Samantha was still in “her” room with Grigori. I just couldn’t wait to hear all about that once he came out.
“Where’s Linus?” Donut asked Elle.
“Bautista is babysitting him for me,” Elle said. “He’s already out there handing out the tea Bautista showed him how to make.”
We were doing the Linus-goodbye-party thing now because once the race started, he wouldn’t be allowed in town between the sixth and seventh heats. It had been Linus’s idea to do it in the same place where all the crawlers were gathering to get picked as volunteers for the assault on the Pineapple Cabaret, which was the commons of Hungry Eyes. Tran and Zhang had chased off all the NPCs and set up a few tables, and it was turning into a large party, even for those who didn’t want to participate in the Cabaret escape plan.
“I’m not going to lie,” Elle said. “I’m going to miss some of the things that little pervert says.”
“Blood bar,” Imani repeated. “Can we get on with this, please?”
“Okay, guys,” I said. “Here’s the situation. Two races left, heat six and heat seven. We’re starting with four teams each and ending with just one, so the plan is to try to keep as many NPCs alive as possible for this sixth heat and get as many crawlers as we can off the playing board before the seventh heat starts to minimize as many crawler-on-crawler races as we can. We have about two hundred people going to the Pineapple Cabaret, and according to Mordecai’s math, we need about fifteen hundred people to take deals on top of that to minimize crawler-on-crawler races.”
Elle snorted. “Good luck with that. Have you seen the chatter?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
We were fighting a losing battle. By this point everybody knew that the deals were much better right at the beginning of the eleventh floor as opposed to the end of the tenth. The fact that the whole dungeon was imploding and that none of thiswould probably matter didn’t seem to be sitting well with a lot of the survivors.
I continued. “For those of us who are staying, and assuming we actually survive this final heat, it sounds like we will be going straight to the eleventh floor, and it will start immediately. The announcement stated the whole thing is scheduled to last about three hours.”
“Aren’t these things supposed to last like weeks and weeks?” Elle asked.
“Yes,” replied Rosetta, “it’s an actual rule. But it’s a Syndicate rule for the showrunners designing these floors, not a rule hard-coded into the programming. The AI is following the game rules explicitly, but it’s ignoring most if not all the Syndicate guidelines. They are two different things.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We will go to the eleventh, and the parade will start. It ends in some sort of arena. There we will face another floor boss, and then that will be it. For those of you coming, should you wish to do this with me, the plan is to simply survive. But for me, I have an Emberus problem. I need to make certain Hellik is dead before this eleventh floor ends or I get a smite, which is why I need to...”
Donut scoffed angrily.
“... leave the party with Donut to make sure she doesn’t get hurt during this process. We have two hours left before the sixth heat starts, and we have a lot to do. But before we do that, there’s still a lot of information we don’t know, which is why we’re here right now.”
I turned to Rosetta. “Tell us everything you know about the Scavenger storyline.”
“Yes,” Donut muttered, “let’s all waste time learning about dungeon lore that’s not going to matter because we’ll all be dead in a few hours.”
Rosetta rubbed her tattooed leg absently.
“Okay. The myth, at least the dungeon myth, is much like the Scolopendra myth, meaning there are multiple versions of this story. I suspect the dungeon just picks whichever version suits it best if it ever comes up. But the main gist is that before the current pantheon existed, there were older, wilder gods. When the new gods came and expelled the old ones, one was banished to Sheol, some were banished to the Nothing, and some were outright murdered. In the myth, if some of the gods put up too much of a fight, the new gods shifted their focus to their worshippers. If all the worshippers were dead or converted, the god faded away. You saw how that works on the eighth floor when you had the Thorn room challenge.”
Penny the pig let out a loud snort. She was sitting there in the corner of the barn, watching Mongo warily as the dinosaur played with Rend, probably jealous Mongo was taking away all her new friend’s attention.
A small wave of guilt washed over me.
Rosetta continued. “The all-tree is an actual tree in the dungeon, but it’s also a metaphor for existence itself. The tree gave fruit to the old gods, including Nekhebit, who is now also called the Scavenger Mother of Mothers. In the old times, she was a life and protector deity, though she was depicted as a vulture, a scavenger. She who cleaned up after the others. She supposedly wasn’t allowed to have children, but she did anyway. She had three kids, including Apito, who in turn got impregnated via either the all-tree or she made herself pregnant. Take your pick. Nekhebit was the last of the old gods to fall, and she was defeated by her daughter, Apito, absorbing the last of the vulture goddess’s worshippers.”
“Wait,” I said. “Apito is Nekhebit’s daughter? If Nekhebit is the Scavenger, then the Scavenger’s Daughter isApito? I thought it had something to do with Scolopendra. And what about the war mages? How does Samantha’s sand-oozedaughter play into this, because that’s pretty much what Akuma said they were looking for.”
Rosetta shook her head. “No. Nekhebit isascavenger, but she’s nottheScavenger. Nekhebit had three children. A son, a daughter, and a centipede.”
“Acentipede?” Donut asked. “She gave birth to a centipede? How does that work?”
“Christ,” Elle said. “This bullshit is giving me a headache. So the vulture lady had three babies. One was Apito, whose own children kicked all the old folks out and started their own party. One was a centipede who turned into a hotel for rich people and who occasionally spews world-ending magic spells and is now hanging out at the bottom of the dungeon. Who is the last guy?”
“This is where the myths start to diverge,” Rosetta said. “Sometimes Scolopendra is the Scavenger, so the Scavenger’s Daughter is the result of a Scolopendra union with someone else. Sometimes this mysterious son is considered the Scavenger. He exists in the empty plane, cleaning up the souls that escape. He, in turn, impregnates someone, and their daughter is the Scavenger’s Daughter. Sometimes he’s the first mortal, which doesn’t make sense because he comes later, but that’s what the myths say. Sometimes all three—Apito, Scolopendra, and the son—are called a divine trinity. There’s just one of them, but they’ve been split. It doesn’t really matter, or maybe it does. But what’s important is that this child, the Scavenger’s Daughter, is considered one with the same power that Apito had. An entity that has the power to erase the current pantheon and start again. But this one is even more powerful. She can take the powers of gods and use them for herself.”
Donut gasped. “Just like that Spock guy when he was on that show with the cheerleader!”
I snorted a laugh. I couldn’t help it.