. They didn’t have elephants or giraffes, but the main attraction had been a crusty, old tiger who’d sat in the middle of the ring while a woman in a leotard twirled fire sticks around it.
Most of these memories came back to me, years later, from photos. I would find the shoebox with those pictures more than a decade later, hidden under my parents’ bed. This was after another birthday of mine, after I was left alone in the world. This box had been my mother’s. Her secret. It was filled to the brim with photographs and ticket stubs and a deflated balloon, but the items were only of that time, the few weeks of our lives when she’d run away. But of all my patchy, incomplete recollections of the circus, there is one characteristic of that day I will never forget.
The smell.
It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It was the scent of peanuts and cotton candy and roasting corn and hay and animal musk and cheap, plastic toys all rolled into one. But it was more than that, too. My four-year-old mind couldn’t possibly register it at the time, but it was the scent of happiness, of joy, of being a kid, of not being afraid. Over the years I’d catch similar scents in places such as the county fair or carnivals or whenever I visited a place with livestock. But this was a different, oddly specific aroma that had been indelibly imprinted on me as a four-year-old, a scent I’d sometimes remember as the path I could’ve taken, the world I could’ve lived had my dad not found us and taken us back. A scent I’d been chasing all of my adult life.
It’s funny, how that happens sometimes. We associate smells with memories, and when that memory is triggered, we are momentarily pulled away, no matter the current circumstances. That’s exactly what happened here, as I stepped into the most fucked-up circus in the history of the universe. I was surrounded by bedlam, by unorganized chaos and clutter, by one what-the-fuck after another, and that smell just came out of nowhere, smacking me like a goddamned baseball bat, and making me think of my fourth birthday party, when I’d been with my mom and visited the circus, and I’d laughed and clapped and dropped my hotdog onto the dirty bleacher before picking it up and eating it even though it tasted like dirt. My mom had cried, had been crying, and up until that very moment when the smell hit me for the second time in my life, I’d always thought she’d been crying about the damn hotdog.
And it made me mad, so fucking mad. I had so little of my mom, so little memory I could call my own. It was one of the few things this fucking place couldn’t possibly take from me, yet that was exactly what had just happened, and it was so unexpected, so violent, so final that I no longer cared about the stupid plan, or of trying to save my life.
I just wanted to tear it all down.
But you don’t want to hear about any of this shit, do you? It’s not important. Not when we were weeks past the earth’s expiration date. Not when I was standing there like an idiot as I watched a unicycling, woman clown roll past me while greedily devouring what looked like a goblin leg. The colorful yet demonic acrobats, who’d moments before had been firing magical mortars at monsters the size of buildings, were now sailing back and forth above me. The lemurs juggled. The clowns sang.
I thought of Donut, passed out and exposed, only protected by Mongo. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. You will not break me. You will not break me.
It was as if the battle outside hadn’t occurred. These were still the fucked-up, transformed versions of the circus workers, but each and every one of them was feverishly performing a parody of their original acts, all of them shoved tight against one another. As I watched, two of the acrobats collided in mid-air, and they fell, crunching to the ground. Nobody took any heed.
A weathered, wooden sign stood in my path. A cutout of a figure with a speech bubble. It was of a dwarf wearing the red and black coattails and top hat of a ringmaster. On the wooden sign it read, “I am Ringmaster Grimaldi! Welcome to my Circus! Within this tent, all your worries and fears are left behind. All we ask is for you to sit down, relax, and enjoy. Let us take those burdens from you, even if for just a short amount of time.”
I returned my gaze to the performers. What the hell was going on? Did they forget? Was there a spell? Did they just assume they were safe? Furthermore, none of them—despite having red dots on the map—were even glancing at me. It was as if I was invisible.
I shook my head. This fucking game. I still clutched onto my ticket, and I didn’t dare let it go. They were leaving me alone now, but I feared if I dropped this thing, I’d be toast.
And then I saw it. The vine. The thing was so huge, my mind hadn’t properly registered its presence. I’d thought it was part of the tent or the show, a stage prop. Even after my extensive conversation with Mordecai regarding this thing, I’d been expecting, well, a vine. Like a dude with a bunch of brambles coming out of himself, reaching every which way and that, maybe curling up the center pole.
This was more of a giant-ass bush or shrub than a vine. It took the entirety of the center ring, and it reached the ceiling of the tent, swallowing the pole. It was a pale green color, less haphazard looking than I expected. Along the ground, multiple, python-like roots spread. Unable to find purchase in the floor of the Over City, the roots spread above ground, reaching all corners of the tent.
As I gawked, a new achievement popped up, one of the special ones I couldn’t minimize. The moment I read it, I felt all of the blood rush out of my face.
New Achievement! You Can’t Fight City Hall!
But you can sure die trying.
You have discovered a city boss!
That’s right. Let me say that again for the assholes in the back!
A.
> CITY.
FUCKING.
BOSS.
Welp. If you gonna go, you might as well do it with style.
Just an FYI. As of this moment in the current season of Dungeon Crawler World, not a single Crawler has faced a city boss and survived. And for good reason. Only a complete moron would voluntarily put themselves in a situation where they had to fight one of the most powerful monsters on the level.
Reward: A lot of people are probably going to watch you die. That’s a better prize than most of us get.
A few additional achievements appeared, but I waved them away. A city boss. Holy fuck. Like with the bear, I didn’t appear to be locked into the tent. I took a step back and looked over my shoulder. The Clammy Clown remained at his post, arms crossed, blocking my exit. But I could get out. I could easily get out right now.
No. You can do this. You have a plan. I swallowed and examined the massive plant thing in the center of the arena.
Ringmaster Grimaldi – Pestiferous Vine
This is an Elite.
Level 85 City Boss!
Before the cataclysm, if you asked any child of the sprawling Over City what their favorite activity was, a good number of them would happily tell you of the great and wonderful Grimaldi’s Traveling Circus. Children dreamed of walking outside and seeing the long line of circus carts rumbling through the streets, of the tents being erected in their local park. Circus night was a holiday. A time of joy.
To Redstone Grimaldi, nothing was more important than his family. He loved each and every one of them. When the cataclysm came, and the poison cloud swept over the circus, he was center stage. He remains there to this day.
Transformed from a simple dwarf to a hulking Pestiferous Vine, Grimaldi uses his special powers to keep his family safe and alive. No matter how many times they die, no matter how many crawlers the clowns devour, he brings them back, memories intact. Well, mostly intact. Somewhere in there Grimaldi may be aware that this may not be the most moral of choices. But that’s what we do when it comes to family. We protect them at all costs.
And besides, you know what they say.
The show must go on.
After the description ended, nothing changed. Nobody moved to attack. The vine didn’t move at all. My eyes caught the largest of the roots. It snaked up into the empty bleachers. I walked toward it, slipping past clowns and lemurs and other oddities. I passed the strongman ogre with the appendage coming out of his neck. I realized with a start that the single-headed ogre’s countenance bore a striking resemblance to the center head of the three-headed ogre tattoo monster. He held the same jagged scar across the side of his head.
This creature was also an elite. His name was Apollon the Mighty. He stood behind a small stand with a faded sign that read, “Iced Cream. A frozen treat from another world! No chewing necessary! Glides right in like a winter dream!”
“Cone?” the ogre asked as I approached. He held up what appeared to be a petrified ice cream cone. He dipped it into a bucket attached to the stand, and when he pulled it up, the cone was filled with writhing, bone-white worms, similar to the ones who’d infested Heather the Bear.
“No thank you,” I said, swallowing hard so I wouldn’t be sick.
The creature watched me pass, a strange look of confusion on his face. His dot was red with a cross on my map. The strange appendage, a thick vine branch I now realized, twitched oddly. I kept moving, clomping onto the bleachers.
Carl: It’s an elite and a city boss. You didn’t tell me they could be both! Holy shit. A city boss. Is this still going to work?
Mordecai: Uh. I was right, though, correct? It’s a Pestiferous Vine?
Carl: Yes. It’s fucking huge though. It’s as tall as the tent!
Mordecai: It should still work. The core will be the same size. I think.
Carl: You think? Holy shit, Mordecai!
“There are a few different kinds of collective mind-control vine monsters, but the combination of spores and parasitic worms means it’s likely something called a Pestiferous Vine,” Mordecai had said last night. This was after the recap show, but before we’d gone to sleep. Signet had mentioned “the vine” a few times, and I’d asked Mordecai if he knew what that was. “It’s a sign of lazy writing, if you ask me,” he’d said. “It’s like on earth television shows. Every time there’s a cop show, the cop’s marriage always sucks. There’s always a storyline with a serial killer. There’s always that asshole lieutenant. These vine things on the third floor, they’re… what is the word? A trope. That’s it. Pestiferous vines are a trope for these shows. It’s because of the volcano story. The girl finds her grandma had turned into one of those things.”
At this point, we’d already agreed that Donut and I would be idiots to have anything to do with the circus quest. But Mordecai had insisted on turning the subject into a lecture regarding collective mind plant monsters, which were common in the dungeon, as they were common in the universe.
“Every season,” he’d said, “Crawlers fall by the hundreds to these things, especially on the sixth floor. But plants are always easy to kill. Very easy to kill, as long as you know the trick. The problem is the trick is different for each one. Take that Pestiferous Vine, for example. It’s a plant that infects other mobs. It’s called a vine and it looks like a plant all right, but it’s really a hybrid fungus combined with a type of plant you don’t have on earth. Don’t get me started. Anyway, it excretes these mold spores that infect parasitic worms, who in turn infect other mobs. What happens next depends on a variety of factors, depending on the mob and the type of worms. It’s fascinating stuff because there are literally billions of combinations. And these vines are real, too. This isn’t made-up for the dungeon. Anyway, once the worms infect the mobs, this tri-symbiont, well, maybe tri-parasitic depending on how you want to look at it, relationship forms.”
“So how do you kill one?” I asked. My head was already starting to hurt from the conversation. At this point, Donut had lost interest and was running around with Mongo in the restaurant.
“For the Pestiferous Vine, it’s kind of a good news, bad news thing. The good news is they’re one of the easiest ones to kill. The bad news is it’s not instantaneous. The vine loves moisture, and it loves blood. You drip a few drops of blood directly onto one of the vines, and it’ll slurp it right up. But,” Mordecai said, leaning in closely. His eyes sparkled as if this was the most interesting subject in the world. “If that blood is from something that had been poisoned, it breaks the link with all of its symbionts. It takes about fifteen to twenty minutes to work, unfortunately. But one moment the vine is alive and well. The next, it’s mulch. It doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t know its been poisoned. But it’s still dead.”
“Does it kill all the other mobs?”
“Depends. Some immediately go insane. Some drop dead. Some don’t realize anything has changed.”
“So you poison yourself, dribble some blood on it, and it’s dead?”
“That’s right. It won’t know, but if it suspects, you need to be careful or it can save itself.”
“How? Is there a cure?”
“Yes. If you’ve given yourself an antidote, and you give the plant an equal amount of the same blood, it will cure it. You can’t just pour an antidote potion on there. It has to be the same blood. So be careful. If it knows you poisoned it, it’ll try to get its monsters to bleed you.”
Assuming Mordecai’s information was correct and still valid, then I could kill Grimaldi right now from my spot in the bleachers. Still, I was nervous. Mordecai had warned me multiple times that when it came to elites, the rules didn’t mean shit.
I sat down on the cold bleacher next to the vine. I tried to act casual, but I knew I had to be fast. If these producer guys had been watching my feed last night, it was possible they had already deduced what I was about to do. Everyone in the arena continued to ignore my presence. I took a deep breath. Okay. Here we go. I pulled my nightgaunt cloak off and put it over my
legs, like anyone settling in would do. My constitution lowered by four points when I removed the cloak. But it also removed my poison resistance.
Poisoning myself was easy. I had a ton of potions. I pulled a health potion and held it in my hand. I drank one by clicking it in my hotlist, and then I quickly drank the one in my hand before the potion cooldown. I’d done this once before when Donut had been injured during the fight with the Juicer.
You have been poisoned!
“Oof” It felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach by a damn horse. It took everything I had not to double over and cry out. Before, I hadn’t felt this part. My health started to plummet. I kept one of the lemurs’ juggling knives in my belt, and I pulled the palm of my hand across it, cutting deep enough to create a long gash. I squeezed my hand together as blood rained down on the vine.
I cast Heal on myself, which didn’t stop the poisoning. I waited the next few seconds before my potions opened back up, and I took one of my few poison antidote potions. I’d received those way back in the very beginning, from a silver adventurer’s box.
I gave myself a second to just breathe. I pulled the cloak back over my shoulder and looked about to see if anything had changed. Nothing. I hazarded a look down, and the blood was almost all gone. All that remained was a few drops that’d landed on either side of the thick root.
I had no idea if it worked or not.
A note from DoctorHepa
Purely out of a sense of self-preservation I have made the executive decision to post the next chapter right away (Well, in an hour or so. If it's not up right now, please come back in a few.)
Chapter 58
I waited a few moments to see if there was any sort of sign that the city boss was sick. There was nothing. It was time for the next part of the plan.
Carl: Zev. I did it. But the plan has changed. I want you to message them right now and tell them exactly what I say.
