Wasteland Warlords 3: A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG Adventure
Author: James A. Hunter; Eden Hudson
Date: 2024-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Humour; Adventure
Description: “If you’re not ready to lay it all on the line out here, you won’t make it a week. The wasteland’ll chew you up and spit you out.” Clay Jaeger finally has the chance to become the spellslinger he always wanted to be—the one his family needs him to be to survive the dangers of the wasteland. A teacup pig claiming to be a cursed Great Blue Wyrm has offered them a quest to take out a Dungeon Lord with the exact power set Clay’s been looking for. There’s just one problem. The Dungeon Lord can steal the souls of his enemies and summon them to fight his battles for him. Clay is more than willing to
Publisher: Shadow Alley Press
Rights: Copyright 2023 James A. Hunter. All rights reserved.

Wasteland Warlords

EPISODE 3

JAMES A. HUNTER

EDEN HUDSON

Contents

Summary

Author and Publisher Updates

1. Relics of the Past

2. Voodoo Throw Down

3. Secondhand Books

4. Hollywood Hills

5. A True Shonen Protagonist

6. The Three Labors of Clay Jaeger

7. The Wyrd, Wyrd West

8. Breakfast of Champions

9. Going in Loud

10. War Machine

11. High Noon in Haunt Topic

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About the Authors

Summary

“If you’re not ready to lay it all on the line out here, you won’t make it a week. The wasteland’ll chew you up and spit you out.”

Clay Jaeger finally has the chance to become the spellslinger he always wanted to be—the one his family needs him to be to survive the dangers of the wasteland. A teacup pig claiming to be a cursed Great Blue Wyrm has offered them a quest to take out a Dungeon Lord with the exact power set Clay’s been looking for.

There’s just one problem. The Dungeon Lord can steal the souls of his enemies and summon them to fight his battles for him.

Clay is more than willing to lay down his life to protect his family, but is he willing to risk his eternal soul on a gamble that might not pay off? Time to roll the dice and find out…

Author and Publisher Updates

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Chapter 1

Relics of the Past

“There it is!” Bacon Bits squealed, curly tail wagging with excitement. “My dungeon.”

Clay looked off the overpass in the direction the teacup pig’s chipped hoof was pointing as Alex, Joe, Chonk, and Griff crowded around him in a semicircle.

Down below sat the ruins of a sprawling shopping mall. Unlike most of the urban decay they ran into out in the wasteland, however, this place might not have been destroyed by the Merge and the subsequent twenty years of human abandonment. At least, not entirely.

The wings looked as if they’d been demoed to make way for new construction, then forgotten about. A little off-center, at the edge of what might’ve once been the food court, stood a massive obsidian plantation house straight out of a horror movie about the back streets of New Orleans. It was cheesy antebellum architecture at its finest, complete with a huge double-decker porch held up by cracked columns, and a gabled roof crowned with a squared cupola. There was no way in hell that had been an original part of the mall.

Clay had read about places like this before coming to the wasteland. They were called Artifact Structures.

Twenty years ago, their world had collided with Hearthworld, one of the most popular VRMMOs ever created. Los Angeles had been at the epicenter of the Merge, and according to legend, it hadn’t just been monsters that poured through the rift. Buildings, villages, dungeons, and even landscape features like mountains and caves had rudely smashed into the world like a hail of asteroids. The closer the Jaeger Squad got to LA, the more these Artifact Structures would appear.

Still, this particular structure had clearly undergone some significant design changes in the years since its arrival.

Where the parking lot should’ve been was a lush rolling green field dotted with gnarled trees, cracked stone mausoleums, and aboveground vaults covered in kudzu vines and Spanish moss. A thick ground fog swirled through the out-of-place graveyard, drifted over its leaning steps, and climbed into its shattered windows. Remixed synth music thumped out of unseen speakers, and corpse candles floated over the graves, flashing neon colors in time with the bass. A black fence topped in iron spikes ran around its perimeter, skirted by an uneven cobblestone road that looked like it’d been worn smooth by centuries of horse and foot traffic.

The iron sign over the carriage gate read Haunt Topic.

Joe whistled. “Well, I’ll give the big bad Voodoo Daddy this—he’s got style.”

“No, he doesn’t!” Bacon Bits snapped. “He appeals only to the lowest common denominator pop culture ideal of a voodoo dungeon. There is not an original scale on his body.”

“If that’s what works for you…” Joe shrugged.

Clay ignored them, studying the graveyard barring their path. In order to make it to the front door, they’d have to follow the winding cobblestone street through the displaced cemetery. Problem was, that cemetery wasn’t empty. Creatures shambled and danced around in beat with the unseen music. At first glance, Clay thought they were bright neon skeletons dressed in ancient emo and gothic-hip apparel, but on closer inspection, he realized they were humanoids covered in black grease paint and Day-Glo skulls and bones.

“What type of creatures are those?” he asked Bacon Bits, keeping his voice low.

“Hauntsters. They spawn here in droves and spend all their time fawning over the leather corsets, specialty suspenders, novelty shirts, and fingerless gloves.”

“Do they have any special abilities?”

Bacon Bits turned up her snout. “If you consider amassing hoards of minor accessories from something called ‘anime’ a special ability. Many wear pentagrams and carry Voodoo Dolls and Chicken Blood Bombs, but they are only emulating our fool of a Dungeon Lord.”

“I haven’t had much dealing with the Voodoo school of magic,” Griff said, watching the skeletal rave below with his one good eye. “Wasn’t a part of Hearthworld’s original system. But I’d say treat anything with Bomb in the name as particularly dangerous.”

“Same,” Clay agreed.

Seeing they didn’t share her scorn, Bacon Bits turned to Alex, who had become her best friend in the short time they had been helping her.

“I ask you, Alex, is there anything more cliché than a haunted house? When I am on the Dungeon Lord’s throne, I will return dignity and terror to the office, beginning with a complete renovation from the ground up.”

Alex smiled down at the little pig. “What kind of dungeon will you make it into?”

“Oh, the most formidable and intimidating Wyrm Farm!”

Clay raised an eyebrow. “You might need to reconsider the name.”

“You could call it the Bait Shack,” Joe suggested. “Clay and me used to get worms from a placed named the Bait Shack out on I-44 all the time. Excellent night crawlers. They had this worm casting pile out back, and for twenty bucks—”

“It will not be that type of worm farm!” Bacon Bits snapped. “It will be a battleground for the Draconic Grubs that spawn here to evolve into Great Wyrms of any color they choose, not just the colors the Lizardman believes set off his gothic ambiance. Why, they could even become Great Dull Gray Wyrms or a respectable Taupe.” She sighed. “Imagine the variety!”

“By the way, obvious grammar violation,” Alex said, pointing at Joe. “It should’ve been ‘Clay and I got worms from the Bait Shack.’”

Joe looked at her like she was crazy. “But you don’t even like to fish.”

“I’m talking about how you should have phrased it. Clay, tell him.”

“Let’s focus,” Clay interrupted. This wasn’t the time to play games. Before they’d hit the sack last night, Bacon Bits had dropped the bomb on them that her Voodoo Shaman Dungeon Lord could steal a soul and turn it into his zombified slave. Clay had been turning over possible scenarios since then, trying to come up with something in their arsenal that would protect them against a spell of that caliber. Unfortunately, all the sleepless night had yielded him was that they needed to take out the Dungeon Lord before he managed to get off that hit.

He pulled the Camera Obscura out of a drop pouch. It looked like one of those old-fashioned wooden box-style cameras, except it fit in the palm of his hand and was steampunked out with shining brass gears and embossed telescoping lens caps.

╠═╦╬╧╪

Camera Obscura

Durability: 27/49

Properties: Grants a 30-ft circle of invisibility, hiding user and all allies from enemy spy engines, scrying technology, and underlings for up to 20 minutes per charge.

To activate Camera Obscura, press the shutter button.

Charges: 5/6

To charge Camera Obscura, user must kill an elemental chimera of at least level 1, attach a rune of power, or plug in to a 110-volt electrical outlet.

“What you see isn’t always what you get.”

╠═╦╬╧╪

The Camera had come from the Sooq as part of a quest reward. They’d gone after it with the intention of hiding from the drones of the Gearhead Incant Flynn Lynes, but with him out of the picture, they were free to use its magical stealth technology on the spies or lookouts of any enemy they might face.

“Once this is activated, we’ve got twenty minutes undetected.” Clay looked at Bacon Bits. “Is that enough time to get us to the Lizardman?”

“More than enough,” she said. “It is a small matter of getting through the boneyard unmolested by the Hauntsters and taking the passage beneath the Weeping Angel. From there, a short series of unguarded underground corridors will let us out just behind Saurian’s throne. We will meet no resistance until we are face-to-face with him, then we shall launch a quick and brutal assault, flanking him on all sides before he can cast any of his ritual magic.”

Bacon Bits sounded confident enough, but Clay had his doubts. There were a hundred ways this could go south.

But they did need to take out another Dungeon Lord, and they probably weren’t going to get a better chance than this.

Clay knelt down by a stretch of sand that had drifted onto the overpass and started sketching out a rough map. “Here’s the throne. Griff and I go in first—I’ll go right; Griff, break left—guns and magic blazing. When we have his attention over here, Joe and Alex, you come around the back of the throne and hammer him from behind. If everything goes right, we’ll keep the Voodoo Daddy off-balance enough to finish him before he gets his bearings and starts firing off that zombie curse at us. While we’ve got him distracted, Bacon Bits, you find your cursed claw—”

“And when I am restored to my true form, we will see how Saurian enjoys fighting the Terror of Santa Clarita, the awakened and furious Great Blue Wyrm of Vengeance,” Bacon Bits said, her beady little pig eyes flashing in a chillingly draconic way.

“So basically, the plan is to go in heavy and hit him with everything we’ve got.” Alex grinned and cracked her knuckles. “I’m down with that.”

“You would be, Katotes,” Joe said. “Chonk and me are a little more sophisticated. We’re going for less ‘Hulk Smash’ and more ‘Lumberjack Buddies Save the Day,’ aren’t we, pal?”

Chonk chittered and revved his little hedge-trimmer arm in agreement.

Everybody checked their loadout. That job used to take a lot less time back when the Jaegers first came to the IZ and had barely anything but their guns and the body armor on their backs. Now Joe was clanking around in a mech suit, Alex was kitted out with armored samurai sleeves called kote that boosted her already insane Incant Constitution and Strength, and Clay had his trusty Cinderscale Cuirass that granted him +2 Strength, +1 Con, and a passive +18% Fire Resistance Bonus. Even Griff had leveled up his jacket to a brown leather duster with a better armor rating and +2 to Magicka.

They weren’t the same tumbleweeds who had rolled into Camp Liberty a month before, not by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, at the time, taking on a Tier 4 dungeon would’ve been suicide. A total party wipe. But now, with two of them wielding Incant powers, a former NPC on their side, and a bunch of stat potions helping Clay keep up, they were just the squad for the job.

Clay hated that he was their weakest link, but he wasn’t going to let himself get caught up in that. If everything went well today, he just might come out of the Haunt Topic an Incant himself. And they could really use a spell caster to round out their party. Griff had some ranged spells, but he was a melee fighter at heart and better with a sword than he was with an Arcana ball.

“Also, Joe, Alex was right before,” Clay said, now that everybody was on the same page and ready to rock. “It’s ‘Chonk and I.’ The pronoun has to make sense by itself if you take the other person’s name out.”

“Boom,” Alex said, opening her hand as though dropping a mic.

“Huh-uh, you don’t get that point,” Joe protested. “Only grammar violations with official rulings at the time of violation can be counted; it’s not retroactive. As my bank used to say before they closed my account, ‘No backdated checks.’”

“If we are ready, then let us be on our way,” Bacon Bits said cheerfully. “The sooner begun, the sooner Saurian will have his comeuppance.”

“All right, everybody squeeze into the shot,” Clay said, putting an arm around Alex.

Joe leaned over Clay’s shoulder, sticking out his tongue and making rock ’n’ roll horns at the Camera Obscura. While Griff edged in the side and Chonk climbed onto Joe’s head, Alex snagged Bacon Bits and tucked the teacup pig under her arm.

“Cheese!” everybody said.

Clay thumbed the shutter.

The miniature Edison-style flashbulb went off, sending up a curl of smoke. With a whine, the Camera ticked down to 4/6 charges. Something stabbed into Clay’s palm. Out of a thin, scrollworked slot in the bottom of the box, an old-timey photo printed, square and glossy. Somehow the photo managed to capture everyone’s worst side. It floated to the dirt.

“Did the rest of you guys just get a notification that you’re obscured from enemy spies for the next twenty minutes?” Alex asked, her eyes losing focus as she read unseen text.

“Aye,” Griff said.

“Yep.” Joe nodded, and Chonk either agreed or was just nodding to mimic his owner.

Clay checked his Active Effects with the Monocle of True Seeing just to make sure he was covered, too, then slipped the eyepiece back into a pocket on his vest.

“All right,” Clay said, “let’s do this.”

“Hold up!” Joe snatched the photo off the ground and dusted it off. “Aw! Group pic. Now we can look back on this day and say, ‘Remember how young we all were right before we whooped that big bad Voodoo Daddy’s ass?’” He slipped it into the pocket on his sleeveless flannel shirt, then waved his hand to summon his mech suit. He took a deep breath and blew it out with a satisfied grin. “These are the days we’ll cherish forever. Always take a keepsake—write that down, Chonkie, it’s the key to a long and happy life.”

“If you are finished waxing poetic,” Bacon Bits grunted, “then follow me, squadmates.”

The teacup pig led them down an off-ramp and around the Haunt Topic’s street level.

As they approached the strange aboveground cemetery, Clay eyed the moss and vines strangling the black iron gate. The greenery was sprinkled with brilliant black-, white-, and purple-striped trumpet flowers. A mundane lizard scampered out of the street, probably following the scent of standing water in the boggy Haunt Topic yard, but it never made it through the fence. The second it brushed a violet-colored petal, it was instantly chomped in half with teeth made of razor blades.

Clay’s eyebrows shot up.

Next to him, Alex said, “Um, do those flowers have teeth made of those emo necklace razors? I swear I just saw a heart on one.”

“They are ridiculous, aren’t they?” Bacon Bits said, rolling her eyes. “What have razor blades to do with voodoo? The theme does not fit. I suspect he just found what remained of the store which stood here earlier and reused it. Much less point-spend that way. When I am the Dungeon Lord, the Wyrm Farm’s flowers will shoot flame or some other breath attack, and hang the cost. I intend to stay entirely on brand.”

Despite their vicious nature, the snapping vines ignored them as Bacon Bits trotted up to the gate. It was like they didn’t exist at all. She hiked up onto her back hooves and hopped at the gate latch until Clay reached over and opened it for her.

“This is very embarrassing.” Bacon Bits grunted. “I am normally more than equal to the task of opening my own gates. I am very adept at flying, and in my natural form I am many times larger than this ridiculous little potbellied body.” She gave an adorably flustered headshake that made her ears flap. “However, thank you for helping me, Clay. I extend my gratitude.”

He shrugged. “What are squadmates for?”

“Indeed!” She wiggled excitedly. “Oh, I am very much enjoying being part of a team.”

As they skulked in through the gate, Clay kept an eye on the gyrating ravers painted up like Day-Glo skeletons. Thanks to the Camera Obscura, none attacked or even seemed to notice as they passed by, but he couldn’t quite make himself relax. He felt like he was in the middle of a circle of claymores, staring down the words FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

Luckily, Bacon Bits didn’t mess around. She led them straight to a cracked aboveground tomb topped with a weathered statue of a weeping angel.

“Here I must prevail again upon one of you giants,” she said, looking from Clay to Joe. “Stretch your freakishly long arms up and shake the angel’s left hand.”

Joe followed her directions, the gears in his mech suit whirring with the motion.

With a stony rasping sound, the weeping angel’s wings flared out wide and the lid on the vault scraped back, revealing a set of worn stone stairs leading down into darkness.

Alex eyed the staircase skeptically. “You’re sure this entrance is never guarded?”

“Oh, never,” Bacon Bits assured her.

“It’s more an exit than an entry, lass,” Griff said. “Least, that’s the way they used to design ’em back in Hearthworld. The heroes used ’em as a shortcut out after defeating the Dungeon Lord. I s’pose folk weren’t interested in fighting their way back up through the levels. It was just the way of things. Sometimes old traditions like that’re hard to shake.”

Alex, Griff, Chonk, and Bacon Bits all had dark vision as part of their power sets, and Joe had a pair of ridiculous, rusty goggles that looked like a scientist high on bath salts had tried to redesign NVGs from old junkyard parts. Clay didn’t have dark vision, but he did have the same old workaround humans had been using for centuries: a flashlight. He clipped it to his M4, cast Control Lights, and dimmed it until he was sure the beam wouldn’t reach beyond their circle of Obscurement.

One by one, they filed down into the underground passage, Bacon Bits leading the way.

A weird smell immediately got Clay’s attention. He took a deep breath to make sure he wasn’t mistaking it.

“Is that patchouli?”

“Yes.” Bacon Bits snorted indignantly. “The fog is scented with patchouli incense. Saurian believes it will draw in the ‘right crowd’ of humans to die in his dungeon. I told him that if it has not drawn in anyone in twenty years, it will not begin now, but he refused to hear my words of truth.”

“Artists,” Joe said, shaking his head. “We’re a fickle yet stubborn lot. I remember one time I put together this flame-throwing chicken kaiju for the local Chick-fil-A, and when it was done, they didn’t want it. They wouldn’t even pay me, if you can believe it!”

“They hired you to fix their drive-thru speaker, and you made them a giant flamethrowing chicken statue instead,” Alex said.

“One,” Joe said, putting up a finger, “show me somebody who thinks a kaiju chicken squawking fire ain’t cooler than a dumb drive-thru speaker and I’ll show you a big fat liar. Two, that’s my point. We artists can’t be trusted to go with the market when the market goes all boring and mundane against our natural inclination to make flippin’ cool stuff. Voodoo Daddy just hasn’t matured as far as I have in my artist journey yet.”

Clay snorted. “That was like a month before we left for the IZ. Didn’t you tell them they could shove their speakers up their ass if they didn’t want the chicken?”

“Yeah, but I’ve grown a lot since then, and I realize now I could’ve made something that made me happy and the customer happy too. Like a giant flame-throwing chicken with the speaker built into the side. Oh! And maybe it lays eggs, but the eggs are your order in an egg-shaped bag!”

Clay and Alex exchanged looks that said exactly how far they thought Joe’s artist journey had progressed, then quietly continued down the passage. Cobweb-covered alcoves lined the way, filled with shelves holding an assortment of random plastic junk in ancient yellowing clamshell covers and moth-eaten cardboard.

“Huh.” Alex leaned in to look at a bright yellow squishy puffball with a face. “I used to have a Velcro wallet from this anime. Tomagoyama was the adorable sidekick they made all the money on.”

Clay’s flashlight beam fell on a chibi figurine from a Saturday morning cartoon he and Joe had watched when they were kids.

“Check it out.” Clay picked it up and tossed it to his brother. “It’s Hey Doug.”

“Aw, hell yeah!” Joe scanned the shelves. “Do they have one of his dog, Meatchop? Chops was the best.”

With one scarred finger, Griff poked an MCU LXIX: Avengers vs Disney Princesses collectible bobblehead.

“What’re ya supposed to do with ’em?” the old weed asked.

Alex shrugged. “Put them on your shelf or clip them onto your backpack so everybody else at school knows you’re cool. Collect them all.”

“Aha,” Griff said. “Then once you complete the quest and you’ve found all the pieces, they combine to give you a magical ability or special achievement.”

“Nope.” Clay shook his head. “You never find one piece of the collection, you grow up, move out, your mom gets sick of tripping over them, and she sells them all at a garage sale.”

Joe chuckled. “Somebody’s still mad about his Total Metal Alchemist minis.”

“They were collectibles,” Clay snapped. “Worth way more than twenty-five cents a bag.”

Alex patted his arm. “It’s okay, nerd. When we’re done with this Saurian guy, we’ll loot you some replacement TMA merch. With all this junk from other shows, they’re bound to have it.”

They passed memorabilia, jewelry, posters, and socks covered with references to Attack on Giant, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Goo, My Champion Academy, Gabimaru Sumo, and a dozen other old shows. Farther in, racks were set up featuring T-shirts screen-printed with pop, screamo, and metal bands that had been popular twenty years ago or more. They still carried Misfits shirts, which had to be considered classical by now.

Joe rifled through a few racks. “They never have any country-metal bands. Talk about not catering to your audience.”

“Pretty sure country-metal’s audience is just you,” Alex said.

Griff squinted his one good eye at the shirts. “Guess none of these have any magical properties, neither?”

“You could say they give you +2 Cool,” Clay offered, shrugging one shoulder.

“Squadmates, we must focus!” Bacon Bits stomped her chipped hoof on the flagstones. “These worthless miscellanies will give us no aid in defeating Saurian!”

The sharp reproof snapped Clay out of his nostalgia-fueled daze and seemed to do the same for Joe and Alex, too.

“She’s right,” Clay said, a little embarrassed at having gotten so caught up. “We’re here to take a run at a level-20 Dungeon Lord, not go back-to-school shopping.”

“If I absolutely must say one good thing about Saurian’s décor strategy, it is that these worthless pieces of loot often have this exact effect on humans,” Bacon Bits grunted begrudgingly. “For whatever reason, little bits of plastic serve as an excellent distraction. Every floor of the Haunt Topic is littered with such trinkets. Perhaps I will not dispose of that tactic when I establish the Wyrm Farm.”

Clay cleared his throat and scratched the back of his head. Talk about a sobering look at their species. No wonder humans got so lazy and bogged down in stuff that didn’t matter back on the other side of the wall.

Leaving behind the shrine to consumer culture, they headed deeper into the incense-scented passage. Silence descended upon them as they refocused their attention on the upcoming fight.

After a short time, the floor began to slope steadily upward, and Clay caught sight of light peeking through the cracks of a door ahead.

He turned back to his family and friends. “All right, Griff, you’re with me. Joe and Alex, remember to keep clear of the line of fire. I don’t care how much HP Incants have, I don’t want any accidents. Everybody ready?”

Once everybody had responded in the affirmative, Clay grabbed the door handle.

“Let’s do this.”

Chapter 2

Voodoo Throw Down

Clay swung the door open. The throne room was dimly lit with can lights, set high in the ceiling overhead, and more spook-rave music was pulsing in the background. Incense cones burned inside the sort of grim reaper-, wizard-, and dragon-themed censers he used to see in gas stations on I-70, pouring waterfalls of smoke down to cover the floor in a thick patchouli-scented fog.

Barely a yard in front of the door loomed a massive red-and-black velvet wingback chair. Definitely the Haunt Topic throne. A long, thick leg encased in black skinny jeans and a thick-soled warboot buckled all to hell hung lazily over one arm of the chair while a scaly green tail curled around the back.

No question where the Dungeon Lord was, then.

Griff darted past Clay and hooked left around the throne, faster on his feet than a guy his age had any right to be, hands burning cobalt with balls of arcane flame.

Clay tucked the butt of his M4 into his shoulder pocket and broke right. With his Hatchling Naga’s Band of Quickstrike, keeping up with Griff’s head start wasn’t a problem. His eyes locked on the voodoo daddy Dungeon Lord.

In addition to those giant boots and skinny jeans, the Lizardman was wearing a bloodred, skintight tank top under an undersized vest. Whether he was showing off his massive guns or the intricate network of glowing tattoos covering his arms, chest, and neck was hard to say; both were equally impressive. Perched on his head at a jaunty angle was a worn top hat decorated with a rattlesnake’s fanged skull backed by dozens of hair-covered tarantula legs. It looked like something off a My Chemical Romance album cover.

Apparently, the guy had been kicking back with what was either a goblet of blood or an especially dark cab sav. He blinked at the sudden appearance of intruders in his dungeon, reptilian lids slicing across his eyes from the side.

Clay opened fire before Voodoo Daddy could move, sending three rounds straight for his chest. Blue light strobed as Griff lobbed one of his magical bombs.

With a sound like a rattlesnake warning its predators to back off, a shell of ghostly energy surrounded the lizardman, absorbing the M4’s rounds and detonating the arcane fireball harmlessly.

As if he was barely inconvenienced, the lizardman stood up to his full eight-foot height and tossed back the last of his drink.

Clay didn’t like to waste ammo, but out of the corner of his eye, he could see Joe and Alex waiting for their chance to come up from behind. He and Griff just needed to keep the Dungeon Lord distracted. He fired again, while Griff lobbed another fireball from his corner of the room.

The blue fireball and first two shots bounced off that force field with a rattlesnake sound, but the third of Clay’s shots sliced through, shattering the ghostly wall like it was made of glass.

It seemed the protective barrier only had so many hits it could take. Clay swapped the M4 for his Lesser Wand of Inferno. Time to see how much damage he could get through before the lizardman repaired his magical shield.

The Voodoo Daddy Dungeon Lord saw the weapon swap and chuckled, showing rows of needlelike teeth. He reached into his vest. Out came a little clay pot.

Clay fired off an Inferno Lance, the first of its eight shots for the day.

With his free hand, the lizardman made a sweeping gesture and a wave of force slapped the Inferno Lance aside. It skittered off target and slammed into a wall, almost taking out Griff in the process.

Before Clay could fire again, Voodoo Daddy flipped the lid off the clay pot with his thumb claw and dumped a toxic-looking green powder into his hand. He took a deep breath and blew the powder at Clay.

Clay didn’t know what the powder was, but he damn sure knew he didn’t want to be hit with it. He tucked and rolled. Where he’d been standing, a cloud of hissing green fumes ate into the stonework of the wall and disintegrated a wizard-themed incense holder.

A crackling blue ball of energy arced through the air from Griff. It slammed into the lizardman’s side, staggering him, but still not taking him down. Voodoo Daddy grabbed a second clay pot and lobbed it at Griff. It shattered musically on the stone floor, and the powder swirled into a rumbling lightning storm. The old weed tried to dodge a brilliant green bolt, but it caught him between the shoulders. With a startled shout, Griff went sprawling.

Bertha roared.

“Eat chain saw, Komodo breath!” Joe raced around the throne, mech suit clanking, wielding the Poulan Pro Classic overhead.

The Voodoo Daddy Dungeon Lord didn’t even blink. He pulled a blowgun from his hip and brought it to his scaly mouth with the practiced smoothness of a lifelong competitive shooter. Pfoom. A black-feathered dart whispered out of the barrel and planted itself in Joe’s neck.

Black poison raced through the veins of his throat, visible even through his skin. Joe stopped in his tracks, Bertha wavering overhead. Her engine idled out, then died off. Slowly, like a felled tree, Joe collapsed forward. He landed with a racket that sounded like someone kicked a trashcan full of pots and pans down a stairwell.

Chonk leapt off the top of the throne, chittering, and landed on Voodoo Daddy’s scaly head, denting in the top hat with his flabby little body. For a couple seconds, the lizardman was caught up trying to tear a rabid trash panda off his face.

Seeing the opportunity, Clay cast Sludge Slick on the spot where the Dungeon Lord stood.

[A thin sheen of oily sludge appears within line of sight of the caster and lasts for 1 minute before evaporating. The sludge is extremely slick and has a small chance of causing those in the Area of Effect to slip.]

An unseen force ripped Magicka out of Clay like a pit bull tearing meat off a bone. Casting spells without the benefit of Incant powers was no cakewalk, but a puddle of oil appeared beneath Voodoo Daddy’s boots.

The lizardman slipped and skidded in the oil as he wrestled with the angry mechacoon. Finally, one boot shot out from beneath him, and he slammed down onto his back in the sludge.

“Havoc!” Bacon Bits’s voice echoed through the throne room.

The lizardman ripped Chonk off his head and tossed the mechacoon aside… just in time to see Alex sprinting around the throne with the teacup pig riding shotgun in her vest pocket.

Clay couldn’t get off another shot without potentially hitting his wife or Bacon Bits. He cussed under his breath and took off running, trying to get a better angle on his target.

Meanwhile, Voodoo Daddy was reloading his blowgun.

At the edge of the puddle of sludge, Alex leapt, cocking back the kama end of her kusarigama like a nightstick.

“Havooooc!” Bacon Bits squealed again, pumping one chipped hoof as she and Alex flew through the air.

Without batting a reptilian eyelid, the lizardman fired off the dart.

Alex twisted out of the way in midair. Except the dart didn’t miss. It made an impossible right-angle turn and slammed into the meat of her deltoid between the samurai kotes and her body armor vest.

“Alex!” Bacon Bits wailed.

Clay’s gut knotted instinctively, even though he knew Alex would be all right. When she’d become an Incant, she’d inherited Immunity to all poisons, diseases, and filth from Katotes. It was going to take more than a little blow dart to put her down. Instead of dropping like Joe had, Alex snapped out her kama and cracked Voodoo Daddy in the jaw. He slid backward in the sludge while Alex and Bacon Bits landed in a three-point crouch.

“How—” the lizardman hissed, but the flaming spiked flail at the other end of the kusarigama slammed home just then, knocking him back even farther.

Right at Clay’s feet.

Clay aimed the Wand of Inferno, point-blank.

With a chuckle, Voodoo Daddy hissed out a curse that shook the whole throne room and turned Clay’s stomach, the whispered words booming like thunder.

As the Inferno Lance sliced toward the lizardman’s face, a theremin wailed out an eerie note and howling ghosts exploded off the Voodoo Daddy’s skin, absorbing the brunt of the impact. The Inferno Lance detonated. The force of the blast kicked Clay in the chest like an angry mule, knocking the air from his lungs and throwing him back several feet. For a split second, his skin seared, then everything went black.

Next thing Clay knew, he was staring up at the can lights in the throne room ceiling. It felt like somebody had taken a baseball bat to his ribs and swung for the fences. He groaned and rolled onto his side, fumbling in his drop pockets for a health potion.

“I might have known it was you, ᵶᶓᶉ⸞ᴞᴥᴪᵑᴎᴔᴚ†,” the lizardman sneered. Bacon Bits’s real name slithered off his forked tongue in a sound like rustling scales. “You were a fool to return.”

“You were a fool to believe the Great Blue Wyrm of Vengeance would never return to you, Saurian!” Bacon Bits stood, tiny and mostly helpless, but clearly not cowed. Her beady eyes flashed with a draconic anger way bigger than her teacup pig britches.

It looked like she was trying to block Alex’s body from the Voodoo Daddy with her own teacup-sized potbelly. Why Alex needed protection, Clay couldn’t figure out at first. His wife was still on her feet, but she was surrounded by some kind of mini forest of yellowed twigs.

Wait, was that…? Clay blinked and looked closer. The twigs were bones. Skeletal hands had emerged from the floor and were wrapped around her ankles and calves, dragging her backward, away from the lizardman. Alex tried to smash her way clear with her fist and kusarigama, but for every pair of bony hands she crushed, a dozen more took their place.

“Fool I may be, but at least I am no coward,” the teacup pig sneered. “I have come to challenge you as a true Dungeon Lord ought to—face to face, tooth to claw—while we are both awake.”

Voodoo Daddy threw back his scaly head and laughed. “Hard to call it tooth to claw when you have a small army doing your bidding. Tell me of your heroics when they are serving me.” Again, he reached into his seemingly bottomless vest.

What he pulled out looked like somebody had grabbed it off a 3D printer unfinished. It was made of gray-white plastic and had an oversized head and chibi body, but otherwise its features were completely blank.

“Now, Joe!” Bacon Bits squealed.

With a roar of afterburners, Joe rocketed across the throne room and slammed into the lizardman’s side, bearing him to the ground. They rolled across the stone floor, mech clanking and lizard tail slapping in turn.

Bacon Bits sprinted, hooves clopping, toward an alcove filled with knickknacks. On the highest shelf, Clay spotted a huge, scaly blue dragon’s claw. That had to be the token used to curse her, trapping her in the body of a tiny piglet instead of the Great Blue Wyrm she claimed to be.

He didn’t see the problem until Bacon Bits skidded to a stop in front of the shelf. The teacup pig only stood about two feet high, even on her back hooves. That claw was way out of her reach. Clay could never make it there in time to help, Griff was down for the count, and Alex and Joe were both entangled with their own fights.

Thinking quick, Clay shouldered his M4. With the eagle-eye skill he’d developed thanks to a boost from several stat potions, he took aim and shot out the bracket holding up the left side of the shelf.

Without the support, the shelf slanted down, and the claw, a stack of incense sticks, and half a dozen of those completed chibi figures like the one the lizardman had pulled out of his jacket slid off and toppled to the floor.

Bacon Bits’s eyes lit up when she saw her lost claw within her reach. She leapt for it, hooves stretching out in front of her.

A sound like a semi crashing head-on into a steel guard rail screeched through the room. The lizardman had thrown Joe halfway to the throne. The lizardman was a bit worse for the wear, however. He was bleeding from his mouth and had some new road rash showing through a rip in his skinny jeans. And boy did he look pissed.

“I should have zombified you years ago, you overambitious little Grub,” he snarled. Holding the blank figurine high, he roared out a curse that made dust and rubble rain from the ceiling. “Damned souls at my behest, doom one more soul to my eternal service!”

Just as Bacon Bits’s chipped hoof grazed the draconic claw, a massive ghostly green hand erupted from the blank figurine and snatched her up off the floor, huge fingers wrapping tightly around her petite form, squeezing out a startled oink.

The claw clattered to the floor and shattered.

“No!” Alex screamed, hacking and slashing at the skeletal hands, trying to get to her tiny pal. “Bacon Bits!”

“Alex, run!” the little pig cried.

Clay fired off round after round at the lizardman, but the laughing Voodoo Daddy casually conjured another shield and every shot bounced harmlessly away.

The spectral hand dragged the squealing Bacon Bits through the air and sucked her into the blank figurine clutched in the Voodoo Daddy’s palm. In a flash of cancerous emerald light, the teacup pig disappeared, and the figurine shifted from a mostly formless humanoid to a cartoonishly adorable Blue Wyrm with an oversized head, giant eyes, and rounded fangs.

Leathery hands grabbed Clay under the arms and hauled him to his feet, his shattered ribs screaming at the movement.

“We can’t win this, lad,” Griff barked. “If she’s truly bent to his will now, we’ll be fighting a Dungeon Lord and his enslaved Great Blue Wyrm.”

Clay’s hand finally found a Magicka potion in a drop pouch. He downed it, taking a quick scan of the room.

By the throne, Chonk slapped Joe’s cheek, waking him from that last impact. Joe groggily shook his head and stumbled to his feet. The spell of skeleton hands ran out at the same moment, and Alex lurched forward as if she hadn’t been ready for the sudden freedom.

Voodoo Daddy shot them a toothy grin and pulled another blank figurine from his pocket.

“Who wishes to become my next ZombiePop?”

For a second nobody said a word.

Clay cursed under his breath and snatched a Magicka potion out of a drop pouch. Using up every bit of his Magicka at once, he cast Beguiling Call, Control Lights, and another Sludge Slick.

His head spun and his body went limp, but Griff caught him before he hit the deck. Hanging on to a tenuous thread of consciousness, Clay plunged the throne room into pitch-black darkness and whispered a message to Joe and Alex.

“Retreat immediately, no arguments. Out the same way we came in, before Voodoo Daddy makes it out of that sludge puddle.”

It looked like Alex was going to argue, but thank God, Joe scooped her tiny form up before she could throw herself at the Dungeon Lord. His mech suit whirred and gears smoked as she fought to get free, but the steel and magic managed to hold, even if just barely. Joe dragged her kicking and screaming out the back door.

Clay and Griff limped to the door, which was being held open by a chittering, scolding Chonk. When they made it to the passage, the mechacoon spun around and scampered into the darkness after Joe.

Clay shot a look over his shoulder before following Griff out. He couldn’t see the lizardman in the pitch black, but he could hear his smug chuckle ringing off the walls of the throne room.

Scowling, Clay ducked into the passage, leaving behind their friend’s soul trapped in a plastic ZombiePop and enslaved to the Dungeon Lord she despised.

Chapter 3

Secondhand Books

No one spoke as they pulled into the Sooq and parked the dune buggy outside their little circle of tents. Clay hopped out of the back where he’d been riding as their gunner and offered his hand to Alex, helping her down from the vehicle. She accepted the proffered limb and didn’t let go of his hand even when her feet hit the ground. Instead, she just squeezed it tighter. He pulled her into a hug. Their gear scraped awkwardly together, but she snuggled in deeper like she could burrow in far enough to escape this shitty day.

Joe stayed in the driver’s seat, playing with the keys. Sensing his owner’s mood, Chonk trilled softly and patted Joe’s arm.

Griff kept his hat brim turned down and his face hidden.

Finally, Clay slipped out of his wife’s arms.

“We’ve gotta get Bacon Bits out of there,” he said, breaking the fragile silence that had enveloped their party.

“Clay…” Alex sighed.

He knew she was going to protest. That she would be the voice of reason no matter how much it hurt. She was strong in that way. But Clay wasn’t ready to give up yet. “She’d be furious that voodoo douchebag in that stupid tiny vest has her soul trapped. We can’t just forget about her. For better or worse, that ridiculous pig is a member of the Jaeger Squad, and we don’t leave our own behind. Not ever. So I say we reload, we get back in there, and we save her. Period.”

Joe shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re going to force me to be the rational one here. Bro, do you even understand how outclassed we are? Our attacks barely touched him. Your bullets literally bounced off him.”

“First off, for literally to be correct there, you’d have to say that the bullets bounced off his shield, not him,” Clay snapped. “Second, if bullets won’t do the job, we buy a fuckin’ rocket launcher and shove it down his throat. Let’s just see how he wards against that.” He glanced over his shoulder at the flea market stalls set up around the campground. “Somebody here’s got to have some heavy artillery for sale. That shield of his could only soak up so much damage before it dissipated. Couple rounds from a fifty cal oughta set him straight.”

Alex rubbed his arm. “We’re all upset, babe, but you saw what he could do. We’re lucky he didn’t zombify every one of us.”

“He didn’t bother with us because he wasn’t interested,” Clay argued. “That petty asshole only wanted Bacon Bits’s soul, and only because she had the guts to challenge him. I’m not letting somebody stomp around like some voodoo Godzilla enslaving everybody smaller than him.”

“I’ve seen a heap of different schools of magic in my day, lad,” Griff said, finally raising his face and fixing his ice-blue eye on Clay. The old weed’s scarred features were stony with regret. “But I never came across one like this. We go back in there, we’re dead.”

“Or worse,” Joe said, eyes wide. “ZombiePops. Chibi’s not a good look for me, Clay, and plastic makes me chafe.”

“On top a’ all that, I reckon he’s like as not to have changed the locks since we left,” the old weed continued. “No way we’d get in the same way. We’d be fighting our way up through every floor, with the whole dungeon on high alert.”

“Come on,” Alex said softly, tugging Clay toward the tents. “Let’s get some food and some rest. Standing around here arguing isn’t going to help anything.”

“Yeah, never argue when you’re hangry,” Joe said, nodding along in agreement. “I’ve never once made a good decision when I’m hangry, in point of fact. Just avoid hanger and hangovers. That’s my motto.” But Joe’s typical happy-go-lucky sense of imparting a brilliant piece of wisdom upon the world was missing from his lecture. Even Chonk was sitting slump-shouldered on Joe’s lap. They were trying to put on a brave face and lighten the mood, but every one of them looked utterly defeated.

A fist clenched Clay’s gut. The Jaeger Squad had gone through a lot since making it to the IZ, gotten their asses whooped good on multiple occasions, but this was the first time they’d really and truly lost.

Clay ran a hand through his hair. He wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing with them right now. They were hurting and disillusioned. They needed time to lick their wounds. His stomach growled. And maybe they needed food, too. Joe was right about one thing at least—going hungry never helped morale.

“Fine,” Clay said. “We’ll eat something, get a little rest, and regroup.”

With a few halfhearted murmurs of assent, Joe, Chonk, and Griff headed for the tents, heads down and backs bowed.

Alex stayed. She stared up into his eyes like she was looking for something.

“You okay, babe?”

“Just down, not out.” Clay shrugged off his M4’s sling and started stripping off his sweaty gear. “Listen, while you guys get some food together, I’m going to take a look around the Sooq—” She took a breath to protest, but he cut her off at the pass. “Not for a rocket launcher. I just want to see if anybody here’s got some old paperbacks. Something to help take my mind off things for a little while, is all.”

That dragged a smile out of her. “You know, normal people just eat a gallon of ice cream.”

“Not saying I won’t get one of those, too, if somebody here’s selling.” He kissed her cheek. “See you in a bit.”

* * *

The Sooq was basically a magical junk sale, with creatures of every sort camped out in RVs, converted busses, Airstreams, and camper vans. Elderly folks in straw hats and cooling neck wraps slathered sunscreen on their red, green, blue, or multicolor faces. As Clay threaded his way through the maze of stalls, he kept on the lookout for the wasteland equivalent of the crotchety old geezer with the collection of dog-eared paperbacks.

He wandered for nearly half an hour but eventually found the books out in front of a massive fifth wheel, guarded by a decrepit hag and a beautiful young woman. Both wore pristine white blindfolds and fanned themselves with the type of cardboard fans Clay was used to seeing in the hands of old ladies at church.

He nodded hello as he browsed their rickety card table stacked with an assortment of musty leather-bound spellbooks and water-stained Stephen King and James Herbert paperbacks—then he realized he was nodding hello to two people wearing blindfolds.

“Nice afternoon, huh,” he said instead.

“It’s too bloody hot,” snapped the young woman in return. Clearly not one for social calls.

The old hag gave her a poke in the arm with her fan. “Mind your manners with the customers!”

The young woman sighed, but made no move to apologize.

“Anything I can help you find, sonny?” she asked in a biting tone that warned Clay he’d better not ask.

“No thanks, ma’am, I’m just browsing your spellbooks.”

She snorted. “There’s a chance! And here I thought humans couldn’t read.”

“Mogrifa!” hissed the old hag. “You can’t say things like that right in front of one. It’s not their fault they can’t read.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t say, Mogrifa!”

Clay was confused. Were they both named Mogrifa?

“You’ll lose the sale, blast you!” the older one grumbled. “Wait until he’s bought something and gone before you run off at the mouth.”

Clay ducked his head to hide a smile. “To tell the truth, I wasn’t able to read spellbooks before—my base Intelligence wasn’t high enough—but I managed to get my hands on a couple stat-boosting potions. A lot of these spellbooks are still beyond me, but not all of ’em.”

“See?” the young woman said triumphantly.

The old hag flapped her fan dismissively at the young woman and turned to Clay.

“What school of magic are you studying, sonny?”

“I didn’t realize there were different schools,” he admitted. “I’ve just been picking up what I could, mostly cantrips.” A thought occurred to him. “My family and I recently fought a Dungeon Lord who used some kind of Voodoo magic against us. Don’t suppose you have anything that would counteract that?”

“Voodoo, eh?” The old hag shook her head. “Never heard of it. Can’t be one of the original schools from Hearthworld.” She pointed a finger as gnarled as a tree root at a long folding table supported in the middle by dusty cardboard boxes. “Cantrips and low-level spells’re over here. From the sound of it, the ones on that card table are too advanced for you.”

“Oh, now who’s spouting off?” the younger woman sniped.

While the women bickered, Clay moved over to the folding table. He wished he could buy everything they had—horror novels included; it’d been a while since he’d read a good book just for the fun of it—but even with their new trading partnership, he didn’t have near enough gold to swing that. Books were rare, even out here in the wasteland. Instead, he started flipping through the musty pages of the old tomes, searching for spells within his current reach. When he was an Incant, he would come back for the higher-level books.

“Handle with care,” growled the young woman, an eerie black aura beginning to grow around her head and shoulders.

Chastised, Clay stopped riffling the pages. “Yes, ma’am.”

Not wanting to get on the bad side of the only booksellers he’d found in the Sooq so far—especially when he didn’t know what they were capable of doing to him—he went back to looking through the tomes with exaggerated care.

It was easy enough to separate the spells he had a high enough Intelligence stat to learn from the ones out of his reach. All he had to do was flip a book open and see whether he could read the twisting storm of sigils inside. He found three within his Intelligence level—Underwhelming Smell, Minor Shield of Warding, and Haphazard Effect—but he only had enough gold on hand to buy two of them.

Underwhelming Smell: Scent a 15-foot radius with a natural aroma for thirty seconds. Smell has a 15% chance to fool both opponents and allies within the radius with an Intelligence equal to or less than that of the caster.

Minor Shield of Warding: Conjure a mystic barrier of energy, capable of absorbing 250 points worth of melee or arcane spell damage.

Haphazard Cast: Equal chance for one of the following to occur—(1) opponent is teleported to random location within a 15-mile radius; (2) caster’s hair blazes with Infernal flame, causing 2 damage/second for 15 seconds; (3) all targets friend and foe in a 15-foot radius fall instantly asleep; (4) opponent becomes 15 feet tall with proportionate Strength increase; (5) caster gains triple speed with proportionate Dexterity increase; (6) nothing.

As eager as Clay was to learn every spell under the sun, he just couldn’t see how being able to create a smell and trick people into thinking it was the real deal would come in handy against the Voodoo Daddy Dungeon Lord. Haphazard Cast would require considerably higher Magicka with every shot, but it came with a sixty-six percent chance of a favorable outcome, and only a thirty-three percent chance of a bad result… if you counted “nothing” as bad, which it probably would be in a combat situation.

Haphazard Cast would probably require a bigger time investment to learn, but Clay was confident that if he kept his nose to the grindstone, he’d be able to master it. Plus, it would probably get him the most bang for his buck. Underwhelming Smell was a simple cantrip, but it just didn’t have enough utility to warrant the cost. Minor Shield of Warding, on the other hand, would make an excellent addition to his slowly growing arsenal of spells. Absorbing 250 points of damage wasn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things—Alex did 229 points of Melee Attack Damage with a single strike from her kusarigama—but it also wasn’t nothing. A spell like that could provide excellent cover in a pinch and would come in handy in all manner of situations.

“Are you going to buy anything or just show off that you know how to read all day?” snapped the young woman.

“You learn it, you bought it,” the old hag agreed for once.

“I’ll take these.” Clay handed over Minor Shield of Warding and Haphazard Cast with the appropriate amount of gold.

“That’s more like it.” The young woman snatched an ancient plastic shopping bag from a bagful of the same hanging off the side of her lawn chair and scooped his purchases into it. “Maybe you should tell him about Diebolt Neiderdorf, Mogrifa.”

“Don’t you speak that name to me, Mogrifa.” The old hag turned up her nose. “I wouldn’t spit on that dippy fool if he were blazing with a mistimed fire spell, much less send a customer his way.”

The young woman sighed and held out the bag of books to Clay.

“Bad blood between them ever since he forgot our birthday,” she said confidentially. “But Diebolt’s studied every new school of magic that has popped up since the merge of our two worlds. He’s something of an Earth enthusiast. If anybody knows about this Voodoo or how to counteract it, it will be Diebolt.”

Clay felt the tiny spark of hope he’d been hanging onto catch and flare up into a full-blown brush fire.

“Don’t suppose you know where can I find him?”

“In hell, I hope.” The old hag sniffed and crossed her arms.

“Don’t listen to her,” the young woman said, waving a dismissive hand. “He lives in Los Angeles, in a strange structure on a hill. A place marker of sorts, reading ‘Hollywood.’ You’ll find Diebolt inside the D.”

“As in, ‘Damn him to the fiery pits below.’ And you can tell him Mogrifa said so.”

Clay thanked the women and hurried back through the market, eager to tell his family there was still a chance they could take out the Voodoo Daddy and free Bacon Bits.

Chapter 4

Hollywood Hills

“You want to go into LA?” Alex said. “The epicenter of the Inhabited Zone? Where the monsters are so thick that the US government gave it up as a loss twenty years ago, and the Warlord of the West took over?”

Clay stuck up his hands in a take it easy gesture. “It’s not like we’re going to rock up to his doorstep and pick a fight. The Hollywood sign’s on the north end of town in the hills, at least ten miles from Shieldwall.” They’d all seen clips of the action when they were kids; that flyover shot of the OLL in the sign burning had been a favorite of the news bloggers for a while, and they still showed it sometimes when they talked about the Merge. “We slip in, find this Diebolt guy, get some answers, and slip back out, full stealth. The Warlord won’t even know we set foot on his territory.”

“Yeah, short stack,” Joe said. “We’ll get killed way before he hears we were in the neighborhood, so don’t even worry about it.”

Clay glared at his brother. “I meant because we’ve got the Camera Obscura.”

“For twenty minutes at a time,” Alex said. “And where are you going to find a 110-outlet when its charges run out?”

“It runs on runes, too,” Clay said, digging the Camera out of his pocket so she could see the item text for herself. “With one of Joe’s Fyula runes, it’ll keep going as long as we need it.”

Griff had been quieter than usual during Clay’s presentation, sitting and staring solemnly into the cook fire. He finally looked up.

“You seem to have it all figured out, lad,” he said. “But I’m here to tell ya, the Warlord’s the least of our worries in LA. There are Artifact Structures all over those hills and the mobs’re so thick you couldn’t beat ’em back with a stick. Any time the Camera’s protection wears off, we’re sitting tortles.”

“It’s not like we’re defenseless,” Clay protested. “We’ve got two insanely powerful Incants on our side, and you aren’t such a slouch yourself. If we can’t handle a couple mobbings at this level, then we shouldn’t be out here in the wasteland. We’ve got to do this for Bacon Bits. Nobody else is going to rescue her. We can’t leave her there with that Voodoo dickhead.” He looked from Griff to his wife to his brother. “Come on, guys. She needs us. No Jaeger left behind.”

“Aw, shucks,” Joe said. “You know I can’t resist when you go all noble jarhead on us. This idea is stupid as hell, but Lumberjack Joe Jaeger never met a stupid idea he didn’t like.” He slung an arm around Clay’s neck and gave him a noogie. “I’m in, you big sexy Marine you!”

Clay shoved his brother off and raked his hair back into place.

Across the fire, Griff pawed at his bristly chin. “Well, we’re up the Hearth without a Heat Resistance spell ’til we have a better idea what we’re up against. As annoying as the piglet is, I’ll admit I don’t much care to see her enslaved to that lizardman. Besides, we need to find you a Dungeon Lord to kill, lad, and if anybody’s cruising for death, it’s this Voodoo Daddy. Seems to me this scholar of magic is the best lead we got.” He nodded. “Aye, lad, let’s do it.”

That just left Alex opposed. Why in the world was she so against this?

“This Diebolt guy could know what we need to get revenge for Bacon Bits,” Clay told her. “Don’t you want to kick that lizard’s ass and get your talking pig sidekick back?”

Instead of rallying her like he’d hoped, Alex’s face darkened.

“Sure, and what if this time it’s not Bacon Bits who gets zombified? What if it’s Joe or Griff or…?” Tears sparkled in her eyes, and her fists shook at her sides. “What if it’s you? How am I supposed to go on if I lose you?”

Clay crouched down on his heels in front of her. “Hey, Crazy-san, take it easy. You’re not going to lose me. Remember what you said when the docs told us there was nothing else we could try?”

Alex swiped away a stray tear and refused to look at him… which meant she did remember, she just didn’t want to say because she knew it wouldn’t help her win the argument.

“You told me it didn’t matter what some jackoff in a white coat said, you weren’t going down without a fight.” Clay caught her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what the big, bad Voodoo Daddy tries, I’m not going down without a fight. Besides, I know if I do end up zombified you’ll burn that motherfucker’s dungeon to the ground to get me back. That’ll be another Save in your column, which we both know you could use. You’re behind by like three now.”

That got a reluctant laugh out of her.

“Asshole.” She shoved him, barely a touch of Ettin strength behind the push, but it knocked him onto his backside in the dirt. Putting his enhanced dex to good use, Clay tucked and rolled back to his feet.

He grinned at her. “That sounds close enough to a yes for government work.”

“Fine.” Alex stood up and wiped her eyes. “I guess we’re going to LA.”

* * *

Despite Clay’s assurances that they could do this, they were taking the trip into the epicenter of the IZ seriously.

They spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the Sooq for ammo, potions, and runes. Anything they could carry that might possibly come in handy in LA. That was where it had all begun twenty years before. Portals had opened throughout the city, dropping otherworldly monsters in amongst the movie stars, game programmers, and fast-food workers. Medieval mead halls were planted next to Starbuckses, and an active volcano ended up smack-dab in the middle of the San Gabriel Mountains.

The highest concentration of monsters in the Inhabited Zone was still there, but they had spread like a cracked egg flattening out in the pan, inhabiting the surrounding mountains, desert, and coast. And of course, there was the Warlord of the West to worry about. You didn’t mess around with the only human who had built an empire in the deadliest sector of the wasteland. Rumor was, back in the early days, the good ol’ US federal government tried to go toe-to-toe with him and came out missing the whole damn foot.

The best thing to do was steer clear of southern LA like their lives depended on it. Because they did.

They set out loaded for bear at first light the next morning and made it out of Santa Clarita without a single skirmish. For the most part, the city was inhabited by nocturnal creatures anyway, kokopellis and crocturnals and the like. On top of that, the Jaeger Squad’s new alliance with the Sooq kept away a lot of the locals that did come out during the day.

Joe’s refurbished dune buggy ate up the miles between Santa Clarita and LA. Since they’d crossed the containment wall, Clay had gotten used to having to hoof it everywhere they wanted to go in the wasteland. A few days ago, all that had changed again when Joe rebuilt the buggy from pieces they found in an old machine shed in Soledad Canyon. Being able to hop in the buggy and go wherever they needed to was insanely convenient. It gave Clay a new appreciation for what a helluva revelation it must’ve been the first time a caveman hooked a cart up to a horse and hopped in.

Clay was just starting to think this trip was going too well when they ran into their first sign of the locals.

Twenty miles out of LA, as they traveled through the mountains, the I-5 ran between two steep rock walls, surrounded by signs warning of Falling Rocks, and still showing the rounded holes where the dynamite had been packed in to blast the road through. At the narrowest point, huge boulders and primordial-looking cedars from the forests higher on the mountainside had been dragged onto the road, setting up a blockade.

Joe covered Bertha’s engine case with both hands. “Don’t look, Bertha. It’s ugly.” He shook his head. “Splintering trees all messy and uneven instead of giving them a nice clean, honorable death with a top-of-the-line Poulan Pro Classic. Breaks your heart to see it.”

In the back of the buggy, Clay turned in a slow circle, scanning for danger. He didn’t want to get surprised by anything that could snap a tree in half like a twig.

A branch in the blockade line suddenly twitched as if something had bumped it.

“They’re invisible!” Clay took aim at where the creature would be and fired, realizing as he did that he could see a faint shimmering in the air. Then ten faint shimmerings, all headed their way. Whatever they were, there were a lot of them. He fired, round slamming into the meat of something with a dull thump. Purple blood sprayed. “Aim for the light distortions!”

“The what?” Alex snapped, Mossberg pointed in the general direction of the blockade, but not aiming at anything in particular.

Joe leaned over the wheel of the buggy, the old .44 Magnum he’d picked up in Camp Liberty in hand, squinting out the windshield. “You mean light distortions like sunlight that looks weird or ‘light distortions’ as in ‘not very heavy’ distortions?”

Clay locked in on another target and fired. “Dammit, Joe, just start shooting that way!”

“They’ll be Sasquatch Savagers,” Griff hollered, though it was obvious even the old weed was having trouble. He launched a ball of crackling blue arcane energy at the blockade, but it wasn’t near any of the shapes lumbering toward their dune buggy. “Slow but crafty. Don’t let ’em surround us!”

Thinking quick, Clay cast Control Light and upped the brightness of the distortions until ten hulking apelike outlines glowed neon green. One was sprawled in front of the barricade. The rest were lumbering toward their dune buggy.

“Those,” Clay barked, lining up the fastest of the monsters in his sights.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” Joe fired off the .44, barely clipping an ape silhouette in one of its long swinging arms. “Stupid ranged weapons.” With a slight clanking sound, Joe encased himself in his mech armor and hopped out of the dune buggy, Bertha revving in his hand. “Taste my chain, Squatches!”

Alex’s Mossberg boomed once, then she gave up on shooting, too. Switching to her kusarigama, she waded into the melee behind Joe.

More faint distortions were skidding down the mountainside to join the fray.

“Shit.” Clay downed a Magicka potion and lit them up, too. “Griff, we gotta bring the barricade down!” He jumped out of the buggy. With a boost of speed from the Naga ring, he sprinted to the rock face and pulled himself up onto an outcropping. From there, he had a much better angle—one that wouldn’t end in somebody taking a bullet by friendly fire. Down below, the Squatches were swarming Alex and Joe.

Joe was planted right in the center of the road, his chain saw squealing in defiance while he goaded the Sasquatches.

“Hooey!” he hooted. “I don’t even need to see you furballs, I can smell y’all comin’ a mile off. Like old gas station sushi left out in the July sun.”

The barely visible Sasquatches converged on him, but with his heightened Constitution and reinforced mech suit, Joe could take a helluva beating.

“Yeehaw, now we’re having a party!” he yelled, wheeling Bertha in a wide arc and splattering gore across the asphalt.

Alex darted through their ranks, using her Goliath Grip and Uncanny Reach ability to lash out with her kusarigama while staying well outside of the Sasquatches’ reach. Joe tanked, and she dealt enough damage for ten times her number. Her overpowered strikes cut through their tough hides with ease, raining arcs of purple blood like a magical cloudburst.

Problem was, they weren’t making any headway toward getting out of there. There were just too damned many Squatches, and more were pouring in all the time. With their Incant abilities, Joe and Alex could square up one-on-one with anything short of a Dungeon Lord and walk out with a W—but there was a certain quality in quantity, as Clay’s old Marine Corps machine gunner buddy was wont to say, and the Squatches had plenty of that.

A boom rocked the hillsides and the air strobed blue as one of Griff’s bombs splintered a boulder in the barricade. It didn’t create a hole they could drive through, but it was a start.

The old weed took aim again.

One Squatch seemed to have figured out their plan, because it turned and lumbered toward Griff like a jumbo jet gaining speed on the runway. Its long arms came up, ready to rip the old weed in half.

Clay zeroed in and nailed the monster ape in the head. As the creature died, whatever illusion had cloaked it suddenly dissipated. The Sasquatches were seven or eight feet tall and covered with thick muscles and shaggy, unkempt hair. Dull black eyes were situated beneath a prominent sloped brow. The creature tumbled into the side of the buggy, rocking it on its shocks and disrupting Griff’s next shot.

Undeterred, the old weed hopped over the slumped carcass and blasted the barricade again. A section of cedar exploded into toothpicks, debris and dirt cartwheeling through the air.

Joe whooped as he caught on to what they were doing. “Hell yeah! It’s lumberjack time, Chonk!”

Snagging the mechacoon, Joe kicked on his rocket boots and blasted up and over the Squatches’ heads. He dropped on the opposite side of the barricade and set Chonk down on a branch. Together, the little trash panda and the mech-suited redneck started sawing through the back side of the barricade, helping Griff open a hole, while Clay and Alex kept the Squatches busy.

“We’re through, lad!” Griff shouted, his gruff voice triumphant.

Clay leapt down from the outcropping and jumped into the dune buggy’s driver’s seat.

“Hang on,” he told the old weed. He gunned the engine, rolling over fallen Squatches, and shot into the throng. “Alex, get in!”

Snapping out her kusarigama one last time, she drove back the green-lit beasts swarming her and swung herself over the buggy’s tailgate.

The engine roared as they jounced through the battlefield, flying toward the barricade.

“Come on!” Clay yelled to his brother as they tore through the hole, ragged bits of tree screeching along the sides and scratching the paint.

“Don’t worry about ol’ Lumberjack Joe,” Joe yelled, grabbing the chittering mechacoon from a branch. “Chonkie and me’ll fly ahead and scope the highway out!”

As the Jaeger Squad sped away from the destroyed choke point, healing and stamina potions were passed around. The Squatches continued to follow them for nearly half a mile before finally giving up the chase, outraced and outclassed by the dune buggy. After another handful of miles, once they were sure they weren’t being followed anymore, Clay pulled over and topped up his Magicka. Joe flew back to let them know he and Chonk had spotted at least three more ambushes over the winding ten-mile stretch ahead.

They were in the thick of things now. If they got bogged down again there was a damn good chance this lonely stretch of highway would be the end of the road for all of them.

Thankfully, they’d come prepared. Maybe they weren’t the strongest sons of bitches in LA, but they didn’t need to be so long as they were the sneakiest sons of bitches.

Clay pulled out the Camera Obscura. Joe had applied a Fyula rune to the side—which meant the Camera slowly regained charges over time—but the effect still required activation, and it would still only work for twenty minutes at a time. Everybody squeezed into the photo—Joe yelling “cheese!” again—and Clay activated the next charge.

“Another keeper,” Joe said, gently tucking the polaroid into his mech suit.

Clay switched spots with Joe, giving his brother the wheel and climbing into the gunner turret on the back of the buggy. They rolled through the next ambushes without much problem. The creatures lying in wait offered a lot of confused looks and grumbling but posed no real resistance. Hard to stop what you can’t see, as Clay and the others had just learned thanks to the Squatches.

When the first charge wore off, however… Well, that was a different story. Within seconds, they were neck-deep in Banded Gila Demons. Between Alex and Griff, they knocked back the stocky lizard creatures, while Joe sent the dune buggy tearing ass down the highway again and Clay fought to snap a selfie that would cover them all.

That set the pattern for the rest of their trip into LA: twenty minutes of relative peace with the wind in their hair, followed by a frantic five to ten minutes of monsters swarming out of the desert and onto the buggy while Clay finagled everybody into the photo at once.

The fighting grew more strenuous the deeper into the ruins of the urban sprawl they drove. Before long, there were dozens of different creatures all attacking at once, and the roads were clogged with abandoned cars, forcing them to slow the buggy enough to crawl over the rubble on the sidewalks. The sun had begun to set before they made it to the Hollywood Hills. Wearily, they cut across country, off-roading eastward and up the slumped little mountainsides.

“There it is!” Alex said as they topped a rise.

Clay turned to follow her finger.

Perched on the hill ahead were the charred remains of the Hollywood sign. The H and Y had taken some serious damage when the first O and LLs had burned, but the WOOD was still standing strong. A reminder of a different age.

There was definitely something off about the D, though. It was hard to pinpoint what exactly, but for a second, it didn’t look flat like the rest of the letters. It looked almost three-dimensional. Then, like a door slamming shut, the giant letter went flat again.

Was it possible this Diebolt guy could be watching them?

Clay checked the timer on the Camera. Still eleven minutes until they were visible again.

But they weren’t technically enemies. At least as far as Clay knew, the guy was allied with the Sooq, which made them friendlies. So maybe he could see through the obscuring properties of the Camera.

Joe had started to slow down, looking for a place to pull over, but Clay didn’t think that was their play here.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, mouth set in a grim line. “Drive us right up to his front door. We didn’t come all this way to stay strangers.”

Chapter 5

A True Shonen Protagonist

The D in the sign continued to oscillate between flat and filled-out as they drove up to it. Going against his instincts, Clay slung his M4 over one shoulder, letting it hang down his back. The Wand of Inferno was still in a side pouch on his pants, well within reach of his right hand, but it was a lot less conspicuous than the rifle.

“Nobody reach for a weapon unless this guy attacks me first,” he said, hopping out of the back of the dune buggy.

Alex scowled up at the D. “Maybe one of us should come with you.”

Clay grimaced and shook his head.

“He’s been living out here for God knows how long,” he said. “We’re probably not the first band of heavily armed people he’s seen, and if we all come storming up, it’ll look like we’re here to raid his place.”

“As if we couldn’t have all the letters we wanted,” Joe scoffed, rolling his eyes. “D isn’t even top ten. J’s the obvious number one slot, with O and E in a close second and third. C is okay if you like that sort of thing. A, L, and X, meh…”

“Do you ever get tired of stirring up shit?” Alex asked him wearily.

“Not really,” Joe said. He turned to Griff. “G’s pretty decent. I’d put it in the low top ten, maybe seven or eight.”

Clay left them behind and strode—hopefully in a friendly way—toward the oddly blinking letter. The closer he got, the more obvious it became someone had built up the D to be habitable. Doors and windows showed through the flat surface now and then, and the shadow on the ground was wide enough for a small shed, definitely bigger than a thin sheet of metal. Clearly there was some sort of glamor or spell in place, meant to conceal exactly how built up the place was from prying eyes. Even as he got closer, the air shimmered and the door disappeared.

“Excuse me.” Clay rapped his knuckles where the door had been a second before. It looked for all the world like he was knocking on thin air, but the rattle of knuckles on metal carried over the hush of the hills. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said. “I’m looking for Diebolt Neiderdorf. The booksellers at the Sooq told me I could find him here.”

There was a slight creak from overhead. Clay stepped back and craned his neck. A pair of bulbous froglike eyes peeked out of an open window.

“Mogrifa sent you?” a deep voice croaked. “Did she say anything about me?”

Clay rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. He didn’t want to offend the one guy who could help them rescue Bacon Bits, but he also didn’t want to roll the dice that this guy might spot his lie and refuse to help them, either.

“The older lady might’ve mentioned… something about… how she ‘wouldn’t spit on that dippy fool if he were on fire.’ Though I might be paraphrasing a little.”

“Oh.” The eyes seemed to deflate a little. “I thought she would have forgiven me by now.”

Clay shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, the younger one seemed to think the older one would before too much longer.”

That perked him back up.

“Hey, that’s something! No one knows Mogrifa like she knows herself.” A slimy green face appeared in the window, the eyes perched on top. It smiled, thin lips stretching past its face on either side, and beckoned with a webbed hand. “Well, don’t just stand there. You draw attention we don’t want. Come on up!”

The door reappeared and swung open with a groan. Clay had to jump back to avoid getting smacked in the face.

“I’m not alone,” Clay said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the buggy.

Diebolt ducked back down until only his eyes were peeking over the windowsill again. Furtively, he studied Clay’s family.

“Yes, I see. And are they trustworthy, mmhm?”

“That’s one thing they’ve got in spades,” Clay promised.

The eyes moved slowly up and down. It took Clay a second to realize Diebolt was nodding.

“Very well. You may bring them up,” the weird little guy replied, before turning and scuttling deeper into his dwelling.

* * *

Five minutes later, the whole Jaeger Squad was ensconced in a tiny living room that smelled like cold Pizza Rolls and looked like a shrine to otakus. Hand-painted figurines from some ancient anime had been arranged on a side table, a pile of squishy characters had been stacked in a corner of an old sofa, and a set of commemorative plates decorated in VRMMORPG maps from twenty years ago hung on the wall.

Diebolt bustled in from the adjacent kitchen with a tray full of special edition Mojave Comics Universe cups. A toxic-waste-green concoction bubbled inside as he passed them out.

Clay looked skeptically down at his. Before he could ask what it was, though, Joe dumped his down the hatch.

“Ah!” Joe sighed, smacking his lips. “That hit the spot. What do you call this sweet, sweet nectar?”

“Mountain Dew Classic,” Diebolt said. “A very rare vintage outside the IZ these days. They stopped making it back in ’71, claiming it caused superdiabetes, but that was just the usual hysteria. I’ve been drinking Classic my whole life, and look at me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Clay saw Alex set her cup down. Nobody wanted to ask the lumpy little frogman whether the Mountain Dew had turned him into a bipedal amphibian or whether he’d spawned like that and was actually the picture of health for his species.

“Pfft, I never listen to those health nut wackjobs,” Joe said, letting Diebolt refill his cup. “If it isn’t made of vegetables and fiber, they start yelling it gives you this and it kills you that. All a bunch of bunk if you ask me. You only live once, right? I’m smart enough to know I’m here for a good time, not a long time. Besides, out here it’s the goblins that’ll get ya, not the Mountain Dew.”

“Finally a man with some common sense!” Diebolt stuck the empty tray behind a well-traveled recliner, then boosted himself up into the seat. He tugged on the strands of a wispy beard trailing down from his froggy double chin. “Now, you were saying about a new school of magic?”

“Yeah,” Clay said, nodding. “It’s called Voodoo. It’s not exactly new to us, though. We’ve had it—at least one version of it—on Earth for hundreds of years, but this is the first time we’ve encountered it out here in the wasteland.”

“Mmhm, mmhm.” Diebolt nodded. “What you’re facing is probably nothing at all like the Voodoo you humans were used to seeing in your day-to-day lives.”

“We weren’t used to seeing it at all,” Alex said. “Not in our part of the country, anyway. There were people who practiced it as a religion, but there wasn’t any real magic here before the Merge.”

“But you had rites and rituals and things like this, yes?” Diebolt said, waving his hand impatiently. “The Merge is greatly misunderstood in your world. Many of you believe that when the Merge occurred it simply shoved Hearthworld in wholesale, completely unchanged from the game that it was. Facile! An absolute glossing over of the facts. What happened, in my opinion, was that the Merge took the fantastical ideals already existing in the zeitgeist of both Earth and Hearthworld and combined them into something new. An amalgamation, if you will.”

He clapped his wet hands together with a slimy slap. “This is why so many new schools of magic were created—because you humans had ideas about ‘magics’ that Hearthworld inhabitants never dreamed of. Magics you had been keeping compartmentalized in other VRMMORPGs like All Haints’ Day, Black Magic Bureaucrat, Viking Dance Party IV, and so on. Dungeons spawned which embodied these new ideals, and that is where we get dungeon lord classes such as Bardic Valkyrie, Red Tape Paladin, and in your case, this Voodoo Shaman.”

Joe leaned back on the sofa and smirked. “I think I fought a few Red Tape Paladins down at the DMV when I tried to get my CDL so I could haul all those feral foxes across state lines. You wouldn’t believe how much they hate it when you don’t fill out their forms.”

“It is their greatest weakness,” Diebolt agreed in all seriousness.

“Well, that might explain where it comes from, but it doesn’t tell us how to go about counteracting the Shaman’s Voodoo,” Clay said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “The Mogrifas made it sound as if there was a way to neutralize his spells.”

“Oh, yes. Oh my yes. She’s right.” Diebolt waved a hand. “In Hearthworld, there was a system of checks and balances referred to as the Primal Creation Wheel. Here, however, the wheel has become more of a”—he cast around for a word—“a mirror. Equals and opposites. For every new school of magic that has arisen, its nega-magic has also arisen.”

Griff frowned. “Nega-magic?”

“Like a nega-ninja,” Joe said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “If you’re wearing black, he wears white. If you’re a redheaded stepchild, he’s a greenheaded one. They just flip the colors so he’s opposite.”

“And he does all the counters to your moves at the same time you attack, so you never get anywhere,” Alex explained. “It’s super frustrating.”

“Good,” Clay said. “That’s exactly what we need. We want to be the thorn in Voodoo Daddy’s side. So what kind of nega-magic are we looking for exactly?”

“Well, the magic of the Wyrd West, obviously,” Diebolt said. “The issue is that you, not being an Incant, NPC, or Dungeon Lord, cannot take on the magical class that counteracts Voodoo.” He gestured from Alex and Joe to Griff. “And the Incants and NPCs on your side already have classes of their own, none of which are compatible with the Wyrd West school of magic.”

Griff grunted. “So the lad’s got to kill the Dungeon Lord and become an Incant to get a school of magic, but he can’t kill the Dungeon Lord ’til he’s an Incant with the right school of magic? That’s a helluva catch.”

“You might say it’s bigger than a catch-21, but not quite the size of a catch-23,” Joe said, fighting to withhold a grin.

“First Proust, now Heller?” Alex threw up her hands. “Seriously, Joe, when did you read books?”

He aimed a finger gun at her. “Audiobooks, short stack. What’d you think I was listening to out in the shed when I was working on Chickzilla?”

“Guns and Roses? Lynyrd Skynyrd. Some dumb country-metal, swamp rock band. Definitely not Joseph Heller on tape.”

“The more you know,” Joe said, miming a rainbow with one hand.

Clay wedged his way back into the discussion.

“There’s got to be a way around the technicalities,” he said. “I’m not an Incant, but I’ve been able to learn some low-level spells and cantrips anyway. What if I learned magic from the Wyrd West school?”

“Aha,” Diebolt said, raising one stumpy finger. “Now you’re thinking like a true shonen protagonist. As it happens, I have managed to come by a fair few items and runes from the Wyrd West that might well help you in your battle against this Voodoo Shaman. Oh yes, indeed. But I won’t give them away to just anyone who walks in off the street. First, you must prove yourself worthy.” He spread his hands in the air and shouted at the ceiling, “Twelve impossible labors there shall be!”

“Twelve?” Alex looked scandalized.

Diebolt blinked. “Is that too many?”

Joe shrugged. “It’s a lot, dude,” he said, “even for a manga character.”

The frogman tugged his chin hairs while he reconsidered. “What if there were only three impossible labors?”

Joe’s eyebrows jumped up. “Just three? You’re real bad at negotiating. Haven’t you ever heard of middle grou—”

“Three works for me,” Clay interrupted before his brother could convince Diebolt he should require six or eight. “But I have an objection to making them impossible. If, by definition, they can’t be done, then there’s no way to prove myself worthy. Which means I’ll just be wasting my time here instead of finding a better solution somewhere else.”

“Yes, I see that now,” Diebolt said. “Very true, very true.” He raised his hands again and crowed, “Three moderately difficult but not impossible labors there shall be to prove your worth!”

Joe rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re talking! Moderately difficult is exactly the right amount of difficulty for my brother. My only question is, when does Clay start?”

“Now’s good for me,” Diebolt said, hopping down from his recliner. “Does that work for you? Or is there some other scheduling conflict, mhmm?”

“No, that’s… Today is great,” Clay said. This wasn’t at all how he’d expected this to go.

╠═╦╬╧╪

The Three Moderately Difficult but Not Impossible Labors of Clay Jaeger

Diebolt Neiderdorf, reclusive scholar of Hollywood, has agreed to grant you three magical rewards in return for the completion of three labors which will prove your worth. Beware, however, that no test is what it seems.

Labor 1: TBD

Reward 1: Increase of +15 Intelligence

Labor 2: TBD

Reward 2: Wyrd West Quickdraw Weapon Set

Labor 3: TBD

Reward 3: Wyrd West Nega-Voodoo Rune

Failure: Fail to complete the current labor.

Penalty: Forfeit that labor’s reward and possibly be unable to complete a subsequent labor, if it depends upon one of the previous labors, which it probably will.

Restrictions: TBD

Accept quest? Yes/No

╠═╦╬╧╪

So far since coming to the wasteland, Clay had only seen a couple quest forms, but even he knew they were usually more specific than this. There was no way to guess what he’d be doing, maybe because Diebolt himself hadn’t decided what the tasks should be yet. But the rewards… With plus fifteen to his Intelligence stat, he’d bet money he could read half those spell tomes back at the Sooq, not to mention they would have a way to defeat the Voodoo Daddy and get Bacon Bits’s soul back. The payoff was too good to pass up.

Hoping he didn’t regret it, Clay selected Yes.

“Excellent!” Diebolt started to clear away the cups of Mountain Dew Classic, then stopped. “And thank you all for bearing with me. I’ve never officiated something like this before. This is all very exciting. It’s like I’m one of the official examiners in one of my favorite manga, Hanta Hanta.”

“Not a problem, my man,” Joe said. “Jump in with both feet, I always say. It’s the only way to learn.” Chonk chittered in agreement.

“You’re doing great.” Alex patted the frogman on the lumpy shoulder.

“Well,” Diebolt said, puffing up a little, “I have been practicing, just in case.”

Chapter 6

The Three Labors of Clay Jaeger

One of Diebolt’s illusion spells and thirty minutes in the dune buggy later, they were standing on the rim of a rumbling volcano. Heat and sulfurous smoke rose from the caldera, and in the center of the cauldron, thin crusts of basalt floated on a lake of bubbling lava.

“Behold the Hearth!” Diebolt shouted, gesticulating ceremoniously. “Transplanted to Earth from the world that bore its name. As you can see below, in the belly of the Hearth, a Plus-Ultra Phoenix has laid her clutch of eggs.”

Clay tracked the frogman’s hand waving to a nest of pumice floating on one of the rock floes below. Three charcoal-black eggs lay in the nest, glowing from some kind of orange lace patterning their shells.

He got a bad feeling that he knew where this was going.

“Phoenix eggs, the fragilest of the egg kingdom, but also the most valuable.” Diebolt’s voice wavered a little at the end as he ran out of air. He sucked in a deep breath to continue his mighty intonation, but got a lungful of smoke instead.

The frogman doubled over, coughing violently. While Joe slapped him on the back, Alex dug out a plastic jug of water from her rucksack. Clay knew this was all happening around him, but his mind was racing, trying to figure out how he was going to complete the task he was pretty sure Diebolt was about to ask him to do.

“Thank you,” the frogman choked as he accepted the jug from Alex. He gulped it down, then wiped his mouth with a sleeve. “Hoo. Much better.” Clearing his throat, he continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Your first moderately difficult but not impossible labor, should you choose to accept it, is to retrieve one phoenix egg without breaking its shell. Do this, Clay Jaeger, and I shall grant thee your first reward!”

That tracked, considering the basalt floes looked about as thick as a saltine cracker.

Clay nodded and licked his lips—dry from the searing heat of the magma below. He thought back to the quest text: no test is what it seems.

“Were there any restrictions besides not breaking the shell?” he asked.

“None!” pronounced the frogman in that same ceremonial tone. “The only rule is that there are no rules!” He shrugged. “Except don’t break the egg, obviously. Because then you can’t give it to me, and phoenix eggs make excellent breakfast skillets.”

Clay had started toward the rim of the volcano, but when he heard that, he stopped.

“Wait, I’m sorry.” He glanced at the frogman over one shoulder. “You want this for a breakfast skillet?”

“It matters not!” Diebolt intoned, thrusting his hands into the air. “The task is your only concern!”

Great. So he was going to risk his life for breakfast food. Still, as long as Diebolt made good on his promised reward, Clay didn’t care what the guy did with the egg.

Clay steeled himself, then cautiously climbed over the rim and half skidded, half walked down the bowl to the edge of the lava. Sweat poured down his face and stuck his shirt to his back under his cuirass. He swiped wet hair off his face and got a better look at the surface of the lake of fire.

From this angle, the basalt floes looked a little sturdier—some were even thick enough to qualify as basalt bergs—but none looked very stable. Clay reached out with one foot and tested the one closest to shore.

It dipped, then flipped completely over under barely any pressure.

He walked down the line a bit and tried another. It crumbled under his boot.

“Joe,” Clay yelled up the hill. “Would you fly over there and bring me one of those eggs?”

“You got it, bro. Lumberjack Joe is on the case!”

Joe hopped over the rim, insta-changing from his jorts and cutoff flannel shirt into his mech suit. Rocket burners roared, blasting him easily across the lake to the nest in the center.

But the second he picked up one of the eggs, it shattered into a million pieces, lava-bright egg yolk running through his fingers.

“Oh shit!” Joe shot straight up, flailing his hands and flinging burning goo everywhere. His rockets flared as he flew over and landed next to Clay. “The inside of those things are insanely hot. Look, it melted the palms of my gloves.” He held up his hands to show where the metal had run.

Clay scowled out at the phoenix nest. The insides had to be in excess of a thousand degrees. No test is what it seems.

Was there a way he could use that heat? Hell yeah there was, though Diebolt was going to be angry if he really did intend to turn the egg into a skillet. But he’d said there were no rules, and the idea Clay had churning in his head had actually come courtesy of the frogman. So in a way, this was all Diebolt’s fault.

“Is your mech suit strong enough to fly us both out there?” Clay asked, peeling his Cinderscale Cuirass off over his head like a dirty T-shirt.

“You mean with me cradling you like a baby?” Joe asked. “Easy peasy!”

Holding the cuirass in one hand, Clay slung his other arm around his brother’s neck.

“All right,” he said, “let’s do it.”

Joe swept him off his feet, and they shot through the smoke and fumes to the phoenix nest. Clay twisted around, getting Joe to hook him around the waist and dangle him over the eggs.

“Keep me as still as you can.”

“No problemo!” In spite of his hearty assurances, Joe’s voice was strained. The suit might give him a strength boost, but Clay was no featherweight.

Working fast, Clay rearranged pieces of pumice around one of the eggs, until he had something that would function as a reservoir. Next, he cast Sludge Slick inside the bowl, using the thick oily matter to stop up the holes, transforming it into a bowl that would hold liquid. That done, he dumped the water from his canteen into the reservoir. The water hissed and steamed, letting off a few lazy bubbles in the process.

He swathed his left hand with the Cinderscale Cuirass, which had an 18% resistance to Fire, then he poked the other egg. Immediately, it fell apart, spilling its goo under the reservoir and adding the yolk’s heat.

The water instantly erupted in a violent rolling boil. The glowing latticework of cracks on the unbroken egg began to darken and fill in as it cooked from the steam. Within seconds, all the water boiled away.

The steaming egg, now completely black, sat whole and undisturbed in the center of the bowl.

“Hard-boiled phoenix egg, coming up,” Clay said.

Gently, he picked the egg up with the makeshift Cinderscale glove. Thank God, it didn’t crumble. Cooked, the thing felt as solid as a softball in his hand.

He nodded at Joe. “To land, Jeeves.”

“Roity-o, guvna!” Joe said in a terrible English accent.

A rush of rocket boots later, they landed on top of the volcano. Clay hopped down from Joe’s arms and held out the phoenix egg to Diebolt.

The lumpy little frogman clapped. “That was awesome! And for the record, I wasn’t going to eat it anyway. Phoenix eggs give me terrible indigestion. But it was so cool! The way you guys zoomed over there, then when you poured the egg yolk on the bowl and the water went whoosh! Clever, inventive, brilliant!” Regaining his dignity, Diebolt accepted the egg and cleared his throat. “Clay Jaeger, you have proven yourself worthy of thy first reward! I grant thee +15 to your base Intelligence!”

Clay felt something turn inside him like a key opening a rusty padlock. Intelligence was something of a misnomer because it really had nothing to do with the mind and everything to do with the ability to cast and conjure magic. Fifteen additional points was substantial—especially for a human who wasn’t an Incant—and all of a sudden, Clay could feel magic thrumming in the air around him. Could feel it moving and cycling through his body in time with the rhythmic beating of his heart. The world swam a little on the edges, then the feeling passed as things snapped back into focus.

“Hot damn,” Joe cheered. He elbowed Alex. “You thought you married a smarty-pants before? He’s going to be insufferable now.”

Alex grinned up at Clay. “Lucky for him, I think nerds are sexy.”

“On to the second moderately difficult but not impossible task!” Diebolt cried, raising the phoenix egg high. “Clay Jaeger, I demand you stand this egg on its tippy-tip”—he pointed to the narrow end of the egg—“on top of the Capitol Records Building’s pointy spike thing.” Then he jabbed Clay in the chest. “And this time, no help from Joe or anybody else.”

* * *

Clay spent the whole ride down from the mountains and through Hollywood planning for the second task. He was pretty sure he knew how to get the egg to stand on end. It was a measure of how weird his life had gotten that that was the easy part to figure out.

What he doubted was how he’d get to the top of a skyscraper in the IZ alive without flying. It was exactly the sort of place that tended to be infested by the biggest and the baddest of the Dungeon Lords. They had faced a Tier 3 way back in the ruins of Bakersfield, over a hundred miles from the epicenter of the Merge, and just recently gotten their asses handed to them by a Tier 4 in Santa Clarita, still thirty miles out. Going on that alone, he’d be facing at least a Tier 5 smack-dab in the middle of LA, and if that wasn’t a suicide run, then Clay was an Army gal.

Could he scale the outside of the building somehow? They’d brought cordage and tackle with them from civilization just in case, but so far they hadn’t run into any rock climbing situations in the wasteland.

Joe wheeled the dune buggy around a corner, and the site of Clay’s upcoming suicide run came into view. He’d seen pictures in history classes and in old documentaries of the Capitol Records Building, designed to look like an ancient stack of records on a turntable, with its needle jutting into the sky. Supposedly, there used to be a light on top that flashed out the Morse code for “Hollywood” all night long.

With twenty years of neglect, however, the shining white skyscraper had taken on a dingy gray cast. The balconies protruding from its formerly perfectly round floors looked bent and crumpled in places, like a giant soda can crushed by an enormous fist. Dark, monstrous shapes dangled below the sunshades that hadn’t been damaged. Occasionally more of the creatures would hop out the windows and flap around the building on massive leathery wings.

As they got closer, Clay could hear strains of some ancient jazzy music drifting through the streets. On the top level of the building, right below the lopsided, beat-up Capitol Records sign, a behemoth red-furred gorilla easily as wide as a Humvee was swaying slowly and crooning into a massive ribbon microphone.

“Behold, the roundiest skyscraper in LA!” Diebolt announced, returning to his ceremonial voice. “Home of the great Nat King Kong, the Dungeon Lord who crushed a thousand challengers and wooed a thousand hearts with his timeless and beloved music.”

“Meh.” Joe shrugged. “Give me some good ol’ country-metal any day.”

“Philistine,” Alex said. She sighed dreamily. “It sounds beautiful.”

“Listen here, short stack, I am A-one hundred and ten percent-Merican and proud of it.”

No one but Clay seemed to care that more and more of those dark winged shapes were flapping up the side of the building to join the crowd at the muscle-bound Kong’s rooftop concert. As they got closer, he realized the feathered creatures were some kind of hulking bodybuilder birdmen, wearing…

“Are those…” He squinted up at them. “Are they wearing thongs?”

“Muscle Beach is just a few minutes across town as the shrikebear flies,” Diebolt said as if that explained it. He checked his Solar Wars Episode III wristwatch. “Several of the more size-conscious mobs spend the day there working out.”

Joe craned his neck to see out the windshield. He let out a low whistle.

“Those budgie-smugglers don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?” he said. “Truth be told, the dang things look spray-painted on.”

“Exactly,” Alex said. “Now do you see why we refused to go on float trips with you until you stopped wearing thongs?”

“Hey, my thong game was on point,” he said, tapping his chest. “Not like these goobers. You can have too much muscle. You need a more voluptuous body to pull off a banana hammock, such as yours truly’s curvaceous form.”

The dune buggy growled to a stop at the foot of the monster-infested tower, and Clay clambered out. Forget every scrap of plan he’d managed to come up with on the ride over; the swarm of shrikebears and the massive singing King Kong shot that all to hell. He was going to have to come at this from a completely different angle. Even if Alex and Joe had been able to help out, there was no way they could take on all of those creatures.

“Well, no time like the present,” Diebolt said cheerfully. He handed the hard-boiled phoenix egg to Clay, then nodded up at the skyscraper. “Upsy-daisy.”

Swallowing, Clay tucked the egg under his arm like a football and pulled out the Camera Obscura.

“No stealth-enhancing items!” Diebolt said in a rush. “I meant to mention that restriction while we were on the Hearth.” He glanced side to side. “I definitely didn’t just think of it now when I saw… um… nothing.”

“Fine,” Clay muttered, shoving the Camera back into his pocket. Not like he could’ve scaled the building in under twenty minutes anyway. Still, that took out the idea of a speed run up through the inside. Getting ripped apart by a bunch of moose-knuckled birdmen was not on his agenda for the day.

So he couldn’t make it up to the spike. But maybe he didn’t have to.

“All right,” he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure the frogman wasn’t going to spring any other last-second restrictions on him. “I’m starting the second labor now. Any more catches I oughta know about?”

“Proceed, Clay Jaeger.” Diebolt waved his hands grandly. “And good luck.”

Clay nodded, slipped the egg into his ruck, then did a hard pivot and sprinted down the street in the opposite direction. His boots slapped against the cracked concrete as he passed smashed star-shapes etched with old names he vaguely recognized—The Beatles, Neil Diamond, Taylor Swift.

At the end of the block sat a towering dispensary with a steel pineapple the size of a house on top. The place clearly hadn’t fared as well in the Merge as Capitol Records had—its brickwork was crumbling away, and the whole thing leaned crazily to one side—but with the pineapple, it was just tall enough.

Praying the dispensary’s remaining infrastructure was strong enough to hold at least his weight, Clay took a running jump and grabbed onto the bottom lip of its lopsided awning. He chinned himself up and onto the metal roof. From there, he snagged the hanging ladder of the building’s fire escape and started climbing. Eyes peeked at him from smashed windows, and he heard the occasional snarl, but he didn’t stop. Hopefully, if he could get this over with fast enough, he wouldn’t have to worry about the amount of potential aggro he was drawing.

“It’s a human!” a high-pitched voice shrieked.

A flood of spidery demons crawled out of a smashed window on the third floor, legs skittering on the metal as they chased after him.

Chapter 7

The Wyrd, Wyrd West

Clay cussed under his breath. So much for being fast enough.

On his heels, dozens of ecstatic spider voices shouted over one another.

“I can’t believe I finally get to taste human flesh! They say it’s the tenderest meat.”

“I call the intestines!”

“Dibs on the gonads!”

He glanced at the grating between his feet at the oncoming horde on the fire escape below. Those spider demons were pretty small, and with their fragile-looking bodies, there was no way they could hit too hard. He didn’t need to stop them forever—he just needed to stall them long enough to make it to the giant pineapple above.

Calling up the simple Shield of Warding spell he’d learned before leaving the Sooq, Clay thrust his hand down, palm out, and cast the spell. A shimmering blue shield, five feet wide and five feet tall, hung in the air like a giant manhole cover, completely blocking the fire escape. There was no way past, which meant if they wanted to get a taste, they’d have to burrow their way through his conjured shield.

The excited screaming turned into cries of frustration as the swarm of demonic bodies slammed against the conjured barrier. Their legs jabbed at the magical shield and their fangs fruitlessly lashed out, dealing a point or two of damage at a time. Luckily, they weren’t even close to taking the shield out.

Clay’s knees went weak and darkness tried to edge out his vision as the spell ate through his Magicka, but he caught hold of the railing and hauled himself back to his feet. A demon-infested former dispensary in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard was no place to pass out—not if he wanted to keep his nads.

The screaming demons quieted behind him as he topped the last level of the fire escape and hauled himself onto the rooftop. The giant metal pineapple loomed overhead.

Clay snagged a stamina potion from a drop pouch, downed it, and tossed the bottle over his shoulder as a rush of energy that beat any caffeine pill or energy drink on the planet surged through his system.

“Hey, that’s littering!” a matronly voice snarled.

A hulking black widow trundled out from behind the pineapple, her bulbous thorax swaying as she moved.

“Pick up your trash this instant, young man,” she snapped. “Were you born in a junkyard?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Clay said, hoping he sounded more apologetic than shit-himself-terrified. “I’ll get it picked up right away… if you promise not to kill me?”

Dozens of glowing red eyes narrowed.

“Why would I promise not to kill a human if I don’t know whether he’s here to kill me? Especially a litterbug.”

She planted her spidery forelimbs on her hips, waiting expectantly for an answer.

Sensing his time was running out, Clay hurried to explain.

“I’m not here to hurt you. See, I’m actually here to shoot down the spike on that building over there,” he admitted, pointing to Capitol Records. “I couldn’t get a decent angle on it from the ground. The top of your pineapple is just high enough that I should be able to take it out—if you let me up there, that is. I didn’t plan on killing anybody to get the shot, though.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Check the little facehuggers below, if you don’t believe me. I didn’t touch them, just stopped them from chasing me.”

He let the shield fall, and the little spiderlings raced up onto the rooftop—and skidded to a stop.

“It’s Mom,” the whisper traveled from the front line backward through their ranks. “Play it cool.”

The black widow let out an annoyed sigh. “You say you’re going to shoot down Nat’s Needle?”

Praying it wasn’t the worst idea in the world to be honest right then, Clay nodded.

“Good,” the black widow said. “That jackass ape’s been lording it over me for years how much taller his dungeon is than mine. If you take out the needle, the Pineapple Palace will finally be the same height as Capitol Records, and he can suck it. Not to mention his nightly broadcast won’t blare across the neighborhood every evening when millions of good little spiderlings are trying to sleep.”

Clay let out a rush of relieved breath. “Thank you for understanding.”

“Do you need a ride to the top?” the giant spider asked, reverting to a motherly tone. “It’s not an easy climb, even for one of my little ones, and I’d hate to see you slip before you’ve shot the needle down.”

“Uh, sure, that would be great.”

She squatted down, swollen abdomen flattening against the ground like a bagful of snot.

Trying not to show how grossed out he was, Clay clambered onto her back and held on. The ease of the trip up the side was well worth the sharp, scratchy hairs stabbing at his arms and legs and the skittering sounds that he would probably be hearing in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

At the top, he climbed off and studied his target. According to the wording of the quest, he didn’t need the whole spike, just the top part, but his mama hadn’t raised him to ignore a lady’s request—especially not one coming from a lady who could wrap him up in webbing and feed him to her babies, nads, intestines, and all.

Raising the Wand of Inferno, he aimed at the base of the needle and fired off the first Inferno Lance of the day. It would’ve been an impossible shot if not for the fact that the wand relied on Dexterity for its accuracy, and he had a lot of Dexterity to go around. The first shot rocked the whole building. With a scream of metal, the needle lurched to the side. On the rooftop, a stunned Nat King Kong and his birdman groupies fell silent.

Clay took a deep breath and forced himself to focus. This was the part where he had to get it exactly right. One big, visibly traceable shot like that was a surprise, two gave your enemy a direction to look in, and the third told them your location.

He aimed for the ripped and scorched metal at the bottom of the leaning spike and fired again.

The Inferno Lance tore through the last shreds of the needle. The gorilla’s mic went hot with feedback, then cut off. With a groan like a dying giant, the needle tumbled off the roof and crashed to the street below, slamming into the already broken asphalt like an asteroid.

“Over there!” a birdman squawked. “It’s coming from Priscilla’s Pineapple Palace!”

Okay, so maybe that three-shot rule of thumb only applied to humans.

“You’re damn right it did, bucko,” the black widow yelled, shaking her forelimbs. “Come get some if you’ve got the guts!”

Birdmen leapt off Capitol Records and shot toward the Pineapple Palace in a cawing, flapping cloud. The massive gorilla threw down his microphone and swung off the side of the tower, crashing down into the parking lot.

“Battle stations, my children!” the black widow cried. “Abaddon through Azerath, cover the street! Bartholomew through Candi, aerial defense! Chelle through Damian, flight patterns!”

In answer, countless little spider demons poured out of the Pineapple Palace’s windows. They flooded the street, crisscrossing it with webs, and covered the tops of nearby buildings like living paint, shooting web attacks at the oncoming birds.

Clay searched the area below Capitol Records for his family and friends, but couldn’t see them. Either Diebolt had put up another illusion to keep them safe or they had moved out of the vicinity when things got dicey.

The black widow jabbed a forelimb at the rampaging Kong blasting his way through the sticky webbing on the street. “Thicker, Asmodius, lay your traps thicker! This is no time for laziness! When I was your age, we spun our webs twice that strength every time!”

Clay cleared his throat awkwardly. “Well, I’m going to hit the road.”

“Yes, yes, you know the way out,” she said absently, waving a giant, multi-segmented leg toward the ground. “Casen, look where you’re aiming! If I have to come down there… Where in the world are Chelle through Damian?”

“We’re over here!” a host of voices buzzed. It was the group of spiders that had been chasing him up the side of the dispensary. They were still in hot pursuit, beady, arachnoid eyes locked on Clay.

“Now is not the time to be chasing humans, you lot!” huffed the black widow. “Can’t you see there’s a war on? I’ll let you eat after we deal with Nat and his insufferable birdmen.”

“But Mother,” one of them mewled like a petulant toddler, “what about the intestines?”

“We have more than enough liquified intestines stored inside. Now hop to it, those birdmen aren’t going to kill themselves!” The spider queen rolled dozens of glowing red eyes, then leaned over toward Clay. “It’s always something with that letter group. Now go, before I change my mind…”

Clay didn’t need to be told twice. He gave her another brief “thank you, ma’am,” then turned and scaled his way down the pineapple.

Meanwhile, the C through D spider demons rushed past him to the edge of the roof. Each one wove little silken balloons and hurled them into the air. When the wind caught their chutes, they sailed toward the birdmen like eight-legged paratroopers.

One spiderling tried to take a bite out of Clay as it passed, but he kicked it aside. It got up and scrambled after him, but a sharp shout stopped it in its tracks.

“Connie, if I have to tell you again, I am not going to be happy!”

Chastened, the spiderling scuttled away to do its mama’s bidding.

On the street below, Clay dodged the weirdest war zone he’d ever been in. Squawking birdmen tumbled out of the sky, tangled in sticky nets or overrun with spiderling paratroopers. Spider demons blasted up web barricades thick enough to block out the last of the sunlight, while a behemoth gorilla threw smashed cars, chunks of concrete, and whatever he could grab through the sticky mesh. Clay had to roll out of the way as a gigantic distillery barrel went flying past. God knew where Kong had gotten that.

The thickest of the fighting made the street just in front of the Capitol Records Building impassable, but Clay booked it around the back, where the needle had fallen. There were no angry gorillas, birdmen, or gung-ho spiderlings back there, just the twisted wreck of metal that had once sat on top of the tower.

A throaty chuckle rose from a pile of rubble. The stone shimmered, then disappeared, revealing Diebolt and the Jaeger Squad.

“Are you all right, babe?” Alex hopped out of the dune buggy and checked him over. “Do you need a healing potion?”

“I’m fine,” Clay wheezed.

Diebolt wiped his bulbous eyes. “That’ll teach them.” He chuckled some more. “They think they can tell every mob in Hollywood what to do just because the Warlord let them keep their dungeons, but that doesn’t make them the king and spiderqueen of the world.” He grinned at Clay. “What I’m really interested to see now is how you plan to make that egg stand on its end on the tip of the spike when the spike’s lying on its side in the street.”

“Like this.” Clay pulled the hard-boiled phoenix egg out of his backpack and jammed it, point-first, onto the needle’s tip. The shell crunched and the spike sank into the meat of the egg. When he let go, the egg stayed impaled on the point of the needle as if it were balancing on its end.

Diebolt clapped, laughing harder. “And here I thought I was going to Kobayashi Maru you! Well done, Clay Jaeger, you have completed your second moderately difficult but not impossible labor. And you entertained me in the process. Oh yes, yes you did. And now for your boon!”

With a flourish, he presented an ancient-looking revolver holstered in an equally beat-up leather cartridge belt lined with thirty ammo slides, each one holding an etched silver bullet.

Clay put on the Monocle of True Seeing as he accepted the weapon.

╠═╦╬╧╪

Wyrd West Quickdraw Weapon Set (Unique)

Pieces Acquired: 3/3

+6% Dexterity

+6% Intelligence

+39% Wyrd Damage to Voodoo-Aligned Creatures

+39% Voodoo Spell Resistance

╠═╦╬╧╪

The Ace of Spades

Wyrd West Double-Action Revolver (Unique)

One-Shot Damage: 30 - 39

Durability: 113 of 113

Tier Requirement: 1

Dexterity Requirement: 13

Gun Class Weapon - Fast Attack Speed

+25 Points of Wyrd Damage

+13% Boost to Firing Speed

+13% Voodoo Spell Resistance

+13% Wyrd Damage to Voodoo-Aligned Creatures

╠═╦╬╧╪

Wyrd West High Speed Low Drag Cartridge Belt (Unique)

Armor Rating: 13

+13% Boost to Quickdraw Speed

+13% Boost to Reload Speed

+13% Voodoo Spell Resistance

+13% Wyrd Damage to Voodoo-Aligned Creatures

╠═╦╬╧╪

Wyrd West Tattooed Silver Bullets (Unique)

+13% Bleeding Damage

+13% Voodoo Spell Resistance

+13% Wyrd Damage to Voodoo-Aligned Creatures

+13% Chance of Inflicting an instance of Rot on target (Stackable)

Silver Bullets Regenerate at a Rate of +2/Hour.

╠═╦╬╧╪

Clay whistled. The revolver alone packed a helluva punch, but altogether, the pistol, bullets, and belt would give them a serious leg up over the Haunt Topic lizardman.

“Phwew!” Joe slapped Clay on the shoulder. “Oh buddy, I didn’t know how you were gonna manage that one. That difficulty level really jumped up, huh?”

Clay grunted. “That’s for damn sure, but this Quickdraw set was worth the risk. Look at this. Plus thirty-nine percent additional damage against voodoo creatures, and minus thirty-nine percent damage from voodoo spells.”

“That douchebag lizardman won’t know what hit him,” Alex said, leaning over his shoulder to inspect the set.

“And seeing those bullies fighting each other was worth a little something, too,” Diebolt said. “A win-win-win situation for us all, you might say.”

“Given the difficulty of the last labor, I almost hate to ask,” Griff drawled, turning a wary eye on Diebolt, “but what’s he got to do next?”

Clay was dreading the answer to that question, even with his new gear in hand…

* * *

One dune buggy ride later, they were standing behind Diebolt’s giant letter home, the sun setting on the horizon. There was a small garden back there, with a tree growing next to it.

“Behold!” the frogman intoned, raising his arms. “The final labor of Clay Jaeger.” Diebolt reached into his robes and pulled out a fish. “You must… cut down that tree with this herring!”

He slapped the fish into the palm of Clay’s hand.

“Are you kidding me?” Alex stared down at the herring. “You want him to cut down a tree with a fish?”

Joe threw back his head and laughed. “I get it! Frickin’ hilarious, man,” he said, popping Diebolt on the shoulder. “I love Monty Python, but these guys aren’t as big twentieth century fans as I am. Not really in the know like you and me, you know?”

“It’s just a joke,” Diebolt explained, taking the fish back and shoving it into his robes again. “I promised only moderately difficult but not impossible labors, and this one is an impossible labor from an ancient classic of a movie.”

Clay wiped the fish slime onto his pants. “So, if this isn’t my last labor, what is?”

From a different pocket on his robe, Diebolt pulled out a round blue Squishy toy. “I have all of the TTIGRAAG Squishies but one: Veldora Tempest. Did you happen to see one when you were in that Haunt Topic?”

“Uh…” Clay didn’t see where this was going. He racked his brain, but couldn’t remember. “I’m not sure. Guys? Any help here?”

“There were Squishies,” Alex confirmed with a nod. “I saw a Tomagoyama.”

“Wrong show,” Diebolt said. “But if they had any Squishies, then they had TTIGRAAG ones somewhere. Those were their best sellers.” Turning back to Clay, he said, “Your final labor, Clay Jaeger, will sort of operate on credit. I’ll give you the Nega-Voodoo Rune, but in return, you have to bring me a Veldora Tempest Squishy from the Haunt Topic.”

“What if they don’t have that specific one?” Clay asked, brow furrowing in concern.

The frogman thought about it for a second, then shrugged. “Eh, then grab me another Rimaru or Shion. Oh, or Gabiru-sama.” He switched back to his official quest-giver voice. “Do you choose to accept this labor, Clay Jaeger?”

Clay nodded and stuck out his hand to shake on it. “I’ll get it done.”

“So shall it be,” Diebolt said, his slimy fingers encompassing Clay’s. The frogman squeezed his bulbous eyes closed and boomed in a grandiose voice, “I grant thee the Wyrd West Nega-Voodoo Rune… on credit!”

Icy heat crawled up Clay’s arm, across his shoulders, up his neck, then down his chest and opposite arm. A static buzz of power filled his upper body, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Deep green lights pulsed under his long sleeves and shined between the gaps in his body armor. The wind kicked up a whistling breeze, and a low, twanging guitar tune drifted in on it, as gritty and dry as the wasteland.

Joe was the first one to break the silence. “Dude. That was awesome.”

Clay peeled back his sleeve. Grinning up from his arm was a grayscale tattoo sleeve of a skeleton dressed like a Wild West gambler, smoking a cigar and fanning out a dead man’s hand in one bony fist. The tattoos didn’t stop at his shoulder, either. They covered his chest, climbed up his neck, and wrapped around his other arm, too. There were scenes of ghostly Native Americans hunting buffalo across a wide-open plain, steampunk Mormons guiding an iron horse across a vast prairie, and a boot hill of gunslinger graves.

“Those are sick as hell,” Alex said, tracing a finger over the ink on Clay’s throat. “And check out your stats.”

Clay put on the Monocle of True Seeing and looked down at his hand.

╠═╦╬╧╪

Clay Jaeger

Level: 0

Race: Human

Class: Unassigned

Alignment: Neutral

Exp: 0 Exp; to next level: 440

Available Characteristic Points: 0

Health: 133/133

H-Regen/5 Sec: 0

Magick: 371/371

Magick-Regen/5 Sec: 0

Stats:

- Strength: 19 (17 + 2 item bonus)
- Constitution: 13 (12 + 1 item bonus)
- Dexterity: 26.5 (23 + 3.5 item bonus)
- Intelligence: 39.22 (37 + 2.22 item bonus)

Attributes:

- Armor Rating: 54

- Melee Attack Damage: 63

- Ranged Attack Damage: 110 (85 + 25 Wyrd Damage item bonus)

- Spell Damage: 150
- Movement Rate: +7.15%
- Critical Hit Chance: 10.15%
- Critical Hit Damage: +62.88%

Active Effects:

- +18% Fire Resistance

- +13% Quick Draw Speed, Reload Speed, and Firing Speed

- +39% Wyrd Damage to Voodoo-Aligned Creatures

- +39% Spell Resistance

Player Special Skills:

- Discordant Inversion Tribal Tattoos (Voodoo)

╠═╦╬╧╪

“Does this mean we’re ready to save the bacon?” Joe asked, wiggling his eyebrows. “Bits? The Bacon Bits? Anybody?”

Alex rolled her eyes. “You ought to get a grammar violation for every pun you make.”

“Just for that I’m taking ten bonus points, and nobody can stop me.”

“You ornery pups ever get tired a’ bickering?” Griff asked wearily.

“Not really,” Joe said at the same time as Alex shrugged and said, “No.”

The old weed huffed. “Figured as much.”

Clay stowed the monocle.

“Cool it with the bacon puns,” he said, barely holding back a grin. “It’s time to go hog wild on a big bad Voodoo Daddy.”

Alex groaned. “Not you too.”

Chapter 8

Breakfast of Champions

Before they headed out, Diebolt gave Clay a scarf covered in anime girls and books and moons with the express purpose of delivering it to Mogrifa.

“She seems to have taken a liking to you, perhaps for your appreciation for books,” the frogman said. “She may not set your hair on fire if you’re the one to tell her I’m sorry about her birthday and that I already had her present, I just lost track of the date.”

Like Diebolt predicted, neither of the Mogrifas—or the two halves of her?—set Clay’s hair on fire when he handed over the scarf and the message. The old one still acted sour as an unripe lemon, but before he left, she tied the scarf over her wiry gray hair and smoothed it with what seemed like reluctant appreciation.

The whole thing made Clay think of those couples in high school who were always fighting but never broke up and usually got married the day after graduation.

“I think it’s cute,” Alex said as they huddled together and watched the campfire.

Clay couldn’t agree. “Sure, if you like giant hassles. Too much drama’s a big turnoff.”

“Well, you got the perfect girl on the first shot,” she teased.

“You mean the perfect girl got me.”

“Hey, you asked me out.”

“Yeah, after months of this pretty girl following me around dropping hints.”

She laughed. “I’m just lucky you finally looked up from your library books.”

In a rare turn of events, they were alone for the night. Joe and Chonk had gone off drinking with an owlbear he’d befriended over previously owned campers and their mechanical problems. Griff was last seen headed for the Lady of the Sooq’s battlewagon with a bloom from a prickly pear. According to the slick old weed, he and the aging cat lady had made a date for dinner and cards with another couple of oldsters from the nomadic market.

Clay and Alex weren’t wasting their privacy. While Clay had been delivering Diebolt’s calamitously late birthday present, Alex had bought a bottle of Myrtleberry Homebrew from a one-legged pixie running a potion stall and mobile brewery.

In their quiet little tent circle, they sipped the dark purple wine from a dented canteen bottom and an old coffee mug with a broken handle, watched the fire crackle, and talked about everything but what tomorrow might bring. Alex turned grim once and a shiver ran down her back—either reliving what had happened to Bacon Bits or looking ahead to what might happen to the rest of them—but Clay put his arm around her and hugged her close, and pretty soon they headed inside, leaving the bottle of Homebrew half drunk by the fire while they enjoyed being alive for at least one more night.

* * *

Clay and Alex woke up the next morning before the sun. In quiet companionship, they revived the fire and started gearing up in the predawn gray.

Joe joined them before too long. Clad in his sleeveless flannel and jorts—no tin pants yet—he climbed out of his tent and stretched, letting out the longest, loudest jaw-popping yawn. Clay was surprised half the Sooq didn’t lean out their camper doors and yell at them to keep it down. But maybe the elderly retirees closest to their little circle of tents hadn’t turned on their hearing aids yet.

Joe was chipper as always, seemingly untouched by his late night out. Chonk not so much. The little mechacoon cussed his owner in Racoon as he crawled out of their tent, his fur sticking out in different directions and his beady eyes bloodshot.

“Chased beer with wine,” Joe said, affectionately scratching the little coon’s bed head. Chonk shoved Joe’s hand off and slumped down by the fire. “He got into that bottle you two left out here—guzzled the whole thing when we got back from Buzz’s. I told him, ‘beer after wine and you’ll wish you were dyin’,’ but the greedy little drunk wasn’t having any life lessons last night.”

By the fire, Chonk grumbled and crossed his arm and hedge trimmer.

“Don’t worry, Chonky old buddy, we’ll find you some ibuprofen,” Joe promised. “Friends don’t let friends go into battle hungover.”

Clay dug a bottle of Vitamin I out of his ruck for the furry little lush, then got back to helping Alex take their tent down. Meanwhile, Joe was busy banging around with pots and pans, making enough noise to wake even the old folk with their hearing aids off.

“I know y’all are dyin’ to get a move on, but let’s not be too hasty now,” he said, slapping a frying pan on the coals. “We need to start things off right, with the most important meal of the day. I’m making a big ol’ mess of scrambled eggs.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “Where did you get eggs at out here?”

“Those Squatches had a bunch on them.” Joe held up a dark-shelled egg the size of his fist. It sparkled with what looked like flecks of glitter. “Astral Condor Eggs. I looted a bunch of ’em.” He cracked the one he was holding into the pan, sending up a sizzle. “They’re insanely good for you. Twenty-four hours of lowered Stamina costs, and probably chock-full of nutrients we’ve never heard of like Alpha-5s. Eggs always are.”

Clay was just glad they looked like regular eggs inside and weren’t green or purple polka-dotted or something. He’d eat them either way, but it was nice every now and then to be able to relax and not wonder the whole time he was chewing whether they would all get some kind of weird food poisoning from the otherworldly fare.

Besides, anybody could cook eggs. Surely Joe wouldn’t Joe those up.

Joe flipped the pan with a flick of his wrist and dropped half of the fluffy yellow Astral Condor scramble into the ashes.

“Five-second rule!” With his fork, he scooped the pieces out of the ashes and back into the pan.

Clay exchanged nervous glances with Alex, then settled down by the fire to read Haphazard Cast. With everything they needed in the buggy and ready to go, he had time to learn the spell. He was so close; he could feel it.

After five minutes’ study, the spell unfolded in his brain. The Intelligence boost from his first difficult but not impossible labor had made understanding all the crazy symbols and diagrams in the weathered tome a breeze. If they survived Bacon Bits’s rescue run, he’d have to revisit the Mogrifas and see how many of their advanced spellbooks he could learn.

Griff showed up not long after Clay had tucked away the tome, just as Joe was doling out his gourmet breakfast onto their mismatched plates.

The old weed blinked in surprise at the first bite. “Huh.” He forced down the bite. “Thought maybe they had pepper on ’em.”

“You thought wrong,” Alex said, pushing her eggs around her plate with a bent fork. In addition to not being a morning person, she wasn’t big on Joe’s particular brand of cooking. “It’s ash.”

“Hey, the little imperfections are what give artistic creations character,” Joe insisted. “These ain’t your run-of-the-mill, cookie-cutter omelets that any goober off the street could make—they’re special. The secret ingredient is love.”

To prove his point, Joe shoveled in a huge forkful and immediately started coughing on a pocket of ash. He chased it with a spluttering gulp of water.

“See?” He coughed. “Delicious, delicious love. Now eat up, all of you. We’ve got a big day ahead and we need our reduced Stamina costs.”

Clay couldn’t argue with that. Didn’t stop him from scraping a bunch of the ash off his eggs before digging in, though.

* * *

With the most important meal of the day done, they loaded into the dune buggy. There wasn’t a lot of talk as they drove. The weight of the fight ahead seemed to get heavier every mile they drove. Bacon Bits was counting on them. Failure wouldn’t only mean leaving her trapped and enslaved to the lizardman Dungeon Lord, it could mean all of their lives.

The dark mood held as they parked on the viaduct overlooking the Haunt Topic. The sun was just peeking over the horizon, showing the Day-Glo skeleton rave in full swing in the cemetery down below. Except now there were twice the number of spooky hipsters gyrating to the music, and all of them were concentrated around the weeping angel mausoleum.

Clearly, the Voodoo Daddy had learned from their first failed attack and shored up the defenses on the secret entrances.

“So much for sneaking in the back way again,” Joe said.

“Good.” Alex scowled down at the obsidian plantation house and cracked her knuckles. “I’m ready to bust some faces for Bacon Bits. No sneaking required.”

Clay studied the sprawling plantation house without comment. Another new feature graced the rotting wraparound porch—a pair of birdlike creatures in Victorian plague masks, wearing long black pleather coats.

The plague doctors crossed paths in front of the rickety screen door, thick-soled boots clumping on the wood. They stalked to the end of the porch, spun on their heels, and stalked back the other way, then did it all over again. Their route and their timing never varied. In theory, it should be an easy ingress.

But seeing them put a bad feeling in Clay’s gut. It wasn’t just their creepy garb or the glassy alien plague masks obscuring their facial features; it was the fact that for there to only be two of them patrolling the front entrance—when, by contrast, Saurian had posted a ton of Hauntsters in the cemetery—the plague docs had been chosen for their quality, not their quantity. They must be packing some serious power.

Clay might have the new Wyrd West tattoos and the Quickdraw set slung around his hips, but those weren’t going to do Bacon Bits any good if they couldn’t even get in the front door.

“All right, step one, get through those plague doctors without raising the alarm,” he said.

“Then we’re gonna need this.” Joe produced a rusty can of WD-40 from a compartment on his mech suit. “I never met a screen door that didn’t talk back. If we want quiet, you better let me deal with ’er.”

Clay nodded. “We’ll cover you while you handle the door.” He pulled out the Camera Obscura and glanced from Griff to Alex to Chonk. “No attacks while we’re Obscured—not unless you absolutely have to. The less attention we attract getting inside, the more ammo and potions we can save for the Voodoo Daddy.” He received a round of affirmatives. “Alright, everybody squeeze in nice and tight.”

With a flash, the Jaeger Squad was Obscured and the countdown timer started ticking madly away toward zero. Silently, they made their way down from the overpass. The razor-flowers on the carriage gate had been doubled, too, almost hiding the black iron beneath their climbing vines.

Clay’s shoulders tensed up as they approached. What if Saurian had guessed how they had slipped past his defenses the first time and found some sort of workaround for the Obscurement?

But the razor-flowers continued hissing and waving in their prescribed patterns, giving no indication they could see the intruders. One by one, they slipped over the gate undetected and started up the cobblestone path.

At the bottom of the front steps, Clay signaled for everybody to halt.

Not ten feet in front of them, the plague doctors continued on their same patrol route, crossing paths in front of the screen door and turning back at the edge of the porch. Up close, Clay could see that each one carried a slender length of wood similar to his Lesser Wand of Inferno. Except where his had fiery red etchings, theirs had sickly yellow carvings.

Waiting for them to pass in front of the screen before moving, Clay waved a hand and led the way up the front porch, picking and choosing his steps as carefully and quickly as he could. The ancient-looking boards stayed miraculously silent, even under Joe’s cumbersome mech-suit weight. At the door, he, Griff, and Alex formed a protective semicircle around Joe and Chonk as they got to work.

The WD-40 went on with barely a hiss. Joe eased the door open a fraction of an inch, then stopped, maybe spoken to by some unfathomable rust-magician’s instinct. He applied more lubricant, then wiggled the door back and forth a little to work it deep inside the hinges.

Satisfied, he gingerly swung the door wide.

It glided open on silent hinges.

Joe shot Clay and the others a thumbs-up, then reached for the cracked porcelain knob on the inner door. It turned a quarter turn, then stopped with a hair-raising clunk. Locked.

At the noise, both plague docs spun around, firing off sickly yellow bursts of noxious fog toward the door at the same time, visible target or no. Clay conjured a Shield of Minor Warding around them all, absorbing the brunt of the toxic-looking blasts on his pale blue barrier.

The Minor Warding stopped the shots, but when the second one landed, the shield fizzled and winked out. Obviously, the docs were slinging some serious power if two spells could deal out 250 points worth of raw damage in a matter of seconds. Probably why the lizardman put them on guard duty in the first place.

Clay couldn’t let them get off another shot. He didn’t have the hit points to survive a direct assault like that, and he also didn’t have the Magicka to stay on the back foot. He needed to act, and he needed to do it now.

“Joe, get that door open!” he yell-whispered, hoping the Hauntsters wouldn’t hear him over their blaring music. “Griff, take out the other doc.”

Without waiting for a reply, Clay grabbed his K-Bar and sprinted all out toward the closest plague doctor, pinning its wand arm to its pleather-covered chest and stabbing the creature in the side of the neck repeatedly as he forced it backward.

The doc didn’t want to go down, and a frisson of panic buzzed through Clay’s mind as he realized that if they kept this up until they made it off the porch, the rest of his squad would be outside the Camera Obscura’s thirty-foot range, exposed for the Hauntsters and any other hostiles to see and raise the alarm.

Just as they hit the edge of the rotting porch, the flaming flail end of Alex’s kusarigama whipped around the doc’s leg. The log chain snapped tight, and down went the dying creature. With his enhanced dex, Clay caught the doc and brought him down soft, finishing him off with a final knife to the throat.

When he turned back, Griff was pulling a shortsword from the other plague doc’s mask. The old weed had managed to put his threat down without drawing the attention of the Hauntsters who were still shambling and gyrating in the cemetery.

Holding up a wait a second finger, Griff bent down and grabbed something off the corpse.

A skeleton key on a chain. He came back and stuck the key in the lock.

The damn thing still wouldn’t turn.

Joe waved his hands to get the old man’s attention, then tapped his chest. I got this.

Putting his shoulder into the door, he jiggled the knob and door and at the same time turned the key. The tumblers clunked open, and the door swung inward.

On the other side, a dozen pleather-wearing plague docs and a dozen glowing neon grubs stopped what they were doing and spun around to face the open but ostensibly empty doorway.

Overhead, a black candle chandelier dripped wax into the foyer.

“Close your eyes and hit the deck!” Clay yelled at his family as he cast Control Lights.

The candles blazed like a thousand suns as he turned up the intensity on the flames. Muffled cries of alarm and pain sounded as the makeshift flare momentarily blinded the inhabitants, but the docs all flung their sickly plague spells willy-nilly anyway, and the grubs barfed out brilliantly colored acid, heedless of the fact that they couldn’t see.

Clay cast another Minor Warding in the doorway, blocking that first wave of damage and using up the last of his Magicka at the same time. Darkness washed in at the edges of his vision and his legs trembled and gave out beneath him. He dropped to one knee, groping with numb fingers for a Magicka potion.

The foyer strobed blue and shook with a deafening boom as Griff lobbed an arcane bomb into the blinded creatures’ midst.

“Look out!” Alex said, leaping over Clay’s shoulder and into the thick of the combat.

Bertha roared and Chonk’s hedge trimmer gave a high-pitched yowl as Joe and the mechacoon followed hot on her heels.

Screaming, howling, crashing chaos filled the entryway, courtesy of the Jaeger Squad.

So much for stealthing their way past those first couple rooms. Clay’s hand finally closed around a Magicka potion. He gulped it down, then raised his M4 as the world finally stopped spinning like a top.

Looked like they were going in loud.

Chapter 9

Going in Loud

They fought their way through the Haunt Topic for what felt like ages 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 it was just the plague docs and acid-spewing grubs, then more Day-Glo 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 any of them could, Clay’s Shield of Minor Warding saved her butt plenty of 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, however. 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 the 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 a 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 the 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 gun belt. 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 plushies 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 That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Goo. Which one is the Tempest guy he wanted?”

“Let a twenty-first-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. I liked its live action version, too.”

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-patterned 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 knew what to look for when it came to traps.

He raised a fist, calling 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 mech-suited 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 gettin’ 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, with 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 mech suit 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 laths 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…”

Chapter 10

War Machine

Ten minutes later, the Jaeger Squad was following a hacking, slashing, slicing war machine down a narrow corridor full of Hauntsters. The thing—which Joe had affectionately dubbed the Ginsu Push Mower 9000—cut through hostiles like a weedwhacker through fresh dandelions.

Joe had refitted the blades to a bunch of other junk he’d collected on their journey through the wasteland, creating a slapchop of death that carved anything in its way into bite-sized chunks. Chonk rode on his shoulder, chittering with excitement and revving his hedge trimmer while Joe steered the mechanical beast.

“Listen to this baby purr!” Joe yelled over its engine as he steered its blades into an acid-spewing grub. Brilliant neon gore splattered the walls. “She’s the perfect melding of mower and magic!”

Much as he hated to admit it, Clay had to agree. With that thing running, he, Alex, and Griff were left to take out anything that managed to slip past its nightmarish spinning blades—which wasn’t much. Mostly just the creatures that could fly, like the headless chickens and the Wyrms. One Hauntster tried to jump over, but Alex kicked the Day-Glo-painted humanoid back into the mouth of Joe’s unholy creation, equal parts mower, woodchipper, and headsman axe.

They were making excellent time, and Joe even managed to level up.

“I don’t know how we ever managed without the ol’ Ginsu Push Mower,” he said, fondly patting the contraption’s side when they stopped for a quick regroup. “Was that even really living? I say nope.”

“Sure does take the heavy lifting outta the job,” Griff drawled.

While Joe inspected his new stats and made his selections, Alex checked their position against the map of the dungeon she had access to from her character sheet.

“It doesn’t specifically say Throne Room This Way,” she said, eyes unfocused as she stared at a map Clay couldn’t see. “It won’t show me much detail on the areas we haven’t discovered yet, it just sort of illuminates the edges of them until we actually walk in, but through that door is the beginning of an ascending staircase.”

“This place only has three stories,” Clay said, recalling the exterior of the Haunt Topic. “That’s got to be it.”

Joe hung his jaw aslant. “Well, that could be a bit of a problem. I don’t think my glorious invention can climb stairs. That’s going to have to be in her next iteration.”

“Then we best restock and reload,” Griff said, checking the cutting edge of his notched shortsword with a calloused thumb. “I’ve never yet encountered a Dungeon Lord who made the last stretch before their throne room a cakewalk.”

Griff definitely wasn’t wrong.

The second they opened the door to the stairs, a hail of poisoned darts flew at them from the riser of every step. They dove for cover, but that didn’t help. Like the blowgun projectiles they’d seen the Voodoo Daddy shoot in their initial battle, these darts could turn on a dime and follow their targets. Clay took two in the arm and one in the back, and Chonk got a couple in the fat roll on the scruff of his neck. Joe took one in the face, but most of the darts pinged off his mech suit to find a less resistant target—namely Griff’s posterior. Clay finally managed to kick the door shut, sealing them off from the vicious projectiles.

The whole ten-second episode required them to re-regroup, this time with a generous dose of health potions and antidotes doled out by Alex. She had received several darts as well, but with Katotes’s Immunities, she hadn’t been affected by the poison, and her health-regen had topped her back up in no time from the minimal amount of piercing damage the darts had inflicted.

When he was back to full HP, Clay stood up and dusted himself off.

“I’m not sure whether my Shield of Minor Warding will cover us against piercing damage.” He thought back to the wording of the spell. “I think it just protects against melee and arcane damage, but either way it’s only good for two hundred and fifty points. If that outlasts the darts, then we’re fine. If not, then we’re right back here.”

“New plan!” Joe twirled his Everyman Tool and descended on his three-bladed war machine in a clatter.

Some unscrewing, a little Sawzall action, and some welding, and he presented his newest creation: a rusty tower shield as tall as he was that looked like it would just barely clear the doorway on either side. Jutting out from the front were three heavy-duty axe blades.

“Magic and smarts ain’t the answer to everything, brocifer,” he said, slapping Clay on the shoulder condescendingly. “Yep, sometimes you just need a little old-fashioned blunt force to catch a bullet for you.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Clay said, “but… you remember that these darts go around corners, right?”

Joe threw up his hands. “Well, shit, man, I can’t think of everything! I’m the beauty, not the brains. Can’t you magic up something with your fancy new juju?”

“Maybe we don’t have to,” Alex said. She was bent over by the door, squinting into the keyhole. “There’s a lever at the top of the steps. Maybe our big bad Voodoo Daddy throws the switch when he goes up so he doesn’t get shot with his own darts.” She straightened up and turned to face them. “I’m immune to poison, and with my Bloodborne Armor, piercing damage can barely touch me. I could barge in, slam the door behind me, run upstairs and shut the lever off, then let you guys know when it’s safe to come up.”

Clay didn’t like the idea of Alex acting as their meat shield—that was Joe’s department—but thanks to all the mobs they’d taken out over the past few days, she’d jumped to level 12. Not only was she the highest level amongst them, but she also had the largest Health pool out of all of them, and an insane regen reinforcing it. Plus, poison and disease resistance just for good measure. It was hard to argue with her logic, even if he didn’t particularly like the application.

She must’ve read the reluctance on his face, because she stretched up and gave him a reassuring kiss on the cheek.

“Don’t worry, babe,” she said. “There is one little catch, though.” She looked at Joe and offered him a wide grin. “I’m going to have to punch you in the face. Hard.”

Joe squinted and scratched at his head. “Unless I misheard, you just said you’re gonna punch me in the face. Two questions. One, why on earth would you need to do that? And two, why on earth would I let you do that?”

“I can’t trigger Bloodborne Armor—it’s a passive ability that only works once I activate Bloodborne Frenzy. Bloodborne Frenzy is basically Barbarian Rage, but in order to activate it, one of my party members needs to be bleeding. I can’t punch Clay because he’s not an Incant. Animal abuse is never okay, so there goes Chonk. And it would be downright disrespectful to punch one of my elders, so Griff is out. That leaves you.”

“So what you’re sayin’ is you need me. That I’m the best, nay the only, man for the job.”

She sighed. “Yes, Joe. I need you. You are the best, nay the only, man for the job. Happy?”

Joe grinned. “Couldn’t be happier,” he shot back, “just make it fa—”

Before he could even get the word out, her fist landed square in his mouth. Blood trickled down his lip. He glared flatly at her.

“You’re the best, Joe,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.

“That’s what I keep telling everybody,” he said.

Alex pressed her eyes shut tight, hands balled into fists, and issued a bloodcurdling roar. A halo of bloody red light erupted around her, and when her eyes shot back open, the pupils were deep crimson. Bloodborne Frenzy boosted her speed, evasiveness, and damage output for two minutes, while Bloodborne Armor increased her resistance against normal weapons by fifty percent and temporarily swapped her Strength stat for Constitution when calculating her overall health and regen rate.

For two minutes, she was essentially She-Hulk and could absorb an insane amount of damage.

“It should only take me a second to run upstairs and save all your candy asses,” she growled, her voice guttural and inhuman.

Before Clay could respond, she yanked open the door and raced through, slamming it behind her.

He, Griff, and Joe all lunged for the keyhole at the same time. There was a quick shoving match, but Clay came out the winner in time to see Alex stuck like a pincushion full of darts while hopping over a bear trap.

The steps were littered with devices designed to slow down or stop raiders long enough for the poisoned darts to finish the job. Her foot barely touched down on the next step up from the bear trap before she had to juke a cube of glowing green gelatin. Then she hurdled what appeared to be a pool of quicksand built into the next stair. The slime reached lazily after her, but she darted left and kicked off a wall, propelling herself farther up the staircase and over what appeared to be a giant cosmic void. A fresh wave of darts peppered into the slime; it died in with an inhuman gurgle.

She made it to the top of the stairs and slapped the lever down. Immediately, the barrage of darts cut off.

Clay straightened up and jerked the door open.

“That only counts as one save,” he called up to her.

“Aw, did somebody eat some sour grapes?” she gloated, picking a handful of darts from her shoulder. “I’m gaining on you, Clay-san. At this rate, I’ll be winning in no time.”

“I’ll worry about that when you’re not still two saves behind.”

In response, she chucked a couple of the darts his way.

Alex’s Bloodborne Frenzy lapsed as Clay and Griff carefully navigated the trap-lined stairs, while Joe and Chonk flew to the top with the aid of the mech suit. There was a short corridor at the top that ended in an ominous, black-painted door. A fog of patchouli-scented incense rolled under the door, and a red-and-white sign that read Employees Only had been placed at eye-level.

Alex checked her map again. “Bingo. There’s our throne room.”

While Griff and Joe checked their loadouts, Clay helped his wife pull out the handful of darts in her back that she couldn’t reach. Even with the joking around, he couldn’t help but take a quick peek with the Monocle of True Seeing to make sure she really was okay.

╠═╦╬╧╪

Alexandra Jaeger

Level: 12

Race: Incant

Class: Bloodborne Striker

Alignment: Blood

Exp: 7,835; Exp to next level: 10,560

Available Characteristic Points: 0

Health: 287/290

H-Regen/5 Sec: 63

Magick: 290/290

Magick-Regen/5 Sec: 10.75

Stats:

- Strength: 60 (54 + 6 item bonus)
- Constitution: 26 (25 + 1 item bonus)
- Dexterity: 34 (31 + 3 item bonus)
- Intelligence: 18

Characteristics:

- Armor Rating: 121
- Melee Attack Damage: 239
- Ranged Attack Damage: 177
- Spell Damage: 179
- Movement Rate: +9.3%
- Critical Hit Chance: 8.4%
- Critical Hit Damage: +67%

Active Effects:

- Rapid-Regen

- Goliath Physique: Disease, Filth, and Poison Immunity (Permanent)

Bloodborne Striker Skills:

- Battle Instinct
- Goliath Grip
- Uncanny Reach
- Bloodborne Frenzy
- Bloodborne Armor

Player Special Skills:

- Chain Weapons – Oversized (Melee Skill) Lv. 5

╠═╦╬╧╪

“Damn, girl.” He whistled. “You’ve really got some regeneration.”

Just a couple minutes and her Health was already almost completely refilled.

“Tell me about it.” She dusted her cargo pants off like that would brush away the myriad pinpricks they now sported. “And pretty soon here you will, too.” She turned to the Employees Only door. “Let’s go give this lizardman a bad case of e-reptile dysfunction.”

Joe scowled. “You just ruined wordplay forever for me. Possibly hearing in general.” He raised his right hand. “I vote we make a rule that you lose ten points per pun. All in favor?”

“What?” Alex put her fists on her hips. “That’s total bullshit! You’re just mad you didn’t think of e-reptile dysfunction first.”

Joe shrugged. “I’m a man of capricious and varied whims, short stack. Deal with it. Voting time! Speak now on puns or forever hold your peace.”

The bullshit motion passed almost unanimously.

Chapter 11

High Noon in Haunt Topic

Clay looked at Griff. The old weed had one hand on the Employees Only door, awaiting the signal it was go time. The others were right behind him, ready to fan out and rain down destruction on the lizardman Dungeon Lord from both sides, but Clay was the main course for the Voodoo Daddy tonight. Or rather, his Nega-Voodoo tattoos were.

One last time, Clay pulled the Ace of Spades and checked that the cylinder was full. Six rounds. In the heat of battle, he probably wouldn’t have time to reload a weapon this involved. It wasn’t a yank and replace like his M4’s magazine. He had to make all six shots count.

That meant utilizing a little misdirection. Combos, like Alex had always tried—mostly without success—to teach her karate students at the dojo. Don’t just throw a single kick; fire a punch or a different kick first to get yourself into a better position and to draw your opponent’s attention. Then they won’t see the kick coming a mile away.

Clay had never been much for sparring, but he knew good advice when he heard it.

In his off-hand, he gripped the Wand of Inferno. If anything could draw attention, it would be that.

Sucking in a fortifying breath, he jerked his head at Griff. The old weed ripped open the door.

Clay sprinted straight down the middle of the room toward the lizard on the gaudy wingback throne.

Was it his imagination or had Voodoo Daddy Saurian grown? From this angle, it looked like the lizardman was at least twice as big as he had been before. He had also exchanged his dented top hat for a fedora and lost the tiny vest in favor of black suspenders printed with bloodred vampire teeth. In the skinny jeans and tank top, the lizardman radiated the same aura as the lead singer from an early, off-brand 2000s pop-punk band.

“Back for more?” The Voodoo Daddy grinned, his cold reptilian smile revealing a mouthful of fangs like ice picks. Yeah, those were definitely different. They’d looked more like needles the first time around. An ironic little mustache was stuck to his upper lip, which was another new addition.

Clay’s suspicions were confirmed when the lizardman rose from the throne—and kept rising. The creature stood at least twelve feet tall now, with double the amount of raw muscle he’d had before. He was a ripped emo Godzilla in black skinny jeans, with a row of spikes down his spine like a stegosaurus, and huge obsidian blades protruding from the end of his tail.

Clay fired off an Inferno Lance.

Just like their first meeting, the lizardman whipped a scaly hand through the air, force-knocking the Lance aside.

But on the heels of the Inferno Lance, Clay had surreptitiously fired his first shot from the Ace of Spades. The silver bullet flew straight as an arrow, completely unnoticed by the Voodoo Daddy until it was too late. Lizard blood sprayed through the air in an arc as the round slammed into the rippling meat of the lizardman’s shoulder.

The Voodoo Daddy stumbled back a step, grabbing at the wound in his shoulder. His hairless brows leapt skyward.

“Wyrd damage? You want to play with fate and magic, do you?” He chuckled. “Puny fool!” He thumped his chest with a fist and thundered, “I am the god of the Haunt Topic, no longer just a lowly Voodoo Shaman, but an evolved Spiritworld Bocor!”

“Phft, more like the evolved incarnation of My Chemical Bromance,” Joe taunted as he stomped into the room in his mech. “Is this your final form? Let me guess, the Emo Screamo King? Is your final move the Hipster Mustache Ride?”

“Your insults don’t work on me,” the Shaman hissed. “I’m as dead on the inside as you are about to be on the outside.”

The lizardman raised a clawed hand, and the ambient spook-rave music hit a crescendo, drowning out Joe’s insults. An army of ghostly spirits flew out of the shirts and posters and incense holders scattered around the throne room. There were anime-looking warriors with ridiculously oversized weapons, long-dead musicians with their instruments converted to instruments of death, and white-bearded wizards accompanied by loping packs of wolves.

Saurian’s summoned force converged on Clay.

Instead of hacking him apart, the ghostly characters crashed into a wall of Obscured Jaeger Squad. Well, mostly Obscured at any rate. While Clay and Joe had occupied the Shaman’s attention, Alex, Chonk, and Griff had all sneakily moved into position under the cover of the Camera Obscura. Bertha roared, Alex’s kusarigama snapped, Chonk chittered, and Griff’s shortsword and buckler rang out against the oversized anime weapons. The rest of the crew appeared in a flash as the effects of the Camera faded.

The Voodoo Daddy snarled, the curl of his scaly lip tilting his ironic mustache off-center.

“Should’ve expected such treachery! But it’s no matter. A Spiritworld Bocor is more than a match for a couple of grubby humans, Incant or no!” Saurian tore a clay pot from his pocket—though with the skintight level of those jeans, Clay didn’t know where he’d managed to hide it—and flicked the lid off with one sharp claw. Etchings on the side glowed with ghostly energy.

Before the lizardman could attack, Clay cast Control Lights and turned those glowing etchings into another flash bomb.

Saurian growled in pain and threw a hand over his eyes. In spite of his temporary blindness, Voodoo Daddy lobbed the pot at where Clay had been.

Had been because Clay was busy running for the lizardman’s flank. The pot exploded harmlessly, acid eating a divot into the stone floor.

As Clay ran, he cast Beguiling Whisper and fired off a twofer from the Wyrd West revolver.

“Over here, salmonella breath!” Clay yelled, using the spell to put the sound in Saurian’s opposite ear and simultaneously cover the reports from his pistol.

The lizardman spun the wrong way, and the dry shaking of a rattlesnake’s warning filled the throne room. That ghostly shield enveloped him like a giant spectral bubble.

The first Wyrd West bullet managed to slip past before the shield snapped closed, but the second exploded against the barrier in a flash of toxic green light.

Still blind, Saurian lobbed a second pot. This didn’t land harmlessly like the acid pot. Wrapped up in a fight to the death, Griff blundered into its howling hurricane winds. But he didn’t go alone. The old weed managed to pull a white-haired anime character in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit, wielding a massive scythe, into the pot’s area of effect with him. The gale-force winds battered the combatants with driving slivers of hail. The icy projectiles pierced Griff’s armor and tore into the scythe chick, slicing open flesh and armor alike.

Joe swooped into the storm, rockets flaring, and snagged Griff. Left to face its wrath alone, the anime girl dropped her scythe and fell to her hands and knees, dramatically coughing up blood. Tear-jerking music swelled from nowhere, then in slow motion, she collapsed in a heap of bloody limbs. Multiple times. From different angles. “Nani?!” she squawked before finally hitting the stone floor and disappearing.

Clay shook his head. Anime tropes were too weird for this world.

Across the throne room, a clank rang out as Alex’s kusarigama flail knocked the helmet off a massive suit of armor. Clay realized with a surge of unreality that she was facing down one of the Total Metal Alchemist characters—the only one he’d never managed to find before his mom had sold off his collection.

“Scratch a line in the blood symbol on its neck,” he sent her with Beguiling Whisper. That had been the way you killed them on the show.

Ducking under a huge haymaker from the suit, Alex closed the distance and slipped under its arm. She climbed up its back like a tiny blonde spider monkey. Then, with the kama end of her kusarigama, she scraped an x through the symbol that animated the suit. It dropped dead with the same overly dramatic camera angles and music as the scythe chick had.

Shooting it a weird sidelong look, Alex sprinted off toward an infamous metal guitarist from decades ago whose gnarly axe had turned into a literal axe, with massive double blades protruding from the sleek guitar body.

Joe zoomed overhead, still carrying Griff in the crook of one arm. As they got within reach of Voodoo Daddy, Joe opened his arms and let the old man drop, hollering, “Bombs away!”

Seeing that Griff was going to crash off the shield, Clay lobbed a pair of Inferno Lances at it, overloading the ghostly barrier. It shattered like glass.

A split second later, Griff slammed into Saurian, plunging his shortsword into the lizard’s shoulder. The blade only penetrated a couple inches, nowhere near enough to do any sort of lasting damage to the Dungeon Lord.

It did knock the fedora off the lizardman’s head, though, which was a small win.

“My hat!” The Voodoo Daddy swatted at Griff. “You uncultured swine!”

The old weed jerked the sword out of the lizardman’s shoulder and jumped, turning his ankle, but avoiding a much worse injury from those razor-sharp claws.

“You’re bigger morons than ᵶᶓᶉ⸞ᴞᴥᴪᵑᴎᴔᴚ† to challenge me!” the Voodoo Daddy sneered. “Did you truly think non-magical weapons can harm Saurian the Ostentatious?”

A pair of Wyrd West bullets slammed into his gut unexpectedly, courtesy of Joe and Griff’s distractionary tactics. With an oof, the lizardman stumbled backward, clutching at his gut.

“Obviously not,” Clay said, smoke drifting from his revolver’s bore. “That’s why we brought this.”

Saurian chuckled.

“You’re going to make an excellent addition to my zombified servants, little wizard wannabe.” He reached a clawed hand into his skinny jeans pocket, pulling one of those blank, unformed ZombiePops from its impossible depths. His forked tongue flashed as he hissed, “Damned souls at my behest, doom one more soul to my eternal service!”

As the spectral hand erupted from the figurine, Clay turned and ran—but not very fast. This was what they’d been waiting for.

Icy fingers closed around his upper body, pinning his arms to his sides.

At their freezing touch, his discordant gunslinger tattoos exploded from his skin in a rush of brilliant green light backed by the grungy twang of a Western guitar riff.

The Voodoo curse backfired, converted in an instant into Wyrd West energy. The rebounding spell careened into Saurian like a missile, and the throne room shook with the force of its detonation. The lizardman flipped ass over teakettle through the air, smashing his gaudy wingback throne to splinters between his giant scaly ass and the wall.

Through the dust, Clay caught sight of the Voodoo Daddy staring back at him. For the first time, there a glint of fear in those reptilian eyes. Saurian was realizing that there was a real possibility he might not win this. He had thrown his toughest curse at one of these pathetic humans, and the human had sent it roaring back on him a hundredfold.

With a sideways blink of his inner eyelids, the Dungeon Lord covered up his momentary panic and hauled himself back to his many-buckled warboots.

From the shelf of oddments behind him, he grabbed the adorable Greater Blue Wyrm ZombiePop.

“ᵶᶓᶉ⸞ᴞᴥᴪᵑᴎᴔᴚ†,” Saurian hissed, “I command you to kill this spell-slinging human!”

He spiked her figurine on the floor. Instead of shattering into a million shards of multicolored plastic, it puffed up like a smoke bomb, discharging a bright blue plume.

A breeze blew through the throne room, clearing away the cloud to reveal a massive Greater Blue Wyrm fully as long as a midsized sedan. Bacon Bits’s cobalt scales glittered as her long, fishlike tail undulated, and her luscious beard riffled majestically.

“I am sorry, Alex and squadmates,” Bacon Bits rumbled, advancing on Clay. He could tell it was still her, though all trace of the teacup pig’s sweet, high-pitched squeal was gone. The draconic eyes were the same. “But I cannot disobey the master of the ZombiePop parade.”

She opened her fang-filled maw, all a hell of a lot sharper than the cutesy little nubs on the figurine, and unleashed a hellstorm of blue flame.

* * *

Clay dove out of the way and rolled back to his feet, hitting the floor in a dead sprint.

Bacon Bits belched another gout of flame, the fire eating through a display of cheap incense fountains like they were kindling. The speed boost from his Naga ring kept him ahead of the fast-moving Wyrm, but just barely. Worse, he didn’t know how long he could keep this up. He didn’t have a Stamina bar to watch, but he could feel more draining out of him every time his boots slapped the floor. Sludge Slick wouldn’t work on a creature that could just fly over its oily puddle, and he didn’t want to use Haphazard Cast and chance accidentally turning her into a bigger version of herself with the corresponding Strength boost.

The rest of the Jaeger Squad watched this deadly game of tag with expressions of mingled dread and uncertainty. Joe reluctantly raised his suit cannon, but didn’t fire. They didn’t want to attack Bacon Bits, but if they didn’t, she would kill Clay.

Nobody seemed to know what to do.

Clay couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t a decision he would’ve wanted to face down, either. But maybe he could find a way to work around killing the former teacup pig. He snagged a Magicka potion from a drop pouch and tossed it back without slowing down.

“Keep her off me,” he sent along an invisible current using Beguiling Whisper. “Voodoo Daddy’s the key, and he’s almost done for. If I can kill him, there won’t be a master of the ZombiePop. I just need y’all to buy me a little time.”

The messaging spell only went one way, but Clay knew they’d heard and understood when they leapt into action.

Griff raced into the path of the soaring Greater Blue Wyrm, planting himself between her and Clay. He thumped his shortsword on his buckler in a challenge.

“Let’s see if I can’t remember a little mob-fighting from my arena days,” he drawled.

Bacon Bits spotted him and tried to serpentine around Griff, but he was a spry old weed. Everywhere she zigged, he zagged. With no other recourse, she opened her mouth to flambé him.

Which was when Joe rocketed right into her side in a full-on quarterback sack.

The air whoofed out of Bacon Bits’s lungs, her fire cutting off mid-spout. The two of them careened crazily through the air, never actually touching the floor, but slamming along the ceiling and walls, crashing into shelving and sconces.

Chonk scrambled along their length as easily as if they were a particularly misshapen and fast-moving tree. With a chittering war cry, he climbed onto Bacon Bits’s face and latched onto her beard. Grabbing a fistful of blue hair in his paw, the mechacoon steered the Greater Blue Wyrm like a bucking bronco, crashing her into wall, shelf, and floor.

With Bacon Bits off his tail, Clay skidded to a stop and started reloading the Ace of Spades. His hands shook with exhaustion and adrenaline overload as he snatched etched silver bullets out of his gun belt. Thankfully, with the extra dex, the times he fumbled them, he was able to snatch the dropped cartridges out of the air and shoved them into the cylinder.

A motionless form caught his attention while he worked. Alex. She stood with shoulders bunched, her fists clenched at her sides.

Silently, Clay cussed himself out. She couldn’t fight her best little buddy. And with Griff, Joe, and Chonk keeping Bacon Bits distracted, she didn’t need to.

“Hey Crazy, I need a distraction,” Clay whispered to her, dumping the last of his Magicka into another Beguiling Call, meant for her ears alone. At the sound of his voice, she twitched, her shoulders loosening up a degree. “Can you get Voodoo Daddy’s attention for me?”

With a curt nod, she spun to face off with the overgrown lizard.

Using her Uncanny Reach ability, Alex whipped her kusarigama at Saurian’s head, extending its chain mid-shot a good twenty feet to better knock that smug grin off his face.

The lizardman dodged and chucked a clay pot at her. Her leg hooked gracefully through the air, kicking the pot into the far wall. Its acid hissed and ate into the stonework while steam rose in thin wisps. Saurian reached for his blowgun, but Alex drew her Mossberg faster. With Goliath Grip, she could wield two-handed weapons with one hand, and she put that ability to good use with the shotgun. She blasted him with shell after shell, racking the Mossberg impossibly with one hand between shots.

Spotting his opening, Clay slipped around the lizardman’s back. That swordosaurus tail snapped and whipped erratically, the razor-sharp spikes at its tip gleaming and ready to cut anybody who tried to flank him to ribbons. Clay dodged a sweep of the deadly appendage, took aim with his revolver, and fired point-blank at the back of Voodoo Daddy’s scaly head.

He never saw whether that shot hit the target.

Just as his finger released the trigger, the swordosaurus tail crashed into his shoulder.

Lightning flashed inside his brain.

Agony tore through his shoulder and left arm like a tornado, so loud and frenzied that he didn’t notice he was tumbling across the floor until he slapped into the wall and everything went black.

A furry paw slapped at his cheek. He groaned. A second later, the glass neck of a potion bottle was shoved between his lips, and the furry paw pinched his nose closed.

Clay choked and sputtered, half of the healing potion geysering out of his mouth. The rest he managed to swallow. The pain in his left arm deadened a few degrees, but not enough to have fully healed. He opened his eyes and chanced a glance at the mangled limb.

He winced. The whole arm was hanging by a single string of meat and gristle thinner than his pinkie finger. Not good.

Chonk climbed onto his face and tried to shove another health potion into his mouth.

Clay took the bottle from the mechacoon and shoved him away before Chonk could drown him with good intentions. This time under his own resolve, he chugged the full contents of the potion.

The syrupy concoction burned in his chest like hundred proof. The heat spread out to his fingers and toes and brought a renewed rush of vitality with it. The dangling arm pulled itself back together, strands of muscle tissue regrowing before Clay’s eyes, and the shoulder blade Clay hadn’t even realized was broken snapped back together like puzzle pieces.

A bloodcurdling scream from Alex sent ice rushing through Clay’s veins. As he stumbled to his feet, however, he didn’t find his wife clamped in the jaws of a giant lizard. What he found instead was a tiny, furious little berserker on a rampage.

Saurian stood over the shattered remains of his gaudy throne, shooting dart after dart at Alex from his blowgun. He had conjured another ghostly shield to protect himself from her Mossberg, but neither that nor the hail of darts seemed to deter the petite dodge tank.

Pulsing with that angry red light, Alex broke into a dead sprint.

The lizardman’s eyes widened. Even he had to know that someone that small could hit like a rocket-propelled freight train when she was in a Bloodborne Frenzy. Blow after blow, Alex hammered at the ghostly shield. She was relentless in her ferocity. Saurian stumbled backward, trying to escape, but she didn’t let up.

Clay scanned the floor, searching for his revolver. There, in a litter of stonework, wrinkled T-shirts, smashed incense cones, and crumpled posters. He snatched it up just as Saurian got a decent footing.

With a whispered curse that shook the Haunt Topic to its foundations, Saurian sent spectral energy flowing out of every piece of junk collectible in the throne room, channeling it like a lightning bolt straight toward Alex.

Clay broke into a run, already knowing he was too slow to throw himself in front of her. What about a Shield of Minor Warding? Could he conjure one in front of her? Shit, it would only eat up 250 points of the damage; that would barely touch whatever this curse was.

“No!” Bacon Bits bellowed, overcome with concern for her favorite member of the squad. The Greater Blue Wyrm ripped herself from Joe’s mech-suited grapple and threw herself at top speed between Alex and the Voodoo Daddy’s deadly spell.

Black and white light strobed, thunder boomed, and colors across the room inverted momentarily before flashing back to normal.

Bacon Bits tumbled to the floor, a gaping hole in her side. In a puff of smoke, she disappeared, the chibi ZombiePop taking her place.

“You son of a…” Alex’s curse trailed off. She wavered on her feet, a matching hole burned in her body armor. Not much of the attack had gotten through Bacon Bits to her, but it was just enough. She tried to take a step toward the lizardman, but her legs gave out.

Clay made it to his wife’s side just in time to stop her from face-planting. A thousand screaming versions of his own voice assailed his brain at once, but he ruthlessly walled the panic storm off into a corner to be dealt with later. If he had to. Other people got to lose their shit when things went south; Clay Jaeger didn’t. Alex needed him, and he couldn’t fuck up because he was so scared they’d come all this way and fought all this time just for her to die now that he couldn’t form a rational thought.

He eased her to the floor, already digging in his vest for a health potion with a surprisingly steady hand. It felt like he was watching from outside himself as he poured the potion between Alex’s lips. Luckily, he had more success than Chonk with the red, syrupy liquid. Alex still coughed plenty of the potion back in his face, but the hole in her stomach started mending immediately, helped along by her monster regen.

That insane screaming in the corner of his brain went silent, replaced by cold fury.

An electronic whine filled the throne room.

“Let’s go, Daddy-o,” Joe growled, his suit-mounted cannon glaring red.

The blast rocked Saurian back on his heels. Immediately, Joe started powering up another, but his cannon’s warmup wasn’t fast enough. The lizardman pulled his blowgun.

Clay gently laid Alex on the floor and stood. Drawing the revolver, he took aim at the Voodoo Daddy and fired.

Bloody mist exploded from Saurian’s hand. The blowgun clattered to the floor.

“You fool!” the lizardman roared, yanking a curse pot from his pocket. “You believe because you have some piddly weapon that you can challenge to me? You are nothing! Noth—”

The second bullet slammed dead center into Saurian’s chest, cutting him off mid-rant. The curse pot dropped harmlessly to the floor and rolled away.

Clay let the gun do the talking. He stalked closer as he fired again. And again.

The shots thudded into the Voodoo Daddy’s torso. He stumbled, backing away instinctively, but unable to escape. He attempted to conjure up another shield, but failed.

“No!” the lizardman roared. “I refuse to be defeated by Wyrd damage! I am Saurian the Ostentatious. I make my own fate!”

“Not today you don’t,” Clay said, firing the last shot in the cylinder.

Saurian caught it right in the teeth.

The lizardman’s head lolled back, then his body followed, toppling almost as slowly as the anime characters had. Except this time there was no heart-wrenching music and multiple camera angles to draw out his death.

With a boneshaking thud, the Dungeon Lord fell dead on the throne room floor.

* * *

“Diga diga doo, the Voodoo Daddy’s dead,” Joe sang. In a blink, he had his mech suit off and was back to his everyday tin pants, jorts, and flannel. He patted Bertha lovingly. “Sorry you didn’t see much action, girl. Next time, I promise.”

Glare still locked on the still form of the lizardman, Clay stuck the smoking revolver back in its holster.

A feminine groan from behind him made him spin around. Alex was sitting up and rubbing at her head.

“Ugh, I feel like I went on a bender with Chonk and Joe.” She glanced around the destroyed throne room. “Did we win?”

“I think so.” Clay looked down at his hands. He didn’t look or feel different. Maybe Saurian wasn’t really dead, just in some weird lizard coma?

All of a sudden, the spook rave music cut out with a screech, and a driving drum track hammered through the throne room. Golden light burst from Clay’s skin, shining as bright as any of his blinding Control Lights spells, and an invisible force lifted him off his feet.

All the minor bumps and bruises he’d taken during the fight burned away in an instant, and that shaky feel of too much adrenaline for too long washed out of his veins. Even the blood and dust and dirt disappeared, leaving him cleaner than he’d probably been since the last precious hot shower he’d taken back in the Cans at Camp Liberty.

The light shifted from a brilliant gold to that Wyrd West green, this time shining from beneath his skin. Gunslinger tattoos replaced the ones that had disappeared in the eruption of the Nega-Voodoo spell. There were even more than he’d had before. The magical ink crawled across his body from throat to ankle, marking him up like a cowboy yakuza, before finally fading to the India blue of a decades-old tattoo.

Thin writing, similar to the quest texts he’d seen, appeared before his eyes.

Alteration Complete

New Race Assigned: Incant (Freehold)

New Class Created: Mystic Fateslinger

╠═╦╬╧╪

Clay Jaeger

Level: 7

Race: Incant

Class: Mystic Fateslinger

Alignment: Wyrd

Exp: 1,013 Exp; to next level: 4,760

Available Characteristic Points: 30

Health: 168/168

H-Regen/5 Sec: 23.5

Magick: 452/452

Magick-Regen/5 Sec: 26.67

Stats:

- Strength: 19 (17 + 2 item bonus)
- Constitution: 13 (12 + 1 item bonus)
- Dexterity: 26.5 (23 + 3.5 item bonus)
- Intelligence: 39.22 (37 + 2.22 item bonus)

Attributes:

- Armor Rating: 75

- Melee Attack Damage: 179

- Ranged Attack Damage: 213 (188 + 25 Wyrd Damage item bonus)

- Spell Damage: 220
- Movement Rate: +7.3%
- Critical Hit Chance: 10.3%
- Critical Hit Damage: +63.25%

Active Effects:

- Magick Reserve Regen
- Reptilian Infrared Detection
- +18% Fire Resistance

- +13% Quick Draw Speed, Reload Speed, and Firing Speed

- +39% Wyrd Damage to Voodoo-Aligned Creatures

- +39% Spell Resistance

Mystic Fateslinger Skills:

- Fateslinger
- Infinite Ammo
- Spelled Ammo
- Friendly Fire

Player Special Skills:

- Ranged Weapon Proficiency (Ranged Skill) – Lv. 1

- Firearm Mastery (Ranged Skill) – Lv. 4
- Weapons Specialty: Pistol – Lv. 1
- Cartography (Trade Skill) – Lv. 1
- Weaponsmith (Trade Skill) – Lv. 1

- Discordant Inversion Tribal Tattoos (Voodoo) – Lv. 5

Player Grimoire:

- Sludge Slick – Lv. 1
- Control Lights – Lv. 3
- Beguiling Call – Lv. 2
- Minor Shield of Warding – Lv. 1
- Haphazard Cast – Lv. 1

╠═╦╬╧╪

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “It worked. I’m an Incant.”

Clay scanned his new and improved character sheet, feeling a knot in the pit of his stomach unclench for the first time in months. Although he’d reassured Alex time and time again that nothing would happen—that they’d both survive and be able to ride off onto the sunset strip together—he hadn’t ever really believed it. Not totally. Life had given them more than their fair share of tough breaks, and deep down he’d half expected this to be just one more. But they’d done it. The wasteland was a deadly place for anyone, but now he and his family had the skills to navigate it with at least a small level of confidence.

And now that they could all gain experience and levels from their kills, their power would only grow.

Hell, he’d already hit level 7 and his overall stats had skyrocketed, even though his Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, and Intelligence hadn’t moved an inch. His Health and Magicka were way up, and he could now passively regenerate both given enough time. His melee, ranged, and spell damage had also doubled or even tripled in some cases, plus he’d unlocked a bucketload of innate abilities and just as many Special Skills. He glanced at Fateslinger, focusing on the words, and text swam across his vision.

Fateslinger: As an initiate of the Sacred Art of the Arcana Gun, Fateslinger allows the wielder of the Wyrd basic proficiency in all ranged weapons and grants them an added armor bonus when wearing medium armor. Melee and ranged weapon damage is now calculated using an Intelligence Modifier instead of the traditional Strength Modifier, significantly increasing damage output.

He whistled softly and read on.

Infinite Ammo: Passively convert Magicka into custom ammunition, designed to fit virtually any firearm. Ammo cannot be generated while in combat and still needs to be manually loaded into any weapon system.

Spelled Ammo: Bless or Curse ammo with pre-cast spells and hexes, which activate on contact with an enemy combatant.

Friendly Fire: Ranged healing has never been easier. As a Fateslinger, shooting allied party members now heals them for one-fifth ranged attack damage, and critical hits add double regenerative bonuses.

In the background, he heard Joe whoop and felt Alex throw her arms around his neck. The skill descriptions disappeared, only to be quickly replaced by a host of new notifications that kept on coming like the old Galaxy Wars opening crawl.

As the victor over Saurian the Ostentatious, Spiritworld Bocor, you have the option to absorb each soul he has zombified for an additional +20 Intelligence, or to become the new master of the ZombiePops in his possession at time of death.

Creatures summoned from ZombiePop figurines serve their master until the creature’s Health reaches 0, the master is killed, or the master banishes them back into the figurine. After eight hours in the figurine, the creature may be resummoned at full Health. Rejected ZombiePops will revert to their animate form.

Available ZombiePops:

1 (Greater Blue Wyrm)

1 (Apprentice Plague Doctor)

1 (Neon Green Grub)

Clay scowled, his jaw hardening into a grim line. No way was he keeping a slave, no matter what the prompt tried to call it, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to absorb a bunch of unsuspecting dungeon monsters for any level of Intelligence boost, not without giving them a chance to fight back.

“Clay?” Alex touched his arm.

“One sec, Crazy.” Clay made his selections, then picked up the Bacon Bits ZombiePop. “Bacon Bits, I command you and the other ZombiePops to do whatever you want. You’re free.”

Blue smoke billowed from the chibi figure, and Bacon Bits erupted. Near a destroyed shelf along the far wall, a low-level plague doc and a bright green grub burst from similarly kitschy figurines.

“Alex!” the Greater Blue Wyrm rumbled happily.

“Bacon Bits!” Alex threw her arms around as much of the former teacup pig’s huge true form as she could manage.

Griff chuckled and patted the pair on the shoulder like an indulgent grandpa.

“Hooray, the gang’s all here!” Joe revved Bertha in celebration. Chonk clambered up Joe’s leg and hugged the grinning redneck’s head before joining in and gunning his hedge-trimmer arm in a high-pitched and dangerous version of a fist pump.

Another notification appeared before Clay.

Congratulations! You have defeated the current Dungeon Lord of the Haunt Topic, Saurian the Bocor. This Stronghold is now vacant; as a Freehold Incant you may claim it for yourself and assume the role of Dungeon Lord.

If you dismiss your rightful claim, the Dungeon will lie fallow. Be advised, however, that any current Floor Overseer will be entitled to lay claim for themselves if you decline. Should another monster claim this Stronghold, you will have to challenge them in a duel and win to reassert your superiority.

Would you like to claim Dungeon Location: Haunt Topic? Yes/No

Clay knew he didn’t want the place. Being tied down wasn’t what anybody in the Jaeger Squad wanted at this point. But he knew someone who had risked her life for a chance to sit on the Haunt Topic throne.

“Bacon Bits, is there some way I can make you the Dungeon Lord of this place?” Clay asked.

The Greater Blue Wyrm’s eyes shined.

“Oh, Clay Jaeger, you are such a mystery to me. Gaining a seat of power and immediately offering it to someone else, when you could instead crush all who stand before you.” She slipped out of Alex’s grasp to nuzzle against Clay’s shoulder in thanks. Slowly she floated back, shaking her head somberly. “No, I must not accept this throne. A Greater Wyrm Farm is too much responsibility for even me.”

“Aw,” Joe pouted. “I was looking forward to visiting the Bait Shop.”

“It would not have been called that!” Reining in her outburst, Bacon Bits looked down at the floor. Was that a blush darkening the scales under her beard? “To tell the truth, I have come to love my place in your squad—in our squad. I wish to stay with Alex and the rest of you. If you will have me, that is.”

“If that’s what you want, you’re always welcome,” Clay said.

“Yeah, who wouldn’t love a dragon watching their back?” Alex slung an arm over the big beast’s neck. Or maybe her back. It was hard to differentiate body parts with a creature that was basically just a head on a tail.

“Technically, I am not a dragon at all,” Bacon Bits said cheerfully. “Their species is a very distant cousin to the Wyrm family. The distinction may seem subtle to an outsider, but when you come to learn all the ways in which Wyrms are far superior to smelly, unwieldy dragons, you will see a great many differences.”

All of which she happily elucidated for them in great detail on their victorious return trip to the Sooq.

* * *

“Gather ’round, ladies and gents, pull up a seat and hear the tale of how Lumberjack Joe’s big brother slayed the kaiju and turned into the wasteland’s own magical Jesse James,” Joe said, raising his third margarita to the crowd gathered around Tajira’s tiki bar. “I call this chapter, Clayie’s Got a Gun.”

Clay shot an exasperated glance at Alex on the barstool beside him.

With Joe’s increasingly popular Sooq storytelling happy hours, they were never going to be able to keep a secret. It would only be a matter of time before word got out that wastelanders didn’t have to risk their lives raiding a dungeon and killing a Dungeon Lord to become an Incant—all they had to do was take out another Incant. And God only knew what the Jaeger Squad would have to deal with if the government outside the IZ ever got wind of all this.

Alex caught Clay’s look and shrugged. “He’s your brother.”

Shaking his head, Clay took another slug of whisky.

“Jesse James,” he muttered.

“Never heard a’ the guy,” Griff said, sipping at the ancient Scotch Tajira had dug up for him from her collection. “Must’ve been a hell of a warlock.”

“You’re more the Wyatt Earp type.” Alex dusted a piece of dried grass off Clay’s shoulder. “Law and order and a pocketful of crazy friends.”

A reluctant smile tugged at his lips. “Does that mean you’ll be my huckleberry?”

“If you play your cards right.”

Clay glanced around at the gathered host of Sooq retirees who had pulled up lawn chairs and parked Rascals to listen to Joe’s exaggerated version of the battle at the Haunt Topic. Tajira was mixing up a second pitcher of Blue Lagoons for Bacon Bits and Chonk, who was sitting on the Greater Blue Wyrm’s head. Both were obviously already sauced. Griff had tastefully chosen to give the husband and wife a chance to banter under the semblance of privacy by turning his full attention to Joe’s story.

“I’ve already heard this one.” Clay knocked back the last of his whisky and offered Alex his hand. “Want to head back to the tent? If you’re good, I’ll let you check out my new tattoos. All of ’em.”

She laughed.

“You do know how to sweet-talk a lady.” She grabbed his proffered hand and hopped off the barstool.

Like teenagers sneaking out after curfew, they skirted around the edge of the elderly crowd, heading for the far side of the battlewagon. Nobody noticed them leaving the festivities early.

They barely made it past the last retiree before a caustic voice boomed through the campground like it was being broadcast over a set of loudspeakers.

“Listen up, shitstains, this is your Warlord speaking,” it growled from every direction. “One of you jackoffs came stomping into LA and fucked up shit in my territory—shit I single-handedly kept settled for twenty fuckin’ years. Either the Sooq sends out the stupid mofo who started a dungeon war in my backyard, or I wipe this whole damn city block off the map.”

It looked like they weren’t going to have to wait for the word to spread before the shit hit the fan. Trouble had already come a calling, and it was worse than a handful of ambitious wastelanders or a platoon of government black ops mercs. Far worse.

The Warlord of the West was standing on their front step, and he had an army of monsters at his back…

* * *

THE END

Wasteland Warlords Episode 3

Clay’s adventure continues in Wasteland Warlords Episode 4. Get it here!

When deadly MMO monsters flood the West Coast, a retired assassin is forced to fight magic with every tool in her IRL arsenal.

Enjoy even more of the Wasteland Warlords’ world, get this free short story from Allen Dante here!

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About the Authors

James A. Hunter

James A. Hunter is a full-time inkslinger and the bestselling author of Viridian Gate Online, Rogue Dungeon, Bibliomancer, Shadowcroft Academy, and Vigil Bound! In addition to writing, James is also the creative director and acquisitions editor for Shadow Alley Press, an industry leader in Fantasy, Science Fiction, and LitRPG books.

James is a former Marine Corps Sergeant, combat veteran, and pirate hunter (seriously). He’s also a member of The Royal Order of the Shellback—’cause that’s totally a real thing. And a spaceship captain, can’t forget that. Okay … the last one probably isn’t true. When not writing or spending time with family, James occasionally finds time to eat and sleep.

eden Hudson

I am invincible. I am a mutant. I have 3 hearts and was born with no eyes. I had eyes implanted later. I didn't have hands, either, just stumps. When my eyes were implanted they asked if I would like hands as well and I said, "Yes, I'll take those," and pointed with my stump. But sometimes I'm a hellbender peeking out from under a rock. When it rains, I live in a music box.

But I'm also a tattoo addict, sumo junkie, and the world’s okayest drummer. Jesus actually is my homeboy.

Wasteland Warlords Episode 3 is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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