Wasteland Warlords Episode 3: Chapter 9 - Going in Loud

They fought their way through the Haunt Topic for what felt like ages, but had probably only been a couple hours, before they came to the first staircase. In every room and hall, they encountered hostiles hiding in forests of stuffed clothing racks and mountains of novelty kitsch. At first just the plague docs and acid-spewing grubs, then more Dayglo Hauntsters packing guns and spells, flying Wyrms, and headless chickens the size of those mountain Squatches with a deadly combo of poisoned, razor-sharp spurs and powerful wings strong enough to break bones.

Joe acted as their tank, charging into each room, drawing the ire of every creature with the raw force of his personality, and effortlessly soaking up any damage they dealt. Alex jumped around the room like a Bouncing Betty, leaving a trail of destruction in the wake of her swinging kusarigama. Griff played backup, darting out with his short sword or slinging orbs of arcane energy, while Clay focused on ranged fire support and casting minor cantrips. Although Alex could absorb more punishment than Clay could, her class was clearly designed to deal out damage, not take it. His Shield of Minor Warding saved her butt more than a few times during the ascent.

Thank God they’d gotten that Stamina boost from Joe’s ashy eggs that morning, or Clay would’ve run out of steam a long time back. He couldn’t regenerate worn-down attributes as fast as the Incants in their party, or even, it seemed, as fast as Griff and Chonk. He managed to hold his own, but even a little more Stamina cost and he would’ve been in serious trouble.

“Clay, look out!” Alex cried.

He ducked as a headless rooster sailed toward his face, poisoned spurs slashing. From his crouch, he took aim with the Wyrd West revolver, the Ace of Spades, and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed green, and a silver bullet glowing with green runes whistled through the air like a mortar. It slammed into the chicken, blowing the headless creature to bits all over the peeling wallpaper.

The whole action, from drawing to firing, happened so smooth and fast that Clay himself hardly had time to register that he was doing it. “Quickdraw” didn’t begin to describe the revolver’s speed. A guy could use up those thirty silver bullets in no time if he wasn’t careful. Well, twenty-nine now. And getting more would be tricky at best, impossible at worst. He stashed the pistol back in the holster hugging his hip and switched to the M4, dangling from its sling.

A clothes rack to Clay’s right rustled. A monstrous grub popped out and barfed neon green acid at him.

Without his enhanced Dex, he would’ve been covered in the stuff. As it was, even jumping out of the way, he still got a couple drops on him. The acid sizzled through the leg of his pants and raised tiny burns on his calf that hurt like hellfire. A face-full of that would take a guy out of the fight right quick. He tucked and rolled. As he came up, he fired off a Haphazard Cast. The grub disappeared, presumably teleported somewhere within a fifteen-mile radius.

“Behind you!” Joe hollered.

Clay spun around to find the twin to that first grub slithering across the floor toward him.

An electronic whine filled Clay’s ears.

“Duck, bro!” Joe yelled, taking aim with the forearm-mounted cannon in his suit.

The barrel flared red and boomed.

The oncoming grub splattered like a water balloon full of pudding.

“Ugh, sick!” Alex had been in just the right position to take most of the splash across her left side. She had bigger things to worry about than a little gore splatter. A plague doctor rushed her from the right, wielding a chained weapon of his own. A thurible, which was basically just a word for those fancy incense dispensers they used in Catholic churches. On the end of the chain was a heavy metal ball spewing out noxious gas. Alex ducked below the swinging ball, then shot forward like a rocket and threw her formidable strength into a punch that knocked a plague doc’s mask almost all the way around.

The doc seized up and dropped to the floor, unconscious. Alex swiped grub-spray out of her eye. “Shit, it burns!”

From behind the leaning mountain of brightly colored Squishies, a Lesser Pink Wyrm shot toward her, glittering tail undulating like a cross between a snake and a fish.

Clay raised his M4 on instinct, but Griff stepped into his line of fire, putting himself between Alex and the Wyrm. Heart pounding at the near disaster, Clay pointed muzzle at the floor.

Griff pinned the Wyrm to the wall with his shortsword, then reared back for an arcana blast.

The plague doc Alex had knocked out sat up, shook his head like he was clearing the cobwebs, and pulled out a wand, locking in on Griff.

Clay put a round through the glassy eye of the plague mask without missing a beat. The creep dropped back, dead before he hit the deck, as Griff finished off the Lesser Pink Wyrm.

The room was clear.

Clay slumped against the wall, swapped out a fresh mag for his M4, then reloaded the revolver with etched silver bullets from the gunbelt. Across the room, Joe and Chonk looted potions of Cure Disease and Antidote from the plague docs. Either that was somebody’s idea of irony or the docs were susceptible to their own contagion spells. Everybody but Alex, who had an Ettin’s immunity to poisons, diseases, and filth of all kinds, partook of the illness-eradicating potions. While they did that, she washed grub acid from her quickly healing skin with water from Clay’s canteen. She didn’t need to waste a Health potion. Her regen was so fast that the acid burns were gone by the time she sluiced away the last bit of grub vomit.

That done, she picked up the heavy duty incense burner the Plague Doctor had dropped and gave it a thorough once over, then added it to her pack with a shrug. “I’m already pretty damned good with a chain weapon,” she said by way of explanation. “Having one that can also unleash an AoE toxic cloud might not be a bad idea.”

“Phft,” Joe said from across the room as he rummaged through another Plague Doc’s pack, “you already have a weapon that can unleash an AoE toxic cloud.” He shifted his weight, grunted, and let an eye watering fart rip. “Smells just like love and ash.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “Gross, but fair.” She sidled over to a knee-deep mound of discarded plushes and crouched down. “Hey, I think these are the Squishies Diebolt was talking about,” she said. She tossed Clay’s canteen back and picked up a smiling blue ball the size of a cantaloupe. “The tag says TTIGRAS. Which one is the Tempest guy he wanted?”

“Let a twentieth century expert help you out, short stack,” Joe said, sauntering over. “He’s a dragon, usually blue and black.” He shook his head at the ball Alex was holding up. “Not that color of blue. Also, sometimes he’s a person with completely different colors.”

Clay nudged a couple Squishies with the toe of his boot. “Well that sure does narrow it down.”

“I’ll stand guard.” Griff took a spot at the foot of the staircase, arcana ball in hand, good eye watching the mezzanine above for threats. “Never was much for that anime crap you Earth folks like. ’Cept for Cowboy Hiphop. Now, that was a decent show—although the live action was a little hit and miss for me.”

For the next ten minutes, Clay, Alex, and Chonk helped Joe sort through the pile, occasionally holding up a find for Joe to inspect. None of them were the specified Squishy.

Joe blew out a disappointed sigh. “It’s not here. They’ve got about ten kinds of Rimaru and Shion, though. Hey, they’ve got a Traditional Fall Festival Kimono Shion!” He held up a leaf-pattered purple ball with what looked like a unicorn horn sticking out of it, then grabbed a similar one in a rounded business suit. “Which one do you think my man Diebolt will like best?”

Clay started shoveling Squishies into his ruck. “Just grab a couple of each, then he can pick his favorite.”

Packs stuffed with collectibles from a show that hadn’t run in more than sixty years, they took to the stairs. This time Griff took the lead. He wasn’t as resilient as Joe and he wasn’t a rogue-based class, but the Old Weed was the next best thing. He knew dungeon layouts better than anyone Clay had ever met this side of the containment wall. Griff was always a little secretive when it came to his colorful past, but he’d admitted to having known a dungeon lord or two in his day. The man knew how they thought, which meant he also know what to look for when it came to traps.

He raised a fist, calling for them to a halt, then crouched down, running a hand thoughtfully across his chin. He grunted. “Don’t much like the look of this.” He gestured toward a step that looked just like all the others as far as Clay was concerned. “Problem is, I don’t see a way to avoid activating it.” He pulled his short sword free and reached out, tapping the sharpened tip against the wood.

Massive pendulum blades dropped from the ceiling with a series of metallic shinggggs.

Griff nodded as though expecting nothing less. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting the razor-sharp axe blade that sprang from a horizontal slit in the wall, right at neck level. This trap was a double whammy, attacking on two planes for maximum surprise.

Clay grabbed Griff and jerked him out of the way as a blade sliced through the space where the old weed had been standing a split second before. They fell backward into Joe’s mechsuited arms, tumbling down the steps, and would’ve knocked the whole party flat on their backs if Chonk and Alex hadn’t jumped out of the way.

Gray whiskers littered the step where Griff had been, and there was a brand new bald patch on the old man’s scarred chin.

Alex whistled. “If Clay was a little slower, you’d be half the man you used to be, Griff.”

“Boo!” Joe shoved Clay and Griff off, lifting their combined weight with the aid of his suit rockets and setting them back on their feet. “Only Joe’s puns are funny!”

“You got ten points for yours,” Alex said. “That means I get ten points for mine.”

Clay jerked his chin at Griff. “You all right?”

“No worse for the wear, lad,” Griff said, dusting himself off, “just not as limber as I used to be. Should’ve seen that extra blade.” He shook his head. “Must be getting’ complacent in my old age. The Griefer, he used to daisy chain traps just like that. Get ya lookin’ one way, then hit you from the other way.” He chuckled softly. “Or in his case, he’d hit you from every direction all at once, plus a few directions you didn’t even know existed.”

Clay had heard of Griefers before—the most famous one being Roark the Griefer, and a handful of copycats trading on his name-recognition since the Merge—but now wasn’t the time or place to ask Griff if he was talking about the original Griefer. But maybe once this was all done, and the Voodoo Daddy was dead, they could have a long talk about how the old weed knew so damned much.

Satisfied nobody had sustained serious injury, Clay eyed the swinging blades blocking their passage up the staircase. In most video games he remembered shutdown mechanisms like levers or rotation puzzles so the party could get past the trap. Not so here. He tried to find a pattern in the rhythm of the blades, but just when he started to think he’d figured it out, one would suddenly speed up or slow down.

Obviously Voodoo Daddy wasn’t the helpful, considerate type of dungeon lord who was going to leave his enemies a clever way to progress safely through his dungeon.

Clay studied the blades again. They were anchored somewhere up inside the ceiling, so unless he wasted three of his eight Inferno Lances or a ton of ammo from his M4 trying to saw through their solid metal pendulum shafts, he wasn’t going to shoot them down.

Unlike the second of his difficult but not impossible labors, however, there was no rule saying it had to be Clay Jaeger alone who took those blades out.

He turned to his brother. “Don’t you have some kind of ability where you can disassemble any kind of machinery?”

“Hells yeah, I do. Arcane Tinkerer,” Joe said proudly. “And if you’re noodlin’ what I think you’re noodlin’, then she is exactly what you’re looking for to handle this little situation we have on our hands.”

Clay gestured for him to go right ahead.

A full-cap welding mask whirred out of the back of Joe’s mechsuit and snapped closed over his head like an astronaut’s helmet. With a two-fingered salute, Joe kicked on his rockets and shot straight up, crashing through the plaster and lathes of the ceiling to where the blades were anchored.

Clay jumped out of the way to avoid the rain of debris and plaster dust.

For a few minutes, the only sounds were the rocket burners, metallic clinking, and then a growl like a grinder. Probably Joe’s Everyman Tool. That thing could turn into any gizmo Joe might need at a moment’s notice, making it possible for him to carry a whole shop’s worth of paraphernalia around in his pocket. Pretty handy.

While Joe worked, his legs—the only part of him visible below the ceiling—moved and shifted, directing the rockets so he could twist this way and that.

Finally, the first blade of the trap dropped and stuck into the step below, its cutting edge embedded several inches into the wood. With the hiss of metal sliding across metal, the second and third blade followed in short order.

Joe dropped back to the steps, a long metal rod in hand. “Never use a single drive shaft where three times that many will do you, that’s what I always say.”

“I can’t imagine any situation where making things needlessly more complex would be the smart move,” Alex said, folding her arms across her chest.

“Then you don’t have a very good imagination, short stack,” Joe said, tapping her lightly on the nose with the pipe. She batted it away. “If Voodoo Daddy had followed my one simple rule, then I would’ve had to work three times as long to take his contraption apart instead of just slipping this puppy out and letting it all fall to pieces.”

She glared at him. “Is there axle grease on my face?”

Joe winked at her over his shoulder. “I’ll never tell.”

“Don’t be a dick, Joe.” Clay pointed to the left side of his nose. “You got a little bit right here.”

While she scrubbed that off, Joe gathered up the parts from the blade and their mechanisms.

“Before we run off,” he said, pulling out his Everyman Tool again, “I think I just might be able to whip us up a little something fun…”