“What the hell is wrong with you!” I shouted up in the air, pointing angrily as we moved off the kitchen counter. “You said you were done with this bullshit!”
“What the fuck!” one of the men suddenly shouted as we jumped off the kitchen counter. This was a human shell named Deontay, and he hurled the massive PlayStation controller right at us. The controller missed, but it crashed loudly against the cabinet behind us as some of the kids noticed and screamed.
This version of Imani was backing up. She’d reached down and picked up Gucci the dog. But now she was looking at everyone in the room, horrified, as if she’d just noticed their eyes had all been sewn shut.
The dog, I noticed, didnothave the X’d-out eyes.
“What the hell?” the other man shouted as we hit the ground, ignoring Imani. Pontiff hit the spider legs, and we skittered past the feet of the passed-out man, causing everyone to scatter back. We moved under the couch, passing four or five remote controls and a few dusty dog toys.
We started to scamper up the wall, angling toward the gate.
“Mom,” I heard Imani say. “Mom, your eyes.”
Elle: We’re about to drop into the apartment.
Donut: THE GATE IS ON THE WINDOW IN THE LIVING ROOM.
“Carl, I think that’s Imani’s dad,” Donut said as we zipped up the wall. “Do you think she’s going to freak out? I mean, the real one?”
“No,” I said. “Not Imani. She’s not going to like it, but she’ll be okay.”
We emerged from behind the couch as we climbed the wall. Behind us, everyone was now screaming, ripping at their own faces.
The older woman—Imani’s mother—screamed as she plucked one of the stitches fully open. Imani remained in thedoorway, horrified. She had the phone to her ear, but she was now looking at a photo on the wall, which also had the crossed-out eyes. She hugged the dog even tighter and backed into a room, then slammed the door.
The body of Imani’s mom went still, freezing in place. The designator over her head disappeared and changed into something else.
Ruptured Feast Hive.
The beetles, each one about half the size of the truck, started to pour from the hole in the woman’s face, which was peeled back like a bullet hole through metal. Her body froze, with her hands still reaching up around her face near the point of contact as the beetles emerged, now coming from the eyehole and the mouth, just coming and coming and coming, too many of them, pouring out.
Gucci the Maltese yipped from the other room as Imani screamed into the phone. On the floor, the man continued to convulse. Everyone else was suddenly frozen in place, with bugs pouring from their eyes, nose, and mouth.
We hit the window and pulled through the gate.
Gate Five of Seven cleared.
A beetle jumped from the head of Deontay and landed on the window right in front of us.
All things being relative, the beetle was the size of a goddamned bear. The armored, six-legged, oddly hairy bug was shiny, like it was coated in wet paint, and even though the shell was black, it shone a deep purple as it caught the light. The scythe-like forward legs looked powerful enough to lop our heads off.
But then I noticed the purple opalescence also had a secondary tinge to it. A familiar yellow glow.
“Fuck me.”
Sacred Feaster Scarab Beetle. Level 50.
This mob is invulnerable. You may not kill it while it is in this condition.
All right. So sometimes people make mistakes. Sue me.
What you’re looking at is one of the types of bugs I plucked off Khepri’s feast table from his never-fucking-ending temple in Club Vanquisher. The original plan was to have all the people, doggies, cats, fish, that turtle in apartment 411, the monkey Rezan’s mom had in 634, everything as shells living in their loops. And when you guys race through the rooms, it screws up the loop, causing the shells to become aware, breaking them open and releasing the prizes inside like a fucked-up piñata. You with me so far?
Here’s the thing. These fucking gods are doing shit I don’t like, and more importantly, they’re doing shit I can’t control. You’d think that chick that used to have the boob armor would’ve killed or subjugated this one by now since that’s been her MO since she set foot on the 12th floor, but for whatever reason, she’s left the weird-ass, bug-headed Khepri dude alone. Probably because he freaks her out just as much as he freaksmeout.
Anyway, this god did something earlier that I’m not going to explain, yadda, yadda, cascading effects and whatnot, and now we have this clusterfuck that’s about to ensue.
I used these bugs specifically because they’re invulnerable. But their aggro wasn’t supposed to get triggered when they emerged. Instead, they were supposed to flow to the roof and come together to form a pretty badass 100-foot-tall gate boss named theSacred Guardian of the Immortal Tem. I was really looking forward to it.