Donut: WHO IS CUMBERLAND?
Elle: Five bucks says it’s her ex-husband.
The announcement continued, her voice abruptly cheery for a few seconds before she started to descend back into drunken despair.
Two races left, and as you already know, the last two races are one after the other. The last heat will have three teams per heat, and only the winner survives. But per the dungeon rules, any of you idiots who are too cowardly to just fucking die will have access to an Outreach Guild between the sixth and seventh. Just remember, that seventh racemusthave three teams per heat. And if one member of the team escapes via deal, anyone left over will still have to complete the race. Hopefully your driver for the seventh heat isn’t the one who jumps. Did you even love me? Like, ever? You know what? I’m glad you’re dead. You’d probably just love all this. I fucked everything up just like you said I would. Well, you know what, Cumberland? You were right. I bet that makes you feel soooo fucking proud. I’m glad you and your evil mother got blownout of orbit in your stupid habitat that I fucking paid for with myjob. You know, “job”? The thing that earns credits so you can eat and live and not waste it all on blowhole porn and your whore girlfriends with their obvious flipper jobs?
Oh, and don’t forget, this will be the first level that has a floor boss. And the AI gave me some shit to read about the 11th floor but I ain’t gonna read it because Iwantit to kill me. It’s just something about the floor only having a time limit of three hours for the whole thing. Who fucking cares? Now get out there and kill, kill, kill.
This was followed by a good ten seconds of sobbing before the microphone cut off.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
Louis: You called it, Elle.
Elle: You haven’t seen bitter until you’ve seen a woman who’s realized after fifty years of hard work and marriage that her husband was a cheating idiot. We had lots of those at Meadow Lark. Imani, you remember Francine Herrada? The new wife came in that one time and Francine tried to throat-stab her with a knitting needle.
Imani: I remember. Doctor Gracie and Yolanda had to hold her back. You started calling her “Killer.” She didn’t like that.
Elle: Honestly, I probably would have cheated on her, too. She once told me that adding spice to food was a sin. Can you imagine? That poor husband.
Hedy was just shaking her head, tablet in hand. “So, do you want to know what upgrade they voted for?”
“Is it worse than the chair?”
She snorted.
[ 69 ]
“Nice.This is quite the invigorating space,” Prepotente said as he, Donut, Imani, Elle, Rosetta, and I sat down in the corner of the pet stables. “I have a pet stables upgrade as well, but not the advanced one. This room is significantly bigger. When we combine, it will go up to level 5, I believe. That will add the Stablemaster benefit, giving us three more mercenary slots.” He paused. “Then again, perhaps not if so many guild members leave.”
“My blood bar only has an hour left,” Imani said, her voice clipped and irritated. “So we should do this quickly. The volunteers are gathering in Hungry Eyes. Louis is out there now and says it’s a huge crowd. Florin is going to start making the choices.”
Imani was angry with me regarding our strategy for the eleventh floor, which I’d just posted on my page inTheBook of Voodoo. She’d left a three-paragraph tirade about how we were all going to die. Thankfully, Elle had come to my defense. Even Prepotente, who was usually very adverse to suicidal plans, seemed to be eager to attempt it. Imani was now threatening to take a deal because we were all going to die and she wished she could take the Pineapple Cabaret exit.
I had responded,I hope you do take a deal. Nobody would blame you. You deserve the rest. I hope everybody does at this point. I know our chances are next to nothing that this will work.
She had simply replied,Goddamnit, Carl. This is insane.
But even Imani knew I had no other choice. My Emberus issue was coming due, and with the announcement that the eleventh floor was going to happen so quickly, my hand was being forced.
We’d spent some time discussing the potential trap that the Pineapple Cabaret was, and even though we’d already sent Li Na, we decided it would be best that only volunteers who didn’t worship a god and had remained human get to go. Rosetta and Tipid both warned about magical races that might have some serious issues if they did manage to escape. Absolutely no fairies or other flying classes could be allowed to go. Louis couldn’t go because his gill surgery required magic to work. Chris, Donut, and Florin were all out as well, as we simply didn’t know how their races might function outside the dungeon. Florin would probably be okay, but I had some serious concerns about Donut. And there was a good chance Chris, as a rock creature, would simply drop dead the moment he stepped out of an enhancement zone.
Donut had asked some alarming questions about the enhancement zone they’d used when she’d done her deal interview with my new wife, and Mordecai’s response was less than reassuring. Chris had also been forced to use this so-called modified zero zone. As had Louis, Elle, and so many others.
So, despite everything, we decided that we were going to warn everyone about what might potentially happen on the eleventh floor, allowing everyone to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to continue. And if people didn’twant to participate, we were urging them to take a deal at either the end of the tenth floor or the beginning of the eleventh.
So far, most of the responses had been horrified anger at the plan.
Donut was currently not speaking to me, either. The strategy involved me leaving the party temporarily for the eleventh floor. We currently had Mordecai working on the implications of that when it came to the setup of the safe room. He had to shuffle ownership of a lot of things around and buy upgrades with our rapidly dwindling funds.
Now, as we gathered to talk in the stables, I watched Rend and Mongo rush back and forth across the room, playing, while Gonk snorted indignantly.
We’d actually already had the level 5 stables, but we’d lost it when Li Na left. Zhang’s space was the bare minimum one. That was about to get much worse.
We’d chosen to have the meeting here in the pet stables because, according to Rosetta, this was a secondary guild add-on room, and as such, there was an existing bug that gods didn’t see what we did in this area.
It wasn’t that good of a benefit. If I attempted to leave the faith, it wouldn’t work. If I did something permanent, such as remove a god-given gift, they would notice the moment I stepped from the room. And the viewers could still see us. But if we openly discussed some god quests in here—such as Samantha’s pronouncement that she’d had something to do with the death of Geyrun on the previous floor—the things we said wouldn’t be overheard by the deities.