Even though most of the lights were broken in the main warehouse, there was just enough illumination to make out the colossal shape shambling toward us. It stood fifteen feet tall and was easily ten feet wide at the shoulders. Although I could make out the rough shape of arms and legs, the approaching Dweller looked more like an amorphous blob than it did a man.

Instead of carefully threading its way through the maze of washers and dryers, the creature simply carved its own path, pushing through the clunky old machines as though they were made of cardboard instead of solid steel. Clearly, the creature was strong, but it was slow as balls, which gave me enough time to summon Synthia 2.0 and Drumbo Rebooted.

Drumbo looked more less the same as the last time I’d conjured him, but I’d made a few upgrades to Synthia. Her limbs had been badly damaged during the skirmish with the kiosk crabs, so I’d reinforced her with chunks of crustacean exoskeleton. Rigid orange and purple plates covered her thighs and shoulders like armor, and I’d crafted a rudimentary chest plate to protect her torso. Her right arm still ended in a whirling chainsaw, but I’d replaced her left with a large crab claw.

I’d also fashioned crude plastic suits for each Horror, made from strips of blue construction tarp, old rain ponchos, and copious amounts of Duct tape. Hopefully, the shoddy upgrades would help protect them from the splash damage of my StainSlayer Maelstrom spell.

As the two Horrors stepped through the void and into reality, I instantly felt my mental tether click into place. My minions were extensions of my will, just waiting for instructions. I directed Drumbo to stand guard over the tiny laundromat behind us. Didn’t want whatever nightmare we were dealing with to accidentally kill the Brownies.

Then, instead of waiting for the monster to get in range, I reached down into my tool bag, fished out a single red Firebomb Grenade and fast balled it right at the gargantuan son of a bitch. The tennis ball flew true and nailed the monster directly in the chest with a soft thud. As expected, the rune activated on impact and bright tongues of orange fire exploded outward, quickly crawling across the monster’s torso, finally giving us enough light to get a good look at what we were dealing with.

An iteration tag flashed above the monster’s head, and I instantly regretted my decision to help the Brownies.

Dweller 0.5826A – Shart Stain Golem – Laundry Maintenance Manager [Level 26]

We’ve all been there at some point: caught in the grips of a long road trip or bewitched by a night of partying and heavy drinking. Everything is all sunshine and rainbows until one sneaky little fart slips out, which is more than it seems… With trembling fingers, you reach down to inspect the damage. Yep, you’ve just sharted yourself—a misadventure which will leave its mark on fabric and pride alike.

Ever wonder what happens to all those skid-marked, shart-stained undergarments?

Well, let me tell you, they rarely make it into the laundry basket.

Instead, most wind up in a trashcan or shamefully buried in a hole on the side of the road. A special few, however, slip through the cracks in reality, and eventually find their way to the Backrooms. And when enough of shit-streaked underwear glom together, a Shart Stain Golem is born. Forged in the fires of deep shame and digestive despair, these things are unstoppable juggernauts. Cross one and you’re in for a very shitty day.

HAHAHAHA. But seriously, puns aside, this thing will fucking murder you.

“Yeah, fuck this noise,” I said. “I did not sign up for this.”

Much as I wanted to turn tail and run, however, there was no place to go.

The creature, still lit up like an Iraqi burn-pit, took one more lumbering step, then bent over and ripped a nearby washer from the floor. With a great billowing roar, it hurled the machine at us like an angry toddler discarding a toy. The industrial washing machine had to weigh half a ton, at least, and there was no way I’d be able to stop it with raw telekinetic power.

“Look out!” Jakob shouted, but I was already moving.

I bolted left and dove, rolling back into a crouch.

I avoided the projectile by inches as the bulky machine smashed into the gray concrete with a deafening rattle, kicking a plume of dust and debris. Drumbo hadn’t been quite so quick or so lucky. The washer had turned his legs into a pair of meat pancakes and was now pinning the Horror to the floor.

Drumbo’s health bar was already critically low and draining faster by the second.

With a grimace I banished the minion before it flatlined completely.

The Horror wouldn’t be ready for combat any time soon, but better to recall it than let it die slowly under the weight of an industrial-sized washing machine. No one, not even a mindless minion crafted from the body parts of a monster, deserved to go out like that.

Jakob and Croc had both managed to get clear of the attack, while Synthia 2.0 had leapt onto a row of washers and was sprinting, balls to the wall, across the tops of the machines. She closed the distance with insane speed and leapt at the golem with her chainsaw roaring. She didn’t hesitate for a second and didn’t seem to care that the monster we were fighting was a sentient wade of soiled underwear. I was glad she was up for the job, because I certainly didn’t want to get close enough to touch that thing.

No amount of showering would ever let me feel clean again.

Jakob seemed to have similar sentiments, since he’d pulled a strange weapon from his Storage Space so that he could fight at range. The weapon resembled a bazooka—though it was covered with so much colorful graffiti that it looked like something yanked straight out of Fortnite.

Jakob levelled the ranged weapon and shouted “Fire in the Hole” as he depressed the trigger. There was a whomp and instead of unleashing a rocket, the colorful bazooka launched…

A leather love seat through the air.

The sofa slammed into the golem with the force of a car crash, but only managed to knock it back a step or two, while doing minimal damage in the process. The flames covering the monster’s body had started to dwindle, and though the fire damage had put a small dent into its overall HP, the golem hardly looked phased.

The creature had turned its attention to Synthia 2.0, who was standing atop a dryer, swiping at the golem with her chainsaw. Her screaming blade bit effortlessly into the fabric, but the creature’s health pool was so vast, it hardly seemed to do a damned thing.

Since Croc was still out of range, I figured it was time to break out the big guns. I wasn’t going to get a better opportunity.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Mana surged out from my core as caustic clouds formed overhead and great drops of blue death rained down from above, splattering the golem. The creature howled as the super bleach went to work with deadly efficiency. Even better, the spell triggered one of my most powerful passive abilities, Wild Surge. It instantly replenished my Mana Pool, increased my Mana Regeneration rate by 25% for 2 minutes, and procced a cascading effect that duplicated another round of StainSlayer Maelstrom at no additional Mana cost.

The creature’s health bar dipped below eighty-five percent as torrents of bleach pummeled its huge, disgusting form. Despite my best efforts to waterproof her, Synthia 2.0 took some superficial splash damage as well. Still, she kept battling, undeterred, lashing out with both her chainsaw and crab pincher.

I thrust my free hand outward, palm up, and cast Stone Skewer.

A spear of glinting black rock, as long as my arm and as thick as my wrist, flew toward the monster like an artillery shell. The creature was so distracted with Synthia that it didn’t even try to avoid the attack, and the stone spear effortlessly punched through the golem’s soggy exterior. Between the bleach storm and rock spear, I’d already dropped the disgusting son of a bitch down to the eighty-percent mark and was feeling surprisingly optimistic about this battle.

After the debacle with the Kiosk Crab, I’d mentally prepared myself for the worst, but so far, this thing wasn’t so bad. I mean, it was gross, sure, but everything in the Backrooms was gross.

Jakob launched another sofa, this one a boxy, 1960’s puke-green three-seater. With a ground shaking roar, the golem whirled around and snatched the sofa from the air with one enormous hand. Then, without missing a beat, the creature turned and used the couch as a makeshift baseball bat, swatting Synthia away. The blow landed with a crack­—the sound of breaking bones and crunching metal—and my reanimated horror cartwheeled through the air like a ragdoll, over half her HP gone in a heartbeat.

I pulled free several purple Health Grenade tennis balls from my Storage Space and used telekinesis to transform them into healing homing missiles. Even though Synthia wasn’t technically alive in the strictest sense of the word, the grenades still worked like a charm. One of her legs—which had been bent at a shockingly grotesque angle—straightened as she gained her feet and her HP rose back above the 60% mark. Another pair of Healing Grenades brought her back up to 90%.

As my bleach-storm finally tapered off, I grabbed several additional Firebombs from my storage space and sent them flying, two at a time, toward the monstrous Dweller. The bright red tennis balls exploded on contact, spewing more fire across the creature’s rumpled form. The blaze spread at an alarming rate, devouring the creature’s HP, quickly dropping the monster below seventy-five percent.

I prepared another round of Firebombs, ready to burn this literal shit-stain to a crisp, when something sliced through my bathrobe and punched directly into my kidney. It felt like getting shanked with a red-hot fire poker. I gasped in agony, temporarily blinded by the ungodly pain, and dropped to the floor, clutching at my side.

You have been afflicted with Toxic Shock Syndrome and will suffer from increasingly debilitating effects until cured! All effects from Toxic Shock Syndrome are temporarily reduced by 5%, due to the passive effect, Gas Station Hotdog.

Stage 1: Extreme headaches, high fever, and mild disorientation.

Stage 2: Countdown until additional onset symptoms 02:57

What the hell is happening to me, I thought, though everything felt mildly jumbled inside my head. I rolled over, one hand groping uselessly at the puncture wound, and caught sight of my assailant.

This wasn’t the Shart Stain Golem at all, it was something else entirely.

The creature was tall and whip thin, its body and limbs insubstantial and made from a greenish gas that seemed to shift as the creature moved. A pair of burning red eyes, like hot coals, sat in a face otherwise devoid of features. Other than those hellish eyes, the only thing solid about the creature was the sleek black dagger it carried in one wispy hand.

Dweller 0.5715D – Silent-but-Deadly Gaseous Assassin [Level 15]

They say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The same is true of farts and shit. You never get one without the other.

I grimaced. I couldn’t believe it, I was going to be killed by a sentient, malevolent fart. Given my life, that was a surprisingly fitting end. But I wasn’t ready to die. Not here.

I wanted to go out the way God intended: black-out drunk at the age of ninety-three, sandwiched between a bed and a beautiful woman. That was my destiny, dammit.

It was hard to think straight, though. The inside of my head was fuzzy and dull. My thoughts, sluggish. Still, I knew I couldn’t just lay there. If I did, this thing was gonna gut me like a trout.

With a garbled warcry, I sent my Demolition Screwdriver hurtling toward the creature’s face. The monster didn’t even bother to move, and the tool passed harmlessly through its head without an ounce of resistance. It didn’t deal even a single point of damage. Of course, this thing would be completely immune to physical attacks.

Should’ve guessed, considering it was a sentient gas cloud.

The assassin lunged, its deadly black dagger aimed at my throat. Although the creature itself was intangible, its weapon wasn’t, and I managed to get my hammer up in time to deflect the blow. Thanks to a bit of wild luck, my counterstrike knocked the dagger from the creature’s hand and sent it clattering to the floor some ten feet away. On reflex, I took a swipe at the assassin with my hammer and was surprised when the weapon smashed into the creature’s spindly leg with a flare of brilliant blue light.

A health bar appeared, dropping by a quarter, which is when it occurred to me: The hammer was filled to the brim with Mana. Although this thing may have been invulnerable to physical damage, it was susceptible to Mana-based attacks. I took another swipe, but the assassin danced back a few feet, easily avoiding my strike. And, thanks to the terrible pain throbbing in my side, I couldn’t gain my feet to follow. That was fine, though. I had ranged attacks up the wazoo.

I activated Pressure Washer and sliced the creature in half with a beam of water. The spell carved another chunk of the monster’s HP but didn’t do much long-lasting damage. The two halves simply merged together again as the creature slipped back another few paces, opening additional distance between us. Then the creature raised one ghostly hand, and an orb of sludgy black goop formed in its palm. I wasn’t sure what the spell was, or what it would do if it hit me, but I doubted it would be good.

I activated Sterilization Field and a ring of blue-white light rippled outward, forming a dome with me at its center. Although Sterilization Field had a number of significant limitations, overall it was an incredibly powerful spell which reduced all incoming magic and elemental attack damage by 50%. That wasn’t the only thing it did, however. Any spellcaster trapped inside, who had a lower Resonance Score than me, couldn’t activate any Mana-Based Relics. Not until they left the area of effect.

This backstabbing, turd-burglar was firmly inside the AoE.

Its sludge spell fizzled and died, but the effect of the Sterilization Field didn’t end there.

The white light washed over the creature like holy fire. In less than a handful of seconds, the gaseous monster was just gone, scrubbed from the fabric of existence. The only sign that the monster had ever existed at all was the dagger, laying several feet outside the dome.

I just stared, slack-jawed at the place where the monster had been standing just seconds before, trying my damnedest to figure out what in the hell had happened. I’d used the spell plenty of times before and it had never had an effect quite like that.

Since the Dweller didn’t have any physical form to speak of, maybe it had been composed entirely of Mana? That was the only thing that made any sense, given the circumstances. Or maybe it was something else entirely. I wasn’t sure, but maybe the why didn’t matter so much. Not right now, anyway. All that really mattered was that the spell had been unbelievable effective. And if it had been that effective against the Silent-but-Deadly Assassin, there was a good chance it would also work against the golem.

I just needed to get into range first.

With a grimace of pain, I pushed myself into a sitting position and chugged a healing elixir which stopped the hemorrhaging in my side and restored my missing HP. Unfortunately, the elixir didn’t banish the Toxic Shock Affliction still rampaging through my body like an angry T-Rex. Almost as though to emphasize the point and mock me in the process, I received another notification.

Toxic Shock Syndrome has metastasized, and new symptoms have evolved. You will suffer from increasingly debilitating effects until cured! All effects from Toxic Shock Syndrome are temporarily reduced by 5%, due to the passive effect, Gas Station Hotdog.

Stage 1: Extreme headaches, high fever, and mild disorientation.

Stage 2: Full body aches and crippling muscle weakness. Athleticism and Toughness are reduced by 25%. Health and Stamina Regeneration are reduced by 50%.

Stage 3: Countdown until additional onset symptoms 9:59

Well, screw me sideways. That couldn’t be good.