The NPCs. The mobs. The gods. The demons in Sheol. The others, whoever they were, though I was pretty sure I knew.
Lucia. We had to keep her alive.
This next floor was going to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
I watched Donut just sitting there, quivering, rubbing her paw on the dirt. She, too, was examining a mask on the ground as Mongo licked at it. Rend sat on my side, also licking at a bloody horribles mask. Penny stood beside them, licking at the remains of an elf politician who’d been wearing the mask.
I grunted with amusement.
“Eat the rich,” I said.
Rend looked at me, tongue lolling out.
“Yum,” he said.
Determination filled me. Despite what I’d just said, I knew what I had to do. I had to stay on the twelfth floor. I had to keep anyone from “winning” the Ascendency until everyone left in the dungeon got out.
Across the way, the pulsing goo of Scolopendra thrummed. At any moment, a new creature would come out. According to the pet biscuit description, she would be a regular pet transformed back to level 1. We would stick her in the pet carrier and keep her in our inventory where she couldn’t harm anyone else.
Turning her into a pet made her the ultimate weapon. If I had her in my inventory and I was killed, she would die, which wouldinitiate the final attacks. A true fail-safe. It would be our key to surviving this next floor, and it would be the key to stalling until everybody got out.
I knew our odds were still ridiculously slim, but I had hope. So much hope, and it had been such a long time since I’d felt anything like this.
We can do this. We can live. We can get free.
We can fucking win.
I reached over and rubbed Donut’s head. She looked up at me, quivering. The others were already approaching the garage. We had ten minutes left before level collapse.
“It’s okay,” I said, rubbing her. “It’s okay.”
“Carl?” Donut said. “Uh, okay, so we have a problem. Don’t get mad.”
“I won’t ever get mad at you. What do you mean?”
“So, with the inventory. It was happening so fast, I made a mistake. Like, a really, really bad one.”
Across from us, the gelatin coalesced, and then it just sort of drained away, revealing a shape.
Mongo growled.
A human-sized centipede appeared.
A new member has joined your party!
Sexy Scolopendra. Level 1.
Crawler #12,953,456.
The level 1 crawler looked up at me.
She wasn’t a pet.
She’d been transformed into something akin to Commander Stockade from the Lemig team. The warlord who’d smashed his face to the floor until he died. But instead of a caterpillar, she still looked like a horrifying centipede, only with a humanlike face with strangely giant lips. She had no arms. Twin yellow antennae twitched on her head. She had a red bow on one of the feelers.
“What the ever-loving fuck?” I asked, jumping back.
Donut had given me the wrong pet biscuit.