“He’s not coming for you. He’s coming for Carl!” Donut cried, scrambling up. She was absolutely soaked in red gore from the joining. “We need to get out of here before?—”
“There you are!”
Slam!
Grull swung his axe, and a wave of wind hit us just before we alighted, and crunched us heavily to the ground. We all stumbled anew. The roof crumpled in. The shield overloaded and winked out. One of our tires broke off and flew away. We spun out on the ground, turning sideways, and we would’ve flipped without the gyro. The slow-moving wave of molten metal lurched toward us, overtaking the automatons. And walking in that wave were literally hundreds of the elementals. They roared as one and started charging, quickly outpacing the angry god.
Grull stood only ankle-deep in the molten metal. It didn’t seem to affect him. Donut shouted an order, and Dong pushed open the back door.
I caught sight of Sweety, far to the side, still high in the air, gliding on wings, feet flaming and trailing smoke, trying to get past all this.
“As tall as a mountain,” Corcunda muttered, looking up at the god.
Grull raised his axe over his head. “I’m gonna enjoy this, Meat!” Bubbles started to form around his shoulders. “After allthis time, and you’re going to die like the little bitch that you... Gah!”
Donut finished castingLaundry Day.
The orc was ejected from the god’s chest. He dropped like a rock into the river of metal below.
“We don’t have time to kill you now,” Donut shouted. “Maybe next time!”
The Maestro was not, unfortunately, dead. The orc, while not invulnerable like the god itself, could not die here on the tenth floor. He could only be killed on floors where the rules stated outside tourists could perish, and there weren’t any of those left. He could still get splattered, but he would just regenerate a few minutes later.
Still, it probably hurt a whole lot, and for that, I was glad.
I knew from my discussions with Mordecai that he would appear in his quarters on the twelfth floor. But because of the AI’s new rules that everyone had to be wearing their soul armor no matter what, he’d come back to Grull, probably in just a few short minutes. This would be a problem if we ever made it to the twelfth floor—though that floor had some interesting rules regarding soul armor—but for right now, it gave us a few minutes before the Maestro would be back.
The god, however, was still here. And Corcunda was still marked for death.
I activated the spider legs, and we skittered off toward the exit, running as quickly as we could.
Grull snorted indignantly and looked about as we started to pull away.
“Corcunda,” the god roared, his voice deeper and much more terrifying now, “you have failed in your faith, and now you must be punished. You cannot hide. You cannot flee. Accept your punishment like the warrior you once were.”
Grull started casually walking toward us. The slag elementals were faster and would be on us sooner. The spider legs weren’t nearly as fast as the now-useless tires, and the howling monsters slowly gained on us. Ahead, all the survivors were attempting to queue up at the single exit to the room. This doorway, only wide enough for two, already had a wreck right at the entrance. A bulldozer-like vehicle was pushing it all through, but everyone was stopped, trapped, right in the path of the god and the elementals.
Many had clearly lost their containment, and multiple vehicles were on fire. Everyone was bunched together.
“Go, go, go!” Donut cried. “I’m going to cast?—”
“No,” Corcunda said, putting a hand on Donut as I swerved around a broken crate. The box was filled with screws. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, millions, and they were just spilled everywhere in the chaos. The spider crunched over them like gravel.
“No,” he repeated. I watched over my shoulder as the mantaur reached down and encompassed Dong in a hug.
“You worried if I would no longer love you once I returned to this form. But how could I not? Even if you and Porky hadn’t made amends before we joined, how could I forget what we had? You have been nothing but a shining light in my life, and I want to thank you for always holding true. But now I have to go to Grull. The only way he will leave is once I am properly smited.”
The mantaur removed the only thing he was wearing—the scarf around his neck—and put it around Dong’s.
Warning: Race ends in 3 minutes.
The elderly stripper, whose health was almost all gone, reached high up and put his hand against the cheek of the mantaur. “My love,” he said, “do you really think I will ever leave your side again?”
He held his other arm out, and he pulled an item from his inventory.
The massive lance, which I hadn’t seen since the day I’d given him that damn sock, appeared in his hand. The man held it steady, straight with just a single hand, pointing it out the back of the open door of the truck.
Pointing it directly at the immortal god of war.