“Carl, stop that immediately!” Donut cried.
“You’re so adorable when you wag your tail like that,” Samantha said, sounding like her normal self. “All I’m saying is Britney needs to get to either the Halls of the Ascendency or Sheol if she wants to get that crazy Ysalte bitch out of her.”
I’d heard a little about the Basilica. It was the main temple and bottom floor of Club Vanquisher, but it was also part of the mechanics for the Ascendency battles. I’d never heard of this Vulgar Temple thing.
“Britney isn’t going anywhere unless we get her off this floor.” I started to pant with anxiety. As much as it pained me to say it, Jurgen was right. If Lucia died, the tens of thousands of children in her head would die. She had to be protected. We all knew that.
What would you do, Carl? What would you do if it was you and Donut? What would you do if she tried to kill you right now? Or Donut? Would you just let her?
“Shut up,” I tried to say out loud, but it came out as a growl.
None of that mattered. I watched as Louis and Britney’s gecko backed up and then returned toward their cul-de-sac. For a second, I was worried it wasn’t going to allow them to exit the track, but it let them just walk right back toward their garage.
Florin and Lucia were arguing. Lucia clearly wanted to go to the stairwell, but after a moment, they also started backing up.
Imani and Elle had a plan to blow the Cadillac sky-high and stop the Russian crawlers within if they’d refused to take a deal, but the car was still sitting there. I knew Imani had been working them hard, pleading with them. But I also knew two of the Russian guys had wanted to go to the Pineapple Cabaret, but athird one worshipped a god. The third one was ineligible to drive this heat. Because of that, they’d missed the cut.
But now that it was either this or facing certain death, we could at least attempt to save their lives.
We’d been talking about sending the players to that “holding area,” even if they worshipped a god or if they had incompatible anatomy for escape. Akuma was worried that if they went into the Cabaret, they would immediately institute a smite. That was still possible, but the more I thought about it and the more I talked to Rosetta about how this so-called holding area worked, the more I realized this in-between place itself could be a good alternative. Those who entered were put into stasis similar to the stasis one would get tossed in if one took a deal. According to Rosetta and Mordecai, it was a blink-and-it’s-over sort of thing. And then when I asked more about how someone like Herot could pull someone from stasis, Tipid replied that he’d spent a season on a site-prep crew. It worked almost like an inventory. The person designing the floor could select the stored individual off a menu and zap them in. It was a relatively simple procedure.
Tipid also reiterated that nobody else really looked at this catchall holding area after the season started because nobody ever went into it. The whole point of the Nothing in the first place was that it was built to catch problematic entities and to be used as a toss-and-forget system that would also act as a convenient pocket dimension within the dungeon’s lore. So many storylines and artifacts relied on the existence of the Nothing to function. The catchall storage area had become a redundant backup.
Hopefully Pontiff had made his way to the Cabaret. There were no guarantees he had, especially since he was an NPC, and it was quite possible Herot saw that and decided to just leave him sitting there.
I thought again of that message I’d received after Pontiff had jumped through. It was consistent with an NPC entering an off-limits area of the game, as opposed to what had happened with Splash Zone and the others. It implied it had worked.
Assuming Pontiffhadgotten pulled in, he would have a message for Herot: There might be people coming who worshipped gods, so he had to be careful. It was okay to keep them in stasis for now. If that whole god thing was a lie, then it wouldn’t matter. If it wasn’t, then he could release them one by one as the gods lost their power during the Ascendency battles.
The best part was this would work regardless of whether we survived. The Ascendency game moved on with or without crawlers still in the game.
As for everyone else, like with the fairies and those with noncompatible races to survive outside the dungeon, they could still go to the Cabaret. They just couldn’t escape the dungeon when the opportunity arose.
... Or maybe they could with the rapid spread of the dungeon’s enhancement zones. We just didn’t know.
All of this required the dungeon itself to survive. And Herot. But Herot was a cookbook author, and as such, I trusted them.
Deep down, I knew this was all paper-thin reasoning. But the alternative was certain death, and most everyone knew that. More importantly, it was a desperatefuck youto those who were trying, once again, to get us to kill each other. That alone made it worth a try.
Chris’s truck started thebeep, beep, beepas it backed up, with Imani and Elle following.
The Russian Cadillac suddenly burst forward to the middle of the lobby and flipped up at a 90-degree angle, like a rocket about to launch.
They were making a run for the exit.Goddamnit.After all that, and they were trying to run?
“Carl!” Donut shouted.
It happened so fast.
The APV and Chris’s truck both fired spells at the car. Their shield sparked and then flickered. Prepotente hurled something, and the shield fuzzed out.
In that moment, as the shield was down, Donut castAstral Paw. She smashed the car where it stood, crushing it like a tin can. The Cadillac simply ceased to exist.
From the moment Donut shouted to the moment the car was crushed was less than a full second.
Three new player-killer skulls formed over Donut before I even had the chance to think,Holy shit.
[ 84 ]