“My fucking balls. You crushed my balls,” he gasped.
Elle snorted. “Just one of them. I hope it wasn’t your favorite.”
“Carl kicked a mage in the balls once,” Donut said. “Zev said the audience didn’t like it. I bet they liked this. It’s a lot funnier when a woman does it.”
“She didn’t kick him,” Louis said. “Sheshatteredit... Dude, what are you doing?”
“You never know what might be useful,” Prepotente said. He’d pushed his way into the small room and was carefully picking the little ice flecks off the ground and was putting them into a glass beaker.
“Just ask your blasted questions,” Akuma panted. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “We’re trying to help you idiots. We’re on the same side.”
Akuma’s health was slowly, slowly draining. We only had a few minutes. Apparently one of the ways to kill a war mage was to encase them in an anti-magic shield. They were, after all, magic made flesh.
“Let’s start with why you wanted me to come in the first place,” I asked. “And why did you want me to kill two teams?”
Akuma continued to pant. “There’re too many of these vehicle races. Too many teams. You crawlers weren’t supposed to survive in these numbers to this floor. The AI had to compensate by drawing from the deep reserves. On the last floor, when they made the floor even bigger, they plumbed some of the mobs from the first and second floors, but those mobs are different, and it didn’t work right. So now some of these NPC teams”—he opened his eyes and looked at the three mercenaries, who were still against the back wall in the other room—“and all the NPCs for the mercenary guilds are getting pulled from emergency backup. It’s because your numbers are too great, and when you broke the seventh floor, it required them to quickly populate the map on the eighth in a way that further depleted the reserves.”
“Wait, how do you know any of this? And what does that mean?”
I was now used to dungeon-born NPCs being fully awakened to their situation, but not like this.
“A former crawler taught me all about it. A skink. They’re trapped in the Cabaret. They know how all this works better than anybody. Better even than the AI itself, I think. They’re an annoying fucker. Even more annoying than the cat.”
“Jacobus,” Imani said.
“Wait, wait, I’m sorry,” he gasped, holding up his hand as the tiny fairy zipped up to him. The reverse tooth fairy made a disappointed grunt, high-fived the raised hand of Akuma, and zipped back to Imani.
“Well, I never,” Donut mumbled. “You don’t even know me!”
“I watched you,” he said. “I watched the last hundred seasons. I was watching you until we went out for Faction Wars.”
I took a breath. I wanted to ask him more about this former crawler, but for now, it was a tangent. We had so much to go over.
“Okay. What does it mean that they’re using NPCs that shouldn’t be used?”
Akuma started to ramble through clenched teeth. “NPCs and mobs especially aren’t supposed to be used for more than a few seasons. That skink I was telling you about, he has this process he calls the Worn Path Method, and it helps us realize what we really are. Mobs are supposed to get recycled once they’ve been used a few times to prevent that from happening. But it’s expensive, and their records are spotty. And as a result, these mobs and NPCs are used over and over. They do audits occasionally, but so many get missed. But Herot, that’s the skink, they figured this out. They and another former crawler found a way to exploit it all.”
“Does anyone understand what the hell this guy is talking about?” Louis asked.
I couldn’t breathe. Herot. The author of the sixteenth edition of the cookbook was still alive. And he—they?—was here. But where? How were they trapped?
“So?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even. “What does any of that have to do with anything?”
“The dungeon is full of mobs who know their own nature. Everything is broken. It’s all accelerating. Even if the AI hadn’t already gone Primal, the awakened NPCs are like a disease to theintegrity of the crawl as a whole. The whole thing is poisoned. Everything has to be removed. Nothing inside the dungeon will be allowed to survive past this season no matter what happens. Even if the outworlders somehow gain back control, we are well past the point of no return. Everything must be destroyed. That meanseveryoneand everything in the dungeon. All that work of generations will be binned. But these two former crawlers, Herot and Menerva, their exploit is a way for us, the NPCs, to survive. But you crawlers can use it, too.”
“Exploit in what way?” I asked.
“You don’t know enough about the way the dungeon works to understand. But a dungeon is modular. There are thousands of pieces that need to come together. There is what they call the framework, the shell upon which everything is built. That part—which includes all the stored mobs, the reusable locations,someof the indentured workers—is the important part. It’s the third-to-last thing that gets installed into the planet, and it’s the one physical part that’s reused every season to make the dungeon. It’s like a crawler’s inventory but a huge one, and it is a physical object. It is moved from planet to planet. The current season’s showrunners feed their plans for the season into the framework, along with the software. And then the macro AI is installed into the planet’s Primal Engine, and I suddenly wake up, thinking I’m a godsdamned palace guard. Or a pet groomer in a city with no waste management and no way to get food. Our forced memories are oftentimes so paper-thin, we start to realize something is wrong long before the floor is even over.”
“That’s like that one train station during the Iron Tangle,” Louis said. “They all thought they had, like, apartments and stuff, but when everyone went there, the whole area was empty. It was a complete mindfuck to them.”
“Okay,” I said. I already knew some of this. It was blowing my mind that this was an NPC. I felt numb, and I was stillreeling from the reveal about Herot. I tried to remember if I’d ever heard the name Menerva before. I wished Rosetta had come with us. I needed to press on. His health was almost half gone.
“Try to explain it anyway. What is the exploit? What is the Pineapple Cabaret? And how do we use it to our advantage? You said this former crawler was trapped there?”
Akuma nodded. “Many seasons ago, two indentured former crawlers approached the current season’s showrunner and asked for permission tobe in charge of building the seventeenth floor. Nobody ever makes it to the seventeenth floor, but the showrunners are required to have plansin place. It would be a way to help automatically dispose of awakened NPCs, and it would fulfill the requirement to have a floor ready togo. The showrunner agreed, and they were given access to create thefloor.”
“So the seventeenth floor is the Pineapple Cabaret?” I asked.