Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

by DoctorHepa

  I refrained the urge to choke the woman out. All of this information about how they abused their workers was infuriating, terrifying, and painfully familiar, but it was also irrelevant. “But what are they? Are they wizards? Giant owls? Elves? Tell me what they look like and what sort of powers they have.”

  She gave me an are-you-really-that-stupid? look. “Do you know what a naga is? They’re kinda like that. But blue and with six arms. They take their payment by getting to eat one or two dwarves a shift. It saves the company a lot of gold.”

  “What kind of magic do they cast?”

  “They hypnotize the dwarves and grapples getting off the train. They keep them around for eight to twelve hours depending on the lines attached to their station, and they send them through the portal when it’s almost time for their shift to start again. It saves me from having to tell them that overtime is mandatory. Though sometimes they gather enough wits about them to ask for time off before they get on the train. Then they get a trip to my office, and I give them the gold armband.”

  “Armband?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.

  She beamed. “It was my idea. We tell them that if they wear the armband during one more run, the Kravyad will know to teleport them straight home at the end of the shift. But really it lets the Kravyad know they’re troublemakers who are okay to eat. It added another 5% to our productivity in Q2. Even Rod was impressed.”

  Donut: I DON’T LIKE THIS LADY. SHE’S ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO IS REALLY MEAN BUT DOESN’T THINK THEY’RE MEAN.

  Carl: No kidding.

  I took a deep breath. “Tell me about the employee portal. If the workers go through it, it just takes them to the platform? Can anybody pass through it?”

  “That’s right,” Madison said. “Straight to the platform. I suppose others could go through. We’ve already had a few of you lot sneaking through. Of course it’s lifebound to the Kravyad. So if something happens to them, then it snaps closed. They insisted on that when we wrote out their contract. It was a big point of contention.”

  “So the creature has to remain alive for the portal to work?”

  “That’s what I said. Now are you going to take me back?”

  That station number 435 was another sort of trap. You could only get through if you kept the Kravyad, boss or not, alive. I paused to send all this information to Bautista. He and the survivors had retreated from the mimic back onto the train, which was thankfully still running.

  You can’t save them all. This was something Bautista and his group would have to figure out on their own. I’d done all I could from here.

  “I have a few more questions,” I said to Madison. “Tell me about the ghouls that almost killed you.”

  She frowned. “Those filthy things are not my job. Doris over at substation B is in charge of that. This is her fuck up. That husband-stealing whore couldn’t even get that right. I told Rod that she’d be the death of him, but of course he didn’t listen. She’s in charge of keeping the Krakaren happy, which meant she was also in charge of excess citizen disposal. But she wanted to impress Rod, of course, with her money-saving concept. An extra train on an existing line was much cheaper than a dedicated conveyor line. And look what happened. The good news is Substation B fell before E did. I hope the ghouls ate that fat bitch and popped her oversized implants.”

  I was about to ask her another question when Elle pinged me. I held up a hand. As I talked to them, Brandy knocked on the furnace door. I opened it. She started grilling Madison about her paycheck while I stepped outside to escape the heat.

  Carl: Hey guys. What’s the news?

  Elle: It’s not a train like we thought but a roller coaster with no cars. You know those rolling carts they have in the robot rooms? The robots fill them with these ghoul things and roll them down to the coaster. It’s a pretty far hike. At least it was for us. The robots push the roly things and the bottom of the cart catches on the roller coaster, and off they go. It’s like the thing they have at the hospital that takes your trays away. But a hell of a lot faster.

  Carl: Yeah, the carts end up back at the trainyards. The ghouls are then supposed to be moved to a train that takes them all the way to the Abyss to get rid of them.

  Elle: Why would they send them all the way back to the start just to turn them around and send them back? What sort of inefficient bullshit is that?

  Carl: You were never in the military, were you?

  Imani: It’s designed to break down, I think. Or maybe they’re just terrible at design. Maybe both. At least we’re free of monsters in this tunnel. Only the ghouls can enter the robot rooms. The other monsters aren’t allowed in for some reason. But the ghouls actually get into the cages themselves. And then the robots lock them in and roll them down into the tunnel and put them onto the conveyor.

  Carl: Something is going to happen when enough of them get to the same place. I don’t know what.

  I quickly went over everything I had discovered, and I gave them an update on what was happening with Bautista. I’d already sent out a mass warning about the station mimics at station 433.

  Imani: We’ve been camping and killing the ghouls as they rush by, but they give shit experience. Carl, there’s a lot of them coming now. A whole lot. Also, there’s another type of ghoul sometimes in the mix called a wrath ghoul. I think it might be what happens at the end of stage 2. They are very strong. Be careful. We were just debating on whether or not to hijack a few carts and get onto the carousel ourselves or going back to the main track and hiking to the transit station.

  Shit. That was a scary proposition.

  Carl: If it was me, I’d take the conveyor. But it’s super risky. I don’t know how gentle it is, plus when you land, you’ll end up at the service station. If you end up at Stations B or E, the gate is down, and there’ll be less ghouls. But if the fence isn’t down yet wherever you end up, you’ll be surrounded by literally thousands of the monsters. It’s a huge gamble.

  Elle: But it also sounds really fun. By the time all those best roller coasters were popping up around the country, I was too old to do it. My Barry used to puke cotton candy after just the tilt-a-whirl, and I never got to do the real rides. Now’s our chance.

  Imani: I’ll let you know what we decide to do. Take care, Carl.

  Donut: CARL, YOU BETTER GET BACK IN HERE. THEY’RE FIGHTING!

  I grumbled as I returned to the cab.

  “Well we just don’t need your services anymore,” Madison was saying to Brandy as I returned to the cab. The entire room was sweltering. The cry of a baby emanated from the furnace.

  “You can’t fire me,” Brandy said. “I only deal with Portia.”

  “Portia!” Madison scoffed. “I have two weeks more on the job than Portia, which makes me her senior. I will not have my employees mouthing off to me like this.”

  “Your employees? Why is it everyone in human resources always thinks they’re the boss? You’re not, you einzeller. You may be the one who does hiring and firing, but it’s not your decision. You are ze boot, not ze foot. Besides, I have contract. We demons take our contracts very seriously. You can’t make decisions like that without running it past an exec, and we both know it.” The demon’s black orbs glowed, and I feared she was about to blast the human with a fireball, which would probably be bad for everybody in the room. Brandy was level 75 and Madison was only level 10.

  “Ladies,” I said, interrupting. “You guys can discuss this later, preferably after the ghoul outbreak. Nobody is getting fired right now.” I grasped onto the towel and gently pushed at the furnace door. Brandy made a face like she was going to protest, but then another baby came, and I took the opportunity to slam the hot door while her face was scrunched up in pain.

  Madison cross her arms and pouted. She was literally quivering with anger.

  Donut: CARL, SHE REMINDS ME OF SOMEBODY BUT I DON’T KNOW WHO.

  I laughed out loud.

  Carl: Do you think you can guard her while I go up that ladder and peek
into station 24? Maybe you can use that charm of yours and get more info out of her.

  Donut: OKAY, I’LL DO IT.

  Carl: Cool. Don’t let Brandy out again.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said out loud.

  “Can I come?” Katia asked.

  I’d been planning on going up the ladder and sticking my head through the trapdoor to look and see what was up there. If there were mobs, we’d come back to clear them later. That quick shot we’d seen of Lucia Mar had showed her fighting waves of ghouls before she had to retreat, and I wanted to see if this station was the same. But it was rare for Katia to want to do something dangerous, and I didn’t want to shoot her down.

  “Okay,” I said. “But we’ll just be a minute.”

  * * *

  “I’ll go first,” I said, climbing up the ladder. The ladder led to a trapdoor about 25 feet up. Unfortunately it was a regular door, not a subspace portal, so I couldn’t use my skill to see through it.

  Katia got on the ladder behind me. She was in her normal, human-sized, non-enhanced body. We ascended quickly. I grasped onto the door and pushed it up. Dust cascaded down over me as I pressed. I emerged into a large, well-lit room with rocky walls and ceiling, the size of a big warehouse. Five stairwells sat in a circle in the middle of the room, light shining directly up over them like blazing spotlights. The moment I saw them, they marked themselves on my map. I didn’t see any mobs or any other features in the room except the exits. Ten of the exits circled the room, leading down to regular train platforms. Each one had a sign over them. All were colored lines except one, which was Escape Velocity III.

  That gremlin mechanic had been right. There was a named train that looped back. I already had one person on my chat who said he’d seen the Escape Velocity Train, but he hadn’t tried it. Also, the name didn’t have a number after it, which suggested all of the trains that looped back might be called Escape Velocity.

  Then again, the Iron Tangle employees were also trying to talk people into the mouth of a station mimic, so who knew what was safe and what wasn’t.

  The trap door I’d pushed through was disguised as a rock outcropping. It made me wonder how many hidden and secret doorways we’d walked right past. My Escape Plan skill supposedly had the ability to find hidden doorways, but it didn’t seem to work very well. I needed to talk to Mordecai about that once he got out of jail.

  I hesitantly pulled myself up into the room, looking about. Katia popped up beside me.

  “There’s nothing here,” I whispered. Whispering felt appropriate. The stairways all emitted a gentle, pulsing hum. I knew they wouldn’t open up until there was six hours left, which was ominous. There had to be a reason for that.

  “Maybe the ghouls are on the train platforms,” Katia said, pointing at the exits. “I don’t have anything on my map.”

  “Weird. It feels like a trap. Let’s leave it be for now. Maybe we’ll look at stops 36 and 48 and see if they’re the same.”

  “Hey,” Katia said as I turned back to the trapdoor. “I wanted to talk to you alone for a second.”

  “Sure,” I said, pausing. “You know you can always private message me, too.”

  “I know,” she said. “But the messaging always feels so impersonal. This is really important.”

  “Okay,” I said, starting to feel a little apprehensive. “What is it?”

  She was clearly nervous, which made me nervous. “Remember when I said some of my parts, like my eyes and mouth need to be flesh? What it really says is at least two of my eyes need to be flesh. Which made me wonder, does that mean I can have more than two eyes? So I’ve been practicing, and it turns out I can make as many eyes as I want. The problem is, it makes me want to vomit if I have more than two. And the acuity is not right. I’m very near-sighted with them. I’ve gotten it to where I can have a third eye, and as long as the field of vision doesn’t overlap with my other two, my brain can handle it. You’d think it’d be the other way around, that it’d need to overlap for it to work better, and maybe that’s so and I’m doing it wrong, but for now I’m training myself to see directly behind me while I walk. It’s like watching two shows at the same time, and it’s hard to remember which one is which even though it’s obvious. I keep it closed most of the time, but I can open it a minute or two at a time before I get a really bad headache. Hopefully soon I can train my mind to understand a full array of vision all around without going insane. That would be very useful. It’s just, I feel less, I don’t know, human when I do it. I know I’m not human anymore. I need to get over it. I know that. But it’s hard.”

  “That… that’s wild,” I said, “And it will be really helpful. But why is this a secret?”

  “That’s not the secret.” She wrung her hands worriedly. It was something she did often, no matter what size she was. “Donut did something when she didn’t think anybody was looking. I talked to Hekla about this, and she thinks it was a setup. That you had her do it on purpose to test me. But I think I know you better than she does, and that’s not the sort of thing you’d do. Besides, you didn’t know about my third eye, so how would that be a setup anyway? Donut did it so nobody would see.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Katia?”

  She pulled a little slip of paper out of her inventory and handed it to me.

  “The other day when you got hit by the Nightmare and were gone, Donut and I went back out on the tracks to clean it. I saw Donut pull this from her inventory and then stuff it under the track so nobody would find it. But I was practicing with my third eye, and I saw her do it. When she wasn’t looking, I grew a new arm, slid it along the track, and I grabbed it.”

  I examined the paper. It was a black ticket with a familiar, gold leaf skull embossed on it. I felt a chill rush through me as the description appeared.

  PVP Coupon.

  Ah, betrayal. Sweet, delicious betrayal.

  If you have this coupon in your inventory, and you kill the crawler whose name appears on the backside of this coupon, you will receive the following rewards:

  Gold Savage Box

  Gold Weapons Box

  Gold Apparel Box

  Platinum Adventurer Box (This benefit may only be redeemed a max of 3 times)

  +1 Player Level (This benefit may only be redeemed a max of 3 times)

  I flipped the paper over. The slip read:

  Crawler #4,122. Carl.

  “What the hell?” I said. The sight of my name on the paper gave me a second chill. “Where did she get this?”

  “PVP means player versus player,” Katia said. “I didn’t know that. Hekla says when someone gets one of those skulls next to their name for killing a crawler, and if they’re in a party, they get a Savage box, and it contains the coupons.”

  “That means she got this after she killed that guy in the club, and she didn’t want to tell us about it.” I felt myself relax. This wasn’t a big deal. Was it? She had gotten rid of it. The system gave out the coupon to be a dick. I imagined in a less tight-knit party, the existence of such coupons could cause a lot of paranoia and damage. But the idea of Donut wanting to hurt me was ridiculous. It was a waste of a prize, and she’d gotten rid of it so she didn’t have to deal with having it. End of story.

  Katia continued to wring her hands. “There’s more. I thought this was a good thing at first. But later, I told Hekla about it, and she said they don’t just get one coupon. They get one for every member of the party.” She paused. “This was the only coupon Donut got rid of.”

  Shit, I thought. I could now see why Katia was freaking out. She thought Donut still had one of these coupons with her name on it.

  “Maybe she got rid of your coupon at another time,” I said. “And how does Hekla know this anyway?”

  “My friend Eva. I told you about her already. She was with me before. We went into the dungeon together. She has a skull. There was a man. We didn’t know him, but we met right when we got in. When we joined the daughters, Hekla didn’t want h
im coming with us. But he insisted. We told him to go away, but he wouldn’t. He grabbed me by the arm, and Eva stabbed him with her trident. I thought he’d be okay. She’d just stabbed him in the back of the leg. But he died, and she got the skull. She got the coupon book, though she never told me about it. She only told Hekla.”

  “I’m sure Donut got rid of the other coupon,” I said. “Look, I’m glad you told me. But the last thing we need is to worry about each other. I’ll talk to her to make sure. I won’t tell her you found the one with my name on it.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice small. “Thank you, Carl.”

  I pulled the coupon back into my own inventory. My mind raced. I’d have to ask Donut about it. I didn’t have a choice. But first I needed to confirm some of this info with the only other person I knew with a player killer tag.

  Carl: Imani. I have a question for you.

  She had been forced to kill several of the Meadow Lark residents when they’d first arrived at the dungeon, to save them from an agonizing death. I knew it haunted her.

  Imani: Hello, Carl. We’re collecting carts so the team can ride the conveyor. It’s hard to get them off the track without breaking them. What can I do for you?

  Carl: When you received your skulls, did you get a PVP coupon? I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.

  There was a long pause. I thought maybe she wasn’t going to answer.

  Imani: I did. I received something called a Savage box, and all it contained was the coupon book.

  Carl: How many coupons were in it?

  Imani: It had a coupon in it for every member of the party. I tried to burn them, but they didn’t catch on fire. I left them behind on the first floor. Brandon wanted me to keep them in case I had to, you know, do it again. But I could feel them sitting in my inventory, and I didn’t want them there. So I got rid of them. You should know Elle did not get them when she got her skull. I used to think people only got them on the first floor, but after Donut told me about the two she received, I now think only the first member of a party to get the player-killer skull gets the coupon book.