Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  “Are you certain about that?” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure you’re wrong there.” It’d taken some experimenting, but I’d finally managed to make an open-top backpack that listed the items as “contents” when I pulled it into my own inventory. I had to give the backpack a slight lip and something like 3/5’s of the mass had to be within the pack and not sticking out.

  Her eyes went wide. “Okay, but I can’t equip it until you move that stand. When you do, it’s going to break the straps or break my shoulders.”

  “You’re stronger than you think. And we’re not going to rest the weight on the straps. This is how we’re going to do it. Keeping the backpack on, reform yourself so you have four legs, and build a shelf on your lower back, pushing the holder thing rearward, easing it away,” I said. I held up a crude drawing I’d made on the back of a gym membership form.

  Katia went pale, but she started the transformation without another word.

  Donut entered the room. She’d been in the training room practicing riding Mongo. She stopped dead at the sight of us.

  “Carl, what are you doing to Katia?”

  “The stand is too tall now,” Katia grunted as her backside grew. She shortened as she grew two extra legs.

  I nodded. “I’ll fix it. Keep going. Keep your back flat. Think of it as a shelf. It doesn’t need to be that long. Push your hind legs further back and make sure they’re made of metal. Yeah like that.”

  “Oh god,” she said. I watched as her body transformed. Her arms disappeared, and a third pair of legs appeared, giving her six. Her clothes melted into her mass as her back grew in thickness, creating a shelf for the backpack. The straps strained against her shoulders as the stand pushed away.

  “Legs aren’t going to work,” she grunted. The six legs melded together, lowering her body further. She was starting to look like a slug with an armless human torso. I pulled my tape measure and noted the height from her shelf to the floor.

  “It’s not as much weight as it looks,” I lied. “As soon as that table pushes away, it should automatically equip itself to you.”

  The stand clattered backward. I cringed as the heavy backpack tumbled down, landing on her shelf. Katia cried out in pain. And then the backpack disappeared, turning the same color as her flesh. The whole, dense blob formed into a rounded shell-like shape. Holy shit it worked. She yelped as she tumbled over onto her back, like an overturned turtle. She started to cry out.

  “Carl!” Donut yelled. “You hurt Katia!”

  I ignored her. “You have a lot of mass now. Take a deep breath and reshape yourself. Use the new metal to keep yourself balanced.”

  Katia stopped struggling and closed her eyes. She slowly regrew the six-legs as her torso and head melted into the mass. The torso returned, growing up out of the center of what had been her underside. Her top half retained its normal shape, but her arms were twice as long as normal. The elephant-like legs reshaped into wide spikes. The entire form rose off the ground, turning her into a horrific, bug-like monstrosity.

  “I’m going to throw up,” Katia said. “It’s going to take a lot of getting used to.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re carrying around more than a ton of extra armor now.”

  “A ton?” she said, lifting her arm. “A literal ton? 1,000 kilos?”

  I grinned. “Closer to a ton and a quarter. Give or take. That metal from the dwarf robots is a lot heavier than normal iron. How do you feel? Can you move okay?”

  She reformed, turning back to the Hekla shape she’d made earlier, but now she was about 11 feet tall. She stood to her full height, towering over us. She swung her arm. She formed a fist and punched at the air. I could feel the rush of wind.

  Mongo cried out in fear and scurried to hide behind Donut.

  “It says I have a strength bonus when I carry this much mass,” Katia said. Her voice was deeper. “It also says my dexterity goes down, but I don’t feel much slower. If I keep a normal body’s density, I can probably make myself twenty feet tall. Do you think they’re going to let me keep this? Isn’t this some sort of exploit?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think this is what you’re supposed to be doing with this class.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Donut said. “She’s not going to fit into a train at this size.”

  “No, she’s not,” I agreed. My mind was already working on ways to make her even bigger. That dexterity debuff was going to be a problem. Maybe if I build a foundation for her. Something with wheels she can slide into. “But that’s why the backpack method works. Unequipping is easy. She can just mentally pull the backpack into her inventory, and she’ll shrink back down. She’ll keep the backpack in her inventory, and she can now choose how much of that metal is in there when she puts it on, which will make her mass variable. We’ll need to work on getting her able to equip it fast. And we need to upgrade her makeup table so she can store more shapes. I’ll work on the stand to make equipping faster. Also, I need to be on the lookout for denser metal. Maybe we can fashion something that isn’t so cumbersome. Those metal poles might be a problem if the ceiling is low.”

  Katia shrunk further down, her face taking many forms. She stopped at about seven feet, but her torso was three times thicker than it should be. Her arms reached to the ground, making her look like a gorilla.

  I reached up and banged on her arm. It clanged like metal. Good. “Make sure you keep your flesh core deep on the inside.”

  “I’ll have to work on it,” she said, flexing her arm. “I can’t replace my eyes and mouth with metal parts. I’ll have to build a cage around my head.”

  “Good, good,” I said. “I want to try with different materials in your backpack. And you need to practice with choosing the amount of metal that remains in the bag.”

  “Can you put weapons and other enchanted items in the backpack?” Donut asked. Mongo tentatively approached and started sniffing at her.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Weapons don’t become a part of her mass, and magic items like rings and stuff don’t impart their enchantments unless they’re equipped as intended. I can’t make shoulder pads out of two enchanted helmets and expect it to work. I asked Mordecai that a while ago.”

  Katia continued to experiment. Her hand turned into a curved, metal shield the size of the gangway chock. She pulled her rarely-used axe and extended her arm. I noted she was getting a lot better at changing her form quickly. I knew it still hurt her. “When the daughters hear about this, they’re going to flip out. If only Fannar could see me. I’d like to see him call me useless now.”

  “I wish Mordecai was here,” said Donut. “I bet he’d have something to say about this.”

  “I bet he would,” I agreed.

  * * *

  The first part of the recap episode was a montage of people getting killed on the trains. I watched as a group entered what appeared to be a modern diesel train, one of the named lines, and were almost immediately overrun by little crab-like monsters that had drills instead of claws. In the midst of the battle, I spied a form standing at the back of the train car, watching and laughing. A war mage. This one looked like an orc, but he had the same, long silver hair as Dismember.

  Katia had returned to her normal size. She’d spent the last hour working with her new form, practicing with different masses. She could remove the backpack using her inventory system, which was a bit inelegant, causing her body to fall and splotch onto the floor in a round, quivering, unshaped mass. It turned out if she suddenly unequipped more than 50% of her mass all at once, her body reset itself. That was okay, though it was a little gross. She only remained in the blob form for a couple of seconds before she reverted to her regular, human form. To equip the extra mass, she first had to pull the newly redesigned stand, set it up, and then pull the backpack so it was set perfectly on the stand. She’d then back into it, set the straps, and then transform to her slug shape. From there she could form whatever she wanted based on the amount of �
�transformation mass” she kept in the backpack. Putting it on took her about thirty seconds, which was still too long. We were working on it.

  I pointed out the creature on the screen. “I think all the named trains will have war mages on them.”

  “If so, each one attacks in a different away,” Katia said. On the screen, yet another war mage was ripping apart another pair of crawlers. I couldn’t tell what the attack was, but the crawlers were choking as if they couldn’t breathe.

  The show moved to feature several crawlers it didn’t normally show, including Quan Ch, the one crawler who’d received a Celestial Quest box at the end of the last floor. Donut grumbled as she watched him fly down a train tunnel on his ethereal wings, shooting blue lightning out of his left hand. He blasted the front of a train, which crumpled and stopped dead on the track. A ManTauR corpse fell out the front of the destroyed cockpit.

  “That jacket he got lets him fly and shoot lightning,” I said. “That’s pretty cool. But if he’s flying around blasting trains, that’s going to cause all sorts of problems. I wonder what line that is.”

  “I don’t know, but that’s our jacket,” said Donut. “He didn’t even do anything to get it. It’s not fair!”

  “Nothing is fair,” I said.

  We watched Elle pick up a Clurichaun, freeze his head, rip it off, and throw it to another party member. This guy, some sort of muscle man class, twisted in the air and hurled the ice ball at a giant goat boss. It slammed into the goat’s head, staggering it. A menagerie of other creatures, the former residents of Meadow Lark, rushed the goat monster and tore it to pieces.

  They showed a short clip of us using the Hole spell to decapitate the war mage. They spliced in a shot of me laughing, a scene from some other time, before showing me picking up the mage’s head and sticking it in my bag. Those assholes. They’re making me look crazy.

  “Why did you take the head, Carl? That’s gross,” Donut said.

  “We loot everything, Donut. You never know what might be useful.”

  We’d received a silver quest box for that fight, but it had been nothing but healing scrolls and trap kits. I’d received another two of those alarm traps along with some random trap supplies.

  The show ended with Lucia Mar fighting a group of zombie-like creatures in a large room. The monsters just kept coming and coming, and she eventually fell back. The room, I realized, held a set of five stairwells all situated in a circle.

  How the hell did that little shit find the stairwells so quickly?

  The show ended, and before the nightly message could come, two things happened. The leaderboard changed, and I received a notification.

  You have received a Bronze Benefactor Box from the Valtay Corporation.

  I paused, waiting to see if either Donut or Katia received anything. Neither said anything, and I assumed that meant they hadn’t. I knew this season, the more they paid for us, the cheaper the benefactor boxes were to the sponsors. But Mordecai had said even Bronze boxes would be prohibitively expensive. He’d also said the contents of a Bronze Benefactor box were generally better than even regular platinum boxes.

  Donut was gazing up at the leaderboard. The top five hadn’t changed. Elle moved up to spot eight, and Li Jun the street monk had fallen off, replaced by Quan Ch, who was a level 31 half-elf Imperial Security Trooper. I wasn’t surprised. With that magic jacket of his, he was likely going to rocket his way up the list.

  “He’s a cheating poser,” Donut grumbled.

  Good Evening, Crawlers.

  I wanted to remind you of our earlier announcement, that for this floor only, the stairwells will remain closed until six hours prior to collapse. A handful of you have managed to find your way to stairwell locations. Good job, but we are still several days out before you’ll be able to do anything with them.

  Due to some unforeseen technical difficulties with our Hobgoblin Mechanic Interdiction teams, trains that are breaking down on the tracks are taking much longer than anticipated to be cleared and put back into service. This is resulting in some premature chaos along several routes. We’re sure you can handle it.

  And finally, you should all have your sponsors now. Every single crawler in the dungeon has received a sponsor, a first for Dungeon Crawler World. We are currently processing benefactor box requests, and there will be a slight delay in loot box fulfillment. We are distributing them as quickly as we can. We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience. We are giving priority to emergency boxes where the benefactor has paid the emergency delivery fee.

  Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!

  “They’re holding onto our boxes, Carl!” Donut said. “I just know Princess D’nadia got me something good.”

  “Actually,” I said. “I just got a bronze benefactor box. Hopefully you guys will get yours soon.”

  “And you haven’t opened it yet? Open it! Open it now! And make sure you send a note that says thank you.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said, pulling the box. I wondered if they had paid the “emergency delivery fee” for this.

  The box appeared, a glowing, bronze-colored box. Sparks flew off it as it magically opened. A symbol I’d never seen before decorated the top. It was a circle with a squiggle through it. Words in Syndicate Standard were etched underneath the circle. It read The Valtay Corporation, Keeping the Best of You Alive.

  I shivered, remembering the brain parasites these guys really were.

  The box contained a pill. It was a regular sized, blue and yellow capsule.

  For a terrifying moment, I thought maybe this was an actual brain worm. I remembered seeing a video once about how people used to give themselves tapeworms to lose weight, and they came in the form of capsules like this. They want to take over my body. I shivered again. The idea was absolutely terrifying. I read the description, which was in a slightly different voice and font than usual.

  Valtay Corporation Neural Enhancer #544. Variant 32.c

  This item is compatible with your Morphology and Interface.

  Warning: This pill will cause a permanent change to your brain. This item cannot be unequipped or undone once installed.

  Warning: You do not have a Valtay Corporation Neural Interface installed. While your current wetware system is compatible with this Neural Enhancer, it is recommended you visit a Valtay Corporate Outreach Center to discuss upgrade options. Payment and Legacy plans available. Keeping the Best of You alive.

  Current wetware: Syndicate Crawl Version 47.002.Human.

  Taking this pill will install the following upgrade to your interface:

  Identify and Analyze Subspace Portals.

  “What the hell,” I muttered, turning the pill over in my hand. Why had they given this to me? What was a subspace portal? And if they had paid the extra fee to get it to me more quickly, was it just because they were rich assholes who could afford it, or was there urgency?

  Also, since the description was in a different format than regular items, did that mean I could actually trust what it said?

  Just to be double sure, I put the item in my inventory and noted both its rarity and value. Its value was just below the Kimaris figure. Its rarity, however, was listed as common. I pulled it back out of my inventory, now reasonably certain it didn’t contain any sort of hidden parasite. If it had, it wouldn’t have let me stick it in there. I hoped.

  “Whatever,” I said. I popped the pill into my mouth and drank it down using my cold cup of coffee.

  A moment passed before anything happened.

  A new tab is available in your interface.

  The tab was labeled Third-Party Upgrades. I clicked on it.

  Warning: All communication-based upgrades will be disabled while you are within the dungeon. Any attempts to circumvent dungeon security will result in immediate disqualification.

  The neural enhancer was the only item listed. I clicked on it, and a note popped up. This upgrade is working properly. There was no other information or menus.


  I popped up the Sponsorship tab and found the notes section. I could send them messages, but they couldn’t send them to me. I knew Donut had been composing and sending thank you notes to Princess D’nadia all day.

  Thank you for the upgrade. I don’t know what it’s for or what it does, but I appreciate the support.

  I felt nothing but revulsion for anything and anybody who had anything to do with this shitshow, but if they were going to be sending me beneficial items, I had to appear grateful.

  “So what was that thing?” Katia asked. She’d bulked up and was on her way to the training room, where she was going to work on her Catcher skill. I was going to follow her and work on my Powerful Strike. I was going to work on it every day until it hit 15.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, trailing off. My eyes caught the doorway to the exit out into the coffee shop. It now glowed purple. A tooltip popped up over the doorway.

  Standard Subspace Portal.

  Analyze? Yes/No.

  I clicked on Yes, and a series of numbers appeared. I had no idea what I was looking at. However, at the bottom of the list was a few lines that seemed important.

  Type: Two-way portal. Gated to user.

  Can you pass this portal? Yes.

  Environment on other side of portal: Compatible.

  Visual Analysis? Yes/No.

  I clicked Yes, and a still photo of the coffee shop popped up. It was empty of customers, but Nodd the Bopca stood behind the counter, picking his nose.

  I can see through doorways now.

  “Oh hell yeah,” I said.

  A note from DoctorHepa

  It's the weekend! I hope everybody has a good one and is staying safe. You are all my favorite people. My AC issue was nothing but a blown fuse that appeared to blow for now reason whatsoever. Hopefully it doesn't keep happening. My car is another story.

  Over on Discord, I asked for people to do me a solid and vote for Dungeon Crawler Carl on Soundbooth Theater's bi-monthly Total Request Live segment, and we won! Last night Soundbooth Theater--the same folks who narrate series such as Everybody Loves Large Chests and many other great LitRPG-themed books--did a scene from DCC. Here's the segment. I'd really appreciate if you would click the below youtube link and comment about how much you'd like them to make this into a full audiobook. It's a great way to support this story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTvb_gszOrg