I whistled through my teeth.

Huh, that had worked much better than I’d anticipated. Honestly, I’d seen some pretty gnarly explosions during my time in Iraq and on demo sites scattered across the greater Kentuckian planes, but this… This was on a whole different level.

The two monkey-filled purple barrels that Frank had hurled prior to the detonation had somehow survived the explosion. The remaining minions were picking themselves up off the hay-covered floor.

Bellatrix and the others had also been far enough outside the blast radius to avoid taking any damage. The hulking bear with the horrific and all-too-human face was down below fifty percent now. She was bleeding from a legion of different wounds. Temperance danced and twirled around the lumbering creature like a manic pixie, hacking with her cleaver and bludgeoning with her bat. Croc had retreated from the front line, taking cover behind a sectional sofa while Jakob treated the mimic’s injuries.

A colossal roar pulled my attention away from the scene and back toward the blackened crater. It was hard to see anything thanks to the thick plume of smoke drifting up, but there was definitely something moving in there.

I held my breath as the hulking form of Kong emerged from the curtain of black and gray.

His Health bar hadn’t dropped by even a single percentage point, which wasn’t much of a shock since the Bassist was still alive. He hadn’t come away completely unscathed, however, regardless of what his HP bar said. His black-and-silver fur had been almost entirely burned away, and smoldering ruined chunks of skin and meat hung from his thick frame.

Frank threw his head back and issued another furious roar, rhythmically pounding at his chest with enormous fists. I stared on, completely dumbstruck, as the thirty-odd reanimated murder monkeys turned away from me and swarmed the gorilla. They leapt on him en masse, and before long he was buried beneath a veritable sea of simian bodies.

What the Kentucky Fried Fuck is going on here?

Horror dawned on me as I saw the small army of monkeys begin to melt—their flesh turning into a gelatinous mess, which merged with Frank’s own battered and broken body. The gorilla swelled in size.

Nine feet, then ten.

Twelve feet.

Fifteen.

Up and up he went, like Jack’s beanstalk straining toward the heavens above.

By the time the dark alchemy was finished, Frank stood at least twenty-five feet tall, his chest as big as a tractor trailer, his arms like a pair of juvenile redwoods. His entire body was covered with bits and pieces of reanimated monkeys. Simian arms and twitching tails poked out, seemingly at random. Distorted Monkey faces protruded from his shoulders, chest, and legs like cancerous growths.

Uh-oh.

“Time to party!” Funtime Frank bellowed, his voice the sound of an industrial cement mixer. Then Franken-Kong charged me. He ran on all fours in a rolling, simian gait that ate up the ground at an incredible rate.

“Could use some help over here!” I hollered, stealing a quick glance at the others. Bellatrix was missing an arm, and ropes of intestine and sparking wires drooped from a slash across her abdomen. Her Health bar was strobing manically, warning, warning, warning, but she still had a little gas left in the tank and she wasn’t going down without a fight.

“We’ll be there when we can!” Jakob hollered back.

Bellatrix exploited his moment of inattention and lunged forward, slamming a huge foot into the Cendral’s metallic shield. The kick knocked Jakob back at least ten feet and left him gasping and wheezing on the floor.

I turned back toward the charging Kong. I just needed to buy a little time here.

That I could do.

I pulled out my perpetual ace in the hole, the Super Slammer of Shielding, spiked it on the floor, and intoned the arcane ritual words of old. “Let’s Pog!”

The golden birdcage sprang up around me, and the two-minute countdown timer appeared, tattooed on the air. Funtime Frank skidded to a stop a handful of feet before the edge of the shimmering barrier and let out a roar of impotent rage, so loud it dropped me to one knee. The huge eldritch monkey horror raised a fist the size of a monster truck tire and brought it crashing down on the top of the dome.

This dome had seen some nasty shit over the past several weeks, but for the first time the bars of light flickered and trembled beneath the force of the strike. It was just for a moment. A flash, here then gone. But suddenly I wasn’t feeling quite as confident. Maybe Frank’s rage wasn’t quite as impotent as I’d first thought. I’d read the Slammer item description more times than I could count and remembered the words with crystal clarity.

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The Super Slammer of Shielding is a rare magical Artifact, which summons a mostly impenetrable dome of arcane power, capable of protecting all those within the confines from physical, arcane, and elemental attacks.

Mostly was the key word there. Looked like Funtime Frank was going to put the resiliency of the shield to the test.

Fists fell, one after another, like artillery blasts, the dome straining under the furious assault. The golden bars wavered and distorted. Cracking. The shield had only been in place for fifteen seconds and I had serious doubts that it would last another fifteen seconds at this rate. I needed to do something to get Frankie-boy to lay off or he was going to crush this thing like a soda can with me trapped inside.

My spells couldn’t pass through the arcane dome, but physical objects could.

I had a couple of actual Molotov cocktails left over from my fight with the Harmacist and also my speed square batarang. Neither seemed like great options against a twenty-five-foot-tall cyborg gorilla covered in the melted corpses of reanimated lab monkeys, but I just needed to buy time, not kill this fucker.

I pulled my speed square from my belt, wound my arm back, and let ’er rip, aiming at the ape’s face. My poor man’s batarang flew true and sunk all the way into one of Frank’s fist-sized eyeballs.

There was a sickly wet pop and the gorilla screeched, stumbling back as he groped at his face. Unfortunately, the speed square didn’t come back because it was lodged in Frank’s eyeball.

Without missing a beat, I pulled out three run-of-the-mill Molotov cocktails—these all made from bottles of Jack Daniels and stuffed with greasy rags, soaked in lighter fluid. With nimble fingers, I pulled out a Zippo and lit the first bottle. The rag went up in a blaze and I fastballed the bottle of Jack at the staggering monkey before he could get his bearings. There was a crunch of broken glass followed by a great woosh as the flames spread up Frank’s stocky legs.

I quickly lit the second and third bottles, throwing both in quick succession.

The two bottles joined the first, one smashing against the ape’s chest, the other splashing hungry flames across one arm. The ape howled, and a Health bar appeared above its head. The bar turned from a burnt gold to a bloody red and dropped for the first time. The last active effect, Bass Boost, loitering beneath Frank’s nameplate had finally disappeared, though Frank’s level had also ticked up by one.

The Franken-Kong was now level 28. One level higher than the Murder Muncher from the Arcade on the third floor.

Could we kill a level 28 blighted Dweller the size of an office building?

I had no clue. But we were gonna give it the good ol’ college try.

“Alright!” I yelled over one shoulder to the others. “Let’s wrap it and tap it!”

Croc was busy eating Bellatrix’s head, but the others were already scrambling to get into their new protective gear. They were moving quick, but I still needed to buy them a little more time. I didn’t want to trigger StainSlayer Maelstrom prematurely and I was hesitant to use Pressure Washer on the overgrown ape. The flames were doing a good job of distracting Frankie-boy, and using water would only douse the inferno crawling across the creature’s monstrous body.

Time to do something stupid.

With the golden protective shield still in place, I quickly swapped Bad Trip for a much more unstable Relic. Burn, Baby, Burn.

The Uncommon, Flamethrower Relic clicked into my Spatial Core and I felt chaotic power surge outward through my veins like a raging forest fire. Death and Destruction sang inside me. Burn, Baby, Burn only cost 2 Mana per second—an extremely cheap spell—and dealt a nasty 30 points of Flame Damage on contact, plus 5 additional points of Fire Damage per second. Sure, it would also deal 2 points a second of Burn Damage to me as well and there was a chance I could spontaneously explode, but so what?

Now wasn’t the time to play it safe. Now was the time to set shit on fire.

I deactivated the Super Slammer, then squared my shoulders, thrust both hands forward, and unleashed a red-hot column of flame as thick as a telephone pole. My skin started to crackle and blaze in the same instant, terrible heat spreading backward up my hands and along my arms. Scorching my chest and face in the process. My HP bar began to drop, and the pain consumed my world. It felt like touching a hot stove. But with my whole body.

I didn’t care.

I just screamed and let the flames flow, because as much as they were hurting me, they were hurting Funtime Frank even more.

I let the spell roar for a full ten seconds, until Frank blazed like a Yule log and his Health had finally dipped below 90%.

My own Health had plunged by nearly a quarter and my skin felt raw. Like it had been stretched too tight across the muscle and bone beneath.

While Frank raged and burned, I took a few seconds to spam Mental Micromanagement, starting and stopping the telekinetic flow in rapid succession like a burst of machine-gun fire. It didn’t take long until Wild Surge activated, quickly boosting my Mana back up to 101.

Unfortunately, the flames had started to die down, leaving burnt and blackened ruins in their wake. Funtime Frank wasn’t looking like he was having a fun time at all. He looked pissed.

The enormous ape opened its mouth and spit something wriggling and purple at me.

The color drained from my face as I realized what it was. A writhing ball of monkey parts, all jumbled together. Arms and legs, tails and faces. I raised a hand and attempted to blast apart the incoming cannonball of fused lab monkeys, but the narrow beam of water just punched straight through. The ball of limbs and faces continued hurtling toward me undeterred. I took evasive actions, but my stupid boot caught on a piece of wooden shrapnel from one of the barrels.

I stumbled and instinctively glanced down. It was only for a moment, but when I looked back up, the ball of monkey parts smashed into my stomach, knocking the air from my lungs. I doubled over, wheezing, and pitched onto my side, suddenly unable to breathe. The monkey ball didn’t do much damage, but it did break apart on impact. Before I fully knew what was happening, a dozen or more severed monkey arms were somehow pinning me to the ground.